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.”
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.