Founders (15 page)

Ken opened a package and inserted a pair. As he did, he gestured for Perkins to do likewise. Then he said, “You’ve got the rifle with the scope.”

“To make ‘absa-tively’ sure he’s dead?”

Ken nodded. “That’s right, D. Just give me a chance to warn the ladies that you’re going to shoot.”

It took Perkins a full minute to get ready for the shot. He laid a throw cushion from the couch on the windowsill of the window that Ken had been using to shoot from. He pulled up a dining room chair to sit on, and rested the fore-end of the Remington pump-action .270 across the cushion. He exhaled loudly. Then he cranked up the scope to 9 power and clicked off the
rifle’s safety. Just when Ken thought that he was about to shoot, Durward said, “Give me a sec. I’m still kind of nervous. The crosshair is dancing.”

He again loudly let out a breath. A few moments later, he squeezed off a shot. Pulling the muzzle back down from the recoil, he looked through the scope and said, “I hit him just above his ear. So if he was faking before, he ain’t faking now.” He calmly pumped the rifle’s action, chambering a fresh cartridge, and toggled the safety button to the safe position. Then he removed the rifle’s magazine and topped it off with a cartridge from his pocket.

They waited another hour to see if the looters would return, Durward concerned that they might be back with reinforcements. He paced back and forth between the kitchen and the back bedrooms, consoling his wife and daughters, and giving them updates.

As they waited, Ken said, “I’m sorry that I shot right through your kitchen window.”

“Shucks, that’s what they make clear sheet plastic for, right? Don’t you worry. . . . I’m sure I’ll be able to scrounge up some replacement windows in the next few days. But before dark tonight, we’ll cover the broken windows with sheet plastic. We can hold it in place with some batten strips.”

Their neighbor from down the road drove up to the gate on his ATV, with his mixed breed cattle dog on the back as usual. A sporterized Springfield rifle rested in the rubberized spring steel forks mounted on the ATV’s front deck. Carrying their rifles, Ken and Durward walked out to the gate to talk to him.

As they neared the gate, the neighbor asked, “You folks okay?”

Durward answered, “Yeah, we’re fine, just scared spitless.”

“All that shooting, and you only got one of them?”

“I think we hit a few more of them inside their rigs,” Ken answered.

Durward swung the gate open and the three men closely examined the body and the surrounding ground. The gravel and the
adjoining pavement were heavily littered with chunks of broken safety glass, in at least three distinct colors. There was blood on some of it. There was even more blood around the body. They found more than seventy pieces of fired brass that obviously came from AR-15s, AK-47s, and at least one AK-74. The lacquer-coated steel-cased brass from the latter captivated Durward and his neighbor. This was the first time that either of them had even heard of the smaller-caliber AK. The neighbor’s dog watched all this from the back of the ATV, with its tail wagging.

The dead looter’s body was partially resting on an inexpensive pair of Chinese-made bolt cutters. The man was in his late twenties or early thirties, Hispanic, and overweight. He had lots of tattoos. He had been hit twice through the lungs by .223 bullets from Terry’s M4, and once through the head by Durward’s .270 Winchester.

Ken said in a droll voice, “Well, D., you can sleep peacefully tonight, knowing that you didn’t kill anyone. This guy was dead long before you sent that piece of ‘let’s make sure’ through his noggin.”

As they were examining the body, the neighbor’s dog jumped off the back of the ATV and started licking at the blood on the gravel driveway. “That’s just
wrong
,” Durward said.

Seeing this, the neighbor shouted, “Bad dog! Load up!” The dog obediently jumped back onto the rear deck of the ATV.

They rolled the body over. Searching the pockets, they found the man was carrying no identification. In his pockets, they found two small rolls of clothesline twine, and a slightly rust-pitted Kershaw pocketknife.

“With both the landline and cell phones out, do you think we should try to get over to the Sheriff’s Office to report this?” Durward asked.

The neighbor shook his head, and said, “No. My son-in-law Ted is a Cedar County deputy. He said that the few deputies left
at both the Cedar and Johnson County Sheriff’s Departments are following up on something only if it’s major.”

Durward asked, “So an attempted home invasion robbery and attempted murder isn’t
major
?”

The neighbor again shook his head.

Ken said in a low voice, “These days, those crimes are just piddly. And killing in self-defense is just par for the course. I say we bury him, and be done with it.”

The man nodded, and then said, “Yep, that’s what I hear people are doing all over. We’re back to vigilante days and ways.” After a pause, he added, “Well, I’ll leave the cleanup chores to you gents.” He stepped astride his ATV, started it, and drove off with a wave.

Durward handed Ken a padlock to replace the one that had been cut, and asked, “Do you think we should sweep up all the broken glass?”

Ken shook his head. “No, we should leave it as a warning: ‘This is what happens to looters.’”

They wrapped the body in a piece of used white plastic silage tarp. Rolling the looter up in the tarp was messy and cumbersome. They also found that the shrouded body was too heavy for the two of them to carry. So Durward drove his blue Ford 8N tractor out and they unceremoniously rolled it into the front scoop.

They buried the dead looter in the garden, six feet deep. Since his tractor lacked a backhoe, most of the depth was dug by hand. The tractor was able to scrape a gouge eighteen inches deep, which took them below the frost line. Even still, digging the grave took several hours.

The four adults at the farm took turns saying prayers over the grave—both prayers for the unsaved, and prayers of thanks that they hadn’t been shot. There was a brief and polite theological argument when Terry said prayers for the dead looter. Perkins said that he believed that once someone was dead, it would have no bearing on their salvation. As he put it, “Either he was saved, or
he wasn’t. Okay, I won’t try to stop you from saying prayers for his soul, post facto. But scripturally, they’re ineffectual. Oh, and scripturally, there is no Purgatory. That’s an extra-biblical creation of the Catholic Church.”

The Perkins daughters seemed oblivious to the solemnity of the graveside prayers. They fidgeted with their mittens, pulled off each other’s caps, and kicked at dirt clods.

The next day, they counted ten bullet holes in the house and twenty-five in the silo. Ken had shot out one window, and the looters’ bullets had shattered two others. Several of their bullets passed though two room partitions and assorted furniture before being stopped.

Up in the silo cupola, they found that two of the looters’ bullets had pierced the back of the chair and the sheet metal wall behind it, just above where Terry’s head had been when she sat down to shoot. After seeing that, Terry insisted, “We need to add some
armor
to that cupola, D.”

The bullet holes in the silo and its cupola were soon patched with auto body filler or, in the places where they could reach both sides, with nuts and bolts coated with auto body filler. The holes in the house’s siding were filled with dowels from D.’s wood shop. It took several weeks of inquiries, but eventually all the windows were replaced. They were paid for with bartered corn, soybeans, and beef jerky.

D. made good on his promise to replace the Laytons’ expended ammunition. They had fired forty-seven rounds of 5.56, and twenty-four rounds of 7.62 NATO. This took lots of searching and dickering. It eventually cost Perkins more than 1,600 pounds of bartered corn, soybeans, and scrap steel.

Ken and Terry bartered for very little while they were in West Branch. Ken swapped a nickel-cadmium 9-volt battery and a silver dime for a bottle of Break-Free synthetic lubricant, after their original had been depleted with regular gun maintenance. They
also traded a pair of socks for an assortment of Ziploc bags. In their weeks traveling overland, they discovered that plastic bags were essential for keeping the various contents of their backpacks and pockets dry.

Durward said, “Well, I got my money’s worth for my security force. Those space rifles sure are something. It sounded like World War III had started.”

Fearing that the looters would return, they kept on high alert at the Perkins farm for the next two weeks. Temporarily, there were two people on guard at all times. They also decided that they needed better communication between the house and the silo. So Karen Perkins tapped into the local informal barter network, putting out the word that they would trade wheat for a pair of intercoms. Within three days they completed a trade of 400 pounds of wheat for a well-used but serviceable NuTone intercom, fourteen batteries, and enough three-conductor wire to reach the top of the silo. The base station was set up on the wall behind the woodstove’s brickwork. This spot was chosen by Ken because he had determined that it was the part of the house with the best ballistic protection.

Two days after the dead looter was buried, they started their ballistic protection mantlet project. The steel came from an eighteen-disc offset harrow that had sat disused behind the tractor shed. This, Durward explained, was just an old spare, with a hitch that kept breaking anyway. After soaking the disc attachment bolts with penetrating oil overnight, Ken and D. were able to dismount all eighteen of the rusty discs from the harrow’s frame.

They hauled the twenty-six-inch-diameter discs up to the top of the guard tower silo two at a time, with a rope threaded through the center holes of the discs. The discs were positioned in a heavily overlapping pattern at the cupola’s doorway, looking like fish scales. They were held in place by a wooden framework of 2x4s.
The front and back halves of the framework were joined by long lag screws.

Just behind the tractor discs, they laid nine horizontal layers of one-eighth-inch-thickness sheet steel from Durward’s large collection of scrap metal. This was designed to protect anyone in the cupola from rifle fire that was directed at a steep angle, up through the floor. As a bonus, this steel sheeting provided protection from fire in the event that the hibachi was ever accidentally tipped over.

As an afterthought, Ken and D. covered the front of the mantlet framework with a twenty-seven-inch-tall piece of plywood. Ken noted, “If anyone attacking sees just a sheet of plywood, then they’ll think that they can shoot through it. I’d rather have the mantlet draw fire than have someone decide to deliberately aim over the top of it.”

That same day, they repositioned the alarm bell pipe inside the cupola so that someone could ring it from behind the cover of the mantlet.

After installing the mantlet, they discovered that it retained a lot of heat from the hibachi, making the cupola even more comfortable to sit in during guard duty in cold weather.

Joshua Watanabe was well settled in his routine of helping with the cattle at the ranch and patrolling his assigned silos and LCC. One morning in late March, he drove the Unimog through patchy snow to MAF A-01. As was his habit, he stopped 550 yards short, behind an intervening low hill. He parked the Unimog and ambled to the top of the hill, carrying his deer rifle cradled in his arms. Unlike past patrols, he was surprised to see three vans and a pickup in the MAF’s parking lot. He dropped prone and popped open his rifle’s
scope covers. Looking through his scope, he could see several men in civilian clothes. They were walking in and out of the building carrying boxes. He watched for several minutes, and jotted what he saw in his notepad. The vehicles had three different colored license plates. He crawled off the top of the hill toward his truck. Once he had gotten below the military crest of the hill, he rose and ran back to the Unimog. Per the security SOP, he first tried the Malmstrom security frequency on his issued handie-talkie. Just as he expected, he heard nothing but static. From this locality, the VHF radio had line-of-sight communications only when a helicopter was airborne. Then he tried the Great Falls repeater at 155 MHz. He got a response from a police and fire dispatcher. Because they lacked communications patching capability, the dispatcher had to take down a message by hand, and relay it to the 341st Security Forces Squadron at Malmstrom. Joshua asked the dispatcher to read back the message to him, which emphasized that he was the “friendly” with the vehicle, 500 meters southeast of the MAF.

As a precaution, Joshua rolled out an optic orange marker panel on top of the Unimog’s radio shelter and pinned it down with a tire iron and a tow chain to ensure that it didn’t blow away.

A few minutes later, Joshua was back on the hilltop, again glassing the MAF. The looting was continuing. With his other radio, Joshua made his first direct contact with a security detachment pilot, reminding him that he was located on the hilltop to the southwest of the MAF, and advising him of the local wind and cloud cover.

Soon, he heard helicopter rotors in the distance. The looters heard this, too, and they ran for their vehicles. Joshua thumbed off the rifle’s safety, and centered his crosshairs on the fogged driver’s side window of a van that was parked perpendicular to him. Trying to control his breathing, he squeezed the trigger. A moment later, as the crosshairs settled back down after recoil, he could see that the window had shattered.

All four vehicles started to roll out of the MAF parking lot. Joshua fired again, not expecting a hit. A UH-1N helicopter came into view to the north, flying low, following the undulations of the terrain—what the pilots call nap-of-the-earth flying.

Joshua was alarmed to see that the vehicles turned left after exiting the MAF gate. They drove south down the road toward him and the Unimog. Although he was twenty yards from his truck parked on the shoulder of the road, he felt very exposed.