Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

Washington?”
    “With a good antenna, sure, no problem. Twenty meters would probably work best. I might be able to make a dipole antenna, but without a tuner . . . I don’t know.”
    “What do you need?”
    Ken was silent for a moment. “Forty or fifty feet of copper wire, any gauge will do. Co-ax cable. Fifty feet should do. Two six-foot copper grounding rods. Enough posts to suspend the whole antenna thirty feet off the ground.”
    I looked at Dad. “Where are we going to get all that stuff? And how are we going to put an antenna that high up without the guards noticing?”
    He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know.”

Chapter 69
    Getting the supplies turned out to be much easier than I’d anticipated. A lot of the refugees had been rounded up on the road while they tried to flee the disaster zone. They’d fashioned crude tents with whatever came to hand, and FEMA had allowed them to keep their improvised tents when they’d entered the camp. For some of them, the best raw materials available had been items ripped out of their homes. Wire torn out of walls—both electrical and co-ax—served as crude cordage for guy lines. Copper pipes substituted for tent poles. The prefects fanned out across the camp again, looking for the materials we needed and arranging replacements or tent upgrades for refugees who allowed us to take parts from their shelters.
    While I searched for materials, I also kept an eye out for unused canvas. Unfortunately, tent materials were at a premium—all the canvas in camp appeared to be in use. I wasn’t sure how I could manage to steal an occupied tent. Maybe Ben would have an idea.
    We didn’t find a forty-foot length of wire, of course. We had to splice it together from dozens of scraps, joining each chunk with its neighbor with the tightest twist we could manage. One of the prefects found a family using chunks of a tailor’s cloth measuring tape as improvised belts—an invaluable find since Ken wanted the wire measured precisely. He did a bunch of calculations in the snow outside, muttering something about 468 megahertz to himself. When he finished, he told us to make each of the two legs of the antenna sixteen feet, ten inches long. With all the splices, Ken said he’d be shocked if it worked. The co-ax cable was even harder to splice than the copper without connectors or tape.
    We used six-foot lengths of copper pipe as grounds, driving them into the earth by pounding on them with heavy rocks. The ends of the soft copper pipes belled out, and we couldn’t get them driven more than a few feet into the frozen ground. It was as good as the rest of the hap-hazard setup, I guessed.
    Raising a thirty-four-foot antenna thirty feet off the ground proved to be impossible. We simply didn’t have any poles long enough. Plus, an antenna that tall would be visible from the guard shack—a risk we couldn’t take. Instead we strung the antenna across the tops of the tallest tents. Ken wanted it thirty feet high—he got about eight.
    By evening, we were ready to try it. Ken, Ben, and I crowded into the tent while Dad and some prefects kept watch outside. Ken slowly turned the dial on the transceiver, listening to static and squeals with the silent intensity of a priest at prayer.
    He’d been at it fifteen or twenty minutes when something occurred to me. “Why don’t you call out? Maybe someone’s listening but not transmitting.”
    “Transmitting takes more than twenty times the juice as listening. We’ve only got the two batteries, right? Which do you want? Four hours of transmitting, or eighty of listening?”
    “Oh.” That made sense.
    More than an hour passed before Ken gave up scanning. “I really can’t tell if this is working without an antenna tuner or an SWR meter. Maybe the antenna is too long. Go trim an inch off each side. That’ll change its harmonics, maybe even help.”
    Cutting the copper wire without proper tools was a pain. I had to get the end of the antenna down off a tent, lay the wire against a brick, score it with a knife, and then bend it back and forth until it broke. Ben came along to help, holding the shake light for me. Still, it seemed like it took a long time.
    Ken spent another hour scanning channels, then sent me back out to trim the antenna again. Almost immediately upon my return, we heard a voice.
    “Peace with the Lord, for the hour of judgment is upon you.”
    A huge grin cracked Ken’s face wide open. “Damn, can’t believe this