They had a shipping area too where they packed the bricks in shrink-wrap and loaded them into cartons. Orne moved bulk around the country in regular trucks and private planes just like UPS. He had a computerized billing system and inventory control. As a cover operation he bought crafts?dolls and quilts and rag rugs?from local women and shipped those out to mail-order. It explained the boxes going out air freight and washed the dope money.
He was moving tons of the stuff right out in the open like that and never a sniff from the cops, because according to him the cops and the DEA were set up to catch dummies really, not smart people like Orne or Kaczynski the Unabomber, a local hero, unless they’re betrayed by someone close to them. In another gallery of the mine he had the armory and we took a look at that too. He had every kind of weapon, pistols, rifles, machine guns, mines, rocket launchers, boxes of shells and ammunition, plus other military hardware like radios and generators and in another room stores of food and water for when the nuclear destruction came and they had to all sit it out down in the deeper tunnels where the radiation couldn’t follow. The electricity to run the place they generated from methane that came from a digester fed on hog manure from North Carolina and he also had a little steam generator that ran off of coal, but that wasn’t hooked up yet. We cooked with the methane too.
So I began my life on Bailey’s Knob. Everyone was friendly to me in that reserved, formal mountain way, except for a couple of the younger women who had their eyes cocked on Orne and were mad that I had got him instead, but nothing too bad. The whole place ran on kin spirit, they were all Randalls, Warrens, Wendells, Coles, more or less related to one another and to the Foys, because you couldn’t run an operation like that with just hired help. Any one of them could’ve blown us but none of them ever did and I will not blow any of them now by supplying names. The other thing about the Knob was no TV. There was no reception of course because of the mountains and no one wanted a satellite dish. They listened to the radio and made music themselves, like in the olden days, or watched movies on VCR. I thought it was real restful, not to have people blaring at you from commercials every night and besides it left more time to read. And no phones, no ringing to distract you, to bring news from the outside no electrical bane or boon interrupting life. No phones no taps, was Orne’s rule and he wouldn’t have one on the place. The pay phone outside the grocery in Tiptree was our only contact with the outside, and Orne paid the salary of a girl there all she did was answer the phone and take messages for him. Once or twice a day she’d ride up the mountain and deliver the messages and every couple of days or once a week Orne would go down there and make calls.
I was there two years and four months and in that time I guess I read every book in Orne’s library. There was all of Nietzsche, naturally, and near everything that anyone had ever written about him biographies and such, and some other philosophy and political science and economics, as long as it didn’t say anything good about religion or welfare or socialism. Besides that, most of the shelves were taken up with history and military history and how- to books, and reference works, so that when the world collapsed we could construct civilization again, but leave out the parts Orne didn’t like. There were no novels. Orne thought that fiction was a waste of time, and no poetry either except one book called the 500 Top Poems, some guy collecting the most anthologized poems, and Orne thought that was good enough, plus the complete works of Shakespeare. He also had a nearly complete collection of field manuals for the U.S. Army and a complete Loompanics catalog, all kinds of books on how to be a terrorist at home or change your identity and all.
Right off he taught me the business. The trade in domestic marijuana is much larger than most people think. In California it’s second only to grapes as a cash crop. I don’t know about Virginia, but I guess we were right up there with apples. Slade County hadn’t produced so much income since the Caledonia shut down. The prime sensemilla we grew went for over $200 an ounce on the street and paid us around forty dollars or $1,280 a kilogram and we shipped between 400 and 500 kilos a month so an income of half a million per. Figure 70 percent for salaries and overhead that’s still a lot of money and all of it went into gold, because Orne didn’t want to have his money in data when all the computers went to slag. Once a month he’d go to Roanoke and hire a private jet and fly around his distribution area, collecting his take and converting it into one-ounce ingots, maple leafs, Kruger-rands and when he had enough he would bury them around the property in gallon jars. He used a mil-spec GPS receiver and took a digital photo of the burial site and then he stored the photo in encrypted form along with the GPS coordinates on his little solar-power Argonaut ruggedized laptop. I learned how to do that too.
Besides this work, my time was my own. When I got sick of reading, I walked the land with map and guidebook, learning the trees and plants, sometimes with Orne, who knew it like his own face, and sometimes alone. They had built a watchtower on the rocky crest of the Knob and we would sometimes go up there and view our eight hundred acres. From there you could see the growing blanket of the state forests and watch it turn from green to golden and red and also the blighted areas where the coal companies were carving the tops off mountains and also St. Catherine’s Priory, lodged against its own hill, Sumpter Ridge across Crickenden Hollow from Bailey’s Knob, a set of blue-gray boxes among the trees. Orne pointed it out to me and said maybe they would sack it like the Vikings did when the end came. It was in my first autumn there that I saw snow for the first time, and was also for the first time cold in a cold wind and felt what it felt like to be hugged warm by someone else.
I’m sorry, you’re not interested in my delights, although it’s the case that the devil has a whole bag of them. Not like in the horror movies where the devil’s always obviously nasty, yellow eyes shooting flames from fingers making people fly into the walls, oh no he is as nice as pie and truly solicitous of your comfort. It is God who makes you cringe and hide your face and suffer pangs of torment, and flings you against the wall, not that I knew that then, and not that you know that now, but I pray you will learn.
What else? We played a lot of paintball, all joining in after work and on weekends, war with two teams or sometimes escape and evasion with three or four trying to get through and the others trying to keep us out. We took turns being commander. Most of the guys and some of the women had been in the service, so it was a pretty tough league and at the beginning I was usually killed fairly soon. I never got particularly good at being the commander, which is kind of strange, considering what happened later on. We did a good deal of shooting too, pistols rifles of all kinds machine guns rocket launchers. We had a 60 mm mortar and I got to shoot that and we also practiced making booby traps and blowing things up. Orne had the whole place packed with explosive devices and in case of a raid he intended to seal the mines under tons of rock, hopefully with all the narcs inside it. We tested these demo charges in unused tunnels. There is so much blasting in those hills from the mining that no one ever noticed our noise. I liked blowing things up, there is a luxurious thrill that goes through my body when I release a shot. Orne said I was a dab hand at it.
I didn’t meet Skeeter Sonnenborg until I was there for well over a year, in fact on October 10, 1989, because he had been away in some far corner of the globe, although I had heard a good deal about him from Orne and everyone else. Ol’ Skeeter. Remember that time when ol’ Skeeter run his motorcycle through that wedding in Boonetown? Or started the goat racing? Or got drunk and brought a girl back to his place having forgot he already had a girl there he just asked to marry him? Skeeter was the best buddy. On that morning I was lying in bed with Orne and about to either get up or do it again, when we heard a crackling of gravel and then the potato-potato- potato sound of a Harley-Davidson exhaust and Orne lit up a big grin and said damn it’s Skeeter back again. We got out of bed then and I was just looking around for something to put on when the door kicked open and there was Skeeter in his riding leather and his Nazi helmet. He ran his eyes over me and said nice tits honey and then jumped on Orne and they wrestled and whooped and punched each other down on the floor until Orne got him pinned in a hold and he hollered enough.
Well there is often a problem with the girlfriend and the best buddy. With Skeeter around Orne seemed to lose about twenty points of IQ, not that Skeeter was dumb far from it. He had gone to a fancy prep school name of Andover or Hand Over Your Money Daddy as he always called it and spent some time at the University of Pennsylvania before he dropped out in ‘73 and joined the marines, which is where he met up with Orne. They didn’t want to miss out on the war. He was obscure about where all he came from, allowing only that his daddy was a plutocrat and he didn’t have much to do with his people. That was strange to me, since among Orne’s kind you just didn’t leave your kin no matter what kind of low dogs they were but there were a lot of rules that didn’t seem to apply to Skeeter, including him making fun of Orne’s philosophical ideas. Skeeter didn’t believe in getting ready for the End of the World, nor strictly speaking did he believe in getting ready for the day after tomorrow. Or that’s how it seemed, although in fact he was a perfectly competent businessman. What he did was sell weapons. He lived in Kelso, Virginia, which was about fourteen miles away on the other side of Sumpter Ridge, where he ran an outfit called The Gun Nut. This was not just selling Remingtons and Colts to the locals. He was an arms dealer on a fair scale, and he traveled all over the world buying and selling lethal hardware. He was the first person who ever talked to me about Africa, but I have run out of pages so here ends the third book.
Shortly before the surrender of Metz to the Prussians, a frantic Georges de Berville shipped his daughter
