Bay area, doing recon. My favorite rock is our place of residence. Cold storm front rolling in headed east.

Chinese north and east of us, we've managed to stay out of sight and mind (to them anyway) though.

Sub sighted, contact initiated. Cannot go into details but we have more equipment and new orders now. (looks like I'm more or less drafted, don't mind too much because I got a multi-spectrum scope for the M-4 out of it.)

Headed north. Probably going to have to go dark for the time being. I'll post something when I can, and give details if I can.

Camped out at an NG depot in the LA area overlooking the port.

Snow is now a foot deep, the locals are going nuts making snowmen.

Picked out some chains from the motorpool here that'll fit the humvee we have.

Haven't seen the sub, did see a whale, tempted to poke around the marina and see if we can find a boat we can use. Our orders are undefined beyond checking the places we have, so probably some weather reporting in advance of storm fronts would be useful for our guys.

From the descriptions of the sub we're fairly certain it's a Russian submarine, but we won't know unless we finally get in contact with them.

Snow... in Los Angeles...

One of those things you kinda hope for all your life to see, and then when it happens it's kinda bittersweet.  Kinda interesting to see the local populace's reaction to it.

There were people talking about a submarine that's been popping up at the marina. We're going to be watching for it to see whose it is.....at range of course.

Barstow got hit hard.

That's about all you can say. in the LA area now poking around finding troops and sending them north. Kind of organized chaos down here.

Went back to China Lake and grabbed some portable gear to set up a temporary sms network to relay information back north.

Anyway saw a small search plane headed out towards the area we designated this morning. Anyway headed south again. Next stop Barstow.

At fort Irwin, place got cleaned out, at least they left a note on a wall in spraypaint... though how we're going to find them is another matter. We've got  encoded SMS systems working in some areas, but this far south reception is a crapshoot. We've got a working radio, but well.. I don't want to broadcast the information of what area the soldiers of Irwin went into in an unsecure way.

"Leaving Fort Irwin, taking gear with us, off into mountains to the east. Electronics are fried. Map on commander's desk is bugout location. Nov. 20 2012"

We did find a few grave-sites in the parade grounds. The base is mostly intact, and most of the desert is sand and dirt around here, it looks like most of the bombs hit to the west of here. Staying the night, then on move to where we have reception to get a secure message out for a search of the area for the fort Irwin soldiers. Hope they're ok.

Ok, regarding the questions as to why I showed my mother a drawing of the symbols on the drone. During college she worked in the foreign languages section of a library, and had a lot of downtime.

Anyway, on move to the Mojave again with the group I was with recovering the Chinese spy plane bits.

We're going on weapons cache identification out in the desert, and checking in on some other things like the status of Barstow, Fort Irwin, and then the LA area, as no one's been really in contact with anyone in the LA area since those marines arrived at the beginning of April.

So as I was saying. Lots of tanks.

Apparently the local solar array that was built a couple years ago was a cover for tank storage, because it was basically a big underground parking lot full of tanks, apcs, mobile artillery and troop transport trucks.

And ammunition.

And fuel.

All hidden and protected from harm by a few feet of dirt, armor plating and reinforced concrete.


And we just moved everything out.

Oh and a silly amount of spare parts, spare armor plating, spare everything. It's kinda amazing that it was just sitting there hidden like that. Kind of cool actually. Anyway on move.  Armor is headed north to join the fight, as well as some mobile artillery.

Let me preface this by saying I've been all over the valley of my hometown, explored every interesting location, and would never have expected there to be such a treasure-trove of military vehicles hidden here.

So apparently a silly amount of tanks, munitions and fuel were hidden in my hometown.

Not allowed to say where, at least not until we get them all moved out, which might take a while.

It seems the gate guards upgraded weapons while I was gone.

On arrival we were greeted by two toyota "technical"s with type 67's set up on them. They almost opened fire, we almost opened fire, and it was almost a clusterfuck.

After about an hour of discussion we finally were allowed passage in. We're staying at the hotel right at the creek edge for now, one of the lieutenants that came along is off at a council meeting finding out what happened exactly and trying to get permission to actually go through town proper to look for the armor cache we think is here.

I can guess what happened based off how armed the town is though.

The Chinese rolled in, probably looking for those unicorns that we're chasing, and then they were ambushed and either killed or captured. And all the arms that the Chinese soldiers had got split up among the local militia.

On a related note my mom and dad are alright, and they heard from two of my brothers, which leaves one still off somewhere, though before all this started he was in Britain on business. Should probably try e-mailing him I guess.

Showed my mom sketches of the drone symbols, and she has no idea what it means only that she's seen the language maybe once before. She didn't say much beyond that.

On my way home to check up on things off that way. I've also been asked to take some of the soldiers with tank training with me because someone in the upper command thinks there's a cache of armor back that way.

I guess. I've kinda been all over that way since I was a kid and there really isn't a lot of places that can hide tanks and things like that, but it's not my time wasted.

Found ourselves a blacklight, and it just makes the mystery even bigger.

At a distance the pattern actually looks like a QR code, only blown up to a large scale, unfortunately we don't have a cell phone that's that smart that works otherwise we'd try and "read" the code.

Even back at Leemoore there's no clue as to what it is.

Anyway Russians dismantled the chinese plane and took the blackbox somewhere. While we were off in the desert the Chinese got their asses handed to themselves in Fresno and the lines are further north. Every few minutes we can hear the crack from the Mariposa artillery shelling the chinese. It's a strangely comforting sound. Albeit loud. I'm going to see if I can get a day to go check on home.

Spent the last couple of days messing with the "drone" or whatever the hell it is trying to make sense of it. None of the components are anything like we've seen before.

The circuit "boards" are paper thin, there's no obvious data ports and there's no writing that we can recognize it and we don't have a blacklight with us, the metal its made up of is resistant to cutting with both a hand saw and a cutting torch, but a diamond blade on a hand grinder went through it like a hot knife and butter, though the cutting blade burned up pretty quickly.

It also takes an edge pretty nicely and so we all made knives from the hull. Light material, strong and doesn't break easily. Can't ask for much more than that, it might be worth trying to mill out a rifle receiver from it if we can find a shop with a cnc machine, but that's for a whole other day.

beyond that, not much to talk about. On our way out of the desert.