Drone Wars 1: The Beginning Read online

  Drone Wars: The Beginning

  A Novel

  By

  Mike Whitworth

  Published by Doc’s Press

  www.docspress.com

  Copyright © 2013 Mike Whitworth

  All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  My wife, Diana, made this novel possible. Without her support, courage, love, and encouragement, I could never have written this story. I love her with all of my heart! Also of immense help were our cats Happy and Dusty, who often took turns sleeping on the desk as I wrote, and our dogs Bear and Misha, who frequently slept at, or on, my feet as I wrote.

  The cover art is by the talented Kip Ayers. Thank you Kip for such fantastic work and being so great to work with! See Kip’s work at www.kipayersillustration.com.

  Author's Forward

  This is a novel, a work of fiction, written only to entertain. It is the first in a series of novels about a monstrous conspiracy by a government and its supporters to murder citizens who disagree with their viewpoint and actions, and what happens when some of those citizens survive and take action against that government.

  The novel is set in the USA some time in the future. I chose the USA only because it is a place familiar to most readers, and this familiarity allows better plot progression. I have taken much freedom to describe government agencies and titles that do not exist in order to simplify the plot.

  The incidents and people described herein are completely imaginary. None of the incidents are real, or ever happened. I sincerely hope nothing like the imaginary incidents described in this work of fiction ever do happen to anyone anywhere.

  At this point in time, though, I am not so very sure that someday soon they will not. The technology described in this book is mostly either available now, or is projected to be available fairly soon. As all of us know, technology can be misused by people who have evil intentions as well as by those who simply do not think about the ramifications of what they are doing.

  I hope you enjoy this imaginary tale of what our future might become, and I sincerely hope that the bad parts of such a future never come to pass for anyone, anywhere.

  I do not advocate violence against government, and I do not want a second civil war in America. I do, however, have a few words for anyone who believes they can control the American People through tyranny of any kind. To you I say, no matter how much you believe you understand the American People, you don't. No matter how you proceed, you will seriously underestimate the will, creativeness, and fortitude of the American People, thus ultimately creating your own downfall. True Americans, though very patient and peace loving, value liberty, and are neither subjects nor slaves to do any tyrant's bidding. No matter how massive any tyrant's efforts to divide or subjugate them, the American people are a force that can and, sooner or later, will defeat any evil.

  Mike Whitworth

  April 2013

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Author’s Forward

  Chapter 1: ATTACK

  Chapter 2: PEGGY

  Chapter 3: REFUGE

  Chapter 4: GROUND HOUND

  Chapter 5: DRONES DOWN

  Chapter 6: SANCTUARY

  Chapter 7: THE MOUNTAIN

  Chapter 8: THE ORGANIZATION

  Chapter 9: PEGGY WAKES

  Chapter 10: THE MEETING

  Chapter 11: TONI

  Chapter 12: THE BIG SPLASH

  Chapter 13: THE RESCUE

  Chapter 14: REUNION

  Chapter 15: PLANNING

  Chapter 16: FIRST STRIKE

  Chapter 17: UNDERGROUND

  Chapter 18: MISSISSIPPI

  Chapter 19: KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

  Chapter 20: CHALLENGE

  Chapter 21: NORTH CAROLINA

  Chapter 22: THE BATTLE

  Chapter 23: MONTANA

  PREVIEW of Drone Wars Two: Flint and Steel

  Chapter 1: ATTACK

  "Murder by remote control is still murder.” John Debrouillard

  Middle-Indiana

  The silence, interrupted only by the sound of the hoe striking the earth as I sliced the sparse weeds off just below the soil surface, was both refreshing and calming. As usual, I enjoyed the rhythm of hoeing the garden as much as I enjoyed being outdoors on a sunny Indiana summer day. It took me a minute to notice the buzzing, whirring sound. I turned just as the drone fired. That turn saved my life because the .40 caliber round fired by the drone missed. I dropped the hoe and ran for cover.

  The drone followed me flying about six feet above the ground and repeatedly fired at me as I dodged crazily across the garden stomping the plants that I had carefully tended and cared for during the past two and a half months, and some for an additional six weeks in our greenhouse before we transplanted them to the garden.

  I stepped onto the 2x10 that bordered one of our raised beds, and the board gave way. I stumbled and fell to my hands, which dove eight inches into the soft, compost-rich soil. Several rounds fired by the drone made pockmarks in the ground just ahead of me. I realized that they would have hit me had I not stumbled.

  I rolled to my right as the drone repositioned itself for another shot, sprang to my feet, and dashed across a series of raised beds by stepping only on the boundary boards as though they were narrow stepping stones. The beds were each four feet wide and there was a two-foot-wide path between each pair of beds. The differing length of my steps and varying pace made my motion jagged and more difficult for the drone operator to predict. The drone kept firing, but my erratic motion helped me dodge the bullets.

  I made my way to the portable building we used as a shop without getting hit and dove through the open door. The drone kept firing at me but, with the four and a half foot span of its four-rotor system, it couldn't come through the door after me. The bullets had no trouble passing through the thin metal walls though. I quickly turned my heavy workbench over and crouched down behind it.

  The Roubo-style workbench top was made of a 6-inch-thick slab of glued-up hard maple and stopped the bullets. I was glad now that I liked to work wood using hand tools where such a heavy bench was needed. A typical, plywood-topped bench used by most power tool woodworkers would have left me riddled with holes by now.

  I had read where this model drone carried a .40 caliber, semi-automatic pistol equipped with a laser sight and a one hundred round drum magazine, but I thought they were only used overseas by the military. I had no idea how many bullets the drone had already fired, but it was a lot. After the drone fired maybe 20 more rounds almost randomly into the building, the rolling staccato of gunfire ceased. I jumped up and dashed across the shop to the door. The drone was hovering about seven feet off the ground not four feet from the open shop door. I imagined I could see its cowardly, psychopathic operator sitting at his desk controls somewhere safe as I grabbed the 12-gauge shotgun from the pegs over the door and brought it to bear on the drone all while expecting to be shot. I had to act though because my wife Susan was in the house, and I didn't want the drone to kill her too.

  The shotgun was a Remington model 870 pump that held five rounds. I fired all five as fast as I could work the action. On the fifth round, the drone veered away and crashed in the yard.

  I felt a momentary elation but didn't take time to enjoy it. I ran for the house holding the empty shotgun. Susan was in the house canning sweet corn we had picked that morning and I wasn't sure if the drone I shot down was the only one. Susan was coming out of the house as I crossed the yard.

  "What happened?” she asked. I could tell she was shaken by the tone of her voice. "What was that thing?"

  "We have to get out of here, Sweetheart," I said. "We have to go now.” That was when
I heard them.

  This time there was more than one. I glanced across the cornfield that abutted our backyard. The sky just above the six-foot-high corn was black with drones. As they came closer, the sound grew louder until it drowned everything else out. I dropped the shotgun, grabbed Susan, and started for the house just as the roar of 50-some-odd drones, all firing their .40 caliber guns at once from two hundred yards away, began. Susan jerked, and I almost carried her into the house, down the hall, and lowered her through the trap door into the root cellar as the bullet storm ripped through the house. I felt a blow on my right calf and another on the top of my right shoulder as I dropped through the trap door after Susan.

  The root cellar wasn't there when our house was built. Two years before, we cut a trap door through the floor in the small bedroom that served as my office and excavated the root cellar below the house proper, one five-gallon bucket of dirt at a time. We chose to put the root cellar under the house for several reasons. First, during the winter we wouldn't have to go out into the cold or snow to retrieve our home-canned food or our stored carrots and potatoes. Second, our one-acre lot was small enough as it was and we wanted to use the space an outside root cellar would have taken up for growing edibles or other useful things. Having the root cellar under the house also made it a quickly accessible tornado shelter, which was nice since Indiana has more than its share of tornados.

  Our lot, zoned rural residential, was mostly gardens and various edible plants grown in raised beds, with fruit trees, bees, chickens, and rabbits. Our lot was a hard-won, edible landscape with a dose of permaculture. The root cellar was lined with hundreds of jars filled with food that Susan had canned from our gardens and small orchard. She had also canned more than a hundred quart jars of chicken and rabbit meat. We grew and raised about 90% of our own food, and I worked from home as a consulting hydrogeologist, as well as sold wooden dough bowls and handcrafted furniture that I made during the winter months in our 12 by 32 foot, wood stove-heated workshop.

  After we dug the root cellar, we lined the walls with rubber roof membrane and then poured one five-gallon bucket of hand-mixed concrete at a time into the forms. When the 10-inch-thick concrete walls and footing below, all reinforced with rebar, had cured, we sealed the inside with a thin coat of hydraulic cement. The root cellar had two rooms. The first, which we were in, had a concrete floor, and the second had a dirt floor that helped to stabilize the humidity for storing root crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes, apples, and carrots, etc. through the winter. The floor of the dirt-floored room was two feet lower than the floor of the other room. I had installed an automatic sump pump just in case of flooding. So far we had no flooding problems. Since the basement was dug into clay-rich glacial till, I didn't expect any, but it pays to be careful.

  Both root cellar rooms were capped with a steel-reinforced slab of concrete, 12-inches thick, supported by 12-inch steel I-beams. Part of that stoutness was to transfer the weight of the center support piers for the house above to the new footings poured for the root cellar, and part was to add sufficient mass so that the root cellar could double as a fallout shelter. When we built the two-room root cellar, I thought we were going overboard, but Susan encouraged me to take my time and do it right. Building the root cellar took us over a year. I don't think the neighbors even noticed, but then we were careful not to tell them or let them see what we were doing. I bought the steel beams when the neighbors were all on vacation and hauled them home on our 16-foot utility trailer. It was almost all Susan and I could do, even with come-alongs and a winch, to get them off the trailer and under the house into position. At the time, we didn't dare ask anyone for help.

  It was just operational security, or OPSEC. Susan and I are preppers. I had been worried about the economy for a few years and when I mentioned to Susan that we should store some food and supplies just in case we had an economic collapse or an EMP event, she encouraged me, and then led the way in planning the gardens, fruit trees, and chickens. The bees and the rabbits were my idea. The small rack of firearms on the wall next to the canning jars was Susan's idea, even though when we married she didn't like guns.

  I slammed the trap door shut above me, glad that we had lined it with ¼" steel plate and three layers of Kevlar. Susan stood against the storage shelves holding her side. She didn't look good. I helped her through the door and down the steps into the second room and set her down on a wooden bench I made for her to use while sorting through the lower storage bins. It was then I saw the blood on her side and chest. Her last words to me were "I love you Sweetheart. Kill the bastards for me, please!” Then she slumped over into my arms. Her life passed while I held her. I hugged her tightly to me, and my tears started to flow as the house above was macerated by thousands of .40 caliber lead bees.

  As I stroked her head, I remembered our first sweet potato crop and her bubbly excitement and enthusiasm as we dug them up. I turned the sweet potatoes up from the earth with a shovel, and then she pawed through the dirt with her bare hands, holding each one up for me to see as if it was a rare diamond or emerald, all the while happy and smiling and suggesting ways we could cook them.

  After maybe 10 minutes, I managed to get up and went back into the concrete-floored room and took a 9mm Browning High-Power, that had belonged to my Father, a Beretta Bobcat in .22 long rifle, and a stainless steel .223 Ruger Ranch Rifle from the gun rack. The rifle had also belonged to my Father. New sales of all three semiautomatic firearms like these were banned. Until now at least, the feds had stopped short of house-to-house confiscation and had just said that semi-automatic weapons owned before the law was passed must be registered and proof of purchase provided. I had no proof of purchase, and even if I had, I would never have registered my weapons. Registration has been the first step to gun confiscation and genocide in every tyranny of the last century.

  Back in the dirt-floored room, I grabbed one of the bug-out bags we kept there. In the bug-out bag were Dave Canterbury's five C's of wilderness survival, three ways of making fire (combustion), a couple of reflective space blankets for cover, a billy can for a container, some parachute cord, and tarred bank line for cordage, a Mora knife for a cutting tool as well as a canteen full of water, some survival food bars, a first aid kit, some fishing tackle, a compass, a small flashlight, and full magazines of ammo for the guns. I also had a Swiss Army Knife and a small sharpening tab with a diamond grit plate and a ceramic rod in my pocket. The sharpener also used to have a ferro rod for striking a spark to start a fire, but it broke off one time when I dropped it. I never got around to getting another one.

  I slipped the High Power into my waistband and clipped the inside-the-pants-holster to my belt and jeans. The Beretta I dropped into the bug-out bag still in its pocket holster. I took one last look at Susan's body slumped on the bench.

  "I will get the bastards for you, Sweetheart, every last one of them. I promise!” I said as I took one last look at the love of my life slumped dead on the bench. I wanted so much to bring her back; to return to the mostly carefree days of growing fruits and vegetables and raising chickens; to return to the happy times we had shared, but I knew those times were gone now forever—all because some asshole in our government was afraid of people who were self-sufficient, or had opinions differing from the mass of sheep posing as citizens of our once great country. The sheeple some called them. Well, I was no sheeple and, although I had never been a violent person at any previous time in my life, I now knew that the capacity for great violence had always lain dormant within me. Susan's murder brought it welling up from depths I never before knew existed.

  I moved a rack of bins aside—it rested on concealed rollers so it moved easily—and crawled into the escape tunnel.

  I had just finished the escape tunnel about six months before. It was shored, floored, and walled with treated lumber. The bottom of the tunnel sloped from both the entrance and exit to a low spot located about midway along the length of the tunnel. The space below the floorboards was
filled with gravel, and I had installed an automatic sump pump at the tunnel's low point. The sump pump drained into a flowerbed in the yard. There were also LCD lights, with battery backup, installed along the tunnel to light the way.

  Susan had requested the tunnel. She said that if times got bad, we might have to leave our home and she wanted a concealed and safe way out. She was worried that if the government ever declared martial law that we might be forced to go to a FEMA camp. I have always had a moderate case of claustrophobia, but I dug the tunnel for Susan anyway. I wouldn't let her dig because I thought digging the tunnel was too dangerous. She carried dirt though; as ever, always determined to help.

  Susan thought FEMA camps would be used to guillotine, or otherwise kill, and cremate 'useless eaters.' She said, because we were just regular, everyday citizens without much money, the government would probably be happy to kill us off so the powers that be would have more of the Earth's resources for their own use. I wasn't sure that I agreed with her, but I wasn't sure she was completely wrong either. I had always heard that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In my lifetime, I had yet to find any evidence that statement was not true.

  I read somewhere that the president locked himself in his study and reviewed the films of overseas drone strikes like they were some kind of death porn. I had not known that American citizens were being attacked with drones here at home on our own soil until now, but I hoped that son of a bitch of a president was watching when I took down the first drone.

  When Susan and I started prepping we were both overweight and out of shape from living a typical American lifestyle. All the work I had done, and cutting out all wheat, GMO corn, almost all sugar, both diet and regular soft drinks, and eating our own chemical-free produce and meat now had me fit and strong. Instead of the 290 pounds I used to weigh, I was now 220 pounds of pretty solid muscle on a six-foot frame. I had even started jogging about a year ago.