Like I said, it was impressive. And it was no doubt built to keep the riffraff out. But then there’s me.
You see, back in the eighties, I’d broken into a 134-acre compound as well (maybe even better) protected as this one. It is called Camp David, and I had done the penetration at the request of the White House chief of staff, who’d read about SEAL Team Six and Red Cell in some classified report or other. How he found me was way above my pay grade. All I know is that one morning the phone on my gunmetal gray desk rang, and two hours later I was in civvies, sitting in West Wing One, as the White House chief of staff’s office is called, listening to an offer I couldn’t refuse.
It was explained to me that the numerologist who worked for the First Lady was worried about Libyan terrorists taking the president hostage or blowing him up. (You will remember that these were the days when Qernel Qaddafi’s hit teams were actively prowling and growling.) Well, tea-leaf readers were well received in this administration, and so the First Lady had called the chief of staff and said she wanted the guards at Camp David to be tested, so she’d feel confident that they could, in fact, withstand a terrorist attack during their weekends up in Maryland’s Catoctin mountains. Her husband had already been shot. She didn’t want him taken hostage or blown up.
The First Lady had requested the help of Delta Force in the matter. But by then there was so much known about Delta that the story—and its origin—would have leaked to the press in a matter of weeks, which would not have helped the situation. Red Cell, however, was still operating in a wholly top secret fashion. And so, we were tasked, assigned, and entrusted to conduct our security exercise in the black.
It took us almost two weeks of work—intelligence gathering the same way terrorists would gather their intel. We hung out at the bars nearby. We took pictures. We probed the fence lines and the sensors. But thirteen days after we began, we managed to get three SEALs and two pounds of simulated C-4 to within five yards of Aspen—which is what the president’s cabin is called. That was close enough for me—and for the First Lady’s numerologist, too.
Once we’d accomplished our mission, we showed the Marines and Secret Service exactly how we’d done it, so they could take appropriate countermeasures. (I’m pleased to say, by the way, that the protective doctrine we Frogs developed a decade ago is still SOP up at Camp David—and there have been no subsequent penetrations, although regular exercises are still performed by Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.)
Hour 183. First thing we did was run a forty-eight-hour surveillance on the main gate. Wonder volunteered for the duty. After all, he first did that sort of thing as a baby-faced Force Recon Marine in the outskirts of Hanoi—and since he’s still here among the living, he’s gotta be pretty good at surreptitious surveillance. We dropped him off at night (actually, at 0430, when it is quietest and a guard’s biorhythms are at their least effective). He dug himself a concealment position, burrowed in, and started his target assessment log. Yes, it was uncomfortable. Yes, he ached. Yes, the creepie-crawlies had nibbled on his nether parts. And yes, he was stiff, hurting, and stinky by the time we came to get him. But that is the way such things are done. Remember my Commandment: Thou has not to like it—thou hast just to do it.
A quick story. Do not skim over this, gentle reader, because you are going to see this material again. Okay. General Sam Wilson, as good a Spec Warrior and leader of men as ever lived, once assigned a five-man group of his Special Forces shooters an exercise against an entire company of the 82nd Airborne Infantry. He selected as his venue a high, old wooden railroad trestle bridge northwest of Rice, Virginia, just outside Appomattox. The bridge—known as High Bridge—dates back to the Civil War (although the current trestle was built in 1936). The SF’s goal was to “blow” the bridge, which was being guarded by the paratroopers, just as a train came across it.
Now, the trains run only every two days on this particular spur of the Norfolk and Western. That told the colonel in charge of the 120-man 82nd Airborne contingent he’d kick the hell out of the Green Berets. No way could they get to the bridge without being seen. Especially since he’d be on scene thirty hours before the train showed up.
But General Sam was a take-no-prisoners kind of guy. “If you don’t win this one,” he told his A-Team, “don’t bother coming back. You’re professionals, and I expect you to behave like professionals.”
So the A-Team went in forty hours early. At night. During a rainstorm. Four of them floated down the Bush river, using logs and other detritus as camouflage. They dropped off beneath High Bridge and concealed themselves in the mud of the river bank. One by one, they pulled themselves up the bridge and hid in the track bed and the thick oak supporting beams that ran under the span. They stayed put for almost two days, lying silent in the ninety-degree sunlight, and fifty-degree night, while unsuspecting paratroopers walked right over them as they patrolled in shifts.
General Sam’s shooters stayed there until four minutes before the train came. At which point they got a signal from the fifth man, who’d been lying concealed half a mile down the tracks. They rolled off the bridge, hit the paratroopers from behind, detonated their IEDs and “blew” the trestle. Sure, they were uncomfortable during that night and two days. (And that, friends, is an understatement.) They’d pissed and shat on themselves. They’d been bitten by mosquitoes, ants, and spiders. They’d drunk their sparse water supply by the sip, not the gulp. But they lasted. They’d persevered. And they went back to Ft. Bragg with their heads held high—and the knowledge that they’d acted like the professionals they were.
And that’s the way Wonder did his job, too. In forty-eight hours we retrieved him, cold, messy, smelly—and replete with information.
And while he’d done his job, we’d done ours. I’d been in touch with Mugs. His law enforcement fax-net buddies were coming through. They’d identified more than three dozen self-styled militias and armed gangs. And, better, they’d staked them all out without alerting ’em.
That’s the great thing about local cops: they can sneak and peek without attracting attention to themselves because (1) they know all the back-door routes, and (2) they’re part of the landscape. Ride some night with a state trooper or local country sheriffs deputy. There’s not a Jeep trail or unpaved logging road they haven’t traveled.
I went over Wonder’s log while he showered and made notes.
There were two regular deliveries to the hacienda: a Pajar messenger van that made the trip into town at 0900 and again at 1630, and (this being California) a greengrocer’s truck that came at 1100 to deliver the day’s salad greens. All the other vehicles on the log sheet had come and gone at irregular times.
There had been a security company van that arrived to check a problem. The phone company came and went. An office supply house had delivered several cartons of goods. There had been a dozen visitors, including a TV news crew.
The fence line was patrolled, ploughed, and raked freshly three times daily, and making our way across it would be difficult. Not impossible, but difficult.
Doc suggested that we might try to trap some rabbits, then release them to see how the guards reacted when the bunnies tripped the sensors. I rejected that plan out of hand because it would take too long to achieve any results worth a damn.
The obvious way to go would have been to capture one of the regular vans that made deliveries and impersonate the driver. But, as Wonder noted, since the greengrocer was Japanese, and we weren’t, it would be hard to impersonate him at the gate. Could we sneak aboard his truck and make it through the gate, then slip away and hide?
Not really. He drove a vintage pickup, with the boxes of mesclun and other delicate greens stashed in the cab. The Pajar van was another possibility—but getting aboard might prove difficult, as it was driven by a staff driver. The other visitors were not regulars. There were no patterns. We were about to be goatfucked.
Hour 135. Wonder, pristinely laundered, played with the computer. We surfed the Internet, skimming
through militia and wanna-be Usenet news groups. We scrolled past the usual conspiracy theories about Waco and Oklahoma City, complaints about the ATF, and love notes to G. Gordon Liddy. Then, buried in the Misc. hierarchy, Wonder came upon a news group we hadn’t seen before, alt.politics.parker-lc.
I had Wonder key in. You see, I know something that you probably don’t: John Parker was the Colonial militia commander in the Battle of Lexington—the very first engagement of the Revolutionary War. Guess what the date was, friends. It was the morning of April 19, 1775. That is precisely 218 years prior to the Waco fiasco, and 220 years before the Oklahoma City bombing. Lightbulb.
We scrolled through two dozen articles—boilerplate debates on Madison’s Federalist papers, gun control, and crime. Wonder scratched his head, “WTF, Skipper? There are twenty other boards that have this kind of stuff on ’em.”
But not with an April 19 peg. The boilerplate had to be chaff. “It’s camouflage. Keep going.”
There were 160 articles in the list. Number 93 was the one I’d been looking for.
From: [email protected] (John Parker) Subject: Arousal of Lincoln Militia Remember the gallant deeds of Sam Prescott and emulate them on his anniversary. The time is now. Freedom awaits.
Remember your high school American history, gentle reader? Sam Prescott was a twenty-three-year-old doctor who rode out on the night of April 18, 1775, to warn the patriots that the Brits were coming to capture them. Yeah—Paul Revere’s the one who got all the credit for that midnight ride. But old Paul was actually captured by the Brits. It was Doc Prescott who got the minutemen—what our militias were called in those days—up and ready for the battles of Lexington and Concord. Hey—take a good look at those names, friends. Lexington and Concord. L and C. As in Lyman and Clyde. As in LC. As in LC Strawhouse. Sometimes I fucking amaze myself.
We scanned the rest of the news group. There were nineteen messages that took note of the jparker item. Wonder snared them on the hard disk and printed them out. I called Mugs and passed on the list of names and addresses. While I did that, Wonder went back into his Trojan Horse program, played with it for half an hour, then logged back onto Internet.
He was about to pull a Robert Roger—circle behind the bad guys so we could ambush ’em. The program would allow him to backtrack—discover the identity of anyone who added a message to the alt.politics.parker-lc. news group. Once we’d done that, I could pass the information on to Mugs and Grose—who’d shut the doors on the bad guys without alerting LC’s network of snitches or pals.
Wonder, satisfied with his handiwork, then broke into the Department of Justice Intelink. He used it to move onto the big classified system itself, then cruised for half an hour or so, perusing top secret message traffic from half a dozen agencies. If anybody had the same theory as I did about the Oklahoma City/Waco/Lexington and Concord anniversary, they sure weren’t talking about it on Intelink. It was as quiet as Pearl Harbor at 0630 on December 7, 1941, out there.
There was something very wrong going on out there. I know that when you don’t hear crickets, there are tangos in the bushes. The same thing goes for chatter. It was almost as if Intelink was on some kind of ERS—Enforced Radio Silence. I had Wonder scan again. There was nothing. Nothing about LC. Nothing about the arms activity. Nothing about the search for your’s truly. All that sound of silence made me very nervous.
I checked in with Grose, using the SATCOM suitcase unit we’d brought, and brought him up to speed. It all made sense to him. For his part, he reported that he and “the lads” had already scooped up three boatloads of tango assholes—or “sea sphincters,” as he piquantly described them. The detainees included five representatives of a Puerto Rican Ultranationalist group, a quartet of white supremacists, and six very seasick Crips—drug-dealing urban refugees all the way from Chicago. My friends, this country ain’t called the Great Melting Pot for nothing. He’d scuttled two of the three boats—saved one for emergencies.
I started to bring him up-to-date on the news from Mugs. BTDT, Grose growled. In fact, he’d already been in touch with one of Mugs’s fax net buddies—a former UDT Frog (and retired Louisiana state trooper) named Boo, who was on his way to PP-22 with a big, borrowed shrimp trawler and a suitcase full of handcuffs.
It was good to see that the old Frogs had things under control. I wish this young one could report the same. But my condition was not as good as his.
I was still wanted for murder.
We had to deal with LC Strawhouse before he and his people went ballistic.
And the Priest was somewhere in the middle of this muddle, but I had no clear picture of whose side he was on—other than his own. Was he a part of the fucking problem—or part of the goddamn solution?
I had no immediate resolution to any of those problems, which is what I said to Grose, adding that even after our forty-eight-hour surveillance, getting inside the compound without attracting attention was going to be tough.
I listened to Grose take a long pull on a can of Coors. “Listen, you asshole,” he growled, “the problem is, you are not thinking like a fucking unconventional warrior but like one of those pretty-boy admirals currently running the show.”
That kind of pissed me off. What was his point?
His point, he told me in the simple, declarative, well-seasoned sentences common to world-class master chiefs, was that when the situation got desperate, it was my job to make things happen. The rest would take care of itself. I, he said, was looking for some complex and intricate solution. Instead, why the fuck didn’t I just keep it simple, stupid?
Such as?
“Put down the goddamn computer and do something concrete. Go fuck with their phones, you lard-ass shithead. Make their alarm system go ka-blooey. Then you hijack the repair truck when it shows up, and you get your butts inside.”
Simple solutions have always made sense to me. So there was only one thing to say in response: “Aye, aye, Chief—will do.”
We went back to Duck Foot’s videotape and screened it again. This time we paid attention to the phone cables. They were thicker-than-normal ones, which meant he had six, eight, maybe even ten separate phone lines. Each line was capable of handling four in/out pairs, and an unknown number of separate wires for the security system. Those phone lines ran up the mountain to LC Strawhouse’s compound from the main road, strung atop a series of towers he’d probably paid to have installed by the phone company. From the edge of the plateau, a queue of telephone poles ran to within fifty yards of the fence line. From there, the wires went underground to the hacienda, the town house complex, and security system jacks.
There was no use blowing a tower and bringing the line down, or messing with the telephone poles anywhere outside the compound. These days, the phone company can diagnose a line problem from the business office—all it takes is a finger or two on the computer. No—we’d have to blow the phones inside the hacienda so LC’s people would call for the repair man. Oops—that’s repair person in these days of genderless description, isn’t it?
That was bonne nouvelle and mauvaise nouvelle. It was bonne because, knowing what I knew about LC Strawhouse, his phones would probably be state-of-the-art. And it is much easier to screw with phones filled with computer chips and transistors than it is to fuck with the old-fashioned, wire-coil, rotary dial, five-pound ebony black Bakelite Bells with which I grew up. You could repair those phones with chewing gum and baling wire. When these new ones break you just throw ’em away. The old rotary dial jobs could survive a direct lightning strike. The new phones cannot take a huge power surge. Hell—they can’t even take a small power spike. All we had to do was send a blast of current up the line, and we’d blow every receiver in the place.
Easy, right? Well … not quite your everyday piece of cake, Tadpole. Blowing the line meant getting close to the terminal box, which is where the phone lines go from terranean to subterranean. That box was fifty yards from the electrified perimeter fence—and in clear view (although two hundre
d yards away) from a gatehouse. Which meant we’d somehow have to get up close to the fence line without attracting attention to ourselves. The operative phrase here, friends, is “attracting attention to ourselves.” As previously noted, the guards at Rancho Mucho Macho were efficient assholes, and we’d have to be inventive. And we’d have to be inventive quickly. We were at Hour 131 already.
The first problem was creating a current surge. The surge had to be introduced into the lines after they’d come out of the junction box and were headed directly toward the house. That was because once they’d come down the pole and passed through the box, the phone company wouldn’t be able to tell whether the problem was in the buried trunk lines, the wiring inside the hacienda, or within the phones themselves. They’d have to come out and investigate.
Here is a piece of trivia for you. Phone lines carry a six-to-seven-volt load.
You say you want to know what that means in English? It means that the 650-amp, twelve-volt battery in our van—the handiest piece of equipment we had to create a power surge—wasn’t going to do the job. We could get a generator, but schlepping it up to the junction box, then starting it, then … well, you get the idea.
It was Wonder who came up with the most workable solution. The van’s alternator surged at 60 amps. If we ran a line from the alternator, used pin probes, punctured the phone cables and spiked the lines, the surge from the alternator would fry every phone line our spikes were touching. That left the small problem of getting the van within proximity, running a few yards of cable, spiking the phone line, revving the engine and frying the phones, removing the cable, and exeunting, south (let’s all repeat this mantra together, shall we), without attracting attention to ourselves.
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