Chapter 6

I left to find Sally and found her looking for me. “C’mon, stud, Dana’s waiting for you to plant a little one in her womb,” she said as she grabbed my hand and pulled me towards my room.

“What?” she asked when I stopped.

“I need to show you something first. It should only take a minute,” I said and pulled her into Don’s study.

She smiled sheepishly at Don and then noticed the case I turned towards her. “What’s that?” she gasped, seeing the coins.

“That’s part of what we collected from the two guys we captured last night. One of those cases is ours. I asked Don to keep it in the family vault for now. He plans to have a vault built in our new home.”

“That’s a fortune,” she gasped.

“And we’ll leave it alone unless there’s an emergency. Unlike paper and electronic currency, these just become more valuable each year,” I explained.

“It will make me feel better knowing that we have such a huge reserve,” she said, kissing me lightly on the lips. “I don’t mean to be rude, but there’s a horny, fertile concubine waiting for Jim,” Sally told Don, blushing.

He waved us off, laughing.

I guess that Don liked the idea. I later heard that he went into the dining room where the women were all gathered and went over to Stephanie. “I have something for you by way of an apology for what I did yesterday,” he told her. Evidently, she squealed excitedly and dragged him to the bedroom when he showed her the unit to deactivate her birth control implant. I also heard that Mom and Aunt Peggy went with them to make sure he did it right. Somehow, their devices were also turned off. I guess that Lacey, our two-year-old half-brother Zachary, and I will have another sibling. He or she will probably have half-siblings and nieces or nephews the same age.

I woke up to Liv’s lips gently caressing my face. “Did you have a good nap?” she asked teasingly.

“I can show you how good it was,” I teased back, pulling her down on top of me.

“Show me later,” she giggled. “Dinner is ready, and Don wants to talk to you,” she said, stealing one last kiss and giggling before jumping back out of my reach.

Don laughed when I found him. “Bedhead,” he explained, pointing at me. I ran my fingers through the messed-up hair and shrugged.

“Our friend from last night asked if we’d be willing to help capture and interrogate the next higher boss in the chain. The Captain and his brother separately identified him and where he stays. They warned that he has military grade sensors all around his property, more sophisticated than the army base does.”

“How’d he find us?” I asked.

“He asked the State Police Commander to contact the person who contacted him and so on until the Sheriff commed me,” he chuckled. “Considering how easily he could have asked for and been given our identities, he’s trying hard to not find out who we are.”

“Good,” I replied. “What time?”

“I suggested meeting them at zero hundred hours. He said they’d meet us at the same place we met last night, except in New Orleans.”

“Okay, that’ll give me time to catch a couple hours’ sleep,” I replied. Don called the General back using a special com unit made by the company he works for. It displays no identifying information of the caller, and the location can’t be tracked because the information is stripped when the call is made. He gave the General the number to use to contact him and said to call him “Cajun.” He agreed that we’d meet at midnight in New Orleans. I recognized the name Cajun as the handle his fellow troops had given him when he was in the service. I’d seen it on the cloth cover from his helmet that he brought home after he finished his tour of duty.

“Cajun and Gator, huh?” I asked Don. “Sounds like the name of a bad televid show,” I chuckled. I guess that hit his funny bone because he got a good laugh out of it.

Sally looked at me expectantly, but I saw Aunt Peggy off to my side shaking her head at Sally and making a zipping motion across her lips. “They will tell us what they can, when they can,” she explained to everyone in the room as she ushered us all to the dinner table.

After dinner, the ladies dragged me off to bed again, not to infer that I put up any resistance. I did manage to catch a couple hours’ sleep before my com unit’s alarm woke me up. “Be careful,” Sally admonished me nervously as she gave me a parting kiss and a tight hug, as did several of the other women. Half an hour later, I was showered, dressed, and ready to go. Don led me out to the armory where we loaded each grav sled with ten pencil sticks and a second fusion energy source meant to power a directed EMP weapon capable of disabling an escaping vehicle. He also locked in two long magazines of 10 mm rounds for each of the two silenced onboard automatic rifles.

We both donned battle armor and his company’s newest LiCHDICH (pronounced Litch-Ditch), or LIghtweight Composite Heads-up Display Integrated Combat Helmet. The helmet itself weighed less than four hundred grams, including the face shield and radio. We added laser communication equipment and a battle-cam, as well as independent and integrated targeting systems. I noted proudly that someone had painted “GATOR” across the front of my helmet and included a drawing.

The “Gator” they drew had a green body sculpted like a weightlifter with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and muscular arms and legs. It had camouflage colored skin, full body armor, and carried a LiCHDICH in the crook of its left arm. It also wore a combat vest and sidearm and had a combat rifle slung over each shoulder.

I know that carrying two rifles isn’t practical, but everyone in the family has seen me do it on my way to the grav sled when I go hunting. Once aboard the grav sled, both rifles were secured in racks inside the sled until I needed one of them. Even though it was impractical to carry both like the drawing showed, it looked intimidating.

“Trudy did that for you after you went to sleep. As you know, she’s quite the artist,” Don said when he saw me looking at the “Gator.”

“I’ll have to thank her in the morning,” I replied emotionally.

The composites used in the face shield and the helmet were the latest ones developed for stopping ballistic projectiles. A hit from a 15-mm round would leave you with a headache, and might scratch the surface, but nothing worse. The independent and integrated targeting systems worked with both the new handheld assault weapons and the targeting system installed on the grav sled. I was familiar with the setup since the independent targeting system was exactly like the one on the grav sled that I used when hunting. The helmet would combine both systems if I used a handheld weapon while still on the sled. If I used the sled’s weapons, all targeting information appeared on my visor’s HUD.

One nice thing about adding the sled’s targeting system is that I can zoom in the “scope” so that I can hit the center of a bullseye at sixteen hundred meters with the 11 mm or 13 mm rifles. Normally, I only use those rifles when I’m after bears or large gators.

Communications include both ultra-short-band radio for close communication and a laser communicator for longer distances. The wearer can determine the range for the ultra-short-band radio from ten to four hundred meters. Nobody beyond that range can detect the short-range radio transmissions. How? I have no idea. While I understand the basics of physics and do well in the classes, advanced physics isn’t one of my best subjects. Laser transmissions can be used from person to person, or by transmitting directly to a drone or satellites so they are undetectable. I was impressed with the helmet’s capabilities and told Don so.

We arrived well before zero hundred hours and met the General at the State Police headquarters in New Orleans. Twenty-four MPs and six FBI agents accompanied him. The MPs set out in a dozen S-TAC’s, their latest armored assault vehicle and troop carrier, each vehicle taking a different route to their assigned location surrounding the new criminal base of operations being established in New Orleans. The original criminal base just outside of Atlanta was still in use but was due to be shut down and vacated within a week. Once we signaled the Army, they would shut down all communications, including radio and laser transmissions from the New Orleans area.

Shortly after midnight Sunday morning...

Don and I arrived outside the criminals’ new compound at 0015, well before the MPs would be in position. While Don stood guard, I relaxed and let my consciousness flow out towards the base, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

I maintained a running commentary to Don, letting him know what I saw and what I heard. He stopped me when I commented about the newest sensors along the west side of the complex. Some sort of passive sensors had been installed but hadn’t been hooked up yet.

“What kind of sensors?” he asked.

It took me several minutes of listening in to learn that the sensors measured background cosmic radiation. “Don’t that beat all?” Don said amusedly. He explained that anything going over the sensors, even a cloaked grav sled, would momentarily decrease the level of background cosmic radiation, alerting them that there were cloaked or stealth intruders. Even cloaked high-altitude aircraft could set it off.

I also learned that they were expecting four kidnap teams tonight. Each would deliver a captured woman sometime between 0300 and 0500. They had no idea that one team had been compromised because there was to be no communication before they reached the compound. The delivery dates and times had been set when the assignments were made.

By 0030 hours, we’d finalized our plan of attack and updated the General. We were prepared and ready to attack when our com signals to the general went out, right on time. Don zipped over the fence first, just to be sure the sensors really were inactive. Once he was safely above the building complex, I followed, turning left along the wide corridor between the sensors and the building, targeting the sixteen sentries patrolling the grounds.

By the time Don was inside the main building, I’d taken out most of the sentries. The remaining four had taken defensive positions in what appeared to be a small blockhouse next to one of the doors leading inside the complex.

The pencil sticks were designed to attack small aircraft and grav sleds. They could still disable larger aircraft with a carefully aimed strike in areas such as a fuel tank, wing, or the tail, which could cause the craft to crash or explode. Otherwise, they merely hampered the aircraft’s maneuverability, which makes it a sitting duck for the second shot or forces the craft to return to base.

As such, it took four pencil sticks to breach the blockhouse and kill the guards inside. Once the outside was clear, I mentally scanned the building’s perimeter again, and then beyond the perimeter of the base, making sure that no reinforcements for the bad guys were coming from behind us.

Unlike Don, who had managed to electronically bypass the security locks on the door he used, I used brute force. I knew that Don was inside on the far side of the building, so I burned the lock and hinges off my door with high temp cord. Attaching a rope to the door handle, I backed the sled away twenty meters and pulled the door open in case it was booby trapped and I missed detecting the threat. Fortunately, it wasn’t.

After the breaching practices Don and I had done, I’d learned to remove the automatic rifle’s extended barrel, leaving only the barrel stub. That made it easier to turn and otherwise maneuver in the confines of a building. Once again, I cleared my mind and sent my consciousness out to search the building. Six men remained inside, all locked in the heavily fortified communications room.

Even knowing where they were, I made my way through the building cautiously, watching mentally and physically for any booby traps, again not finding any. When I reached the communications room, I put high temp cord around the locks, but also put a shaped charge of Tredex against the door to blow it inward. A sensor would trigger the charge if anyone opened the door from inside. I put a much larger charge of Tredex against the outside wall across the room from the main door, one large enough to blow a hole in the wall and damage or destroy the communications gear inside, as well as sever the room’s power connection.

Then I headed for Don’s position. Since the radios were still down, I used the dog whistle we each carried. Nobody else could hear it, but the sensors in our helmets were configured to pick it up and make it audible. I gave the whistle sequence that let him know everything was okay here and he replied. When I was close to him, I whistled our IFF signal, getting a reply. I kept doing it until I could physically see him, and he acknowledged my wave.

“Check this out,” he said, motioning to the door of a large vault. He’d obviously burned his way through the locking mechanism since it was gone, and the vault door stood open.

“How do you know that nobody else is hiding in the halls?” I asked.

He pulled a small cube from a pouch, one I hadn’t seen him bring. “I put one of these at the end of each corridor as I made my way through the building. They let me see anything that enters the corridor, even if the corridor is full of smoke. I had to make sure each one was linked to the next one to transmit the signal via laser. Every view projects onto the HUD of my face shield. If something moves, the view flashes to let me know. I saw everything you did since you stepped inside the building,” he explained.

“Oh,” I replied, realizing that I should have known he had everything under control. I also realized that he could have watched everything by expanding his consciousness the same way I did.

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed when I looked inside the vault. “There’s enough drugs in there to keep everyone in the state stoned for a month.”

“And enough weapons and munitions for a small army,” Don added. “Let’s finish rounding up the last six creeps and file a claim for what we want in there,” Don said.

“Claim?” I asked.

“Yup, we’re ‘civilian contractors’ even though we’re doing this for free. That means we can claim three quarters of the loot we capture, just like they let the elite forces do during their missions,” he explained.

“Great, you’ll want some of those assault rifles and sniper rifles for the boys,” I commented.

“Still thinking ahead I see,” he chuckled.

I explained how I’d rigged the explosives and he nodded.

“Blow the door to make sure they’re hiding behind the communications equipment. Then blow the charge against the wall behind the communications equipment. That should at least stun them. You and I can each use a different opening to enter the room to capture any survivors,” Don said.

There were three survivors when we reached them. Two were unconscious or stunned and the third was buried under rubble from the collapsed wall. Blowing the wall also cut the power to the room. Don guarded the three prisoners while I went back outside and launched a single green flare, aiming it towards the west side of the complex to let the MPs and FBI know to enter from that side. I met them at the west gate.

“Everything okay?” the General asked.

“For us, yes; not so much for the bad guys,” I chuckled. “We’ve got three prisoners.”

“Damn,” one of the MPs whistled when he saw the partially destroyed blockhouse.

“Nice,” another commented when he saw where I had burned the lock and hinges off the door.

I stopped the General and adjusted the HUD on the helmet Don loaned him so it was hooked up to the cameras inside. He followed me to the control room where the MPs took charge of the three prisoners. Two were led away on unsteady feet and the third had to be carried out on a stretcher.

Don took the General to the vault and showed him what was visible. “I’d like the assault rifles and two dozen sniper rifles, as well as all the ammo for both. Have two of each mortar and all the mortar rounds, as well as the RPGs sent to the Sheriff in Blanc Bayou. I’ll split the assault rifles, sniper rifles, RPGs, and ammo with him,” Don told the General.

“Mortars?” The General asked.

“Gotta train the boys,” Don said, jabbing his thumb towards me.

“Let me recommend that you store the heavy weapons and ordnance at the base so you can use the facilities there to train your boys in a controlled environment,” the General suggested.

“That sounds reasonable. The second vault is where the money is stashed. If you have anyone that can open it, the army can keep the currency and electronic money. I’ll take our portion in the bullion and gems. If you don’t have anyone, I know a couple of guys who can open the door without damaging it, or I’ll let Gator try his hand at it after we deal with the Atlanta base. I’d like to keep the door, too. That means we’ll also need to keep the frame, since they are a single unit,” Don explained.

“You want a vault door?” the General asked incredulously.

“My boy just got married this morning and we’re building him a house with a big vault for when he goes to China,” Don replied.

“You think he’ll be in elite forces?” the General asked, looking me over.

“He’s better now than I was when I finished my years in the Marine Raiders,” Don said proudly.

“You think that he’ll terrorize the Chinese as badly as you did?” the General laughed.

“No, I’m counting on him to bring the Chinese to their knees so that no more of our boys die over there. A hundred years from now, Chinese mothers will whisper to their children that they’d better behave, or Gator will get them,” he said without the slightest hint of a smile.

“If anybody besides you told me that, I’d ignore the statement. Given your track record, I can only hope that he enlists soon,” the General said soberly.

“Two years, he just turned sixteen,” Don replied.

“Let me know if I can help when he’s ready,” the General replied, “and I’ll let you open the vault door. No telling how long it would take the army to get someone here who can do it without explosives.”

“We’ll be back for it. Let General Blacknell know that we’ll meet him at the rendezvous in about thirty minutes,” Don said once we got outside and used our clickers to recall our cloaked grav sleds. “And don’t forget that they are expecting three deliveries of women here tonight,” he added right before snapping a salute and then climbing onto his sled. I followed suit and we jetted into the night sky.

“Jesus!” General Blacknell gasped when we uncloaked next to him twenty-eight minutes later. He had fifty MPs and two dozen FBI agents with him. Twenty S-TACs and ten ambulances were parked nearby.

“General Conklin says that you two kicked ass and took names over there,” he said. “Hopefully, you can do the same here.”

“We’ll do our best,” Don promised. The General showed us reconnaissance photos of the base. It was the same size and appeared to have an identical layout. When we zoomed in on various sections, we could see the field of passive sensors just inside the fence.

“I’ll bet an EMP would fry the sensors. It might even shut down more electronics inside the bunker, depending on how well they’re shielded,” I suggested.

“Oh, yeah,” Don chuckled. “You do your thing so we know what we’re up against. Then, we’ll knock out the south and east sensor fields and enter the base from the east. You circle around the compound to the north and I’ll head south and west taking out the sentries. Once the outside is clear, you can do your thing again to check inside and we’ll breach the west entrance like you did earlier.”

I climbed back on the sled and cloaked because I didn’t really want anyone watching me, guessing about what I could do. Despite the adrenaline rush that was starting again, I was easily able to expand my consciousness out far enough to check the compound. I also remembered to check the area outside the compound searching for possible reinforcements that could sneak in behind us. I was searching just half a klick outside the compound and found nothing except a few people working in small manufacturing facilities and warehouses.

The compound had twenty-two guards patrolling the building’s perimeter. Four of them had dogs with them. I was surprised when the dogs sensed me and started looking around for me, although they seemed to be looking for a friend.