•   •   •

On Malorie’s third day at the ranch, it was wash day. Ray went out to start the Lister generator set, but it wasn’t long before he shut it back down and came into the house, looking glum. He kicked off his mud boots and walked to the kitchen table. He said, “We have a problem, ladies and gents: The engine is turning just fine, but the generator is not.”

“Uh-oh,” Alan said.

Alan, Phil, Malorie, and Ray all walked out to the generator shed together. Ray brought a rag and a flashlight.

Examining the generator set, they could see nothing outwardly wrong, other than its usual small and chronic oil leaks. It was Malorie who spotted some metal filings beneath the coupling that joined the engine shaft to the generator shaft. “Hey, look here: Looks like it ate a Woodruff.”

Phil, who only had rudimentary mechanical knowledge, asked, “What’s that?”

Malorie pointed the tips of her index fingers together to illustrate. “The two shafts come together end to end, like this. A Woodruff spline keeps them aligned, and this coupling sleeve holds the spline in place, and the coupling is in turn held in place with these big Allen-head screws.”

After a pause, she went on. “I’ll need a set of Allen wrenches—they look like three-sixteenths—but it could be a size smaller or larger, or possibly even metric. Oh, and I’ll also need some sort of degreaser, preferably in a spray can.”

Ray nodded. “The Allen wrench you need is right here.” He pointed to a wooden tray of maintenance tools that had been power-screwed to the wall of the shed.

Alan offered, “I used to have to tighten those Allen screws once every few months, but then I got wise and stared using green Loctite so that they don’t drift.”

“I’ll be right back with a spray can of carburetor cleaner,” Ray said.

While Phil held the flashlight, Malorie deftly loosened the Allen screws. Just as Ray stepped back into the shed with a spray can, Malorie slid the sleeve aside and chuckled.

She said, “I knew this thing was old, but I didn’t know it was this old. This thing is pre-Woodruff.”

“Meaning what, Mal?” Ray asked.

“Meaning it is not a square Woodruff key that got eaten. It’s a taper key, which is what they used before Woodruffs became commonplace. That means that finding or making a replacement key will be a lot more difficult.”

She went on to explain. “The good news is that keys are made from mild steel, with parallel sides and base. The top face of the key has a slight taper of just a one- or two-in-a-hundred ratio, which allows you to fit it into a keyway, followed by a rapid take-up of the slack in the hole, by the taper.”

“So you’re saying that you have to fabricate a replacement for a part that you’ve never seen, because we only have a few fragments,” Ray said.

“That’s right. I don’t suppose you have a dial micrometer?”

“No,” Alan answered glumly.

“But I’ll bet the Leaman ranch has one that we can borrow,” Ray offered.

Mal looked up. “Also ask if they have a tube of some machinist’s Prussian blue. It’s also called blue dykem.”

Ninety minutes later, Ray roared back to the ranch on his KLR motorcycle. He shouted, “Got ’em!”

After spraying all of the parts with degreaser, Malorie used the projecting tips of the calipers to measure the keyways on the shafts and coupling in several places, and took notes.

“Not only do I have to account for some taper, but the keyway also shows some wear, even though it was obviously harder steel than the spline. So to compensate, I’m going to have to taper the new key in two different axes.”

She made the new taper key from a standard seven-sixteenths-inch threaded steel bolt. She wisely left the head of the bolt in place for most of the steps so that she’d have that to clamp firmly into Alan’s bench vise. An Aladdin mantle lap was fetched and set up for light to work by.

Malorie explained as she started: “Normally I’d use a milling machine or even just an abrasive cutoff wheel to work this down to the rough dimension, but of course we’re without power, so we’ll use the old-fashioned method. Namely, hand files and plenty of sweat.”

The four of them took turns filing flats on four sides of the bolt shaft. After one hour and fifteen minutes, they were close to the requisite rough dimensions, and Malorie started measuring with the calipers more and more frequently. After nearly two hours of work, Malorie was doing all of the filing and all of the calipering as the three men stood back and watched. She let the work piece cool for a few minutes as she took a sip of water. Then she loosened the vise and dropped the workpiece into a rag.

“Time for a sanity check,” she declared.

After carrying the roughed taper key and the “mike” to the generator shed, she did a test fitting. She nodded. “I just wanted to make sure that I was visualizing the taper correctly in both axes.”

After taking another measurement, she carried her work back to the vise in Alan’s shop.

She continued with more filing, now much more deliberately, and taking regular measurements.

Next, she sawed off the head of the bolt with a hacksaw and cleaned up that rough end with a bastard file.

Over the next hour, she took three more trips back and forth to the generator shed between filing sessions. She now used the tube of blue dykem to mark the taper key so that when she did test fittings, contact with the high spots would become apparent.

The finished taper key was tapered not only from top to bottom, but also along its length to compensate for the worn keyway.

Installing the key took just a few light taps of a brass hammer. The coupling went on with ease. It was a perfect fit. The Allen screws were again cemented with green Loctite—a special formulation that was designed to break loose, when needed. (Standard clear cyanoacrylate glue was unforgiving and all too permanent, for machine screws.)

Wash day began several hours late, but Malorie’s mechanical skills had saved the day. Describing the repair later to Claire, Alan commented, “It was like watching one of the Dutch Masters do an oil painting. That job would have taken me two or three days. We’re very lucky that Malorie came here when she did. Great timing.”

Claire replied, “I don’t believe in happenstance. I believe in divine appointments. God brought Malorie to us for more than one reason. All of those reasons will become clear to us, with time.”

•   •   •

That evening, as they were washing and drying the dinner dishes, Phil said to Malorie, “You really amaze me. You’ve got a lot of hidden talents. Mechanical ability like yours is a rarity in men, and a great rarity in women.”

She blushed slightly, and replied, “I’m sure you have hidden talents, too. I notice that you’ve hardly mentioned what you did when you were working in counterintelligence.”

“Most of that doesn’t have much relevance to our work here. In fact, my knowledge of things like order of battle and terrain analysis date back to when I took my Officer Basic Course rather than my later work in CI.”

“But I’m sure you have some great stories to tell about your cloak-and-dagger days.”

“Nah. It was mostly just pushing paper.”

41

IN A PAST LIFE

The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.

—Thucydides

Seattle, Washington—June, Three Years Before the Crunch

Phil Adams hoped that the Iranian hadn’t spotted him. If he had, then he might as well as pull the plug on the day’s surveillance.

Phil was fortunate to still be in the loop. Most of his contemporaries disappeared into anonymous and mundane civilian life after their assignments ended and their clearances lapsed. But Phil had made the transition from active-duty military intelligence (MI) into intel contracting almost effortlessly, thanks to the longevity of Task Group Tall Oak, an ongoing DIA (and later DCS) program with proven success. Their specialty was industrial counterintelligence, but to some extent they were capable of “all source” intelligence gathering and analysis.