by Oliver North
Rachel’s face was now so close to his, he could sense the warmth of her breath when she said, “So you have decided to consciously break the law. How do you and Mack reconcile this with the oath you each took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and what you teach in Sunday school about ‘rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’?”
Peter reached out in the darkness and put his arms around his wife. She felt him take a deep breath and then reply, barely above a whisper, “I anguish over all this, Rachel, just as our founders did when all thirteen colonies organized secret Committees of Correspondence in 1774. Good God-fearing men like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and John Adams eventually concluded that the monarch and Parliament had become intolerably tyrannical. Fifty-six of these patriots pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to declare independence. A Newman ancestor marched with Daniel Morgan in the American Revolution and was wounded at the battle of Cowpens. Mack, our daughter, our son, and I all took an oath to support and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. I pray that what we do in the days ahead will restore rather than usurp that Constitution for the benefit of our children and grandchildren.”
She pulled him closer and gave him a long kiss on the lips, and then said, “Good. I’m with you, Peter Newman—wherever this takes us.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
COMMITTEES OF CORRESPONDENCE
RESIDENCE OF U.S. SEN. MACKINTOSH CAPERTON
305 MARYLAND AVE. NE, WASHINGTON, DC
SATURDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 2032
0125 HOURS, LOCAL
Senator Mackintosh Caperton’s colleagues on both sides of the aisle knew him to be ethical, diligent, possessed of extraordinary foresight, and incorruptible. Though not celebrated for lengthy oratory, when he rose to speak even his opponents listened. The Navy Cross, Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts he was awarded for action as a U.S. Navy SEAL during Operation Just Cause in Panama, Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, and a dozen more classified missions all speak to his courage.
Although Caperton was the most decorated member of the U.S. Senate, few had ever seen the classified citations for his bravery under fire and he never spoke publicly about those events. A slight limp from the prosthesis replacing his right leg below the knee was the only visual clue to the injuries that eventually forced him to retire from the service. When asked about the tiny blue and white device he wore on his lapel he replied simply, “I wear it to remember those with whom I served who did not make it home alive.”
Now, two-thirds of the way through his third term as Montana’s senior senator, even his political rivals described him as “three steps ahead of the rest of us.” Caperton’s most frequent response when presented with a “we must do this now” legislative issue was “John Paul Jones once said, ‘In matters of principle, be deaf to expediency.’ Jones was right.” When pressed, he invariably insisted, “I understand your sense of urgency, but before we rush this through, we must ask ourselves, ‘What will the American people say about us five, ten, twenty, or even a hundred years from now?’”
One of his detractors, intending to insult him, once told a reporter, “Never tell Caperton what you intend to do. By the time you finish a sentence, he has thought through the options and figured out something he thinks is better. That’s probably how he picked his wife.” When the accusation was published, Mack commented, “He’s right. SEALs always ‘think ahead.’ Angela was the best option I was ever going to get. As every SEAL should be, I was ‘good-to-go.’ I’m glad she was, too.”
Despite Caperton’s reluctance to engage in unwarranted legislative activity, those who served with him on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence also knew that when it came to issues affecting the nation’s security or the safety of U.S. troops, he could be swift and decisive. His legendary foresight led him to prepare backup communications plans with Peter Newman and scores of others around the United States and overseas.
* * * *
The “Flash Precedence” message pinged Senator Mack Caperton’s government-issued Personal Interface Device exactly eight minutes after Peter Newman hit SEND on his unregistered PID. Despite the hour, Caperton immediately arose from the bed he normally shared with his wife, Angela, went to his small office next to their bedroom, and turned on an ancient desk lamp.
He placed his PID next to a DigiVu on his desk so the two devices could “talk” to each other through their short-range infrared transceivers and pinched the top right corner of the DigiVu screen with his right thumb and index finger to turn it on. The text of the PID MESH-mail message instantly appeared on the thin plastic sheet.
CONFIDENTIAL
U.S. SENATE PRIVILEGED COMMUNICATION
PRECEDENCE: FLASH VIA PID
180617ZSEP32
FM: TCALPJ
TO: SSCIMC001
SUBJ: CRITICAL MATERIALS PRICE PROJECTIONS J17A3TR29 [C]
PER YOUR REQUEST, PROJECTED PRICES FOR THE RARE EARTH MINERALS & SHORT SUPPLY ELEMENTS IN THE HIGH-DEMAND TIME-FRAME YOU SPECIFIED ARE LISTED BELOW IN GLOBAL EXCHANGE CURRENCY [GEX] PER GRAM OR PER MILLILITER AS APPROPRIATE:
La = ¤2.1; Ce = ¤2.2; Pr = ¤21.10; Nd = ¤21.17; Es = ¤11.8;
Pm = ¤4.8;
Sm = ¤10.8; Eu = ¤22.13; Gd = ¤28.7; Tb = ¤16.7; Dy = ¤3.7;
Ho = ¤18.5;
Er = ¤3.13; Tm = ¤29.4; Yb = ¤18.9. Md = ¤21.10; Ac = ¤25.1;
Th = ¤28.3;
Pa = ¤15.1; U = ¤11.12; Np = ¤17.9. Pu = ¤8.9 ; Am = ¤15.9;
Cm = ¤20.15?
MY BEST TO ANGELA,
SEMPER FIDELIS, TOM
All PIDs issued by the U.S. government come equipped with basic encryption algorithms built into their software. PIDs used by individuals doing classified work have a more complicated level of encryption—though even this can eventually be broken by code crackers using sophisticated computers. But anyone intercepting this transmission, even if they broke the PID encryption, would see only a listing of elements from the periodic table and their expected “prices” in gex—Global Exchange Currency units. That’s what Caperton intended when he set up the system.
The first thing Mack checked was the routing—who sent and relayed the message. Reading backward on the “From” line, Caperton could see that PJ—Peter J. Newman—was the originator. Newman sent it to AL—Alvin Loomis—a former Navy SEAL living in Oklahoma. If all the protocols Caperton established were being followed, Loomis then sent the message over an Anark-controlled fiber-optic cable to TC—Tom Cooper—a retired U.S. Marine sergeant major in Texas. Cooper used his registered PID to send the message to Caperton, rendering the originator—Newman—and the first relay station—Loomis—invisible. Anyone intercepting and decrypting the transmission would think Cooper originated the message.
Next, Mack checked which “one-time pad” Peter used to encode his message. Though slow and primitive compared to modern electronic encryption systems, a frequently changed pad is an effective cipher system—providing an adversary does not know the key being used to convert letters, words, symbols, or numbers from one meaning to another.
Caperton devised a very simple system using articles appearing in four of the few surviving, readily available, daily U.S. newspapers: the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times,Washington Times, and Washington Enquirer. The entry on the message subject line—J17A3TR29—told Mack all he needed to know: Newman used the Wall Street Journal of 17 September. The article Peter used was in Section A, page 3, on the top right of the page and it was twenty-nine lines long. He fetched the previous day’s edition of the Journal from the far side of his desk, opened the paper, and found the referenced article:
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Texas Businesses Hit Hard by Mexican Border Closure
Austin, TX, Sep. 15, 2032—Texas Governor David Charles says the White House decision to close the U.S.-Mexican border will likely cost his state a million jobs between now and the Novembe
r election. “We all need to ask if this is the best way to conduct foreign policy,” Mr. Charles told reporters at a news conference in Austin.
“We’ve been the target of international terrorism and now we are being targeted by our own government,” the governor said in a prepared statement. Responding to a reporter’s question he insisted, “Can you think of a worse way to handle a crisis than the way Washington is handling this? We won’t have any jobs or a friend left in the world if they keep this up. If this is the best they can do, make my twelve-year-old son Secretary of State. He could certainly do a better job.”
Asked about progress in investigating the 9-11-32 terror bombings in Houston, the governor was blunt in criticizing the administration: “We had our best people working on this. But as you all know, the entire investigation has been taken over by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. We know that no one has yet been indicted for these crimes. To the extent we are able, we are monitoring the investigation but communications with the crowd running the show from Washington are marginal at best. I know there are a lot of rumors floating around out there but we’re not allowed to confirm or deny any of them. If you have a source in Washington, let them know I told you ‘We the People’ have a right to know what they know, today, not after the election. We need to know who did this to us.”
Governor Charles, who considered running for president this fall, has also been outspoken about what he says is an inadequate federal response to the environmental consequences of the Houston attack. “It has been slow coming and poorly coordinated,” he said on a national radio interview on Wednesday. “What this says to me, is that the elites in Washington just don’t care about the rest of us. Your job is to tell ’em that.”
Placing the newspaper column beside the DigiVu, Caperton used a pencil to number the lines of text in the paper, 1 through 29, confirming he was using the appropriate pad. He then quickly matched each of the twenty-four line and word number combinations in Newman’s PID message with the appropriate lines and words in the newspaper’s text:
Line 2, 1st word:
White
Line 2, 2nd word:
House
Line 21, 10th word:
source
Line 21, 17th word:
told
Line 11, 8th word:
my
Line 4, 8th word:
best
Line 10, 8th word:
friend
Line 22, 13th word:
today
Line 28, 7th word:
that
Line 16, 7th word:
FBI
Line 3, 7th word:
now
Line 18, 5th word:
monitoring
Line 3, 13th word:
all
Line 29, 4th word:
Your
Line 18, 9th word:
communications
Line 21, 10th word:
source
Line 25, 1st word:
also
Line 28, 3rd word:
says
Line 15, 1st word:
our
Line 11, 12th word:
son
Line 17, 9th word:
indicted
Line 8, 9th word:
Can
Line 15, 9th word:
you
Line 20, 15th word:
confirm
With the punctuation Newman subtly inserted among the “prices” in his message, the brief missive was both a warning and a plea for help:
White House source told my best friend today that FBI now monitoring all your communications. Source also says our son indicted. Can you confirm?
Though the first sentence would alarm almost anyone, instead of becoming agitated, Caperton smiled as he reread the brief communiqué. In using the phrase “my best friend” he realized Peter was referring to his wife. Rachel had somehow developed a “White House source” as good or better than anything the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was able to recruit.
Second, Caperton anticipated he might eventually come under suspicion and planned accordingly. Over a year before, he obtained ten thousand unregistered, “throwaway” PIDs from contraband seized during a counternarcotics operation in Nigeria carried out by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
In the course of his travels, he and Angela delivered hundreds of these unregistered devices to trusted individuals who shared his concerns about where the West in general and the United States in particular were heading. Mack called the others in his network “Committees of Correspondence.” With Peter Newman now in, that brought the number of “trusted messengers” to fifty-six. He smiled again at the historical significance of the number. In July 1776, just fifty-six patriots signed the Declaration of Independence.
Knowing he was under surveillance was also a great advantage. His SEAL experience, long tenure on the SSCI, and close connections with DEA undercover operations were invaluable. He knew he would have to maintain a pattern of life that would appear routine to his watchers and listeners.
To that end, Mack first deleted Newman’s encrypted message from his PID and put the annotated newspaper story and his notes into the Organic Chemical-bath, Certified-green Shredder beneath his desk and listened while the documents were ground into compost mulch. He then activated the DigiVu’s MESH connection and placed a Vid-Call to a number in Montana.
Angela picked up on the third ring. “Oh, Mack, you should be here,” she said as her image appeared on his plastic screen—before he could even say hello. “The cottonwoods are turning early this year. The slopes above the river are covered with gold leaves. On the way here from the airport I saw a half-dozen mountain sheep, a herd of mule deer, and a pair of elk grazing in our yard when I pulled up the drive.”
* * * *
Caperton smiled at his wife’s effervescent enthusiasm for their ranch. Twenty-five miles west of Great Falls and across the Sun River from Fort Shaw, it had been in his family for four generations. His great-grandfather built the original ranch house in 1907 with river stone hauled up from the Sun River on a horse-drawn wagon. The roof beams were hand-hewn lodgepole pines that Mack’s namesake cut in the foothills of the Rockies nearly forty miles upstream and floated down the river in the fast-flowing spring melt.
There the Caperton clan thrived, raising kids, wheat, soybeans, corn, and cows, gradually expanding the original 1,500-acre parcel to more than 20,000 acres. Mack’s dad, born in the midst of the Great Depression, used to tell how his father was famous for helping neighbors with interest-free loans when failing banks tried to foreclose on ranchers late on their mortgages. In 2016, during the Great Double-Dip Recession and a tidal wave of new foreclosures and government bank seizures, the descendants of the families Grandfather Caperton aided in the 1930s were the ones who convinced Mack to run for the U.S. Senate. For reasons of her own, Angela readily agreed and Mack won handily.
Much of Mack’s political success was Angela’s doing. They grew up on neighboring ranches and as youngsters, Mack and Angela were high school sweethearts. Her family was also renowned in Montana. Angela’s grandmother, Mabel, was the oldest World War II–era Women Airforce Service Pilot—a WASP. She flew P-39 Airacobra fighters and B-25 Mitchell bombers from Great Falls Army Airfield—now Malmstrom Air Force Base—to Fairbanks, Alaska, for delivery to Russian pilots under the Lend-Lease program.
On a midwinter flight in 1943, an engine fire in the P-39 that Mabel was piloting forced her to bail out of the aircraft and parachute into the snow-covered, trackless wastes of northern Canada. The story of her perilous, six-day hike to civilization is still part of Montana folklore.
When Mack became the first graduate of tiny Fort Shaw High School to attend the Naval Academy, Angela pledged to wait for him and went to study business at the University of Montana in Missoula. They married in 1978 at the Naval Academy Chapel with Marine 2nd Lieutenant Peter Newman and Ensign Marty Cohen leading s
ix other classmates in forming an arch of swords for the new bride and groom.
Mack and Angela instantly became what she called “military migrant workers,” as they moved first to California, then Virginia, Florida, Hawaii, and finally back to Virginia. Their son John was born in 1980 while Mack was assigned to Naval Special Warfare Group One in Coronado, California. Daughter Beth came along three years later while they lived at the naval base in Little Creek, Virginia. Mack learned of her birth while he was deployed with SEAL Team Four to Beirut, Lebanon.
In 1991, Mack was badly wounded on a classified SEAL mission in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. After months of life-threatening infections and painful attempts to save his right leg, Navy surgeons finally removed the shattered limb and fitted the SEAL with a prosthetic replacement. Confronted with the prospect of a protracted period of desk duty, he opted to be “surveyed out” of the service in 1992.
Undaunted by an unwanted and unexpected career change, he polled Angela, John, and Beth about where they wanted to live. The answer was unanimous: “the Ranch.”
Angela started homeschooling their children while Mack was still in the SEALs, and when they moved to Montana, she converted the old bunkhouse at the ranch into a classroom. John and Beth mastered their Libertas textbooks—and the use of hunting rifles, shotguns, pistols, and fishing rods. They rode fence lines, rounded up stray calves on horseback, shot rattlesnakes, coyotes, and prairie dogs from the saddle, and hiked the peaks of the Lewis & Clark National Forest, visible from the living room windows, to the west of their home. A portion of every winter was spent on skis at Big Sky, Moonlight Basin, Bridger Bowl, and Whitefish.
