Obstacles

by David Wilson

  Talon began to protest that statement but stopped and pondered the statement before saying, “Actually, you are correct. I do have 8-year-old triplets, and I have led grown men most of my life, but I do not have any experience with teenagers. But how in the world could she not realize that her disobeying directly led to Jeff’s death? Any blind person can see that.”

  “I’m not saying this to be mean, but we definitely need to get you home to experience those kids of yours growing up,” said Don, “It’s hard to explain and the only reason I know this is I’ve had to deal with raising Mat for the last four years. After his parents’ divorce, and trust me, it was as ugly as it gets between two people, Mat was angry and lashed out at anything and anyone, including me.”

  Don shifted his seat and reached out for the thermos. Taking his time thinking, Don poured himself some more coffee before he continued, “Anyway, there were times I wanted to just beat some sense into that young man, he would say and do some of the stupidest things I have ever seen and blamed me for why he had done them. I know it doesn’t make any sense to our generation, our parents or grandparents would have beat the living shit out of us if we had back talked them or made the excuses the way these kids do. The bottom line is we ended up in counseling and believe it or not it helped. Mat is a different kid, or I should say, young man, then he was three years ago. He had so much anger back then and did not understand it wasn’t his fault that his parents could not make their marriage work. It also pissed me off that I had said the same exact things to Mat a hundred times, but he would not listen to me, but this idiot shrink says them and all of a sudden Mat begins listening to him and as if by fucking magic Mat begins to listen, and life got a whole lot better. I really believe that we are dealing with a like type situation here. Ok, I’m now off my soapbox. Your turn.”

  Talon sat there slightly stunned by what Don had said, a thousand things running through his mind at the same time. Everything from this is bullshit to I can see that was crying out for attention in his mind, but the foremost part of his brain was thinking, am I really that out of touch with the youth of today. As a professional interrogator, Talon prided himself in his knowledge of the human mind and what made people tick. But he was smart enough to also know when he was out of his depth. Reaching over, it was his turn to pour himself more coffee while all of this raced around and around inside him.

  “So how should we handle this,” Talon finally asked. “I was going to get the group together after breakfast and talk about the actions of yesterday and just lay it on the line. Now I’m not sure that would be the best action now. I’m not the one if she is looking for a big group hug and for someone to tell her it is all ok. I do realize with time I might be able to forgive her, but right now, I’m still so mad about it that I could easily tell her to get out and never think twice about it.”

  “And that’s why you are not the one to talk to her about this,” said Don softly, “Everyone can just feel the heat coming off you since that happened yesterday, and you have the kids scared to death of you.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Talon, not understanding what Don was getting at.

  “OK, bear with me on this, and I’ll attempt to explain it the way they see it. You have to understand that those boys out there are in complete awe of you. Beth, on the other hand, is just scared to death of you. Think about it, you have gotten us this far by refusing to allow anyone or anything to stop you. Then yesterday, you almost single-handedly took out how many terrorists, 15, 20. Sure we helped, but we only did exactly what you told us. It was you that walked out there in the open yesterday with knowing there was a sniper in the building and that those guys were going to try something, and they did. But did you run, no you just calmly stood there and gunned them all down. Then last night, you went back down there and took out another complete team by yourself and came back like you had been out on the town for a drink.”

  “Well, the first thing you have wrong,” stated Talon, “I was scared to death yesterday, and I got lucky as hell last night, oh and, one of them did get away last night.”

  “Moot points to these kids,” said Don, “Right now, Mat or Ben would jump off a tall building if you told them to. Also, right now, if you tried to pull Beth off to the side and talk to her alone, everyone would think that you were going to take her off and shoot her for what she did yesterday, including, and most importantly, Beth would think that.”

  “Wait a minute,” Talon injected, “I have been on my best behavior with these kids trying to set the example, and ordinarily, I would not be this nice if these were all grown men. You are making me out to be some kind of monster scaring little kids.”

  “No,” said Don as he was shaking his head, “Not a monster, at least not to Mat and Ben, maybe to Beth, but to the boys, there is a whole lot of hero worship going on. Now Beth is a whole other story. Here is what I would suggest, take it for what it is. Let me take Beth off to the side this morning, I will suggest she and I go see if we can get a deer with that bow of hers. That will give me a chance to talk to her one on one and give you a chance to talk to those boys. And you need to. I’m worried they are going to do something brave stupid to try and impress you and get themselves killed doing it. Not blaming you, you just see what has to be done and do it without thinking, and you have the skills to pull it off. They do not. Please talk to them and get them to understand.”

  Thinking about everything Don had said, Talon nodded his head and said, “OK, let’s give it a try, and I will impress on Ben and Mat that I’m not some super-soldier. I really appreciate you coming over and talking to me about this. I would have screwed up big time, charging in like a bull in a china shop. Thanks.”

  Don stood up and offered a hand. Talon grabbed it, and Don pulled him to his feet. “That’s what friends are for, let’s get back to camp and get breakfast going, I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”

  Chapter Ten

  Arriving back in camp, Don and Talon were impressed that everyone was already up and busy. Mat was over by Talon’s bike trailer, Ben was attempting to build a fire and Beth was busy gathering up limbs for the fire. Talon headed over towards his hammock to drop off his M-4 and chest rig. As he walked up, Mat began stammering some excuse for being in Talon’s trailer. Talon could barely make out it had to do something about the fish.

  Talon smiled at Mat, “Slow down, its ok. Now, what exactly are you looking for?”

  Mat took a deep breath, “I’m trying to find the spices and one of those foil bags you used to cook the fish in last time. We have two good-sized cats that Ben and I already cleaned, and they need to be cooked this morning before they go bad.”

  “All of the cooking supplies are in the bag marked food. Go easy on the olive oil as we don’t know when we will find any to resupply with. There, grab that blue bag, the foil, and all the spices will be in that one. Make sure you but the spices back in that bag and the bag back into the trailer after you use them. Try and not get fish slime on anything. A damn bear can smell fish for about five miles, not much danger of that now, but where we are going, it will be,” Talon replied.

  Stepping over to his hammock, Talon glanced up to the sky and reminded himself that he should put up his tarp before dark tonight. The sky was clear other than back towards the east, where the smoke from the fires still darkened the horizon. Stripping off his M-4 and chest rig, he unzipped the netting on his hammock and dropped the equipment into the hammock. Turning to his trailer, he dug around and found the waterproof bag containing all of his cleaning equipment.

  Getting himself settled in his hammock, Talon unzipped his cleaning kit and began field stripping his M-4. His mind drifted to thinking about his family while he watched the bustle of the camp and cleaned all of his weapons. That reminded him that he should set up the shortwave receiver after he finished up cleaning up his gear. Taking his time, he field stripped the M-4, then both of his Glocks, leaving a heavier than normal coat of oil on each of them. He end
ed up almost having to soak his chest rig with water to get all the mud off of it. Last but not least, he carefully wiped down all of his knives and edged tools with an oily rag.

  Putting away his cleaning gear, Talon dug around in his pack and found the black Silent Pocket pouch. Laying that to the side, he also pulled out the Goal Zero and his personal Anker 21 watt solar panels. He continued to dig and finally found the charger for the AA batteries. Turning to the group, Talon spoke so everyone could hear him, “I know everyone is busy with breakfast, but when you finish with that, please get out all of the used AA batteries and drop them off over here. If later you walk by and see a set of batteries that are fully charged, please change them out. Dead batteries go in the red box, charged batteries go in the clear box.”

  Carrying the solar panel over to the west side of the small clearing, Talon unfolded the panels and propped them up against a small log. Opening the Silent Pocket pouch, he pulled the battery chargers out and hooked one of them up to the Anker and one up to the Goal Zero solar panel. Walking back over to the supply trailer, he pulled out the two plastic boxes containing the AA batteries. Opening the red box, he began loading each of the chargers with the AA batteries the team had used over the last two days. Each of the chargers held four of the depleted AA’s. Hopefully, the sun would stay out, and they would be able to get most of the depleted batteries charged today.

  Walking back to his hammock, Talon’s excitement rose several degrees as he picked up the Silent Pocket pouch that contained his shortwave radio receiver. Opening the pouch, he laid the radio in his hammock and pulled out his fishing reel antenna. Pulling on the long wire antenna until he had a quarter wavelength pulled out, he stopped and attached the wire antenna to the plastic spoon handle that he had made for this. After securing the antenna, he pulled a large fishing sinker out of the bag and secured it to the other end of the spoon handle. Standing up, he eyed the trees around the clearing. Putting the antenna wire down, he reached into his hammock for his chest rig. From the chest rig, he pulled out his compass. Turning in a half-circle, he stopped when his compass pointed towards the northeast. Picking up the weighted end of the antenna, he hefted the weight and again looked at the tree he had just picked. Briefly swinging the weight, he attempted to toss the weighted end up and over the limb in the tree he had picked. Cursing under his breath, he turned when he heard a brief spurt of laughter behind him. Turning, he saw he had gathered a small crowd of observers. In fact, the whole team had stopped what they were doing and were gathered to watch him.

  Turning to the group, Talon asked, “OK, what is going on?”

  Don stepped forward, “We were just curious to see what you were doing. It was pretty obvious whatever it is, it is important, and no one wanted to interrupt you, so we were just watching.”

  “You’re right; this is important and really is the main reason we are stopping for today and tomorrow. I apologize I should have gathered everyone together and explained what I’m doing. Mat, did you get that fish prepared?”

  Mat stepped forward, “Yes, we were just waiting for the fire to burn down to coals before we put it on.”

  “OK, just put some more wood on the fire and then come back over here, and I’ll explain what I’m doing,” directed Talon. Everyone watched as Mat and Ben quickly ran over and added several pieces of dry wood to the fire and then turned and rushed back over to the little group. Talon continued, “What I’m doing is setting up the shortwave receiver antenna. I know the frequency that several of the HAM operators from my area operate on. So I’m attempting to set up a long-wave antenna. Actually, a quarter wavelength antenna, to pull that band wave in. I have two fish reel antennas, one is 50 meters long, and the other is about 100 meters long. I plan to begin with a quarter wavelength set for that frequency range. By the way, I know this sounds a little crazy but bear with me, and I will attempt to explain it all. So the megahertz for….,” Talon explanations trailed off as he observed the confused looks on everyone.

  As Talon stopped talking, everyone just stood and watched him until Don started laughing, then everyone burst out laughing. Talon just stood there with a confused look on his face. Don stepped forward and raised his hand, “OK, Professor, I am so sorry, but that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen since all of this shit started. The look on these kids' faces as you got to explaining wave propagation and oscillation rate was priceless. It was as if you had horns spring from your forehead and began speaking in tongues.”

  Ben stepped forward, still holding his side from laughing so hard, “So as Don said, Professor, you are going to have to dumb this whole radio thing down, please remember, lacrosse at Maryland, not nuclear physics at MIT.”

  Beth chimed in, “I agree, and I do know it is important, but as Ben said, try and bring it down a little, please, Professor.”

  “OK, settle down, and stop calling me Professor, I’m sorry I dropped into lecture mode, I will attempt to slow down and ‘dumb’ it down as much as I can. So everyone knows the ionosphere is made up of five layers, right? These layers are effected all of the time by heat, radiation, X-rays, geomagnetic storms, lightning, the season of the year, cattle farts, hell just about by everything. So most HAM operators transmit on the 10 meter to the 75/80 meter bands. Your antenna needs to match these bands to more effectively pick them up. The wavelength of the signal means how many times the signal basically bounces between the ground and the ionosphere over a given distance. This is call propagation. The simplest way is to string up a long wire external antenna about 50 to 70 feet long, pointing more or less in the direction the radio signal is coming from, making sure it is well away from any metal. You also need to insulate the far end of the antenna. I made one from a plastic spoon from an MRE’s. I just drilled a hole in the spoon part and another in the handle, and you are good to go. As you can see here on my long wire, I have a length of 5/50 tied to the spoon handle and with the fishing weight tied to the 5/50. That way, I can get this weight over a limb, and the antenna will not be grounded. So the formulas for the length of the wire go something like this. If you want a 5.90 MHz frequency signal picked up, you divide 468 by the 5.90 that equals something around 79 feet and three inches. That is for calculating a half-wave antenna, but we are going to half that to a quarter wavelength, to begin with. You can, most of the time, get away with using a half-wave or quarter-wave antenna. Today as I said, we are going to use a quarter wavelength because one we don’t have that much space and two I wanted to attempt to pick up transmissions from Texas. We will set the antenna on a Northeast by Southwest heading,” Talon paused and studied the group, “Is this making any sense?” he asked “After we get it set up we will need to keep someone on the headphones any time we can to catch any news. The operators are not on all the time as a real radio station. Most of the time, they will broadcast at the top of the hour, on even number hours. When you hear something, write down what you hear. A lot of the time, they will be using shorthand code, and it will sound like Smokey and the Bandit.”

  Don was the only one out of the group that got the reference. He laughed, and the others just stood there, thinking he had gone crazy. Don stepped forward, “Let’s get that antenna up, I’m ready to find out just what in the hell is going on in this world right now.”

  As the group moved to get out of Talon’s way, Ben asked Don, “What the hell is Smokey and the Bandit?”

  Talon nodded after checking that everyone was out of the way, he turned back to the tree he was attempting to get the antenna up in. Twirling the weighted end of the antenna, he launched it with as much force as he could up into the oak tree. This time he was on the mark, and the fishing weight snaked up and over a large limb about 30 feet off the ground. After making sure the actual antenna wire was not touching the limb of the tree, he pulled out his compass again and checked the bearing again. Satisfied with the bearing, he loosely stretched out the antenna until it was off the ground and secured that end to a tree.

  Returning to his hammock, he
pulled his Sangean shortwave receiver out of the faraday pouch and then removed it from its leather case. Carrying the radio over to where he had tied off the antenna, Talon sat down on the ground and plugged in the antenna on the side of the radio, followed by the small headphone jack. Slipping on the headphones, he turned on the radio, he double-checked it was set to shortwave and began to tune the rough tuning knob. Once he got into the general range of the channel he wanted, he switched to the fine-tuning knob. Checking his watch, he saw it was 7:20 AM and reached over and turned off the radio. Taking the headphones, he sat them on top of the radio and stood up.

  As he stood, he again saw everyone was looking at him. “I will get back on it as it gets closer to the top of the hour. The receiver recharges itself via solar power but there is not much of a chance anyone is transmitting right now. Plus, I need another cup of coffee and some food.” Seeing the disappointment on everyone’s faces, he added, “I just want to remind everyone that the radio is a sensitive piece of equipment, please be careful with it. Please, it is our only link to what is going on around the country, and it will be hard to replace if it gets broken. Also, I know everyone is excited to hear any news at all, but please remember that most of what we will hear is rumor, and there is no way we can tell if it is true or not. Last I just want to caution every one of you, I doubt that any news we do hear will be good news, so be prepared for the bad news.”

  Moving over to the water bags, Talon filled his Pathfinder canteen with fresh water before heading over to the cooking pit. Talon was pleasantly surprised to see someone had already prepared everyone a bag of Mountain House eggs. Squatting down, he snagged the hot water pot and filled his coffee cup, refilling the hot water pot with the freshwater from his canteen. With his breakfast secured, Talon found what looked like a comfortable spot on the ground and joined the rest of the group that was sitting in a circle around the cooking pit.