Ken walked to the gate with his HK clone muzzle down, but with his thumb on the selector switch. As he unlocked the gate and opened it, Curt looked down at Ken’s rifle and said appreciatively, “Oooh, HK-G3!”
They spent the next half hour on the front porch, quizzing Curt.
“I went home to visit my family on Guam, but I couldn’t find any decent kind of job there. I knew I didn’t want to go back on active duty because I’d no doubt get deployed back to A-stan, and I didn’t want to go in the Army Reserve, because I’d no doubt get deployed back to A-stan….” He paused to laugh, then said: “So I was doing some job hunting on the Internet and I read about the oil boom in North Dakota, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ It turned out they were hiring almost anyone with a strong back and who was willing to put up with winters in the Dakotas. And it didn’t hurt that I was a veteran. When the economy went kerflooey, I asked around and found a job at the other end of the county, at a big grain elevator. The place is run by a family that’s been there since the 1890s. They own both the elevator and a feed lot. Again, being prior service helped me get the job.”
“So why’d you leave?”
“The man who owned the company kept having more and more of his relatives arrive after the Crunch. Some of them trickled in pretty late, even as recent as last November—and they told some amazing stories about how they managed to get out of the big cities. Anyways, blood is thicker than water, so I got asked to leave—politely, you know, and with plenty of notice. At least they gave me until the snow was off the roads. Nobody else in town needed a security guy, so off I went.”
The questioning shifted to Carl, who asked, “Do you have any military paperwork?”
“Yeah, I’ve got my DD-214—that’s a discharge document and service record.”
Being cautious, Carl first matched Mehgai’s face to his driver’s license, and then the name on the license to the DD-214. The discharge document told Carl nearly everything he needed to know. Curt Mehgai had been awarded two Army Commendation medals, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart.
Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana
March, the Third Year
The UNPROFOR contact team arrived at Malmstrom very quietly. General Woolson had expected that they would immediately attempt to relieve him of command, and he had a contingency plan in place to counter that. But surprisingly, Woolson was told that he would continue to command the base.
The UNPROFOR team soon took over the old headquarters building. But it took three months for several large generators to be hauled in from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and to get power to the building reliably.
The interactions between General Woolson’s staff and the contact team became a strange ballet of probes, feints, obfuscation, and denial. Woolson was repeatedly threatened with being relieved of command for “studious lack of cooperation.” He countered that he was a team player and complained that he lacked resources to provide the data and facilities access that the ProvGov demanded. Both sides in the struggle did their best to hide key facts and intentions. Their meetings went on for months. Woolson and his staff finally moved out of their trailers in the hangar and back into the headquarters building in November.
Inevitably, both Woolson and the UNPROFOR liaison team commander got what they wanted: Woolson didn’t have to give up the keys to the kingdom, and the UNPROFOR team denied Malmstrom the resources required to resume operational capability (OC).
Though they were never spoken per se, it eventually became apparent that the UNPROFOR contact team had only a few key goals:
1. To maintain security of all fissile material and cryptographic systems.
2. To keep all of Malmstrom’s MAFs de-alerted indefinitely.
3. To assess capabilities and to deny resources needed to improve any existing capabilities.
4. To assess how many silos had been flooded by groundwater intrusion, and how many were still dry (and hence conceivably capable of being realerted).
Rather than simply relieving Woolson of command, he was nominally put under the operational control of UNPROFOR. His “commander” was a UN major general from England. However, Woolson carefully did some picking and choosing in deciding which of his orders he would carry out, and which he would not via delays, excuses, and obfuscation. Many orders, he said, had been “put at a lower priority, or placed ‘under study, due to lack of requisite resources.’”
Woolson discovered that the two highest-ranking officers on the UNPROFOR contact team had drinking problems. So he kept them well supplied with liquor. This tactic further slowed the pace of the meetings.
In a secret meeting with no UN officers present, Woolson told his staff, “We continue the tap dance and treat them like mushrooms—we keep them in the dark and spread the steer manure around liberally. We stall them, and pencil whip them, and play charades as long as possible. Most importantly, we do not let them have the codes so that none of the LCCs can be accessed. To make it look like we are being compliant, we will let them ‘inspect’ as many LFs as they’d like—very slowly and laboriously, mind you—but we make excuses so that we never, ever, give a UN officer access to an LCC capsule. We can walk them around upstairs at the MAFs and give them nice dog-and-pony shows and pretty little PowerPoint presentations until they are blue in the face. But the bottom line is that they never get the crypto keys. The LCCs stay locked down, gentlemen. We will deny them any launch capability.”
As a contingency, Woolson ordered that thermite devices be built and secretly distributed. These were a last-ditch measure, designed to destroy both the encrypted blast door locks at the LCCs and the jackscrew mechanisms for the seven-ton “B Plugs” at the LFs. This contingency plan was given the code name “Uniform Delta,” which stood for “ultimate denial.”
Secretly, the UN staff had decided that there wasn’t enough manpower that could be spared to secure and reactivate Malmstrom’s vast missile fields. And, after all, the missiles weren’t needed anyway. They had plenty of operational missiles in France, Russia, and China—at least as long as Russia and China continued to toe the line. The stated goal of “reactivation” of Malmstrom was in fact a “capability denial operation.”
The key to the UN’s denial strategy was the decision to delay restoration of grid power to western Montana. The UN’s general staff had concluded that if they wanted to keep the American missiles neutered, all they needed to do was delay having the power grid in that region reenergized.
18. Millennium Falcon
“Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.”
Bradfordsville, Kentucky
April, the Third Year
There was someone banging on the door downstairs. The bedside windup clock showed that it was 5:15 a.m. General store owner Sheila Randall quickly dressed and walked downstairs from the apartment to her store. A man from the Resistance whom she recognized was outside. He was shivering, standing in a heavy downpour with a dribble coming off the brim of his fishing hat. Sheila unlocked the door and the man stepped in. He was dressed in dark civilian clothes, with a brown North Face jacket. The rainwater dripping off of him made a spreading puddle on the floor.