Founders (31 page)

The next morning, the recipient of the carbine and field gear came to Ben’s tent to again thank him. “It’s an honor to have this rifle,” he said. “I promise you that I’ll use it fighting the good fight. And I’d appreciate your prayers. I just wish I could be as fearless as you.”

Ben shook his head. “I’m not fearless. I’m just
determined.
There’s a difference between the two. I’m nothing special.”

After motioning for the young man to sit down next to the tent, Ben continued, “You know, I read a lot of books about the Holocaust and the people who survived the death camps to go on and fight for the independence of Israel. They had to fight the British first, and then the Arabs. Those men and women could be very fierce and determined, because most of them had nothing left to lose.”

The recruit nodded, and Ben went on. “When I heard that the ProvGov was setting up concentration camps, just like the Nazis, I very quickly decided that I’d never get dragged into one of them. I’d rather die on my feet with a rifle in my hands—”

The recruit interrupted, “—than on your knees.”

“Yes, precisely. My attitude, as a Christian, is that I know that this mortal life is short, and that I already have life eternal
in heaven. So it is all a matter of keeping perspective. I have confidence that you’ll fight the good fight. Never forget this conversation.”

Depending on the tactical situation, the five-man Recon Team was often loaned out to work with Hammond’s Hellhounds, the Mulholland Company, the Fawcett Company, Gunners Against Illegal Mayors (GAIM), the Gillian Group, the Morris Maquis, the Lexington-Versailles Company, or the Alvin York Brigade. All these were independent militias that operated in western Tennessee and western Kentucky. They numbered between nine and twenty-eight members, mostly men.

The Recon Team’s specialty was locating enemy positions and lines—and crossing them, if need be. They would then guide militia companies to vulnerable points to attack. The Old Man handpicked all of his fighters from other units. He recruited Ben Fielding shortly after his team’s point man had been killed by an exploding land mine. The Old Man selected men who were exceptionally well tempered, physically fit, experienced in the field, and who had perfect uncorrected vision. Ben and Brent were the only members of the reconnaissance team that didn’t have prior military service. Most of the others had been Army Rangers or Army Cavalry scouts, one had been a Force Recon Marine, and another was a former Navy SEAL.

When Ben asked the Old Man his name, he answered dryly, “You don’t have a need to know, son. Besides, it’s safer for
both of us
if you don’t know it.”

The Recon Team was famous for never taking more than a one-week break from operations in two years of the resistance war, and most of those were after actions when several team members were wounded. The Old Man was the only member who made it all the way through the war. All of the others were replacements for those who had been killed or wounded. Like Ben, all of them
were sworn to secrecy. Further, all were under orders to never mention their surnames to each other. At one point, there were two members on the team named Jim. They were called “Old Jim” and “Young Jim” to avoid confusion.

Brent joined the Recon Team much later in the war than Ben, just nine months before the UNPROFOR collapsed. He replaced a medic who had been killed in an ATACMS missile strike.

From the vantage point of his leaky pup tent, Brent sized up the Mulholland Company. They were a ragtag bunch, with few recognizable leaders. With twenty-nine members, it was one of the larger resistance militias. Recent experience had shown that larger units were easier for the UNPROFOR to detect and engage. In fact, the trend was to split resistance units into groups no larger than fifteen. The Mulholland Company had not yet done so, but a split was already under discussion. The members of the company had a wide assortment of weapons, uniforms, and equipment. A good portion of their gear was captured.

Like many other resistance units, there was a preponderance of young men—many still in their teens and as young as sixteen—and men in their late fifties and early sixties. Most of the married men in the ages in between had feared for their families’ safety and therefore didn’t feel free to join the fight. Both in their forties, Ben Fielding and Brent Danley were in the minority. Like many men their age in the Resistance, Brent and Ben had both lost family to the ProvGov’s actions, so their motivation could be attributed partly to revenge.

And, like many others their age, Brent and Ben had a deep-seated hatred of the ProvGov, and this made them some of the most motivated and tireless fighters. One of Brent’s most common sayings was “I’ll only relax when Hutchings is six feet under, and we have a Constitutional government again.”

The militias that tried using armored vehicles found it made them targets for airstrikes or laser-guided artillery rounds. So
after taking heavy casualties in the first few months of the resistance war the goal became to destroy UNPROFOR vehicles, rather than capture and use them.

The most effective use of vehicles by the Resistance was to drive abandoned or stolen civilian cars and SUVs for high-speed covert movement of troops, to mass for short-duration raids. Often their weapons would be hidden in the vehicles in case they had to pass checkpoints.

Most resistance units preferred 7.62mm NATO battle rifles, such as M1As, AR-10s, FN/FALs, and HK91 clones. These gave them better range than the M4s, M16s, and AK-74s used by the UNPROFOR army, yet they were still light enough to carry on long patrols. Light belt-fed weapons such as the M249, MG4 (the German equivalent of an M249), and the M240B were also highly prized. The other weapons that they did their best to procure were Claymore mines, LAW rockets, AT-4s, and the various generations of Russian RPGs. These were used to great effect in anti-vehicular ambushes.

A few resistance units in urban areas found that they could carry M4 carbines broken down into two halves concealed beneath heavy coats and jackets. Assembling the guns took just a few moments. This modus operandi often resulted in gaining the element of surprise when ambushing UNPROFOR troops who were off duty or otherwise in a low state of readiness.

“The qualities of a good intelligence officer:

• 
Be perceptive about people

• 
Be able to work well with others under difficult conditions

• 
Be able to distinguish between fact and fiction

• 
Be able to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials

• 
Possess inquisitiveness

• 
Have a large amount of ingenuity

• 
Pay appropriate attention to detail

• 
Be able to express ideas clearly, briefly and very important, interestingly

• 
Learn when to keep your mouth shut

• 
Understanding for other points of view, other ways of thinking and behaving, even if they are quite foreign to his own

• 
Rigidity and close-mindedness are qualities that do not spell a good future in Intelligence

• 
Must not be over ambitious or anxious for personal reward, and the most important quality: What motivates a man to devote himself to the craft of intelligence?”

—Allen Dulles,
The Craft of Intelligence,
1963

With a quiet word from the Resistance, Kaylee soon got a job working the front counter and cash register at a bagel and pastry
bakery on Knox Avenue in Radcliff. The owner was sympathetic to the Cause. His bakery was in the building that had been occupied by the Better on a Bagel bakery before the Crunch. It was located near the junction of Knox Avenue and North Wilson Road. When it reopened, the bakery was called Bullion Bakery, and had a metallic gold painted sign in the shape of a gold ingot.

Because Kaylee would be in contact with so many people each day, it was the perfect place for her to be able to surreptitiously pass notes, memory sticks, or even small parcels to couriers. In the event that she had to deliver a note or memory stick to a courier after-hours, she had two dead drop locations: one inside a carved-out copy of the book
Soil Survey of Hamblen County, Tennessee
in the dusty stacks at the Radcliff Public Library, and one in a Ziploc bag beneath the cigarette butts in the top of a steel fence post in the parking lot of Cho’s Snack Corner on North Wilson Road.

Andy was often up late in the night, preparing intelligence reports on Kaylee’s aging Pentium laptop. His greatest fear was that someday he’d be identified by a ProvGov mole within the Resistance. He spent many hours reading books on espionage tradecraft, and implementing the concepts he had learned. As a mole himself, he went with the assumption that there would be one or more ProvGov moles in the Resistance who would see his reports. For this reason, he was careful to just
summarize
the contents of ProvGov and UNPROFOR documents, rather than duplicate them.

“One of the oldest counterintelligence tricks is to create multiple versions of a document,” he explained to Kaylee, “with a pattern of very subtle differences—even just a comma that is changed to a semicolon or an extra space, for example. They carefully keep track of which suspected agent is provided a particular version of the document. Then, when a mole at the far end gets a copy of the document he forwards it back to the government, and they can then analyze it and deduce who leaked it. Back during the
Obama administration, that technique was even used within the White House to identify members of the staff who were whistle-blowers.”

Andy’s reports covered a wide range of topics—everything from the latest troop movements and flight schedules to power politics within the ProvGov. The more technical reports detailed things like radio protocols, the range and effectiveness of various UNPROFOR weapons, vehicle vulnerabilities, radio direction finding, and the ProvGov’s diminished access to spy satellites.

The Resistance was particularly interested in the specifications of radio-controlled IED (RCIED) countermeasures systems. They were already fairly familiar with American-made jammers. These included the Duke cell phone jammers mounted on Humvees, and the Guardian man-portable counter-RCIED system. But they knew much less about the Rhino II and Rhino III passive counter-passive infrared systems. These systems used a glow plug mounted on a boom that caused passive IR-initiated IEDs to predetonate before a vehicle passed over them. And, until they later captured some for analysis, they also knew hardly anything about the German-, Dutch-, and French-built IED jammers.

Many of Andy’s reports were instrumental to resistance planners, both tactically and strategically. To the geographically scattered group leaders of the Resistance, he was known only as “Confidential Source #6.”

At the other end of the chain was the intelligence network of officers and ProvGov civilians, coordinated by General Olds. He used Andy Laine as the coordinator and compiler for this information. Most of the reports were in text files that were copied onto older 1- or 2-GB memory sticks for a courier to pick up from Kaylee the following day. His supply of empty memory sticks was kept inside the pedestal of a round oak table. He made a habit of leaving out no more than ten empty sticks at any time, in case his apartment was searched.

After each night’s work, Andy copied the “Games Backup” folder from Kaylee’s laptop onto a pair of Ironkey 8-GB thumb drives, and hid these in a secret compartment in the bottom of one of his SIG pistol magazines. The Ironkey drives were uniquely designed so that if anyone without the correct password made multiple attempts to open the files, the files would be automatically erased. After he had written new files to the Ironkey drives, he erased the requisite sectors of the laptop’s hard drive clean, with special “Wiper for Windows” software.

Whenever Andy needed to copy a file from his laptop at the brigade headquarters, he would use a third Ironkey drive that he kept in a hidden compartment beneath a drawer in his office desk, or he would remove one of the other Ironkey drives from the SIG magazine while in a restroom stall. The same compartment in his desk held a Panasonic Lumix ultracompact digital camera that he used on the rare occasions when he needed to photograph a map or a piece of equipment. He kept a cable at home that allowed him to transfer the images to Kaylee’s laptop and then in turn to a thumb drive.

Andy would have preferred to have used all Ironkey drives, but because the courier runs were so frequent and one-way, he had to rely on less-secure standard thumb drives. Andy always kept a can of WD-40 lubricant on his desk. After writing files to thumb drives for Kaylee to deliver to the couriers, he would give each of them a squirt of WD-40. He had read that this coating made it almost impossible for them to retain fingerprints that could be lifted.