Survivors – A Novel of the Coming Collapse

In a perfect world, Lars would have had the squad members all carry rifles with fully interchangeable ammunition and magazines. Instead he put Hector Ruiz and the other two men with M1As together in the “infantry” team along with Bob Potts, who had the Saiga. At least three of them would have the chance to share magazines, and of course Potts could at least use loose .308 ammunition stripped from M1A magazines. It took a bit of begging and bribing, but each man on the team soon had at least eight spare loaded magazines. For his own fighting load, Laine decided to carry eleven spare magazines.

The medic, Johanna, was part of Laine’s cavalry team. They called themselves cavalry, but in actuality they’d operate as dragoons, fighting dismounted. Although Scrappy was accustomed to the sound of gunfire, they didn’t have time to train the other horses. In essence, the horses were planned as little more than quick getaway vehicles. There was no way to predict how the horses would react to the sight of Molotovs exploding and fusillades of gunfire.

All of the men wore ACU desert digital pattern camouflage fatigues. The ACU pattern was generally disliked, since it looked like a gray blob from a distance. This was the main reason that they had been replaced by the U.S. Army with the multicam OCP uniform. But ACUs did blend in fairly well in sagebrush country, which predominated where they were heading. Also, by all wearing the same uniforms, they’d have the advantage of being able to quickly recognize each other from a distance.

They day after the team was selected, they began training. They started with patrolling formations, carrying unloaded rifles. At the same time the horsemen practiced moving both mounted and on foot. By the afternoon the squad’s movement and hand signals began to look professional, but not as smooth as Laine would have liked. They next practiced ambushes and immediate action drills, such as reacting to an ambush, reacting to ground and aerial flares, and breaking contact.

Their trigger time began the next day at Laine’s ranch. Each rifle was meticulously zeroed for its owner. There was also time spent familiarizing each other with the peculiarities of handling all of the weapons, in the event someone had to pick up and use someone else’s rifle. Next, Lars passed on a few practical tips about night fighting. One of the most important of these was: “You may not be able to see your sights well. So, if in doubt, hold low, since the natural tendency is to shoot high, at night.”

Late in the afternoon, they were scheduled to drive to the refinery, to get a briefing and demonstration of the Molotov cocktails Little Ricky had been cooking up. Just after the team arrived, Lopez had them form a semicircle and explained, “If I had a few more days, I could have probably worked up some thermite grenades, but the clock is ticking, so these will have to do.” He pulled out a mason jar filled with a honeylike substance.

Ricardo Lopez had perfected a flameless design that was much safer to use than traditional “lit-rag” Molotov cocktails. It was based on a design that had been described to him by his great-uncle, who had served as an adviser in Angola in the 1970s. Working in an open area for safety, wearing a respirator and static-grounded boots, Lopez first created a large batch of thickened gasoline. All through this process, an assistant with several fire extinguishers was standing by. Lopez did his thickening in an open-top fifty-five-gallon drum that was half filled with gasoline. This gas had been decanted from the top of a larger drum that had been allowed to settle. The goal was to get pure gasoline with no water.

Lopez and his assistants threw large quantities of foam pellets and scrap Styrofoam from shipping boxes into the drum and then stirred it with a length of broomstick. A surprisingly large quantity of Styrofoam was needed before the gas began to thicken. The stirring continued as more and more Styrofoam was added and quickly dissolved. Gradually the mixture thickened to the desired consistency, about that of molasses. Their end result was about thirty gallons of thickened fuel, which Ricardo dubbed “the Poor Man’s Napalm.”

Lopez then brought several stacked cases of one-quart mason home-canning jars to his open lab. Wearing gloves and a clear plastic face shield, he opened a carboy of automobile battery acid. He carefully decanted one half cup of the concentrated sulfuric acid into each mason jar and then filled the rest of each with thickened gasoline. They were then sealed with standard mason jar lids and ring. In case any of the acid might have dripped onto the exterior of the jars, they were each rinsed thoroughly, twice, using one of the refinery’s portable emergency eye-wash fountains. After they had dried, two large rubber bands were slid onto the middle of each jar.