Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse

CHAPTER 30 Radio Ranch

Edgar Rhodes had just turned seventy-two when the Crunch hit. He had lost his wife two years earlier, to cancer. His only son, an electrical engineer, had moved his family to Brazil a decade earlier. Edgar was alone at the ranch. The sign by the front door read “Radio Ranch,” and the place certainly lived up to its moniker. He had selected the property forty years earlier, specifically because of its favorable ridge top siting. The ranch parcel was thirty-five land-locked acres. His road transited deeded right-of-ways through two neighboring properties to get out to the county road. Edgar liked the privacy. The ranch had plentiful water—a big spring near the bottom of the property—but not much else. There were no trees and there was not much topsoil. Rocks poked through the surface of the soil throughout the property. But Edgar liked his ridge top.

He said that it gave him “line of sight to the world.” Eventually, five antenna masts were scattered around the house. The largest was his “moon bounce,”

perched atop a sixty-foot tower. There were also dipole and sloper antennas stretched as far as eighty-eight yards from the house, in several directions.

Edgar used a pair of hydraulic rams to lift the water to the house. They were very inefficient, but reliable. The twenty-five gallons a minute at the spring yielded only five gallons a minute at the house.

Thirteen months after the Federals invaded the Palouse Hills region, Edgar was the recipient of a package that he hadn’t expected. A knock on his door at 11 p.m. woke him from a sound sleep. Edgar put on his robe and slippers and picked up his Belgian Browning twelve-gauge shotgun. He was about to snap on the 24 VDC porch light, when he heard a muffled but familiar voice through the door, “Edgar, it’s me,Vern. Leave the light off! I need to ask you a favor!You’ve got to hide this package.” Edgar drew back the heavy bars that he had built for the top, middle, and bottom of the door. He opened the door warily, and asked, “What’s so important you have to come here in the middle of the night?” He could see his neighbor in the dim moonlight. There was a woman with him. They were silent. Edgar motioned inward with his hand, and said, “Well, come on in.”

Vern and the woman crept in, groping in the dark front hall. After Edgar had rebolted the door, he lit a big “triple wick” candle and carried it to the kitchen.Vern and the unfamiliar woman followed him. They sat around the table, with the candle between them, lighting their faces.

It was then that Edgar could see that the woman was emaciated. She appeared to be around sixty year old, with graying hair. Her eyes were sunken, and the skin around her jaw seemed taut. She also looked frightened. She kept glancing at Vern.Vern spoke in a jumble. “I’ve just gotta ask your help. This is Maggie. She escaped from the Federal camp down at Gowen Field, three weeks ago. Folks have been shuttlin’ her north, here into rebel-controlled land.

I can’t keep her. I can barely feed my own family. I figured that since you were alone, and that because you eat good, that, well, you know….”

Edgar raised his hand to signalVern to stop his chatter, and then asked, “Can you cook, Maggie?”

She nodded.

“Can you mend clothes?”

She nodded again.

“Do you know how to shoot?”

She nodded again.

“Can you speak, Maggie?”

She laughed, and answered, “Of course I can speak!”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty.”

“How is your strength?You look something terrible thin.”

“I’ve lost a lot of weight, but I still have my strength. Will you hide me here?”

Without a pause, Edgar answered assuredly, “Certainly, ma’am. Nobody bothers me here. The Federals have never noticed me. Even if they did, they’d think I was an eccentric old hermit. Come to think of it, I am an eccentric old hermit. I suppose some day they’ll come looking, to confiscate my radios. But in the meantime, since I’m so far off the county road, nobody is going to notice that there’s somebody else living here.” Maggie beamed and said quietly,

“God bless you.”

Vern stood up and made his goodbyes, thanking Edgar Rhodes repeatedly, and giving Maggie a hug. As Edgar shook his hand,Vern said, “Now you take good care of this little gal, Edgar.” He turned and disappeared into the darkness.

Edgar made Maggie a batch of scrambled eggs before bed. He apologized for not having any coffee or tea. As he walked her down the hall to the guest bedroom, he said, “You can tell me all about your adventures in the morning.”

The next morning, Edgar went looking on the front porch, where he expected to find Maggie’s luggage. There was none. She had only the clothes on her back. They consisted of a long and tattered gray dress, a pair of filthy tennis shoes with no socks, and an oversized man’s forest green trench coat.

Over a breakfast of eggs, flat bread and honey, and slices of cheese, Maggie told her story. “We lived in Payette. My husband had died five years before the stock market crash, so I went to live with my daughter and her family. Three weeks after the troops and the UN administrators arrived, they came for our whole family: my daughter, my son-in-law, their two children, and me. Both my daughter Julie and my son-in-law Mark were with the resistance. They were trying to organize groups in the neighborhood for sabotage. One of our neighbors must have informed on us.

“They surrounded the house at 6 o’clock in the morning. Must have been forty of them. They said that they’d burn us out if we didn’t come out with our hands up. They dragged Julie and Mark away in handcuffs. They took Mark’s guns and CB radio as ‘evidence.’ They gave me, and the children, just five minutes to pack a few clothes, while they stood there with Kalashnikovs pointed at us. Then they searched me again, and they took everything that I had packed in the suitcases and the duffel bag and scattered it across the yard, looking for ‘contraband.’ They laughed and kicked me while I was picking it all back up and trying to repack it.

“When Mark shouted at them, the soldiers threatened to kill him. Finally, after I had most of the clothes picked up, they threw the bags up into the back of a big canvas-topped Army truck, and handcuffed me next to Julie and Mark.

They even handcuffed the kids. We were all connected to a big heavy chain—it looked like a big boat anchor chain, running lengthwise down the middle of the truck bed. It was welded down at both ends.

“They stopped and picked up another family later the same day, the Weinsteins. By the time they had them loaded in the truck, Mrs. Weinstein was having a nervous breakdown. To her, it was the Holocaust all over again. They had lost great grandparents and several great aunts and great uncles in the Nazi years in Germany. Seeing it happen all over again was just too much for her.

“We were nearly fifteen hours in that truck, without a drop of water. They only stopped once to let us relieve ourselves, and we had to do that in full view of everyone. They did what they called ‘double locking’ the handcuffs, so that they wouldn’t tighten up, but even still they left horrible red marks. Poor Mark lost some of the circulation in his left hand, but the guards wouldn’t do anything about it. When they finally took the cuffs off of him, his hand was all puffed up. He must have had permanent nerve damage in that hand.

“Gowen was a horrible place. We were put in a barracks with eleven other families. There were fifty-nine of us in that barracks, at first. We had one large pot, and we had to do all of our cooking in that, as best we could. There was a weekly ration of spuds. And once in a while, there would be some beans, or bread, or wheat. But there was never enough. Once in a blue moon we’d get some rotten lettuce or cabbage.

“We never got a trial. There was never even any mention of it. And when we asked about appealing our confinement, or asked when we would be released, they just laughed at us. Most of the adults were expected to work. Some of it was just make-work. Others worked in the sweatshops. At Gowen, the big industry was boots. Julie was one of the boot makers. She worked eleven hours a day, with fifteen minutes for lunch. If she didn’t do her quota of stitching, she was beaten.

“They came most every day, to take away one or two people for interrogation. It was usually the men. They came back, usually a day or two later, looking ghastly. Sometimes they couldn’t walk. They were usually bleeding. Sometimes they were bleeding out of the rectum from being kicked so much. They often talked about the torture: beatings, whippings, electric cattle prods. Oh, and the bruises, so many bruises! I thank the Lord that I never got picked up for interrogation. I don’t think that I could have survived it.

“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.

“You’ve probably heard the shortwave ‘pirate’ stations like Radio 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:

“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 numbers. 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.

“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:

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:

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.”