“Something stinks,” Matt snapped. “This ain’t how we do business, and Dan’s body over there is exactly why.” Matt stared hard at Josh, who tried to remain in appearance unafraid yet upset by the whole untimely tragedy. “One thing bothers me. My mentor and good friend rolls out here without telling any of his brothers what he’s doing. He comes out here with Carnegie’s lapdog, who is now telling me my mentor violated one of the biggest rules in the game and makes entry into a fucking barn all by his lonesome.” Matt stopped, his stare hardening even more. “No way, no how, motherfucker.”
Josh straightened as Matt finished. “You’d best watch how you throw around accusations like that, sailor,” Josh growled defensively.
“Fuck you, Josh,” Matt snarled dismissively.
Jared and Clarence spent considerable time discussing potential plans for bringing down a flying war machine. Admittedly neither man was even close to an expert on the subject, so the entire exchange was in theory only. Jared was aware of helicopters that crashed after hitting power lines, and this was his first focal point. Clarence wasn’t altogether convinced they could pull this plan off and offered his opinion. Clarence wanted to dig a hole in the area the helicopter landed, cover it with thin plywood, and have the machine tip and destroy itself upon landing.
The issue troubling Jared was how they could get the military to fly into the homestead in place of driving in with their Humvees like they’d begun doing the last two trips. Jared felt that killing a dozen guys and burning a couple of Humvees wouldn’t be a big enough statement and would in his judgment be dangerous and a waste of their time and effort. Clarence told Jared the guys in the helicopter who came the first time seemed like professional soldier types, whereas the Humvee crew gave the impression of being a less professional group, maybe reservists.
Jared’s mind hummed as he began building the framework for a plan to not only lure a helicopter crew to the homestead, but destroy it once the aircraft arrived. Jared and Clarence both agreed it was imperative they destroy the aircraft before it was able to off-load a bunch of jocked-up gunfighters. Both men agreed the women needed to leave the area and wait for Clarence and Jared to link up with them after the fact. Deep down, Jared knew Stephani was going to tell him to take a flying leap off a short pier when he suggested the women and children sit this one out. At the same time, Jared was also aware they could use an additional rifle even if it were untrained and untested. For the time being, Jared kept the Stephani dilemma to himself.
Clarence told Jared the Humvee tax-collection crew stopped in about every four days. He said they traveled up the dirt road and moved throughout the area, collecting what they could from people who either were fettered to one place by their living arrangement or folks who were just plain unlucky enough to get in the military men’s way. Jared’s plan was going to take longer than four days, so he and Clarence would need to come up with a plan to hide what they were doing.
The following day, Jared and Clarence took the chainsaw, climbed on the tractor, and headed off down the dirt road, following the power lines away from the house. They spent the entire day cutting down power poles and letting them lay where they dropped. In a two-mile stretch, the men cut down nearly one hundred poles. Neither man knew a thing about what Pacific Gas and Electric or PG&E lines were capable of after the event, so they steered clear of any transformers or other unidentifiable pieces of equipment secured to the downed poles.
Once the men were finished cutting the poles down, they set about separating the lines from the poles. From what Clarence could tell, PG&E used their own special nuts and bolts, which required special tools for removal. Clarence didn’t own any of PG&E’s special tools, but he did have his acetylene torch. Clarence used the torch to cut the lines free from their moorings. It was time-consuming work, and Clarence didn’t get as much done as Jared would have liked.
Once the sun burned low in the cloud-streaked western sky, both men climbed onto the tractor and returned to the house. Stephani was sitting on the side of a hill three hundred yards from the house when Jared and Clarence arrived back at Clarence’s home. Seeing the men’s return, Stephani came down without a word, her rifle slung over a shoulder, and walked toward the house. Jared was far too weary to attempt figuring out if Stephani was upset or just relieved they were back. Not knowing caused Jared to remain mute while he and Clarence stowed the tractor inside the barn.
When Jared cleared the barn doors after the tractor was put away, Stephani sat in a chair on the porch, with her rifle cradled across her lap—watching. Jared often felt she was a burden to deal with, but now he was relieved she’d possessed the presence of mind to set up a lookout on the side of the hill while he and Clarence were off playing Paul Bunyan. Shannon was capable, Jared had no doubt about that, but she was different than Stephani. Steph was a go-getter, and Jared was pretty sure he knew what type of lawyer the woman had been. Jared was positive Stephani was not the type of attorney who sat in an office and shuffled paperwork from one side of her desk to the other. No, Stephani was, in Jared’s view, a doer, and he was convinced she had often surprised her opponents in the courtroom with not only her tenacity, but her intelligence.
“Hey, Steph,” Jared murmured as he passed the woman, almost smiling as he thought about her poor unsuspecting courtroom opponents. They’d most likely seen her good looks and wondered who the pretty little gal was sleeping with in order to be allowed the opportunity to argue a motion or sit second chair next to some older male partner during a trial. Only after she’d battered them with a convincing cross-examination or a wildly effective opening statement would her opposing council realize they hadn’t reached into the pond and grabbed a minnow; instead, they’d reached into the pond and been bitten by a shark.
The following day, Jared and Clarence spent the morning building several giant devices they intended to roll the downed power lines onto. Each device was made by taking two fifty-five-gallon barrels and removing both the tops and bottoms. Once the barrels were readied, Clarence positioned four four-foot lengths of two-by-four lumber through the center of each barrel. Next Clarence used tie-down straps to secure the lumber to four locations an equal distance from one another on the inside of the barrels. The lumber protruded approximately one foot on either end, which was what Clarence secured the tie-downs to.
Next, both Jared and Clarence used the chainsaw to cut short lengths of two-by-four, which they inserted inside the barrel and attached to the interior lumber. The shorter pieces acted as struts and reinforced the interior of the barrels. They cut and installed four struts in each barrel, locking them into place with large screws. The interior of the barrels wouldn’t allow an adequate swing with a hammer, so Clarence headed off to the barn and returned with a hand-operated drill and a screwdriver. The men took turns in the awkward interior of the barrels, drilling pilot holes for the screws and then screwing them into the wood.
Next Clarence measured the diameter of the tractor’s rear wheels and cut four more lengths of lumber just slightly shorter than the diameter of the wheels. The two men placed two of these new lengths of lumber on either end of each set of barrels and used additional tie-downs to draw them tight against the barrels, effectively making a crude rendition of a wire spool attached to the outside of the tractor tires.
Clarence was the one who’d come up with the idea that they could jack the tractor off one wheel, attach the wire spool to the lifted wheel, and use the tractor’s power to reel the wire onto the spool. Jared was a little disappointed in himself for not having thought of this on his own. In truth, he was quickly finding out in this new and challenging world there were people from classes of society he’d formerly thought to be beneath him in terms of ingenuity who quite simply were geniuses when it came to figuring out and solving today’s problems.
Building the wire spools was taking much longer and proved far more difficult than Jared could have fathomed. Conversely, Jared enjoyed the good fortune of listening to Clarence grumbl
e about the lack of power tools and how if he’d been given access to a real drill, as Clarence put it, they would have been finished with their wire-spool-building project hours ago. It was at that moment Jared realized something about himself. He suffered in silence for the most part. Clarence was obviously a hardworking, tough man, but he did not suffer in silence. This wasn’t a knock on the man, Jared thought, it was simply an observation.
Jared’s mind wandered to the women he was traveling with, and he recognized they both suffered in relative silence, as he did. Maybe he was drawn to people like himself, and maybe the two women were as well, which would explain why they’d chosen to venture out and away from the relative safety of Quinten’s ranch. Jared entertained no plans to remain in the company of Clarence and his family, and now he contemplated the reason. After some reflection, Jared concluded it wasn’t anything tangible; it simply boiled down to a slight difference in how the two parties handled hardship and that was enough. For now, Jared and Clarence would rely on one another as they strove for a common goal. When the goal was achieved, the two would part ways. If they met later in life, they would be friendly based on the experiences they were building now.
“Let’s load up what we’ll need and head out to the end of the line,” Clarence suggested, causing Jared to blink and look up at the man before nodding in agreement.
He would definitely have to give this line of thought some more time in the future, but for now he’d bench the whole thing and get back to work. Clarence and Jared hopped atop the tractor and drove around the immediate area of the barn, searching for a few items essential to getting the line spooled up on the extemporaneous wire spools. First stop was the barn, where Clarence wedged a floor jack up in the driver’s area of the machine. Following the floor jack procurement, Clarence tossed a small three-quarter-inch piece of plywood into the front bucket of the tractor along with several additional tie-downs.
Clarence returned to the driver’s seat next to where Jared clung with some difficulty due to the single-seat design of the machine. Clarence spun the tractor around and guided the front bucket under one of the wire spools. With some gas and front bucket lift combined, Clarence was able to get the wire spool into the bucket before he tilted the bucket up and slightly back, trapping the wire spool for their moderately bumpy ride to the end of the downed power lines.
“Hold on,” Clarence barked as the tractor lurched forward. Jared looked back in time to see Stephani leaving the porch, heading across the front yard. She was presumably aimed at returning to the same hill where she’d assume her sheepdog status while the two men were out playing around with the power lines.
On the ride down, a thought came to Jared. “Hey, why don’t we spool up some of this wire, maybe half, and see if we can just drag the rest back to your place? I mean, as long as it’s just the wire, it shouldn’t snag on anything.”
Clarence drove, but didn’t respond for a few seconds; then he looked at Jared. “I say we get this first roll done and try it. If it doesn’t work, we can get the next spool out here and go from there.”
The men reached the end of the downed power line and realized they needed to use a hacksaw to cut through the lines they wanted wound up on their spool. Jared looked at the thick lines and then at the seemingly impotent little saw and wished they’d brought the cutting torch. Thirty minutes later the men completed cutting through the two thick strands of PG&E line.
As Clarence pulled the floor jack off the tractor, Jared called out, “Hold on, man.”
Clarence dropped the heavy piece of equipment to the ground and squinted at Jared questioningly.
“No, listen, we can do this much easier. Work smarter, not harder,” Jared said hurriedly.
“What?” Clarence said begrudgingly. He already had a plan, and changing things up in the middle of a job wasn’t something Clarence was fond of.
As the adjusted plan became clearer in Jared’s mind’s eye, he became excited. “Easy, instead of pulling the wire onto the spools, why don’t we drive over it? I can be on the ground, making sure it isn’t jumping off the barrels and stays lined up. You just keep that spool rolling right over the top of the line.”
Clarence scrunched his face in consternation as he weighed their options in his mind’s eye. When Jared didn’t relent, Clarence shut the tractor off and dropped to the ground in mute agreement to Jared’s latest scheme. The two men set about lining the barrel up with the tractor’s rear wheel, and then using the tie-downs, they secured the barrel to the wheel so that it was aligned with the center of the wheel and would spin when the tractor was driven forward or backward.
In the end it wasn’t quite as easy as Jared would have liked. The downed lines often zigzagged and lay off to the side of the dirt road. When Clarence was unable to navigate the tractor over the area the downed lines were, the men stopped, unfastened the spool from the tractor’s wheel, and used the John Deere to straighten the line or pull it onto the road, which turned out to be a tremendous amount of extra work.
When the first wire spool could hold no more, the men spent the half hour required to cut through the lines and then returned to the house, where they dropped the full spool of wire and picked up an empty barrel spool. The two men repeated this drill four additional times before they ran short on daylight. Exhausted and half-starved, they returned to the house, where Jared spotted Stephani in her lookout position, and to his surprise, Essie sat on the front porch, the small .22-caliber rifle cradled across her lap.
Jared didn’t say a word, but he did sneak a peek to make sure the magazine well of Essie’s rifle was empty—it was. Jared didn’t know for sure, but assumed Stephani was giving Essie something to do by using her on the front porch. A kid’s presence on the porch with an unloaded weapon did nothing for their immediate predicament, but it was the foundation for the future, so Jared remained silent on the matter and went inside after tousling Essie’s hair with a wink.
Food was already prepared, and Jared ate like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. The moment he finished his meal, a crippling fatigue swept over him. Jared murmured something to Shannon about being exhausted and headed to bed. There weren’t many words spoken during or after the meal by anyone. The women and children, sensing the men’s need to rest, let them be. Stephani’s eyes told of a woman who’d sat in the cold all day, fighting to keep warm, and who wasn’t in a mood to converse any more than Jared was. Within thirty minutes of dinner, the entire group were sleeping soundly.
The following day, one day before Clarence expected a visit from the tax men, he reminded Jared of the path the helicopter had taken when it landed the first time he and his family were contacted. Neither Jared nor Clarence knew much about the glide angle a helicopter took on approach to a landing, so they guesstimated where they should lay their trap.
Jared’s plan all along was to string a line across the helicopter’s path, which he hoped would result in the aircraft colliding with the line and then crashing to the ground. In the last few days, Jared’s mind continued adding little adaptations to his original plan. They included a sturdy anchor point on one side of the small valley the homestead was located in. The opposite side would be attached to the tractor. The line would be hidden on the ground by weeds, dirt or whatever else they could find to blend the black plastic-coated lines into the natural surroundings.
The anchor point might or might not hold after contact with the helicopter, but this didn’t matter as long as it held the initial weight of the line. For an added surprise, Jared planned on attaching smaller football-sized concrete globs to the wire. He intended to dig small holes, pour concrete in them, and then lay the line into the holes in twenty-foot intervals. The unanchored end of the line would be attached to the tractor positioned and ready on the opposite side of the small valley, ready to speed forward, pulling the wire off the ground and into the air, where with a lot of luck the Black Hawk would fly right into it.
Even if both the anchor point and the end of the wire attache
d to the tractor came loose after contact, the football-sized cement globs were expected to do their devastating job. Jared imagined this was a likely outcome after the helicopter’s rotor caught the line and reeled it in, bringing with it the destructive power of the fifty-pound concrete projectiles attached to the line. There were seven in all, and Jared was fairly confident if just a couple of his cement gifts impacted the Black Hawk, the aircraft would be doomed.
Jared and Clarence got to work that morning, and the first task they undertook was to attach a large auger to the rear of the tractor. After which they loaded the front bucket with fifty-pound sacks of quick-dry cement Clarence retrieved from his barn. Jared chose a spot on the side of the gentle slope off to the south side of the dirt road as his anchor point, where Clarence deftly used the auger to dig a hole five feet deep and nearly two feet across. Clarence tied a foot-and-a-half-long piece of iron bar to the end of the line he intended to go into the cement to ensure the line could not slip free of the concrete anchor when pressure was placed on it.
It took sixty-five bags of concrete to fill the south-side anchor hole. Every five bags Jared poured into the hole, Clarence would take the tractor and scoop water and slop from the creek and dump it in on top of the concrete mix. This no doubt did nothing for the structural integrity of the concrete anchor, but it would have to do. The men were running out of time. When the anchor point was poured and the line was securely embedded deep in the cement-filled hole, the men set about digging the smaller holes for Jared’s football globs.
Jared originally intended to hide the tractor, but they ended up a little short on wire, and with time running out, they didn’t have the luxury of another day collecting wire. The tractor would have to sit in plain sight while its driver would have to be the thing they concealed from the low-flying aircraft. The rest of the day was spent camouflaging the power line and digging a low depression next to the tractor, where Clarence could hide until it was time to drive the tractor up the north-side hill, pulling the line taut across the aircraft’s path. Jared felt certain the moment they heard the Black Hawk approaching, the tractor could be started in order to save Clarence the trouble when things really mattered. In Jared’s experience since the solar flare, time seemed to speed up considerably when an operation or event approached its peak. It was better if they allowed themselves as much time as possible in the event of an unscheduled hiccup.
The Jared Chronicles | Book 3 | Chains of Tyranny Page 13