Expatriates (9 page)

“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

—Edmund Burke, 1791

T
he Jeffords and Navarros motored out the inland waterway under the Quinapondan Bridge on the evening high tide. Their goal was to travel southeast all night long to get them well beyond line of sight of Mindanao, and any coastal boats and their short-range radars. Once they were at least fifty miles offshore of Mindanao, they would turn due south.

Sleeping in
Tiburon
was very uncomfortable. With so many five-gallon buckets of coconut and palm oil strapped down inside both sides of the hull, it left only a twenty-inch-wide crawl space in the middle. Here, Tatang had laid long scraps of Zamboply brand plywood atop the keelson. These were topped with scraps of old handwoven
banig
mats. The plywood often wobbled and shifted, despite having copra husks wedged beneath them. The addition of four thin foam mattresses made sleeping just marginally more bearable.

To make matters worse, the combined smells of the diesel exhaust, diesel fuel vapor, various cooking oils, dried fish,
bagoong
(shrimp paste), ginger,
patis
(fish sauce), body odors, and lingering paint fumes were potent, especially when the wind dropped.

After the initial exhilaration of getting clear of Samar and into open water, the realization sank in that they faced a long trip in cramped, uncomfortable quarters.
Tiburon
's V-hull cross section was decent, but at times it acted more like a flat-bottom skiff than a modern chined boat design, doing little to dampen the effect of waves. Instead of lapping up the sides, they slapped noisily, depending on the boat's presentation to the wind and waves, adding to the vibration and drone of the engine. In all, the effect varied between just tolerable and downright miserable.

Even before they got under way, one of their biggest concerns was the safety of seven-year-old Sarah. To protect her from falling overboard and drowning, they purchased a child's life vest. They supplemented it by attaching a nine-foot-long nylon rope that was kept constantly clipped to either Peter or Rhiannon's belt with a carabiner. Thankfully, Sarah had a placid demeanor and was content to play with toys and dolls at her mother's feet for many hours each day.

From their first night at sea, they ran
Tiburon
with her navigational lights turned off. Tatang wisely taped down the switches for these lights to prevent them from being turned on out of force of habit. Other than lights in the cabin—which were used exclusively with the companionway storm hatch closed—their only light came from the dim glowing dial of the compass and the small screens on the GPS receivers and the depth finder when any of those were switched on. Realizing how far light could be seen on a dark night, they kept these screens covered by rags to subdue their glow, uncovering them just when needed.

They developed a routine that if anyone on deck wanted to go below after dark, they would give three rapid knocks on the companionway hatch. Then the hatch would be opened from within,
after
the cabin lights were switched off.

Like many coastal fishing boats,
Tiburon
had no head other than a tall, wide-bottomed urinal bucket for the cabin, and a pair of ropes fastened to the deck forward of the transom to hold on to, so that whoever had their buttocks projecting off the stern wouldn't fall overboard. As the only adult female aboard, Rhiannon found these ablution accommodations presented a privacy challenge. The transom was in full view of whoever was manning the wheel. Tatang and Joseph were gentlemanly, however, and would sing out, “I'm looking straight at the bow, Mrs. J., no worries!”

One evening shortly after the change of watch at the wheel, Peter and Rhiannon heard Tatang and Joseph in an animated conversation in rapid-fire Tagalog. All Peter caught with certainty was Tatang twice saying the words
dalawang uri ng isda
, which he knew meant “two kinds of fish.”

After Tatang had gone below, Peter asked Joseph, “What was all that about?”

“Tatang says that being out here dodging the ILF's navy is just like this: There are only two kinds of fish in the ocean: fish you can eat, and fish that want to eat
you
. We just need to choose our course carefully—far away from the islands so we don't run into the ILF fish, the kind with guns.”

“That sounds like sage advice to me.”

—

A
s they motored each night, they usually trolled for fish, which added great variety to their diet and was their main source of protein. Once in a while they would hook a fish that was too heavy for their tackle and would break their lines. Tatang was worried that if this happened too many times, they would run out of fish hooks.

To avoid detection, their Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) was to run the engine and make their forward progress at night. At daybreak, unless there was another boat or an island in sight, they would usually set their sea anchor—a fourteen-foot-long cone of cloth. The only exception was when the current was favorable to their intended course. Then they allowed
Tiburon
to drift, but they kept a close eye on the GPS. If the direction of the current changed, they would set the sea anchor. During daylight hours they did their best to sleep, leaving just one of them on watch to scan the horizon with binoculars. They traded off on this duty at two-hour intervals.

At dusk they would eat their “dinner-breakfast,” start the engine, and press on. They were close to the equator, so the periods of daylight and darkness never varied by more than twenty minutes, seasonally. They essentially had twelve hours of travel in darkness, and twelve hours in stealth mode in daylight.

To maintain light discipline, all of their checks on the charts were done below with the storm door slid shut. They plotted a tiny dot with an ink pen once per hour while they were making forward progress.

By SOP, whenever they saw or heard an aircraft, they would throttle back to one knot to stop creating any visible wake. They kept this SOP even at night. They would then wait twenty minutes after the plane could no longer be seen or heard to advance to three-quarter throttle.

Washing with salt water made everyone feel uncomfortable and they never felt quite clean. The sunshine caused chapped, cracked lips that petroleum jelly never fully healed. Sunburned ears, noses, and necks were another irritation. The smells of seawater, fish, coconut oil, and the cooking spices became pervasive. Together, they were just
the smell
that was the constant reminder that they weren't still at home in their nipa hut. The boat's constant motion was at first unnerving to Peter, but it later became almost calming, like a cradle being rocked. Jeffords concluded that he would never want a career working at sea, but he could bear up to it for a couple of months.

Their daily routine gradually turned into a blur. He prayed several times a day. Often they were prayers that he wouldn't get short-tempered in the cramped confines of the boat. The few excitements came when fish were caught, or when the sight or sound of a plane prompted them to stop their engines and anxiously wait to see if they had been detected.

Ahead of them, the vast expense of the South Pacific seemed endless. There were so many things that could go wrong and bring their voyage to an abrupt end.
Tiburon
was a small boat in a big ocean.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

—Sun Tzu,
The Art of War

L
ooter activity dramatically increased in Central Florida as the cities ran out of food. Bands of looters that numbered from five to sixty—some on foot and some in vehicles—fanned out from the larger cities like Orlando. Their attacks began with soft targets, mostly isolated hobby farms owned by retirees. Their modus operandi was to stealthily approach a house late at night while the occupants were sleeping. Then they'd smash windows and charge in rapidly, in the modern home-invasion mode. The property owners who survived the initial assault were often bound and interrogated. The truly unlucky were raped and killed. The looters would stay for the night, systematically stripping the farm of food, fuel, guns, ammunition, liquor, batteries, and precious metals. Livestock was often crudely butchered in barn stalls, with the looters cutting meat into fifty- to seventy-pound chunks with the hide still on. They left behind only the heads, forelegs, and gut piles.

The looter gangs quickly grew in size and sophistication. They began sending small scouting parties ahead to spot targets. These scouting teams used SSB CB radios to relay back the GPS coordinates of soft targets. At first, their idea of great communications security (COMSEC) was simply reading the GPS coordinates over the air in reverse sequence. Later, they adopted simple transposition ciphers for their messages, but these proved to be quite easily decrypted.

The Lake County sheriff consulted the president of the local ARRL-affiliated ham radio club and was told: “All it takes is at least two hams equipped with loop or small yogi antennas, compasses, maps, and enough time to get lines of bearing, or LOBs, on a ground wave signal before it goes off the air. Those LOBs are plotted on a map. The intersection of two LOBs is called a cut, and it takes three or more LOBs to establish an accurate fix with a halfway-decent circular error probability. From there, you just move in to narrow it down to an individual house or vehicle.”

He continued, “We have a lot of club members who are adept at DFing in the field. They've all been in our ‘Fox and Hound' group. They track each other down just for fun.”

Members of the club gladly volunteered. Their vehicles preceded small convoys of QRT vehicles. Pinpointing the houses or vehicles that were the source of the transmissions was relatively quick in lightly populated ranch lands but more tedious and time-consuming in suburban neighborhoods.

The looter spies were mainly found hidden in abandoned houses. They simply moved vehicular CB radios indoors and connected them to one of a half dozen charged car batteries that they had brought along. Their amateurish attempts at COMSEC turned out to be their downfall. By reading aloud lengthy coded messages (from simple and easily decrypted transposition ciphers) in five-letter groups, they were on the air for as long as twenty-five minutes per broadcast. This gave the ham radio operators plenty of time to track down their locations.

—

T
omas Marichal generally enjoyed being the guard for the hardware store, but the long hours were wearing him down. Eventually, both José and Jake began taking two-hour guard shifts once a day on a rotating schedule.

Tomas was concerned that even though he alternated between standing in different corners of the store, someday he'd be caught in an inattentive moment and shot by an armed robber. He voiced his concern to Jake. “What we need is some sort of armored guard booth
inside
the store. We need something like the bulletproof kiosks that they have for cops and security guards, like at the big shopping malls.”

After discussing this possibility, Jake, Tomas, and José all sketched some ideas for an armored guard booth, but their designs all lacked sufficient visibility. Then José suggested buying the teller windows from the now defunct Bank of America branch on West Burleigh Boulevard.

Jake learned that control of the bank building had reverted to the owner who had leased it to the bank. The building was sitting vacant. Jake made arrangements to meet the owner. They walked through the frame of the bank's smashed glass front door, with chunks of shatterproof glass crunching beneath their shoes. Birds had already started to nest inside the building. The interior was a shambles. Mortgage brochures, bank forms, and worthless Federal Reserve Notes littered the floor. But the four Plexiglas teller windows—each with a round metal voicimeter mounted at chest level and a rotating cash tray at counter level—were still intact. Jake was pleased to see that each Plexiglas window sat in a stout steel frame.

As Jake was taking measurements, the owner offered an explanation for the state of the bank. “B. of A. closed the branch after the inflation hit. They really did their customers dirt. When depositors came for their money, they didn't have enough cash on hand, so they gave everyone cashier's checks for their full balances and closed their accounts. People asked, ‘Where am I supposed to cash this?' and the manager just said, ‘That's your problem.' Even worse were the people who had safety deposit boxes. They only gave them one week to empty their boxes. When I repossessed the building, I found the main vault door was open, there was a huge pile of empty deposit boxes, and more than twenty boxes had been drilled open. Drilled by whom, I can only speculate.”

Jake shook his head in disgust, and said, “I never liked B. of A. I've heard some horror stories about how they handled their ag loans with the orange growers.” Jake finished jotting down the dimensions in his notepad. Then he looked up and said, “My offer is one hundred seventy-five dollars face value in silver coin.”

“For each?” the building owner replied.

“No, one hundred seventy-five dollars face for
all four
of them. And we'll handle all of the removal, transport, and cleanup.”

“But these are bulletproof . . . and they probably cost a fortune.”

“No, they're bullet
resistant
, and they're just like hundreds of others that I can find in abandoned banks all over Florida.”

The owner was clearly disappointed by the offer, but after a moment's hesitation he extended his hand to shake on the deal. Jake and a crew of four men came to dismantle and haul off the teller windows the next day.

The new guard booth was constructed near the middle of the store to give it a commanding view. It was pentagonal and used the teller windows on four sides and the door from a Winchester Silverado gun vault on the fifth side. Beneath the four teller windows, the first thirty inches up from the floor were plate steel, constructed of two quarter-inch thicknesses of Grade 50 hot-rolled A572 steel. Above these were bolted the teller windows with their rotary cash trays still attached. The booth's roof was just one quarter-inch thickness of steel, but it was firmly welded in place. Two thicknesses of the steel went over the triangular spaces between the window frames. The voicimeters were converted into gun ports that were latched shut from the inside.

Gasoline to run the arc welder was in short supply, so Tomas decided to use his oxyacetylene torch. Welding gases had become a valuable commodity, so he charged as much for the oxygen and acetylene as he did the steel when he put in his time and materials bid for the job. After the cutting and welding was done, Tomas smoothed the rough edges with an angle grinder. Then Janelle did the painting, starting with gray Rustoleum primer, and then adding two coats of white lacquer paint. The ten-gauge steel vault door was left in its original granite gray color with a Winchester factory logo near the bottom.

The vault door was only fifty-four inches tall, so the guard had to stoop whenever passing through it. It had originally been designed to open only from the outside, but by removing the inside panel and installing a secondary wheel, it could be quickly opened from the inside. In the event that the exterior lock dial was scrambled, the combination lock mechanism's back cover was left loose so the lock's three notched plates could be realigned with a pin punch. A large wooden block was cut so someone inside could prevent the vault's locking bars from opening, in case any miscreants ever gained access to the vault door's combination.

A tall swivel chair with a bucket seat allowed anyone manning the booth to be able to quickly turn to any of the four windows. It immediately became apparent, however, that the booth would need better ventilation. Two large rectangular vents were cut in the top, using a cutting torch. Expanded metal mesh was welded over the top of each vent, and sliding metal plates with handles were installed to block the vents in an emergency.

The final touch for the booth's security was suggested by Tomas: a set of high-pressure SCUBA air tanks that could be cracked open in the event that armed robbers tried to use tear gas or some other irritant to flush out the guard. Tomas surmised that closing the top air vents and then opening an air tank valve slightly would create a positive overpressure so no irritants could get into the booth.

The air tanks came from a SCUBA shop on Highway 441 in Mount Dora. Though there was probably still some work for commercial divers on the coast, in inland Florida, SCUBA diving had mostly been recreational. So dive gear was available for a pittance after the Crunch. The shop owners were happy to sell Jake two steel “120” dive tanks, which were both fully charged with 107 cubic feet of air at three thousand pounds per square inch.

The armored guard booth was quickly dubbed the Pentagon, and it spawned plenty of nicknames. Whoever was manning the booth was called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs or just the Chairman. Any reading materials inside the Pentagon were called the Pentagon Papers.

Despite all the jokes, the Pentagon was taken very seriously. The shotgun, AR-10, and piles of loaded magazines in the continuously manned Pentagon made it abundantly clear that the Altmiller's store would be a tough nut for any robbers to crack. The booth was greatly admired by the store's patrons. One elderly lady commented, “I wish I had a house built like that.”