James Rawles - Founders

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.

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.

“I’m sorry to arrive like this without any warning, but I need your help,” he said urgently. “We’ve got a man in our truck who’s been shot in the leg and in the shoulder. He’s stable, but we can’t get him to our field hospital in Russell Springs before daylight. Our intel says that there are Germans and Belgians patrolling the roads between here and there, there’s a temporary checkpoint on Highway 68, and there may be an ambush set up somewhere along Liberty Road. We’ve also heard that there might be a reconnaissance drone up later today, that they’ve been flying in daylight hours out of Fort Campbell. If we use a team on foot to carry him on a stretcher, it’ll take a full day, and he’s likely to go hypothermic. We’d rather wait until either tomorrow night or the night after and carry him by truck, even if we have to make a roundabout trip.”

Sheila nodded and said, “Okay, but the last time you came here, it was just that gal with the shrapnel. I don’t know how to take care of someone with major wounds.”

“Don’t fret, we’re also dropping off a medic named Brent, to take care of him.”

Sheila nodded again. “All right, let’s bring him in the side door, and help him up the stairs.”

As she swung open the side door, she saw her son, Tyree, descending the stairs behind her. He was wearing pajamas and carrying his shotgun. “What’s up?” he asked.

“I’m afraid that you’re going to have to give up your bed again.”

Tyree grinned and said, “No prob, Mom. I’m an early riser, anyway.”

The resistance fighter they carried up the stairs from the store to Sheila’s apartment was named Jedediah Peoples. He was nineteen years old. He wore a wispy beginner’s mustache and was from Westmoreland, Tennessee, near the Kentucky state line. He had been shot through the left buttock and thigh. These were large, ugly wounds, but not life-threatening. Sheila was impressed by Brent Danley, even though he wore a pair of eyeglasses that had comical-looking repairs to the bridge and one of the eyepieces. The repairs had been made with paper clips and surgical tape. Brent had thinning reddish brown hair. He was soft-spoken and competent.