Camp chaos, p.37
Camp Chaos, page 37
part #1 of The Unit Series
“Oh, for inside we use a different one.” He picked a second device out of the box.
“A cricket?” Cloud asked.
“Sure. Watch this.” Voice pulled out a controller, set the cricket on the floor, and proceeded to have it creep and hop around the room, all the while displaying everything within its camera view.
“And it can pick up the controller inside the building?” Crow asked.
“Probably not. But in that case, it has some autonomous programming. Kind-of like one of those automated floor cleaners. It will find a wall and then creep along it, handling it like a maze. Just keeps the wall on either its left or right until it picks up control signals again.”
“Voice,” Hank began, “has anyone ever told you you’re a fucking genius?”
Amigo and Hank crouched on the ground, rows of corn concealing them from view of the buildings on the Camp Chaos property. They watched the images that appeared on the tablet between them. Perched on a weed within sight of the entrance to the milking barn sat one of Voice’s dragonflies, its far-sighted eye trained on the doorway. Each time the door would open, Hank would tap her watch. On the face of the watch was a message: “Hal, store image.”
High above them, its own eye trained on the fifteen acres of the Camp Chaos complex, a Keyhole-11 satellite passed overhead, soon to be replaced by another KH-11, then another. Data from the Keyholes passed via the unit’s own satellite links to the mainframes in their Quantico base. Once analyzed by Hal, the information then was relayed to the team in the field. Within their Lockridge Farm mission complex, the other five team members worked at doing the final analysis of the data from both the Keyhole satellites and the tiny drone, as well as monitoring the progress of a second tiny drone, shaped like a cricket, that was steadily closing the gap between the point where it was released and the entry to the milking barn.
“I mean to tell you,” Amigo whispered, “it is fucking hot out here today.”
“Makes you feel right at home, doesn’t it?” Hank whispered back, her tone chiding.
“Yeah, right. It would get to a hundred degrees, sure enough. But in Arizona, they skip the fucking hundred percent humidity. I swear, I’m soaking wet from sweating.”
Hank turned to him, grinning, and placing her pinky alongside one eye, said, “Which would you like? To see the world’s tiniest tear, or,” rubbing her index finger against her thumb, “hear the world’s tiniest violin? Suck it up, Buttercup.”
“Why do we have to be out here in the middle of the day?” Amigo asked. “It’s at least a little cooler at night.”
“But we aren’t,” Hank replied. “Given the amount of money it likely took Camp Chaos to put this complex together, it’s reasonable to assume they have the same sorts of capabilities we have – including FLIR. With outside air temperatures being about the same as our own body temperatures, we’re less detectable during the day. So again, Buttercup...”
“And fuck you, too,” Amigo replied. “What I’d really like is to hear Hal say ‘image matched’ for every image we send in.”
“Yeah, that would be nice,” admitted Hank. “The more operatives we identify, the trickier it’s going to be to get them all without having them decide not to be captured alive. We really need to get the cricket inside. I’m betting that the complex is somehow rigged. Meaning trying to storm it might be futile, or even dangerous.”
Amigo studied the images being sent back by the cricket as it made its progress toward the milking barn. “Voice has got to be one of the cleverest guys I’ve ever met. Have you been watching how this thing is getting to the barn?” He pointed out a pinned spot on the progress map for the cricket. “He just tells it, ‘go here.’ If it encounters an obstacle, like a corn stalk, it just follows around one side of it until it has a clear view along the line leading to the programmed destination. Then it resumes its programmed path. He says it will do this once it’s inside as well. Hopefully, it will find an opening into the underground facility that it can squeeze through.”
Hank leaned over to get a look at the tablet displaying the cricket’s progress. “Looks like it’s encountered a big obstacle at the moment,” she said. “Am I wrong, or is that the edge of the concrete that the milking barn sits on?”
“Yes. Our little buddy has arrived. Now watch what it can do.”
Hank watched as the cricket appeared to scratch at the concrete with its front legs. One caught on a rough area, and the camera view shifted to vertical, showing the out-of-focus edge of the concrete and a view of the sky. The view shifted, and now showed the edge of the concrete in focus.
“It just swapped its far-distance camera for the near-distance one,” Amigo explained. “Now it’s going to start looking for foot holds.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, like a guy scaling a climbing wall. It will look for imperfections in the concrete and then reach for them with a leg. Watch closely when you see it reach out with a leg and you’ll see there are two tiny hooks on the end of each one. It will hook either a little projection or a hole in the concrete and haul itself up. Then it looks for another one and hooks it with the other front leg, then hauls itself up again.”
Hank watched as the camera scanned the concrete, and, finding a crack, watched a leg reach out and hook the edge. The camera image then slid toward the hooked leg, and the process repeated itself, until before long the top edge of the concrete was reached. The camera view then rotated, showing the concrete platform that the milking barn sat upon. Again, a leg reached out toward a tiny hole in the concrete, and the cricket’s camera showed it resting level on the concrete’s surface. The camera then showed the cricket bounding by leaps across the concrete. Reaching the edge of the building, it turned to the right and began to inch along the corrugated panels that made up the side of the milking barn.
“Now it’s looking for an opening.”
The camera view showed the cricket scanning the lower edge of the panels. It stopped and the camera view shifted to one looking straight at a rusted corner of a panel.
“It’s got one. Now let’s find out how big it is in case we need it for something else.” Amigo thumbed the cricket’s controller and a set of grid lines appeared over the image of the rusted gap in the panels. “Looks like it’s roughly two inches around. Hal, mark location,” he instructed the mainframes. A red pin appeared with a set of GPS coordinates next to it.
“Now it’s going to get iffier,” Amigo said. “Voice wasn’t sure how well we’d be able to communicate with the cricket once it made its way inside a structure. It has its autonomous programming so it can search the area on its own, and it also has an ultra-micro SD chip to record images. When I asked Hal to mark the location of the opening, it set those coordinates as a default location for the cricket to return to when its juice starts to run low. Hopefully, we can get it back out to here so we can retrieve it and download the images it has.” He looked at his watch. “And according to the alarm I set for us, we need to start heading out and catch our ride back to Lockridge, so our little buddy is on his own. I’m going to bring the dragonfly back out so we can grab it, and then tomorrow’s surveillance team can pick up where we left off.”
He picked up the controller for the dragonfly, and soon had it flying back to where he and Hank were hidden in the corn. Bringing it in, he had it land in her hair, grabbing it, nearly laughing out loud at her comic attempt to see where it had landed on the top of her head.
“Let’s go.” They made their way back through the rows of corn to a road a quarter of a mile south of the Camp Chaos complex, where they encountered Cloud with one of the panel vans, pretending to investigate something under the hood.
Seeing them arrive, Cloud said, “Looks like it’s all fixed.” Dropping the hood, he slid open the door to the van. Amigo and Hank looked to see if anyone was within view of the van, then hopped inside, shutting the door as Cloud started the engine and drove off.
“Hank, you’ve got a bug in your hair,” Cloud observed.
“Yeah. Amigo’s a smart ass.”
“That’s what makes the two of you a perfect team.”
“No, Spud and I are a perfect team. Amigo comes in a distant second.” She pulled the dragonfly from her hair and handed it to Amigo.
Taking in the countryside while they drove back to the Lockridge Farm mission complex, Hank reflected that the team had now been five days staking out the Camp Chaos location and still had not managed to identify all of the operatives within its underground walls. Voice’s tiny dragonfly drone consistently returned images of people that didn’t match images taken earlier. And Hal’s analysis kept increasing the potential number of terrorists within its walls.
Arriving at the mission complex, she greeted Doc Wright and Jana as she passed through the medical area of the complex, then through the tunnel and up the stairs to the common area. Spud was sitting with his tablet, going over the latest conclusions Hal had come to with regard to the potential number of terrorists at Camp Chaos.
“So, what does Hal say now?” she asked.
“Only one new face today. Hal is now estimating 550 operatives.”
Hank sighed. “Trying to bring this group to justice before they all decide to gulp an energy drink is going to be damned near impossible.”
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions before we get the data back from the cricket,” Voice said. “If the complex is rigged in some way, then we should be able to see from the cricket’s data feed just how they’re doing it. Maybe even see how to disable it.”
25
“We have chatter,” Crow said. “Another incident being planned by our neighbors to the south.”
“Where?” Hank asked.
“Kearny, New Jersey,” Spud answered. “In the northern part of the state, near New York City and Long Island. About 40,000 people, half of whom are Hispanic. Hal picked up the outgoing call from our usual tower here, north of Henderson. The call was then routed through a tower right there in Kearny.”
“So, we’re going after Hispanics this time,” Hank said. “Anyone significant that we should be looking at for being the target?”
“Once again, we have a mayor who fits the bill. He’s Hispanic,” Spud said. “And about twenty percent of the population is non-citizen. Most of them are also Hispanic. Apparently, that’s what’s setting our Camp Chaos group off. Chatter was that ‘Uncle Rob’ didn’t know how to control the cousins.’ The mayor’s name is Roberto.”
“Kearny is practically a suburb of New York City,” Amigo said. “What’s it look like? Pretty dense urban area?”
Hank had already thought of the possibilities. She slid her tablet over in Amigo’s direction. “A few parks, but pretty much rooftops and roads. If you look at the mayor’s office, though, there’s a park right next door.”
Cloud had also been investigating what would be necessary for air operations. “Kearny sits within the New York Class B airspace. They have established helicopter routes there, so any helicopter support is going to be out. The best we can do is get the team into Newark Liberty, which is practically next door to Kearny. About seven or eight miles as the crow flies. Or as Crow flies, depending upon which side of the quarter is up,” he added, a tinge of annoyance in his voice.
“You need to get one of those fake quarters where both sides are the same,” Spud said with a smile.
“Quit giving away my secrets,” Crow said, garnering a scowl from Cloud.
“Can I suggest that Voice stay here and continue to work on the data from the dragonflies and the crickets, and the rest of us head to New Jersey?” Amigo said. “We’ll need Cloud and Crow to get us there, and then perhaps work this the same way we worked Benton Harbor, with Edge and Spud taking care of the park and Hank and me up on a rooftop.”
“That sounds like a reasonable plan,” Spud said. “So now we just need to figure out what to take and get our two fly boys here to get us there.”
“I’ve already got the flight time calculated,” Cloud said. “We’re about three hours’ flight time to Newark.”
“And I’ll get a call in to the fixed-base operation at Lincoln so we can taxi over and get some fuel,” Crow said. “I’m not sure they could fuel the Latitude there on the National Guard ramp, but if they can then we should be ready as soon as we can get our clearance and take off.”
“I don’t think we’ll need the sniper rifles in this environment, do you, Hank?” asked Amigo.
“The AR10s should work and will be easier to conceal. So, two rifles, handguns for everyone in the team, spotting scope, and I’m going to say just to be on the safe side, three loaded magazines apiece. The rooftops are white, so our coveralls will work both for bluffing our way onto the roof and concealing us while we’re there. Let’s get it loaded up, Amigo, so we’re ready to have Jana scare us to death while flying down I-80 to the airport in Lincoln.” She thought a moment. “You know? Maybe we should see if the DoJ will authorize an ambulance so Jana won’t have to risk a ticket all the time.”
Spud and Edge worked at pulling weeds in the park across from the mayor’s office. Their vantage point allowed them to see most of the front and the rear of the building, as well as the interior of the park itself.
“It’s a virtual certainty that our guy will be somewhere here in the park when the mayor arrives,” Spud said. “It’s got a lot of natural cover.”
“Agreed,” Edge said. Both would occasionally look in another direction and shift so as to keep a constant eye on their surroundings.
“Hank, Amigo, do you guys have eyes on anything from up there?” Edge asked. He stood up and pretended to stretch, looking across the front of the building to where the tops of the sniper team’s heads were visible, binoculars scanning the ground below.
“Spud, Edge, not a thing,” came Amigo’s reply.
Hank scanned the ground from their vantage point once more. Her forehead wrinkled, her face disturbed. Something’s not right. Where’s our perp? She looked to where the mayor’s car was parked. He had apparently arrived early. Maybe our man missed his mark and left?
Look harder, one of her little voices murmured.
“Team, mayor is coming out of the coffee shop across the street from his office,” Spud announced.
Shit! He’s not in the building! He went for coffee!
Hank started searching more than the ground around the building.
“Got him,” Amigo whispered next to her. Keeping his binoculars aimed, he pointed – not down, but across to the roof of the coffee shop.
Hank kneeled and scanned the roof with the scope on her rifle. “Team, our perp is on the roof of the coffee house across from the mayor’s office.” As she watched, she saw the man raise a rifle and begin to take aim, just as Amigo announced, “Gun.”
She placed the reticle of her scope centered on the perp’s head. “Hank, no time for Spud and Edge to get to him before he shoots the mayor. Shooter ready?”
“Shooter ready,” she said, sliding the safety off with her thumb.
“Two clicks up, wind is negligible.”
“Roger, Amigo, two clicks,” she said, making the adjustment on her rifle scope.
“Send it.”
She squeezed the trigger and heard the suppressed pop of the round as it escaped the barrel through a silencer, then watched the man on the rooftop jerk and fall out of sight. Then she lowered her forehead onto the stock of the rifle. “Goddammit.”
“That was a good shot,” Amigo said.
“That was an unnecessary shot,” she said, turning to him with her eyes glazed with tears. “We made an assumption. Perp will be on the ground. We should have considered that he’d find himself a rooftop – just like we did.”
Amigo took in a deep breath and blew it out. “But the good news is right there,” he said. “Our mayor is alive, and just walked through the door of the building. The shot had to be taken, Hank. It was that guy over there, or the mayor.”
“Hank, Amigo, report,” Edge said.
“Edge, perp is down. Now all we have to do is figure out how to get him off the roof and over to the airport.”
Hank was hiding her rifle back under her coveralls. “I’ve gotta get the fuck off this roof,” she said. She headed to the rear of the building and climbed down the fire ladder there, followed by Amigo, then made her way to where the team’s rented van was standing in front of the park. They climbed in, Spud and Edge having already done so.
Amigo pulled out his tablet. “According to the satellite view, there’s an alley behind the coffee shop. Good chances are there’s a fire ladder or fire escape there that our man used to get on the roof.”
Spud drove the van around to the alley. “We got a bit lucky here,” he said. “There’s a fire escape. That will make recovering the body a bit easier.”
“That’s got to be his car,” Hank noted, pointing to an older sedan parked facing out of the alley. “Looks to be another cobbled-together car, and he planned a quick departure parking it the way he did.”
“How do we get the body transported?” Amigo asked. “We don’t want to be turning in a rented van with blood evidence in it, do we?”
“No,” Hank said. “Just like the guy in Benton Harbor, we need to get this guy out of here. The body is evidence, and so is the car. My suggestion is going to be to put the body in the trunk and one of us drives the car to the airport. Park it, get a military transport in here ASAP, and have them load both up and deliver the package to Quantico. That will need to happen right now, because we don’t want him decomposing in the trunk, either.”
Hank climbed the fire escape and made her way across the roof with Edge and Spud behind her. The terrorist’s body lay crumpled on the roof, his head resting in a small pool of blood.
“Not much blood, if you stop and think about it,” Edge said.
“Dead men don’t bleed,” Hank observed. “Once their heart stops, so does any bleeding. The blood is probably just what he had in his skull when he took the bullet. I at least have the consolation of knowing he died instantly. A clean kill, as they say. I should be so proud.” Her voice had the obvious sound of someone who wasn’t proud at all. She picked up the terrorist’s rifle in her gloved hand. “I can’t help take him down,” she said. “Just can’t. We should take the rifle with us and not pack it in the car with him.” With that, she turned and made her way back down the fire escape, the terrorist’s rifle in hand.
