Chapter 6.
Note to readers: for added fun load the song: Dreams (1986), by Van Halen, have it ready to play where indicated.
Our wake-up call came at 5:02am, we showered and got packed then rolled our stuff down to the lobby to sign-out. David told him we had a great time and would definitely come back, this was our favorite hotel in San Diego. He left a large cash tip for room service on the soap shelf in the shower. Even though we had to secure the room with a credit card we paid with cash so there would be no credit card activity from the hotel.
The lady behind the counter asked if we saw the flash out over the ocean while we were here and David told her yes, it was very bright, we covered our eyes. He said it reminded him of an atomic bomb test, but she corrected him and said it was a just fuel tank explosion.
Ten minutes later my car (a Neptune Blue Toyota model 86) appeared outside the entrance (it was still dark outside), we rolled out the doors and loaded our four bags into the trunk and used the GPS to get back on I-8 for the long ride up into the mountains, then down the other side, across the California Department of Rocks, then out onto the broad flat Imperial Valley, which looked a lot like around Bloomington, Illinois but with an occasional palm tree.
Once we got onto the Imperial Valley I set the cruise control for 90mph, and the GPS was already set for the Waffle House in Yuma, Arizona where we always stopped for breakfast. 6:45am we parked in the empty lot and walked inside to order steak, eggs, toast, hash browns, and coffee.
As we walked in the front door a police car drove into the lot and stopped behind our car and sat there. We ignored what he was doing and went inside to order and drink our first coffee of the day. I glanced once and saw he was looking at my car and talking into his microphone.
While we waited for our food the cop eventually walked inside, looked around, so we waved at him and he walked over and stood by the booth with his hands on his hips.
"Good morning officer." I greeted him.
"You boys own that fancy sports car?" He asked with a serious tone.
"It's my car, Sir." I replied with a smile.
"The airplane clocked you at 91mph on the highway, I could impound your car for that." He said sounding almost upset. David looked at me and smiled as he smeared strawberry jelly on his toast. The cop looked like he weighed nearly 300 pounds.
"Want some coffee?" David offered while chewing his toast, and slid fully inward on the bench to offer a place for him to join us. That only seemed to make the officer more upset. He probably couldn't fit there anyway.
"Did you run my plate?" I asked.
"Yes I did, it showed your name and address and it also said do not detain for any reason. But you boys gotta understand, this ain't Washington, and it doesn't say I can't impound your car."
I could tell David was getting annoyed because the way he scrunched his eyebrows. "How long you been a cop, Sir?" David asked.
"Twenty seven years." He proudly answered. David replied by quietly telling him, "I think you should call your boss before you say anything else. Don't worry, we'll be riiiiiiight here, we ain't goin' nowhere." He softly spoke to the cop with a mouth full of scrambled eggs.
The cop pulled a smart phone from his shirt pocket and stepped outside and called someone for about five minutes. David and I stopped talking after he left not knowing what shit he might pull on us, it was obvious we stomped on his manhood by not cowering in fear. Then he made another call and looked angry about something as he talked on the phone with his other hand waving around while we finished our breakfast and drank another cup of coffee for the road.
(Note: You should now start playing Dreams, by Van Halen (1986))
While he was shouting into his phone we paid our bill, left a tip, and slowly walked to my car. The cop was pacing back and forth shouting at someone on his phone while we walked to my car. My first stop was to see how much space there was between my car and the side of his patrol car, it looked to be about 4-5 feet, so I watched my rear view cam and backed up, turned the wheel sharply then slowly turned the wheel the other way and drove across three empty spots and stopped near the cop. David opened his window and shouted, "We're going to the gas station if you need us." He pointed to the gas station next door, the cop turned and stared at him with his phone stuff smashed against the side of his head with an angry look on his face. I tooted the horn as we slowly drove across the lot and into the gas station and parked at a pump, still within sight of the large patrol officer.
I pumped, David went inside to pay and wait for the change since we always paid in cash.
After that was done and the windshield was clean we drove two blocks to the highway and got back on I-8 heading east. Because we were in town I kept it at 60mph and noticed that cop was two cars behind us. I turned up the car stereo a bit louder, it played one of our favorite road trip songs: Dreams by Van Halen (1986).
The sun had come up while we were in the Waffle House.
East of Yuma we approached the US Border Patrol Checkpoint, David told me to behave. I lowered the window and told the guy in uniform, We was both proud Mericans,' David exclaimed, "Damn proud!" As he started to ask where we were going I cranked up the radio and slowly rolled away. I shouted back at him, "Y'all er heroes!" I tooted the horn and closed my window, I looked at David and told him, Sulu, engage the warp drive.'
With a twist of the knob we got up to 90mph pretty damn quick and headed east toward Tucson, our next stop for gas, about 240 miles away, just under three hours. Because of the traffic we rarely made 75mph but when it cleared out we used the hammer lane like God intended. I told David that I saw on PBS that Tucson was the Silicon Valley of Arizona and since it was at 3000 feet their weather was a lot like ours back in El Paso which was 3200 feet above sea level.
There was a very flat stretch of desert on I-10 where winds could kick up dust storms with little warning. We've been through that area before and it was interesting to see the steps Arizona took to warn motorists about sudden brown-out dust storms. But today there was no wind and the air was clear, the sky a beautiful cloudless blue.
At 11:10am I reduced our speed to 62mph as we entered the Tucson city limits where the traffic got thicker. We've never stayed here, just got gas and zoomed through but I always heard Tucson was a great town to visit, tons of stuff to see, and lots of great restaurants.
My only complaint with Arizona was their produce sucked, but they raised a lot of cattle so their steaks were usually good but most Arizona produce came from California, grown in sand, so it lacked flavor but looked normal. We've learned over the years to never buy corn on the cob or fruit in Arizona.
We stopped at Burger King then got a tank of gas and hit the highway again, next stop somewhere in New Mexico, cruise control set for 90mph once we got away from Tucson. In my car anything over 89mph we called Warp Speed. There was a curvy uphill stretch on I-10 as it passed from the Sonora Desert into the Chihuahua Desert near the state line and suddenly all the plants were different. All the Saguaro cactus were gone and the desert got lumpy and greener. We discussed stopping for dinner or pushing hard to make it home before midnight. We decided to stop in Deming, New Mexico to hit the Burger King and fill the tank and not stop for a sit down dinner.
We've stopped in Lordsburg in the past but it looked sad, like it was slowly becoming a ghost town like Orogrande. It was sad to see how building the interstate highway that went around these towns killed both of `em. The truth was that aside from the Tucson area, from Yuma to El Paso its one small dying town after another all the way.
Sitting in the dining area eating our second burgers and fries of the day David clearly had something on his mind, we were far enough away from everyone that we could talk work without compromising secrecy.
"You know it occurred to me another reason why our work was so stressful and scary was when we were told we did something wrong because nobody died or we didn't use enough hardware." David said softly.
I stuffed three fries with a big glob of catsup on the ends, "What's that?"
"Every mission we go on is new territory, we do things that have never been done by man before. What we do is like performance art, we're kind of like the Wright Brothers of terror fighting. Someday someone may write a book or make a movie about us, but that reality is so contradictory compared to the response we get from the boss, it seems like he lives in a totally different reality, like he lives on Planet Profit and we live on Planet Anti-terror. On our planet he looks very unprofessional and misguided."
"I can see that, it's exactly that way." I offered while I chewed another few fries.
"The only job we've done recently he fully approved was the one we just finished in San Diego. And could you imagine him being the business manager of the Wright Brothers experiments at Kitty Hawk? He'd put all the focus on how many feet from the end of the launch rails to first touch-down, not how much closer we got to a working airfoil with control surfaces. It really pisses me off just thinking about it." He offered then pushed the last bite of his Whopper into his mouth. I smiled and winked at his clarity.
We didn't talk much after his comments. We finished our food, used the bathroom, and got back in my car. I looked around the lot to check for any obvious intelligence people watching us, but saw nobody nearby.
Again, we engaged the warp drive again and raced across New Mexico but slowed near Las Cruces and started the turn to the south towards the far northwest corner of Texas. I pointed out the lights from La Tuna Prison when we drove past the exit sign. My car really drank gas we used the warp drive and the tank wasn't very big.
Those last few miles of I-10 in New Mexico are very weird, I think it is designed to stop people being chased by law enforcement from easy escape into Texas. The roadway is walled-in on both sides with a very wide paved median. This is the only state border I've seen where the sign says you're leaving a state. Suddenly you cross into Texas and the interstate is wide open again, the change is striking.
Just north of the border is an exit for Highway 404 which heads east between the mountains and was sort of a backdoor entrance into northeast El Paso on a curvy-hilly rural road that was prone to washout during heavy rains, but it's a nice drive.
Since we got back early we decided to slow down to 55mph and take Transmountain Road across the Franklin Mountains with the windows down. The mountains were nearly impossible to see at night but we heard the crickets. When we got up into the mountains before the big V-cut I cranked up the stereo and played Dreams again. David pretended to sing like Sammy Hagar and I pounded drums on the steering wheel, we performed the song together. David actually had a great singing voice, I sang harmony.
We stayed on Transmountain Road across north-east El Paso to McCombs Street and turned right, then it was surface streets, traffic and lights the rest of the way south to our neighborhood. He played that stupid song about four more times until we stopped at a gas station near home on Hondo Pass Drive. He pumped while I went inside to pay. While I was inside I watched an obvious homeless dude walk up to David and try to beg some cash off him.
David simply pointed at him and warned him, `don't come closer,' but the guy started to yell crap. I didn't feel scared for David because he could easily defend himself but I knew he'd get mad if the homeless guy touched him, which happened seconds later. I looked at the cashier and mumbled, "Here we go again."
David quickly batted his hand away and pulled out the nozzle and aimed it at the guy, which caused him to step back. When David put the nozzle back in my car to finish topping off the tank, the guy rushed David but this time he shoved him back hard. The guy bounced off the trash can then landed on his butt and rolled over a couple times and screamed that he needed a `mofo bamalance.' I think that two-handed shove to the chest really startled him. David finished filling the tank and glanced at me and nodded at the dramatic display, and then he smiled at me. I got the change and we left for home, about six blocks from the gas station. Nobody called for an ambulance and the homeless guy left after his audience (us) drove away.
That night we talked about my car. David loved his big truck with the big V8 and I loved my sports car and the performance. He often teased me about the dashboard features that didn't work on my $43,000 car because of the nav system. After I purchased the car I had to take it to a private mechanic and have the car's nav system disabled, I used a GPS mounted to the windshield. Since we're DOD agents we cannot be tracked (except by the DOD), so our phones and vehicles were modified to disable or defeat all tracking. On my (and David's) cell they drilled a hole into the GPS chip and modded the OS so it always fed incorrect location and speed data to anyone monitoring it. I was told it sent tracking info that I was driving around Houston on the I-610 loop at 55mph constantly, 24 hours a day. Occasionally I saw ads for truck stops near Houston on my browser. Any phone number that wasn't in my directory got the tones and a message that my number was not in service. I only received texts from numbers already in the phone. Every time I turned on the phone it alerted me that the GPS had failed, that always made me smile. We had a short discussion about going after the cartel heads down in Mexico, if we were authorized -- would we do it? As of today it is illegal for us to operate outside the lower 48 states and Alaska.
Back in the tac-room we unloaded our stuff, the case got plugged-in and our suits un-packed and back on hooks. He checked-in with our office and played our messages, one was about reward offers for the cruise ship incident that saved hundreds of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars. It said they had good leads on who funded that operation. We confirmed we were safely back at home with only one weapon used, only one known fatality, which seemed to make the boss happy.
After showers we went to bed but after all that coffee I couldn't even close my eyes. On our backs in our cold dark bedroom we discussed the prison-op and one of the rarely used weapons in our case. We had a shoulder fired missile for taking down helicopters. It's a smart projectile that was designed to follow choppers, it homed-in only on the tail rotor. The weapon would gradually disable the tail rotor, giving them time to land before all control was lost, but it wasn't much time, maybe 50-70 seconds.
If the tail rotor suddenly stopped working the chopper would start to spin and become impossible to control, but if the pilot gradually lost it they had a better chance of landing quickly without killing everyone but they usually only had one minute to recognize the problem and get on the ground, this gave the pilot only seconds to decide to focus on landing and not trying to make it back to the airport. Pilots didn't always think that way, but most would. The round exploded and sprayed the tail rotor mechanism with a powerful adhesive that activated with exposure to air, it gummed-up bearings and tail rotor parts. It's a smart weapon that followed the chopper and burst near the rotor and also ruined the airfoil shape of the rear rotor blades.
Those rounds were fired from a shoulder mounted tube, with optical sights and one button operation. Extend the tube, remove the caps, aim at a helicopter, press and hold the button, wait for the tone, then release and hold down again until it fired. About the fastest it could be deployed, from un-capping to launch was about twelve seconds. They're American made and cost about $600,000 each. It would work with the target helicopter flying in any direction, any time of day, and in almost any weather. We usually carried two in our case.
We also carried self-guided `dial-a-yield' weapons for vehicles (land and sea). We had (variable-yield) weapon for destroying anything. Our spiders also had add-on tech we could use and they were highly programmable and remote controllable.
In the wrong hands our high energy weapon could easily topple the most hardened structures. This was why we had to protect our black case, even with our lives.
David fell asleep while I was talking about changes I wanted to make to our mini golf course in the back yard.
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