“They let some of us older women go out to gather firewood, between the inner and outer fence. The inner fence was new, and had that dreadful razor wire. The outer fence was old. I found a gap where the chain link had parted at the base of a post. I pulled it up and squeezed through. I knew that if they spotted me outside the second fence that they’d shoot me down. But by then, I didn’t care. I just wanted out of there. Julie had often told me, ‘Mom, if you ever have the chance to go, then go!’ She said that I shouldn’t worry about her and the kids. So I went without regrets.
“I walked for three days, drinking out of stock ponds before somebody found me. Seven families helped hide me and move me along, by car, by wagon, and on horseback. All those families were a wonderful blessing. And now I’m here.”
Edgar asked, “Do you have any family, other than your daughter and her kids?”
“No.”
“Then you are welcome to stay here, indefinitely.”
A week after she arrived, Edgar took Maggie as his common-law wife.
Five weeks after Maggie’s arrival, Edgar unknowingly brought a bug back with him when shopping at the monthly Moscow barter market. He soon got over it, but when Maggie got the flu, she quickly grew dehydrated and weak. She died while Edgar was sleeping.
Edgar was convinced that if it were not for her malnourishment at the Gowen camp that Maggie would have recovered from the flu. Cancer had robbed him of his first wife, and now the Federals had robbed him of his second.
He never forgave the Federals for that. Before he met Maggie, he had no desire to join the resistance. He sided with them, but did nothing to actively help. But when Maggie unexpectedly came into his life and then so unexpectedly left, it changed him. The day after he buried Maggie, Edgar started packing.
• • •
Soon after joining the resistance, Edgar was put in charge of the fledgling Signals Intelligence Section. He had had communications intelligence (Comint) experience many years before with the Naval Security Group. He had been stationed at Skaggs Island, at the north end of the San Francisco Bay.
He soon put that experience to good use. Their well-camouflaged intercept site tents were generally set up on low hills, usually within twenty miles of Moscow. They had already been operating for nearly a year, on a makeshift basis, using just a couple of Uniden multi-band scanners. When he joined, Edgar brought with him a wealth of Comint knowledge, organizational skills, and lots of additional equipment. This included Drake and Icom shortwave receivers, two additional scanners, a pair of “Gunnplexer” microwave transceivers, a spectrum analyzer, three cassette tape recorders, and several custom-made antennas. Edgar transformed the amateurish section into a professional unit of Comint specialists.
Edgar was a half-century older than most of the men and women in his section. They treated him like their adoptive grandfather. He was a self-professed “crotchety old man,” and they loved it. During some quiet times, he entertained them with old ditties that he played on his ukulele. He sang 1940’s pop songs like “They Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil” and “Three Little Fishies.” The young resistance fighters loved them.
The section got their most prized piece of equipment from the Keane Team, the winter after Edgar took over. It was a Watkins-Johnson AN/PRD-11VHF man-portable intercept and direction finding set. It had been captured from the Federals, complete with an H-Adcock antenna array. Using micro-processor-generated time-of-arrival calculations with the H-Adcock antenna, the PRD-11 could provide lines of bearing on VHF signals, on a three-digit display. The “W-J” could also do intercept (without DF) of HF signals. With the single W-J, they could only produce individual lines of bearing, but even this was valuable for building an intelligence picture of the battlefield.
The original sealed batteries for the PRD-11 were soon expended, but the resourceful crew at the intercept site provided the correct voltage for the system using car batteries. All of the other equipment at the site was similarly powered by car batteries, all of which were laboriously carried to the site, and back down to town for recharging.
Eventually, there were six men and two women on the intercept team.
They manned three round-the-clock intercept-shifts, with two intercept operators per eight-hour shift or “trick.” The “day trick” also had two extra staff members. The first was a Battlefield Integrator/Briefer who plotted “best estimate” enemy unit locations on an acetate-covered map board. The other was a Traffic Analyst or “TA,” who reconstructed the enemy networks by analyzing the pattern of traffic. The TA’s most important time of the day came during the network roll calls that were conducted by the Federal and UN units each morning. Assisting the operational team were a full-time cook, three security men, two teenage message runners, and five “sherpas” who hauled food, water, and batteries to the site.
Most of the sherpas used captured ALICE pack frames with cargo shelves, a few had less comfortable 1950s-vintage army pack boards. All but one sherpa spent their nights with their families in town.
They moved the intercept site roughly six times a year. Each time, this required the temporary requisition of an extra thirty sherpas or a dozen pack mules. Edgar and his team were careful not to operate any radio transmitters from the site—only receivers. Knowing the Federals’ direction-finding capability, the last thing that they wanted to do was key a microphone. All of their messages and intelligence reports were sent out in handwritten notes, carried by couriers.
In addition to generating intelligence reports, Edgar’s team was also in charge of giving communications security (ComSec) training to the leaders of all the militias in the region. Edgar tailored his ComSec lectures to match the expertise of each militia. One afternoon he gave a lecture to Frank Scheimer, the executive officer (XO) of the Blue Blaze Irregulars. Edgar had heard that this militia had a number of captured radios, but that they weren’t savvy in their use.
Edgar sat Scheimer down before him, and waited while the XO readied his pen and notebook. Once he had his attention, Edgar began, “I won’t bore you with an explanation on the theory of radio wave propagation. That would take too long, and besides, it is redundant to a handout that I will give you when I’m done. Take the time to study it in detail, and ask me for clarification if you have any questions, before you head back to your operational area tomorrow. It is essential that you know the difference between ground wave and sky wave, the difference between AM and FM broadcast modulation, skip zone versus skip distance, the various frequency bands, and to know the ways that signals in those bands propagate through the atmosphere. The handout also includes basic instructions on how to use the phonetic alphabet, CEOIs, and so forth.
“So study that handout well, and then teach it to both your CO and your subordinates.
“My goal today is to first let you know what sort of equipment is out there—friendly, enemy, and captured enemy, and to teach you ComSec in a nutshell, so you won’t get yourself killed or give the enemy valuable intelligence. The key acronym that I want you to remember is LPI: Low Probability of Intercept.
“First let me give you a general rundown on the equipment out there. Most of the long-range traffic you hear is in the High Frequency or ‘HF’ range. Beyond about twenty miles, most of the HF you hear propagates by multiple bounces off the various layers of the ionosphere that are described in your handout. How well HF propagates depends on the sunspot cycle. Right now, we are just coming down off of an eleven-year peak in the cycle, so HF is coming in remarkably well. The important thing to know about sky wave HF is that for all intents and purposes it is invulnerable to most tactical DFing equipment. This is because it comes in at ‘near vertical incidence’—straight down from the ionosphere. With all the currently fielded tactical DFing equipment, you can’t get a useful line of bearing—or ‘LOB’—from that. But remember, ground wave HF can be DFed, but again, that is only at relatively short range.
“You’ve probably heard the shortwave ‘pirate’ stations like R
adio Free America and The Intelligence Report that run at around 6955 and 7415 KHz at night, and higher freqs during the day. And, you’ve probably wondered why the Feds haven’t shut them down. It’s because the Federals can’t DF them, so they don’t have a clue where they are located. You see, those signals are coming from deep inside rebel-held territory, and the Feds are intercepting them via sky wave. It must be driving the Feds nuts. I guess that’s why they try to jam them so much.
“Back before the Crash, the NSA had some pretty sophisticated HF-DF equipment back at Fort Meade, and the Army had a one-of-a-kind system called Track Wolf. It was made by a company called TCI down in Fremont, California. They used chirp sounders to judge the conditions of the ionosphere, and some pretty sophisticated algorithms to make sense of near vertical incidence sky waves. Track Wolf, for example, depended on two out-stations along a thousand-mile long baseline to generate useful cuts for HF-DF. Pretty sophisticated stuff. But, to the best of my knowledge, those systems aren’t operating today. If they were, the Feds would have already used what’s left of their ragtag air force to fly into rebel territory and bomb those transmitter sites.
“Most of the two-way equipment out there is Very High Frequency—VHF. VHF operates almost strictly ground wave—or line of sight—and is very vulnerable to DF.”
The XO jotted down on his notepad:
HF Sky wave - No DF
HF Ground wave - Can be DFed!
VHF (All ground wave) - Can be DFed!
“There are lots of civilian two-meter hand-talkies. Of course, the old networks of two-meter repeater stations are long since gone, but those radios still work great in line of sight. Some of the hand-talkies and a lot of the old in-dash rigs are frequency agile.”
The XO cocked his head and blinked, so Edgar explained, “When they came from the factory, the two-meter radios could receive all the way from 118 to 170 megahertz but because of FCC regulations, they could transmit from just 144 to 148 megahertz. However, before the Crash, a lot of hams not so legally modified their hand-talkies to transmit all the way from 140 to 170 megahertz! This was an almost standard job, done with the snip of a diode and reprogramming the EPROM, using the radio’s keypad.
“The frequency agility mod can be done on ICOMs, Yaesus, Kenwoods, Alincos, and Azdens, for example, but not the later Radio Shack models. Those darn ‘Rat Shack’ hand-talkies made from the early ’90s onward are not frequency-agile with just the snip of a diode. They intentionally designed them so the frequencies couldn’t be opened up. Oh well. The bottom line is that probably more than half of the two-meter rigs out there before the Crash were frequency agile, and even more now that there is no FCC to worry about.
“You can do a similar mod to some CBs. I have a Cobra 148 that I modified to 26.815 megahertz to 28.085 megahertz. Most of the later CBs have surface mount components and therefore they can’t be modified, but the older ones can be modified fairly easily. When you operate out of band, you can run into antenna length and tuning problems. Antennas are, of course, optimized for certain wavelengths. When you go too high or too low in frequency, you can get a standing wave ratio that is too high—sometimes over one-point-three-to-one. That’s exacerbated when you are operating mobile—from a vehicle—because you are probably already running quarter wave or less. Even with the bad Standing Wave Radio (SWR), things will work, but just not efficiently; one important proviso. If you’re going to operate out of band, never use a linear amplifier. With a wacky SWR, you are liable to burn up your linear amp. But that’s probably neither here nor there for anyone in our current situation. The whole idea is to keep your electronic signature small. Try to operate with the minimum effective radiated power. Running power is suicide, these days. Keep your radiated power low.
“Speaking of CBs, you should try and locate a Uniden President HR 2510. This is a ham radio that you can modify to transmit and receive in the citizen’s band range. You can open this model up all the way from 26 to 30 megs. It has a frequency counter that you can finetune down to 10 kilohertz. The CB band is a curious animal, you see. There are a few dead business channels such as 27.195 megahertz—between channel 19 and channel 20—that your average CB can’t receive. Nor can they receive the out-of-band freqs that are just above and just below the forty regular CB channels. This makes for some interesting possibilities if you have the right equipment. There’s one drawback, though. Uniden stopped making the HR 2510 back around 1992. If you looked around a bit before the Crash, you could find brand new ones or slightly used ones at CB shops. Back then they cost any where from $250 to $450, so they weren’t for the budget-minded. Lord knows where you’d find one now, but keep your eyes peeled, you might get lucky. When peaked tuned, a HR 2510 can pump out thirty-five watts AM, and forty-two watts single sideband. But again, what you want these days is minimum ERP.”
Scheimer scribbled notes down furiously.
“By the way, the common cellular telephones can be modified to talk unit-to-unit on fixed frequencies within their normal 800 megahertz band.”
“You can even have fun with unmodified hand-talkies. Just operate a pair at offset frequencies. For example, radio number one is set to transmit at 144.9725 and receive at 148.025. Radio number two is set for the reverse. Thus, the average listener gets only half of the conversation. The downside is, of course, that only two radios, or teams, can actively use a radio this way, and a team can’t communicate among itself this way, since their radios are only set to contact the other team. This is even more fun in a modified dual-bander. For example, a Kenwood TH-79A, once modified, runs essentially 136-to-174 megahertz and 410-to-470 megahertz. The factory original transmit specs are 144-to-148 and 438-to-450 megs. So if you play the cross band offset game, the two halves of the conversation can be separated by nearly 300 megahertz. Not too much risk of somebody hearing both sides of that conversation.
“Another trick is to operate AM on frequencies where FM is the norm. Anyone listening in the FM mode will only hear garbage and noise. However, AM radios can be off-tuned to an FM signal, allowing the AM detector to ‘slope-tune’ the FM transmissions. That enables reasonable listening clarity.
“So much for civilian hardware. Most of the enemy tactical gear you’ll run across is VHF, which means it operates line of sight, and it is frequency modulated. There are a lot of frequency-hoppers, but from what we’ve determined, they are all being operated at fixed frequency. There is also a lot of encryption gear, but it is not being utilized. It appears that the expertise on how to do things, like precise time synchronization from a net control station, or remote injection of encryption keys from a net control station, no longer exists in most units. They’ve formed a lot of these units from scratch, so the collective memory, at least on the more arcane and high-tech topics, was lost.
“They also are very slow to replace their CEOIs, and in some cases they use simple letter-for-letter transposition ciphers. I guess they feel invulnerable to decryption because they have Green Hornet decoder rings. Any schoolboy can crack a transposition cipher. We’ve been using all of these amateur factors to our advantage. Because they use their radios so much more than we do, we actually have a better Comint-derived intelligence picture of what is going on than the Federals.
“Now, let me tell you a way you can do your own encryption that is simple but virtually indecipherable. It’s called a ‘book code.’ Get yourself two copies of the same book. A big fat novel works best. It has to be the same book, from the same publisher, and the same edition. Don’t use a Bible or a dictionary, because that is too obvious, and because in a dictionary each word only appears once. To encode, you look through the book and first find the words you want to encode. You write down groups of numbers, starting with page number, then paragraph number, then line number, and the number of words into the sentence where your word sits. If you can’t find the complete word, then you spell it out a letter at a time, using the first letters of words you select. You write it all down in groups of three numb
ers. Between each group, you say ‘break.’ So a transmission would sound like: ‘202, 003, 015, 003 Break. 187, 015, 006, 018 Break,’ and so on. As you use each word, you scratch it out, so you never use the same code groups twice.
“The only risks with book codes come when a radio operator, or a copy of the book, or even just the title of the book are compromised. For that reason, you should change books frequently. You should also institute a list of ‘telltale’ operating procedures that an operator can use to discretely let everyone on the net know that he has been captured and is being forced to transmit under duress. Back before the Crunch, there was also the risk of a book code being decrypted. Conceivably, the NSA could have set one of their Cray super computers to work and break the code by brute force, or perhaps by determining which book was being used, by working from databases of known texts. Under those circumstances, I’d recommend using pairs of obscure novels—either long out of print or published by a small ‘vanity’ publisher, for your codebooks. But under the current circumstances, I’d say that book codes are relatively secure, so long as you don’t ever reuse code groups.” After a pause, Edgar added, “And needless to say, regardless of the encipherment system you are using, the party is over once the code book falls into enemy hands. They’ll be reading all your traffic, past, present, or future.
“If he is spelling out letters, rather than giving the position of complete words, the guy transmitting says ‘Lima’ before the applicable groups. After every five groups, you change frequencies, using a large preset frequency table. You make the switch short and sweet. Just say something like ‘Zap 22,’ to change to a frequency from the table, like 146.3 megs. That way, they aren’t likely to transcribe the entire encrypted message, and they are much less likely to be able to coordinate with other out-stations to get a cut or fix on your location. The guy transmitting waits a ten count to allow the guy at the receiving end time to retune his receiver; then he continues with the next five groups. There is no need for the fellow at the receiving end to key his microphone unless he needs you to repeat some groups. For example, he’d just say, ‘Please say again, last five groups, Zap 14,’ and retunes. Once he has the full message down, he just says ‘Roger out,’ and then he decodes it using his companion book, off-line. Simple.
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