Expatriates: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

Rawles, James Wesley

ISBN 10 : 1480537055 ISBN 13 : 9781480537057

Editeur : Brilliance Audio, 2013

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1

A Glimpse

“Don’t look like a Snicker’s bar if you don’t want to get eaten.”

—Clint Smith, founder of the Thunder Ranch shooting school

Tavares, Florida—
June, Four Years Before the Crunch

They came into the store so quickly that Janelle Altmiller didn’t have time to react. There were three of them, all men in their early twenties wearing hoodie sweatshirts. As they ran up to the counter, two of them pulled out handguns. Janelle was petrified. In a flash, she realized that she was unarmed, and that her husband, Jacob— who was armed—was out of sight in the back of the store, running the panel saw. He was cutting up a piece of plywood for a customer. The noise of the saw would drown out her voice, even if she were to shout for help.

The shortest of the three men tossed a pillowcase to Janelle and ordered, “Fill it! Dump the cash tray and the cash under the tray in, too.” She quickly opened the cash register and complied. As she handed the sack back to the man, one of the others, with an acne-scarred complexion, hissed, “You pick up the phone in less than five minutes and I’ll come back here next week and empty this gun into you.”

The three men fled just as Janelle heard the sound of the vertically mounted Skilsaw winding down. She ran toward her husband in a panicked dash. “We’ve just been robbed,” she shouted over the noise. Jake hesitated only for a moment before unholstering his SIG pistol. He started walking toward the front of the store, cautiously. Behind him, Janelle said, “Three young black guys, all wearing hoodies. Two of them have guns.” Jake glanced at the open cash register and the register’s empty cash tray sitting at an odd angle.

They heard tires screeching outside the store. Jake picked up his pace and jogged to the hardware store’s front entrance. As he ran out the door, he caught just a glimpse of an older Ford Taurus racing down the street. He stopped and lowered his pistol. Then he noticed that his hands were shaking.

“Call 911! Black Ford Taurus sedan. Tell ’em they’re headed south on State Road 19!” he shouted to Janelle. Then muttering to himself, he added, “And they’ll be lost in the traffic and down in Orlando before the cops even get out of the donut shop.”

Their store had been burglarized the year before, so they’d added bars to the windows and beefed up the back door. But they hadn’t expected an armed robbery during the day. To Janelle, robberies had seemed like something that happened only to jewelry shops, liquor stores, and gas stations—and then mainly in Jacksonville or Orlando.

The robbery made the Altmillers seriously reconsider security for their small hardware store. The store had been established by Jake’s grandfather, who had bought the 2.5-acre lot for just twelve hundred dollars during World War II. Situated south of the Dora Canal, it had been in continuous operation since 1946. It was also the last family-owned, independent hardware store in Lake County. All of the others had long since been affiliated with chains like Ace or True Value, or run out of business by the big-box giants like Home Depot and Lowe’s. And while they’d suffered their share of shoplifting, this was the first time they’d ever been robbed at gunpoint.

A few days after the robbery, the Altmillers added four miniature security cameras that recorded directly to their PC’s hard drive. One of these cameras was deliberately set up at a low angle to avoid the classic “view of the top of the perp’s baseball cap.” Another camera was aimed at the front entrance, and contrasting strips of colored tape were added at one-foot intervals running up both sides of the door frame. When seen in surveillance footage, these markings would allow them to approximate the height of a suspect after a robbery.

Most importantly, Janelle and Jake began to carry their pistols daily. They both took the three-day fighting pistol immersion course taught by Florida Firearms Training in Okeechobee. This was Janelle’s first formal firearms instruction. For Jake, who had taken two previous classes by other instructors, the comprehensive course made him realize how much he still had to learn. They both made a point of doing monthly practice shooting sessions at the local range on Sunday afternoons when the store was closed.

Janelle stood just five feet two inches tall—eight inches shorter than her husband. Her rounded hips and short trunk made most hip holsters uncomfortable for her. Drawing her pistol from a hip holster was ungainly because of the short distance between the top of the holster and her armpit. She tried several types of right-handed holsters before settling on a modified Kydex cross-draw holster made by Multi Holsters. She concealed it with the blue Altmiller’s Hardware logo canvas vests that they wore to identify store employees. By wearing the vest unbuttoned, she could draw the pistol quickly if needed. On the few occasions when a customer caught a glimpse of the holstered pistol, it usually triggered compliments rather than ridicule. Florida, after all, had one million concealed carry pistol permits—the most of any state. There was a reason it was nicknamed the Gunshine State.

Doubts

“Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it . . . have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind.”

—John Wesley (1703–1791)

Semarang, Indonesia—
May, Two Years Before the Crunch

Adhi Wulandari was an ambitious perantara insinyur, an intermediate engineer, with a midsize electronics company in Jakarta. He had just survived a big layoff. This had been the first time the company had let go more than just assemblers. Two friends from his department—one from New Zealand and one from Singapore—were the company’s only foreign-born employees. Without warning, they had been told to pack up the personal contents of their cubicles and were escorted out the door. It soon became apparent that all of the others singled out in the layoff were non-Muslims, leaving the with a one hundred percent Muslim staff. The circumstances of the layoff troubled Wulandari.

The next day, word came of a lucrative new video camera assembly contract. Why would the company need to lay off anyone when they’ve just received a new contract? Wulandari wondered. Everyone else seemed happy to still have their jobs, so they didn’t ask many questions.

While reviewing the drawing specifications for the new assembly contract, Wulandari noticed that the drawings were incomplete. The diagrams showed only one half of a clamshell housing marked camera case, a battery, and a digital timer. The large round center section of the housing was a blank spot in the drawings, marked simply as camera position (tbd). The empty space also seemed unusually large for a digital camera, given their recent miniaturization. Even stranger, there were no molded projections in the plastic to hold a camera in place.

All of the parts for the assembly project came in from several other subcontractors: 252 unmarked gray plastic cases from an injection molding company in Tasikmalaya, boxes of aluminum screws from a fastener supply company in Banjarsari, 252 five-year-life 48-volt lithium manganese dioxide batteries sourced from China, bundles of green LEDs from a parts vendor in Jakarta Tangerang, and 252 generic programmable digital timers made by Omron.

The battery specification also struck Wulandari as unusual. Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries would have been a better choice for a camera system. Why would they specify a 48 volt disposable battery, and why did they need one with such a high voltage and amp hour rating? He surmised that they wanted to emplace “set and forget” espionage cameras for several years, but the specifications still seemed incongruous.

When the 252 timers arrived, he grew even more suspicious. They were packed in cardboard boxes labeled omron automation—a major electronics company in Jakarta Selatan—but the timers themselves were completely unmarked. Every other electronics subassembly he’d ever worked with had carried at least a maker’s name and part number. The lack of any markings further piqued his curiosity.

The camera boxes had only a pair of 48-volt DC power input wires, a mini-USB controller port, two pairs of 20-centimeter-long 48-volt output wires, and another 40-centimeter pair of thinner leads in a contrasting color, with smaller connectors that were attached to the low-current, low-voltage green status light LEDs. These were left dangling for later assembly, which was not common practice.

Wulandari asked his supervisor why they were doing only part of the assembly, but the senior engineer offered no explanation. “I don’t know. We are just the subcontractor.” And when Wulandari asked about the customer, his boss said, “They tell me it is a secret project for the BIN. I think it must be some kind of spy camera.” The Indonesian Badan Intelijen Negara—the Indonesian equivalent of the CIA—was notoriously secretive. Another employee, however, was told that it was a project for the National Institute of Aeronautics and Space or Lembaga Penerbangan dan Antariksa Nasional (LAPAN). Wulandari didn’t know who to believe.

Wulandari also raised concerns about the flimsy aluminum screws that were specified for mounting the camera’s timer and battery, as they would be easily deformed when the cameras were eventually serviced. Once again, his concerns were brushed aside. “I have no idea why aluminum. That is just what they ordered.”

After all of the parts had arrived, the assembly of the cameras was completed in just one week and resulted in a very profitable contract for the company. The 252 camera housings—with batteries and timers installed and LEDs attached—were then packaged and sent by truck to another small company farther south in Banten Province, ostensibly for installation of the cameras.

The camera case contract was soon forgotten by most of the company’s employees. But Wulandari’s doubts about it persisted until almost three years later, when the camera cases made news headlines, erasing all doubt about their true purpose.

Life In Oz

“A society that does not defend itself is doomed. A system that remains passive in the face of attack deserves to go under. Those unwilling to defend freedom will become unfree. To stand idly by is to commit suicide.”

—The late Brian Crozier, Strategy of Survival

Fifteen Miles Northeast of Bulman, Northern Territory,
Australia—November, One Year Before the Crunch

It was late in the afternoon, and the three men were tired. They had already lowered ten of the high-explosive seismic charges down the previously drilled shot holes, and this would be the eleventh of the day. Sweat was dripping off the end of Chuck Nolan’s nose. Randall “Rabbit” Burroughs, one of Chuck’s “jug hustler” assistants, lifted the thirty-four-pound yellow plastic tube of Geoprime dBX explosives to the mouth of the hole. The thousands of feet of cables and geophones, or jugs, laid out by the team over the rough, dry terrain would capture the reflected acoustic energy released from these explosive charges and provide an image of the underlying geologic strata.

Looking up from the reel of thin two-strand electrical wire that was resting in the payout stand, his other assistant, Bruce Drake, said, “Hey, mate, you forgot the suspension cord.”

“What?” Burroughs asked.

Just then, the tube slipped from Randall’s sweaty fingers. The five-inch-diameter plastic canister briefly lodged at a slight angle in the top of the bore, but then straightened itself and continued its fall before Burroughs could grasp it again. The wire payout wheel spun rapidly with a loud whirring sound.

Chuck yelled, “Run!” at the top of his lungs.

Run they did, in three different directions. They were still sprinting and just ten yards from the bore when the explosives tube hit the bottom of the hole. The sharp jolt of bottoming in the bore set off the blasting caps. Instantly, the main charge detonated. An enormous cloud of red dust loomed up from the bore and from the soil near it. The ground lurched beneath their feet as dirt and rocks came raining down around them. Chuck felt at least two clods or small rocks hit his yellow plastic bump cap, and one glanced off his shoulder. Another hit the side of Chuck’s Jeep.

After running a few more yards, Chuck stopped and looked back. As the cloud of red dust started to dissipate, he could see that his assistants were still in one piece and running. Even though his ears were ringing, Chuck started laughing uproariously, greatly relieved that they had escaped the blast unscathed.

Drake stopped and yelled at Burroughs. “You mongrel! You’re a few sandwiches short of a picnic!”

After catching his breath, Drake added, “You better keep running, Rabbit!”

Still laughing, Chuck muttered to himself, “Just another day of oil fossicking in the Merry Old Land of Oz.”

Despite their proximity to the blast, there was no damage to the trucks, other than a shattered passenger-side rearview mirror on Chuck’s Jeep. Rabbit Burroughs had been complaining of a headache all day, and had twice mentioned that he thought he was coming down with the flu. That was his explanation for failing to attach the nylon parachute cord that was normally used to slowly lower the seismic testing charges. They laughed off the incident on their drive back to Darwin, although Rabbit Burroughs spent the next three days sick in bed with the flu.

Two weeks later, the replacement side-mirror assembly Chuck had ordered arrived. He bolted it on without the assistance of the dealership, but when he’d finished, he was confronted with a strange sight: His perennially filthy Jeep had one clean mirror housing. It was enough to compel Chuck to take his truck to the car wash for a long-overdue cleaning.

The self-service car wash on Vanderlin Drive was run by a genial man in his thirties. By his looks, Chuck assumed the man was half Aborigine. Instead of being coin-operated like the car wash in his small hometown in Texas, this one used credit cards for payment. Washing the accumulated red dirt from the truck took three full cycles.

Chuck wore his cowboy hat as protection from the glaring sun. As he worked, he hummed the tune to the song “I’m So Ronery” from a political parody movie featuring puppets, which he had seen many years before. Just as he was finishing up the last cycle, he heard a woman’s voice from behind him. “What’s T-T?” she asked.

He turned to see a tall young woman with curly, sandy-brown hair, wearing short pants and a simple blouse. Her index finger was pointing to the large red decal on his truck’s back window,...

Revue de presse :

Praise for EXPATRIATES

"A wonderful work of fiction" - Alphecca

"Expatriates doesn't disappoint in the technical nor page-turning sense" - Survivor Jane

“Rawles is an amazingly gifted author who has singlehandedly reignited the postapocalyptic thriller. Survivors is an instant classic.” – Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Full Black

“An incredible tale.” – AmongTheLeaves.com

“Survivors, painting a realistic picture of life with no plan to survive the harsh realities of a crash, has given me a glimpse into how the other half lives, and how I can further prepare to help my fellow man.” – Paratus Familia Blog

“It's [three hundred and seventy] pages of adventure, excitement, and page-turning thrills.” – IfItHitsTheFan.com

“Rawles' Survivors is well worth reading. . . well-written and informative, and speaks with an honesty and bluntness often missing from the policy prognotications of the political elite.” – The New American

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Brilliance Audio
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1480537055
• ISBN 13: 9781480537057
• Reliure: MP3 CD