Lying prone in high Latah orchard grass, Jeff and the Laytons watched as the pair approached. When they were ten yards away, Jeff recognized the man’s face. It took just a moment longer for him to connect the face with a name.
Then Jeff came out in a clear voice, “Tony! Get over here!”
Tony and Teesha Washington instinctively dropped to the ground when they heard the voice, obscuring themselves in the grass. Tony half-whispered,
“Who is there?”
Trasel replied, “Jeff Trasel, Northwest Militia.” The Washingtons slowly got up and walked toward Trasel. They dropped down again, slowly this time, just a few feet in front of Trasel.
Tony said, “I remember you. You were on the Princeton raid—you’re the guy that commandeered the M60—right? Trasel nodded. “We got introduced with all the handshaking that was going on after the raid.”Washington checked the safety on the Thompson, as he did out of habit dozens of times each day, and then went on. “This is my wife, Teesha. I’m not sure if you’ve ever met her.”
Trasel shifted his gaze to Teesha. At five-feet-eleven, she was nearly as a tall as her husband.
She handled the SAW like she knew how to use it. Trasel replied, “I’ve seen her at a distance, at one of the Barter Faires, but we were never introduced. A pleasure, ma’am.” Teesha nodded and smiled in recognition.
“My compadres here are the Laytons, Ken and Terry. Do you know them?”
Seven yards on either side of Trasel, Ken and Terry gave small waves to the Washingtons.
Tony replied, “We only know of them by reputation. They’re the ones that E&E’d all the way from Chicago, aren’t they? That was a heckuva hike.”
Jeff replied, “Yep, that’s them all right, and ‘escape and evasion’ is their middle name.” Jeff set his HK down. Jeff frowned. “I heard that your retreat got wiped out, and that everybody was killed. But you’re here breathing. What happened?”
“We are the only ones that survived. Teesha and I were guarding a cache off-site when the Feds came. The ranch house got mortared, big time. They killed everybody there—thirty-two men, women, and children. We snuck back to the ranch early the next morning. We spent an hour looking at the ruins of the house and barn through the scopes on our M1As, from about two hundred yards. We didn’t dare go too close at first. We were afraid that the Federals might have left an ambush. Just as we were debating on whether or not to go down there, an army diesel CUCV Blazer pulled in the driveway. Two Specialist E-4s got out, all nonchalant, and started loading up all the guns, backpacks, and web gear from the trenches. Then they picked up the first of two body bags and loaded it in the truck. When they were each holding an end of the second body bag and carrying it toward the tailgate, we nailed them. We shot those muthas twice each with our M1As.”
“So what happened next?” Jeff asked.
“We figured that the way they were acting, there wasn’t an ambush set up after all, so we gave them ten minutes to bleed out and hiked down the hill.
They had already gathered up everything of value in the CUCV. So we just threw in our packs and rifles, and rolled the first body bag back off the end of the tailgate. We stripped off those clowns’ web gear, threw it in the back, fired up the Blazer, and took off.” Gesturing to Teesha’s SAW light machinegun, Tony went on, “That’s where the missus here got her Minimi. They had it in the cab of the CUCV. We ditched the CUCV about four miles to the east, way up a skid road in a bunch of yew trees. It took us three nights to carry all the weapons back to our cache point. That was a mile off the road. With just the two of us, it took a whole bunch of trips. We went back to the ranch in the middle of the night two weeks later. The bodies of the Federals were gone.”
Washington gulped, and continued, “We spent most of that night burying our dead in the trenches and praying for them.”
“We’ve been playing cat and mouse with Federals, since then. Between the two of us, we got seventeen UN troops, torched seven vehicles, and captured fourteen more guns. Whenever we’ve bumped into other resistance cells, we’ve doled guns out liberally, along with a lot of food and medical gear. The CUCV and the VRC-46 radio that was in it went to the Blue Blaze Irregulars. Right now, we’re down to just six guns—the M249 Minimi, our two M1As, two .45 automatics, and my Tommy gun.”
Jeff eyed the submachinegun. It had a Cutts compensator, and was missing a lot of bluing. He asked with an air of disbelief, “You didn’t get that from the Federals, did you?”
“No, I inherited this puppy from my grandfather. He was in the Navy, back in World War II. He was a cook stationed on Midway Island. After the Japs attacked there, they got very serious about security, and this Model ’28 became his constant companion. At the end of the war, he couldn’t bear to part with it, so he disassembled it and brought it home with him. He put the barreled receiver in the bottom of one sea bag, and its stock and a bunch of magazines in the other. He just walked off the ship, bold as brass. Grandpa said a lot of his buddies brought home guns that way. Mainly they brought Colt .45s and captured Jap stuff like Nambus and samurai swords.”
Washington looked admiringly at the Thompson, and recounted, “He kept it under his bed for years. He never shot it—just oiled it up once in a while.
When he died of a heart attack, my dad and I went over to the house to help grandma move to the retirement home. When she pulled it out from underneath the bed, I nearly fainted. It was made at the Colt factory. My dad had seen it before, lots of times, but I had never even been told about it. It was a family secret. Grandma said to me,‘Your grandfather said that after he jumped off this mortal coil that he wanted you to have this.’ You see, my grandpa and grandma knew that I was really into guns. My uncle and I had just started shooting sporting clays the summer before, and I had really started getting into it.”
Jeff nodded his head, smiled, and asked, “When was this?”
Washington replied, “I had just turned nineteen. I was in junior college. That was back in ’97. I didn’t get a chance to shoot this thing until after I got up here. I’m pretty good with it, now. It runs like a champ.”
“How did you first get involved with the Templars?”
“I was born and raised in Andover, Kansas—it’s a suburb of Wichita. So was Teesha, here. Shortly after I got out of high school, a friend showed me a video called America in Peril. That really got me thinking. I had an Internet account at the J.C., so I started searching the web, using Google, looking for everything I could find on topics like survival, guns, food storage, wilderness medicine, and militias. Those web pages brought me up to speed very quickly. I started posting to a ‘Survival and Preparedness’ forum at The Claire Files. Roger Dunlap noticed one of my posts there, and we started corresponding by e-mail. Pretty soon he got me set up with PGP—that’s a crypto program—so we could write back and forth without anyone snooping on us.
“The Dunlaps invited Teesha and me out to Troy for a two-week visit the summer before the Crash. It was an extension of our honeymoon trip to Yellowstone. It was kind of funny when we got there to Roger’s ranch. You see, we had never met face-to-face, or even spoken on the phone—everything was by e-mail, you see—so none of the Templars realized that we were black folks.
Roger just said, ‘Hey, cyberspace is color blind, and so am I. Welcome!’ That’s the kind of guy he was. We liked the Templars a lot, and they liked us. I told the Dunlaps that I was going to try to find a job in Idaho after I got my degree.
“Officially we weren’t Templar members when the Schumer hit the fan, but we figured that they were our best bet. We couldn’t get through to them before we left because all the long distance lines were down, and our local Internet port server was hosed. My dad lent me his mini-Winnebago, and Teesha and I crammed as much as we could into it. Dad said that he was going to stick it out with his neighbors in the suburbs. We arrived here not long after the riots started, and we got immediately assigned to the ranch security and hunting detail.”