by Joe Nobody
All of this was lost on Andrew Weathers, his mind wholly occupied by thoughts of pending mid-term exams. That… and the latest news concerning his father and Uncle Mitch.
He was trying to keep a low profile on campus, venturing outside rarely, and often sporting a hoodie and sunglasses. Until recently, Andrew had been living a normal college life. Then his father had apparently invented possibly the most dangerous weapon ever. That was the moment everything changed. Being the son of the most wanted man in the world hadn’t proven to be a bowl of cherries.
It had started innocently enough. His friends ceased hushed conversations whenever Andy entered the room. Then people started avoiding him altogether. He could understand there being a bunch of controversy over the issue, but didn’t people realize he didn’t have anything to do with the events plastered across the headlines?
Strangers would approach him, some adamantly declaring his father’s guiltlessness. They claimed that the government attacked first and that the co-ed should be proud of his dad.
Other people weren’t so diplomatic or open-minded, announcing harsh opinions about his father. They claimed Dusty was a monster out to destroy the American way of life.
Throughout it all, Andrew kept his feelings bottled in, making a serious attempt to focus on his schoolwork and trying to ignore things he couldn’t control. That, however, proved to be nearly impossible.
There was an equation to it all. The more his father appeared in the headlines, the more people treated the student differently. It didn’t matter if he were meandering through the commons or attending a lecture. Folks were continually throwing distrustful glances in his direction or bending closer to whisper private comments. People stared but rarely made eye contact.
His mother assured Andy that his father was blameless and that the truth would come to light soon enough. “Son,” she’d said during one of their many phone calls, “your father is doing what is morally right. His actions are honorable, and I’m proud of him. You should be, too.”
Andrew just wished he could talk to his dad and hear his side of the story. He was confident that would clear a lot of things up.
Glad to get out of the public eye, Andy was relieved when he finally reached his dorm. Before entering the nondescript low-rise, habit prompted him to turn and scan the street.
There they were, sitting in the usual spot. Andy waved to the two men wearing suits despite the heat. He wondered if the black surveillance van was well air-conditioned.
For a brief moment, the student smiled, the thought of strolling over and asking for a demonstration of their super-secret devices triggering a transitory moment of comic relief.
As if reading his mind, one of the agents lifted a white cup of what was most-likely coffee, tilting it in Andy’s direction as if offering a toast. “Oh shit,” the young Weathers whispered. “Can they read my mind? That was freaky!” He turned and hustled quickly inside.
Andy was never quite sure why the FBI was watching him so closely. At first, the common sense answer was they were waiting for the father to attempt communication with the son. But over time, Andy decided that wasn’t all there was to it.
Finally, it dawned on the inventor’s son that the small surveillance force was there to protect him from being abducted.
The ransom would be the rail gun. They’d probably cut off his finger and send it to his father with the demand letter. Who am I kidding? he wondered. They most likely would kill me after getting their hands on dad’s toy…. if he’d make the trade.
Throughout the entire ordeal, that reoccurring quandary had been troubling for the young man. How would his father react? Would the tough, old Texan give into the kidnappers’ demands?
To make matters worse, Andy wasn’t quite sure what he’d do if the situation were reversed. Would he surrender the most powerful weapon ever devised to men who by their very actions, were proven criminals?
It was all so serious… so permanent… so… so… life and death.
In the end, it wasn’t character, honor, or determination that allowed Andrew Weathers to push it all aside and continue to function. Nor was it the love and devotion he felt toward his father that pulled him through. It was raw, basic, animalistic survival.
He simply reached a point where it was impossible to dwell on it anymore.
Andy took to laying low, managing his daily activities while trying to stay under society’s radar. It was the only option. He avoided social situations, stopped going to rallies and sporting events, and even washed his laundry in the wee hours of the morning. He fell into a lifestyle not unlike that of a hermit. “Well, at least my GPA should improve with all the additional study time. I haven’t just exactly been a social butterfly these days, Mom, I feel like a butt-ugly bookworm with the sex appeal of a sloth.”
He’d found an isolated nook in the library, discovered the rear-most booth in the coffee shop was nearly invisible from the main seating area. Andy often walked to his classes taking longer, but less visible routes. He hadn’t been to a party since news of the rail gun had commanded the headlines. Dating, once a primary focus of his energies, was off the table.
He often observed the FBI teams performing their duties. Andy occasionally found himself thinking of the serious-faced men as part of his social circle, having one-sided conversations with distant vans while he walked or gazed out his dorm window. “Now that’s just sick,” he’d pronounced after a particularly boring afternoon. “You’re like a little kid with make-believe friends that wear badges and guns.”
Initially, Andy had thought the surveillance teams consisted of eight to ten men, but after a few weeks of no results, that number apparently had been scaled back. Lately, there were entire days where his federal buddies were nowhere to be found.
But not today.
His dorm room’s door was just like all the rest, identical portals into small chambers that somehow never quite felt like home. Digging out his key, Andy pivoted to unlock the entry to his only private space when the scuffle of a footfall caused him to turn.
The world went black as a hood was yanked over the student’s head, an extremely foul odor filling his lungs. Ether.
For just a moment, the student thought some upper classmen were pulling a prank. That pissed him off, prompting a broad swing of his arm in an attempt to locate a target.
Instinct then took over, prompting an automatic reach for the dark cloth blocking his vision and polluting his nose and mouth. But Andy found he could not move his arms. Strong hands held him – iron-like grips on his wrists threatening to pulverize every bone.
The next set of commands issued by his panic-filled brain was to run. That too proved impossible, his body lifted effortlessly off the ground by a force that felt like steel bands gripping his chest in a human vise.
Andy felt his body tipped sideways, his physical struggles and deep breathing spreading the foul-smelling drug through his body, weakening his limbs. He landed on some hard surface, the impact jarring his tingling body.
Inside the hood, Andy struggled to maintain brain function, to remember the details of the attack. All he could see was a horizon of virgin white, the brilliant hue filling his mind’s eye. He tried squinting, but his baby blues were already closed. Slowly the color faded, a void of darkness consuming the light until there was a single, star-like pinpoint of reality.
Then the world went black.
“They must be having trouble with the gas in the dorm,” commented one of the FBI men. “That Western Gas van is parked in a fire zone.”
His partner looked up from his listening equipment, annoyed at the interruption. “What?”
“That van over there. It pulled up a couple of minutes ago and parked in the fire zone. It’s from the gas company.”
Blinking some focus into his thoughts, the technician shook his head. “There’s no gas in the dorms. When I was installing the bugs and phone tap, I wanted to use the gas lines, but the building is 100% electric.”
&n
bsp; “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m positive. Why would there be a gas truck here?”
The oddity sent a surge through the agent behind the wheel. “I’m going to go check it out. Call that phone number on the side of the van, and see if they dispatched a repair crew here.”
“Sure.”
The driver exited, looking both ways before jogging across the street. He’d watched the offending van pull up, but no one had exited the vehicle. “Probably just a wrong address,” he reasoned, walking briskly to have a word with the gas company tech.
Before he was halfway across the dorm’s significant grounds, two men appeared around the corner, pushing what appeared to be a large laundry cart, complete with a toolbox strapped to the front. “What the hell?” the agent whispered.
Whatever was in the cart was heavy, the two men in gas company uniforms struggling to push it across the sprinkler-dampened grass.
Realizing they were making for the idling van, the agent perked alert, knowing something just wasn’t right. Reaching for the handheld radio in his jacket, he sensed the sidewalk jogger too late.
A telescoping baton snapped to its full length, extended with a flick of the runner’s wrist. In the same motion, the well-muscled arm coiled for the strike, just as the agent began to spin in order to face the threat.
The FBI man had time to note the physical conditioning of the approaching jogger, a question forming in his mind why a member of the college football team would attack a federal officer.
White, vibrating lines of pain shot through the agent’s head as the baton’s lead weight struck his temple with a sickening crunch. As his legs gave way, the last memory embedded in the victim’s mind was of a tattoo on the attacker’s arm. The ornate, beautifully scripted letters, accented by a single, vertical lightning bolt, read “CAG.”
The four men in the gas company van drove off the sprawling campus, the driver keeping to the traffic laws while his comrades prepared Andrew for transport.
The still-unconscious student’s hands were bound with a nylon tie as a man with medical training checked Andy’s vital signs for any trauma associated with the anesthesia delivered via the hood. That garment was sealed in a plastic bag to prevent the substance’s ability to affect any of the team.
Master Sergeant John Millard, retired, supervised the squad’s efforts with a keen, professional eye. All waste, including the sterile wipes he’d used to clean the blood off his baton, were bagged and sealed for disposal later. Every team member wore gloves. No one spit, smoked, snacked, drank, or left any indisputable DNA evidence to be recovered later.
Two miles from the dorm, the driver pulled into a car wash. The site had been carefully selected; the vacuum islands at the rear of the facility were difficult to see from the street. A mini-van was parked nearby, the nondescript transport stolen less than an hour ago from a large shopping mall.
“Clear,” snapped the driver after scanning the immediate surroundings, the one-word report signaling there weren’t any witnesses around to report the transfer. The back doors opened, two of the burly kidnappers hopping out casually and then turning to pull Andy’s limp form from the back of the cargo area.
Acting as if they were helping a drunken friend walk the short distance to the hot mini-van, the young Weathers was buckled in the middle of the backseat in less than 20 seconds.
A few moments later, only the driver was left in the original getaway vehicle. After watching his colleagues drive away, he quickly pulled the gas company’s service van to the vacuum hoses, and with a pocketful of quarters, began cleaning every speck of evidence from every square inch of the interior.
Fifteen minutes later, the now spotless van was left in a busy grocery store parking lot. The driver exited calmly, strolling over to the nearby mini-van and springing into the passenger seat.
By the time the snatch and grab team rolled into the safe house’s driveway, Andrew was beginning to moan weakly and roll his head from side to side.
It was the student’s pounding headache that eventually caused him to climb from the drug-induced depths of dreamland.
Bolts of pain cascading through Andy’s head brought him out of the fog. The foul, chemical taste in his mouth initiated waves of nausea through his gut. Near the edge of vomiting, he opened his eyes and was again assaulted by pain.
Slowly his body fought off the aftereffects, his mind clearing bit by bit. From Andrew’s frame of reference, there hadn’t been any passage of time since his last memory, standing in front of his dorm room’s door.
Images of the black hood started coming back, half-formed visions that were more emotional than physical. A surge of adrenaline cleared his head even more, giving the bewildered kid the strength to roll over and sit up.
He found himself inside of a small room… no, actually it was a closet. There were the long poles where clothes would usually hang, an empty shoe rack in the corner, and several hooks along one wall. A small, single bulb burned in the plain fixture above.
Andy found a 5-gallon bucket, roll of toilet paper, two bottles of water, and three protein bars sitting in the middle of the space. There was a small packet containing two aspirin and a neatly printed note.
Blinking away his still-cloudy vision, Andy read the message: “You have been kidnapped. We are watching you. Don’t pull any bullshit, and you won’t be harmed. Take the aspirin, keep your mouth shut, use the bucket, and you’ll be treated fairly. Try anything stupid or be a pain in the ass, and you won’t like the results.”
His first reaction was to scan the tiny room for a camera. It was on the third pass that he spotted a pinhole sized black dot in the ceiling.
His next move was to test the door, but as expected, it was locked. While the knob turned freely, there was zero budge.
He toured his cage one last time, looking carefully for any possible way out. There was none.
Resigning himself to the fact that there was little else he could do, Andy tore open the aspirin and then unscrewed the top from a bottle of water. Making a motion to toast the camera, he downed the aspirin and then sat on the bucket, wondering which would kill him first. Boredom? Or the men on the other side of the door.
Sergeant Millard entered the kitchen’s small breakfast area, eager for a glass of water after finishing his patrol of the rental home’s perimeter.
Bordered on two sides by Lake Travis, the property was a nearly perfect hideout. As a vacation rental, it was well furnished, more than capable of accommodating the four-man team and their captive.
Located at the end of a small finger of land extending into the manmade lake, the home was not only isolated, but also practically impossible to approach without being detected. There was significant foliage between the estate and its neighbors.
The vast 3-car garage now held the stolen minivan, as well as the Hertz rental from the airport in Austin. It had taken Millard’s men only two days to prepare the master bedroom’s closet for their guest, stock 20 days’ worth of food into the cupboard, and upgrade the home’s security system to an acceptable level.
“Yah, he’z awake. Already vallowing de painz medications,” reported the man monitoring the closet-cam from the kitchen table, his thick, German accent reminding Millard of old black and white WWII movies he watched as a kid.
Glancing at his watch, the sergeant nodded. “That’s about the right recovery time for a 170-pound person. I don’t think we did any brain damage.”
Millard watched Andy over the operator’s shoulder for a moment, his hawk-like gaze noting every detail of the captive’s movements as he sat quietly chewing on a protein bar. “I kind of feel sorry for the kid. He’s the innocent in all of this. When you deliver his meal, ask him what kind of books he likes to read. It will help pass the time.”
“Ya, vol.”
“Carry on. I’ve already informed HQ of our status. Now we sit and wait,” replied the team leader.
Millard continued into the dining room, finding his #2 sit
ting at the expansive table with a disassembled M4 carbine spread out on the glass surface. The smell of cleaning fluid told the team leader his man was performing maintenance as opposed to repair.
“Change into beach clothes and walk the lakeside as soon as you’re done. Tomorrow, we’ll have to go fishing just to make it look good to the neighbors.”
“Roger that, boss,” the second in command responded. “I’ve never been fishing before. Is it difficult?”
“I’ll put the worm on the hook for you if you’re the squeamish type,” came the smart-ass response.
Grunting at the jest, the seated operator glanced down at Millard’s tattoo and commented, “I don’t have one of those, but that don’t mean I’m a pussy.”
Millard shrugged, “I regret ever getting this ink. My captain was furious when he saw it, and I think it led to my early retirement. But it really didn’t matter. By then, I didn’t give a shit about him, Delta, or the good ol’ USA.”
