Lucas had been reading Jock's books. A phalanx was a Greek formation that packed infantry tightly together so that individual soldiers couldn't be picked off one after another. Rather, they were the ones that would take care of pick-off duties.
"Do you have another idea, Lucas?" Jock had become suddenly curious.
"As a matter of fact, I do. I thought of it when Nary came in."
"Command group will continue to meet here," Jock ordered. "The rest of you can play in the gym or something."
An hour later, Jock messaged the family. "Everybody should relax. We need at least a week to develop new plans."
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Chapter 23
Jak never intended to go to Toronto. Instead, she spent a day in London Ontario, not to be confused with London England. She identified herself to the London police as a specialist in finding missing people. She was just passing through and thought that she'd drop by. Did London have any people who had been reported missing? She might be able to earn some money and at the same time give the London police a hand.
The London police were reluctant to give Jak much information because missing persons investigations are always ongoing until the missing persons had been determined to be not missing. The desk sergeant wasn't too forthcoming. It wouldn't do to have some bounty hunter embarrass the police. So Jak did what she should have done in the first place. She went to the local news media. The editor was quite happy to confirm that the police were searching for a man who had gone missing on May 17. She even gave Jak his name.
"Where did Bernard like to drink?" Jak asked.
"The Sink Hole," she replied. "Two blocks east. Everybody called him Hands. Not too many people will want this guy found."
Since Jak had intended to visit that pub only to get a read on the missing guy's character, and since the editor had already given her that, Jak left town and headed west. Bean had been in the London area in mid-May when Hands had gone missing.
# # # # # # # #
Winnie was meeting with Marie on the shores of the St. Lawrence Rivulet as it passed the northeastern tip of the slave island. Marie was going to take a rest in the bottom of the rivulet for a couple of days seeing as how the battle plan wouldn't be ready for a week. Winnie had accompanied her because she wanted to see what Marie would look like in her alligator body. Marie had offered to show her back at the compound, but Winnie had argued that it wouldn't be the same thing. For people who knew Winnie well, they might suspect that Winnie wasn't being 100% honest. They'd be right.
Winnie's ploy started out quite innocently.
"Lucas is working on the battle plan and he wanted me to check with you about your vision. We have a number of options on how we attack the ranches, but we know that you have some preferences on how Big Momma #2 and Big Daddy #2 should die. Could you describe exactly what your vision was?"
"I saw lightning and flames in the skies around the Big House. It's burning. The young girls are running by me when I enter the house. Big Momma and Big Daddy are behind them. They see me, turn, and flee. They're screaming. I follow them up the stairs and they're trapped. Then I chew on them. They called me Marie, so they knew it was me even though I was in my alligator body."
"You told me that you thought you were burning too."
"Yes, I am burning but not badly enough yet to stop me from chewing on them."
"Did you see your snout in your vision?"
"Huh?"
"You were an alligator. You should have been able to see your snout."
Marie had to think. Her eyes went blank. "I didn't see my snout. I was focused so much on the Bigs that I just didn't look down."
"So you're not completely sure that you're in your alligator body, right?"
"I have to be in that body. I'd never be able to survive the flames if I were a panther."
"But you can be a panther, right?"
"I can call a number of different creatures to me. The more often I call them, the more quickly they come. I have used the panther a lot. But panthers can't live long if they're on fire, so I have to be using the alligator in my vision."
"How did you know the alligator's body was on fire?"
"The flames were all around me."
"But you weren't actually in pain?"
"Alligator bodies don't have many nerve endings."
# # # # # # # #
"You see, Marie..." Winnie was using her convincing voice. "We're trying to win the battles with as little damage as possible to the ranches. The slaves will take care of the bosses and the owners. We'll try to prevent any of the slaves from dying, but we're worried about what happens after the slaves win the battles. Where do they go? With seventeen ranches, there are too many slaves for us to relocate to some shelter somewhere. We can't take them back to the town where they were kidnapped. For many of them, that was 10 or 20 years ago."
Marie listened but said nothing.
"For the next couple of months anyway, we were hoping that the slaves might be willing to stay on the ranches and work them. They'd have food and they'd be with people they knew and liked. But they would be the people running the ranch, not the bosses. Do you think they'd go for that? At least for a while?"
"There'd have to be changes."
"Of course. And one change would be where they lived. Many of them could live in the Big House. The cooks could still prepare meals for everybody. People would be way warmer and dryer. But if we burn all the Big Houses down, they'll have nowhere to stay. If we could win the battles without actually burning the big houses down, would that be OK with you?"
"How would you do that? In my vision, flames are everywhere. That's been foretold. It will happen that way."
"We can give you the flames and William says that his flames won't burn the houses down. Is that OK?"
"I guess."
"We'd like to change another thing too. Since you don't know for sure that you are in an alligator's body in the vision, how about being a panther instead?"
"Why?"
"A panther is faster and it's scarier. You'll still get to chew on the slave-owners."
"I guess. Are you going to change anything else?"
"Everything you saw in your vision will come true. The lightning, the flames, and an animal munching happily. Except I was wondering if you'd mind not dying."
"Winnie, I told you. It's been foretold. We can't change the future. Some of Nary's life has been foretold. Changing my future would change hers!"
"We won't change the future, Marie. Your vision as you described it will come true. But you never did see yourself dying in your vision, did you? You just assumed that you were going to die because of the flames. That dying part doesn't have to happen."
Marie sat, thinking. Then in front of Winnie's eyes, she became an alligator. An alligator that trundled into the river and sank below the surface.
"Marie, you don't have to die," Winnie called after her. When the alligator didn't reappear, Winnie activated her sling and dove into the water too. She positioned herself underneath Marie's sinking alligator body and tried to grab it. Marie became angry with Winnie and started snapping at her. Winnie stayed close to Marie's body so that she couldn't turn her snout enough to bite her, but still she had to deal with the front and back feet. Sharp claws! They were hard to avoid but she kept a close bear hug on Marie's chest – make that an alligator hug – and managed to avoid being clawed.
Stop fighting me, Marie! Watch your claws! You don't have to die. If you've seen some of Nary's future, that means that you were there to see that future. If you were dead, you wouldn't have known what's going to happen to Nary.
Marie wouldn't listen. She began to roll Winnie down into the mud. Suddenly Marie's body stiffened and her grip weakened. Winnie felt her own body rising out of the water and being deposited on solid ground. When she had wiped the water out of her eyes, Marie was in front of her, dripping wet.
"That wasn't my alligator you were wrestling with, Winn
ie."
...
When Winnie came to, she was lying on the bank. Marie was sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of her, eating what looked to be a raw fish. "You made a good point, Winnie. I think I'll stay alive. Can we go home now or did you want to wrestle another alligator?"
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Chapter 24
Saturday, June 22. Dreamer and Wizard were in the outdoor gym at the home compound. Dreamer was working out and Wizard was helping. He had been helping her on the workouts ever since Lylah had gone home to her family at the end of May. Right now, Dreamer was working on her 3-point shot. Wizard had a ball-trolley that held fifteen balls and he was feeding her a ball every three seconds. Dreamer would shoot, look at Wizard, and receive a bounce pass in perfect position to catch and shoot. Wizard had mastered the bounce pass! More impressively, he had been scouring the Internet for basketball drills. This catch and shoot drill was one of his finds.
After the fifteenth shot, Wizard would normally retrieve the balls while Dreamer worked on her arm strength. Wiz had hung an iron bar in the sky after William had told him how he had used to do gymnastics in the atmosphere. Dreamer was doing pull-ups on that bar right now.
"My right arm is dead, Wiz. I have nothing left," she said.
"Yeah. Your elbow was drifting sideways on the last five shots. You want to try left hand work, closer in?"
"I dunno. What do you think?"
"Leg conditioning plus ball handling?"
"Let's do that."
Wizard pulled out a set of gardening gloves from the basket of training supplies that he was accumulating. Dribbling with your hand buried inside a gardening glove was always a challenge, even for Dreamer. Wizard set some pylons where there would be the normal basketball court lines and handed her a ball. "Set of lines for one minute?"
"Yeah. And Wiz, you have to urge me to work harder in the last twenty seconds. Just say Go, Go, Go. Really loud."
# # # # # # # #
Jak visited three communities on Saturday: Sarnia Ontario, Lansing Michigan, and Milwaukee Wisconsin. Milwaukee was too big for her to be able to make assumptions about any missing persons and Bean's possible involvement with them. She used the city only as a place to stop and sleep. Sarnia was a strikeout. Lansing was a definite. The missing guy was a womanizer, he liked to use pubs for his hunting grounds, and a majorly tall young girl had been in that pub on the night he had disappeared. The police had tried to find her as a witness, but had no success.
# # # # # # # #
The Wilizy Cloth and Dye store in Surrey B.C. was awesome. Bean had seen pictures of the long-gone Ikea stores that had populated all of Scandinavia's major city centers. When the troubles had come, people weren't too interested in buying home furnishings and the chain had slowly disappeared. But the stores had been a significant part of Scandinavia's history – something for citizens to be proud of. Now some Scandinavians were proud of raping and poisoning.
Bean was looking for one type of item in the Wilizy store. Picnic supplies. What she saw and smelled as soon as she entered the store was chocolate. Bean had tasted chocolate before, but it was very rare in Scandinavia.
Bean had bought a chunk of chocolate in Denmark early in her special ops career. She had been given a five-day leave and, after taking care of some long overdue business in a small northern Scandinavian community, she had ended up in Malmo at the southern tip of the country. She had taken the ferry to Copenhagen Denmark as part of a celebration for the enjoyable visit she had had with a certain police captain. The captain didn't enjoy it as much as Bean had.
After the police captain had opened the door to his safe, the first thing she took out of it was her father's shaving knife. Next she burned every picture that the captain had stored in his safe. That fire consumed the captain's body as well as the burnable parts of the police station. Fire investigators were able to determine that the fire had started in his office where the police captain's body was found; they couldn't determine if he were alive or not when the fire started. Bean wasn't around to give them that answer. She was in Copenhagen, eating chocolate.
That chunk of chocolate had been very expensive. Good too. Extremely good, even. But not something that a lowly lieutenant could afford on a regular basis. Years after her chocolate treat, Bean was in Surrey BC and looking at rack after rack of chocolate delicacies. Some were formed into flat pieces – the store called them chocolate bars. Others were individually sold in little blobs called chocolates. These blobs had chocolate that covered some sweet filling inside. The customers in the store were coming into this section of the store, browsing up and down some aisles, selecting what they wanted, and going into a line where they paid some money. For the little individual chocolates, you had to go up to a counter where you'd point at what you wanted and a teenage girl or boy would put them into a bag, write the price on the front, and hand the bag over.
Bean started browsing and selecting. She quickly found herself with too many selections and not enough hands. Her dilemma was solved when a teenage girl wearing a white shirt with emerald green highlights gave her a container with handles. "You can put what you want in one of these," she volunteered and left. Bean ended up taking one of each bar the store had to offer. The prices were ridiculously low. Then she asked the girl in white and green if they sold picnic supplies. The store did. Their picnic forks and spoons were identical to the wooden cutlery that Bean had found in the bag of picnic debris she had uncovered by Fort Peck Lake.
Bean was now 80% certain the Wilizy were involved somehow in Princess Freya's disappearance from Fort Peck Lake. But just because she found picnic utensils in their store, that didn't prove anything. Anybody could have bought those utensils at any of several Wilizy stores. The fact that the Wilizy sold that picnic debris didn't prove that there were the do-gooders who rescued Princess Freya. More research would be needed.
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Chapter 25
Sunday, June 23. Lucas and Melissa announced that the battle plan for attacking the seventeen ranches was finalized. Lucas had asked for a number of changes to the original and Melissa had agreed. "This plan is much better," she conceded and kissed Lucas on his cheek. Lucas was used to receiving manly thumps on his back; he wasn't quite sure how to deal with a sisterly kiss on his cheek. He rather enjoyed it, actually.
Lucas had had a number of concerns. My readers know already that he wanted to avoid casualties and that meant that they had to ensure that the bosses didn't have any access to weapons. Nor could they be allowed to form themselves into a small, tight group.
Lucas' second concern was that the battle plan should not rely exclusively on William's science – like man-made thunder and lightning, gravitational weapons, invisibility, and lasers. Theo had used a science-based plan that worked at the slave island. But Marie had added a second component to Theo's plan – Voodoo – if you like. Or think of what she added as being the opposite of scientific. Mystical. Lucas wanted to take advantage of the weapons that the Wilizy had in that area. Bob, Contrary, and Marie's alligator – as yet unnamed. Winnie was still working on possible names. Alfalfa, the alligator? Alicia? Alibaba? Nothing had come to mind that was sufficiently menacing.
William had received updates on what the new battle plan would require him to invent as Lucas and Melissa developed it. So on Sunday, he already had one of the weapons designed if not yet created. William, Wolf, and TG headed down to Stanford University to work on two other weapons. Since Mathias and his jumbo freight transports were critical to the success of the plan, they asked him to come along to assist.
# # # # # # # #
Jak was continuing to work her way westward. She visited Madison, Eau Claire and Minneapolis. No missing men had been reported in Madison, an abusive husband was missing in Eau Claire, and Minneapolis was far too large for her to pursue. The Eau Claire man was a possibility, but he hadn't been in a pub before his disappearance. He did fit the general
profile of Bean's men. Call him a possible.
Jak dropped in on the Safe Haven managers in Minneapolis while she was in the city. Their three-storey building's security was very tight. The only way to reach Safe Haven's second floor offices was by an elevator that was monitored with facial recognition software. Any intruders who entered that elevator would be locked inside until Safe Haven's security decided to release. This made her feel better about Scandinavia's association with Safe Haven. Ranch #4 might have some security problems, but overall, Jak thought Safe Haven executives were very security conscious.
Fred Brown, the personnel officer for the western region, was there and he was continuing to preach his conspiracy theory. Somebody is out to get us. Management wanted to know what Jak thought.
Jak told them firmly that it wouldn't be the Saskatchewan army that would be attacking them, that was for sure. Her partner was currently pursuing another lead that might take them to the place where some do-gooder shopkeepers were holding Maddy. However her partner was having second thoughts about this group because whatever armed power they had had in the past, they didn't have it now. Plus all they cared about now was making money. Why would a do-gooder group, who may have recovered Maddy, decide to attack the Safe Haven group with its seventeen ranches? Why would they do that? And if anybody were foolish enough to attack a slave ranch, a highly trained Scandinavian Special Ops platoon could be flying over that ranch inside of 24 hours.
Fred Brown remained unconvinced. "These storekeepers. Do they have a name? What military experience did they have?"
"They're known as the Wilizy," Jak said. They defeated some Alaskans and an Alberta dictator, but that was before they lost their military leadership."
# # # # # # # #
On that same Sunday, Bean returned to the Wilizy compound but landed on the northern perimeter instead of the southern edge. She found a hiding place near the meandering river well outside the warning signs and settled in. She had an excellent view of the river valley, but couldn’t see any actual buildings. She assumed that the Wilizy's buildings were well beyond the second bend of the river, which was as far as she could see.
At 4:32 p.m. on that Sunday afternoon, Bean saw a little blonde girl riding a small pony, or perhaps a large dog. The animal was slowing down from what appeared to be a hard gallop. Bean watched it slow to a trot, turn around, accelerate again, and disappear from view. The girl was riding bareback without benefit of reins or stirrups. She obviously was used to riding this animal. She'd be doing it again.
Bite Me! Page 16