Rescue (an Ell Donsaii story #11)

by Laurence Dahners

  Actually, it was more like watching three 2 year-olds. That Zage Reyes kid was so quiet it was almost creepy. Holly almost had the feeling he was watching the other three kids just like she was. Except he wasn’t watching them to keep them out of trouble. He looked like he was studying them, as if they were some kind of an experiment.

  He was a weird kid, no doubt. Mostly he just sat around, watching the other kids and petting her cat. That was bizarre enough by itself. Toddlers his age usually scared Holly’s cat, pulling on her fur and poking at her. The old tabby, however, had learned that if she plopped herself down by Zage, he would scratch her neck, which she loved. Right now she was purring contentedly.

  Weirder yet, though Zage seldom got up and walked, when he did, he did it much more smoothly than the other kids. Sometimes Holly wondered if he had one of those weird diseases like progeria, except maybe in reverse, so that he could actually be a 10-year-old that only looked like a two-year-old.

  She shrugged, that wouldn’t fit either, the kid can’t even talk. All three of the other babies were babbling all the time and saying a few understandable words, but Zage was silent. He did cry sometimes, if he’d been hurt, but generally made so much less noise than the other kids, that his stillness alone would have made him seem pretty weird.

  Holly felt sorry for Elsa Gardon. Whenever they figured out what was wrong with Zage, Holly had a sad feeling that it would turn out to be something pretty awful.

  ***

  Art thanked the gods for personal air conditioning. He sat in a chair in the sweltering attic bedroom of the house they’d broken into on the Shalimoore golf course. The air conditioning in the house, of course, remained off. They didn’t want anyone wondering why the empty vacation home was active. With the sun on its windows, the upstairs room had to be over ninety degrees, even with the pleasant October weather outside. However, Art’s AC shirt cocooned him in a pleasant flow of cool air. If only it could fend off his boredom. He’d been sitting here every day for four days now and they had begun to wonder if Stockton would actually play Shalimoore on this trip.

  Suddenly he sat forward; a convoy of large black SUV’s were rolling up the driveway to the clubhouse! He picked up the little PGR walkie talkie sitting beside him on the desk. Crossbow didn’t think they should trust any kind of AI headbands. They still wore headbands because you looked odd if you didn’t have one, but the chips had been removed from them. The walkie talkies they had purchased had as many as sixty PGR chips in them providing secure two way connections to all those individuals at once, or one at a time. Art pushed the two buttons that connected the two chips in the walkie talkie that went to Crossbow and Redman, “We’re on! They’re just pulling in.”

  “OK,” Crossbow’s calm resonant voice came back. Art knew Crossbow would have connected himself to the walkie talkies for the entire SCDF. “We’re on. That stupid bitch Stockton is pulling in to the clubhouse. All of you know your jobs. Just do those jobs, calmly, like we’ve practiced. Don’t rush it, and you won’t blow it.” Crossbow continued talking, calmly and persuasively in each man’s earpiece, settling their nerves, reminding them how important the mission was, replaying the sins of the people they were about to kill.

  Art checked and saw that the flag on the green leaned away from the fairway, confirming that the prevailing wind indeed blew up the fairway, across the green and into the woods. This would drive the scent of the men away from the dogs the secret service would be bringing. In addition Crossbow had told the men to turn on the ports attached to their weapons and ghillie suits. Those ports were sucking air in and sending it down to South Carolina in an effort to carry the scent of the men and their weapons away from the dogs.

  Art knew that Redman would be pouring a small quantity of deer pheromone through a port they’d hung in a tree. It hung at the edge of the lot next to the one where the guys lay on top of their rifles in their ghillie suits. The pheromone would splatter into the grass there and should distract and confuse the dogs to some extent. Peanut would be carrying two drugged rabbits down to drop them off in the brush near the edge of the fairway. For a while they’d worried that the dogs would smell Peanut’s recent passage, but then they’d realized that golfers walked back into the brush looking for balls with a fair frequency. The mere scent of people having passed by in the brush shouldn’t be a big problem. The rabbits would stay drugged through a little port Redman had put under their skin. From previous trials they knew that when they shut the drug off, the rabbits woke up in about ten minutes. Peanut would turn off the drugs when the first foursome teed off on the hole.

  ***

  Secret Service agent Will Argant hated Stockton’s golfing boondoggles. Not because he begrudged her the time to relax, the woman worked long hours and deserved a break now and then. Not because they were expensive. Much of the cost the press attributed to her golf junkets were fixed costs, like the costs of the agents who went with her, or the cost of the airplane which had to be maintained and kept available whether she flew somewhere or not.

  No, what Argant hated was the difficulty of providing real security out on a golf course. They did what they could when they were out away from Andrews like this. They kept the schedule of which course she was going to play a secret until they arrived at the course. Their current strategy used two “look alike” foursomes in bulletproof vests also playing the course. One of the look alikes always played in the first foursome. Sometimes the real Stockton and her cronies were in the second foursome, usually in the third.

  The agents accompanying the lead foursome carefully swept the area with chemical sniffers, looked for IR hot spots and used some millimeter wave radar tech to look for unexpected metal in the area. The agents in the actual foursome worked hard to interpose themselves and their body armor between Stockton and any possible sniper’s hiding places. Unfortunately, Will himself could think of quite a few ways to defeat their security measures.

  He just hoped that any bad guys out there weren’t aware of what methods the Service was employing to try to detect them, or weren’t smart enough to work around said methods. Will had a recurring nightmare involving a bomb planted under a green or tee box. Sealed, washed and planted months before, then detonated by PGR, it would be almost impossible to detect. They’d never even be able to catch the SOB who planted it.

  ***

  Will walked past the Stockton look alike who’d just chipped up onto the thirteenth green. He stopped for a moment and frowned out at the undeveloped lot off the end of the green. Covered with a mix of hardwoods and evergreens it provided dense cover. Someone could hide a small army out there.

  He didn’t see anything, but he walked that way anyway, turning and walking along the verge, then stepping back into the undergrowth a ways and walking along about six feet back into the vegetation. He saw a lost golf ball but nothing else. For a moment he thought about calling the dog back. It had passed along the edge of the woods here a few minutes back, but a couple of rabbits had bolted, distracting the dog.

  Finally he settled for tramping a little farther back into the bushes himself. He stopped and looked around but saw nothing. Finally he turned to head back out to the course.

  ***

  Art had moved to a different upstairs room in the house and been watching the three foursomes of the Presidential party. Each of them had a tall heavyset woman to match Stockton but as expected, when he’d zoomed in on the first foursome, the woman had proved to look pretty young. Thin face too, she probably only looked thick because she had on a bulletproof vest.

  In the second foursome the woman walked like an older woman. He had a hard time getting a good look at her because it always seemed like there were several agents in the way but when he finally caught her face with his scope he could see it actually was Stockton. “Crossbow,” he said on the walkie talkie, “she’s in the second foursome. They’re coming up on the tee for thirteen now.”

  “OK,” Crossbow said, then he started talking to the men agai
n, somehow both calming and exhorting them. He had the men in the ghillie suits start moving slowly forward through the brush toward the green.

  ***

  With a feeling of unreality Tom Jessup slowly rose to his knees and brushed some dangling strands from his ghillie suit out of his eyes. He braced his AK against the tree and sighted in on his assignment, the third agent from the left. He hadn’t counted the caddy because the first volley was just supposed to take out the Secret Service. The agent that was Tom’s target was slowly walking towards Tom. Thankfully he wasn’t traveling across his sight. Tom placed his sight on the man’s upper chest right below his head. With the AK firing on auto it would tend to rise. Rather than fight it, Tom would let that action lift it into a head shot. Alternating armor piercing and soft jacketed rounds, some bullets would penetrate the armor and some would be especially effective against the target’s unprotected head. Finger curled on the trigger Tom waited patiently, still finding it hard to believe what he was about to do, but utterly determined not to let Crossbow down.

  In his ear Crossbow serenely said, “Fire,” and Tom carefully squeezed the trigger. Surprisingly, the explosion of noise from the other men firing around Tom didn’t startle him at all. He watched his sight rise with the satisfied feeling of a job well done. The agent’s head disappeared in a spray of blood and Tom moved his head to look for anyone still standing. His gun started to swing of its own accord toward one of the golfers but then the guy went down too.

  They were all down. Even the President, though hopefully she was just ducking.

  Tom stood up and started to back into the woods away from the golf course. Soon he turned and stepped out, bringing up a primitive GPS and looking for the pip which would guide him to a rendezvous with his truck.

  ***

  Riding one of the golf carts outfitted with millimeter radar, Will Argant was most of the way around the fourteenth green when he heard the hailstorm of AK-47 fire erupt back at the thirteenth green. Heart sinking, he ripped the wheel out of the radar agent’s hands and floored the accelerator back toward thirteen. He called base, “Code Red! Extensive automatic weapons fire at POTUS location. Security team to the thirteenth hole at Shalimoore. Activate medical rescue, choppers in the air. Surveillance drones zoom in on POTUS location, tell us what’s happening!”

  In his heart Argant knew that there was no way his President could have survived. From the tremendous volume of fire this hadn’t been a lone sniper. Someone really had snuck a small army in somewhere near that green.

  On his watch!

  Goddammit!

  As Will drove the seemingly endless fairway back to thirteen he saw several pickup trucks jounce out of the yards of houses bordering the course. They careened out across the fairways toward the thirteenth green. With some self-aware amusement he realized that he felt somewhat offended when they drove right up onto the green, damaging its putting surface. The four trucks all parked briefly on the green, then took off in different directions. “What the hell just happened there?” he barked into his HUD. “Surveillance! What did they do on the green?”

  The overhead drone’s controller said, “Picked up POTUS and a bunch of mobile men, probably their own people ‘cause they came out of the trees.” The voice came back, “or her body. They put her in the brown truck. Probably don’t realize we have eyes overhead and think we won’t know which truck to follow.”

  “Shit! One of you stay on that truck. The other zoom out to try to follow the others and give us some idea where they go in case it’s a trick.” Will’s golf cart rolled out onto the thirteenth green. Bodies lay everywhere. Will saw Senator Arkon and multibillionaire Howard Esmer lying near the flag. Stockton’s body wasn’t among the others however. Will’s eyes registered his good friend Bob Schutz lying not far away, the left side of his head a bloody mess.

  Sickened, Argant heard the drone controller’s voice come on again, “Problem. The brown truck has pulled onto a long section of narrow road where trees overhang. I can’t see the truck most of the time. I think it must have stopped as we should have had glimpses of it farther down if it kept moving. I’m zooming back, not seeing it, not seeing it. Oh crap, now I’m getting glimpses of multiple vehicles driving away from that area! I’m not even sure how many and I sure can’t tell what types.

  Sweet Jesus, Argant thought, they’ve not only kidnapped the President but they’re going to get away with her? “Get the other drone to your area. Guide the choppers to your area too. Try to track as many of the vehicles as you can. Zoom back so we can at least track all of them later.” He paused, then sighed, “If anyone has any great ideas, let me know, I’m desperate here.”

  ***

  Art stared wide eyed out the attic window of the house. Bodies littered the thirteenth green and its aprons. Counting the Presidential foursome, their caddies and sixteen agents, there had been twenty four people around the hole. Now twenty-three bodies lay scattered about, none of them moving. The security teams from twelve and fourteen were on their way. Of the twenty SCDF shooters that had been in the trees, eleven had run out onto the green and climbed into the trucks. The others would have begun beating their retreats back through the woods. In their ghillie suits with ports for food and water, they could stay out in the forest for a long time, but most of them should be out of the area by dawn tomorrow. Well, he thought, time for me to get out of Dodge before the President’s men get their shit together. He started down the stairs.

  ***

  The stolen trucks that picked up the men on the thirteenth green ran until they could drop the men under trees, but near their own vehicles. They paused under trees in many other locations to confuse any possible watchers in the sky. After the men driving got out, the stolen trucks were sent back home under their own AI control while the drivers hopped into their own cars for the ride to their next assignment, or back home to South Carolina. They made it out just ahead of the roadblocks setting up to prevent their escape.

  About eight miles west of Pinehurst an SUV pulled into the garage of a rented house on the Foxfire Resort. Once the garage door had closed behind it, Redman got out of the driver’s side and walked around to the back lift gate. Salem, who’d rode shotgun, met him back there. They lifted the President of the United States to a sitting position and, putting her arms over their shoulders, stood her up. With significant effort they maneuvered her through the big garage. As they approached the door into the house proper, it opened. Crossbow stood there, unsurprised, unexcited, merely expectant. He congratulated them matter of factly, but still, in response to his praise, they swelled with pride.

  Stockton had recovered enough from the drug they’d given her to stand with assistance, but she remained very clumsy, stumbling frequently. Since she was both tall and heavy she posed a problem for the two men as they maneuvered her down the stairs into the basement. They did finally get her downstairs without a serious fall. They put her in the modified recliner, tipped it back and handcuffed her wrists and ankles to bolts that had been attached for that purpose. Her head lolled back and her eyes closed again. They passed a heavy stainless steel U-bolt around her neck and snapped it into the locking mechanism of the bomb Redman had assembled. She could shower in it, but Crossbow could detonate it any time he wanted by PGR. Cutting the bolt would cut a wire inside of it that would set the bomb off. The only freaking way she would ever escape from here would be without her head!

  Redman and Salem sat looking at her in astonishment, unable to believe that Crossbow’s plan had been successful. The goddamned President of the United States! In our custody!

  Crossbow, on the other hand, went upstairs to make a sandwich as if nothing at all unusual had happened.

  Twenty minutes later Stockton lifted her head and looked around blearily. “Wha’ happ’n’d?” she slurred out. She struggled briefly to sit up which tugged on her restraints. She looked briefly down at the handcuffs with a puzzled look. As if it were too much to comprehend, her head fell exhaustedly ba
ck against the recliner and she drifted back to sleep.

  Chapter Eight

  Washington D.C.—ASSAULT ON GOLF COURSE CAPTURES PRESIDENT! A military style assault captured President Stockton while killing everyone in her party including Senate Majority Leader Harold Arkon, professional golfer Tim Turney, and multibillionaire Howard Esmer, a major donor to Stockton’s campaigns. They were playing the thirteenth hole of the Shalimoore course near Pinehurst North Carolina when a fusillade of automatic weapons fire struck them from a densely wooded lot bordering the course. Four caddies and sixteen members of the Secret Service are among the dead. The dense trees and rural geography have allowed the perpetrators to flee successfully so far, though there is no doubt that the devastation they wrought seems to have had a paralyzing effect on the Secret Service. The FBI is arriving in force to the area and the military has cordoned off the area. Unfortunately, many believe that the men involved have already escaped the area with the President.

  So far, though there has been a great deal of speculation, no one knows who, or rather what group, carried out this horrific assault and kidnapping. Most observers find it difficult to countenance the possibility that anyone could have organized and motivated such a large group to carry out such an atrocity. Such acts are usually carried out by deranged loners, or occasionally by stressed though tightly knit military groups. In civilian life shaping such a group without at least one of them having an attack of conscience and reporting them to the authorities seems unlikely in the extreme.

  One might point out that history is replete with individuals such as Hitler and Stalin who successfully organized groups as large as entire countries to atrocity. They did not do so, however, without resistance and it would only have taken one objector to derail this particular horrific endeavor.