Chapter 5

Mark took on the job of organizing a militia from the men who had been thrown out of the Army for being Jewish. Most of them had been EMs (Enlisted Men) who could not stand the dictates of the Church. However, a few had been officers, including a Lt. Colonel Aaron Lourie who had been in the Infantry. Lourie was immediately tagged as the man to head the militia. He was very good at organization building, and he found a captain and two lieutenants to lead companies. Sergeants were made platoon leaders, and the organization grew from there.

We even had the makings of a heavy weapons platoon if we could get the weapons. That was less of a problem than we had expected. We were able to buy several versions of the .60 caliber machine gun, including a quad AA (anti-aircraft) mount with radar guidance. I can't imagine where that came from, but it was a welcome addition to our armaments when Mark picked it up from a contact in Mexico. It cost us a pretty penny, but it could be worth its weight in gold if and when we were attacked.

We also picked up a flock of IR (Infra Red) guided RPGs that would be perfect for defense against attacking helicopters. All we needed now were some 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers, and we would be as well armed as most Army units.

Just as our money was running low, we made a marvelous discovery. We had been running exploration teams with GPS back into the depths of the cave complex. They were well beyond the portion of the cave system that had been explored by NRC, so they were on virgin territory. New Mexico had long been known for its hard-rock gold mines, so it was not too surprising when they found a vein of gold. What was surprising was the size of the vein! It was 30±6 inches thick by about 60 inches wide, and there was no telling how far it ran.

Mining started immediately, and that included building a road capable of handling an electric tractor and a pair of carts. The tractor was just not capable of hauling more gold than that, but we didn't let that worry us. We simply assigned more tractors and carts to the job.

We had so much gold that we let anybody who wanted it have some to play with. A group of artisans began to craft jewelry from a portion of the gold, and they were making some beautiful items. Mark started taking some of the jewelry with him on every trip and sold most pieces for much more than their value as straight gold. Those artisans quickly became worth their weight in gold!

To the surprise of almost everybody, including me, the farm was doing very well. It easily supplied all of the vegetables we needed and could have done twice as much. The special lights worked out so well that we stocked up on as many as we could find. They were not a common item in a small town hardware or garden store, so it meant that we had to get them on special order. This bothered me some because of the chance of attracting too much attention, but we got away with it, so I certainly couldn't argue with the results.

Our big problem was getting enough meat. At first, we bought meat from the local ranches, but they were having trouble keeping us supplied. We were pushing 2,000 souls in our new home, and we went through a lot of meat. Cindy started looking for a way for us to raise our own inside the cave. That was going to be a real project, but we all sincerely hoped that she would succeed. Chicken, turkey, and pork were not too much of a problem, but we really wanted beef, and that was where the problem lay. Cattle were not very efficient converters of grass into meat, so they needed a lot of feed. Our farmers were working on that phase of the problem, and we figuratively held our breath hoping that they could do it.

One day, I received a message from Gen. Arbuckle's office wanting to know if we were ready to accept more "undesirables?" I held the courier while I read the message and wrote up a reply. My main question was what was the sex of this block of undesirables, and my secondary question was why they were being cut from the population.

The answer was that these were families: husbands, wives, and some children, who had been laid off from jobs locally and were not easily trainable to different tasks. I also suspected that they were not wholehearted supporters of the establishment. There was a total of 187 people in the group, and they needed an answer from me by this same courier. Hell, for that number of people, we could find a place to keep them just from the viewpoint of saving their lives.

I answered that we could make room for them, especially since our testing program was ready to include children. My conscience stung me, so I told him that we were now in a position to take anybody he could send us. He should just accumulate enough to make at least one bus load so that I could justify the fuel expenditure in my annual report. All I needed from his office was the timing and the number of people involved. His cooperation was greatly appreciated, and I would make sure to include a note of this in my reports. I cautioned him that nothing official would ever surface outside of ONI, but he certainly would be remembered at appropriate times. My messages always contained a caution to destroy them after reading!

After this exchange of notes, we picked up three or four busloads of prisoners every three months. This went on for over a year, and Arbuckle's office never caught on. Hooray for the narrowness of the confirmed bureaucratic mind.

*****

Well, we finally got tripped up. We all knew that it was going to happen, we just didn't know when. We had been at Carlsbad Cavern for just over two years and had a population of nearly 3,000. OK, 2,968 in total, if you must know. Of these, 979 were classifiable as children, so we had an ever growing population. By this time, we had solved most of our major problems, but we still had not worked out all the details of herding cattle inside a cave.

Anyway, we were given away by Gen. Arbuckle, himself. He had been called to a conference in Denver, and had gotten drunk enough to want to show off his connections to important people. He didn't say much, but ONI eavesdroppers at the party heard about a secret experimental medical facility at Carlsbad Caverns. This was no big deal, of itself, because ONI had secret operations all across the country. The little bit of data was included in a monster report that was sent to headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain.

It was over a month later that some clerk was going through the records and failed to find any mention of such a secret operation. In fact, none of the files had any mention of anything to do with Carlsbad Caverns. This was suspicious, so the clerk routed a routine memo to his boss pointing out the discrepancy. The boss had just been reamed a new ass hole by his boss for a screwup in another file, so he was anxious to make damned sure that it did not happen again. This sub-boss ordered a thorough review of all the records of secret ONI installations all over the country. No record of such an installation could be found anywhere, so another exhaustive check was made. Still no record!

The sub-boss was beginning to worry at this point, so he went to his boss to explain the discovery and, incidentally, to cover his ass this time. This boss was shocked at the discovery, and he quickly routed a request for an investigation of the situation up to his boss. Ah, now he could breathe easier. He had asked for an investigation of a possible discrepancy, so his ass was protected from any return fire. After all, he had followed protocol and had bumped the problem to a higher echelon.

The request worked its way up the chain of command until it got to a high level where it was then routed to the chain of command responsible for investigating this sort of discrepancy. The request now worked its way down the chain of command until it finally reached the ONI office that would do the actual investigation.

This office happened to be in El Paso where the occupants were bored to tears with nothing to do. At last, a request for an investigation that would get them out of the office for a few days. There was a lot of infighting among the five resident investigators to get the prized plum of a trip. Two men were selected and prepared to leave the office the next day.

It was about a three-hour drive from the ONI office to our front door, so the men showed up just before lunch time. Undoubtedly, they expected to cage lunch from us and then turn in an expense account for lunch, anyway. Well, they were disappointed.

They pulled up to our parking lot and got out. They did see our buses and trucks painted in ONI colors parked behind the chain-link fence we had recently put up. We had a gate and a new air conditioned guard shack at the gate so that we could keep nosy-parkers as far away from our door as possible.

The two investigators came up to the shack, strutting like they owned the world. They flashed, and I mean flashed, their ID so fast that neither guard had a chance to look at it. Then, without waiting for acknowledgment, they demanded to be taken to the commanding officer. We had an SOP (Standing Operating Procedure) for just this situation, so my office was buzzed with a special code to warn me of an ONI visit.

I jumped up from my desk and strapped on my side arm before rushing to the gate. There was some shouting already going on when I arrived, and the two investigators were incensed that they were not being treated like the royalty that they were.

Oh, Man, it looked like I barely arrived at the gate in time. The two ONI field investigators were just about to try the patience of my two guards to the breaking point. Another two or three minutes and the investigators would have been full of holes. It's amazing just how obnoxious some officious people can get!

I ran up and announced in my most commanding voice, "OK, STOP IT RIGHT NOW!" I turned to one of the guards and asked, "Who are these people, and what are they doing here?"

Joey answered, "We don't know who they are, Sir. They waved something in our faces too fast for us to read what it said under the badges, and they refused to let us see them again when we asked. Now they say they want in to inspect the installation, and I told them that we could not let them pass without specific authorization from you, Sir." Joey was one of those ex-Army men who knew how to make a report, so he did a very good job of keeping up our false front.

I turned to the two visitors and asked, "OK, I got that, now, who are you and what do you want?"

The older and more rotund man of the two announced officiously, "We are special investigators from the El Paso ONI Field Office here to inspect this installation. It is not on anybody's list of official installations, and we want to know why. Are you the CO (Commanding Officer)?"

"Yes I am. I can tell you that we are a special experimental station, but I cannot tell you more. But that's why we are not on any official installation list. I must apologize, but I cannot allow you inside our gates without proper authorization from my superiors."

The older and more rotund one, who happened to be the more obnoxious of the two men, pulled out his badge and flashed it in my face, but this time he did it slowly enough for me to read some of the larger print. They were, indeed, authorized to go anywhere they damned well pleased, so we were in a bit of trouble.

We couldn't just shoot them and dump their bodies somewhere in the desert because the whole damned country was under constant satellite surveillance and whatever happened in our parking lot could be seen from near space. That meant that we were going to have to be very creative in handling this mess.