“Why? Why have you brought this to me? What am I supposed to do with this? These photos, these notes, god, these notes! Do you know what half these things are?!” he shouted at them, “If what you say is true, we don’t stand a chance. We cannot defeat this …” he waved the notes at them, then paused, and looked at them again.

“Wait,” he said, in a quieter voice, “you never said where you got these from. How did we come across such information?”

Neal smiled, and then he sighed. “Oh, Colonel, that is why I love you so much.” The colonel frowned at him, but he continued, “You are absolutely right to say we cannot defeat technology like this. And you are right to ask how Madeline and I got this information.”

He walked up to the rugged man and looked him in the eye, his expression becoming serious again, “Barrett, we have some small hope. They are not all as they seem. It may not be much, but we have a friend amongst them. Colonel, one of them is a spy.”

* * *

The last remnants of the colonel’s resistance gone, they had, eventually, begun to reap the profits of recruiting this new member to their team.

Twenty years in Air Force Intelligence and Surveillance gave Barrett a detailed understanding of the armed forces and intelligence services of both the US, its allies, and many of its enemies.

As he started to wrap his head around the massive disadvantages they faced, his training started to formulate a plan. He explained that it would be like when they first looked to build up an intelligence capability in a foreign nation. It was a slow and laborious process, and it always began with a single, reliable asset. But there was a method here, and they would follow it as best they could.

They would need to carefully recruit allies with specific capabilities. They would need a process for that. They would need safeguards. They would need code words and covert methods of communication. Neal suggested mail, and the colonel concurred, but said there were other methods as well, methods that harkened back to the days of the Cold War, and even the heady days of Enigma and the resistance fighters in Europe. Classified ads in newspapers, and online, would be one way, heavily coded, of course. Trigger calls and e-mails to dummy accounts, disguised as cold calls and junk mail.

For direct action, they could clearly use the highly encrypted ‘SurFeR’ radios for short distances, but no doubt if they all started carrying those around the Agents would soon become suspicious.