by DL Barbur
The house smelled old. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, exactly. It reminded me of some of the ancient homes up the hollers in Appalachia where I’d grown up, places that had been in the same family for generations. They were houses where babies had been born, old people had died, and lifetimes of family dramas had played out. The floors were wood, with paths worn in the finish, and plenty of uneven boards. Most of the furniture would qualify as antique, but the living room was lit by the glow of a very modern looking big screen television. The John Wayne classic Sands of Iwo Jima, was playing with the sound turned off. An old man was sitting in a recliner snoozing.
“Hey, Rudder!” Dale all but yelled.
Rudder’s eyes popped open and he slowly got up from his chair. I couldn’t tell how old he was. I would have believed anywhere from sixty to ninety. He was short, probably not even 5’6”, and had glasses so thick they made his eyes look unnaturally large. He wore an old patched workshirt that had probably been new when I was in elementary school, jeans and suspenders.
“I’m Rudder. Pleased to meet you,” he said sticking out a hand. It felt like a piece of leather, and I got the idea he probably could have broken my hand if he’d wanted.
“Dent Miller,” I said.
He then introduced himself to Alex, who he seemed much more interested in. While he was trying to make small talk with her, my eye was drawn to the far wall. There were four pictures and a rifle. Two of the pictures I recognized. One was Franklin Deleano Roosevelt. One was John Wayne, a promotional photo from Rio Bravo I wasn’t mistaken. The third picture was of a guy holding a guitar. It wasn’t Bob Dylan, but I still felt like I should know him. The fourth picture was a faded, sepia-toned snapshot of a young guy holding a rifle in a US Army uniform.
The rifle mounted on the wall was the same kind as the one in the picture. It was an old M1 Garand, the US service weapon from World War 2 and Korea. It was in decent shape, but judging from the scuffs in the wood and the wear on the Parkerized finish, it had seen some use. Someone had engraved the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” on the barrel.
That spurred my memory. The dude with the guitar was Woody Guthrie, the folk singer from the 1930’s. He’d had a sticker on his guitar that read “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
“That’s my old rifle,” Rudder said from behind me.
“It’s a beaut,” I said and meant it. I’d served in an era when rifles were made out of plastic and weighed less than seven pounds.
He pulled it off the wall and handed it to me. Out of habit I pulled back a little on the charging handle and saw the shine of a brass cartridge case in the chamber.
“It’s loaded,” I said.
“Of course it is,” Rudder said. “The damn thing is no more than a club if it isn’t loaded. Although it’s pretty good at that. If you look down there by the toe of the stock, you’ll see teeth marks from some poor German bastard I had to take care of after I ran out of ammo.”
I flipped the rifle over in my hands and saw what looked very much like the marks of a pair of front teeth. I’d once carried a shotgun with marks on the stock very much like them.
“You carried this in the war?” Suddenly I realized the photo of the young man with the rifle was Rudder. I was trying to do the math on how old he had to be.
“You betcha. We were separated for damn near twenty years. I had to hand her over at the end of the war. I always remembered the serial number, so when the government started selling them off as surplus, I wrote the Director of the Civillian Marksmanship Program and asked for her by name.”
“Wow,” I said. The rifle seemed even heavier in my hands now. “What unit were you with?”
“Dog Company, 2nd Ranger Battalion.”
“Wow,” I said again.
In June of 1944, D company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion had landed at Pointe Du Hoc on the Normandy coast. There they had scaled cliffs under heavy fire, so they could blow up German artillery. They started with just over 250 men, and two days later, only 90 of them could still walk and fight.
Dale ambled over.
“Old Dent here spent some time in 3rd Battalion over there in Somalia.”
Rudder’s face lit up at that. “I’ll be damned,” he said and shuffled over to a bookcase on the wall. He didn’t have to look for what he wanted. He pulled a DVD off the shelf.
I recognized the movie right away as Blackhawk Down.
“This one is a cracker jack,” he said. “Did they get it right?”
“Mostly,” I said. “Not all the details are perfect, but they nailed how the guys acted.”
He slapped me on the back. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s nice to have all of you here. We’ll have to swap war stories when we get a chance.”
Rudder and Dale showed us around the rest of the property. The bunkhouses were clean, but a bit dusty, and we could stash the helicopter in the barn. Casey scampered up an old rusty windmill like a squirrel, trailing a rope behind her, and pulled up some antennas and cables. Within a couple of hours, we had a radio link established to the surveillance cameras on the ridge outside Webb’s ranch and a working cell phone repeater.
A couple hours before dawn, we went out in a pasture and dodged cow pies as we put infrared strobes on the ground to mark a landing zone. I stood there shivering in the darkness, wishing I’d brought a heavier coat for about fifteen minutes before I heard the helicopter.
It was on us before I knew it. It was a small helicopter, an MD-500, nicknamed the Little Bird, and our pilot Jack had been flying a computer-generated route that kept the noise signature as low as possible. He brought the little egg-shaped aircraft to a hover. In the greenish tinged display on my night vision goggles, it looked like it was surrounded by a green halo due to the static discharge from the blades, but otherwise it was completely blacked out.
Jack let the Little Bird settle on its skids and shut the engine down. I waited until the rotor blades drooped and stopped before walking under them. When I saw Jack switch on his headlamp, I took off my goggles and turned on my own headlamp and walked up.
Bolle climbed out of the co-pilot’s seat, looking more than a little green. I’d taken a quick look at the route they’d flown on a map and gotten nauseous just thinking about all the jinking, turning and nap of earth flying through various valleys to get here unobserved. Dalton was in the backseat, his cane beside him. He looked pale, but that was probably more because of the excruciating pain of sitting on the thinly padded seat for a couple of hours with his busted leg than the in-flight shenanigans.
Dalton handed me the ground wheels that attached to the helicopter’s skids and I passed them out to the others. We’d practiced this more than a few times and within a half hour we had the Little Bird’s blades folded and rolled it into the barn.
“Eddie and Henry will be here in a couple more hours with the rest of our gear,” Bolle said as we walked in the trailer. We’d decided to make it our command center. For one thing, Rudder wouldn’t have any reason to go inside, and we could keep our conversations secure. For another, we could pack it up and move it at a moment’s notice.
While Casey briefed Dalton on the equipment, I gave Bolle more details about the guys who had tried to kill me at the motel.
“And you’re sure you’re fine now?” He asked. He sounded genuinely concerned.
Instead of answering, I looked at Alex. I’d been trying to put it behind me all night long, but I was hypersensitive to the slightest hint of trouble with my body. I’d been going non-stop all day long, so it made sense that I felt exhausted, but I kept waiting for my heart to skip a beat, or to get dizzy or something.
“I’ve been monitoring his vitals ever since,” Alex said. “Whatever it was, it was fast acting and his system seems to have flushed it out.”
Bolle nodded and looked back and forth between us.
“Good,” he said. “We can’t afford to lose you.”
He pulled a tablet out of his briefcase.
“We’ve
managed to pull a list of employees at Freedom Ranch, using IRS and Social Security records. We’re hoping to find someone who we can use as a confidential informant.”
I scrolled down the list.
“There are twenty-five people on here. Do ranches normally have this many employees?”
Dale looked over my shoulder.
“Not by a long shot. I run almost twice as many cattle as this Webb fellow, and it’s just me, the boys, and Mandy. I hire out work from time to time, but I’d be broke in no time if I kept that many hands on salary.”
“Huh,” I said. “I wonder if one of them is CRYPTER.”
“We had the same question,” Bolle said. “We’re running checks on all the names right now. It’s also possible that CRYPTER is one of Marshall’s people, and not on the list.”
I heard a buzz from the desk beside Casey.
“Speaking of CRYPTER,” she said and handed me the phone in its plastic baggie.
I made sure everyone knew to be quiet and pulled it out of the bag. I showed the latest message to Bolle.
“Not exactly news,” I said.
“Tell him we need something actionable,” Bolle said.
Before I could type that out, another message came in.
Delivery to ranch scheduled tomorrow via UHL commercial courier. Tracking number attached. Suggest you intercept it. Nothing more tonight. CRYPTER out.
Next came a sixteen-digit string of letters and numbers. Casey typed them in to the UHL website.
“It’s a shipment from an outfit in Arizona called AeroCrafters. They sell aircraft parts salvaged from wrecked and crashed aircraft.”
Up until now, Jack had been standing silently in a corner, bobbing a tea bag up and down in a cup of hot water.
“I wonder if they bent their plane landing it on that short runway. There sure are some hellacious skid marks in those pictures you showed me.”
“I thought they couldn’t even take off again from that runway, assuming the plane is there in the first place,” I said.
Jack sipped his tea.
“Well, technically, that runway isn’t long enough to get that Gulfstream airborne, but that assumes two things. One, that you aren’t afraid to over speed the engines on takeoff, and two that the plane is at its normal weight. If you go inside a business jet like that and start stripping stuff out like the wet bar, upholstered seats all that business, you could make that plane much lighter. It might be enough to get her airborne.”
“What if it isn’t?” Casey asked.
“Then you turn a really expensive airplane into a big pile of smoking parts,” he said, sipping his tea.
“You think we can get a warrant in time to intercept that shipment?” I asked Bolle.
“I don’t care,” Bolle said. “Warrant or no warrant, I want what’s in that box.”
Chapter 14
In the end, we didn’t get the warrant. Bolle was too paranoid about giving up CRYPTER as a source to even apply for one. We were also afraid that a search warrant based on texts sent from an anonymous source would be too much even for the friendliest of Federal judges. So we winged it.
The next morning, even with the air conditioner running, it was hot sitting in the sun along the highway. Fortunately, we didn’t have long to wait before the UHL truck came trundling down the road.
Bolle had surprised me on this one. Since we were breaking all sorts of laws, he took the lead. I sat beside him in the passenger seat of the Charger as he pulled out onto the road, flipped on the red and blue flashing lights, and pulled in behind the delivery truck as it stopped on the side of the road. I covered him as he approached the truck.
“Special Agent Lubbock, FBI,” he said, flipping his badge wallet open and shut so fast I was surprised he didn’t sprain his wrist. “We have a warrant to search the truck and remove a package.”
I stifled a grin. Lubbock was my old boss at the Portland Police Bureau. I wasn’t sure where he was these days, but he wasn’t a cop anymore, and certainly not an FBI agent.
“Uh… I have to call my boss?” The driver looked at him like we were aliens from another planet.
“Remain in the vehicle with your hands in plain sight,” Bolle said.
Dale and Jack pulled in behind us in Dale’s pickup as I rolled up the back door of the delivery truck. The package we needed was easy to find. It was a six-foot-long wooden crate in the center of the cargo compartment. I grabbed it and grunted, barely managing to move it a couple of inches. It took all four of us to haul it back to the pickup.
As we pried the lid off with a crowbar, Bolle walked back and handed the driver some paperwork that contained a bunch of legal looking nonsense.
“Don’t go to the ranch. Give this paperwork to your boss. If you talk about this to anyone else, I’ll put you in federal prison. Now leave.”
The delivery truck fishtailed and sprayed gravel.
Dale popped the last nail out of the crate with a grunt. I was no aviation expert, but I was pretty sure what we were looking at was a front landing gear for a medium-sized airplane.
Jack practically crawled into the crate with a penlight, muttering and reading off numbers that Dale jotted down on a pad. Our cell phones didn’t work out here, but we could reach the radio repeater Casey set up just fine. Jack read the numbers to her over the encrypted link so she could research them and we high tailed it back to Rudder’s ranch. No one had driven down the highway since we stopped the delivery truck and we wanted to make our selves scarce. We particularly wanted to avoid being seen by the sheriff or his deputies.
While we were gone, Eddie and Henry had arrived with the rest of our equipment. Eddie was standing outside the trailer with his hands in his pockets and blinking in the bright sunlight.
“I thought places like this only existed in movies,” he said as a cow mooed off in the distance.
“Welcome to the country, city boy,” I said and chucked him on the shoulder. He gave me a smile that suggested he was getting over the funk he’d been in since the shooting at the zoo. He’d come very close to dying that day, and sometimes people needed a while to bounce back from that.
Casey was grinning when we walked into the trailer.
“It’s from a Gulfstream G100,” she said. “The part numbers match.”
Bolle nodded his head.
“Now we just need some parallel construction.”
The landing gear in the back of Dale’s truck was pretty damning evidence that there was a Gulfstream G100 parked in the hangar at Webb’s ranch. The problem was, it was illegally obtained evidence. Now we’d have to find some legal means of proving what we already knew: that Marshall, the airplane, and the money were at Webb’s ranch.
“Try CRYPTER,” Bolle said.
Need to talk, I typed.
He surprised me by answering almost right away.
I have five minutes. Be quick.
Need a picture of Marshall at the ranch, I typed. Might as well go for broke.
Trying to get me killed? No way. They are pissed about the airplane part. Trying to come up with a way to move the money.
Bolle frowned. “Tell him to give us a name.”
Over twenty people work at the ranch. Give me a name. Somebody I can use.
The phone was silent for minutes, and we all stared at it as if willing another message to come through.
Most of them are security. Don’t even try. The ranch hands go into town to party on Friday night. Try one of them. No more time. CRYPTER out.
“That’s tonight,” Casey said. “I ran the backgrounds of the people on that list. I think I’ve sorted out which ones are the ranch hands. They are all local. The rest are all from out of town and have military backgrounds, so they must be the security people he was talking about.”
“That’s helpful,” Bolle said. “But how do we get to them?”
“I have an idea,” Casey said. “But I’m going to need some fashion magazines and some new clothes.”
She looked
at me.
“I’m also going to need to borrow your girlfriend,” she said.
Chapter 15
“I don’t think I can do this,” Alex said.
“Why not?” Casey asked. “Your ass looks great in those jeans.”
I had to admit Casey had a point. The floor of one of the bunkhouses was littered with tags and wrappers from a western wear store in Ontario, Oregon, a town about an hour and a half away. Casey and Alex had taken a quick field trip with a government credit card and returned with a trunk full of Cruel Girl and Ariat clothes, some cowboy boots, and in Casey’s case, hair dye. Her hair was now chin-length and platinum blond.
“I just don’t think I can pass as a local,” Alex said. She looked down at the checked shirt with pearl snap buttons, sequined jeans, and Tony Llama boots she was wearing. “I feel ridiculous.”
“We don’t have to pass as locals,” Casey said as she walked over and put a straw cowboy hat on Alex’s head. “We have to pass as girls from the city who are TRYING to pass as locals. Am I right, Robert?”
After she and Alex had changed clothes, Casey had our resident cowboy culture experts, Dale and Robert, come in the bunkhouse. Robert had been sitting quietly on a threadbare couch, surrounded by copies of Cowgirl Fashion magazine, and valiantly trying not to stare at Alex’s ass, at least not while I was looking.
Robert stared at the floor as he talked. He’d done two tours in Afghanistan and probably had killed more people than the plague, but something about Casey made him get all fumble mouth and embarrassed.
“Well, back home, we often get gals from Portland, and even Seattle that come on vacation and, you know… Dress the part and hit the local bars. I imagine that happens down here too.”
“Exactly!” Casey said. “What happens in cowboy country stays in cowboy country. They’re all looking to save a horse and ride a cowboy.”