by Gene Skellig
Casey froze. Rob had crossed the line. With his near paranoia regarding security, Casey was not sure how to respond. Rob had done a first rate job of evolving and refining the concept of the facility, and Casey had come to enjoy working with and trusting Rob; but now everything had suddenly been moved to a different and much riskier level.
“Well, Rob, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this line of thinking. After all, this is all very confidential, right?”
“Yes, and I’m sorry to have brought it up, but the other client is working with some of the same technical questions you are. Although he has not said so, I think that his project and yours could be mutually instructive,” Rob answered sheepishly.
Then Casey realized that this was the first test of some of the security protocols he had been working on, in developing his Contingency Plans and Branch Plans.
Recognizing that these plans were now being triggered by the unexpected comment from Rob, Casey thought all the way back to when his planning for the project had first started. Information Security and Operational Security, INFOSEC and OPSEC, were necessary elements in his planning. They flowed from some of the core Factors and Deductions Analysis that he had identified in his original planning cycle.
This was why he had paid such attention to various forms of security. Security would be enhanced by the cameras he had planned for key locations around the facility, the observation posts he would establish in the forest, the specialized communication systems, the hidden walls and even weapons and food caches that would be created. But planning and technology alone would not guarantee security.
Casey believed that the only real security was going to come from people. Being part of a community, rather than being isolated from it, was going to be the Operational Centre of Gravity. This would go along with the Strategic Centre of Gravity, that of Information Collection and Analysis.
With these deductions in mind, Casey was clear that what was needed was to make meaningful connections with the right people in the right places. He began a detailed analysis of the personalities and capabilities of key people in the expected Area of Operational Responsibility, AOR, and the friends and family members that could be expected.
We need other people in life, Casey believed, even if the number of people we need could be counted in the hundreds and thousands and not in the hundred of millions. We also need to be free from interference. We need security of person and property, and we need to stay below the radar screen as much as possible. Others must not know what you have, if your intention is to hang on to it and use it in the manner you choose.
Casey did not want anybody to have a list of the contents of his home. He did not want some desperate but powerful person to identify his home as an attractive target or potential source of needed supplies.
With this in mind, a considerable emphasis in planning had been placed on information security, intelligence gathering, and networking. So the problem raised by Rob’s suggestion of talking with the other client was a philosophically important one to Casey. As Casey sipped on his water and considered what Rob had said, all of that flashed through his mind.
Casey decided to treat this as he would a potential Emerging Threat while still remaining open to the possibility that it could work out in a positive manner.
“OK, Rob, here’s what I’m prepared to do. I’ll meet with your client, but on my own terms. Here is what I want you to do, and I’m sorry if this feels a bit cloak and dagger. Why don’t you get his phone number. Then we’ll go out for a walk, and you can call him from another location.” Casey said this as he got to his feet and moved to the door of the conference room. Looking very startled, Rob awkwardly complied and led Casey to his office, just across the hall.
Rob retrieved the phone number. Casey smiled to the Meg Ryan look-alike as he led Rob out of the office.
Casey thought to himself. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but now I have the initiative. If this supposed client is legit, I can set up a meet with him and ask a few questions right now, without him having had a chance to talk to Rob. If he’s fishy in some way, he’ll be less prepared and easier to catch in a lie.
But when Casey got Rob to dial the number on a pay-phone outside the 7-11 near Rob’s office, the other client didn’t seem fishy at all. His name was Henry Davidson, and Casey liked “Hank” from the start.
“Hey, man, it’s alright that you called me right away and cut out the middle man,” said Hank. “I would’ve done the same thing. You can’t trust strangers, and why should Rob have told either one of us about the other anyhow? But I’ll tell you one thing, the kid’s done a great job on my warehouse, and he didn’t ask too many questions. I take it that your project and mine share some features that we may not want to have widely known?”
“Yes, but I’m not so interested in the details of your project as I am in having an opportunity to know something about who you are, where you’re coming from,” replied Casey.
This short conversation resulted in both men agreeing to set out immediately from opposite sides of Vancouver to meet in front of the giant crab sculpture at the H.R. MacMillan Planetarium, at Kitsilano Point. That way, both could be assured that the other would be busy getting through traffic, and the meeting would be candid and genuine, and hopefully unobserved.
When they met, they soon discovered that they had a lot in common and were talking up a storm as they strolled randomly through the park connecting the Planetarium with the Maritime Museum, and then on past Kitsilano Beach. Both men were concerned about the difficulties they saw coming and wanted to have a safe haven that could help them through what could be some very difficult years ahead.
Both men had large families, with Casey leading his family of seven, and Hank with his wife, two teenage sons, a pregnant daughter and a son-in-law. Both men were gold bugs, financing their projects with gains made from the gold junior sector. Gold was surging, as the worldwide currency wars continued to devalue all major currencies against each other, and against gold. The money-printing of the central banks and the sovereign debt crisis was spiraling out of control.
Differences between the two men were notable. Hank was a fisherman; Casey didn’t like fish. Hank was a very religious man whereas Casey was not. Casey noticed that Hank didn’t talk about any extended family or friends, while Casey had a large number of people he was concerned for. But they both agreed that they could cooperate and be in contact, and ultimately agreed that it would be better if they did not actually look at each other’s plans, as that could create a security risk. They agreed to meet occasionally to discuss technical aspects of their projects, and to share information on the best places to buy materials and technical equipment that they both had an interest in.
Hank was an avid amateur radio operator, in addition to having a marine license to transmit on the marine FM frequencies as part of his business operating a small coastal supply tug & barge operation. Once Casey learned this, he suggested that they agree to each have an identical copy of a randomly chosen book which they could use as an encoding reference for open voice transmissions.
Hank understood immediately what Casey was talking about and the two men simply walked into a small bookstore near Kitsilano Beach, and selected a suitable book.
Hank chose “The Forager’s Harvest: A Guide to Edible Wild Plants” which would be a useful addition to their libraries. The two men sat at a park bench and discussed how they would use page, line and word numbers to encode their radio messages.
At the time, Hank and Casey didn’t realize how instrumental their newfound friendship would prove to be.
5
“h” RECESSION
08 August: 33 Months Before NEW
It was after losing his father to a heart attack that Casey Callaghan really took stock of his life. In doing so, he realized that there had been a generational shift. He could no longer talk to his dad about politics, economics, or philosophy. His father had been a very astute observer of these subjects, and had been
a great man in his own right. But now he was gone, and Casey had lost a great source of insight and guidance.
His father’s death was a profound loss for the Callaghans. Casey realized that he would have to step forward and become the leader of the extended Callaghan family. He had maybe thirty years of very active life left in him before he himself became an old man and died in his turn. What would he do in that time?
Working through this, Casey had a very difficult few years indeed. It was a mid-life crisis, and it took its toll on his relationship with his wife, Tatiana, or simply “Tanya” . First and foremost, Casey determined that he would leave the military, where he had served as a pilot with the Canadian Air Force. Secondly, Casey decided to move to the West Coast, where he and Tanya could raise their children in a stable, permanent home.
Frequent moving from one military post to another would be a thing of the past, as would the steady paycheck. The couple fought about it for two years, all the while Casey delaying his ultimate goal in favor of keeping his marriage intact and his family together. While he was caught in limbo, Casey had an insatiable fixation on the problem. It was constantly on his mind. He made several trips to the coast, to visit family and talk through issues of his father’s passing. He also looked at real estate, thinking about where they should settle.
Casey started to formulate his plan. At first he thought all he needed was about a million dollars to build a home and be debt free, accepting any odds job he could get to keep himself active as he enjoyed retirement. But in those two years, where he spent much of his time thinking about his dream of building a better life for his family, he also became more concerned about the worsening economy.
He had always been a gold bug, so while the global financial crisis unfolded Casey invested every penny he could get his hands on into a developing gold mine up in Yellowknife. He had once been posted there and knew of the region’s once prodigious production of gold. While flying a DHC-6 Twin Otter for the Air Force he had landed on an airstrip used by a gold exploration company. The other pilot told Casey about the exploration going on there and how much gold the original mines in the Yellowknife Gold Camp had produced. Casey made contact with the exploration company’s CEO and was given a comprehensive tour of the camp, drill core shed, and other workings. This began Casey’s long and profitable relationship with Trophy Fish Gold, TFG on the Canadian Venture Exchange.
As he watched the price of gold continue to rise, and got deeper and deeper into his exploration of the financial crisis, Casey watched hundreds of videos on the internet. He was fascinated with concepts ranging from peak oil to how fiat currencies work, and how currencies and economic systems ultimately fail.
One particularly terrifying thing he learned was that there is a mathematical truth called “The Rule of 70”, which says that anything that grows exponentially will double at a rate of 70 divided by the growth rate. So if something grows at 3.5%, it will double in 20 years.
What was terrifying about that simple mathematical fact was made clear to Casey in a video he watched on You-Tube. The video was made by a professor who explained the public policy implications of exponential growth. The crazy looking old teacher gave a series of examples of how we fail to apply the simple mathematical truth that for something to continue to grow exponentially, it will keep on doubling in a predictable manner. He illustrated this through the metaphor of a bacterium in a pop bottle, growing at an exponential rate.
In the bottle analogy, there is a microscopic organism in the bottom of a pop bottle. It’s multiplying exponentially, doubling every minute. At 11:00 am there is just one bacterium in the bottle; but by noon, 60 doublings later, the pop bottle is 100% full!
Each doubling consumes an amount equivalent to all that was consumed in every prior doubling combined. Even if the first several doublings were not noticeable, it is not until the last few doublings that there is any indication that there is a problem and the system is about to fail. So in our final minute, we consume the rest of our bottle and then become extinct.
And then the professor said that this is the central issue facing the global economy. The modern economy is a system where exponential growth is considered to be good, as though it can go on forever. The examples about peak oil, inflation, urban sprawl and human population were scary, and the take-home truth for Casey was what it told him about how little time humankind had until its own extinction.
That hockey-stick shaped graph from those exponential growth videos started to appear more frequently in the economic data. As Casey followed the unfolding economic crisis he recognized that the growth in public debt had become a run-away scenario that ultimately would come to a crashing halt. Casey intuited that the world would become a much more dangerous place.
Whether by wars, exhaustion of resources, or climate change, he believed that the world was fast approaching that 11:59 moment. A big die-off is coming, much like the winter kill of a crop after an extremely harsh winter. Casey knew in his heart that this would begin to play out long before his children became adults.
After scaring himself with that realization, Casey knew that the day-to-day responsibilities of providing for his family and enjoying the prime years of his own life were about to become very different indeed.
A few years before, Casey was intrigued at the impact made by a simple flood cutting off a small town in rural Ontario.
The simple event took the community by surprise. Nobody was prepared for it. So when the trucks and trains stopped bringing fuel and food into the community, people quickly found themselves in trouble. The gas station ran out of fuel, and the grocery stores ran out of food. Emergency relief had to be flown in until the road and rail access was restored.
We would all be in a lot of trouble if the trucks, trains, fuel, and ships stopped coming into our cities. And that, Casey had realized, is exactly how it would happen.
Something in the system that is the human version of that pop bottle would break. Our exponential consumption and growth rates would come crashing down towards zero. It could be happening already. The economic tea-leaves seemed to be saying that the new normal should be a zero or negative growth rate.
Casey realized that with human nature being what it is, all those talking heads on TV could not get their heads around the simple fact that zero growth may be what we need at this juncture, rather than to employ desperate measures to re-stimulate a logarithmic growth rate of 3% or so. So rather than recognizing the need for sustainable consumption the powers that be were going to fight the slow-down with everything they had. They would print more and more money; try more and more desperate measures to keep the growth going. So the chances for a deliberate, gradual reduction in consumption were long since lost, perhaps as far back as the 1970s. Now there could only be the one, harsh systemic failure.
And that could lead to war.
Casey thought, from what he had experienced in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, that war was ultimately pointless. He wanted no part of a war that had nothing to do with keeping his family safe. He wanted no part of a regional war, which could escalate into an all out world war.
A nuclear war.
Even with the disarmament and modernization of the world’s nuclear forces, there were still sufficient stockpiles of weapons to destroy ourselves several times over.
Perhaps all of his internet roaming had made Casey a bit paranoid but he could conceive of a disintegrating world where a nuclear war would become more likely. A limited nuclear exchange between rivals on a regional basis seemed possible.
A conflict between Iran and Israel was made that much more likely when Iran admitted that they had achieved the capability of enriching uranium. It would only be a matter of time before Iran would enrich sufficient uranium to that 90% level necessary for an atomic weapon. Add that to the missile capabilities that Iran had developed over recent years and you would have a new nuclear power with the capability of achieving their avowed goal of obliterating the state of Israel.
In the past, the nuclear powers would never use nuclear weapons in war because the massive number of atomic weapons would loft so much soot and fine particles into the upper atmosphere that the world would be thrown into a decades-long nuclear winter.
Casey had read several studies on the subject. The consensus was that there would be considerable cooling in all continental areas of the northern hemisphere. It would only take a few hundred detonations, such as a regional nuclear war between Pakistan and India, to have serious consequences.
A larger nuclear war, with thousands of detonations, would have a much larger effect on global temperatures as well as on how much sunlight would be able to reach farmland. This, on top of the stresses already placed on our environment, would lead to crop failures on a massive scale. Casey believed that the world was on such precarious economic footing that the likelihood of wars in the future was increasing. He decided that this was a personal danger to his family as long as they lived in Winnipeg.
If a large-scale war occurred, then Winnipeg would be one of the key command and control centers that would be taken out by the enemy. Winnipeg was, after all, the alternate headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD. Since NORAD was a bi-national agreement between the United States and Canada, an enemy would target both the headquarters of Continental NORAD region, CONR, at Colorado Springs and also take out Winnipeg in an attempt to take out NORAD’s ability to provide the United States and Canada with aerospace warning, the monitoring of man-made objects in space, and warning of attack by aircraft, missiles or space vehicles.
