Prepper's Crucible - Volume Six: The End (5 page)

“We’re out,” he shouted, and the men fell back and
took up blocking positions, leap frogging in groups until they got back to
where they parked the ATVs. They loaded up and headed out of town, splitting
into two groups when they reached the outskirts of town. Cory could hear the
roar of other ATVs behind him and hoped everyone made it out from the various
locations they had attacked.

The groups headed back up the trails and into the
mountains separately, and one by one, pulled up to the cave and got out the
vehicles. The sun peeked over the horizon as Cory stood at the base of the hill
that led to the cave and did a mental count of the returning fighters.
Everybody pulled up and got out of their ATVs, and Cory noticed Caleb and his
group were
missing.

Krista limped to where he stood, blood leaking from
her leg, and said, “Caleb and his crew didn’t make it. We saw them
get
taken out at one of the checkpoints.
They
were lit up by a shoulder-fired missile
and the ATV just disintegrated.
I don’t think there were any survivors.”

“Any wounded?” Cory asked.

“Just me and my son,” she replied.

“Tim!” Cory yelled. “Can you and Rachael police up
the wounded and get them to the cave for treatment?”

“We’re on it. And we got the general and one of his
aides,” Tim said before he moved from vehicle to vehicle and lifted the wounded
out of the ATVs, placing them in a neat line in front of the trail to the cave.
The rest of the group took turns helping them into the cave.

“Eric, we got a total losses number yet?” Cory
asked.

“Seven dead and four wounded,” he replied. “Two of
the wounded are severe and probably won’t make it.”

“Get everyone to disperse to their camps after they
empty Krista’s ATVs and store the supplies in the cave. They can come back for
their wounded later. I
don’t
like being this bunched
together. We may get a reaction today and I
don’t
want
all our eggs in one basket. And debrief everyone before they leave and let me
know how much damage we did when I wake up.” Cory walked off, entered the cave,
and sat with Kate at the picnic table. He stared at her and
she
at him.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said. “
It’s
war, and people die.” They slept together that night on
her bedroll and she stroked his hair until he fell asleep, then she wept.

EMP PLUS 39 YEARS, TWO
DAYS

PRESCOTT, ARIZONA,
TERRITORIAL CAPITOL

Horace again strode through the downtown plaza and
made the climb up the hill to the assisted living facility where Cory was
spending his final days. He was exhilarated at the quality of the piece he
wrote, and knew that his glimpse into the private life of the former governor,
and his contribution to the history of the partisan movement that was so
important the restoration of the Southwest, would propel him to a fame he never
before experienced. He was in tears as he finished his article the night before,
and he felt as though he finally did something that really mattered. He had
taken the action of brave men in a horrible circumstance and made them real to
his readers. He stopped at the base of the hill that lead to the home, looked
up, and saw Cory sitting on the balcony of his room. He waved at the former
governor, who waved back. Horace felt some steel in his spine and resolved to
get the governor what he wanted: a truly united
United
States. He continued up the hill and walked into the reception area, where the
same crusty old woman staffed the front desk.

“Seeing Cory again,” he said, noting that every
light on her phone was going off, but the ringer
wasn’t
making any noise.

“We turned the ringer off three hours ago. You
created a storm of crap we would rather not deal with.” She waved him toward
the elevator with a dismissive gesture and returned to watching the local TV
station that was running a story on high school football teams.

Eric entered the reception area from the elevator
and walked over to where Horace waited.

“He’s ready to see you.” Horace noted Eric again
wore the old .45 hog leg and wondered why he wore different pistols.

“Can I ask why you wear a .45 here and wore the
Glock yesterday?”

“I accessorize.”

“Huh?”

“Google it.”
He turned and
walked back to the elevator. Horace followed and the two men again rose to the
third floor and exited the elevator, moved through the room, and out to the
balcony where Cory lay on the chaise lounge.

“Don’t bother to hand me the paper,” Cory wheezed.
“I already read it, and judging by the phone calls, I would say it was a damn
fine piece. Almost cried reading it, but that’s just not me.”

“I did my best,” Horace answered, surprised at how
desperately he wanted to please a man who was about to die, and could do
nothing more for him. “Can we continue the interview?”

“I’d rather not; but a deal is a deal, so fire
away.”

Horace consulted his notes and then said, “I am
pretty sure you guys occupied the town of Mayer for a while and that wasn’t too
long after your first organized raid. Can you tell me about that?”

“That was about a month after the first raid. We
rode to Mayer and took over a small supply base there. It was close to the
freeway that their convoys used to bring supplies from the railhead in Phoenix to
the Prescott area, so they unloaded the semis there and moved the supplies into
Prescott with old M-35s. We decided that we could get supplies and force a
fight in an area where we could make them bleed.”

“They used trains to get the supplies into the States?”

“We didn’t know that until later. The Mexican rail
system uses narrower gauges on the tracks, so they welded sleeves on the
rollers on their locomotives, used our rolling stock, and
that’s
how we were taken over so fast. They really were pretty clever.”

“What happened in Mayer?”

“We took the base and forced the radio operator to
call in a distress call. When they showed up, we made them fight
street-to-street and bled them dry. They lost close to 200 men in that fight.
We lost 13.”

“How did you pull that off?”

“We drew them into town and then hit them from all
four sides. Mayer is in a valley, and we had the high ground, so we
didn’t
have to worry about friendly fire incidents.
We just opened up on them and kept firing until they were all dead.
Then they sent in the tanks and we had to leave or get wiped out.”

“When did you become a militia and not a partisan
group?”

“When the Air Force decided to drop a guy into our
AO, after we got ahold of them on the ham. Crazy bastards dropped this
guy
into the middle of what they had to think of as nowhere,
but he brought along encrypted radios and C-4. That proved to be
pretty useful
.
And
the guy was very
resourceful. He was a genius with explosives, and he eventually got us air
cover and all kinds of
perks
. Technically, they sent
him in to be a forward air traffic controller, which is a euphemism for someone
who tells planes where to drop their bombs.
But
this
guy was a miracle for us. His name was Bill Johnson, or at least that’s what he
told us; but that was really when the militia began and we started coordinating
attacks with the U.S. military.”

“Were you personally still raiding and ambushing
convoys then?”

“No, I was more worried about trying to keep us fed
and getting ammo. By that time, I was the general and the troops were fighting
the fight. I just did my best to find food and ammo for them. After the
occupation of Mayer, people starting showing up from all over the state and I
became the
guy
who had to coordinate everything. If I
would have been captured and tortured,
it would have all
gone down. We grew to 2,000 fighters by then. We trained them and sent a lot
back to where they lived before the EMP hit, so we ended up with cells of
fighters in Tucson, Phoenix, and Flagstaff. The southern cities worked on
blowing up the tracks before the supply trains arrived, and Flagstaff worked on
getting the Mexicans off the old Army bases there and out into a fair fight.”

Cory laid back and again fell asleep.

“Can you tell me the story from there?” Horace asked
Eric.

“I can tell you some of it, but he never talked
about operational stuff back then.”

“I’ll take whatever you can give me.”

“Okay, but let’s leave him to sleep. We can talk
downstairs in the cafeteria.”

“Fine by me.”

The two men walked down the stairwell and entered
the cafeteria where the home’s occupants who could walk took their meals. Eric
led Horace to an empty table and they both sat.

Eric paused for a moment and then continued the
story. “My brother and I began leading the raids. Tim, Rachael’s husband, took
control of overseeing operations in our AO. Cory spent a lot of time traveling
to meet with the other cells in Phoenix and Tucson. He traveled mostly by ATV
overland and on secondary roads. The Mexicans still had checkpoints on the main
roads into all the towns, so the meetings usually took place outside the city
limits on somebody’s farm or ranch. Cory never spoke much about who was doing
what because we operated on a need-to-know basis, and keeping the different
cells compartmentalized was important to our security. We learned that the hard
way.”

“What happened?”

“Three of our raids were ambushed, and we realized
we had a traitor in our ranks. Finding him
wasn’t
easy. Eventually we did, but we lost
a lot of
men and
had to suspend our raiding for close to a month. We finally found a radio in
his tent, and he confessed. The Mexicans had taken his wife and kids hostage
and threatened to kill them if he didn’t provide information on our movements.”

“What happened to him?”

“Cory executed him with a pistol shot to the head.”

Horace thought for a moment and then asked, “
what
was the U.S. Army doing around that time?”

“They were on the Arizona border. They had retaken
Texas, but met stiff resistance after that. The Mexicans had to protect
Nogales, as all their supplies were coming by railroad through there. So they
fought like tigers to keep that line of supply open.” Eric paused and added, “
the
general the Mexicans sent to replace Santamaria after we
killed him was named Sanchez. Things changed dramatically. Apparently, they
decided to take a new approach. The reprisals stopped and they began a
propaganda war. They dropped leaflets that said any resistance fighter who
surrendered their weapons
would be pardoned
, and
started offering medical assistance to civilians. None of that worked, though.
By that
time
we were having enough success to keep the
loyalty of most of the citizens, and everybody knew the Army was on the way. It
was only a question of time before we would take everything back.”

“Is this when you think you went from being a
partisan group to being a militia?”

“Yeah.
Cory and I
agree on that point. Once we started taking direction from the military, the
prime objective was to disrupt their supplies by train.
So
Cory moved to Tucson for three months and directed operations there. Tim took
command of our operations in Northern Arizona and he traveled to Flagstaff to
coordinate with the militia there.
There was a small Army
Reserve base there that the Mexicans took over and used,
but there were
also around 60 reservists there, and they formed the core of that cell. They
were even more active than we were, and
pretty quickly
gained control of their AO at night. By that
time
we
owned the night as well, but couldn’t operate openly during the day. The
Mexicans pretty much stayed in town on their bases. They patrolled during the
day, but went into a defensive posture at night, so we became more active
raiding static targets.”

Horace was furiously scribbling notes, trying to
keep up with Eric’s monologue and held up one hand to indicate he needed time
to catch up with the narrative. Eric paused, looked at him curiously, and
Horace said, “you have no idea how valuable this information is. You’re
covering a period of our history that we know almost nothing about, except for
some dry facts.”

“You know,” Eric said, after taking a deep breath,
“I saw a documentary on TV about us and the war, and I pretty much laughed
through the whole thing. Everybody makes such a big deal out of what we did.
What nobody seems to realize is that if the Mexicans had sent Sanchez in first,
there probably
wouldn’t
have been a resistance.
But
Santamaria gave us no choice. From the moment they
arrived, they started killing and raping, and confiscating weapons people
needed to survive.” Eric paused, clearly thinking about what he was going to
say next.

“I’m not sure that would be the case,” Horace
answered. “There were different Mexican commanders all over the Southwest, and
resistance movements everywhere.”

“Horace, there were no heroes or military geniuses
in the group. We fought to stay alive and get vengeance for loved ones. We were
all, at first, terrified at what we were doing. But it was better than being
plucked off the street, at random, and being executed like cattle.”

“If that’s the case, Cory wouldn’t have agreed to
lead the militia,” Horace responded. “That just made him more of a target than
lying low, or just running his one cell.”

“He didn’t have a choice. The Air Force would not
accept more than one leader for the state. They objected to the chain of
command not being simple and clear. They pretty much conditioned their
assistance on Cory taking the job. Come to think of it, that man has spent his
entire life doing things he hates to do.”

“That’s what made him great man.”

“He still is,”
Eric
pointed
out.

“I know.”

“You know, he would never agree with that
characterization of him. He never thought what he did somehow
singled
him out for attention.”

“That’s part of what makes him great.”

“Let’s go see if he’s awake,” Eric said. The two men
stood and left the room, walked up the stairs, and entered Cory’s room. A nurse
was just leaving with a half-eaten tray of food, and Cory
was
propped up
in his bed, watching TV.

“Are you strong enough to continue?” Horace asked.

“Of course.
What do you
want to know?” Horace flipped back through his notes and read for a moment,
then looked up. “What can you tell me about Bill Johnson? You said earlier he
was a godsend.”

“He was. Bill was a sergeant in the Air Force. He
was an African American, and really made the difference in terms of us getting
the war to end. He did our first aerial bombing mission just south of Tucson
later that year, and proceeded to blow the hell out of any Mexican train or
truck convoy that was foolish enough to try to move through our territory. That
was the beginning of the end for the invasion, and I think we all knew it.”

“What more can you tell me about that time?”