Chapter 12.
We spent three days at WSMR in meetings with designers, the group was designing a new variable EMP weapon. It will create an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) from a semi-smart projectile. The application for that weapon would be destroying most electronic/electrical devices near the detonation, with a variable range of effectiveness. It could be used to disable a warship, airplane, fighter jet, motor vehicle, radio receiver/transmitter, computers, satellites, and most electronics.
They wanted our input since we were an obvious end user and we had been involved in next generation weapon designs we hoped to see in a few more years. They were also designing versions to be fired from an existing automatic cannon on many Navy vessels. Navy and Army people were also in those meetings.
They also wanted to hear 'use scenarios' from us for the proposed weapon. They already had a working prototype but not the delivery system. Let me tell you, if you've never sat in a meeting with three of the nation's top weapon designers, they were an odd bunch of guys. The panel was very nerdy and oddly dressed, one had a lisp and another one was totally nasal sounding, and the third guy's face looked like one of his parents was a Meerkat.
We also suggested a handheld weapon that could fire a directional narrow EM pulse, one that could be aimed like a fire extinguisher at a specific target, like a fleeing vehicle on the ground, the sea, or in flight. We suggested one that could be aimed at several floors of a tall building from a rooftop across the street or across town. We also said it should have variable output and not be traceable back to the sender.
When you watched war videos and saw the use of rockets the ones that left a trail of smoke back to the point of origin were dangerous. Most of our shoulder fired weapons made a distinct flash that could be sensed by satellites because the flash of their ignition emitted a distinct group of wavelengths not otherwise seen on the planet surface.
Some of the designers were visibly upset by our suggestions, they were leaning towards a weapon that fired a shell that created the pulse and we wanted a weapon that fired an invisible pulse almost like a directional blast of sound, like an air horn. Regardless of the form factor such a weapon was years away. They said they had a basic weapon now but their effort today was on the delivery system and form factor. Our pelican case already had two spots for another weapon.
They wanted to emphasize in these meetings the complexity of the guidance system. Since this weapon would not be used to shoot down or destroy a target (like an airplane or a building) it only needed to detonate near a target, but when launched it had to have some kind of target other than `in the atmosphere up there.' Those options added a lot of potential complexity to its design and use.
The moderator mentioned a possible use scenario: You were the spotter for a military unit that wanted to detonate one above a fortress compound in Afghanistan. From a distance you could determine the target latitude and longitude, but altitude above sea level was another problem when it's estimated from a distance.
And if you got the altitude wrong the weapon might fly into the ground and potentially give away state secrets to the enemy because it didn't detonate, because the altitude was set wrong. Those parameters meant the person firing it had to also bring a laptop computer along which also meant it could not be assembled, loaded, and fired quickly.
"Now hold on a minute Captain. You want me to launch right now but I just got the software running in the computer!" Was one comment we predicted might happen someday after it was deployed.
Regardless of how upset we got in meetings we all ate lunch together and enjoyed great catered meals, and ate like movie stars. It's a long drive from home to WSMR, and we took the shortcut by using the unpaved road turn off just south of Orogrande New Mexico, taking the shortcut across the desert its sixty-one miles to WSMR door to door.
Those lunches were paid for by the development teams, not the Pentagon. They even had Blue Fin Tuna sushi on the buffet, or at least they claimed it was Blue Fin. The color looked proper.
Back at home the wrecking crew was demolishing our bathroom except for the toilet which we wanted to keep. Compared to the new low water usage toilets, we didn't have to flush ours two or three times to get the logs and floaters down the drain.
They were amazed we wanted to keep our ugly old toilet, David told them we didn't care how much water it used, we wanted one that flushed properly. He said, "Let someone else save the whales. We want to conserve water by only having to flush one time."
Back at work we got some feedback from Seattle, they were pleased with the outcome of our micro-robotic invasion of the zone, but didn't like that we took charge of the timing of things, they wanted to retain control over what happened and when. But they were not used to dealing with gas clouds and we doubted their face masks would protect them from our gas so we had to tell them when it was safe to enter, either way it made them briefly not in charge and they didn't like that part.
Our boss hinted about telling them to not call us next time but wouldn't say if he actually told them or not. I told him Seattle had a very fancy incident command trailer they towed around and there was no sense having it if two guys with a quadcopter and a brief case could stroll in, take control, and fix their problem in five minutes with tiny robots. They felt that since they had the only incident command trailer they should be in command of everything... because they had a fancy stainless steel trailer and we only had black plastic cases and weird looking uniforms.
And Amtrak was very upset with the handling of our package at the El Paso train station. The train was delayed for two hours, while they called around in search of someone with a cutting torch to cut off the U-bolt, our boss explained they caused the entire situation by being inflexible, we put Amtrak in touch with the spider factory so next time they selected a better delivery option than the one they used.
They suggested next time we use a service like Fedex but we told them that service had disqualified themselves as a trusted military delivery service years ago.
The thing most Americans didn't know about Amtrak was they did not own the tracks they ran on, they paid a fee to the freight companies to run passenger trains on freight train tracks. That also meant that in most cases their freight trains had the right-of-way, Amtrak had to pull over and wait for them to go by. The reason why there wasn't high speed rail in the USA was our rail networks were built for hauling freight, not high speed passenger trains.
Because they were a lower priority than freight (long distance) Amtrak seldom arrived on time, but people that rode them knew that ahead of time. In the Boston to Washington corridor it's a different story than west of Pittsburgh. And true high speed rail was usually elevated above ground or underground but rarely at ground level because of pedestrians, vehicles, and animals.
Could you imagine the risk for catastrophic damage and injury if a train going 270mph ran into a herd of deer standing (or a single steer or cow) on the tracks? If the tracks were elevated your primary concern list was narrowed down to earthquakes and severe weather.
Building a new high speed rail line would cost an unimaginable amount of money and never turn a profit unless they allowed freight trains on the tracks too. And why would anyone take the train when they can fly cheaper and four times faster? And the planes and airports are already in operation.
On our drive home we had a discussion about our technology and wondered which weapon in our case would be obsoleted next. David suggested sooner or later we'd confront bad guys who were fully aware of the spiders and were trained and equipped to deal with them. Sometime we should come up with a Plan-B for when our first choice of weapons was inadequate. Some day our spiders might need to do battle with drone eating drones.
Our discussion reminded us when we talked about top secret subjects we always had to be aware of our surroundings, we even shut off our cell phones when the topics came up. Sometimes we subconsciously felt reluctant to discuss those subjects even when we were alone together. Not discussing or reacting to certain topics was something that became second nature over time for everyone who worked in the defense industry.
We got home at 4:45pm on the last day we spent with the designers at WSMR, probably the only reason why we met there was it was almost the only place in the southwest where you could hold top-secret meetings (except for a couple places on Fort Bliss). Our office was swept for bugs monthly but it was still not cleared for meetings like that. And we had strict rules about cell phone (and computer) usage in our office since all of them were potential listening devices.
In our office everyone had to leave their cell at the OD desk by the front door. And there was no telephone in the meeting room. We joked about needing to install a five-man Cone of Silence in the meeting room.
We arrived to find our bedroom furniture was moved into the 2nd bedroom. Surprisingly it all fit too! Our bedroom looked like Santa's workshop with power tools and extension cords, drop cloths and a huge portable radio. They had a large trash dumpster set in the yard outside our bedroom window and they had removed the window for easy access to the outside during the demolition phase of the remodel. Our precious old toilet sat in the closet under a tarp patiently waiting for its return to service next month. The bedroom hardwood floor was covered with wood panels and tarps to protect it from damage. David admitted that he forgot we were supposed to empty the room ourselves, but we forgot. He called the contractor and apologized right away.
They had stripped the bathroom to the studs, even the floor was gone. We walked in the garage door as the crew was leaving for the day. I walked to the bathroom door and looked down and saw the basement floor! The new surfaces would all be mold and water proof. They would work on the walls, ceiling, and floor for the rest of the week. They also had to reinforce the flooring under the bathroom with extra joists added beside the existing ones.
The original water heater was in a closet near the front door, it had to be upgraded too, we selected a natural gas tankless water heater which meant they had to replace the vent stack through the roof with a larger triple-wall stack that would be two inches wider. Luckily, the steel natural gas line was big enough.
We spent the evening setting up our new bedroom and dealing with window coverings since the second bedroom got direct sunlight in the morning and we didn't want to wake up that way.
We continued our discussion about buying a small pop-up camper for the motorcycle, versus tent camping. We also drove to the local recycling center and picked two large boxes out of the bin to cut up to partially cover the 2nd bedroom windows. Up to now that room had been totally empty, it didn't even have curtains or curtain rods.
Tiny pop-up campers were small and we were both almost six foot tall, plus it put a fixed limit on how much weight and volume could be carried along, most camping gear had to fit into the camper after it was folded down, which had an empty volume similar in size to a college dorm trunk. If we used the truck and a tent we had almost unlimited weight and space for carrying stuff, plus during storms the truck could serve as a shelter, not so with the motorcycle. Then we decided to compare staying at hotels versus campgrounds. I set up a spreadsheet and we created categories and costs. The camper would be expensive and all new ultra small gear would also be a factor to consider.
If you wrecked on the motorcycle with the camper on the hitch behind you it greatly increased your chances for serious injury. And with a tiny pop-up camper you probably wouldn't want to take long camping trips, like a week at one campground. The spreadsheet gave us a much better look at the numbers to compare truck versus pop-up camping versus motorcycle and hotels. The debate continued for a while. We could afford it; the concern was we didn't want to become slaves to a pop-up camper.
David complicated our decision by adding choices: we could pull the pop-up camper behind the truck, and using the pop-up would prevent us from allowing camping to become hugely complex and expensive like our friends (Mike and Trina Bonham) from Alamogordo. With limited space we'd be forced to limit our gear.
And speaking of the bathroom remodel, we've had to keep our work cases and our collection of cash in the truck and let the equipment room (aka: Tac-room) sit empty for now. The only thing left sitting out was the alert box in the living room. Otherwise there was no hint what we did for a living inside the house while we were gone.
The satellite alert box looked like some kind of wireless weather station so it was safe to let people see it. If it went off during the day the message text was abbreviated into codes that most people wouldn't understand, even if they took a photo of the display it wouldn't make sense to most people. Our boss said it was okay to leave it out.
That weekend we carried our old toilet into the back yard and completely disassembled it and hand scrubbed it until it looked brand new then went out and bought a package of seals, bolts, and new water valves so it would be 100% like new when returned to service. At the store all the float valves we found were cheap plastic junk so we went to Ace Hardware and got an expensive kit that was mostly brass with real rubber seals that should last until the rapture! The float ball for the valve was made of copper and all of it was made in America except the rubber for the seals came from Malaysia. The seals and the big rubber the flapper valve were made in Indiana.
During the first week of the remodel we got called to a situation near Saint Louis at a factory that made artillery shells for the military. They had been receiving calls with bomb threats for months but generally regarded them as nuisances probably coming from an environmentalist. But one day they became real when a pipe bomb exploded beside an HVAC unit on their roof, then things got worse and the calls increased until one day someone dressed like a delivery man walked in with a pistol and a large box and took the receptionist hostage and demanded they shut down the factory and give him $500,000 in cash.
Due to the nature of their business and how the building was not designed with security in mind they called the FBI and the FBI invited us to respond, we were flown on the jet in our Batsuits with our standard gear to Saint Louis then by car to the industrial park (in Dellwood MO) where the factory was located.
About thirty seconds after we arrived (one block down the street and out of sight) there was an explosion inside their front office area. All the front windows blew out and fire department people rushed in (with police) as we stood by the FBI van and watched. The FBI agent told us it appeared the bomb detonated and killed the suspect and his hostage, obviously something went wrong and was not what he planned, we arrived too late to help. So we grabbed our cases and rode back to the airport and used our cell to call ELP and ask for tickets to Denver or Dallas. We also had the OD add airports in Las Cruces and Alamogordo as possible home destinations because they added a lot more flights to choose from every day, even though we'd have a huge taxi bill getting a ride home from Las Cruces. We always got fully reimbursed for money we spent on taxi rides.
We flew back to Dallas and got back to ELP at 7:15pm that evening. It was rather sad that we couldn't intervene, that situation looked ideal for our technology.
On the way back to the airport which was northwest of downtown Saint Louis we stopped at a BBQ place and split a rack of ribs but we didn't care for their BBQ sauce choices. They had great coleslaw and the service was good. The industrial park we just left was very near where the riots happened back when that eighteen year old was shot by police (August 2014) that sparked protests (hands-up, don't shoot) nationwide.
When we got home the first thing we checked was our bathroom. The new subflooring was installed and the walls and ceiling were also roughed-in. Since they were all waterproof they had weird colors. The builders were long gone by the time we got home, as usual we left the pelican and Batsuit cases in the truck along with the Hello Kitty cash box which was wrapped with newspaper and seat belted in the back seat and covered with a black stadium blanket, we ran an extension cord to the truck to plug-in the case.
I made us dinner of spaghetti, garlic bread, and peas. For dessert we had strawberry jello with Cool Whip on top. We talked about our new kitchen and decided to start another spreadsheet to serve as our master formulary and menu. We also had to come up with a name for our new kitchen as if it was a restaurant.
Weeks ago we photographed the overhead aisle signs in the grocery store and marked each item for what aisle it was usually located. The reason for all that was so the computer could sort our grocery list so it went aisle by aisle to eliminate backtracking in the store, neither of us like shopping at the local Food King store (at the corner of Hercules and Dyer) and wanted to get in and out as fast as we could.
This time David wanted to buy a whole chicken and butcher it ourselves and cook it overnight in the crock pot. I'd never cut up a chicken before but decided it was time to learn.
Step one was to use the laptop to watch a video how to cut up a whole chicken, which turned out to be the easy part. We watched one episode of Good Eats that showed how from the perspective of the cutter. We watched another show that had a different style of disassembling a whole chicken, it was called Cook's Country.
I think it took four minutes to partition the bird. We left the wings attached to the breasts and held the bird above the cutting board. That caused the hip joints to dislocate then it was easy to separate the thigh from the body. And at the cost per pound around $1.10 for a whole chicken it was a very low cost option and we got to use our nice new cutting board and German knives. The skeleton got quadruple bagged and tossed in the kitchen garbage. That's one good use for old grocery store plastic bags.
The bad part of buying a whole chicken was most of the bird went in trash which made the cost per pound much higher than compared to a plastic tray of boneless breasts.
We packed the four pieces into glass containers and put them in the refrigerator for tomorrow.
After dinner we sat on the sofa and surfed the movie channels but found nothing to watch so we decided to play a DVD movie then go to bed. We watched the 1998 Titanic movie, we had the 3D blu-ray version and watched with our glasses on.
The Titanic movie certainly made Kate look nice and Leonardo was pretty but too much of a twink. We saw him in a film he acted in years earlier (Total Eclipse, 1995) where he was a French poet, he appeared naked and showed his wiener to the camera. He was way too twinkish back then too but he had a great face for the screen. I still liked Titanic, I even liked the actor Billy Zane, he's super handsome even though he usually played a villain.
The animation they showed in the film for how the ship broke in two and sank was no longer considered accurate, but it's close. The stern half of the ship never stood vertically and bobbed in the ocean like it did in the 1997 movie.
After Titanic I got out the 3D blue-ray for Avatar and we started watching it but had to stop early in the film because we were both tired. We sat on the sofa sharing a glass of wine with the lights off in the entire house, except our bathroom work area.
David commented that it would have been nicer if all the male Na'vi had horse dicks that hung down to their knees and dripped for an hour after sex but retracted smaller than DiCaprio's when not in use.
David pointed out something early in the movie if you watched carefully, when they made their first flight into the wilderness to do nature studies and Jake Sully wandered off while the two others (Norm and Grace) pressed a data meter into a tree root on the ground to watch how fast the trees were communicating, Jake Sully glanced at the camera with a look of `oh brother' eye-roll on his face, right when Grace said, "We can take a sample." He said he thought it was the only time any Na'vi looked at the camera. David said they already filmed Avatar 2 and 3 but delayed the release of Av2 until late 2023.
We showered together that evening, David seemed very romantic afterward in bed. I was on my back and he was half on top of me. We gently kissed in the dark bedroom for a while, he told me a few times he loved me. When that started I was already turned on and stroked myself. David slid down and licked my tits for a while then took the head of my dick between his lips and I made milk for him. He took a few swigs off a water bottle and spooned behind me and we slept all night. I loved falling asleep with his arm around me.
The crew arrived as we were finishing up in the little bathroom. I quickly closed our bedroom door because the bed looked like a sex platform at a stripper bar in Bangkok!
They started working right away, today the big projects were plumbing and finishing the walls so they were ready for the tile guy. We even added a drain in the center of the bathroom floor, just like the kitchen so it could be scrubbed and rinsed with a garden hose (should the need arise). The carpenter said the tile guy would be here tomorrow to start on the walls and floor. We also paid extra to have parts of the walls lined with a sheet steel panel so we could add shelves later on and always hit something strong enough for support.
Our new shower will be part of the room with curtains to pull around but no actual enclosure. The floor had to be contoured to direct the water towards the drain and so water from the shower curtains would drip down the shower drain too. He was using a fine cement to contour the floor to facilitate drainage. They also brought the new cabinets today but couldn't place them until the walls, floors, and electrical outlets were finished. He said it should start to look like a bathroom again by the end of the week.
We left for work at 9am and had meetings with the El Paso Police again over their fugitive problem. We were not responsible for doing their work, even if we located those people the police still would not capture them without our involvement, they said it was a safety issue. Most of the time we only captured the ones that had rewards greater than $5k.
For lunch we drove to a Korean restaurant on Montana Street and witnessed a nasty accident at a traffic light caused by a guy in a van, but he bolted so we followed.
He obviously knew he was being chased because of the half-assed attempts he made at ditching us, like driving around in a couple Walmart parking lots. We already called the cops and told them what the current status was.
And lucky for us, unlike Los Angeles, they did not televise car chases in El Paso. The van tried to escape on I-10 and drove west bound. Our truck had a V-8 engine so he wouldn't be able to outrun us, but we stayed back which I think caused him to spend more time looking in the mirror and less time watching traffic.
We'd made it all the way to the west side near the state line, New Mexico didn't want him to enter their state so they set up a road block and were ready with rifles in hand. They were letting cars go by but slowed everyone down, he swerved onto the shoulder and back into the lane, we were down to 30mph and the sign for the state line was just ahead of us. He finally stopped and bailed out of the van and ran along the shoulder with a pistol in his hand, with one flash of rifle fire the guy fell to the pavement, face first onto the highway and the chase was over, and so was his life. He made it to within two feet of New Mexico, with his arm outstretched his fingers were nearly at the gap in the pavement.
We stopped and introduced ourselves and thanked them for the help. We recorded our report on the way back to the airport then discussed how different things could have been if we had that hand held EMP weapon. Busy day. We were lucky we stayed back far enough that he never shot at us. If he'd shot my husband's truck he probably would have done a pit maneuver with him on I-10 near an overpass.
When we got home we saw the cement work on the bathroom floor was done and curing, all the plumbing was ready and the walls (and floors) were ready for the tile guy. I noticed they made the new contour for the floor drainage but not where the sink cabinet went, so it would sit on the sub-floor and not the tile.
When the crew left they hung police tape across the doorway with hung a note that said: stay off the floor!
Then we cooked the chicken quarters in a small roasting pan in the oven, 310 degrees for thirty minutes and stopped every ten minutes to check the temp. Halfway through the hour we added tomatoes and peeled potatoes and other veggies we had at home. David poured in three packets of chicken bouillon and added more water and some red wine vinegar too.
That turned out to be an excellent meal but we had no leftovers. David said he wanted to try cutting the breasts into cubes and pan frying them with veggies and lots of spices, then serving them with soy sauce and Szechuan marinade.
That evening we watched the rest of Avatar and I blew him on the sofa as the movie was ending. He came before the credits ended.
Sometimes when I did an extra good job of making him come David was so happy and appreciative he kissed me like he's gone crazy. He gave me big sloppy kisses all over my mouth and sucked my tongue and held me tightly until the rush of emotions passed. Some of the time like that when he came extra hard he couldn't come again for two or three days. He called it Prostate Paralysis, I called it Dick Stroke.
My favorite way of doing that trick was to jerk him with my thumb and first finger making a loop and sliding it up and down the last few inches of his boner while I had my (lubed) hand under his butt cheeks and a finger up inside him, moving around on the front wall of the inside of his rectum. If I did it correctly and he relaxed enough I could make him come so hard he'd spurt four feet and look like he was in agony. I saved that one for special occasions so it never stopped working. He actually wept every time I did it and was usually asleep soon after.
Our next mission was in Texas, our first in a while. Del Rio called with a standoff at the border crossing, two guys held twenty tourists at gunpoint demanding asylum in the USA, the report said it appeared they were both very high on something and were sweaty, panting, and shouting all the time. It took a while to evacuate the building and stop all the traffic outside. Both men were armed and had obvious prison tattoos.
We found out later they both escaped from a work detail at a prison farm in Guatemala and stole a truck and drove across Mexico and claimed to have relatives in Oklahoma City.
They called for the jet but the ride to Del Rio wouldn't take long, its only 420 miles from El Paso. But we got in the jet and made it there in 21 minutes! We landed at the Del Rio International Airport and got a ride in a police car to the border crossing building.
The pilot told us that flying at 47,000 feet at 1500mph then suddenly landing was similar to the Space Shuttle landing, it was mostly a non-powered glider landing. Many times at that altitude we didn't show up on radar. Sometimes the pilot had to explain our sudden appearance to people in the control tower.
They only had one border crossing at Del Rio and it was a busy place. The detective that picked us up at the airport said he heard them say repeatedly these guys seemed really high, they were frantic, sweaty, panting, yelling, and seemed desperate to get across. They were going to take hostages, then when border agents said taking hostages while asking for asylum sort of looked bad, so they demanded a vehicle with a full tank of gas and no cops following them. He chuckled and said they obviously never heard of helicopters and airplanes. He said the Border Patrol people were stalling them while they tried to find a city department to donate a vehicle with a full tank of gas. They found one owned by the city parks department and were going to let them take it, but it needed tires and brake repairs but it was still road worthy.
When we arrived the place was a sea of cop cars and flashing lights but nothing was happening, everyone was waiting for their escape vehicle to arrive.
David asked why the border patrol didn't handle it themselves and he said the squad that did that sort of thing, the entire crew was on a training exercise near Las Cruces at a private military training camp for old guys.
When we arrived and got out of the car we changed into our Batsuits in full view of about a hundred people and news reporters. We had no choice really.
And as anticipated, when David was ready to pull on his Batshirt he turned to face the audience so he could show off his body to about thirty onlookers with cameras.
We asked for the detective that brought us to the border station to stay with us to be the radio guy and he said okay after he cleared it with the police chief.
We studied the front of the building to get the layout. They had no floor plans to show us and we saw the doors were slightly open due to the force of wind from the air conditioning on the roof.
I got out our glasses and two spiders, David said to insert two sleep pellets into each one.
Just then the old green Chevy SUV from the Del Rio Parks Department arrived, he was told to leave the keys in the ignition. It was left near the door, they even drove it across the yard and parked on the sidewalk near the door.
I activated one spider and set it inside the green SUV under the front seat, then we got down on the ground behind it and ran the other spider inside the station to examine the situation.
The two guys had five hostages (they released many of the original group before we arrived) and they both had pistols in hand, and from what we saw the cops were right they both looked strung out on meth. Both had face and arm sores and looked like they could cardiac arrest at any moment, but they were young and would probably survive the meth but not enjoy the freedom they craved in America. Neither of us took kindly to people that endangered innocent civilians, no matter why.
We moved our spider inside the check-in station beside their computer display so nobody would notice it and the elevated location gave us a view of the entire room.
"You speak fluent Spanish?" David asked the Del Rio cop, he said his name was Ricardo and yes, he was born in Mexico. We asked if they could move all the cops and their cars far back right now. He used his walkie talkie to request that, and about 45 seconds later it started to happen, they got into their cars, shut off the lights and parked on the far side of the employee parking lot. Some of them even left and went back on patrol.
We tried to convey that this situation was nearly over and we didn't need so many cops here, about 70% of them should go back to normal duties in town.
Like a true hero Ricardo walked inside the station with his hands up and told them he worked out a deal, "The cops pulled back and most of them left, you can get in the vehicle outside, keys are in the ignition, and you can drive off but if you take any hostages then it's over." We heard him tell them to leave now, the cops will not follow you, but no hostages, the gas tank is full and they were free to go, just the two of you.
They looked at each other and around the room, Ricardo gestured to the front door and they ran outside. As soon as they cleared the door he ran the remaining hostages out the Mexico-side door and away from the building.
The two guys ran outside and got in the SUV, cranked the motor and turned around, punched the gas pedal and sped off down the road. As soon as they started driving away I activated both gas pellets on the first spider and looked at my watch, and started a timer. I told the 2nd spider to return to me ASAP.
The road leaving the crossing station was a major stretch of highway, it was four lanes and divided and it's kind of an industrial area. In that part of Texas the river sometimes flooded; that entire area was floodplain so nobody built valuable property. It's almost two miles from the border crossing to Del Rio city limits but the green and white SUV didn't make it that far. The road curved a little then hit a long straight away with lots of empty land on both sides and an occasional industrial looking property. They sped away and one cop followed them (in an unmarked car) but stayed back about 600 feet. We heard them say the two guys made it about a mile then drove off the road down into a ditch and got stuck in the mud, the engine was screaming since the driver still had his foot on the pedal. We told the detective to tell them not to open the doors the car was full of gas. We told them it would be safe to open the hood and yank the main spark plug wire, which was what they did.
We packed up our stuff and got back in the police car and drove past the scene, there was an ambulance and a tow truck and three police and border patrol cars and we could see the two guys leaned forward into the dash board, one door was wide open. When we rolled past the scene my watch said it was six minutes since we fired the gas, they had to wait another four minutes before they could remove the sleeping kidnappers.
When we got near the airport we asked him to drive into a Burger King and we went inside and changed into our street clothes and bought some food then rode the rest of the way to the airport.
Luckily there were flights from Del Rio to Dallas on the hour in a small regional jet so we spent the night in Big-D and got a hotel room and took the first flight to El Paso in the morning.
Our office had installed a new system where we could call a specific phone number to record our report directly into their computer, it would convert it to text and save it. We used it for the first time that night. David trusted our tiny handheld dictation recorder more because it was private and we had complete control.
Everyone seemed to be happy with the outcome of that case. Two spiders and two pellets used, total cost around $230k including airfare but not our hotel room.
We found out two weeks later the two suspects tested positive for methamphetamine and `bath salts.'
Two weeks later our bathroom was nearly done. The lights, vents, cabinets, towel rods, drawers and doors were in and working. The shower curtain track was installed today and they'll re-set our toilet tomorrow. The crew spent half the day today tearing down their shop in our bedroom and hauling tools to the truck.
Tomorrow they'll take up the floor covering and put the finishing touches on the bathroom, then it's time to write the check and run to the bank to deposit that amount. The cost for the bathroom and new water heater was comparable to the cost of a new car! We felt it was worth the money because we planned on staying there for a long time.
That night we discussed what to do next and talked about building a mini-golf course in the back yard with air powered special features, it would be a four-hole course that wrapped around the back yard stone walls. We'd also found a variable cover for the back yard, it required a series of poles to be installed along four sides to support the cover which acted like giant aluminum Venetian blinds to modulate the sunlight that hit the ground. It also afforded us some privacy from prying eyes in low earth orbit.
Your average Joe Six Pack American had no idea how advanced and frequently their property was imaged from space. Since we worked in that industry we worried how it might affect our careers if we were photographed fucking in the back yard so we decided to block their view! When we saw intel reports on high profile suspects it usually included photos of them taken from space, so we had to assume we were on the list too. We'd already seen space photos of our relief team members near their homes around Omaha.
The back yard cover guy shot us a quick quote of $7.2k for a motorized cover above the entire yard. We'd need zoning variances and signatures from six neighbors, David said he'd do that since he was better with strangers than me, especially women and kids.
When we decided to buy this place we picked it because the yard was big enough to install a pool so I reminded him with his mini-golf course to make sure it was not permanent. He said it was mostly made from wood, carpet, screws, staples, glue, and some compressed air features to alter the surface of the course to make it slightly different each time it was played. We went to Putt Putt Mini Golf over on Dyer Street twice a month on date night, weather permitting.
Last time we went to mini golf they actually tried to get us to `join' the club: pay $120 up front and get unlimited play for the rest of the year. Luckily David passed on that exciting offer.
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