“After three weeks, they came for Mark. He fought them. He hit one of the Belgian soldiers square in the nose, and I think he broke it. His nose bled like a headless chicken. They started beating Mark even before they drove off with him. They never brought Mark back. We were sure they must have killed him.
“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.