Authors: Lewis Perdue
Brigadier General Jack Kilgore stood in his glass-sided corner office and took in the desks and maps and consoles and displays filling the vast operations room beyond. Troops in the operations room avoided looking at him and focused on their mission. When their commanding officer refused to sit it meant his pitifully anorexic tolerance for BS had gone AWOL.
Kilgore held a cell phone to his ear and listened to the endless ringing of Dan Gabriel not picking up. The longer Kilgore listened, the more it sounded like a siren. He stopped at his door and followed the thick multicolored skeins of Cat-5 cabling, coax, wave guides, power cords, and assorted wires neatly bundled with cable ties and harnesses, which made only precise ninety-degree turns as they parceled out data, radio waves, and electricity from origin to destination.
There were times he preferred the old days when God, guts, and guns were all you needed to win a battle, provided you had enough intelligence to apply them in the proper proportions at the correct times.
But this new technology, Xantaeus, held only horror, not hope. It dehumanized, removed choice, deprived the individual soldier of his free will and ripped out the very thing that made him human. Gabriel's notion that some soldiers would go where the drug took them and never return haunted Kilgore and made him entertain seditious thoughts.
In the far corner of the operations room, Kilgore's second-in-command, Colonel Bill Lewis, talked with the mapping officer, who accessed the same data that guided cruise missiles and allowed pilots—and Kilgore's troops—to rehearse simulated missions by "seeing" the actual terrain overlaid by aerial and satellite photos with better quality and resolution than the average scrapbook snapshot.
Kilgore pulled the phone from his ear, stared at it for a moment, then pressed the "end" button and let his hand fall to his side. A moment later, Colonel Lewis stood up, took several sheets of paper from the console operator and gave Kilgore a nod. Then he made his way to Kilgore's door and entered.
"Any idea?" Kilgore asked.
Lewis shook his head. "General Gabriel's phone works fine."
"I know that," Kilgore snapped. He waved the wireless unit in Lewis's face. "Tell
Kilgore closed his eyes and grimaced. "Sorry, Bill. I'm low on sleep. My anger's uncalled for."
"We've all been there, sir." Lewis nodded. "This is a pretty intense security exercise given the probability of Braxton as our next president."
Lewis, like almost every other soldier Kilgore knew—himself included—took pride in that they would finally get a commander in chief with knowledge, courage, and guts, someone they looked up to after the dismal parade of draft dodgers, cowboys, flaky liberal peaceniks, actors, and poseurs who had abused the military in one stupid, selfserving way or another. Kilgore realized part of his temper came from disappointment: after they'd waited for so long, the soldier headed for the Oval Office had claymore feet.
He wanted to tell Lewis this, but said only, "Thank you."
"I can tell you the cell's GPS functions are operating properly." Lewis handed Kilgore a full-color, topographical printout on fine, slick eleven-by-seventeen paper. "From this we know he spent over ten hours here." Lewis pointed to a spot near San Rafael. "At his hotel. His last call to you came from there. Then he goes north on 101, east on 37, and north again toward Sonoma." Lewis traced the route. "He stopped for a moment here, then for a much longer stop at an address in the Temelec subdivision, which checks out as the residence of Dr. Frank Harper."
Kilgore followed this silently.
"The phone remained at Harper's for more than five hours, traveled east, then north, and has been stationary since then, right here." He pointed to a series of almost concentric topographical elevation lines west of the Silverado Trail in Napa Valley.
"Braxton's estate," Kilgore said. "Figures. They have a meeting this afternoon." He thought silently for a moment. "Okay, here's how I want you to handle this. Pull a squad together who've trained in Al Qaeda tactics and give them everything a well-funded terrorist cell can get hold of—data, plans from the county, photographs from the French surveillance satellites, leaks from German intelligence—that sort of thing, and start them on planning an intrusion.
"Also, pull together another squad who'll gather everything we have and have them report to me. Put a fire wall between the two groups. Have the first one rent an office or something in the area, set up their operations. Keep this hermetic, no notifications to anybody outside this organization."
"Sir," Lewis said. "Who do you want commanding the squad?"
"You."
"Sir." Lewis smiled.
"Okay. How about the Mississippi situation?"
"The usual cock-up," Lewis said. "The Customs Service weenies are running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off, only twice as fast and half as smart."
"You do know, don't you, that Brown is one of Braxton's men?"
"Nobody's perfect, sir," Lewis said evenly. "The General can't know everything. That's why people like us need to be at our best and weed out the bad apples."
"Well said."
"Thank you, sir," Lewis said, then continued his report. "The fire in Itta Bena spread to a whole row of buildings and burned way past dawn. Brown's assault team caught the blame, and the lawyers are standing in line to file lawsuits. Shanker's family's at the head of the line. He was quite an admired lawyer and beloved figure around those parts, and there was a near riot around the hotel where Homeland Security was staying.
"The Leflore County sheriff, the police chief in Itta Bena, and a bunch of others drove down to Jackson to complain to the senators and the U.S. attorney there, and I understand they're filling some sort of legal action as well. The networks have it, news vans and cameras everywhere. Photos of Stone and Thompson have hit everywhere, but any reporter with an IQ larger than his shoe size is asking embarrassing questions that should eventually discredit David Brown and his Customs assholes."
Kilgore smiled broadly then. Bill Lewis carried a long railroad-siding of a scar along the left side of his abdomen where a trigger-happy Customs agent had shot him during a joint-task-force raid on a bunch of innocent Muslims in Virginia. David Brown had instigated the raid on fabricated intelligence. Kilgore had opposed Task Force 86M's participation in the raid and had relented only after direct orders from the Pentagon. There had been rumors Lewis had deliberately been shot in retaliation, but given Customs' habitual inability to shoot straight, proving it would be impossible.
"They making any progress finding Stone and Thompson?"
Lewis shrugged. "A little. They're working a family tree like what caught Saddam—you know, a chart of everybody he ever knew, hoping it will lead them to Stone. They figure he's headed to Jackson."
"So what do you think of the questions the media are asking."
"I don't have enough data to form an operational conclusion on it yet."
"Uh-huh," Kilgore said slowly. "Do you have a personal opinion?"
Lewis nodded. "The whole thing stinks. I've looked at the records. NSA sent us the voice recordings of the radio conversations starting with Stone's Mayday off Marina del Rey." Lewis shook his head. "This looks like some sort of frame-up cobbled out of bits and pieces. It reminds me of Brown's bogus raids against those Muslim groups in Virginia."
"This doesn't involve Brown or Customs. This was some Army folks from the Technical Escort Unit."
"But, remember, they've been lobbying for Homeland Security budget funds themselves. I spent a little extracurricular time and pulled some records on the colonel who ran the Marina del Rey operation and… " Lewis smiled.
"And?"
"He served on active duty with Braxton."
"I see where this is headed."
"And so did Brown."
"Good work, Bill." Kilgore slapped him on the shoulder. "I'll take over control of the Mississippi operation so you can pull together the Napa stuff."
While Rex and Tyrone collected the remaining items on our list, Anita steered us first into the visitors' lot northwest of the main entrance of the four-story, calf-shit-brindle, brick-sided Veterans Administration hospital. Old men in wheelchairs and luckier ones with walkers parked themselves along the sidewalks, accompanied by family, nurses, and comrades. All smoked cigarettes.
Jasmine asked Tyrone.
"Yep." He bent over and worked at the buttons on the Garmin. "And here as well." We all studied the building as Anita drove into the north lot, then east, and made a
U-turn by the electrical power transformer substation supplying the hospital. Huge highvoltage cables sloped down from the main towers at one side, and smaller, lower-voltage lines led to the hospital.
"Obviously every room and critical care patient as well as the operating rooms and emergency areas have power from the generator. But the police inside don't.
"The police office is on the first floor, to the right, past the main entrance," Anita said as she drove us along a two-lane road heading west through the University Medical Center complex. Finally, she brought us around a large block and parked in front of Murrah High School across the freeway from the VA to study it better. Anita pulled a sheet of paper from the seat beside her and held it up for Jasmine and me.
"I snapped this with my little Canon digital camera when I came by early this morning to visit one of my patients." She handed us the paper. It showed the front of the VA with Darryl Talmadge's room window outlined in thick pen.
"He's in a locked room guarded by totally bored MPs outside the door."
"Sidearms only?"
She nodded.
"Who has the key? The charge nurse?"
"Nope," Anita said. "It's with a captain from something called the Technical Escort Unit, bivouacked in the room next to Talmadge." Anita leaned over and pointed to the room east of Talmadge's.
"Now for the hard part," Anita said as she drove the Suburban back to Woodrow Wilson Avenue and headed for Hawkins Field, our unanimous first choice for stealing a helicopter. As expected, the airfield offered a wide choice of Bell JetRangers, the aircraft Jasmine had flown in Los Angeles for television news crews. But Hawkins crawled with security and too many people.
"Okay, plan B," Jasmine said, little knowing we would eventually run through plans C through BB as the pressure of unrelieved frustration built toward dark. For more than five hours, we crisscrossed Hinds, Madison, Rankin, and parts of Yazoo County, north past Canton and way over toward Flora and Pocahontas, south down to Byram, and finally southeast of Brandon. We found the better the airport, like Campbell Field in Madison, the more helicopters were there and the better the security.
Using an aviation map and data earlier downloaded off AirNav.com, Jasmine directed Anita to smaller and smaller fields, private airports with names like Supplejack, Root Hog, and Petrified Forest.
"Getting warm," Jasmine would say every time we'd close in on a smaller airstrip because we'd find crop dusters there, but so far no helicopters, just fixed-wing Dromader MI8s, Cessna Ag Huskies, and the occasional Ag Cat and an Ayres Thrush.
"There should be more helicopters," Jasmine said now as Anita shifted the Suburban into four-wheel drive and charted a slippery course down a narrow, tree-lined lane paved with mud from summer rains. "Mama and I won a couple of dozen lawsuits for families and school districts when fixed-wing aircraft oversprayed pesticides and seriously exposed children. And we have more and more organic farmers who will sue at the slightest hint of pesticide on their fields. Helicopters are more expensive for aerial application, but the mere threat of legal action has offered a real financial incentive to use choppers instead."
As we mulled this over, the trees gave way suddenly to a pasture.
"Eureka!" Jasmine said.
Anita eased off the accelerator
"Don't slow too much," I said. "We don't want to stick in anybody's memory."
"Okay, over there, at the far edge," Jasmine pointed. "That's a Bell B3. It'll do perfectly. I can hot-wire it in a second." She turned toward Tyrone. "Got the waypoint?"
"Yes, ma'am. Yes indeedy!"
As we approached the trees at the pasture's far edge, a deep banging, popping racket thundered down on us from above. Instants later an old bubble-nosed helicopter with an Erector-set tail burst low over the trees and made its way toward the pasture. It looked like one of the dragonfly rescue copters from an old
M*A*S*H
episode, but instead of a litter for wounded soldiers, this one had a long pipelike array extending left and right below the cockpit. Jasmine turned and craned her head up to follow it. The engine missed an ignition stroke and left a stutter as the sound faded.
"What a relic," I said as we entered the trees again.
"Not really." Jasmine shook her head. "More like a classic. That's a Bell model 47," she said. The engine stuttered again. "Needs a tune-up."
"Belongs in a museum," Tyrone said.
Jasmine laughed. "A lot of flight schools still use them. I learned rotary wing in one." She read the surprise on my face. "A lot of small operators who have to transition from fixed to rotary wing still use the 47 because they're cheap. Bell 47 clubs all over the world buy these, restore them, have races, and fawn over them like vintage Corvettes. The 47's a damn good bucket of bolts if you take care of it."
"And if you don't?"
Jasmine shrugged. "They crash a lot."
Jack Kilgore had finished off the sixteen-ounce tub of bad convenience-store coffee when his encrypted phone rang. He grimaced at the last swallow of thin acidic crap and said a small prayer of thanks he'd been able to drink it in a safe, warm, dry place free of incoming rounds.
"Kilgore."
"Barner here, sir. We have a lead on our targets."
"Excellent. Tell me about it."
The helicopters were gone.
Everything depended on stealing a chopper. Everything.
But when we returned to the GPS waypoint for the helicopters shortly before 3:00
A.M., both helicopters were gone. Anita stopped the Suburban and we all strained our eyes for a glimpse of a helicopter in the empty cow pasture intermittently lit as clouds hurried across the face of the setting moon.