“Very good. Now fire the rest.” He watched her fire, and noticed that she looked more comfortable each time.
When she fired the last round and the slide stayed back, he took the pistol, reloaded it, put it in his coat pocket, and lifted another pistol out of the backpack. “This is a Colt Commander. It’s bigger and heavier, obviously. It’s chambered for .45 ACP, and it’s not designed for concealed carry. It has a little more stopping power than the 9mm. Its magazine holds seven rounds and you can carry one in the chamber. As I said before, I don’t usually do that.”
He went through the whole process again for Marcia, showing her the parts and the mechanism, and then how to load and fire the weapon. He handed her the Commander and let her fire it. After each shot he made a comment, either a correction or encouragement.
After she had emptied the magazine he taught her how to clear the pistol and reload. Then he had her return to the Beretta Nano, release the magazine, check the load, reinsert the magazine and charge the weapon, and then fire those rounds. When she’d fired the last round she reloaded the magazine, then fired through that magazine.
He made her alternate weapons, firing a magazine at a time. He changed targets, finding smaller branches and placing them farther away, always watching her form and accuracy until she had fired a hundred rounds.
“Are you confident that if something terrible were happening, you could pick up either one of these, load, and fire accurately?”
“I know I could,” she said.
“All right, then,” he said. “Reload them both one more time and then help me collect all the brass.”
“I can help you pick it up first,” she offered.
“No,” he said. “Reload first. We’re not people who can afford to have all our weapons unloaded at once.”
He knelt to pick up the brass casings that had been ejected from the pistols. Then he took both pistols, checked to be sure they were fully loaded, and put them in the backpack. When they had picked up the brass they headed to their car. When they were back at the cabin he cleaned the weapons and put them away.
The next day Hank checked and modified his bugout kits. Each contained a few thousand dollars in cash, a Beretta Nano pistol with two spare magazines, and the licenses, credit cards, and passports of a Canadian couple named Alan and Marie Spencer. He set aside the two pistols with silencers he had taken from the two killers in Chicago. He loaded them and put them both in the nightstand on his side of the bed.
Just as he was finishing these tasks, Marcia came in. She could see that the kit he was filling now had a driver’s license with her picture on it, and the pistol. “What’s going on, Hank?”
“Nothing,” he said. “We’re in a good, comfortable place right now, where we have privacy and time. If we don’t use a little of it to get ready for trouble, maybe we’re not earning the chance to keep going. If we don’t earn it, maybe we won’t get it.”
Over the next weeks Hank prepared for events that might occur—another attack by-Libyan assassins, a raid by police with tear gas or flash-bang grenades, a house fire, a car accident, a neighbor who thought they seemed suspicious or recognized a picture that they didn’t know had been publicized, a robbery—anything that might put them in danger. He began to train Marcia to perfect her responses, so each of them would know what the other was going to do.
He bought an emergency rope ladder and kept it rolled up by their bedroom window and bolted to a six-foot pipe. He bought a pair of standard binoculars and a pair of night-vision binoculars. He studied the roads and the houses around the lake from the cabin’s upper windows. He explored the forested areas to pick out trails and dirt roads. In the evening he used the night-vision binoculars to pick out cars, pedestrians, boats on the lake, and animals moving along the trails.
Hank identified the routes a person could use to outrun or evade attackers. He favored the troughs of dry streambeds for invisibility. He looked for outcroppings and piles of boulders for vantage points. But always, he preferred the pine forests, which offered protection from above and floors of pine needles that wouldn’t hold a footprint.
Next he began to test the escape routes. For weeks he used their early morning walks to determine the viability of each route and to get Marcia to memorize it too.
When he was satisfied, he identified a series of rendezvous points where he and Marcia could meet if they got separated. The points were established all the way to San Bernardino and then to Los Angeles on the south and west, and to Las Vegas and Salt Lake City on the east and north.