Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

40 JE NE SAIS QUOI

Malorie settled in quickly at the McGregor ranch. For her privacy, she displaced Phil from his bedroom and Phil began sleeping on a folding futon on the floor of Ray’s room. Meanwhile, Malorie’s bedroom doubled as the intel analysis and translation office. A boom lamp was set up over the desk, for the days that they ran the generator. On all other days, light was provided by a pair of Aladdin mantle kerosene lamps.

On her first full day at the ranch, Malorie gave Phil a briefing on her recent intelligence analysis experience and described how she had done French technical translation.

Then Phil said, “Rather than fill you in on our operations here, first I have a mental exercise for you. I want you to watch this movie along with Ray and his parents.”

He handed her a DVD of the World War II movie Defiance with Daniel Craig, and said, “You can watch this on our laptop tonight, which we occasionally power from the McGregors’ battery bank. I want you to watch it very carefully. There will be a quiz in the morning.”

“Okay. Can I take notes?”

“No. This is a memory exercise.”

The next morning, he quizzed her in detail, for thirty-five minutes. She thought that she did fairly well in answering his questions. Then he said, “Now what I want you to do is watch the movie again—by yourself, with total concentration. This time I want you to just ignore the story, the music, and the foreground action. You are going to watch for all of the subtleties in the background: colors, shapes, sounds, vehicle types, clothing textures, type of footwear, body language, flora, fauna, cartridge casings, wear and tear on objects, architecture, temporal incongruities, et cetera—everything except what the characters are saying and doing.”

“Okay.”

Three hours later, over lunch, Phil quizzed her again. He started by asking, “How do you feel?”

“Exhausted!”

Phil grinned and said, “Good, very good. That means you did the viewing in the right frame of mind.”

Malorie exclaimed, “That was an amazing exercise!”

“I thought that you’d like that. By the way, you can do that watching any movie—even a romantic comedy. That was a trick taught me by a colleague from MI5, in England. Oh, and I should mention that two other variants of the exercise are to turn the sound down completely, or to flip the laptop screen nearly closed or dim the screen and concentrate on just the audio. I’ve watched the same movies four times using these exercises, and it is amazing what you learn to pick up, each way.”

Mal and Phil were always careful to pull out no more than three or four file folders at a time, just in case all of the “intel boxes” had to disappear into the closet in a hurry. (The plan was for both Phil and Malorie to hide in the closet in case of a search.)

Because of the huge backlog of captured documents, Malorie initially worked ten to eleven hours per day, sorting through documents and translating them. Phil was usually with her for most of the day, explaining the military jargon, acronyms, and intelligence terminology. The documents had already been roughly sorted by date, but beyond that they were a jumble. After they had been reorganized and sorted in neatly labeled manila folders, they filled four boxes. Each folder was labeled by subject and also had its tab color-coded blue, yellow, or red to designate low-, medium-, or high-intelligence-value material.

Most of the documents were not fully translated. With 90 percent of the documents she would simply staple on a “gist” summary page. Only the most important documents were translated word for word. Later, when she had more time, she worked back through a lot of the gisted documents and wrote more detailed summaries. As winter set in and the pace of work slowed, she shifted her attention to captured and pilfered technical manuals. The highest priorities were manuals for radios and small arms.

They used Phil’s laptop to write summaries of key intelligence that would be useful if broadcast. These were transferred to memory stick and then sent via the courier network to Washington, where they were read over the air by ham radio operators and relayed to the newly reemerging U.S. mass media. Intelligence on specific targets that needed to be kept secret until after a resistance strike was carried via couriers to the communities within striking distance, where resistance cells were already in place. (Another intelligence cell in Vancouver had been doing the same since the first few months of the resistance war. This was the cell that had coordinated the sinking of the MN Toucan and MN Colibri, in the single-most effective resistance action of the war. It had inspired the formation of dozens of resistance cells.)

Malorie got along well with everyone at the ranch. She and Claire were soon like a mother and daughter. Malorie enjoyed hearing the McGregors’ Canadian idioms. To the McGregors, a couch was a “Chesterfield,” a colored pencil was a “pencil crayon,” a table napkin was a “serviette,” tennis shoes were “runners,” a parking garage was a “parkade,” a fire station was a “fire hall,” and a restroom was a “washroom.”

Phil, Ray, and Stan were all immediately attracted to Malorie, for both her looks and her abilities. When Claire mentioned them staring at her, Malorie joked, “Of course they’re interested. I could be plug ugly and they’d be interested. I’m the only single female in an eight-mile radius.”

Malorie soon gravitated to Phil, but she did not make her interest clear immediately. Malorie found Phil to be a delightful coworker. Despite the stress of the heavy workload, Phil always maintained a good sense of humor. (Phil worked for eleven hours a day doing intel analysis, in addition to his ranch chores.) They shared the same faith in Christ, with an “all grace” outlook on salvation. She loved hearing his stories about Afghanistan and some of his more recent adventures with DCS Task Group Tall Oak. When the subject of his childhood came up, Phil said, “I suppose I had a very regimented upbringing, compared to most kids. It was very Russian.”

“Russian?”

“Yes. The family’s original paternal name was Adamski. My grandfather shortened it to Adams when he became a naturalized citizen. His parents—my great-grandparents—escaped the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war by traveling across Siberia to the city of Harbin, where there was a large Russian colony. My great-grandfather worked there for the Trans-Siberian Railroad.”

Malorie seemed fascinated. “Tell me more.”

“Okay, here’s the condensed version of how my folks got to the States: Both of my grandparents on my father’s side grew up in Harbin and came to the States separately. My grandmother left Harbin for Seattle to attend the University of Washington before World War II. After my grandfather got a master’s degree in electrical engineering in Harbin he went to Shanghai and somehow got a job in Australia, where he worked at the Mount Isa mine, with the ultimate goal of coming to the United States to marry my grandmother. He was in Sydney for the weekend when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, he went to the U.S. embassy to try to join the U.S. Navy. But when he was there, he ran into a Merchant Marine captain who needed someone to fix a turbine since his ship’s engineer was in the hospital with a hot appendix. My grandfather fixed the turbine and stayed on the ship, leaving all of his clothes and books behind in Mount Isa. He spent the rest of the war in the Merchant Marines.”

Phil continued, “While he was on leave on the West Coast in 1945 he married my grandmother. Then, years later when they were established in California, they ransomed my great-grandparents from the communists and brought them to the States, so my dad got to grow up with both sets of his grandparents living in a cottage on the San Francisco peninsula. So a lot of my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s personalities rubbed off on my dad, which then rubbed off on me. The last of my grandparents died when I was ten years old, but a lot of their stories are quite well remembered, and a lot of their attitudes are firmly entrenched in me. They had a strong Christian faith and a deep distrust of totalitarianism—and, in fact, of most other ‘isms.’”

On Malorie’s third day at the ranch, it was wash day. Ray went out to start the Lister generator set, but it wasn’t long before he shut it back down and came into the house, looking glum. He kicked off his mud boots and walked to the kitchen table. He said, “We have a problem, ladies and gents: The engine is turning just fine, but the generator is not.”

“Uh-oh,” Alan said.

Alan, Phil, Malorie, and Ray all walked out to the generator shed together. Ray brought a rag and a flashlight.

Examining the generator set, they could see nothing outwardly wrong, other than its usual small and chronic oil leaks. It was Malorie who spotted some metal filings beneath the coupling that joined the engine shaft to the generator shaft. “Hey, look here: Looks like it ate a Woodruff.”

Phil, who only had rudimentary mechanical knowledge, asked, “What’s that?”

Malorie pointed the tips of her index fingers together to illustrate. “The two shafts come together end to end, like this. A Woodruff spline keeps them aligned, and this coupling sleeve holds the spline in place, and the coupling is in turn held in place with these big Allen-head screws.”

After a pause, she went on. “I’ll need a set of Allen wrenches—they look like three-sixteenths—but it could be a size smaller or larger, or possibly even metric. Oh, and I’ll also need some sort of degreaser, preferably in a spray can.”

Ray nodded. “The Allen wrench you need is right here.” He pointed to a wooden tray of maintenance tools that had been power-screwed to the wall of the shed.

Alan offered, “I used to have to tighten those Allen screws once every few months, but then I got wise and stared using green Loctite so that they don’t drift.”

“I’ll be right back with a spray can of carburetor cleaner,” Ray said.

While Phil held the flashlight, Malorie deftly loosened the Allen screws. Just as Ray stepped back into the shed with a spray can, Malorie slid the sleeve aside and chuckled.

She said, “I knew this thing was old, but I didn’t know it was this old. This thing is pre-Woodruff.”

“Meaning what, Mal?” Ray asked.

“Meaning it is not a square Woodruff key that got eaten. It’s a taper key, which is what they used before Woodruffs became commonplace. That means that finding or making a replacement key will be a lot more difficult.”

She went on to explain. “The good news is that keys are made from mild steel, with parallel sides and base. The top face of the key has a slight taper of just a one- or two-in-a-hundred ratio, which allows you to fit it into a keyway, followed by a rapid take-up of the slack in the hole, by the taper.”

“So you’re saying that you have to fabricate a replacement for a part that you’ve never seen, because we only have a few fragments,” Ray said.

“That’s right. I don’t suppose you have a dial micrometer?”

“No,” Alan answered glumly.

“But I’ll bet the Leaman ranch has one that we can borrow,” Ray offered.

Mal looked up. “Also ask if they have a tube of some machinist’s Prussian blue. It’s also called blue dykem.”

Ninety minutes later, Ray roared back to the ranch on his KLR motorcycle. He shouted, “Got ’em!”

After spraying all of the parts with degreaser, Malorie used the projecting tips of the calipers to measure the keyways on the shafts and coupling in several places, and took notes.

“Not only do I have to account for some taper, but the keyway also shows some wear, even though it was obviously harder steel than the spline. So to compensate, I’m going to have to taper the new key in two different axes.”

She made the new taper key from a standard seven-sixteenths-inch threaded steel bolt. She wisely left the head of the bolt in place for most of the steps so that she’d have that to clamp firmly into Alan’s bench vise. An Aladdin mantle lap was fetched and set up for light to work by.

Malorie explained as she started: “Normally I’d use a milling machine or even just an abrasive cutoff wheel to work this down to the rough dimension, but of course we’re without power, so we’ll use the old-fashioned method. Namely, hand files and plenty of sweat.”

The four of them took turns filing flats on four sides of the bolt shaft. After one hour and fifteen minutes, they were close to the requisite rough dimensions, and Malorie started measuring with the calipers more and more frequently. After nearly two hours of work, Malorie was doing all of the filing and all of the calipering as the three men stood back and watched. She let the work piece cool for a few minutes as she took a sip of water. Then she loosened the vise and dropped the workpiece into a rag.

“Time for a sanity check,” she declared.

After carrying the roughed taper key and the “mike” to the generator shed, she did a test fitting. She nodded. “I just wanted to make sure that I was visualizing the taper correctly in both axes.”

After taking another measurement, she carried her work back to the vise in Alan’s shop.

She continued with more filing, now much more deliberately, and taking regular measurements.

Next, she sawed off the head of the bolt with a hacksaw and cleaned up that rough end with a bastard file.

Over the next hour, she took three more trips back and forth to the generator shed between filing sessions. She now used the tube of blue dykem to mark the taper key so that when she did test fittings, contact with the high spots would become apparent.

The finished taper key was tapered not only from top to bottom, but also along its length to compensate for the worn keyway.

Installing the key took just a few light taps of a brass hammer. The coupling went on with ease. It was a perfect fit. The Allen screws were again cemented with green Loctite—a special formulation that was designed to break loose, when needed. (Standard clear cyanoacrylate glue was unforgiving and all too permanent, for machine screws.)

Wash day began several hours late, but Malorie’s mechanical skills had saved the day. Describing the repair later to Claire, Alan commented, “It was like watching one of the Dutch Masters do an oil painting. That job would have taken me two or three days. We’re very lucky that Malorie came here when she did. Great timing.”

Claire replied, “I don’t believe in happenstance. I believe in divine appointments. God brought Malorie to us for more than one reason. All of those reasons will become clear to us, with time.”

That evening, as they were washing and drying the dinner dishes, Phil said to Malorie, “You really amaze me. You’ve got a lot of hidden talents. Mechanical ability like yours is a rarity in men, and a great rarity in women.”

She blushed slightly, and replied, “I’m sure you have hidden talents, too. I notice that you’ve hardly mentioned what you did when you were working in counterintelligence.”

“Most of that doesn’t have much relevance to our work here. In fact, my knowledge of things like order of battle and terrain analysis date back to when I took my Officer Basic Course rather than my later work in CI.”

“But I’m sure you have some great stories to tell about your cloak-and-dagger days.”

“Nah. It was mostly just pushing paper.”