Moreover, it is a fact that crazies tend to fixate on anniversaries. The Oklahoma City bombing, for example, took place on April 19, the anniversary date of the FBI’s Wackos-in-Waco fiasco. Now, we were rapidly approaching the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing (a double whammy, if you catch my drift and pardon my pun). And from the records on PP-22, a huge number of lethal supplies had been delivered—and disbursed—in the past ten weeks.
My instincts told me that one clock—or, more likely, a whole lot of time bombs—were ticking away.
I had Wonder fire up the computer. He brought up everything we had: the FBI’s shredded memos; the information the Priest had slipped to us. He added names, dates, places, and supplies from PP-22. Then he played “What if?” with his sophisticated spreadsheet program.
The answers he extrapolated were downright scary. And now, I had some precise locations. I got back on the phone to Mugs and read him the results.
His first response was, “Motherfucker.” Then he began thinking like a chief. In fifteen minutes of jawboning he’d come up with a plan. He’d already alerted his network. Now it would go on overtime. He even solved the security problem. He knew a couple of dozen old Frogs who had ties to local law enforcement agencies all over the country. It was them Mugs would put to work. We knew that LC had his hooks into Federal agencies and departments. So we’d stay away from them, rely on Mugs’s old-Frog contacts, and circumvent the system. I loved it—once more, I’d be going through the back door.
Mugs told me he’d need about two days to get things set up. The timing sounded about right to me—so I told him to get his ass in gear, and rang off.
Wonder and I played with the computer again, scrolling through hundreds of files and documents. Then we punched in the Trojan Horse program—the one that Wonder had written to capture passwords—and ran through it to see if anyone was playing the same game as I was.
Yeah—someone was. Wonder backtracked. The evidence was plain as my Slovak puss—someone was out there, tracking us. You could see it from the requests—requests that were duplicates of my own queries. A single password stuck out like the proverbial sore szeb. Oh, the password had been digitized, midgetized, and scrambled like an omelette. But Wonder’s good-as-gold program reduced it to the letters typed by the original user. Those letters were NDBBM. The same ones that sat outside the Priest’s office suite.
The s.o.b. was not only tracking me—he’d been able to get his hands on every piece of information I had. That meant the Priest already knew LC Strawhouse was every bit as dirty as I did. So why the fuck was he talking about hard evidence?
Let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt here, folks. Maybe he was waiting for me to solve the one mystery I still couldn’t figure out: the method LC would use to trigger everything—set his helter-skelter revolution in motion. LC couldn’t use a SATCOM—not enough of ’em out there in private hands to make it feasible. Fax network? Nah—there are too many ways to intercept and otherwise screw up faxes. We’d gone over the rig top to bottom. There were no code books, no schedules—in fact, very little paperwork at all. And certainly, there was nothing that could be used to send a coded message to a hundred—or a thousand—groups, all at once, without leaving some sort of easily discerned pecker tracks.
“Oh, yes there is,” Wonder said grimly, his hand fingering the telephone line plugged into the modem. “It’s staring us right in the face.”
I looked at him uncomprehendingly. “Internet,” he said. “LC could use Internet. There are hundreds of freaking bulletin boards out there—you saw a few of ’em. He could use any or all of them. All he has to do is transmit on the World Wide Web, or send a simple E-mail message to one of the freaking Usenet news groups. There’s no way to stop him, either.”
Never tell me there is no way to do something, because I will find a way to get the goddamn job done. The bottom line is that I will not fail.
“Fuck you,” I said. “There is no such word as impossible.” I scratched at my face. “Let’s think KISS.”
“Okay,” said Wonder. “What’s the simplest solution we can think of?”
“Dispose of the problem at the source. Kill LC.”
Wonder’s head rotated in his trademark left-right-left, right-left-right swivel. “Oh, that would solve the problem, all right,” he said, a malevolent grin on his lips.
It didn’t take much research to discover where he was. The son of a bitch was a fucking egomaniac, and a simple search of the Nexis database revealed that LC had told a political reporter from the Los Angeles Times only two days ago that he was planning a—and here let me quote it for you verbatim, friends—“a kinda strategic think-tank, policy-wonk thing at my place in the desert while I sort my options electionwise.” Translation: He was going to ground in Rancho Mirage in order to set his plot in motion and didn’t want to be bothered.
I put Grose in command of the rig. We repaired some of the platform’s communications gear, so that he and I could stay in touch. Over their vehement objections, I left Half Pint, Pick, Rodent, Gator, and Nasty with him to operate the rig. They wanted to go with me, but there was important work to be done here. They would act as PP-22’s crew—and they’d detain, secure, and interrogate anybody who showed up asking for supplies. They didn’t have to like it—they just had to do it.
I watched the old Frog as he took charge. From the determined look on his face, it was obvious that he was delighted to be back in real-world action.
Duck Foot, Wonder, Doc, and I spent about two hours packing gear and supplies. Then we lowered the thirty-foot, covered lifeboat from its davits just east of the chopper pad, cast off, and steered a course for the coast between Mobile and Gulfport. We had a vehicle to rent, a two-day drive ahead of us, and that goddamn second hand was tick-tick-ticking away ominously and incessantly in my brain, counting down the 264 hours until the double-whammy anniversary, second by second by second.
HOUR 249. DOC TREMBLAY USED THE LAST OF HIS FREDDIE THE Forger IDs and credit cards to rent an anonymous, tan, one-way step-van bound for Chicago at a Rent-A-Wreck depot. Then we drove due west. We stayed out of the big cities (as well as the small towns, and just about everything in between, too). We stopped only for self-service gasoline, paying cash from the cache of several thousand dollars Grose had handed us out of the safe he kept aboard the FYVM. We kept our ugly pusses out of sight, too. No 7-Eleven junk-food sprees. No beer stops. If we had to hit the head, we did it by pulling over on the road and finding a convenient thicket of bushes. No fucking gas station attendant was going to remember this nasty-looking quartet because one of us had to drain the old lizard and one of us resembled pictures he’d seen in the damn newspapers.
I see you out there. You’re dubious. Well, don’t be dubious. Remember the aftermath of Oklahoma City? Even with a nationwide manhunt on, John Doe Number Two proved almost impossible to find. And the man accused of being John Doe Number One was only captured because he was a stupid asshole who drove a vehicle sans legit license plates, carried a fucking pistol in an obvious shoulder holster, his cover story sucked, and he was stopped by one of the most effective anticrime instruments in existence: an alert state trooper. Knowing that, we drove a legitimately rented van, we cached our weapons out of sight, we proceeded at the speed limit, and we attracted absolutely no attention to ourselves whatsoever.
Which is why it took us a mere twenty-eight hours on I-10 (which traverses the southern route from Jacksonville, Florida, all the way to Los Angeles, California) to make the run from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Indio, two and a half hours west of LA. As we’d come across the southern part of Arizona I thought about stealing a C-130 from the old CIA air base at Marana, just northwest of Tucson. But we didn’t need an aircraft, we’d BTDT—Been There, Done That—in Red Cell, and we do hate to repeat ourselves in these books. So we gave a nostalgic, one-fingered salute to the place as we passed the two dozen aircraft that sat behind the still-unprotected (!) fence line, and kept moving westward,
ho, at a steady sixty-five legal miles per hour.
From Indio (which, incidentally, has a sign at the Indio Fashion Mall that says ELEVATION-ZERO), it was less than ten miles to Rancho Mirage. We found ourselves a motel about halfway between the two and slightly above sea level, checked in, then grabbed combat naps and showers. Let me be perfectly honest about the sequencing here and say that we grabbed showers first. We were pretty road ripe.
Hour 221. At dusk, Doc bought us the best map he could find, and we began our first recon of Rancho Mirage, and the well-heeled environs to the north of the city where LC Strawhouse had his hacienda and compound. I have played in the general region—the Marines have a huge air base at Twentynine Palms, north of the Coachella Valley, and I once took Red Cell there as part of an exercise. One hundred and fifty miles north and east is China Lake, home of the Naval Weapons Center, where we SEALs have developed some of the dirtiest, spookiest, nastiest explosive devices in the history of special warfare. I’ll tell you about them sometime.
South of Palm Springs by a hundred miles are the Chocolate Mountains, a high desert area where SEALs—mostly but not exclusively the surfers, football players, and health-food dweebs from the West Coast’s SEAL Teams—come to play and train with those wonderful Tinkertoy all-terrain vehicles that you saw during Operation Desert Storm. (Yes, I know they are modified Chenowths, and officially proclaimed DPVs, or Desert Patrol Vehicles. But they still look like they’re built out of fucking Tinkertoys.) The hot Chocolates are also where SEALs go to perfect their long-range (and I do mean long-range) sniping techniques. So, anyway, I’m familiar with the area. Of course, I’d spent no time in Palm Springs or Rancho Mirage proper. But WTF—you figure that one out on your own, gentle readers and diligent editor, or look it up in the Glossary—California high desert is California high desert, right?
Doom on me. Rancho Mirage proper is right on target. I expected another sleepy desert town. I got Beverly Hills in the Desert. They sold champagne at the fucking supermarket. French champagne. Dom foutu Pérignon, to be precise—at one hundred simoleons a bottle. They had goddamn cases of the stuff on display, right alongside the gourmet blue corn tortilla chips at six ninety-eight the bag, and the ever-popular candied popcorn in a big tin bucket at twenty-six bucks even. What ever happened to Great Western with the twist-off top and original recipe Cheetos in the ninety-eight-cent bag?
I counted sixteen golf courses between our motel and the biggest of the Rancho Mirage resorts—a hotel so large that the bellmen used golf carts to take guests to their rooms. There was no fast food—at least not on any of the main drags. We drove north on Bob Hope Drive, which intersects Frank Sinatra Drive and is only a few miles west of Gene Autry Drive and north of Marilyn Monroe Mesa and Jayne Mansfield Valley (or is that Jayne Mansfield Cleavage?). Anyhow, we cruised past the Eisenhower Medical Center—that’s where the rich and famous go to change their lifestyles (and tame their substance abuse) at the Betty Ford clinic.
South of the Eisenhower, the houses that lined Bob Hope Drive and the streets that intersected it were tightly packed—most homes, even the ones on golf courses, had quarter-acre lots; the town houses sat on even smaller plots. But northwest of the medical center, the houses (and the golf courses) got bigger. We circled through a half dozen of the streets that backed up onto the fairways. Houses here sat on two- and three-acre lots. Placard signs for half a dozen security companies sat prominently on front lawns and next to the two- and three-car garage doors. The architecture was an unsettling melange of ersatz Mediterranean, pseudoSpanish colonial, and mock Frank Lloyd Wright Mission-cum-Hollywood, all accented by palm trees, lush lawns, and small citrus groves. The place was a commercial gardener’s dream.
We drove back southeast along Route 111 and passed the gate house for Thunderbird estates, where ex-president Gerald Ford once rented a house. We continued into Palm Desert, where the houses were cheaper by a hundred thou or so, looped north past the College of the Desert (where Duck Foot and Wonder were denied their request to go chase coeds), turned west onto Country Club Drive, then north again when we intersected Bob Hope. We continued north, past the Eisenhower Center. Three or so miles north of the Eisenhower we turned east, then north again, cut across the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, turned left onto a ribbon of black macadam called Varner Road, and drove another three miles. There, a winding asphalt road had been cut into the desert foothills. We steered onto it, and climbed slowly through a series of tight S curves.
I was impressed. You see, I see things differently from most people. Most folks look at a building and wonder how they put it up. I look at a building and wonder how I can bring it down, or how I can get inside without being seen. Same thing here. We were on a road that had been designed by someone who understood good defense. It was narrow, so that two vehicles trying to pass would have considerable difficulty doing so. Its tight S curves precluded such high-speed driving maneuvers as bootlegger’s turns—there just wasn’t enough room to make a one-eighty without going off the steep shoulder.
I looked toward the summit, which was about a mile away as the bird flies—but probably three miles’ worth of curves, turns, and reverses. A single man with a .50-caliber sniper’s rifle would be able to stop any vehicle on the road at will. You had to give LC credit—he knew enough to build on the high ground.
After another ten minutes of S curves, we reached the summit, which was in fact the edge of a wide plateau. The road widened here—enough so that two cars could actually run side by side. In the distance, I saw lights. So we extinguished ours and drove another quarter mile at a snail’s pace.
There, we found ourselves in a kind of swale—a dip in the road where it would be difficult to see us. I asked Wonder to pull over. He did. I clambered out, walked along the roadside until I could see a long stretch of plateau ahead of me, then peered through the night-vision glasses I’d brought. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. I focused the lenses. There, about a mile ahead of us, a high perimeter chain-link fence, topped with concertina razor wire, ran perpendicular to the road we were on. Across the road itself was a sliding electronic chain-link gate. It, too, was topped with concertina wire. Beyond the fence line by twenty feet or so was a gatehouse. I increased the magnification. Inside the gatehouse, I could make out a pair of figures. Beyond the fence, the road continued straight. There were lights, but it was impossible to make out precisely what they illuminated.
I turned up the power to full. Now I could pick up some detail on the gatehouse itself. There, on its side, was the same stylized, medieval sheaf-of-straw design I’d seen on the stern of the Helen G. Kelley and PP-22.
Yes, that damn clock was ticking away, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. We couldn’t crash the gate because we’d simply be shot down before we made it the mile and a half up to the house—and besides, the commotion would draw every cop in miles. The best SEAL operations are the ones in which you come and go and no one ever knows you’ve been there—except the corpse you’ve left behind. That was precisely my mission here— get in, get LC, destroy his trigger, and get out without anybody the wiser. So, it had to be a real stealth operation. Which meant it was going to take time. Which was something I didn’t have very much of.
Moreover, it wasn’t going to be an easy break-in, either. First of all, the place was immense—two thousand acres is a big spread. Okay—maybe not in Texas. But ten miles from the center of Rancho Mirage, it is.
What’s the best way to do a target assessment on two thousand acres? From the air, of course. And so, at 0900 the next morning, Duck Foot, who is the most anonymous-looking of us, signed up (and paid cash) for a BluSky Tour at Palm Springs airport and took a ninety-minute Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous guided-tour flight.
The pilot was very accommodating. Duck Foot took all sorts of pictures with a video camera we’d bought. He got close-ups of Frank Sinatra’s house, the old Bing Crosby estate, the house where President Ford currently lives, Ambassador Walter Anne
nberg’s nine-hole golf course—and LC Strawhouse’s humongous hacienda up on the plateau above Thousand Palms.
Hour 199. We screened his handiwork until we learned as much about the place as we could without actually being there. Duck Foot’s no Vilmos Zigmond, but at least he kept the damn camera steady, in focus, and he zoomed in on the right stuff. The house itself—twenty-five-thousand square feet of living space built of stone and wood in a modernistic, quasi-chalet style—was situated at the end of that previously mentioned mile-and-a-half-long Spanish tile driveway, in the midst of a grove of manicured date palms. The area around the house was landscaped, but it had been done in shrubs and small trees, affording virtually no cover to an infiltration force. Next door sat a smaller structure—only six thousand square feet—of similar design. That was the guest cottage, Duck Foot was told on his tour.
The house and guest quarters were surrounded by a low chain-link fence, situated some five hundred yards away. It was nicely camouflaged, too, aided by the contour of the land itself—in fact, you wouldn’t notice it unless you came right upon it. It was electrified, too, by the look of it.
Beyond the fence, about a hundred nicely landscaped acres distant, stood another, smaller compound. This one held a dozen small town houses, what appeared to be a good-size motor pool housed in a tan metal building, and a small office complex. Duck Foot’s four-hundred-millimeter lens caught Dawg Dawkins, hand raised to his eyebrows, peering toward the BluSky Tour Cessna. You can hear Duck Foot’s voice on the tape at that point—yeah, I know he broke cover, but it was worth it—saying, “Smile for the birdie, asshole.”
We took what we’d seen and transferred the information onto paper. The security was impressive. Better than the White House, in fact. There were ground sensors behind the outer perimeter fence. There was infrared. And there was a well-paid, highly motivated guard force on duty twenty-four hours a day. They cruised the fence line (with its thrice-a-day ploughed-and-raked chemin sanitaire) in Land Rovers. They manned the gatehouses in pairs, spelling each other on the TV monitors and sensor dials, so no one got eye fatigue. And, dressed in blue blazers, gray slacks, white shirts, maroon ties, and packing side arms, they walked irregular patterns through the compound.
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