Chapter 3.
Our first alert occurred three weeks after we moved to El Paso. At the time we were on waiting lists at two apartment complexes near the airport. Our boss got us housing on Fort Bliss in an NCO neighborhood.
Our neighborhood on Fort Bliss resembled Levittown in 1947, our house had 1200 square feet inside so everything was small.
It felt so nice to finally be done with training after ten years of constant schooling.
We kept the alert unit on a table in the living room so it was central in the house, the volume setting was turned up all the way so it could easily wake us.
The alarm went off at 9:14pm on Friday evening. The display said: ALERT, RPT ELP (ELP was code for El Paso International Airport) FULL GEAR. Translated into English it meant we were to put on our Batsuits, grab our cases and drive to work ASAP, pedal to the floor. That mean meant we were going to be picked up in the little jet and flown somewhere to fix someone else's problem they let get out of hand. We were sort of like the clean-up crew with advanced technology and permission to use deadly if necessary, and the bar was set rather low.
We ran three red lights on the way, a few people honked and flipped us off, but we only ran a light if the intersection was empty with no cross traffic or pedestrians nearby.
David drove into right turn lanes and inched out into the intersection until traffic was gone then he rushed ahead which often caused a chorus of horn honks and raised fingers behind us.
Fourteen minutes later we parked in the employee parking lot (without being chased by cops) at the airport and went inside with our cases. Our office was manned 24/7, just inside the entrance sat a long chest-height counter with a desk behind it where the OD (Officer of the Day) sat and answered calls. He should have more info but probably not the entire story.
He said the alert came from an FBI office in San Francisco about a situation across the bay in Oakland California. They asked for help with a hostage situation at a military chip manufacturer, a secure facility. A man (an employee) went berserk and pulled out a gun and took two women hostage, demanding cash for back pay and a plane ride to Argentina. He was fired yesterday for narcotic use and making threatening statements at work.
This factory made custom chips for missiles and secure comm systems, so it meant we couldn't blow up the perp. We were expected to capture him and prevent loss of life and property damage. So far he had not injured anyone or damaged the facility. I knew from experience that we'd easily capture him alive, we probably wouldn't kill him unless he was a direct threat to life and property.
While we spoke to the OD a bright light flashed across the office. On the far side was a glass door and several large windows that looked out on the airport tarmac, the headlights on the jet panned across and flashed in our windows. The OD said he'd need to refuel but the gas truck was out there already. This would be the first time we flew with our standard gear. We carried our pelican case and Batsuit case that held both our suits but now contained our civilian clothes: jeans, t-shirts, socks, underwear, etc. and two machine guns.
We each had custom Brugger & Thomet MP9 submachine guns, 9mm with silencers, lasers, and custom extended mags and barrels. On our belts our second pouch held two loaded magazines. Both cases could also be used as shields to block bullets.
Twenty five minutes later the jet was re-fueled and the stairs were in place and the pilot instructed us how to load our gear into the tiny three-man cockpit with no extra room. He said flying time to Oakland would be 38 minutes. David climbed up and into the back seat, I handed him the pelican case (which was stowed behind his lower legs and strapped in place. Then I got in the middle seat and the pilot handed me our uniform case (which went between the front of my seat and the backs of my lower legs) then he climbed up and got in the cockpit. While he was getting strapped in and hooked up the tug driver pushed the stairs away. David whispered to me that we should understand this was a very risky transport option. This jet used a prototype engine, experimental avionics, and had no way to rapidly egress. If it caught fire there would possibly be no escape, even the pilots ejection seat was removed to make space for the 3rd seat. And these seats had less padding than tourist class on any modern passenger jet.
In school in Nevada we were trained to not talk to the pilot except in case of emergency, except when he was not inside the jet.
He used the pushback tug because the jet was too close to the terminal building to jet power ourselves around. We slowly taxied around the buildings while there were no other aircraft coming or going, then took off towards downtown El Paso.
One bad thing about the El Paso airport was there was a mountain range five miles west of the runway and we were taking off towards the west, another problem was city noise rules. The pilot had to take off and gently cruise over (or around) the mountains and clear the metro area before pushing the throttle forward. That rule applied to all aircraft that flew over the city. That mountain range also acted like a giant mirror that reflected and amplified the sound of jet engines across (parts of) the east side of the city. The bottom line for jets in El Paso was that noise was always a big deal and it was easy to get busted for breaking the laws. In our case they could fine the pilot but when researching this jet they'd discover it was untraceable and had no address or owner specified. There was no ID number on the fuselage just stars and stripes on the wings. Everyone at the airport knew who owned and operated those tiny jets, they were the only military jets seen at this civilian airport.
We accelerated down the runway, but not very far, and we were suddenly 200 feet up, he gained altitude to about 800 feet before we cleared the west end of the airport and he climbed to 5,000 feet with 8% thrust. We casually flew over the Franklin Mountains (at 120mph) and made a turn to the northwest towards northern California. By the time we cleared the west side and were about twenty miles south of Las Cruces he pushed the throttle and pulled the joystick back and we literally flew vertically to about 46,000 feet above sea level, then he leveled off and pushed in the throttle even more. We were shoved hard into our seats as the jet accelerated to nearly 1,700mph. Lights from towns zoomed by under us and in no time at all he said we were half way to Oakland. We were cruising nearly thirty miles every second! At our altitude the only other aircraft would be military.
He told us we'd fly over Area 51 and a little past there we'd throttle back and coast the rest of the way to Oakland, just like the space shuttle. Since that little jet transported only government VIPs there was almost no where it couldn't fly but the runway needed to be rated for the landing weight of this jet, that alone eliminated most rural airports.
After we parked in Oakland I asked the pilot why Area 51 didn't shoot him down and he said he squawked a code that told them to disregard our presence, and anyone flying that high, moving that fast shouldn't be shot down.
In Oakland we landed on runway 15 and taxied to the general aviation terminal and were met by an FBI agent. At first airport security tried to stop us to make sure we weren't foreigners but the FBI guy told him to let us go, when he walked towards us the FBI dude unstrapped the pistol and repeated his order, we were allowed to walk out the door with our cases and several people in the terminal glaring at us hatefully (those damn out of towners).
In the car on the way to the chip factory he gave us the FBI version of the story. We had been told when an FBI agent explained a situation it was obvious it came from the: `it's not our fault' spin perspective. Another giveaway was the tone of disdain whenever one of them said the words: local law enforcement.
The chip factory was in the north end of Oakland in an industrial area near the intersection of West Grand Avenue and Frontage Road. He held two `hostages' and the police negotiator was talking to him but the man seemed impaired and paranoid. Due to the nature of the facility and what they made they (SWAT) couldn't storm the department, which was why they called us.
I asked how long ago it started and he said almost three hours ago, he demanded money and a plane ride to Argentina. He held two women at gunpoint, the three were seated around a desk in a clean room.
We checked the identities of the women and learned some of the FBI information was incorrect, one of the women was a close friend of the gunman and also a suspect in an unrelated drug crime, so we decided all three of them would be treated as suspects. We knew even before arriving that none of them would be sipping cocktails at a bar in Buenos Aires anytime soon.
The driver asked what we were going to tell them. David told him, "We don't negotiate, we put an end to situations like this, that's all we do."
We arrived and were escorted to the 2nd floor clean section, but declined to get into clean suits. We were shown floor plans of the area and blueprints for HVAC ducting since that would be our primary spider route. We asked if either of the woman had anything to eat or drink or bathroom use and were told water only and no bathroom trips yet. Then we were told all three of them were current or former employees, the two women were suspected friends of the kidnapper. The entire situation stunk worse and worse, like maybe it was entirely staged.
David and I used Whispernet a lot after we got to the scene and decided to use one spider and two sleep gas pellets. That way we could subdue all of them and not take any chances on who really was or wasn't a suspect, since the FBI clearly didn't know and were just making up stuff to make it look like they were doing their jobs correctly.
We set up our stuff about 90 feet away which was in a clean office area with access to the same HVAC ducting in the ceilings above us, but far enough they couldn't see or hear us. We also had control over who stayed in the area. Even though we were there to end the situation we were still required to protect the secrecy of our gear, weapons, procedures, and ourselves too.
David took charge at 11:43pm and asked for the local police to leave the room but first asked them to call for three ambulances with ALS crews to arrive ready to transport and possibly resuscitate (CPR) the gassed individuals. We did that as a precaution, the FBI could take them into custody at the hospital.
We put on our breathing filters (inserted in nostrils) and loaded the spider with a sleep gas pellet. We had no access to digital HVAC blueprints so we'd have to steer the spider manually. We activated the case and confirmed comms with our boss, tonight we were talking to our home office in El Paso, the boss got called to work about the time we left in the jet. He told us the jet flew directly over his home near the mountains, he lived in a nice but older neighborhood in El Paso at the corner of Oklahoma and Morehead Streets.
As kind of a private joke since we outranked our boss (in pay), he was a Captain and we were both (pay grade) colonels we called him: Little Bird but never to his face. I think that situation really bothered him, but we were the ones risking our lives, not him. He was mostly a Pentagon bureaucrat with a background in purchasing and kickbacks.
David softly asked, "You ready Sir?"
I smiled and whispered `yes.' I showed him the spider had two green gas pellets inserted and it was already linked to our case (and our glasses), I handed him his glasses after I switched it on and made sure it showed the same display as mine.
David got out the small joystick type control and plugged it into the case then slipped on his glasses. I set the spider on the floor and immediately sent it a manual-steering (with auto assist) command, otherwise it would take off on its own to surveil and map our surroundings.
While he got ready I had one of the local cops link to our case with his cell so they could watch the same video we saw from the front of the spider, which also got their attention off us and meant none of them would see the actual spider. They were all gathered around watching the tiny screen.
Remind me some day to tell you about us learning to use the spiders, it's an interesting story.
We sat down in their comfy office chairs and watched images from the IR cam on the front of the spider as it ran across the floor and jumped on the wall, ran up, then across the ceiling (which looked weird because it was upside down on our glasses). When watching a spidercam you cannot see the spider or its legs, but it had some ability to pan and zoom the camera image.
When you manually steered the spiders they also employed their own software (auto assist) so you didn't have to command every step. Most moves they did on their own, like when we ran into the wall it already knew to jump onto the smooth vertical surface.
There were three FBI peeps in the room watching us work but we didn't want to order them to leave so we compromised the security of the spider tech slightly. The worst thing that would happen would be if an agent thought it was a real spider and ran over and smashed it on the wall. They cost about $110k each.
The spiders were almost 1.5 inches wide when running across flat surfaces. They folded up into a cubic inch to fit inside their tiny cardboard boxes. All we did was open the box, slide them out, and turn it with on with a tiny slide switch on their underside. In most cases the people standing nearby never actually saw them because of their size, appearance, and nobody expected anyone to have an intelligent drone that small. When we said `drone' everyone pictured something with propellers that made a high pitched sound, the spiders were mostly silent. It was very likely the three agents behind us never actually saw the spider and were probably standing there wondering where the video came from.
David steered it up the wall, across the ceiling, and into the duct and turned on the IR light on the front of the spider. He ran it inside the air duct and we counted the ceiling vent drops that went down into the office ceilings and counted how many we could see but I lost count. David released the joystick and raised his glasses and softly spoke to me.
"Ry, offer them some water and count how many vents you see on this line, leave your glasses here." He said gesturing to the line of air ducts in the ceiling that came down from a main line that ran above the ceiling from us, across the next room, then above the suspects.
So I got up, grabbed three cold water bottles the police had brought already and carried them across the next department, to the far glass door that led into the clean room where the three of them were seated around a desk. I held them up and shook them like an offer, but the guy flipped me off and waved his pistol and yelled: `Shove-off secret agent man!'
I left the bottles on the window ledge so they could see them and went back to David and told him the fifth vent was directly above them, the vent above us was number 1.
He started moving the spider forward again while I put my glasses back on and sat beside him to make sure nobody got close to our gear, then I gently lowered the lid on our case.
The wind noise in the duct was horrible and I was thinking they might hear tiny tapping sounds from the spider feet on the sheet metal air ducts. He arrived at the fifth duct and slowly climbed down along a seam for better spider traction. It amazed me how the spiders could crawl on almost any surface and not slip or get stuck. Their feet had microscopic needle tips with barbs, like walking on eight insulin syringe needles, but our spiders were smaller than that and had microscopic barbs on the sides too. Their feet tips were very like real spider legs, except the muscles were manmade and some of what made them top secret.
The painted walls in most rooms looked and felt smooth to us but to the spiders were jagged surfaces full of pits and invisible textures. Even window glass looked like a jagged rock wall to them.
He paused the spider above the vent cover then slightly nudged it forward until he could see all three people seated around a desk straight below the vent.
I called the police commander over to see if the ambulances were here and if they had handcuffs for perps and he held up about ten plastic cuffs and said one ambulance was here the others would be here shortly. I whispered that to David and he used his arm panel to activate the gas pellet cutter inside the back body segment of the spider.
Our gas pellets came in colored (color coded) plastic capsules. The color was a code for its contents. We had six different capsules and usually carried twenty of them with us in a small pill bottle. Each spider had a wire heating element that burnt open the capsule(s) and exposed the chemicals inside. When exposed to oxygen and humidity a chemical reaction occurred and the powder inside started to heat and smoke. The gas was seen sometimes as tiny wisps of white smoke when it started.
Once any mammal breathed a tiny amount of this particular capsule it first felt a little dizzy (or nauseated), then they felt extremely tired, then they suddenly passed out. From the time they smelled the gas to the time they fainted was usually about 10-30 seconds depending on the exposure level. Sleep lasted for about 15-30 minutes depending on exposure (amount of chemical absorbed via the lungs). Most people woke up with some degree of a headache and a few vomited upon waking if they recently ate.
We've never seen anyone die or suffer an allergic reaction to the gas. And the gas dissipated quickly, in an enclosed area the gas was undetectable after 13 minutes. That's why we wore air filters in our noses whenever we used gas. This gas was chemically similar to an old drug called Amytal, this version was new but the molecule was very similar and had been used by the military for decades in combat situations. It was released as a gas on the field of combat to `sleep' the enemy instead of killing them. A related drug used to be called Truth Serum, but people eventually figured out it caused something more like 'drunk talk.'
In most cases if you were close enough to see the traces of smoke from when the wire cut the capsule open you were already exposed, the best thing to do was to immediately sit or lie on the floor because it's better than falling.
David and I watched the spidercam as the three people around the desk suddenly shook their heads and passed out. The guy fell sideways to the floor. One of the hostages fell forward and dropped her head on the desk and the other one leaned her head way back but never fell.
I signaled the FBI to hand me the plastic cuffs, with my breathing filter in place and my mouth shut I walked across to the next room and opened the door. I walked in and cuffed all three suspects, wrists and ankles and propped the door wide open using someone's stapler. David watched the time as the ambulance crews arrived in the outer office near our gear.
I looked up at the ceiling knowing David was watching and whispered to jump the spider down onto my back. I barely felt it land, then it ran around my front side and I turned it off and slipped it inside my pocket.
Next step was to grab the primary suspect and drag him by his ankles across the next department to the FBI who lifted him off the floor and set him on the ambulance cart, strapped him down and left with him still unresponsive but breathing normally. Next, I took the females one at a time and got them balanced on their chairs and rolled them out to the EMS crews.
I was told all three woke up before they reached the hospital. They were medically cleared and released to the FBI.
We were then surrounded by several city cops and FBI agents politely asking how we did it without standing up. Most of them were convinced we slipped drugs in the water bottles because they never saw the spiders.
David interrupted and told them it was safe to go in the rooms now then he politely explained it was illegal for us to explain what we did. Everyone seemed disappointed with his answer so he handed out our business cards which had the front desk phone number at our office in El Paso and the office in Washington DC. We told our boss over the comms link the situation was resolved and we needed help getting home.
We packed our gear away and went into the bathroom to change out of our Batsuits and back into jeans and t-shirts.
I shook the gas pellets out and put the used spider in a urinal and ordered it to self destruct, which left a black mark but would rinse away eventually. The gas pellets went into the toilet and got flushed.
David had been talking to our OD in El Paso and decided the best route home was to take a taxi across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco to their airport for the first flight to Denver then a connecting flight tomorrow to ELP. Our Pentagon status gave us the authority to order the airline to bump paid customers to make room for us if the flight was completely full. We were not the only agency that could bump civilians.
It was even legal for us to hijack a passenger airliner to get where we needed in case of severe emergency. We also had special rules when dealing with the TSA and most of them were properly trained how to handle our cases. The black case had an emblem on the outside (three of them actually) which the TSA people re-trained every six months to remind them to never confiscate or open any case with that emblem.
Our emblem looked like a common luggage brand logo (Samsonite) but with alterations and it lit up oddly under UV light.
When boarding a jet we usually surrendered our machine guns to the pilot although it was done very privately at the cockpit door. Since our Batsuit case held our machine guns we just surrendered that case to the pilot, most of them never saw the weapons inside or wanted to. Our pelican case was sometimes checked into the cargo hold with the rest of the larger suitcases. If it got lost by luggage handlers we could locate it over the phone with the help of the Pentagon but the entire luggage conveyor systems were usually shut down until the case was returned. But it's rarely been a problem for our service.
If they lost our pelican case for more than a few minutes the entire airport was locked down until it was returned to us.
We always chuckled about having to check our pelican case with the atomic weapons into the cargo hold, as if that would be safer! Depending on the situation, sometimes we carried it on board. The pelican case decision was made based on the airline and airport and how busy things were.
Actually, the airline industry had the best training on how to deal with us and our gear. If they decided to go all small town cop on us and open the case they were trained it may result in their near immediate execution, so they all took the training seriously.
There were specific phrases we were required to speak when detained to warn them and hopefully trigger recall of training they all supposedly had after being hired. If one of them actually opened the case and removed the weapons I could promise they'd be dead within a few hours, there was no apologizing or promising to never do it again after our weapons were exposed.
We learned of one tragic mistake that happened while we were in BUDS training near Atlanta. A baggage handler dropped the case of a team based in Atlanta and opened it to make sure there was nothing broken or leaking inside. That triggered alarms inside the case with the comms system. The alarms were silent but it captured photos and DNA of the person that opened it.
He set the case on the correct cart and finished his work shift and drove home. In the mean time the Pentagon scrambled two teams to the airport to recover the case but it had already been sent to the baggage claim carousel and recovered by our agent who was unaware it had been breached.
They obtained the data from the case and identified the guy that opened the case, he had left work 15 minutes earlier and was in his car on his way home. Five minutes from his house his car suddenly exploded on a busy street. Nobody saw the Predator drone at 12,000 feet that fired a small missile at the man's car and hit the center of the roof and turned his car into a blackened pile of smoldering scrap metal and ash. He survived the longest: 52 minutes after fully opening the case.
To anyone that got a glimpse inside the case it looked like a collection of metallic cylinders stuffed into cutout spaces in foam rubber. You would think an atomic weapon would be larger but ours were about the size of a can of Pringles and the launch tube only slightly larger.
There was another person, a TSA inspector at Dulles International, she took the case to test for bomb residue. She released the latches, the case opened about half an inch, she swabbed around the gap and tested it. The swab tested very positive so she stopped and called for backup. She was arrested and held for questioning for four hours and released then fired from her job because she had the training and ignored the emblems on the case and beside the latches. She said she forgot about the special case rule and was sorry. If she had opened the case to examine the contents she would not have lived long enough to apologize.
Something we learned about getting home after a mission was there were not many daily direct flights to El Paso. We usually had to fly to Denver or Dallas first. So we always planned the trip home by looking for those cities first. For such a nice airport El Paso was not a very busy place compared to others, like DIA and DFW. The thing that bothered me the most about El Paso was the idea that in any direction a mountain range was never far from the end of the runway. But I guess El Paso wasn't the only airport with that problem.
Two hours later we arrived at SFO and used the Pentagon credit card to purchase tickets for the earliest flight to Denver and a connecting flight to El Paso, we'd get home around 1pm on a commercial jet. The bad part was we had a five hour wait until our flight to Denver. So we stretched out on recliners in the Southwest Lounge to wait for our flight to board.
In the lounge there was a TV playing CNN, so David used his cell with a special app that mimicked remote controls and sent it a power-off command to shut it off.
We got back to our office at 1:09pm and spent an hour dictating our summary report then we went home, walked in the door at 4:17pm and took showers and re-stocked and checked our gear. David said our boss was happy, he said our first mission was great, the brass was happy with cost control and speed of the mission. He issued us one verbal attaboy, our first one.
We spent the next two weeks finishing up FAA Flight School and finishing our pilot testing for fixed wing and rotary. So now we were not only super heroes but we were licensed pilots too.