Read Online Last Stand: Patriots (Book 2) by William H. Weber - Free Book Online Page A

on his prepping list, along with a million other items. That was the addictive, never-ending nature of getting you and your family ready for a worst-case scenario. There was never enough time to cover every single eventuality. Pick your battles—a pearl of wisdom his mother had repeated her entire life, one he’d ended up applying in the most unlikely of situations.
    “After the military,” Rodriguez told John , “I returned to Oneida and joined the Emergency Management Office. Once the country was hit, we began reaching out via our radios, first to local towns, then as far away as California and Oregon.” Rodriguez drew in a deep breath. “Wasn’t long, though, before they stopped responding.”
    “Maybe more immediate survival needs took over ,” John suggested. On Willow Creek, fiddling with radios hadn’t been their first priority.
    Rodriguez looked at him knowingly. “ People are busy just trying to get by. Yeah, that was my guess. But before long Jefferson City was the furthest west we could reach.”
    “What about Europe?” John asked. “I heard these signals can travel quite a ways.”
    Rodriguez seemed happy that someone else was finally taking an interest in something he was passionate about. “Oh, they can. But most of the folks in Europe we’ve spoken to are in it up to their eyeballs just like us. Seems like they were hit just like we were. But talking to them was a real waste since they ain’t got a clue who did it.”
    “Truth be told, neither do we,” John told him. “I mean, it was an EMP. That much is clear, but who and for what purpose?”
    Rodriguez snickered. “I could take a gu ess or two. You look through any history book and you’ll see what I mean. The day you become a dominant power in the world, everyone wants to knock you down a peg or two.”
    “So how’d you end up as one of Marshall’s men?”
    “Same reason you did.”
    “The Chairman?”
    Rodriguez nodded solemnly. “Soon as the Chairman came in waving those official papers around, he pretty much had the town eating out of his hand. First out was the mayor and then, one by one, the other members of the Emergency Management Office started disappearing.”
    John’s eyes grew wide. “He was trying to isolate the town.”
    “Seems that way. But I didn’t wait around long enough to find out. Grabbed my gear and carted it out of town under the cover of darkness.”
    Rodriguez put his earphones back on and swiveled the knob on the radio.
    “What are you hoping to hear?” John asked. “Word from the West Coast?”
    “In part , yes. But since most of the country’s gone radio silent, we use our equipment to identify other nearby Patriots, pass information back and forth and coordinate attacks.”
    That last part caught John’s attention. “Aren’t you worried someone’s gonna listen in and hear what you’re saying?”
    The whites of Rodriguez’s eyes flashed with surprise at John’s insight.
    “They can listen all they want,” Rodriguez told him. “First of all we use coded messages. Morse code backwards, sometimes pig Latin, or even a simple substitute cipher where we slide the alphabet off by one or more positions.”
    “ But surely they triangulate the signal and pinpoint your location?”
    “Ah, that’s where it starts to get fun. We’ve got two counters to that. The first is what’s called EME, which stands for earth, moon, earth. By bouncing the signal off the surface of the moon, it makes tracing the signal incredibly difficult. Of course it requires larger antennas. The second method is a bit more complicated. It involves using a manual spread spectrum. Fancy talk for switching frequencies and swapping bands every sixty seconds. Every once in a while we use the same techniques to send out false information just to see if anyone’s managed to figure it all out.”
    John’s head was starting to spin just listening. It sounded as though they had things under control.
    “Any news coming out of