[h3]Ill-Gotten Providence[/h3][hr]The ride up into the mountains was like a hunting trip. Dan was nowhere near the deer hunters the Giguere brothers were, but he felt a native Vermonter's appreciation for the alpine vista that they were getting a treat to. If the day was crisp, as it turned into day from the night's work, they got the same sort of vistas that one saw in 'The Deer Hunter' -- and that was when he stopped thinking about it, because that was a bad omen. 

The radio was blaring a combination of sanitized American patriotic music useful to Soviet purposes, and heavily edited news that was on a scale of reliable to propaganda, was classified BULLSHIT.

That old communist, Che Guevara, who ran Cuba now, had a lot to say, apparently and he was getting plenty of time on the air. Always en vogue before, now those stupid t-shirts were everywhere.

He said it aloud, "Fuck Che." 

They pulled into the camp with the cabin and Dan busied himself with camouflaging the truck before going in. Like the brothers, he saw to the maintenance of his glock, though that didn't take much.

He looked around the room and down to his gun -- the glock was useful for what they'd been doing, but it wasn't going to cut it for what was next.

The drug business paid dividends in two respects - they were able to supply medical needs for the resistance cells they were a part of and then they had a booming contact with black market sources. Guns, ammo, equipment were being sold like hotcakes, but a lot of that was easy to obtain and people had gone buying it up in order to sell at a profit. But quality pharmaceuticals, the sort of shit Joe moved through with the help of the rest of the unit, weren't. 

Survivalists and preppers tended to get everything they could legally ahead of time and were used to squirreling it away, and that made supplies scarce, but they were never savvy about the drug market. The acquisition of pharmaceutical grade shit was the province of hardened, dangerous criminals that protected their territory. 

Never plentiful, and now in higher demand than before, it meant that a little bit diverted aside for survivalists that had too many guns and too much ammo were worrying about what they would do if wounded. The Giguere brothers were juiced in with the back country that way, the sort of militia guys that were sitting on a lot of the ammo. It was a complicated back and forth they were at the center of. But as the middleman, they benefited as a cell.

"Guys, I think it's about to get bad and we need to start breaking out the M-4's and some more of the explosives. Claymores and grenades. We all saw what happened, the heat's gonna be on now." The supply was provided to them by the same pipeline that got them the drugs. They had some M4's.