Chapter 20 -- HDISMSUNROABHBIQ
"OK," Donald said, "let's see what we have."
He was sitting in his office, one of the unused rooms in Gordon's house. His
own quarters were on that wing of the house, and most of his work was done
there. Jessica, Tommy and Carter were there, with the poster board drawing on
which they had sketched out a plan.
"Here," Jessica said, indicating the location of Little Rock on the map, "is
our starting point. Or somewhere in the area. We are at this point
working on the assumption that our subject will be wearing a monitoring device. If
he isn't, that makes it a lot easier, but we have to plan for it."
"What's the effect, if he is?" asked Donald.
Jessica looked at Darrell.
"If he is wearing a monitor, it's likely to be of the type used for people
under house arrest, or something similar. It can track your movements and
report if you get too far outside a certain area. If he
leaves town, they'll know where he is and go get him."
"So he would have to remove it," said Donald. "Is that difficult?"
"No," Carter replied. "It can be cut off quickly, most likely like cutting a
heavy watch band. But it will immediately send an alarm."
"So, it's removed on the way to the pickup point," said Jessica. "We'll want
him to get away from his last reported position quickly, before a cordon can be
put in place. So maybe on a freeway headed for the pickup point."
"Being in a car on a freeway, he would be miles from the place where the
monitor is discarded before they get after him," Carter said. "Especially if
it's a busy night for cops. So a weekend night would be good."
"So we're looking at getting him out of the city, to a pickup point here."
Jessica pointed to an area northeast of the city. "We would need to scout the
area, see what the best route is. It looks like, Dad, you may know this - we're
looking at the area of the Brave Shield freehold. I know it's several big
farmers in this area" - she indicated the area northeast of Little Rock - "and
wonder if any of those farms have airstrips for crop dusters, something like
that."
Donald looked at the map.
"I know a couple of them fairly well," he said. "Which is to say I've met
them a few times at Council meetings. In fact, Howard Taylor was at this last
one. He, and about a half dozen big rice farmers out there, with some family
and friends, are Brave Shield. I believe most of them have aircraft, housed
at airstrips where they operate their crop dusters. It has a pretty good runway -
a couple of them have fair-sized planes, I know a couple of twin engine jobs."
"That's better than a grass field," said Tommy. "We were thinking about the
Bronze Bull group doing the flight. Do you think it would be better to see if
one of the Brave Shield guys could do it?"
"We probably could," said Donald. "Of course the Bulls might not like being
left out. Some of them are old Air Force guys who still like to get some
hours in. Both groups are close to Little Rock, but if we pull it off there
wouldn't be any connection. And, it gives both groups a chance to participate."
"So," Darrell said, "we have a plane take off from, where is the Hot Springs
point - the local airport?"
"No," Donald replied, "better than that. About a half dozen or so of the members
live on large contiguously situated estates. They have a private runway with
hangars, fuel, everything needed to operate privately. Needless to say, they've
recruited some former Air Force types to maintain the aircraft. So there's no
problem with timing, or being tracked."
"So, let's see what we have so far," said Carter. "Our transport could take
off any time that will put it at Brave Shield before our passenger arrives.
That's good flexibility to have - we were thinking a touch-and-go on a grass
strip, only with a stop for the passenger to board. This is definitely better.
What type of aircraft are we talking about, range-wise?"
"I've flown some with Jerry Yarborough, he's a retired Air Force type," Donald said. A-10
pilot back in the nineties. He's got a, I believe, Piper Comanche. Single-engine but with
a pretty good range. We flew out to a meeting in Idaho once.
We stopped for fuel once going and coming. He said it was a little out of his
range, which was about a thousand miles."
"This is well under that," Carter said. "How about the next part. From Brave
Shield to here," indicating the location of Pittsburgh, Kansas. "We seem to
have a contact out there - someone who could provide a drop-off and turnaround
for the aircraft. Do you know much about him?"
"That would be Jim Henderson. A bit of a mystery, even to us, and we're
pretty good at finding out things. Our investigations turned up a lot of
gossip, but nothing substantial. The usual rumors about criminal
connections, mostly, but he looks pretty clean. He's done some things for us.
The few times I've been around him, I had the feeling he was sending some sort
of signal, almost as if he knew something about us, not sure what it was. But
for this, I believe it would work. The only part that's dodgy is driving
through Kansas City."
"Yeah," Carter said. "The other way would be going over to Springfield and
taking the usual route up from there. I believe the KC route is better, with
heavy traffic to get lost in. And if we added a couple of cars, in case we
need a distraction, interference, whatever. I believe the best use for more cars
would be spotters at front and rear. Spot trouble before it finds you."
"I would think Jim could help us out," Donald said. "He has some guys who work for him,
don't seem to be working at anything except whatever errands he happens to
have come up. I don't know if he knows where we live - I suspect he does.
But we can have them peel off and turn back once they're a few miles out, say
at Chillicothe."
"So," said Jessica, "that leaves the problem of where to put him. He'll have
to have agreed to give up his old life completely, we provide a new identity,
and he essentially lives here for the foreseeable future. We can use one of
the houses over on the junkyard road. I'm guessing we have ready access to an
identity, and the Council is willing to use one for this."
"They're agreeable to that. It's an essential element," Donald said. "We have,
at any given time, some on the shelf, constantly maintained as if they were
real people - driver's license, credit cards, bank accounts, the works. Not
many of them - it takes money and manpower to keep them up, but we select one
for a man his age and he can step into it. We've disappeared people before,
with no problems. Probably about as good as the government's witness protection."
"So all we have to do is get him to agree," said Jessica.
"He has to be charged with something first," Carter said. "But I suspect that's
pretty much a done deal. There are already demands for a grand jury, and the
government down there is in the bag. They'll almost certainly do it. The
rest is a formality."
"So we'll be involving Brass Bull and Brave Shield, and doing a deal with Jim," said Donald.
His part is easy, refuel the plane and provide a couple of blockers. We'll
need to set up a code for our communications - even with our encrypted
channels we need our messages scrambled."
"How do we do that?" asked Carter.
"There's an unbreakable code, and only one as far as anyone knows. Apparently
it's only practical for short messages, because of the way it works. Let's see,
we'll need code pads for all three freeholds, and Jim. We'll probably have to
show him how to use it - we freeholders know. Some of us anyway."
"We can get that done," said Jessica. "We need to figure out an efficient way
to minimize the number of messages we have to pass."
She explained the code to Carter.
"It's completely secure if used right," she said. "It's been used in espionage
and such businesses for a long time. But it only works if a different code
and key pair are used for each message, and the code has to be a random
pattern with no way to find a pattern. And you have to distribute the keys
ahead of time.
"We can do it with a dozen or so messages. We'd need to set up how to do it,
and then when it's time to pull the trigger, it's pretty much on autopilot."
Over the next few days they tuned the plan, and it was time to wait. And they
didn't have to wait long - within a few weeks the grand jury had done its work
and delivered the expected result. The cop who fired the fatal shot was
charged with second-degree murder, the other a handful of other charges -
civil rights violations and the like.
"You can bet the prosecutor wrote it up and the grand jury rubber-stamped it,"
Carter said. "That's the way it's always done. The grand jury gets in two or
three weeks of slacking off at the taxpayers expense, meals included, and
pretend to be actually doing something."
"Any trial date?" Tommy asked.
"It's not set yet," said Carter. "if may be a week or more before they set a
date. And it'll probably be close to a year at least before the trial."
"In this case," Jessica said, "the slow wheels of injustice work in our favor.
We've got plenty of time to prepare."
The demonstrations stopped, as if on cue, once the indictments were announced.
The two cops were arrested, arraigned, and released on bail. No one seemed to
notice who put up the money - in any case they would not have made the
connection. The Council had millions in their bank accounts, and arranged
bail throughout a convenient cutout.
They began to set up the plan immediately. Jessica and Carter went down to
Arkansas, driving through Little Rock on the way, assessing the area. Both
found it depressing, as they did most cities. Little Rock wasn't even one of
the larger ones, and it showed the same decay.
"We'll probably have to spend some time here, getting set up," said Jessica.
"You and I will be making contact and getting him ready to jump. If he's
willing."
"We only planned on one," Carter said. "I guess we should have known the other
one wouldn't get off. Not only do I not like leaving him behind - our man
could let something slip."
"Yeah," said Jessica. "But he's looking at a very light sentence at worst, and
more likely having the charges dismissed before the trial. But they almost
always charge anyone involved with something. As for him leaking, he won't
really have anything except instructions to be in a certain place at a certain
time, and he'll only get that a few hours before departure."
Continuing on to Hot Springs, they located the Brass Bull freehold and met a
couple of the leaders. One of them was Jerry Yarborough, the pilot Donald had
mentioned, the other was a weathered army colonel.
"Hi," Jerry said, extending his hand to Jessica. "So your Don's daughter.
Good to meet you. Darrell, welcome to the club. Don told me a bit about you,
so I can see this has something of a personal meaning to you, even if I can't
ever completely appreciate your experience. This is Colonel Morgan Sheppard,
late of the U.S. Army, First ID."
Colonel Sheppard looked every bit the soldier, and he supposed Jerry looked
like a pilot. He guessed that pilots spent most of their time flying or in
offices or other related facilities when they weren't flying.
They were in a large office in Jerry's house, interestingly almost devoid of
air force memorabilia - a large detailed model of an A-10, several pictures,
and that was about it. Jessica spread the drawing out on a table and they
gathered around.
"Don talked about a night flight to somewhere in rural Kansas," Jerry said,
"by way of the Brave Shield installation. I know the area, flown in there a
few times putting in some hours. It should be easy - they'll have to set up
some runway lights. I can set my Comanche down and roll down to the end of
the runway, have the passenger jump in and we're off. Do it right and I'm on
the ground three or four minutes.
"Then, it looks like, we've got a big lazy left turn over southern Missouri,
and what looks the middle of nowhere, south of Kansas City. What's there?"
"A private runway, kind of like the ones you have here and a Brave Shield,"
Jessica replied. "The guy who owns the place does things for us occasionally and
doesn't ask questions. Essentially the same thing, except you refuel before
taking off - a round trip would be cutting it kind of close. Then it's a
straight shot back home."
"Looks easy enough," Jerry said. He looked at Colonel Sheppard.
"What happens to the passenger after he lands?" the Colonel asked. "Not that I
need to know."
"No problem there," said Jessica. "He'll be with us, for the foreseeable future,
as Darrell is. We could use some additional manpower, the way things are
developing. We were glad to get Darrell, but basically all we're doing at
this point is safeguarding some supplies - not that it isn't important but we
could be looking at a need for more security. And recruits are not easy to
find, as careful as we have to be."
"Yeah," said Colonel Sheppard. "We're basically a bunch of old soldiers and
airmen, mostly airmen, waiting for an assignment when the time comes."
"I'm guessing transporting things, and people, would be rather important in
that scenario," said Carter.
"That would be our biggest contribution," Jerry replied. "We've got a pretty good
fleet of aircraft - this will be a good test run. If you have time, it's
getting late, we can fly up to Brave Shield tomorrow, do a few touch-and-gos,
and look around a little."
They dined with Jerry and his wife, a son, and Colonel Sheppard. Sheppard was
a widower, and none of his children had joined him in his association with the
organization. Of the members of the freehold, only about half were married,
and just a handful had one or more children with them.
"A lot of military men end up losing their children, and often their wives, to
the pressures of the decaying society," Sheppard told them. "It started
getting bad with Vietnam, and the wars since then have only made it worse.
And in recent times, they've poisoned the armed forces with their political
machinations that it's hard to get good men. So they're taking whatever is
available, and probably they don't want good material."
Jerry's son Dale was also a pilot, but had elected not to follow his father
into the service, instead becoming a pilot for a charter service. "I get to
fly faster than dad did," he said, and they both laughed.
"The A-10 was a low and slow operator," said Jerry. "I've flown some of the private jets like Dale
does, and they're fun. But the A-10 was fun, too."
The next day Jessica and Carter accompanied Jerry and Dave out to the airfield.
They got into an old Piper Comanche, but so well maintained or perhaps
restored that it looked new. It was a short trip to Brave Shield, and they
performed three touch-and-gos before landing and taxiing to the small group of
buildings about halfway along the runway, where several men waited.
Shutting off the engine, Jerry and Dave deplaned behind Jessica and Carter.
Jerry made introductions and briefly discussed the mission.
They confirmed that they could have runway lights out - it was something they
had planned for and practiced a few times. It was early in the day, so it was
decided that Jessica and Carter would leave Brass Bull and drive to Brave
Shield, spending the night there. After a while they reboarded and Dave took
them up, out in a broad circle over northeast Arkansas and then back to Hot
Springs.
Taking their leave of Brass Bull, Jessica and Carter made the relatively short
drive to Brave Shield, meeting several of the members. After dinner they
stayed in the home of their host, a relatively young man who had taken over
operations of the family farm a few years earlier. His three siblings - a
brother and two sisters - were all in their twenties or early thirties. Their
mother was the quintessential southern hostess and they had an enjoyable
evening. Later, Carter and Jessica talked for a while before falling asleep.
"You could think we're just some normal people visiting with friends," he said
"instead of planning things that might, eventually, end up getting people killed."
"And it almost certainly will," she said, "but as someone once said, as long as
the right people get killed."
"Yeah," he said. "I wish I could have met someone like you in a different situation."
"Me too," she said.
For all her businesslike approach to everything, he suspected she was
hiding some pain. So am I, though, he thought.