Founders: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

24. Mole Tunnels

Fort Knox, Kentucky

December, the Second Year

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.

As Andy became accustomed to his brigade staff job, he consciously reminded himself to avoid making friends with other officers on the brigade staff. As General Olds put it, “Friends mean confidences and confidences are always risks.” Because he spoke some German, he was popular with the German officers. But Andy consistently turned down offers to attend social functions with them. He said, accurately, that he liked spending all his free time with his wife. The other officers seemed to take this at face value, and didn’t take offense.

Deep down, Andy was glad that he didn’t get to know any of the German or Dutch officers well. He reasoned that if all went well, he’d be part of deporting them in less than a year. And for all he knew, he might even be gunning for them.

Andy and Kaylee Laine’s espionage activities were very stressful, particularly to Andy. He constantly felt like he was playing a role in a stage play. He had to control his facial expressions when attending briefings or when reading dispatches. For him to even display the slightest pleasure at the news of an UNPROFOR setback might unmask him. He had nagging fears of being detected. His dreams were a tangle of what he called “bad scenes”: getting caught with classified documents, being arrested and beaten, being tortured. He often resorted to taking a couple of valerian root capsules at bedtime to help him sleep.

It was Kaylee who helped him keep his balance. They had long, cathartic talks about the happenings in the brigade and even global politics. Andy was certain that if Kaylee weren’t with him at Fort Knox, he wouldn’t be able to handle the stress that he was under.

Ed Olds was cautious about security for his intelligence team. They never met in groups of more than three, and in fact none of them except Olds himself knew the names of all of the members. Whenever he had to mention another team member, he would use euphemistic names like “Mister Black,” “Mister Green,” “Our man in the administration,” “Our man in the Signal Corps,” or “Our man in the G2 Shop.” He was so consistent about using the “Mister” and “Our man” monikers that Andy did not learn until years later that there were two women in his intelligence-gathering cell.

Many of Andy’s surreptitious meetings with Olds were during morning PT sessions, or after-hours at Olds’s home, while his DVD player played a science fiction movie with the volume turned up loud. Ed Olds was a serious sci-fi fan, with more than seventy movies and television series in his collection. Andy feigned being a science fiction devotee to explain his frequent visits to the general’s quarters.

One of their key conversations came when they discussed endgame strategies for the war of resistance. General Olds stated forthrightly, “I’ve concluded that the ProvGov and the UN peacekeepers are doomed, for four reasons. First, as we’ve discussed before, they’ve overextended their reach and have thereby spread their forces too thin. Second, they are being confronted by a guerrilla army of resistance that is leaderless, so it cannot be isolated and eliminated. Third, like the Nazis in World War II, they’ve embarked on a campaign of mass arrests and reprisal killings, which is alienating any support that they might have once enjoyed. And lastly, they’ve attempted to disarm the populace. That is an idiotic and futile endeavor.”

“I agree that their goal is futile,” Andy said. “Before the Crunch, we were a nation of, as I recall, around 328 million people, with around 250 million guns. There were 4.5 million guns manufactured each year, but meanwhile fewer than one million guns were worn out, exported, or melted down in those stupid ‘turn in your gun for concert tickets’ programs. Who would be so moronic as to trade their birthright for a gift certificate from Toys-R-Us? But now, after the big die-off, we are a nation of perhaps 100 million people, still with around 250 million guns. There is absolutely no way that we’ll ever be disarmed. From a demographic standpoint, the ProvGov is so outnumbered and so outgunned that it’s almost comical. The handwriting is on the wall.”