Loughran had inscribed its flyleaf, “Big City Boy: Move slow and use your noggin. God Bless, Spence.”
During subsequent visits to northern Idaho before the Crunch, first on hunting trips with Lisa, and later to help out Todd and Mary with upgrading the retreat, Mike stopped by and visited with Spence and his wife. He also regularly went to do business with an explosives distributor in Spokane,Washington. With the permit supplied by Loughran, he was able to get everything that he needed. The first time at the distributor’s shop, the owner was skeptical of Mike, as he had never met him before.
Just to be sure, the owner called Loughran to check on his identity.
Loughran told him, “Heck yeah, Bob, I sent him over there! Now just give him everything that I had him put on the list of what to buy.”
After hanging up the phone, the distributor cocked his head and said, “Well, you check out all right. What can I get you?” Mike breathed a silent sigh of relief.
On his first trip back to Idaho, Mike picked up a case of 75 percent dynamite and a reel of PETN detonating cord, often called primacord or simply “det. cord,” and a pair of cap crimping pliers. On subsequent trips, Mike purchased electric and fuse type blasting caps, a small hand crank “blasting machine” generator for setting off electric blasting caps, thirty pounds of Composition 4 (C-4) plastic explosive, two additional cases of dynamite, and a twenty-pound roll of Dupont Detasheet C sheet explosive.
Eventually, all of these supplies were carefully transported from Mike and Lisa’s to the retreat in Idaho. Mike gave the Grays specific instructions on storing the materials. The most important thing, he told them, was to store the caps and the bulk explosives at opposite ends of the basement. As long as the basement stayed cool and dry, and the dynamite was up off the floor, there would be no problem with deterioration.
One task that had to be done regularly was rotating the boxes of dynamite. Because Mike’s dynamite was of the variety that had nitroglycerin suspended in diatomaceous earth, it was much more stable than the older variety that had nitroglycerin suspended in sawdust. However, there was still a slight risk that the nitroglycerin could settle and seep out of the casings of the individual sticks. To prevent this, it was simple enough to inspect a few of the sticks, and turn the cases upside down once every three months. So that they wouldn’t lose track of this responsibility, Mary marked a circled red “R” for rotation day in her desk calendar at quarterly intervals.
CHAPTER 5
Squared Away
“Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival.”
Dan and Mike helped Mary set up a bed for Rose next to the C.Q. desk. It seemed to be the logical location, since someone would be there to watch her condition around the clock. The only detractor was that everyone had to be especially quiet when they were in the front end of the house. Rose slept almost continuously for two days. Every four hours, whomever was on C.Q. duty woke her to give her dose of ampicillin and offer her something to eat or drink. She refused anything but water for the first eighteen hours, then she started drinking some juice. At four a.m. on the third morning, Rose sat up in bed and asked for some pancakes. T.K., who had C.Q. duty at the time, stepped over to the kitchen and filled her request. She was working on her fourth pancake and gulping down her second glass of orange juice when she asked, “Who are you?”
“My name’s Kennedy, Tom Kennedy. Everybody calls me ‘T.K.’ I’m the personnel honcho around here.”
“Oh, so you’re T.K. I’ve heard Jeff talk about you. He said that you study ancient languages and that you’re a Catholic minister.”
He gave a half smile, and retorted, “That’s not quite right, I’m only a lay minister. I helped give communion at mass. I’ll be leading the daily Bible studies here.”
“He also said that you’re an awesome shot with a rifle.”
“Well, gosh, ‘awesome’ is a superlative term I don’t deserve, at least not among the serious shooting fraternity. By most people’s standards, I guess I am an excellent shooter. I practice with an Anshutz .22 match rifle, my AR-15, and my M1 Garand at the range quite a bit. I also like to shoot in the quarterly competitive High Power matches.”
Rose frowned. “You should start using the past tense when you’re talking about things like that. From what we saw getting out of Illinois, there’s total anarchy everywhere. Houses on fire or burned down. We went through some neighborhoods where there had been frame houses, and all that was left standing were the chimneys. Lots of bodies just littering the street. People looting stores. It looked like footage from Iraq.”
After a pause she asked, “Are you going to let Jeff and me stay here? I mean, from what he told me, Jeff hasn’t been a member of your group for a couple of years, and you’ve just met me.”
T.K. stroked his chin. “I don’t know. With an issue this big, it’ll be up to a vote of the entire group.”
As soon as Rose had eaten her fill of scrambled eggs and pancakes, T.K. went to wake up Jeff, who was asleep on the hide-a-bed sofa. “Hey, Trasel,” he said, “There’s a cute-looking gal with a tremendous appetite in the next room that I think would like to see you.”
Later the same morning, the power went off. Everyone in the house immediately met in the dim gloom of the shuttered living room. None of them held out much hope of it being a temporary power failure. With an air of finality, Todd pronounced, “Well, that’s it. I suppose that our clocks will be reading 10:17 for who knows how long. Months?Years? Maybe decades. From now on, we’ll have to conserve power considerably. We do have a lot of power sources to charge the batteries though. We’ve got the solar panels, the Winco when it’s windy, and our hand crank generator. Starting now, no one will use any more power than is absolutely necessary.”
Todd went to the circuit breaker box in the utility room and toggled off most of the breakers. The only ones that he left on were the breakers for the inside power outlets. He then turned off the main breaker, disconnecting the house’s circuits from the power main. He explained that if the power were to come back on unexpectedly with the inverter set up, it could cause some real fireworks. Then he switched on the Xantrex inverter—a device that turned 12 volts D.C. into 120 volts A.C.
Next, Todd went around the house unplugging the “nonessentials.” This included the computer equipment in his office, and nearly all of the lamps. As he was unplugging his now-silent PC, Todd said, “Well now I’m glad that I didn’t sink any money into that mega gighertz machine I was planning to buy.”
The only lamps that he didn’t unplug were five low-wattage bulbs located in the kitchen, in the bedrooms, and on the C.Q. desk in the living room. All five of these used Panasonic fifteen-watt compact fluorescent bulbs. Once their small supply of fluorescent bulbs ran out, Todd planned to rely on a set of light-bulb adapters that he had purchased from Real Goods in Hopland, California.
These adapters screwed into a standard lamp socket. Within each was a “bayonet socket” that held twelve VDC automotive tail lamps. Todd predicted that there would soon be a lot of abandoned vehicles from which to procure spare tail lamps.
The only other electronic items that still had power were the shortwave radio, the police scanner, the CB base station, an alarm system, and the charger for small batteries. All four of these ran directly on twelve-volt power, rather than through the inverter. When he had unplugged the last of the unneeded items, Todd announced: “That should do it. If it turns out that the battery bank stays up at a reasonable level, then we’ll reconnect things, one at a time.