additional armed security at no cost. “Well, I suppose that’s okay,” she said quietly, and walked off.
The Doyles-Ian, Blanca, and Alex-agreed to each stand a daily eight-and-a-half-hour guard watch, thirteen days out of each two weeks. The intense guard duty schedule left them very little time for recreation-and hardly even enough time to hand-wash their laundry-but at least all of their meals were provided by the four families on a rotating schedule.
Blanca began to carry one of the M16s that Ian had taken in for safekeeping from Luke Air Force Base. Alex provided her some 5.56mm ammo, both for target practice and to keep in loaded magazines. She disliked the M16, mostly because of the odd twang sound that the buffer made in the buttstock when it was fired. She also considered the gun ugly but would not elaborate beyond saying, “I know a good-looking gun when I see one, and this one ain’t it. I like a gun with at least
The Doyles wanted to construct a sandbagged fighting position inside each ground-floor exterior window, but they ran into a problem: a shortage of sandbags. There were no nearby Army or Marine Corps installations, so the local surplus store had no sandbags available. And because Prescott was not in a flood-prone area, the county had just a small supply of sandbags for use if a water main broke. The local feed store had had its supply of empty feed sacks wiped out by just a couple of customers long before the Doyles inquired.
It was Blanca who came up with the answer: sewing their own, using rolls of black polyester mesh road construction underlayment material. This material came in ten-foot-wide rolls. They were able to trade a local road contractor a box of .30-06 ammunition for two rolls of the material.
Because the power was out, electric sewing machines were not available, but Doctor K. put his late wife’s Singer treadle sewing machine table back into operation. The table’s sewing machine had been discarded years before, when the table became a decorator item. But Doctor K. was able to install a much later model Singer machine into the treadle table. This one sewing machine eventually served the families in all four homes in the compound, for everything from patching blue jeans to making ammunition bandoleers. It proved capable of sewing the sandbags as well.
They cut the material to yield completed sandbags of the same fourteen-by-twenty-six-inch dimensions that had been standardized for U.S. military sandbags for nearly a century. Each sack weighed about forty pounds when filled.
Once filled and stacked, to the casual observer, the stacked black sacks looked like dark shadows inside the windows. The sandbag-making-and-filling project went on for three weeks. Clean sand was available from a large pile at the development’s uncompleted golf course. When asked permission to use some of the sand, Cliff Conley replied, “You take what you need. I expect it’ll be a long time before that golf course ever gets finished. Just don’t ask me to help you fill ’em. I did my share of sandbag filling in Vietnam. I’ve now reached the ‘supervisory’ stage of life.”
By SOP, all wireless connections were turned off, for fear that they might be detected by passing looters.
Ian and Blanca settled into an upstairs bedroom that sat above the living room, which was heated by a woodstove. A floor vent gave their bedroom sufficient heat. More important, the bedroom had a sliding glass door to a story deck with a commanding view of much of the compound and the neighborhood. A hot tub sat on the corner of the deck, already drained for winter. It was soon lined with sandbags, turning it into a soft-top pillbox. The hot tub’s plywood lid was covered with Naugahyde and had flaps that hung down six inches. Ian and Blanca constructed a C-shaped framework with five two-by-four legs to support the lid. This positioned the lid seven inches higher than normal, providing a 360-degree horizontal vision slit. To anyone walking by on the street below, the hot tub-cum- pillbox didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, just a covered hot tub. Ian also cut five blocks from a length of four-by-four. These blocks allowed them to raise the lid an additional three and a half inches to provide better vision and hearing at night.
Because his master bedroom in the north wing of the house was too cold after the grid power went down, Doctor K. moved a single bed to what had formerly been his den. The den was just off the living room, and thus it was well heated. He and the Doyles then closed off the hallways to nearly half of the house by nailing up blankets with batten boards, to confine the heat to just the kitchen, living room, and den.
The Four Families staged a coup at the Conley Ranches homeowners association (HOA) meeting just a few days after Ian and Blanca arrived. By prearrangement with their sympathizers, they ousted two “Pollyanna” members of the HOA board. Both of them had wanted to maintain the status quo in the development, because they were hoping for an economic recovery in the near future. They were replaced with down-to-earth pragmatists.
In a series of voice votes that began almost immediately after the change in HOA leadership, all of the Conley Ranches restrictions on landscaping, gardening, pets, livestock, fences, antennas, solar panels, fuel storage, and vehicles were eliminated. Once it became apparent that they were badly outnumbered and that they were getting no traction at the meeting, the two Pollyannas and their handful of supporters stormed out in protest.
Under the new HOA rules for Conley Ranches, large-scale gardening on any unsold lots was encouraged. A 5 percent share of the crops grown on unsold lots was assigned to Cliff Conley, the original landowner and developer of the community. Conley later said that he was more than satisfied with that arrangement. A new HOA security committee was formed. This committee was later jokingly called the “Neighborhood Watch on Steroids.”
After the Doyles arrived, security improvements for the Four Families compound accelerated. With some hired labor to help, they built stockade-style fences connecting the perimeter of the four houses.
Ted Nielsen, one of the compound’s bankers, had a degree in engineering and had worked for a telephone company on his summer vacations during college. He constructed a simple phone hot loop of four traditional rotary-dial telephones for the houses. It was powered by seven car batteries wired in series. This battery bank was connected to a solar panel trickle charger. The dials on the phones were inoperative. They were connected in a traditional party-line arrangement. Each phone had a momentary contact switch added. When any of these buttons were depressed, it put a ringing voltage through the circuit, and all four phones rang. Nielsen’s simple phone system provided the means to coordinate a defense of the compound from intruders.
The interior fences in the four-house compound were removed, leaving a large inner courtyard. Most of this area was converted into four vegetable gardens. Clearing rocks took several days of hard work. Then soil, compost, and manure were hauled in, to be ready for gardening when warm weather returned.
The first week at sea was miserable. It was common to see Yvonne and Yvette vomiting over the stern rail in stereo. After the week of seasickness, everyone aboard
Until Andy and the Tafts got accustomed to navigating and handling the rigging, the sailing was mostly handled by Carston and Angie, who each put in grueling ten-hour watches. Angie piloted from 0500 to 1500, and Carston from 1500 to 0100. As the days passed, everyone else on the boat took on more and more responsibility in handling the rigging and, eventually, piloting. At the end of his watch, Carston Simms would either set the Simrad autopilot (in calm seas) or drop sail and set the sea anchor (in rougher seas). Andy’s topside security duty was nightly from 2100 to 0800.
Every morning after being relieved by Simone Taft (their day watch, eyeballs-only security), Andy would carefully oil the SIG and its magazines. He was very conscious of the depredations of damp, salty air on gunmetal. Then he’d do his best to sleep in the darkness of the sail locker.
One of Laine’s top priorities was familiarizing the adults on the yacht with safe gun handling. He did this in one-on-one classes held late in the afternoons. He taught them how to load, fire, and reload the pistol. Jules got an abbreviated version of the same instruction. The Tafts’ eleven-year-old twins weren’t taught gun handling out of fear that one of them might accidentally drop the precious gun overboard. But they
Most of the training consisted of dry practice with an unloaded gun, and with all of the gun’s ammunition safely in another compartment. But after a week of that, Andy gave Jules and all the adults the chance to actually shoot the SIG. Their targets were sealed empty bottles that were thrown off the bow. In all, they shot just twenty- eight cartridges.
After every lesson, Andy said, “If I go down, then you pick this gun up and you
