Camp chaos, p.20
Camp Chaos, page 20
part #1 of The Unit Series
16
Doc Rich sat in her office, going over the biometric readings from the team members from the night before and listening with a half-ear to the briefing being held in the library. Leading the group for the day was Cloud.
“Today, our training exercise will be a hound and hare exercise. For our newbie, the explanation of hound and hare is that we send out the hare, whose job is to evade capture by the hounds. The hare gets a five-minute lead. The hounds have to pick up the hare’s trail by using tracking methods: searching for footprints, snapped twigs, torn vegetation, etc. We’ll be starting with a run to an entryway to a wooded area, where the hare will be released. Today’s hare will be my cockpit buddy, Crow. Our hare has an advantage on us as he had the opportunity yesterday afternoon to come out and prepare by placing hiding locations and other things that could aid him.”
“In other words, he’s acting just like a perp,” Hank said. “This is going to be right up my alley.”
“And we’ll see how the FBI does against the DEA,” Crow smiled.
“With a run, who gets to bind Hank’s tits?” Voice asked jokingly.
Hank gave Spud a glance. A flash of anger crossed his face, then one of defeat. “No one,” she snapped. “Mike did me a muy pronto job yesterday on a special undergarment.”
The team grew silent. They all glanced from Hank to Spud and back again.
“Suddenly, we have an off-limits topic?” she demanded with a little anger of her own. “And here I thought I’d get some ribbing about all of you not getting the opportunity to help me prepare for an operational activity.”
In her office, Doc Rich sat up, now paying full attention. “Medical 1, Medical 3, join me, please.”
The other two doctors came into the office. “What’s up?” Doc Wright asked.
“I think Hank is about to let loose on the team.”
The silence in the library had continued.
“Well?” Hank asked.
They all looked at each other, with the exception of Spud, who sat looking at the floor.
“Ok. We’re going to have a little chat, because it appears that sex is now off-limits, and if there’s one fucking thing I hate, it’s having guys decide they have to pussy-foot around me...”
Doc Rich was entering commands into the monitor she had been using. Security, library, camera A, audio feed. An image of the library’s interior and the team sprang onto the monitor, and Hank’s voice could be heard. The other doctors dragged chairs around to watch with Doc Rich.
“…because girls aren’t supposed to talk about sex. Do you think Doc Andy didn’t invite me to check out his special drawer? Why do you think some of that stuff is in there? Did you think it was for guys?”
The men still sat silently, not quite knowing how to respond.
“I know all of you have seen the interior of that drawer, too” she said, walking around to stand in front of Voice. “I even know that you like Japanese.”
Voice turned red. In Doc Rich’s office, Doc Andy put his face in his hand and peeked at the monitor through his fingers.
“Well, I’m going to tell you a little secret. Women have needs, too. As a matter of fact, for every time you guys come once, we can come three times – if you’re any good, that is. You get an hour reprieve. We are horny all the time.”
Doc Rich was wide-eyed. “Oh my.”
“Is that true?” Doc Wright asked.
“Shut up.”
“And in case you’re wondering,” Hank continued, anger in her voice, “I did get a ‘prescription’, as he euphemistically puts it, from Doc Andy’s little drawer. A nice, big prescription. He even had to recommend some of that stuff that you guys use,” she said, curling her fingers and pumping her arm in a bit of sign language with an unmistakable meaning.
Doc Andy sat upright and raised an eyebrow toward the monitor. “My, oh my,” Doc Rich said. “A big one?”
“Made me blush,” Doc Andy replied.
“I even play with it sometimes,” Hank continued. “And if knowing that helps you all with some of this,” repeating the same sign language, “then have at it. Enjoy yourselves, and I’ll enjoy myself and everyone will be happy. And now that I’ve just pulverized the ice for you all, can we kindly get back to this training exercise?” She stood and glared for a while, the men silent, then threw up her hands and gave out an exasperated sigh. “Forget it. I need five minutes and a cup of coffee. I’ll be in the cafeteria.” She stood and glanced toward Spud. Their eyes met and held for the briefest of moments.
She stormed toward the library door. “Medical 3, you dirty old perv, you can stop listening now. And that goes for your two compadres as well!” she said angrily, addressing the security camera. Then she walked out.
“Guess she knows about that now,” Doc Rich said.
“Well, that was interesting,” Cloud said.
“Maybe too interesting,” Voice said.
The rest of the team snickered, remembering her remark to Voice.
Spud stood up. “I’ll get her.” He walked out and made his way to the cafeteria.
Hank was sitting at the team table, cradling a cup of coffee.
“Mind if I join you?”
“What the fuck do I care?” she snapped.
“Mind telling me what all that was really about?”
She pursed her lips and shook her head no.
“Maybe after dinner tonight?”
She looked at him. He recognized the expression. He’d seen it in his mirror the day before. “Sure, what the hell.” Getting quieter, she said, “I think I’d like that, Spud.”
“My place?”
“Sure, what the fuck. You’ve seen mine enough. I’ve never seen yours.”
“That’s true. Now come on – we weren’t done with the briefing yet, and we’ve got mission training to do.”
“Ok, Crow – see if you can keep us from catching you.” The team watched as Crow disappeared into the woods, watching his cammies blend into the underbrush.
“His five minutes are up. Let’s go get him.”
The team members fanned out. Hank stood her ground.
“Spread out, Hank,” Spud said.
“Why?”
“So we can form a sweep line.”
“Really? Good initiative, bad judgement. Who taught you guys to track?” She raised her voice and said, “Everyone hold where you are.”
“You’re going to lead this one?” Voice asked.
“If we want to get back to the BEQ before midnight, yeah,” she said. “Sweep lines are sometimes good for search and rescue, but for this we want to use tracking, remember?” She pointed into the woods. “I watched him closely. The last place I saw him clearly was down by that tree. Just follow me.”
She stepped into the woods and strode to stand by a tree. Voice began to go ahead of her, but she stopped him.
“When a person moves across the ground, they leave signs. Footprints, disturbed leaves and stones, broken twigs, torn vegetation… You want to look first. If you move into the trail, you can disturb the signs. Then you lose the trail entirely.”
“Where did you learn this stuff from?” Voice asked.
“Border Patrol tracking team. And they are very good.” She smiled at him. “And I was paying attention.”
She stood and looked around in front of her. “The idea is to look for inconsistencies. It’s the same thing you do when you’re acquiring your target when sniping. Look for the little inconsistencies that tell you what you’re seeing isn’t natural. And I spy with my little eye a series of footsteps.” She walked forward. “Can you see them?”
“Nope.”
“Right here.” She bent down and pointed out a leaf. “This leaf has been turned over. A leaf will be damper on the bottom than the top, so it looks a little darker. Look.” She pointed to a dry leaf, then turned it over to show a slightly darker underside. “Plus, if you do this,” she bent down, “and look across the top of the leaf layer, you can see the depressions in the leaves.”
They all bent and looked. The next few yards of the trail became clear to everyone.
“I’d have never thought of that,” Spud said.
“That’s because you’ve never had to help find a Boy Scout lost in the woods.” She walked forward along the trail Crow had unwittingly left behind.
“You’ve had to help find a Boy Scout?” Turtle asked.
“Yes. He wandered off from the camp and no one knew where he went. The adults in the troop and the other boys walked all over the place and disturbed the sign. They practically had every available person in law enforcement out there to help find him. It was fall, and the nights got cold, so they really needed to find him. The Border Patrol team was called in. They’re practically the experts, given they chase illegals through arroyos and over rocky terrain all the time.”
“Did you find him?”
“Not me personally, but the search team did, yes. He was hypothermic and actually hiding from the rescuers. People’s brains start doing odd things when they get cold. CBP actually found him when they picked up his sign and followed it. They medevac’ed him out by helicopter. The doctors said he was found just in the nick of time. Those CBP guys saved that boy’s life.”
She stopped. “This is where I saw the last footstep.” She bent down. “And there are more.” She moved forward again, then stopped, bent down, stood up, looked around.
“No disturbed leaves this time?” Turtle asked.
“No. But there will be other sign. Where are you, Crow? You didn’t go across the leaves, so you had to have gone across something else. Stones. A log. Like this one.” She looked and saw where flakes of bark had been freshly knocked off.
“On, on,” she said.
The others still stood where they had stopped.
“Come here, he went this way.”
They walked up to her.
“’On, on’ means I’ve found the trail. When someone spots the trail, you say ‘on, on’ and the rest of the team comes to you. If we have to fan out to find sign, we do it from the point where we lost the trail.”
“I’ve got footprints in the leaves,” Turtle said, pointing beyond the end of the log.
“Crow is trying to be clever,” Hank said. “He’s acting like a perp. ‘Run down the length of the log and then make my escape in a direction they’re not expecting.’” Checking for the sign herself, she said, “Good job, Turtle. Lead the way.”
Turtle led the group along another few yards of trail. “I lost it.”
“Are you standing where it ended?”
“Yes.”
“Start looking.”
All the team members started looking for the slight inconsistencies that would point out the direction their quarry went.
“On, on,” Cloud called.
“Watch what’s at your feet, just in case he’s wrong,” Hank advised. Getting over to Cloud, she asked, “What do you have?”
Pointing, “Mud on the leaves.”
“Good job, Cloud. You are, indeed, on. Take the lead.”
Cloud walked along, telling what he was seeing. “Leaves are disturbed. Grass is crushed. Overturned stone.”
The trail led to the edge of a glade. “There’s sign everywhere,” Turtle said.
“Which is why now we have to use our heads.” Hank looked around the perimeter of the opening. “If there’s sign everywhere, it means one of two things. Either he deliberately set up false trails, or he moved around a lot when he set up his hiding place. My guess is door number two. He is somewhere in here.”
She started walking slowly around the glade, humming a little song. Spud recognized it as one from Sesame Street. With each step, she stopped and scanned the area again. Then she walked quietly to an area where tall grass stood. Looking down, she saw what she expected to see. She stood up, and pointing at a patch of grass, quietly sang, “One of these things is not like the others.” As they came up, she pointed out a little loose, fresh dirt in a line. She also pointed to the grass at a spot away from where they stood and held her hand straight up, then pointed at the grass at her feet and made her hand wilt. She pantomimed holding a gun pointed at the spot. The others surrounded the spot and pointed fingers at it.
She reached down and grasped the grass, gently lifting it up. It came up in a large clump, revealing a small sheet of plywood underneath. She grabbed a corner of the plywood and flipped it over to the side.
“Hello, Sadam,” she said as Crow looked up at her from his spider hole.
Seeing the fingers pointed at him, he came up, hands raised in surrender. She dropped him to his knees and zip-tied his hands behind his back.
“And that, gentlemen, is how it’s done.”
“That was fast,” Spud remarked.
“Next time, make me the hare and I’ll take you on a merry chase,” she said.
As they walked from the woods, Hank walked next to Voice and asked, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, Hank.”
“Is there any way to defeat the ability of Medical A from listening in on our conversations?”
“Ordinarily, I’d say no. All the comm feed is through your earpiece, and the mic is extremely sensitive. It can easily pick up conversations from across a room if you take the earpiece out. You have a backup in case you lose the earpiece, and that’s through the watch. The bum ticker coordinates everything and talks to the mainframes through the sat link.”
“What if you put it in a noisy area so it covers up the voice?”
“Doesn’t work. The mainframes can identify what’s voice and what isn’t and separate the voice from the other garbage.”
“Can they initiate a comm link through the watch if your earpiece is out?”
“No. A comm link can only be established by the watch through the swipe, and you have to do that.
“There’s a hierarchy. The bum ticker communicates directly with the sat link and mainframes all the time. Things that it directly controls aren’t suppressible. They can always see your biometrics and location, for instance. The watch acts as an interface with the bum ticker, so you can use it to ask the mainframes for info, and use it to see the info you’ve asked for in the format you request. The earpiece is the dumb bit of the system. It just handles comm but it does it by passing communications through the bum ticker. So, the trick is isolating it from the bum ticker. You can’t do it if it’s in your ear, but you can isolate it by basically putting it in a Faraday cage.”
“Faraday cage?”
“Yeah, an enclosure made of conductive material. It will block electromagnetic impulses so electromagnetic radiation can’t get through to the object within the cage. I’ve got one for my earpiece. I had Luigi make me one out of silver. Just looks like a little decorative box about the size of half a candy bar.”
“I gather sometimes you want privacy.”
“Uh, yeah,” Voice said, turning a little red. “Why? You need to have a conversation that you don’t want overheard?”
“You could say that. Does the box have to be made of silver?”
“No, it just has to be a conductor. I figured better safe than sorry, and silver is the best conductor out there.”
“Can I borrow your little box tonight? Or do you need it so you can speak some Japanese?”
Voice turned red. “Sure, I’ll let you borrow it. Just make sure I get it back.”
Hank walked up to Spud's door and heard it unlatch for her. “Come on in, Hank.”
Hank walked in and looked around. Spud’s quarters were quite a bit more elaborately decorated than hers, probably because he’s been here so long, she thought.
“Coffee?”
“When have you known me to pass up coffee?” she asked, chidingly.
“Never. That’s why I offered.” He brought it and sat it on a coffee table by his couch, putting a cup of his own next to it.
“You did a great job on the hound and hare today.”
“Thanks.”
“I learned a lot from you.”
“Spud, is this the conversation you wanted to have?”
He looked at her. His face said no, but he tapped his ear to explain his silence. He reached for a pad of paper on the end table next to him.
She took Voice’s little box from her cargo pants. Opening it, she pulled her earpiece from her ear and dropped it inside. “Would you like to try this? It’s something really special,” she said.
He pulled his own earpiece and dropped it into the box as well. She then snapped the lid shut.
“Something of Voice’s?”
“How he gains privacy when he’s engaged with Madam Nippon,” she said with a grin. “He says the bum ticker can’t establish a link with the earpiece through the metal.”
“Yeah, well this,” tapping over where his bum ticker was implanted, “is still talking. They can tell from the biometrics when he’s having a conversation with Madam Nippon.”
“And I’m sure he knows that, given he’s I.T. But maybe he’d feel more embarrassed if they knew what he was saying.”
“We all forgive Voice for his quirks. He’s a good programmer.” He studied his hands for a moment. “Just like we’ll all forgive you for the outburst this morning.”
She sat silently.
“Do you want to tell me how we went from discussing a hound and hare exercise to discussing Doc Andy’s drawer, its contents, and the uses of those contents?”
She gritted her teeth. “It was Voice’s stupid remark about who would get to bind my breasts.”
“I think maybe that was a catalyst, but I also know you well enough that it’s something you would ordinarily just roll with. ‘Ha, ha, ha. Fucking funny. Mike beat you to it.’ And you would have even shown them your special bra. If nothing else, you’ve proven to be as candid as the rest of us, and I’ve never seen you pull a punch. But I’ve also never seen you deliver one like that, either. You really hit us with a flame thrower.”
