ALSO BY JAMES WESLEY, RAWLES
Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse
How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It
Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse
Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse
EXPATRIATES
A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse
James Wesley, Rawles
Dutton
DUTTON
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Copyright © 2013 by James Wesley, Rawles
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REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rawles, James Wesley.
Expatriates : a novel of the coming global collapse / James Wesley, Rawles.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-698-13830-8
1. Political fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.A8437E97 2013
813'.54—dc23
2013015366
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
DISCLAIMERS
All Rights Reserved. Any unauthorized duplication in whole or in part or dissemination of this edition by any means (including but not limited to photocopying, electronic bulletin boards, and the Internet) will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This is a work of fiction. All of the events described are imaginary, taking place in the future, and do not represent the world as we know it in the present day. It does not reflect the current geopolitical situation, governmental policies, or the strategic posture of any nation. It is not intended to be commentary on the policies, leadership, goals, strategies, or plans of any nation. This novel is not intended to be predictive of the territorial aspirations or tactics of any nation or any planned use of terrorist tactics. Again, it takes place in the future, under fictional new leadership. Any resemblance to living people is purely coincidental.
The making and/or possession of some of the devices and mixtures described in this novel are possibly illegal in some jurisdictions. Even the mere possession of the uncombined components might be construed as criminal intent. Consult your state and local laws! If you make any of these devices and/or formulations, you accept sole responsibility for their possession and use. You are also responsible for your own stupidity and/or carelessness. This information is intended for educational purposes only, to add realism to a work of fiction. The purpose of this novel is to entertain and to educate. The author and Dutton shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any citizen, person, or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused, or alleged to be caused, directly or indirectly by the information contained in this novel.
This novel is dedicated to my wife, “Avalanche Lily,”
for her inspiration, encouragement, and diligent editing.
She has filled the enormous gap in my life after Linda
(“The Memsahib”) passed away.
CONTENTS
ALSO BY JAMES WESLEY, RAWLES
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DISCLAIMERS
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTORY NOTE
1 | A GLIMPSE
2 | DOUBTS
3 | LIFE IN OZ
4 | SISTERS
5 | PLATEAU
6 | FORTIFICATION
7 | SOLDADOS
8 | FOSSICKERS
9 | BARGAIN HUNTING
10 | DOWNLOADS
11 | THE MISSING UMBRELLA
12 | NIPA
13 | CHARTS
14 | IN FULL FLIGHT
15 | UNFETTERED
16 | CROSS SECTION
17 | FOX HUNT
18 | QUISLINGS
19 | WATER
20 | E&E
21 | RABBLE IN ARMS
22 | THE WAIT
23 | MAD MINUTE
24 | MADAGASCAR
25 | INTO THE DEEP
26 | SHIPSHAPE
27 | WYNDHAMITES
28 | THE UTE
29 | LODGINGS
30 | THE KING HIT
31 | MONITORS
32 | THE RAIDS
33 | DISPATCHED
34 | CRESCENDO
35 | TO YOUR GUNS
36 | EXIGENCIES
37 | LUAU
38 | IBOMB
39 | RULE .303
40 | DEBRIEF
41 | DENIAL
42 | A TIME TO EVERY PURPOSE
43 | THE SPIRIT
44 | CONTACT
45 | HEAD SHOT
46 | CLAYMORES
47 | STAR OF COURAGE
48 | A NEW FLAG
49 | RESTORATION
50 | O CANADA
GLOSSARY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The LORD also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble. And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for thou, LORD, hast not forsaken them that seek thee.
—PSALMS 9:9–10 (KJV)
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Jacob “Jake” Altmiller—Hardware store owner/manager in Tavares, Florida.
Janelle Altmiller—Real estate agent. Wife of Jacob Altmiller. Daughter of Alan and Claire McGregor. Sister of Rhiannon Jeffords.
Lance Alan Altmiller—Son of Jacob and Janelle Altmiller. Eleven years old at the onset of the Crunch.
Captain Soekirnan Assegaf—Captain (“Kapten”) of the Indonesian Navy patrol boat Sadarin.
Sam Burnu—Aborigine ex-convict groundskeeper, Marrakai Heights, Northern Territory, Australia.
Caleb Burroughs—Australian Army WO1 warrant officer.
Randall “Rabbit” Burroughs—Oil and gas seismic crew member. Brother of Caleb Burroughs.
Bruce Drake—Oil and gas seismic crew member.
Thomas Drake—Retired farm foreman. Paternal uncle of Bruce Drake.
Alvis Edwards—Salt and hide broker, Wyndham, Western Australia.
Vivian Edwards—Wife of Alvis Edwards.
Edward Hadley—Private pilot, Alice Springs, Australia.
Paula Hadley—Private pilot, Alice Springs, Australia. Wife of Edward Hadley.
Peter Jeffords—Christian missionary from New Hampshire, living in Quinapondan, Samar Island, Philippines.
Rhiannon Jeffords—Christian missionary, originally from Bella Coola, British Columbia. Wife of Peter Jeffords. Daughter of Alan and Claire McGregor. Sister of Janelle Altmiller.
Sarah Jeffords—Daughter of Peter and Rhiannon Jeffords. Seven years old at the onset of the Crunch.
Lyle Jenkins—Mayor of Mount Dora, Florida.
Samantha Kyle—Disabled RAAF veteran and home automation systems specialist, Palmerston City,
Northern Territory, Australia.
Byer Levin—Mayor of Tavares, Florida.
Tomas Marichal—Former Marine, self-employed gunsmith. A builder of custom AR-15 and AR-10 rifles and carbines in Tavares, Florida.
Tom Martinson—Mayor of Tangerine, Florida.
Alan McGregor—Semiretired cattle rancher, Bella Coola, British Columbia. Father of Ray McGregor, Janelle Altmiller, and Rhiannon Jeffords.
Claire McGregor—Wife of Alan McGregor. Mother of Ray McGregor, Janelle Altmiller, and Rhiannon Jeffords.
Ray McGregor—Afghanistan War veteran and military historian. Originally from Bella Coola, British Columbia. Living in Newberry, Michigan. Son of Alan and Claire McGregor. Brother of Janelle Altmiller and Rhiannon Jeffords.
Joseph Caylao Navarro—Jeepney barker, living in Quinapondan, Samar Island, Philippines. Sixteen years old at the onset of the Crunch.
Paul Timbancaya Navarro—Coastal fisherman in Quinapondan, Samar Island, Philippines. Owner and captain of FV Tiburon and part-time instructor of the Filipino Martial Arts. Grandfather (“Tatang”) of Joseph Navarro. Called Tatang by both his relatives and friends.
Chuck Nolan—American petroleum geologist originally from Texas, living in Casuarina, Northern Territory, Australia.
Ava Palmer—A GIS technician and Australian National University college student raised in Casuarina, Northern Territory, Australia.
Major General Rex Raymond—Special Operations Commander Australia (SOCAUST), near Bungendore, New South Wales, Australia.
Colonel John “Jack” Reynolds—Commander, 7th Combat Service Support Battalion (CSSB), in Enoggera, Queensland, Australia.
Rudolfo Saguisag—Retired Philippine Navy NCO. Nicknamed Dolpo.
Lisa Schoonover—Clerk and accountant at Altmiller’s Hardware in Tavares, Florida.
Ralph Simmonds—Immigration officer with the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.
José Valentin—Former U.S. Army radio repairman. A photovoltaic power sales and service technician with Altmiller’s Hardware in Tavares, Florida.
Quentin Whittle—Former bush logger and commercial hunter, Rapid Creek, Northern Territory, Australia.
Adhi Wulandari—Perantara insinyur (“intermediate engineer”), Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia.
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Unlike most novel sequels, Expatriates is contemporaneous with the events described in my previously published novels Patriots, Survivors, and Founders. Thus, you need not read them first (or subsequently), but you’ll likely find them entertaining. Another novel is planned for the series. Check out my blog, www.SurvivalBlog.com, for updates.
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.
2
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 f
rom 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 company 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.