Chapter 3

“Green light on sentries and other armed personnel,” I radioed. One by one the snipers, who were using suppressors, reported in that their target was down and not moving and that an entry team was checking on them. I said a prayer of gratitude for Gunny and Clark. He’d brought along lots of sniper equipment that the Marine Recon snipers used, including the suppressors, and she had honed the skills of our snipers to nothing short of remarkable in the short time they had trained. Their ten sentries were reported down, and I hadn’t heard a thing.

Once the sentries were verified to be dead, the snipers moved to position two. Ten minutes later Gunny let me know they were all in place. There were four guards on the roof--one on each corner--and four on the ground--two outside the north door and two outside the west door of the building. No heat signatures were visible in any of the building’s windows.

“Go on total acquisition,” I ordered. Several seconds later, I watched two sentries on my side of the roof do a simultaneous silent swan dive as the two by the door crumpled in a heap. The entry team was there quickly to drag the bodies away and sneak inside. I worked with the north team as we inched our way up the stairs.

Spreading out in the hall, our snipers each picked out an IR image carrying a gun while the entry team prepared to charge in. Angles had been checked carefully. All snipers were prone and shooting slightly upwards to miss hostages seated or lying on the floor. Bullets that missed would go high enough to miss anyone else.

One team was on the north side of the large room shooting south and the other was on the west end shooting east. Entry teams were in the middle of the snipers on both the north and west sides. Another team waited in the two stairwells to help captives or to take down escaping gunmen. If there was a question, several squad members were armed with Tasers and zip ties.

“Three, two, one, fire,” I whispered into my radio. Puffs of white powder where bullets penetrated the drywall were visible and then the entry teams surged through the doors. The inside of the large room that used to be a conference room was lit eerily by candles but offered us plenty of light to finish the job as the remaining Rebels were caught in a crossfire of beanbag rounds and Tasers. Obviously used to gunfire and raids, the captives all made sure to stay flat on the floor. A couple of the gunmen tried that trick, too, to no avail. They were quickly captured and secured, and the 43 hostages rescued.

I had talked with the Council a couple of weeks ago about any future raids like this. If we captured anyone, they agreed to put them to work, shackling them and using them for slave labor to help us rebuild. Considering that their other option was death, the Council decided that the slavery was justified since the prisoners would be helping the women they had held hostage and abused. The Council did decide that the slaves should all be neutered just in case they ever escaped.

We ended up with two uninjured (other than a few bruises shaped oddly like the feet of the women they had held captive) and eleven wounded prisoners. One was serious enough that we simply left him tied up knowing that he would quickly bleed to death. The rest I felt could be saved and sewn up relatively easily and they were tied up and hauled to one of the military trucks. I made sure that the two uninjured prisoners were the last ones out and watched what I did to their wounded compadre that we left behind for dead. Having his dick and balls cut off would only hasten his demise. I shoved the severed dick into the mouth of one of the prisoners and duct-taped it shut. One of the dying man’s balls went into the other guy’s mouth and it was duct-taped shut.

Have you ever thrown up through your nose? Burns, doesn’t it? Both men threw up more than once, struggling desperately immediately afterwards to clear their nasal passage of vomit so they could breathe. The fear in their eyes when they realized that I would let them suffocate was exactly what I hoped to see. While the convoy re-formed and headed off, one ACAV stayed behind to stand guard while I interrogated the two men. I separated them into two rooms and started with the one that seemed more afraid. “I’m going to remove the gag and your buddy’s cock from your mouth. If you do anything but cough or tell me exactly what I want to hear I will cut it up into little pieces and stuff them down your throat until you suffocate or finish swallowing his entire cock, understand?” I growled in his face.

He nodded quickly, and I removed the tape. He spent nearly a minute spitting out the cock and coughing up puke. “Tell me about your group,” I ordered. He quickly told me everything I needed to know. They were a collection of the survivors from across several cities, the victors in the gang wars that had raged for over three months. Their territory included everything north of Interstate 10 and east of Interstate 15. The women were captured on the streets or taken from other gangs they defeated. While not treated terribly by gang standards, they were considered group property except for a handful who had been claimed by the leaders. Once his companion confirmed his story we shackled them and tossed them onto the floor of the ACAV where the troops roughly used them for a footrest as we headed home.

We stopped near where the group at UCR had been spotted. I figured that we’d offer them a chance to join us if they were friendly or we could come back later if they had hostages. Fortunately, they were mostly students, male and female, who had banded together like the other groups we’d collected. Once we convinced them that we were a collection of groups like theirs they jumped at the chance to join us having lost several members to the warring gangs already. They were stunned to find out that we had basically annihilated one of the gangs and saved all the captives. Five men and 27 women piled into the cars they were using and always kept fueled ready for a quick escape if necessary.

Lori and Nea had the worst of the wounds on the new slaves cleaned out and stitched up by the time we got home. We didn’t realize it at the time but one of our women had been slightly wounded when a bullet grazed her arm. She was prouder of her wound than bothered by it, showing it to everyone. I knew it would hurt like hell in the morning when the adrenaline had worn off and warned her husband about it. The new women were put up in some of the empty houses for the night.

Spots for the new tanks had been prepared while we were gone, and we now had a tank defending each corner of the housing complex, one protecting each corner of the main part of the base, and one guarding each main road into the base. The captives we freed last night eagerly helped our medical team with the neutering procedures for our new slaves by holding down each of the men and tenderizing their testicles thoroughly before they were removed. Unfortunately, we lost one of the slaves when he went into shock and died. What a shame. The freed captives seemed pleased by his death and agreed with the Council that making them work as slaves was a just punishment.

Two of the new girls sought me out after the neutering ceremony, now completely convinced that we were for real. They had heard that women from all over the southland were taking refuge at Camp Pendleton. Word was spreading among women that there was a large group there ready to defend themselves. More women left almost daily from all over Southern California seeking refuge from the marauding gangs.

We quickly gathered up an all-female QRT and took the two helicopters to Pendleton. The women there obviously heard us coming and took up defensive positions. After getting their attention, the QRT exited and removed their helmets so that the women at the base could see that it was women they were dealing with. Their leader met with Clark and they talked for a few minutes. We had been pretty sure they would want to discuss it, so we gave them one of our radios to be able to call us if they wanted to join us or if they were attacked and needed help.

One of their group came back with us to see for themselves what we were doing and then report back to the rest of the women. When she reported back that night, the women were sold. Unfortunately, there were 219 of them and that skewed our male to female ratio even worse than it had been. They loaded into the big military trucks and convoyed to our base with Pam and Diane flying cover for them. They were all armed and trained but still learned a lot from the additional training we gave them once they arrived.

Over the next three months we dovetailed them into our group as the women gradually gravitated to one family group or the other. Eventually, there were six or more women in each family and mine had grown to 30. I began wondering if the base housing would be enough. I also wondered about needing to build a covered walkway of some sort connecting two houses to have enough room for my family.

We had enough pilots trained by now that we brought back ten older propeller-driven cargo planes from all over the area, both civilian and military. We also had mostly-trained pilots and gunners for six Apache gunships and crew for six Seahawks that we flew back from San Diego. We filled the cargo planes full of ammo and rockets for them, raiding NAS North Island, and even unloading what we needed from two aircraft carriers. Our semis brought back the rest of the Apaches, and a dozen Seahawks, loading them onto flatbeds and making one long convoy covered by a swarm of Apaches and Seahawks. We loaded empty tanker trucks with helicopter fuel from several airports and military bases along the way, winding up with 12 tankers full of fuel and six of aviation fuel for the planes.

Craig even found what he’d been looking for; trainer jets for teaching “propeller” pilots to fly jets. For two days he shuttled back and forth, having someone fly him down in a small prop job which they would leave behind. We had access to thousands of them at nearby civilian airports. He flew back one of the training jets while giving the other pilot with him their first lesson flying a jet. Lori had to clear each potential jet pilot by giving them a more thorough physical than required to fly propeller planes. She had to make sure they were physically able to withstand the rigors of flying an attack jet.

I watched as several of the single women got trained. Their eyes were bright with excitement when they finished their first flight controlling a jet. Not surprisingly, most of them joined Craig’s family. He was pleasantly surprised when I suggested one day that he take his wives up in a cargo plane and let them join the mile-high club as a reward for a job well done. He protested that it was a waste of valuable fuel, but I reminded him that the fuel would go bad long before we used up the existing supplies.

By fall, we had planned out in detail what crops we would raise the following spring and had secured the necessary seeds from feed stores and gardening stores all over the area. Since the Central Valley was mostly agricultural, there were plenty of places to get seeds. We also had the newest and best of the farm equipment from distributors in the surrounding area. All we needed was someone who really understood it all. We had nearly 30 members who had lived or worked on farms, but none had really been farmers per se. Through trial and error, we figured out how each piece of the equipment worked. Piles of binders, stacks of pamphlets, and dozens of shelves filled with books garnered from local libraries, colleges, 4-H meeting places, and county agriculture agents’ offices helped some. I was fairly confident that we would at least be able to grow enough to survive.

We also had a much better idea of what orchard crops were available within an hour’s drive and we spent weeks harvesting apricots, peaches, plums, apples, pears, almonds, many varieties of grapes, and even oranges, lemons, and tangerines. We ate as much as we could, and dried, canned, or froze the rest.

Our next main concern was fuel. Fuel doesn’t store well and what we had was already a few months old. We were making progress with converting trucks and tractors to vegetable oil and rendered animal fat, but the tanks, planes, and helicopters still needed fuel.

Knowing that there were several smaller refineries around Bakersfield I asked our pilots to look around while they were on training flights and find one that was relatively close to us and close to oil pumps that could supply crude oil to the refinery. We would need to secure the area between us and the refinery and pumps.

We hadn’t really concentrated enough on making sure the towns and cities around us were empty of threats or that good people there had an opportunity to join us. For the next week, our helicopters flew over every square mile of the valley within a hundred miles of the base day and night locating everyone and locating refineries and oil wells. When we found a group we contacted them. About a third were cooperative groups and readily joined us, having spent months just trying to evade capture or death. The rest were involuntary groups that we raided, adding to our burgeoning female population. By the end of the recon and capture we had added 32 more men and 286 more women. The new women moved into single female housing until they got to know the families well enough to choose one.

We damn near threw a party when we learned that three of the men were real live farmers, as were an even dozen of the women. They tried hard not to laugh too much at our clumsy attempts to learn to farm. We happily let them have their chuckle at us, simply glad to have someone to show us what to do.

Once we checked the lower valley and made sure it was gang-free, we set up electronic surveillance checkpoints along the highways and freeways into the valley. Every major traffic artery into the valley had sensors put into the road like the ones used to trip stoplights. Ours, though, signaled us that we had company, and triggered a camera array consisting of a traffic camera combined with a night vision camera and an IR camera. Each array was housed on one of the emergency call boxes spaced along the freeway since the call boxes had a solar array to power the equipment and transmit the signal.

Finally, reasonably certain that the lower valley was as secure as we could make it, we appropriated the power from a dam in the mountains to the east. We followed the transmission lines, shutting off power to everything but the lines leading to us and to the pumping station at the head of the California Aqueduct to keep the irrigation water flowing to us. We spent two weeks finding and flipping switches until we had power to the base that wasn’t supplied by our generators.

The next day our oil pumps creaked slowly to life, pumping the oil into the nearby storage tanks that our tankers had drained and delivered to the refinery the previous day. Using a monstrous generator on a semi-trailer, we fired up the refinery. Our chemical engineering and electronics students had managed to get the refinery operating and made the necessary adjustments to have it producing fuel for the aircraft, as well as regular gasoline and diesel for our cars and trucks, as well as the tanks.

Our slaves had had to build a series of pole barns and had turned one into a dairy barn using equipment removed from one of dozens of dairies in the valley. Shortly after our arrival, our people had begun driving every day for up to an hour each way while caring for dairy cattle and other livestock and poultry. They would provide us with meat, eggs, and milk. Once the enclosures here were complete, we herded the dairy cows into appropriated livestock trailers and brought them here. We had also copied, as best we could, the way the pens were laid out.

Two of our more recent recruits were veterinarians, one of them for large farm animals.

Beef cattle and pigs, as well as, chickens were brought in next, as were tens of thousands of hay bales that were stacked with military precision in our next set of sheds. They were mainly a roof and two ends, with tarps hanging on the other two sides to protect the bales from the rain.

Months ago, we had released into the wild any cattle we couldn’t care for. We didn’t want them to suffer and die because nobody could feed them although we weren’t exactly sure how well they would do on their own. Pigs had been butchered for food. Horses had been brought to a handful of nearby farms with large, fenced corrals.

Satisfied with our progress I suggested to the Council that we return to southern California to find and finish off the gangs that had been there. We knew there had been one in Riverside--the Riverside Raiders, mortal enemies of the Rialto Rebels before they met their demise. I was also sure that we’d find one or more gangs controlling LA and San Diego. After that, I wanted to direct our attention to the north.

Our attention was directed to the north that night. It was a proud moment the next morning when my command staff greeted me with knowing grins. Gunny, my second in command, reported that our sensors on Highway 99 went off last night and showed a car crammed full of people headed south. Ten minutes later, a pickup truck with two armed men and two armed women triggered the same sensor.

They had dispatched two QRTs in Seahawks and set up a roadblock. The two Apaches monitored the progress of the vehicles and covered them. “You have entered an area controlled by U.S. forces. Stop your vehicle immediately and exit the vehicle with your hands in the air,” they announced over the Apache’s PA. The first vehicle stopped, and everyone exited nervously. All nine of the people crammed into the car were Hispanic: three men, one boy (although he was as old as our youngest “women”), and five women. They explained in broken English that they had been held captive and forced to work in the fields near Stockton for a large group of men and women.

They were secured and flown back to base while the pickup truck approached. They were stopped the same way but were reticent to surrender their arms and exit the truck until one of the Apaches shredded the engine of the truck with their mini-gun. Unsure just what was going on, the four were secured and flown back to base, too. The first group had been left together under guard in one of the base buildings we set up to hold detainees. They were all fed and given warm bedding for the night. They were astounded at how much we had and that we had electricity.

Two of our women who were fluent in Spanish spent the night interviewing each of them and got the same story. They were basically slaves to a group of armed men and women. The armed men also fucked any of the Hispanic women any time they wanted. They claimed that they wanted to make sure they were all pregnant to keep their group supplied with new “wetbacks” and whores.

Naturally, the four that were armed tried to make it sound like their slaves had been captured trying to attack them and take their women. Unfortunately, their separate stories of the alleged attack didn’t match each other’s once we started asking for details beyond what they initially offered.

Gunny brought in the two guys from Rialto that I’d interrogated and convinced to talk. The two were asked to explain to our four new guests what the man who would be interrogating them was like. Their initial reaction of looking quickly around and cowering basically answered the question but one quickly babbled, “Tell them everything before he gets here, no matter how bad it is. You do not want him to have to ask you anything.” He wouldn’t go into detail but the ladies made him take his pants off and asked where his balls were. The two guys could only stammer an unintelligible answer before they broke down and began sobbing.

It had the intended effect, though. The four quickly told our team everything they knew--which was a lot. They admitted forcing the Hispanics into slavery and abusing the women. They showed us on a map where their base was, where the sentries were posted, and where the fields were that they were working. There were also about 40 white women, 20 black women, and a few white and black men being forced to work in the fields with their “wetback” slaves. Those numbered about 300 women and 100 men.

They had raided towns and farms from Antioch to the Sierra foothills and from Modesto to Galt where they ran into another armed gang. They had defeated them and took their prisoners, but didn’t want to fight another armed group again. They currently had 40 guys and 50 women in their group, mainly armed with AR-15s they took from gun shops, police departments, and prisons.

I spoke with the nine people who’d escaped and asked if they thought the rest of their group would like to join us. They were a little hesitant at first until some of our many Hispanic troops came in. Once they realized that they would be treated as equals, they were sure they would all want to join us.

It was a fucking invasion force that traveled north on Highway 99 the next afternoon. A second, smaller force traveled north on Interstate 5, complete with four tanks on their trailers. Before they reached the Stockton city limits, the tanks were unloaded to lead the parade of six ACAVs when we were ready for them to continue north. Four Apaches would fly cover and help with the distraction.

Under cover of darkness our first group took up positions near the fields the group would return to work in the morning. The slaves would arrive around 7 a.m. in a caravan of old school buses. Their guards would be in pickups like the one we’d stopped the previous night, usually five pickups, each with four guards. Our command van was hidden nearby, ready to block any radio communication once the festivities began. Our now 24 snipers made quick work of the guards. Their orders were “kill shot or gun shoulder.” Seventeen of the guards survived and were captured by the QRT troops hidden along the road. The slaves started to panic but relaxed when they saw four of the ones who had escaped the previous night and saw how many of our troops were women, Hispanic, or both.

It took nearly our entire fleet of cargo planes to hold everyone we rescued, but an hour later, they were loaded and on their way to the base. The 15 wounded guards that were still alive were on a separate plane, cuffed and hogtied, tended to by two nurses with 15 armed guards to keep an eye on them, not that they were in any shape to put up much of a fight even if they weren’t secured. Once Lori patched them up as best she could in the short time she had, they, too were on their way. We were much less worried about their survival than about the well-being of our troops here should she be needed.

By early afternoon, we had managed to get reasonably close to the five-story hotel they used as their headquarters. Their guards were right where we were told they would be and after a thorough scan of the surrounding area I was satisfied they only had the four guards on the roof of the hotel.

Our snipers took out the four guards on the roof and our entry teams took up positions covering every door out of the building. I led the first team to enter, using IR to watch for hidden sentries. We made it to the hotel kitchen with no problem. So far, everything had been just like we’d been told. Many of the details had been verified earlier by some of the people we just rescued.

As expected there were nearly 20 women in the dimly lit kitchen doing everything from sucking off a guard to washing dishes and preparing dinner. Both guards were down even before realizing we were there. While Camila tasered the guard opposite us I grabbed the one getting the blowjob and kept him from calling out until he slumped in my arms, unconscious. The troops with me quickly removed their helmets so the women in the kitchen could see that everyone besides me was an armed Hispanic woman.

They let us know that there should be no further guards until the 4th floor where everyone was kept. There would be two guards at the top of both staircases and two inside the room where everyone else was staying. Most of the other gang members would be sleeping or having sex with their own women or with the slaves they kept here today.

We hurried the women out to safety and talked through a plan. Two troops entered each darkened stairwell chatting in Spanish as if they were the women from the kitchen taking food upstairs. With the stairways and hallways darkened (batteries in the emergency lights had died long ago) they got clear to the top before the guards even wondered who they were. Listening to each other on their radios as the two pairs of women approached the guards, they had timed their approach almost perfectly, all four guards slumped, and spasmed on the floor without making enough noise to be heard inside the main room.

Like the two guards in the kitchen, they were gagged, bound, and hogtied before being dragged (bump, bump, bump) back down the stairs to the lobby and then outside.

Using fiber optics, we watched from under both doors. Like the Rialto Rebels’ room had been, it was lit eerily by dozens of candles. Naked bodies were sprawled all over the floor as dozens of women were being fucked. Many appeared to be active participants while others sobbed or simply lay there.

Two women who were forced to have sex with each other to amuse their captors while they fucked different women were allowed to go to the bathroom. We froze when the guard opened a door and the ladies exited the room. Once the door closed, two of the troops at the far end of the hall began chatting animatedly in Spanish and approached the two women. They gasped when the women grabbed them but didn’t struggle while they held a whispered conversation.

When they finished, the two troops asked my permission to take their place. They wanted to enter the room and come on to the two guards, then drive a knife under their chin and into their brain to keep them quiet. They would lower them to the floor and pretend to be making out while we opened the door and dragged them back out.

There was food and drink on tables along the wall they would pretend to consume while putting out a few of the candles to make the room even darker. Then they would work their way to the other door and repeated the process. I made them promise to hit the floor immediately if anything went wrong. They giggled, stripping right in front of me and kicking their clothing against the wall. “How do I look?” one of them asked teasingly as she pirouetted.

“Cute, but green,” I retorted.

The first girl reached up and kissed me, pulling my hand around to squeeze her tight, naked ass. “Hopefully you’ll have enough energy to thoroughly debrief me tonight,” she whispered seductively.

Not to be outdone, the second girl followed suit. “We both want to be thoroughly debriefed tonight,” she giggled.

There was a smattering of knowing giggles among the women waiting to rush into the room. We had teams ready at both doors in case anything went wrong. I still wondered which two girls I’d just groped. The first part of the attack was carried off without a hitch and two more girls put on the dead guards’ clothes and took their place when the four of them appeared to have finished making out. The two candles nearest the door were extinguished so our two replacement guards were almost invisible.

The two naked girls worked their way quickly around the north end of the room to the other door. One of the guards was a woman and resisted the girls’ advances at first but finally gave in. Their passionate embrace carried them through the door to the hall. I held my breath until I heard the entry team knock her out. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t kill her,” I heard sobbed quietly into the radio.

“You did great. All four guards are down, now. Do you need someone to replace you?” I asked.

“No, I’ll be okay,” she sniffled.

“Make sure you find me as soon as this is over. I definitely owe both of you a proper debriefing,” I breathed suggestively.

“Thank you, Mike,” she sniffed. I heard her take a few deep breaths, then “Okay, I’m ready.”

By the time she was dressed to go back inside, we had managed to find a “white” girl to replace her guard. I could hear them still kissing as they re-entered the room. Two more captive women left and were replaced by two of ours. By now, only six candles lit the room and both doorways were invisible. The girls reported that, other than the four door guards, there were no weapons in the room--not even knives. With the doors invisible, eight more naked girls slipped inside each door, each armed with two Tasers.

“Ready Tasers and beanbags,” I radioed. “Only tier four teams should have lethal weapons. First two entry teams at each door should be stun only for anyone but black and Hispanic women. Third team should have lights on the doors. Direct the captives to safety and take out escaping bad guys. Fourth team will be lethal only if needed. Night vision goggles off now. On my mark, 3, 2, 1, go!”

I heard the squeaking of rubber soles on the linoleum floors as our women rushed into the room. For a couple of seconds, it was fairly quiet. Then pandemonium broke loose as our battery-powered lights came on in the doorways. Shotgun blasts and screams of terror from the captives quickly blotted out everything else. More flashlights went on at both doors and screaming women were directed towards the stairwells where even more troops awaited them.