The laws against prank calls are very lax in Illinois, and so I merely replaced the phone on the hook, hanging up on Tell-Me-Dick and grabbing a few more winks of sleep before starting the day. I was sweating a few piles in the motel room gym an hour or so later when the cell phone rang. It was Karen. Tell-Me-Dick had ruined her sleep, too, and was taking a fair stab at ruining her day as well.
“You’re not going to like this,” she said, starting off the business end of the conversation.
“Then don’t tell me. You’re the cutout for a reason.”
“Dick.”
I knew what was coming. The truth is, this exercise bullshit had already worn a little thin. We’d been doing it for a few weeks now, and—while most of the locals reacted more like Cordella than Tell-Me-Dick—we were still about as welcome as skunks in church. I didn’t mind their reactions so much as the fact that what we were doing was so damn easy. If you’re going to have a war on terror—HAVE A FUCKING WAR ON TERROR! I prefer the offensive to the defensive—that’s what SpecWar is all about—but geez, Louise, get serious. High school kids could have taken over that hospital as easily as we had.
But I’ll get off my soapbox. The short and long of Karen’s phone call was that henceforth and from now on, Red Cell II would have to submit our plan of attack in advance like any self-respecting group of fucking maniacal madmen bent on destroying the world’s greatest country would do.
“I’ll be back in D.C. tomorrow,” I told her.
Karen urged me not to pull the lever on the flush toilet.
“Far as I can see, it’s already been flushed,” I told her. “Come on, Karen, I’m not going to waste my time and the government’s money out here. Get somebody else to pull their pud in the Midwest.”
Karen started lecturing me on how I wasn’t going to get any sympathy. I told her I wasn’t looking for any. As my ol’ friend and fellow SEAL Boomerang used to be so fond of saying: “Sympathy is between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
There were, however, other things I was looking for.
“Meet me at the airport and we can have a nice little dinner,” I suggested. Cooking is one of my unadvertised secrets. “Shrimp scampi, a little wine.”
“You can’t pull the plug on the operation. These exercises are important. The people in Iowa are very appreciative,” said Karen. “Just cool it with Telly, and we’ll work out the rest of this with Rich when I get a chance to talk to him.”
“There’s no way to cool it with Telly. He wants something that will make him look good,” I told her. “Karen, between you and me, the whole country is a disaster waiting to happen. It’s as if no one’s learned anything since 9/11. Nothing.”
“That’s why we need you.”
“Then we do it my way. I’m not sticking with this if the local bozos are calling the shots,” I told her. “I went easy on the people in Iowa. I went easy on Telly the other day. But if you want me to bend over for him, you’re soaping up the wrong asshole.”
“Now, there’s an image.”
We threw a few more words back and forth, basically because we both wanted to put our lips to much better use. Happiness for the Rogue Warrior that morning came in the form of a very cold shower.
The team reacted with the predictable four-letter words when I related the morning conversations.
All except for Trace. Her Apache eyes twinkled and she broke into a grin.
“So when do we put it in his face?” she said.
“How so?” asked Danny.
“We tell him what we’re going to do, and then we go and do it, anyway.”
Straight from the Rogue Warrior playbook. That’s why I like her.
“Is that what you’re thinking, Dick?” asked Doc.
I hadn’t been, but it did make a lot of sense. Fitting, too—shit one last time on the asshole’s parade before packing it in.
“I don’t see why not,” I told them. “Red Cell I played by the rules every so often. Here we’ll just tell them the time and the place and see what happens. That’s what he wants.”
“How much of an advantage can we give them?” asked Sean.
A lot, as it turned out.
Since the in-your-face bit had been Trace’s idea, I tapped her to go and talk to Tell-Me-Dick. I figured it this way: he wasn’t going to buy me presenting him with an olive branch. And as disciplined as I can be, I’m a crappy liar, especially when it comes to sucking up to assholes. Call it a pucker problem: my lips refuse to assume the anal position.
Trace donned her Class A uniform—tight sweater, short skirt, heels like knives—and went to meet Tell-Me-Dick at his headquarters. She returned with our assignment: strike a truck depot in nearby Mudville the following morning at nine A.M. sharp. Tell-Me-Dick even gave her a map of the area. It showed that the only access into the truck depot—which covered roughly twenty acres—was down Water Avenue, one of the two streets in town with a stop sign.
Mudville—the police chief’s a pretty good guy, so we’ll use only a nom de guerre—is a middle-class town about ten minutes outside of Springfield, assuming you hit traffic on the highway. It’s filled with solid middle-class houses, the ones you used to be able to afford when the words “Made in America” were found on something other than antiques. Back then, the center of town was dominated by a large cutlery factory—knives, forks, that sort of thing—and most people around either worked there or at the brick factory near the town line. Between those two places were machine shops, a couple of hardware stores, a guy who fixed radios, and a bank where the teller not only knew your name but would give you a call on the phone before letting your account get overdrawn. They’re all long gone now, except for the bank, which is owned by some outfit in Singapore making a fortune investing the local late fees in chintzy toy factories in Red China. Things are so slow in Mudville that they only open the office Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are three ATMs, which charge two dollars and fifty cents a transaction, unless you’re a bank customer, in which case your account gets you a twenty-five-cent discount.
The fork business went out twenty years ago. Part of it was torn down and another part turned into storefronts. Every fourteen or fifteen months, somebody new comes in fired up about selling candles or cookies or ladies’ underwear, but the only business that’s ever stuck is the used bookstore in the corner unit. If you ever get to Mudville, go in and check the bookcase all the way on the right. That is the Rogue Warrior’s real John Hancock on the title page—just so you know.
I know about the bookstore because it’s right across the street from the entrance to the truck depot, which Tell-Me-Dick assigned us to test. Which meant that it was a good spot to observe the security officer who was observing Danny as he pretended to scope the place out.
The security officer had been alerted by a pair of small video cameras arranged on telephone poles out front. These cameras fed into a security station via a cable back into the complex. The person monitoring the system was reasonably awake. Danny managed to saunter up and down across the street only twice before they sent someone to check. Two minutes after the man on foot came out, a second guard came around in an unmarked car. I say unmarked, but it was a dark blue Chevy Caprice with a pair of whip antennas on the back and a spotlight to boot, so I can’t imagine anyone but Tell-Me-Dick not realizing it was some manner of official vehicle.
In the meantime, my pocket scanner picked up the communications signal. It was scrambled, but my goal at the moment wasn’t to listen in. I hit one of the presets and recorded the dedicated frequency. The geek gear from my buds at Law Enforcement Technologies would help us figure out the encryption and break it later on.
Assuming that much work was necessary.
TV cameras covered the entire perimeter of the depot, with the poles set back from a razor wire-topped fence. A pair of guards were posted at the front gate to inspect incoming trucks. While they were doing a so-so job of it that afternoon, I figured that by tomorrow at nine A.M.—our designated
“event” time—they would have set up the portable X-ray machines they’d brought in on pallets earlier in the day. Two companies of National Guardsmen had been trucked in for the exercise and were augmenting the local police and security teams. I watched them arrive and get waved right through without so much as a glance at the driver’s dog tags.
Danny, Sean, and Hulk continued to test the defenses over the course of the next few hours. We have a few tricks to set off sensors and watch how the security people respond, but most of the work really comes down to observing and interpreting. How many men to a sentry position? What happens if two trucks come up? How many holes are there in the fence? (You’d be surprised!) Are bicycle riders treated the same as trucks? Are women searched? Kids? And on and on. Watching and thinking, thinking and watching. Success in SpecWar requires the ability to use the most powerful weapon in the human body—the gray one atop your neck.
“We can go in as Guardsmen,” suggested Doc at the afternoon planning and pizza session around three. “We can walk in the front gate, right?”
“No, we save the uniforms to walk out,” I told him. “I have something fancier for getting in. Besides, they may actually check IDs tomorrow—on the way in, since they know we’re coming. What they won’t do is check them on the way out.” I turned to Danny. “They’re putting the Guard up at the Holiday Inn on the highway. Think you can charm a few out of their uniforms?”
“I can give it a shot,” said Danny. “We can wait until they go to dinner, then break into the rooms.”
“Sean and Hulk will back you up.” I turned to Trace. “When you presented Colonel Tell-Me-Dick with the plan, did you agree to go in through the front gate?”
“I didn’t say anything. He gave me a map and showed me where the gate was.”
“No agreement on our part to use the gate?”
“No.”
“I don’t see how we’re going to get into the place at nine A.M. if they’re expecting us,” said Sean.
“Who says we’re going in at nine? Trace, did you say anything about going in at nine?”
“Telly said he would expect us at nine.”
“Sure, expect us. We will be there. We will even go through the gate at nine. But we’ll be leaving, not entering. We’ll make a night jump into the depot, set up our charges, and leave via the front gate. All we need is an aircraft. Problem is, my C-130’s in the barn being painted,” I told them. “We may have to contract out.”
Actually, the closest C-130 belonged to the Air Farce’s Air Morbidity Command and was down in Texas. I’d toyed with the idea earlier of requesting a drop from a C-141B out of Scott Air Force Base (there just happened to be one there; I’d checked), but Tell-Me-Dick had gotten the word out banning any flights involving me and Red Cell II. I have enough friends and strings to pull that I could have arranged it, but the crews’ arses would have been exposed later on, and naked Air Farce butts are not a sight for sore eyes.
Besides, Trace had come back from her meet and greet with Tell-Me-Dick’s personal credit card. I thought it might be poetic justice to charge the plane ride to him.
How many people do you think you can cram into a Cessna StationAir?
Well, the specs say six, but six is an awful lot of people for any single-engine plane, especially when it’s taking off from a grass runway, which is what Sky Acres turned out to be. Even four was tight when you toted up the gear we were lugging, but the way I drew up the plan we needed three people inside: Sean, Trace, and myself. Doc put his piloting skills to good use and I would say we cleared the fence at the end of the runway by a good six inches, if not seven.
“Next time we opt for the Turbo,” muttered Doc, referring to the deluxe model. We hadn’t been able to get it in under Telly’s credit limit, unfortunately.
Jumps into an urban environment are not among the easiest ways to while away the nighttime hours, even going out of a C-141 or an MC-130 with high-tech locator gear and a hand-picked air crew. The fact that we were jumping on a moonless night meant it would be hard for the security people below to see us, but that amounted to our only real advantage. The service ceiling on the Cessna is listed as 15,700 feet. Doc pushed her all the way to 18,000 feet to make sure the plane could not be heard from the ground. That kind of altitude is tough on a little engine, but the Cessna was up to it, inspired no doubt by Doc’s mutterings and growls.
The airplane hadn’t been configured for jumping, which made it difficult for us to go out all together. Sean and Trace leaned forward in what you might call a winged-frog pose before disappearing out of the cabin. It wasn’t the prettiest jump ever, but it did accomplish its main purpose, which was getting the hell out of the aircraft. I followed about a half of a half tick behind, head down and arms back in a delta.
Sixteen thousand feet doesn’t qualify as a high altitude jump, but it does give you time to think about where you’re going. Depending on how fast your terminal velocity is, your free fall can last a minute and a half, which is a decent amount of time to kill. Some people have been known to roll over on their backs and count the stars on the way down. Gravity is an easy boss to work for; she doesn’t give a shit whether you’re facing ass upward or downward, just so long as you fall.
I spun back around and got myself oriented around five thousand feet. The truck lot was easy to see; it was the only thing in that part of the state ringed with floodlights. I was off course a bit, but with another delta and slight nudge of the shoulders, I had myself just about dead-on as I came through three thousand feet. I spotted a chute opening on the left about five hundred feet below me. I hunted to the right, watching for the second.
And watching. And watching.
It wasn’t below me, either. Or above anywhere that I could see.
Shit.
A wave of relief shot through me as I spotted a black shadow on my right a few dozen feet above me, which was surprising, though technically not impossible. By now, I was at two thousand feet and it was time to pop the handle on my own rig. I did and got a perfect inflation above. But as I scanned the cells with a small Maglite I realized that the shadow I’d just seen was moving very quickly to my right. It looked to me like the lines had either twisted or started to twist. The thing to do in that situation is to try to untangle until, say, 2,000 feet, then break away and pull your reserve.
That’s what you should do if you’re an experienced jumper and can see what you’re up to. Sean had neither advantage, and his maneuverings were increasing his speed downward as he plummeted toward the point where he couldn’t cut loose and deploy his reserve.
Without thinking about how low I was—shit, I didn’t think at all—I snapped free of my own main and tipped down into a delta. I intended on swooping down, grabbing Sean, deploying his reserve, and then jumping free and pulling mine.
That’s a mouthful, and, even so, it’s easier to say than do. By the time I got my body angled right, Sean had gained so much momentum I couldn’t even see him. When I finally did spot him, I didn’t think I could get him.
Then I knew I wasn’t going to get him.
Then his twisted chute smacked the side of my face.
I hooked my arm under his like a Marine on shore patrol picking up a drunken sailor. He grabbed at me. (He swore later he thought he was rescuing me.) It took forever to get his chute free, and I nearly lost him when it snapped clean. But somehow I got one arm tangled in the strap at his chest and helped him deploy his backup. All this in the space of maybe a thousand feet of semi-free fall. Which translates into less time than it takes to spit, if my math is right.
Two heads may be better than one, but two parachutes aren’t. I dropped free, tucked to the side, and deployed my reserve. I didn’t have a chance to look at the altimeter, but given the shock to my knees when I landed, I’d say I deployed my own chute no higher than five hundred feet, and more likely half that. Steering was more a matter of praying than tugging, but since I am a pious lad, I hit square in the center of the landing zone.
On top of a trailer.
The metal roof took some of my fall, and I rolled on my side as I came down, so all in all it wouldn’t have been bad if Sean hadn’t landed right on top of me. His boot landed in my ribs and he thumped into my head, about as close to a controlled landing as Britney Spears is to being a virgin. As a parting shot, he dug his elbow into my ribs as he rolled to his feet.
Two hundred and something pounds worth of elbow.
“What are you homos doing?” Trace asked from the ground.
“Dancing,” I told her. “So where are the guards?”
“Just the one back near the entrance. Looks like they’re saving their energy for tomorrow.”
“Dogs?”
“Already asleep,” said Trace. She pointed down the aisle of parked trailers toward one of the mutts, who lay on his belly. Dobermans are cute when they’re sleeping, especially if their nap has been induced by Demerol-laced hamburger.
The chutes we had cut away had sailed somewhere into the night, hopefully never to be seen again. We couldn’t worry about them now, so Sean and I climbed down and got to work, setting our tags inside the trailer and then slapping pyrotechnic bags at the top.
In case you’re wondering, the video cameras I’d spotted earlier were probably still working, and undoubtedly doing precisely what they were designed to do—keep an eye on the perimeter of the depot. There were none trained on the interior. Whoever had designed the security system didn’t think there’d be many people dropping in during the middle of the night, which also accounted for the poor lighting in the vast center of the facility where we were.
Scary? Nah. You want to be scared? Go down to your kitchen and open up the food cabinets or pantry or wherever it is that you keep your eats. Jack open the refrigerator. (Grab a beer on me while you’re at it.) How much of that stuff you figure travels in a tractor trailer at some point?
RW12 - Vengeance Page 5