Chapter 12
We found out later that the Interpol reward would be paid by cashier's check and was not taxable. The check arrived by registered mail, we had to drive to the post office to sign for it and show our driver's licenses then we took it to our bank. Three weeks later we made a series of big withdrawals of 50 dollar bills, we had to pre-arrange the withdrawal so the bank could get a special delivery of cash, pre-wrapped from the armored car company. We removed half a mil in fifties and added it to our collection at home. That's ten thousand fifty-dollar bills at one gram per bill is almost twenty two pounds of cash. I told David we might need to reinforce the shelf in the tac-room closet.
And while we researched what business to start David investigated the hot dog industry and business prospects on Dyer Street or some of the other primary north-south roads, and how El Paso was about licensing food carts and food trucks. Prospects for a simple start-up food business did not look good, so we gave up on that idea. I've seen where in some cities a hot dog cart at a good location can earn over $100k a year. But El Paso has a huge Hispanic population that prefers traditional Mex food over burgers, dogs, and pizza. We had to take that into consideration. We don't see too many taco stands going out of business these days.
After the big capture the attempt by national media to identify the people that caught Hamadei (and got the huge reward) was intense, one TV-news van parked in the street in front of our home. We closed all the curtains and stayed inside. Several days later the interest died down then news of a huge cash reward leaked and the TV news trucks re-appeared, by then we had stocked-up the kitchen and spent days in the basement getting caught up on house cleaning. I suggested to David that we have our home added to the list of places to be considered for tunneling. When he asked where the other end would go I paused and realized I had no clue, maybe we could be like Hogan's Heroes and have it end at a fake tree stump but there weren't any in the desert.
I really wanted to use a spider on the TV news satellite vans, our technology would make short work of their equipment, and the spiders would make it appear like equipment malfunctions. We had a few used spiders that were still in working condition, I could have done it at night. David reminded me their use like that might be considered illegal, so we talked about it but never tried it but we sure wanted to. Anything we did with the spiders would be seen by our office, used or new. All spider data passed through the case and was uplinked to a military satellite. Some day I'd like to take one of the used ones and take it apart. I have an idea for one they don't make that could be used for cutting wires and cables. It crawls out onto the specific wire, wraps its legs around it and slices a segment out of it.
We contemplated climbing over our back yard fence, which was a seven foot tall rock and mortar wall that ran down the entire block and part way between the neighbors too. We never met the people that lived behind us so we couldn't just go over the wall suddenly one day.
If we had been alerted and summoned to the airport our commander could easily get rid of the TV news trucks and their crews, but their interest didn't last long. They even used quadcopters to fly over our house and try to see our back yard but our sun visor above the yard kept it private, it's something like a giant venetian blind over the entire back yard because of David's garden, and our frequent hours in the hot tub with no clothes on. I'm sure the neighbors were pissed at all the traffic, especially when the news people wanted to ask them about us. To the media it was like someone winning a huge Powerball award but not wanting to appear in front of any cameras.
That weekend we were able to leave the house in the truck with the ATVs in back and play in the desert on our days off, we went back to Tularosa and camped at Three Rivers, New Mexico on Highway 54. We knew there was rain in the forecast but what we actually got was a very severe thunderstorm, the river in the campground overflowed its banks and we had to get in the truck to wait it out. Our camping gear got washed away but luckily our ATVs were still in the back of the truck.
The road that ran from Highway-54 back into the campground was washed out at one river crossing but we managed to drive across a farm field, cut a wire fence and with four wheel drive we made it back to the highway but the two mile drive turned into a three hour adventure in 4WD in the mud. I think that was the first time his truck was put into 4WD since he bought it.
Since Three Rivers was at the base of a huge mountain (Sierra Blanca Peak) we were worried about rockslides, so we had no choice but to leave during the storm. Turned out we waited too long, probably because we had no idea how much more rain was coming. There was no cell coverage in that park or even near the park.
We never got the chance to go see the petroglyph carvings. It would have been neat to have been at that campground back in July of 1945 because the Trinity Site was only 30 miles to the northwest.
Most Americans didn't know that central corridor of New Mexico along the Rio Grande was practically one military facility after another, after another, and most of it was leased from civilian owners. Lots of those ranges were also used for cattle grazing.
Three days later we flew to Oklahoma City to evaluate perimeter security at a natural gas electrical plant northeast of the city. It was built in the early-1980s but the security was like the ones in Colorado, they were in near total denial so we gave them a set of security guidelines. We did not design security systems but we critiqued existing ones. If they were highly substandard it almost made no sense to find all the flaws when they had nothing but flaws, so I wrote a set of standards and handed them a copy. The federal government ordered power utility owners to have independent evals done of their security, we were one of the recommended teams and our service was free. Since we did not sell systems we did not have a conflict of interest which was one reason why the DOE recommended us.
Their next step would be to contact a company to design a new perimeter alarm system that met the national standards for the newest threat assessments.
For routine trips like that we flew regular airlines or we could drive. It was a one-day drive to Oklahoma City but we flew anyway.
David didn't want to ride in my sports car because of how I insulted him trying to remember how to put his truck into 4WD in that grassy field near Tularosa during that huge thunderstorm. We had some great smoked pork ribs in Oklahoma City. Ribs, corn on the cob, coleslaw, and lots of draft beer. I think we both used almost an entire roll of paper towels!
Our next alert came weeks later and arrived with little information other than a `situation' at a suspension bridge in Illinois. Subsequent reports said a man with a Middle Eastern accent claimed he attached explosives to suspension bridge cables over the Mississippi River and was demanding the release of his cousin from a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, flown to Syria and set free. They had no record of that prisoner having relatives in the USA. He didn't demand money he just wanted his cousin released and flown to Damascus. He set a deadline of 30 hours to get him on the ground alive in Syria, the flight alone would take at least half that time.
I asked David if it was possible for any American airline to fly to Syria and he said no but there were scheduled flights from Atlanta to Cairo (or Istanbul) then to Damascus, they could fly him with an Air Marshall and un-handcuff him on touchdown in Damascus. What they did with him in Damascus was another matter. But maybe the guy knew he would be a hero back in his home country, depending on who controlled the airport when they landed.
Both of us admitted our ignorance about the politics and economics of Syria and we never believed what we saw on TV about that country. But we dropped what we were doing at home and grabbed our cases and drove to the airport PDQ. Like always, by the time we arrived the jet was en-route and due to land in fifteen minutes. We were going to be flown to a municipal airport near Alton, Illinois and picked up by the state police.
Loading both cases into the jet was never fun, we squeezed them between the seats and the fuselage on both sides, it was always a tight fit. Our folding case was built especially for two Batsuits, folded in half. It weighed about 29 pounds when loaded and locked. We also packed our machine guns in the suit case, which accounted for much of the weight because bullets were heavy.
The update we got en-route to Alton said the perp abandoned a car on the shoulder of the Clark Bridge at the west end and attached six devices to six cables on the bridge then got back in his car and hid in the back seat, nobody could see where he was or if he actually was still in the car. They also said it was possible he caught a ride off the bridge (possible accomplice) since early on they thought it was just a disabled vehicle until the bomb-threat (release my cousin and fly him to Damascus or I'll destroy your bridge) was called into the Alton Police Department.
Our jet ride was supposed to take about 54 minutes to wheels down in Alton, their weather was cold with rain in the forecast tonight. But when we arrived it was supposed to be sunny and cool.
We were supposed to land at the Saint Louis Regional Airport, runway 35, in East Alton, Illinois then go by helicopter to the command post in the Argosy Casino parking lot straight north of the bridge. The Mississippi river in that area curved towards the northwest so the casino sat straight north of the bridge.
The Illinois State Police already had four snipers at different locations covering the site but the bridge was so large and the river so wide there was little they could do considering the distance and the weather, which was why we got called.
We discussed the situation on the way to East Alton and considered using a quadcopter to carry spiders to the bridge. The Clark Bridge was so long it was doubtful one of our spiders could run that far to access the site and evaluate and then destroy the electrical systems on six bombs. We studied satellite maps of the area and decided it would likely exceed the distance capability of our spiders. The Mississippi River at that point was four thousand feet across.
Our discussion had to be done over Whispernet because we could not let the pilot hear us discuss capabilities of our spiders. We did not have a quadcopter but could have them flown-in, so after a ten minute review of the bridge and the distances involved we used our gear to contact the Pentagon and order an immediate delivery of two quadcopters, ones that were specially designed for use by our service. These had IR cameras and could carry three spiders at a time, they were also well known to be some of the quietest and longest flying drones available. The US Military had a similar type of drone that was still classified. I think they were made by the same company. One of the quads also had a radio spectrum analyzer on board.
We landed in East Alton (about 45 miles outside our territory) and were met by one guy in a suit and driven across the airport to a general aviation terminal where there was a four seat helicopter and pilot waiting. Within minutes he walked outside and started it and warmed it up, then motioned for us to climb in, buckle-up, and shut the doors.
We buckled in and within two minutes were airborne again and flying straight west towards the Mississippi River. The enormous brilliant white Clark Bridge in the sunshine was the most noticeable structure from 1,500 feet in the air.
If we had gone by car the ride might have taken an hour but we made it in less than fifteen minutes and landed in the parking lot of a riverboat casino that sat straight north of the bridge. The Illinois State Police had an incident command vehicle (a large trailer vehicle with lots of cameras and antennas on the top) and several other trucks parked in the lot with special cameras watching the bridge.
We were introduced to the commander and given a briefing. Basically, the situation was the same as we were told on the way to East Alton. One unknown perp, free his cousin and fly him to Damascus or say goodbye to the Clark Bridge.
"Is the threat realistic, does he have the means to take down the bridge?" I asked and interrupted the briefing because for the first two minutes everything he said we already knew.
"From what we know, the threat looks marginally viable, it appears six charges are fastened to six cables, but we've had no contact with the perp, and the state department has said they had no ability to release his relative from the prison due to his sentence and the situation, this is why we needed another wild card and the Pentagon said that's what you guys did. What can you do for us?"
We ignored his question and asked some of our own that got right to the point, "Have you identified the perp, or the explosive control systems at all?" David asked sounding slightly upset.
"We do not know who the suspect is, due to the distances involved we do not have any intelligence on the bombs or their controls. When the perp called Alton Police he said he was watching the bridge and if anyone got close to the bombs he'd set them off."
"Groovy. Do you have any large shipments going up or down the river any time soon?"
"No sir, all traffic was stopped 55 minutes ago." He answered David.
We looked at each other and told them we had more equipment on the way that should be here within twenty minutes, our first goal was to examine the devices to see if we could safely neutralize the bombs. And while that was going on we were going to see if anyone was inside the car and if the car was actually a part of the threat. I told the cops that there was some possibility the car was unrelated to the threat. It was possible after he drove onto the bridge and stopped, attached the bombs that the car simply refused to start so he hitched a ride off the bridge. It's not likely he wanted to stay on the bridge, but perhaps be nearby like a spectator, but stay within range to detonate his bombs.
The State Police commander seemed a bit upset by our announcement that the suspect was not our primary focus but we were here to end the situation quickly and prevent damage to the bridge since there was no immediate threat to people. As far as we could see this was a poorly planned act of economic terrorism.
Our conversation continued for a few more minutes when someone burst in the door and announced there was another incoming helicopter, "That's probably our gear," David announced and we both went outside to watch him land in the parking lot, this made six helicopters parked in the casino parking lot.
I used Whispernet to suggest to David that we should send someone into the casino and get dinner for us, those places usually had top notch food. He just chuckled at my suggestion and said we needed to concentrate on foiling this clown show before it got serious.
The chopper landed and the rotors began to slow, one man in a Navy dress uniform climbed out with two small cases. We immediately recognized him, someone we saw regularly in El Paso, he was a Pentagon weapons expert. We waved and handed over the cases and got back in the chopper and they immediately left in the direction of Chicago.
David and I set the cases down and opened one of them and unpacked the drone, it appeared to be ready to fly (as they should always be). I went inside the trailer again to ask for any photos they had of the car or the charges while David assembled the quadcopter and got it ready to fly while I got the controller powered on and ready to party.
They handed me a grainy still photo taken from a camera on a police chopper just before we arrived. There was a large four door car parked near the western most cables on the north side of the bridge, facing the west. It was parked on the narrow shoulder so the passenger side doors were too close to the side wall to open more than an inch or two. The driver's side window was open slightly, which told me the driver was probably a smoker. They could not get a readable image of the license plate because of the bridge structure.
I asked if the bridge used a plate reader and was told the system was down, so there were no plate images. He said the cable stayed portion of the bridge was not centered over the river, it sat on the Illinois side which put the car halfway across the river, the bridge and its approaches were just under a mile in length making it nearly impossible for most battery powered devices to reach.
I heard the whine of a quadcopter start up outside and we all watched the monitor as someone aimed a camera at David out in the parking lot as he flew the drone up to one hundred feet then south towards the bridge, out over the river, a long stretch above muddy brown water, I joined him moments later. David walked to the river side of the command trailer so he could easily drive and watch the display screen.
He flew directly towards the suspension portion of the bridge, slowly gaining altitude the entire way. The bridge was about a mile south of the casino parking lot. He stayed below bridge deck level as he approached the enormous white bridge. He flew under the deck and eyeballed the structure for people hiding, but we only saw bird nests.
On the south side of the bridge he flew very close to one of the bombs, it looked like it was zip tied in place holding it tightly around a deck support cable. He flew very close to photograph them in detail.
We saw five regular sticks of dynamite in dark red wrappers, wires ran to each stick from a small blue plastic box with a thin wire dangling out the side in the wind, presumably an antenna. Then he moved to the next two and saw all three on the south side looked the same, five sticks, five electrical blasting caps and a small plastic box with a wire dangling outside. They all looked homemade, except the sticks of dynamite.
Next he flew to the car and imaged it and its license plate. I memorized the number and ran around the trailer to give that to the commander and told him the bombs looked radio controlled and homemade.
David confirmed the driver's door window was partly open and the front seat was empty and there was something in the back seat but with the sun reflecting off the windows it was giving us a false heat register so we could not confirm if anyone was inside the car, but it looked empty, and the doors were all unlocked. David commented that the way the car sat looked like there was no body weight inside because it sat up too high in back like it was out of gas and had nobody inside.
Lastly, he went to the north side and imaged the explosives then flew the drone back north to the casino parking lot.
Nine minutes later it landed and he carried it inside the command post and plugged it into a wall outlet. He pulled out the SD card and handed it to the tech.
They ran the license plate, it was registered to a man with the same family name as the convict in federal prison he wanted to have flown to Damascus.
Next came a rather complicated conversation with the bomb `experts,' we reviewed images from the video David shot with the drone. Everyone was amazed at the quality of the images and their ability to shoot visible light and IR at the same time in extremely high res with stabilization. The big question was, were five sticks wrapped around the cables enough to break them, were they real or fake? The bomb expert at the scene said it was possible, but not guaranteed. Even if only one detonated the bridge would be closed for over a year to inspect and replace that cable, and there was the risk of a partial collapse which would also shut down river traffic.
While we were talking David suddenly got up and went outside and opened the second case and assembled the second quadcopter and got it ready to fly, I went outside and asked what got him all energized, he said he thought he saw a camera by the car's rear view mirror and was curious what signals might be coming from the car or the bombs, so he used the second drone which had the spectrum analyzer that would capture and record all radio signals near itself, within minutes the second drone was in the air heading over the river towards the bridge.
A spectrum analyzer was an expensive electronic device that could receive and examine all radio signals within a range of frequencies, and display them on a graph that resembled a one-line polygraph strip.
Before it got within 200 feet it already identified a signal in the immediate area was on 902 MHz. He also noted the longest cable stay appeared to be re-radiating KTRS-AM which could be dramatically reducing their coverage towards the north because it was out of phase from the original signal. We laughed but we would email them once we got back to Texas.
He picked up very weak signals from each detonator box which he thought could be coming from a receiver or a microprocessor inside the box, but he suspected they were using a very basic type of receiver, maybe even a UHF walkie talkie with tone activated squelch and could be triggered with another FRS walkie-talkie. When it received the correct sub-audible tone the speaker activated and a small light came on which would activate the blasting caps, triggering the explosives.
We suspected again the perp was still in the area, somewhere he could watch if bomb squad people approached his car, he could detonate them one at a time using different whistles or even a simple flute and a ten dollar walkie talkie. David's best guess was the 902mhz signal was constantly sending out audio so the perp could hear if someone was nearby trying to defeat his bombs, that he couldn't see, which also told us he was in the area, probably in sight of the bridge.
We gave our info to the police but they were slightly compromised because it was a different state on the west side of the bridge. I unplugged the drone and flew it to the west bank of the river to photograph everyone fishing or walking around the west side river banks and the Clark Bridge while David worked his best charm school magic and summoned the Missouri State Police to join our party, they had just as much to lose if the bridge fell into the river. I grabbed a folding chair and sat in the shadow of the trailer and flew the drone straight across from the casinos and started looking closely for people along the west riverbank, since it was a floodplain most of the land was agriculture or parks, places to fish and have picnics with the family. There was a Civil War historical site very close to the bridge too.
Since we had no Missouri reps I used my glasses to coordinate with our peeps in the Pentagon. He got on G-maps and surveyed the river with me as we slowly flew south along the riverbank looking at every vehicle and fisherman, luckily there were not a lot of people outside today. I started a mile north of the bridge and flew along the riverbank photographing every human we saw. By the time we got down to the bridge I'd counted five people in two groups.
I stayed far enough that the drone would be invisible to most people and was too far out to hear. As time went by the afternoon winds increased and it became more difficult to get detailed images of the actual shoreline of the river and slowly fly south. I had to stop once in a while to make sure I wasn't about to fly into anything, like the bridge or a helicopter since the TV news people started to arrive.
Our rep inside the Pentagon watched the quadcopter video along with me because people appeared rather small standing along the shoreline holding fishing poles and beer cans.
One hour had passed since the bomb squad saw our first images and everyone was doubtful about using robotics to disarm the bombs, we determined there was nothing we could use the spiders for (on the bridge) and we all agreed nobody was in the car but someone could be listening to audio sent from a camera suction cupped to the windshield.
I was handed a printout of the owner of the car and his driver's license image and suddenly something looked very familiar. He was a Middle Eastern looking guy with black curly hair and appeared to be rather short, his license said he was 5'2" and 180 pounds, which would make him easier to spot.
I used Whispernet to tell David (still in his meeting with the bomb squad) that I might have seen the perp fishing by the river but I didn't want to make a scene. By this time I was south of the bridge still flying sideways looking closely at the shoreline. My heart pounded in my chest as I slowly flew the quadcopter west over land and circled around to where I thought I saw someone that matched his description.
I asked the support cop that was hanging out by me to get me a map that showed detail of the area around the west end of the bridge, I said I thought there was a large parking lot and some kind of monument there too. He took off for inside the command post trailer.
When David joined me I showed him the monitor as I flew over farmland near the bridge, there was a public park on the waterfront with a parking lot and what looked like a historical monument and some kind of raised platform. Then I told him I only had thirty percent power left.
I approached the parking lot from the west at about two hundred feet and showed him a cargo truck and a car were the only vehicles in the lot and over by the waterfront looked like people fishing, sitting on lawn chairs. I zoomed in the camera and imaged from behind a small guy with curly black hair sitting on a chair holding a fishing pole with stuff in a bucket beside him. "At first I thought it was a child fishing with a parent." Then I raised the drone to three hundred feet and flew back to the casino parking lot, halfway across the river I started to get a low battery warning and slowly started to reduce altitude and power consumption and focus on forward speed, I shut off all the lights and extra features so we didn't lose it in the river.
It was still too far to see or hear but I could see the Command trailer on the camera as I raced as fast as I could straight towards myself. With ten percent power left I approached the parking lot and caught sight of us standing by the trailer and set down safely just twenty feet from my shoes and had someone shut it off and run it inside and plug it in and check that the battery charge light came on.
Everyone around us started to panic, the Missouri cops were on the way but with the only bridge in the area closed they had to fly here and most of the available choppers in the area were already parked in this lot! We told them to ask a TV-crew to fly them over.
Using Whispernet I asked David to bail out of his meeting and prep me two spiders, one with two gas pellets and both with generic automotive ignition plans and prep them for flight aboard quadcopter-one. I shut down the controller and went inside to make sure everything was being charged, inside the trailer was total chaos and people shouting and trying to talk on the phone. The biggest camera on the top of the trailer had been aimed across the river at the two guys fishing but they were almost too small to see, partly because of the curvature of the earth and due to distortion caused by the atmosphere just above the river.
David assembled the spiders and put two gas charges into one and uploaded generic auto ignition data into both of them. He inserted them while they were still downloading into the carrier under the first drone and brought it and the controller outside to my lawn chair operating position.
He set the drone down about thirty feet from me then turned on the controller and extended the antenna and handed it to me, then he turned on the drone power and made sure it had an SD card in its slot.
A crowd of watchers had gathered around hoping to see some secret military tech but all they saw was the quad itself which didn't reveal much just by looking, this one had the same cameras but also carried the radio spectrum analyzer. As I got it ready for flight the chopper with the Missouri cops landed and I asked David to go do this thing with them, we might have two unconscious fishermen for them to apprehend in about eight minutes, they needed to get patrol cars silently en-route to Lincoln Shields Recreation Area immediately, we thought that one person was the suspect. He told them the two would be unconscious in about seven minutes. I flew the quadcopter back across the river, two hundred feet above the water, flying west as fast as it would go. My glasses displayed what the quad saw so it was a real FPV flight, but not in 3D.
I crossed the river well north of them so I could circle around and land the quadcopter behind them and release the spiders. David got out our long range controls for our spiders, which was about the size of a pack of cigarettes with a telescoping antenna, they were already active when I took off from the parking lot. When the quad landed the spiders self activate, see the vehicles and put both of them out of commission, which only took about twenty seconds per vehicle, they went to the ignition coils and blew the fuses which would kill the ignition coil which meant no spark and no engine, but they could still honk the horn and play the radio.
Next, the spiders looked for humans and animals nearby and silently approached them and released one gas pellet as close as possible to each person, the camera operator in the command trailer thought we would be able to see (from across the river) if either of them collapsed. He said from their camera they could almost make out one of the men had black curly hair and was rather obese.
It took almost six minutes to cross the river then begin the big circle behind the parking lot and landing.
Two minutes to go, everyone was trying to get a glimpse of the display in my hand. David held the long range remote for one of the spiders in case they needed special instructions, of if more cars arrived in the parking lot.
One minute to go the circle was almost done and it was slowly coming down to ground level and quietly touched down. We saw the spiders appear on the pavement and run under the two vehicles parked side by side, two red dots appeared on our glasses. I re-started the copter, took off and landed it quietly on the roof of the truck so we could watch from behind. From the copter camera we couldn't see the casino parking lot straight across the river, which was a good thing.
The Missouri State cop guy said they had four squads dispatched to the park, silently but with lights for a felony arrest, with orders to capture alive, extremely high priority.
We were getting wicked flashing sunlight reflections off the surface of the river so I switched to IR mode but that made the spiders invisible from behind to the copter camera, but we knew they had already disabled the vehicles and both of them were running towards the old pier location to set off the gas. The spider status lights briefly turned green but when they identified two humans they turned to red again. It seemed to take forever, my heart pounded in my chest and my hands trembled from adrenaline and three cups of coffee. Both spiders ran towards the river even though only one had the immobilizing gas pellets.
If the gas failed and a spider got on your clothing it could still kill you by spiking a tube into a large vein or artery and draining you of blood rather quickly, it usually went for arteries in your neck, in places you couldn't see. It took a special command to go into kill mode, but we've never had the gas not work, even on a windy day. Only a tiny amount needed to be inhaled to knock-out an adult human. The gas worked on most mammals and was a military secret chemical.
Once exposed it took about ten to fifteen seconds to put someone out of action and keep them down for about 7-15 minutes depending on how much they inhaled.
We all got gassed once to get certified using it. I remember David and I got exposed at the same time. We were in a small building in Nevada with a mat on the floor, like a wrestling mat. All of a sudden I felt dizzy and confused and a moment later I woke up on the floor, I had been out for almost fourteen minutes with no memory of passing out, but I had a huge headache, which was a common side effect. They said the gas was similar to cyanide but reversed itself quickly inside the body, so it wasn't lethal.
I saw a tiny puff of white smoke appear on the ground under the first lawn chair then seconds later more smoke under the second chair. As soon as we saw the second flash I told David to tell the spiders to return to the quadcopter and go into standby mode.
About ten long seconds later we saw the first guy slowly lower his pole and drop it, his head bobbed down, chin on his chest. The second guy dropped his pole and his head leaned back so we could see his forehead and saw his cap fall off behind the chair. Shouts of joy erupted around us as we waited for the police to arrive. We watched on the quadcopter cam and saw the spiders return and enter the tiny garage under the copter.
After both spiders indicated being in standby mode I lifted off and hovered about one hundred feet above the parking lot and rotated around and saw police cars approach and the dramatic capture. They laid the unconscious men on the ground and handcuffed them, then carried them by their arms and ankles into the back seats of the police cars and cuffed their ankles too. Cheers went up after the two were in custody.
I kept hovering and moved closer to the waterfront as the police looked at their belongings, one cop reached into the bucket and pulled out a walkie talkie and a string of toy whistles. We cringed by the way he was handling the items not knowing how easily the bombs might be set off, I had David tell the Missouri rep to call them ASAP and tell them not to handle any of the evidence, it could detonate the bombs. About a minute later we saw them run away from the lawn chairs as more and more cars arrived.
Bomb squad techs from the Illinois side drove onto the bridge and cut the wires to the blasting caps and removed all six bombs, the car was towed off the bridge and the east-bound side was re-opened to one lane of traffic in each direction after being closed for five hours.
As the first cars crossed the bridge the sun was setting over Missouri and our work at this site was pretty much finished. With our gear we talked to the Pentagon to see if the high speed jet was available to run us back to El Paso and were told we could be picked up in two hours, so we packed up our stuff, and the Pentagon quadcopters, and woke up the pilot that brought us here and got a freezing cold ride back to the airport. As much as we tried we could not arrange for someone to fly here to pick up the quadcopters, so we had to take them with us back to Texas.
Ninety five minutes later our jet taxi arrived so we had to figure out how to safely transport them, the rule was we could not have anything inside the jet that wasn't secured in place.
In the jet our first task (after refueling) was to pack our cases between the walls and the seat frames. Next we got in one at a time, I always sat in back so David helped me get strapped in the seat and connected to air and comms, then the pilot got in and stood on his seat and watched us fasten down the quads to our laps with a mesh net. Then David got in and connected himself and strapped down the other quad. The pilot visually checked us over and turned around and sat down and did his strap-in.
He closed the canopy and started the jet. Within two minutes we were racing down runway 35 and then straight up to about 40,000 feet and made a big turn to the southwest. We saw the Clark Bridge and all its lights slowly disappear out the side window as the jet approached cruising speed and increase thrust to 1,500mph, he said we'd be landing in El Paso in about 65 minutes due to the jet stream working against us. He also said our ride might be a little bumpy.
We arrived at our home office at 10:15pm and carried all four cases inside but left the two Pentagon cases with the watch commander, we had him call the Pentagon and tell them where they were located, and order us two new spiders and more gas pellets. I saw the bottle of Tylenol was still on the counter from the days our old boss was moving out.
Before we left the pilot walked in the door and said he was just called and told to fly the drones back to Chicago, he took the cases with him and had us call for a fuel truck, next stop: Midway Airport. As we walked out to his truck David said he could increase its range by slowing down to airliner speed and fly like 600mph at 40,000 feet and land at Midway and hand off the cases and get refueled and fly back to Kansas City where the two shuttle jets were based. He wouldn't get home until around sunrise tomorrow.
`Could you imagine that, flying in a combat jet seat from Kansas City to El Paso to Alton to El Paso to Chicago and back to Kansas City all in one day. I bet his ass was red and sore as hell the next day! And that didn't include where he went after he took us to Alton earlier in the day. David said he thought he flew to St. Louis for fuel and maintenance because they had a big Air National Guard hangar there.
We were driving home from the airport, "I want you to know Ryan that I absolutely loved the way you handled that op. You sniffed out that guy and had his entire thing figured out way before any of the experts and all we used was common sense and a couple flying cameras! Yep, too bad there wasn't a reward."
"He had so many flaws, his entire plan made no sense and was so unlikely to succeed, I mean over history how many times were people released from prison because of a bomb threat? I can't think of too many, I know there have been a few that worked for a while but in the long run they all fail."
"Maybe we just don't hear about the ones that worked, and that's why people still try."
"And the way Missouri handled that entire thing was just horrible, so unprofessional like just because the center of the bridge was more than halfway across the river they wanted to ignore the entire event, how fucked-up was that?"
"Maybe that's why the perp hid on the Missouri side because he knew they'd all say it was on the Illinois side of the river, NOT MY PROBLEM DUDE!"
After a couple minutes David told me he thought that concrete structure they were fishing from was part of an old civil war prison. The North held southern soldiers there and hundreds of them died of small pox, and there was something else about Abraham Lincoln supposed to be in a duel of pistols over something, but it never happened. He also said, "The world has changed a lot since 1860!" We sat there in silence for a few moments.
Curiosity got the better of me and I asked, "Exactly how great was the chance that those bombs could have dropped the bridge?"
"Well, that was a topic of great debate within the bomb squad. All of them said they would cause damage but only two felt they could drop part of the bridge, but either way it would be closed to traffic for over a year if any exploded. The cumulative effect of six damaged cables could have brought over half the bridge down and put it out of service for two to three years, not to mention shutting down a vital segment of the river to barge traffic. Ryan, you would be shocked to learn how much raw material is moved on the Mississippi today."
"What about the perp?" I asked.
"It was obvious he wasn't too bright, they all felt he got the bombs from someone, it might have been the guy beside him with the other fishing pole, the guy with the truck that stopped on the bridge to give him a ride to shore."
Out of curiosity I asked him what their big objection to the bombs cutting the stays was, "Most of them agreed that the bombs around the cables and between the concrete sidewalls and the open air would push most of the blast out into space, as if the blast would blast the blast instead of the cables. If he'd used shaped charges it could have worked but the way they were installed probably not. But nobody wanted to gamble with an eighty five million dollar bridge."
I also asked him, "What about the car parked next to the truck by the river?" David told me it was unrelated to the event, the car had been there for weeks and was an abandoned vehicle with a ruined motor.
We talked about the pilot that hauled us to Alton and back, I said he was a very serious guy that didn't like to talk to his customers, then David said, "You know that jet doesn't have ejection seats." I answered, "I knew the back seats didn't, but you think his didn't either?"
"No, look at the back closely, it's a standard bomber pilots seat with no ejection mechanism. They had to remove them to make room for the third seat." Then I said, "That may be why he's so tightly wrapped because his flight has to go perfectly otherwise we all get dead." David explained how these taxi jets were modified for longer flight times, faster speeds, less on performance, and more on reliability.
Back in the house I had him stop and look at the panel with me, it was on vacation mode, then we went to the tac-room and plugged in our case and hung our suits and removed the spiders from the case and put them on the table, one was barely used and almost good as new. The one that cooked the gas pellets had 11% power left so I put it in our large glass ashtray and turned it on so it would self-destroy at 7% and could be smashed and thrown into the household trash or flushed down the toilet. While it ran down its battery we had to keep our case powered off or the Pentagon could tell the spider to patrol inside our house or even to go to the basement sofa then destroy itself which could set fire to the sofa and our house and us too.
One thing David and I agreed on totally was when you had spy gear inside the house there was always a risk of it being used against us.
Our machine guns always stayed velcro'd in place inside the batsuit case. We carried custom made Brugger & Thomet MP9 submachine guns, 9mm with silencer, laser sights, and custom extended mags.
We went to the basement for a four mile run then hit the shower and went to bed.
David was in the mood, I think sometimes when he showered he got turned on by his own hands washing his naughty bits then wanted to party under the comforter but I never said no, so after showers we got in bed and made love, missionary position, he laid with his stomach against mine and we kissed while he slowly worked until he came, then it was my turn to be king.
One of the most favorite things we did was when I was on my back, and he was inside me and just orgasmed, and our mouths were aligned and tongues pressed together, I swear I could feel love streaming into me from his soul. We felt so strongly connected and so deeply in love, I could stay in that position for hours if he could stay hard that long. I'd hold onto him tightly and run my hands through his hair and rub his back and worship him back with my adoration. That was how we got high (not counting alcohol), knowing that until he came he could command me to do anything sexual and I'd obey. It gave us the chance to fulfill our secret fantasy scenarios and made fucking more fun too, and sometimes funny, and sometimes one of us got hurt.
That night we spooned, me in front. I loved to have his arm around me all night. Before we got the window air conditioner it got too hot in bed to spoon all night but with the cold bedroom we could spoon every day. I often slept holding a pillow to my chest and face, but when we spooned I held his arm between me and the pillow.
I think God put us on Earth to be together, I can find no other explanation for how we felt about each other. My life was shit before I met David at UT Austin in the Engineering School student commons. Remind me to tell you sometime about the time we first made eye contact.
Contact the author: borischenaz gmail