Patriots

by James Wesley, Rawles

  “Book codes are similar to what the military and spooks call ‘one-time pads.’ One-time pads are computer generated, and naturally working computers are few and far between these days, so a simple book code is your best bet. I suppose that if we still had PCs and Macs, we could be running Nautilus or PGP Fone, and really get those Federal boys scratching their heads.

  “The Federals and their UN counterparts have far more elaborate intercept systems than ours, some of which are road-mobile. We’ve even spotted some of the old mobile FCC intercept vans. Their modus operandi is to watch the spectrum on a spectrum analyzer—a box that looks like an oscilloscope. When a signal’s ‘spike’ appears on the screen, they tune to that frequency and listen briefly, to distinguish whether it’s a Federal or UN signal or something from a resistance unit, or civilian traffic. If the signal looks significant, a message is passed by intercom to someone ‘sitting pos’ at one of the DF consoles. That operator tunes to the same frequency and takes a line of bearing. Then they radio to another intercept site several miles away, and get a comparison line of bearing (LOB). This two-LOB ‘cut’ is plotted on an acetate-covered map. Three or more LOBs constitute a ‘fix.’ After comparing the map to known Federal/UN unit locations, the shift commander can authorize an artillery fire mission, or can dispatch a foot patrol to investigate. When things work right, the Federals can get ‘steel on target’ less than five minutes after a transmission is made, even if the transmission lasts less than a minute.

  “A three-LOB fix generates a circular error probability or CEP of around half a kilometer across. And that circle—well, actually it’s an ellipse—is good enough for artillery work. Especially when they use a serious area effect weapon like their rocket thingy—what do they call that, M-S-L-R?”

  The XO corrected him. “MLRS. It stands for Multiple Launch Rocket System. They also have some old Russian 122-mil rocket launching trucks. They call those Katushyas. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard a rocket battery do its thing from anywhere nearby. It sounds like the gates of hell opening up. You just pray that you aren’t the intended target. The Federals call the rockets their ‘grid square eliminators.’”

  Edgar resumed. “And again, the CEP plots that the Federals can do are within a one-kilometer map grid square. You put the DF capability together with the rockets, and you’re talking serious trouble for any of the militias that aren’t using their radios properly. That’s why ComSec is so important.”

  The XO jotted on his notepad:

  Intercept = DF = MLRS = Death

  The lecture went on for another hour, followed by a long series of questions and answers. Most of Scheimer’s questions were about the pieces of radio and cryptographic equipment that his Blue Blaze Irregulars had captured.

  Eventually, Scheimer added to his notes:

  Use short transmissions, only!

  Use lowest power possible to get the message across.

  Lower power means LPI.

  Change frequencies and callsigns daily!

  Don’t mention frequencies or CB channels, even if encrypted. Instead, use brevity codes, such as “Zap 1” for 147.235 MHz, and “Zap 2” for 142.370 MHz.

  Build an extensive frequency change table, and change it regularly.

  Use offset transmit and receive frequencies.

  Use encryption as much as possible!

  Narrow-band vs. wide-band frequencies.

  Use variable speed tape recorders to create “burst” transmissions.

  Use directional antennas vs. whips, where practical, to increase range with same power, and lower probability of interception.

  Bounce transmissions off of steel grain elevators to confuse enemy DF.

  Don’t transmit from a bivouac site!

  Use excess captured radios and 60-minute tape recordings of nonsense code groups, at fixed frequency, to make enemy waste field arty ammunition. ;-) Move at least one kilometer after each five minutes of transmission.

  Don’t use the same bivouac site twice.

  Assume that “everything you say can and will be used against you” by Comint collectors.

  A better antenna beats more power, since you get: 1) Less power usage, hence LPI, and

  2) Better reception and transmission.

  • • •

  The two Northwest Militia base camps kept in contact with the pair of microwave transmitters that had been donated to the resistance by Edgar Rhodes. The Gunnplexer microwave transmitters used ten-gigahertz Gunn oscillators and weatherproofed eighteen-inch diameter aluminum parabolic dish antennas.

  The pair of systems had been built five years before the Crunch, by Edgar. Rhodes borrowed design ideas from Richardson’s Gunnplexer Cookbook.

  Because the Gunnplexers transmitted in a tight beam, and were at an unusually high frequency, they had a very low probability of interception.

  When he first delivered and set up one half of the Gunnplexer system at Todd Gray’s camp, he explained, “I used a crystal-controlled solid state oscillator’s harmonic at ten gigahertz to phase lock the Gunnplexer’s frequency output. Without it, the Gunnplexer has a very unstable frequency output. But with the phase lock, it holds to plus or minus ten cycles.

  “Back before the Crash, my cousin and I used this setup for two-way communications at ranges of up to two hundred miles. My cousin lived on the north side of Moscow Mountain up until the Crash. That was sixty-five miles as the crow flies from my place. We had line of sight, so the microwave link was just about ideal. It gave us just crystal-clear comms.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Keane Team

  “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.”

  —Patrick Henry, Virginia Convention Speech, March 23, 1775

  Greetings and “war stories” went on for half the morning. They had met at a rally point four miles northeast of Troy, in a dense stand of fir. Most of those attending used maps and captured GPS receivers to navigate to the obscure rally point. Coordinating the meeting took two weeks, with messages sent by the well-experienced network of resistance horseback and mountain-bike couriers. It was the first time that so many resistance leaders in the region had gathered together in one place since before the Federal/UN invasion. Lawrence Raselhoff, Mike Nelson, and Todd Gray already knew each other. The only relative newcomer was Matt Keane. He was known by both Tony and Teesha Washington, but none of the others had met him.

  When Mike Nelson shook Matt’s hand, he said, “The Matt Keane. Wow. I’ve heard about you and your ‘Keane Team.’ Your reputation precedes you, sir. You’re a living legend. They talk about you on the shortwave all the time. That kayak raid your unit did on the Italian encampment at St. Maries—that was brilliant! And rumor has it that you were the ones that dynamited the UNPROFOR headquarters in Spokane last summer. Was that really you?”

  “Yeah, that was us,” Matt replied in a soft drawl. After four years back in the Pacific Northwest, he still spoke with a trace of his acquired southern accent.

  He added, “But some of the things they say on the shortwave are outrageous exaggerations. For instance, they say that on a provisioning raid I once killed six sentries in less than ten minutes with a bayonet. That’s not right. It was only four. My sister Eileen got the other two. And we used axes. One thing that they did get right was that we’re the ones that did the demo job on the UNPROFOR building.”

  “How did you ever sneak that large a quantity of explosives in there?”

  Keane looped his thumbs into his ghillie cape netting, and answered, “We knew we couldn’t get close on the street. They had a stand-off perimeter with anti-vehicular barricades a block in all directions. So we decided to do an old-fashioned sapping job. For almost a year we had been saving up the unex-ploded bombs and mines that we had defused. We had quite a pile of them. We went in through the city storm drains, and dug a tunnel into the
HQ’s basement boiler room. We had to tunnel only about fifteen feet. The tough part was the concrete walls of the storm drain and the brick basement wall. We did a blitz job with a couple of short miner’s picks on that last wall, the night before we touched it off.

  “We had word in advance that they were going to have a party up at the old convention center, so there were only two guards inside the headquarters building. They were the only ones there, aside from the gate and perimeter guards. Even the radio operator skipped out to go to the party. One of the interior guards was on our side. He made sure that the duty roster was adjusted so that he had duty that night. He also conveniently got the other interior guard so drunk that he passed out. So we didn’t have to worry about the noise from our picks and the falling bricks. My little-big brother designed a special trolley for hauling the explosives in the round cross-section storm drains. We calculated that we hauled in around 1,950 pounds. We laid it all up against the center load-bearing wall and tamped it with the gunnysacks full of dirt that we had saved from digging the connecting tunnel.

  “The charges went off at 9 a.m. sharp. Our inside man had told us that they had a 8:45 a.m. staff meeting scheduled up on the third floor. All four floors and the basement compacted down to a rubble pile less than twenty feet high. There was just one of the sidewalls left standing, and it was only the height of the first story. A couple of weeks later someone wrote ‘MENE, MENE TEKEL’ in letters six-feet high on that wall, just like from the book of Daniel.

  For some reason the UN people never painted that graffiti over—from what I’ve been told, it’s still there. Maybe they didn’t realize what it meant. Or maybe they did, and deep down they realized it was true. Their days are numbered and they have been weighed and found wanting.

  “Our inside man took a video of the charges going off from six blocks away, and then he immediately headed for the hills. The UN press release said that twenty-three of their people were ‘killed by a freak gas explosion,’ but that was pure hokum. We got word later from a mortician in a resistance cell that the actual count was one hundred and twelve.”

  Mike nodded his head and offered, “It was a beautiful demo job. I don’t think any of the Tidy Bowl men got out of there alive. Horrific, but that’s war.”

  “Reminds me of a verse eight from the 35th Psalm: ‘Let destruction come upon him at unawares; and let his net that he hath hid catch himself: into that very destruction let him fall.’”

  Mike added, “They caught themselves in their own net all right. Blown up with their own land mines! As my dear departed friend Tom Kennedy used to say, ‘Dulce et decorum est.’”

  Matt nodded his head and said, “‘Sweet and appropriate,’ indeed.”

  “You’ve studied Latin?”

  “Of course. I was homeschooled. We studied hard, eleven months a year. We didn’t get the same slack that the public school kids did. By the time my brother Chase was twelve, and I was fifteen, our parents had to hire tutors for some subjects. They hired Dr. Cecil, a Jesuit fellow from Gonzaga University, to teach us Latin on weekday afternoons and alternating Saturdays. I still have dreams about all the conjugations we memorized. It’s something that you never get out of your head.

  “Neither of my parents got past geometry, so they also hired a neighbor down the street, to teach us trig and calculus. Mister Critchfield had just retired from teaching higher math, also at Gonzaga. My dad bartered the labor for a bathroom remodeling for the six months of trigonometry, and a kitchen remodeling for the eight months of calculus.”

  Mike cocked his head and asked, “Where are your folks now?”

  “My dad stepped on a mine last summer. He lived for a couple of days. Chase and Eileen and I had the chance to pray with him before he died.” Matt exhaled loudly, and went on. “My mom got killed by willy-peter bomb, just six weeks ago. I guess you’ve heard that the Feds have started burning every remote cabin they can spot, whether it looks occupied or not, just on general principle. It fits into their ‘denial operations’ strategy: Deny us any food sources, and deny us shelter.”

  Mike nodded.

  Keane continued. “My mom had been crippled up with arthritis and was staying by herself at the cabin, while we were out playing maquisards. We heard from neighbors who lived in the mine tunnel on the adjoining claim that there wasn’t anything left of my dad’s cabin.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I envy my parents. We’ll be with them in heaven someday. If I keep that in mind, I can fight fearlessly. I fear only the righteous wrath of God. Like Paul said, when he was in chains in a Roman jail cell:‘Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ That’s Phillipians 4-11 through 13. Those verses are a great comfort to me. I fear no man, and no circumstance.”

  Keane gestured with his forefinger, and continued, “Getting back to the ‘denial operations’ concept, just consider this: I had a friend who was a reserve Army intelligence officer before the Crash. He often told me that the three essential abilities on the battlefield are ‘to shoot, move, and communicate.’ Without all three you are ineffective in any conflict. If you look at how the Federals are operating, they are doing everything they can to deny us all three. They’ve declared our guns contraband. They’re restricting travel with their checkpoints and internal passports, and they’ve banned private possession of radio transceivers. Very systematic. But we are beginning to do the same to them, and they can’t stop us because they can’t often locate and engage us. We are denying them ammunition and other key combat logistics by burning their depots and arsenals, we are impeding their ability to maneuver tactically and to move their logistics with our ambushes and sabotaging their vehicles. And, we are taking down the power grid and phone system faster than they can put it up, so they can’t communicate long distance or spread their propaganda. We’re going to win in the long run. It’s simple mathematics. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. It may cost us a lot of lives… but in the long term? They’re doomed.”

  Mike asked quietly, “I heard Tony Washington mention that you used to be a racist, but now you are not. What’s up with that?”

  “I wouldn’t say that I was a racist, per se. I equate racism with supremacism. If anything, I was a separatist, not a supremacist. And yes, frankly, I was reluctant to work with blacks. I had always kept my distance. But fighting alongside the Washingtons certainly reformed me. They were with us on the St. Maries kayak raid. Tony saved my life two different times that day. I owed him. And I owed him an apology.”

  Mike cocked his head and asked, “So you’ve sworn off racism? You don’t have any animosity toward blacks?”

  “Absolutely none. They’re fighting and bleeding along with the rest of us.

  I’d be happy to have anyone of Tony’s caliber join the Keane Team regardless of race. I don’t care if they are white, black, or green.” Matt grinned and added, “We’re equal opportunity destroyers.”

  Mike shook Keane’s hand, and looking him in the eye, declared, “You’re a good man.”

  Planning the big raid took a day and a half. There were extensive discussions, and detailed analysis of maps, photographs, and floor plans. This was followed by sand-table exercises and a briefing by a reliable “turned” Federal supply sergeant who had formerly lived at the barracks. Coordinating an operation this large was difficult. It included diverse units with distinct command structures, organizations, and standard operating procedures. The planners also had to be diplomatic in dealing with the leaders of less experienced militias.

  Some of them were amateurish, and several had overgrown egos.

  • • •

  Rather than traditional squads and platoons, the Keane Team was organize
d into something they called “Thomas Triads.” These were mini-squads of three guerrillas each. The philosophy behind the triads was that three men was the minimum number that could be combat effective.

  A three-member guerrilla team did not present a signature that was easily spotted, except in the most open terrain. A single triad was used for reconnaissance or sabotage patrols. Two to four triads could be combined to conduct an ambush. Three to twelve triads could be combined for a raid.

  In a defensive mode, or “in laager,” one member of the triad was on “guard” while the second was on “sleep,” and the third was on “support”—tending to cooking, fetching water, and/or gathering edibles. Every eight hours the roles rotated. Thus, each triad provided for its own security, and, depending on circumstances, its own sustenance.

  The rule of thumb was: if more than five triads had to be combined for an operation, it was verging on conventional warfare, and that immediately following the operation, it was time to displace, disperse, and go back to low-echelon guerrilla tactics. The guerrillas spoke with dread about “going conventional.” Meeting the better-armed Federals toe-to-toe was rightly recognized as foolhardy.

  The origin of Thomas Triad organization was forgotten. Keane explained, “It’s just what we were taught by another group. I don’t know who the ‘Mr. Thomas’ who dreamed this up was, but it works. Some guy in California, that’s all I heard. Maybe he’s in that Harry Wu outfit. Results are what counts, and the triads produce results, so that’s the structure we use.”