Spy Fiction: The Hillbilly Protocol (OR) The Chapel of Precious Moments
Turning the Tables on Tom Clancy
Dear Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
I’ve got some free time this month and am attempting to make up for some anemic posting last month as I was out reporting and moving from Virginia back to the high desert homeland in Idaho and Utah. Looking through my archives to find something that might tantalize the paid subscribers among you, and remembered the first part of a novel I was working on that never went anywhere, but remains pretty funny.
If you enjoy it and would like more of it, I am happy to work on that. Thanks again for reading, sharing, and most especially for purchasing a paid subscription. I’m no longer writing for County Highway (creative differences; I wish them well) and this is going to be the main venue for my writing from here on out, probably with a few freelance pieces here and there and with just a few more paid subscriptions (c’mon) I can basically make up the difference in income and have more creative control…and be weirder.
So help!
Become a paid subscriber today and read a bit of The Hillbilly Protocol
If you like it you will be able to read more! Off to the Oakley Rodeo
-Matt
Spy Fiction: The Hillbilly Protocol (OR) The Chapel of Precious Moments
George:
George Glower had a cold. Nothing serious: sniffles, scratchy throat, sneezes, coughs and some aches, handled with some paracetamol. He’d have to get more of the tablets on his next hop across the Pond. He was at the end of the run with the blister packs brought with him to his present home in Arkansas from his previous home in Leicestershire, just south of Nottingham in the English midlands. Still, the cough was there, which bothered him.
He couldn't, for the the life of him, figure out where he'd acquired the cold. This troubled him. His life, well, the job he'd built his life around was, in its roots, all about figuring things out, determining the order, cause and effect of things. He was good at it. One of the best, the few who knew of his existence thought. So why couldn't he figure out where he got this damn cold?
Like the rest of America, he'd been living under the specter of the virus for nearly a year and was as careful as he could possibly be—and given that for the past twenty yfive years, George Glower had been a spy, recruiting, training and running dozens of other spies. Over the years, he'd conceived, built and and monitored an ever-growing self-sustaining networks of informants, operators and saboteurs.
The government that employed him recognized his talents early on as an entrepreneur and encouraged his approach, appreciating the irony of working against the government of the United States using the same skills they claimed to value. And today, of course, he'd be putting that all at risk because of...a damn cold? He couldn't reschedule the meeting; the contact policies and procedures were iron-clad, and the signal he'd received for this particular meeting, once decoded, was clear: a face to face demanded his presence.
So, he was going where his presence was demanded, driving exactly the speed limit in his white late-model Toyota Corolla. The RV should be secure, he told himself. After all, the rendezvous site was one he'd scouted out and transmitted to higher years before, at the annual conference, so the contact procedures higher used were of his own creation. Security was built into every layer of the plan. He was a careful man. Part of the reason he'd been in the business for so long. This was a low risk scenario, he told himself. Even if followed and surveilled, the first face to face meeting his control would be brief, no more than a minute. It would appear coincidental, easily explained, even if the opposition had audio surveillance. Just two tourists on a Saturday morning talking about a tourist trap or exchanging suggestions for where to eat lunch.
It was forty one point two miles from his well-appointed home outside of Bentonville, Arkansas to the RV sight, plenty of time on two-lane twisting Ozark mountain roads to spot a tail, or mentally catch up on lingering work. He was always working, which hadn't led to a happy marriage but did lead to a contented marriage, and he'd purposefully married an American woman in Arkansas, the better to cover himself. She had no idea who he really worked for. No one did.
Certainly not the FBI, the NNSA, the DOE, or the Department of Defense, all of whom he’d run operations against over the year. They didn’t even have him as a Mr X, a hidden hand figure, as far as he could see.
And he still kept an eye out.
He'd only ever spotted a tail in America twice in the twenty five years he'd been operating here, and both were during crisis meetings with cells who had, for one reason or another, found themselves under surveillance by the the American federal police establishment: in the first case, it'd been intentional.
It was in his early days, when he was still building networks, so he'd been forced to build alliances instead. In this case he'd provided seed funding to the tune of a million dollars in hard currency. This was no easy task for George to assemble in those days. Today it required a twenty minute drive to any of his dozen currency caches; in each was roughly a million dollars; five hundred thousand in dollars, the rest split into five denominations of roughly a hundred thousand dollars each, although it varied with the exchange rate.
The payoff was worth it; the group of eco-warriors repayed the hard currency investment by stealing a shipping container filled with automatic weapons from an Army base's rail yard in broad daylight without ever firing a shot—then cached the majority of them in pleasure boats dry-docked for winter. George, in disguise, had done the final part of that operation himself. He carried the crate of weapons with transmitter back to the decoy site, leaving them between the closet and the bed of a crack motel. Before he crawled out the back bathroom window he'd put a thermite charge with a bad fuse on a hard-case briefcase containing a laptop computer and dozens of index cards, pulled the pin and hoped they'd swallow the bait.
They did. The rest of the operation went off without a hitch. The Army spent four years conducting an investigation of its ranks to root out members of the BAR ASSOCIATION. BAR stood for Brothers of the American Revolution, an organization George had made up out of whole cloth to sound absolutely terrifying to the Pentagon; his orders, delivered without jargon, was to fuck with the heads of the American Army leadership in a base within their assigned territory. He suspected it was as much for his evaluation as for any operational need, but he'd approached the operation the way a surgery resident boned up on cardiac procedures before their big day wielding the scalpel under the lights of the med school observation room.
He'd spent a few hours in the library that day reading. He'd assembled a a list of soldiers and their units in the 101st Airborne Division and 5th Special Forces Group and written his operational plan. It'd worked, spectacularly. He smiled at the memory of that time he'd purposefully caught the tail; the Army counterintelligence officer had himself been trailed by an FBI agent, tipped off anonymously that the Army guy was a cleaner for the weapons thieves. The next week, FBI agents descended on Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and arrested half the operations staff of the 5th Special Forces group and the Deputy Commanding General of the 101st Airborne, before ultimately dismissing all charges for lack of evidence.
He didn't like to think about the second time he'd caught a tail. He tried to frame the terror of the time that followed him first noticing surveillance in a positive light: the memory of it kept him from getting complacent with his cleaning routines. Forty miles took him two leisurely-appearing hours; he stopped in to buy fruits from a roadside farmer vendor. He pulled off down the road to examine beehives at Prepper Bee supply, and studied the cars snaking up the road from the quarter operated binoculars at Inspiration Peak, before winding his way through Eureka Springs.
His directorate chief appreciated George's request to burrow into Arkansas.
"Can I tell you something, George?"
"Of course, sir"
"Everyone—and I mean everyone—always wants New York City, and no one ever gets New York City, because we let the Embassy in Washington and the Mission to the UN have New York City."
"I've never liked cities, sir. I don't like London, either."
"So Arkansas? We haven't had anyone there yet, just no time, the coasts and ports take precedence. Arkansas is yours. Your territory will run up North almost to the lakes, down South almost to the Gulf. You'll be there for a career, for life, so think carefully. Your job, you know, to slowly, steadily, carefully, build up your—our—assets in the area, deniable assets, ones that would seem so absurd as to be associated with us."
"I'm glad. You know, I love the Americans. Of course, we're sworn to their subjugation and destruction by any means necessary, but that doesn't mean the Americans themselves, just everything else about the country. No one who really loved the Americans enough to spend a career underground bringing about their destruction would choose New York City to start. Do you know why, George?"
"I do not, sir, but I am sure you will either tell me or I'll spend a career puzzling over your meaning,"
"It's too easy. New York City has always been a town of tories and willing simps for any strongman. It remains a Tory town. There were no revolutionaries there in George Washington's time; during the Civil War the main action was all by draft dodgers. Even the Hindenburg knew better to explode in New York City."
This, of course, was before 9/11, and I often wondered what the DC thought of his thesis after that event.