Keeping The Faith (John Fisher Chronicles Book 2)

by William Lehman

  So I sent a message to Viggo on this program...

  Sent: "Were you 'V' on that text?"

  Responded: "Yes, I see you found your uncles communications protocol."

  Sent: "Yes. Partner driving back to home office with supplies, expects you to intercept. Will cooperate and cover. I take it you know about this court order lawfare bullshit?"

  Responded: "Yes, we're going to hoist them on their own petard. Decisively. I will send you a PDF with official seal and recording numbers when it is written. It should be finished by the end of business today. If you are no longer restricted by law, can you disengage from your enemies this evening?"

  Well, in early February the sun sets by 1630 or so in this latitude, so that shouldn't be a problem...

  Sent: "Yes."

  Responded: "Can you be at 48.1'22.46" N x 123.44'29.21"W at 0200 the morning after next?"

  Well, that took bringing up Google Earth to see where it is, and then figure out what speed I could make, etc. In the end, the answer was "Yes, if nothing gets in my way for too long."

  Sent: "Yes, if nothing gets in my way for too long."

  Respond: "The courier will wait if you are a little late, but he will have to leave by 0400 to get to safety in time. If you don't make it by 0400, the supplies will be left at that location."

  Sent: "OK, thank you my friend. I'll wait for the PDF and sundown." then broke contact.

  After that, I got up and started preparing for getting out of here when whatever Viggo had planned went down. An hour later I got the PDF:

  FOR PUBLICATION

  UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

  FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

  IN RE: Officers John Fisher, and Peter Sims

  THOMAS E. Forquad, Secretary, United

  States Department of the Homeland Security,

  Petitioner,

  v.

  UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT,

  TACOMA,

  Respondent,

  STATE OF WASHINGTON

  DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

  Real Party in Interest.

  No. 14-55555

  D.C. No.

  3:08-cv-99999-

  BHS

  OPINION

  Petition for Writ of Mandamus to the

  United States District Court

  for the Western District of Washington

  Martin Ross, District Judge, Presiding

  Argued and Submitted

  February 4, 2014—Portland, Oregon

  Filed February 4, 2014

  2 IN RE: FISHER

  Before: Cecil Jeter, Dexter Guptill, Jason Ekuland, Circuit Judges.

  Opinion by Judge Guptill

  SUMMARY*

  Mandamus

  The panel granted the Secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security's petition for a writ of mandamus, and vacated with prejudice the district court's order compelling Officers Fisher and Sims to be restrained from entering or working in the Olympic National Park, or on the Criminal Cases involving USMC Sgt. Brown's death, and the illegal taking of game in the National Park. This petition could have been a complaint of Judicial Misconduct just as easily, and frankly this court wonders why it wasn't. The decision to compel Officers Fisher and Sims appears to be capricious and malicious, without factual backing or justification of any sort, except the desire by the father of the late Sgt. Brown, one Senator Brown (d) Iowa, and a set of very spurious claims by the Federal Preternatural office of Investigation. Judge Ross shall consider himself warned that continued behavior of this sort will result in the calling of a JRC on his behavior.

  Well, it went on in that vein for some time, but the short and skinny of it, was that the Judge that the FPI and Senator Brown has in their pocket, was bitch-slapped into the middle of next week by the most liberal appellate court in the nation, in a way that made it perfectly clear that he wasn't allowed to do ANYTHING that would affect Pete and my pursuance of our duty or our investigation into crimes that were under our jurisdiction. The beauty of this being that the only way to appeal this decision would be to go to the SCoUS, and it would take them a year to even think about being on the calendar.

  I don't know how Viggo did this, and it's probably just as well that I don't, and that I don't speculate. If this involved the buying or threatening of a judge, I would have to act on it...so I'm just going to walk off into the darkness (figuratively) on this one, and let sleeping dogs bury their dead (to coin a phrase).

  I printed up a copy, with the appropriate seals, and file numbers, etc. and laminated that bad boy. Then put it in my vest that we wear when we shift, along with a pistol and some rounds, a small can of WD40, a good map, the phone, and a few other goodies, then prepared to leave Tanngnost as soon as it was fully dark.

  Oh, I could have, at this point, just walked out to the observation van they have out in the marina parking lot, knocked on the door, and handed them the decision of the court, before bidding them be on their way, but what was the fun in that? Besides, if I can keep this set of clowns tied up watching an empty boat for a few hours, it's that many less trying to find me once I get up in the mountains. I got on the internet and found an audio file of a guy softly snoring, and another that had audio of a man moving around in a kitchen (it's amazing what people will put on the internet!) and set the kitchen one to go off at 1750, for 15 minutes, then set the computer to run a couple porn clips, about 45 minutes worth, then start the snoring on a loop. If they were watching the boat with an IR pod, this might not fool them (though it might, the old girl's hull is pretty thick), but if they were lazy and just monitoring the bugs, this might buy me the evening before they figured it out. Then I printed another copy of the Court Decision, and placed it on an x of tape suspended at eye level for whoever opened the hatch of the main cabin. By this time it was full dark and time for me to exit. I put on the wet suit that was in the forward repair locker, it wasn't a perfect fit, but it would help. Then some weights, and a BC, with my cop/teams vest over all of that. I wish to Hel I had one of the rebreathers that we had in the teams, but free diving was going to have to do, because the tanks that were in that locker would have made WAY too much noise as I was testing them out, and that would have given the game away.

  The forward hatch was part of a small doghouse, the old style glass ones that looked like a very small greenhouse. I made sure the hatch between the main cabin and the forward companionway was secured, and all the lights were off, then slowly opened the hatch, and very slowly eased out on deck. Then just as slowly and carefully eased into the water...

  I didn't hear any noise of concern, no lights, or where the Hel did he go, so maybe I got away with it. So I did a surface dive, and headed for the other side of the harbor. I could swim about two hundred and fifty meters under water (hey SEAL training was good for something, and being a 'Thrope didn't hurt), which put me out in the middle of the harbor before I had to surface for air, and with the wet suit on, if anyone saw me, they probably mistook me for a seal (mammal, not SpecWar). Three surfaces later, I was around the point and out of any possible view of the surveillance guys. Shortly after, all my swim gear was under a big chunk of driftwood just above the tide line. I was hoping to reclaim it, but if I didn't, well, I guess I could afford it. (that reminds me, I'm going to update the equipment on board to include rebreathers, and a better way of getting off the boat under surveillance as soon as I get a chance) and I was headed for the mountains in cat form. Before dawn I was in the park, and making my way to the drop zone.

  I saw and heard three or four recon flights pass near, but none seemed interested in me. Either they didn't know that I was gone yet, or they weren't looking for a single cougar. Probably had so many false alarms they were only looking for multiple animals together. If they saw me it was in FLIR anyway, I was staying under the trees (not hard to do in the Olympics!). I stopped around 0800 with a deer that had been a little too careless. I wasn't going to play the small game only gig anymore, I had put out a Hel of a lot o
f calories between changing and then running this far, and I still had a lot of running to do if I was going to get to the drop zone in time...it was only fifteen miles as the crow flies. Trouble was, I ain't no crow! As the cat runs, it was more like twenty-five and through some of the roughest terrain this side of Mt. Denali or the Andes.

  I had to evade two road patrols, but these guys weren't the fucking Spetznaz if you know what I mean. My biggest concern was that the tracks I was leaving in the snow would be spotted, and someone would decide that cougars didn't travel in fairly straight lines. My weight was not unusual for a cougar so I wasn't worried about someone thinking "That's too big for a real cat." Unless these guys had brought in some hunters with a clue, I wasn't real worried, they've been city boys mostly, and the day I can't outfox a city boy in my area of the country, I deserved to die.

  I laid up and took a nap at about 1300, I was about three miles from the LZ, and by that time I had been up for well over twenty-four hours, I was bushed. I found a nice little undercut bank with a lot of aspen and fir in front of it, and laid down for a snooze, when I woke it was dark. I changed into cat-man form, so I could use the maps and things easier, but still have some fur between me and the cold. It was about 20 degrees, not bad if you're a cougar, but as a naked man, it's a little chilly. Then I headed for the drop zone.

  About an hour later I was in the small alpine valley that my map indicated was the drop zone, and I was early. Well, if there was one thing the Navy had taught me to do, it was wait, so I curled up around myself, wound my tail around my paws and nose and settled in.

  Some unknown time later I heard the most unexpected sound this side of a brass band. Twin V-12 engines and two three-bladed props...didn't sound like a modern bird at all. This sort of deep-throated roar only came from the old war-birds of the Second World War. I was guessing Lightning or Mitchel, then I got a look at her as she popped up over the ridge. A Mosquito! About then I remembered that Viggo had been a night fighter pilot back in the Second World War. That no good so and so had managed to keep his night fighter! I was so jealous, I forgot for a few seconds where I was and what the purpose of this little evolution was. Then he flared up and a large item dropped out. The chute opened up at about 5K above ground, and the Mosi was gone.

  The chute was a custom job, as big as a cargo chute, but steerable and he had a pod hanging down below his feet like the old World War two paratroop rigs had. In spite of this he was coming in hot, and I hoped he was some flavor of super, or he was going to have two broken ankles at minimum. He touched down about fifteen feet from me, and couldn't do the standard roll out, he had every last item I had bought strapped to himself, or hung in that pod. Probably weighed a good eight-hundred lbs over body weight, it was strapped to every part of his body except his feet, his head, and his arms. Smelled like Vampire, so that's how he managed it, I'm not sure I could, on my best day, in trim for the teams...and I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it today, I'm out of shape for that shit.

  As I ran over to help him collapse the chute, before it dragged him into the next county, he looked at me with a huge grin and said "Bloody Hell, that was fair dinkum mate! Most fun I've had in years! Sean Sullivan's the name, howzit?" in the heaviest Aussie accent I've ever heard.

  Over the next few minutes he caught me up on what had gone on while I had been making my way here. About eighteen hours ago the guys that had been watching my boat figured out that they had lost me. About two hours later they put out a PC to detain on me (what Hollywood usually and erroneously calls an APB, or BOLO), then an hour later rescinded it. Since then they had all disappeared from Sequim, and we had no further information as to what they were doing, though there were reports of "Humans First" types showing up in SeaTac and hopping on busses with what looked suspiciously like gear bags on their shoulders.

  The "Humans First" Movement was one of Senator Brown's power bases. A rather unlikely collection of ultra leftists and red necks, with some fundamentalist religious types (including a branch of the Catholic Church that the Vatican disavows). Their position was that any human, including illegal aliens, oh sorry, undocumented citizens, should have all rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States, and that "the dead, and no longer human" as unnatural beings, shouldn't even be given the protections granted to animals (now here's where it gets really fuzzy) because, either they are the spawn of Satan (if the speaker is one of the Fundie or redneck types) or the result of bad experiments by religious mages and crazy science gone terribly wrong (if the speaker is one of the leftist types). Either way they see one main solution, a Final Solution. They aren't saying gas chamber up front, it's more, "Well, the old ways of dealing with these poor ex-humans was more effective, but not effective enough, which is why we still have the problem and why they prey on the good people of the world today". Leaving as an exercise for the student the fact that "the old ways" involved bounties on every dead Preternatural brought in.

  Needless to say, these douche canoes weren't on my Christmas list. If they were headed into my woods, life was going to get real interesting. I'm guessing that someone (and I was liking Barry Daniels, or even Senator Brown himself for this) decided that if they couldn't win legal battles, they would try for pitched ones, and see how that worked. I'm not sure they thought about just exactly whom they were fucking with. I mean really, every single one of the boys in that camp was there because they had been in combat, usually LOTS of combat, and in their own minds, they felt that they couldn't deal with the civilian world. The world of combat on the other hand...

  After dropping that wonderful item of news in my lap, Sean commented. "Yes, that was Viggo, he never lets ANYONE else fly that plane, it's his baby." and on what a rush it was to get to drop out low altitude, low opening, over the mountains at night, and if I ever needed anything like this done again, he's my man. Turns out that Sean was an Expat Australian SAS type who had been converted after four tours in 'Nam, because life as a normal human was just too boring...Wow. This guy gave a new meaning to crazed adrenalin junky, and the fact that as a Vamp, he was almost indestructible (as long as he kept away from things like terminal sunburn) meant that he had to look harder and harder to find a "challenge" worthy of him. Well, to each their own. I finished helping him unload all the gear bags strapped to various parts, and he took off at a fast (even for me) run in the direction of HWY 101, where I guess someone was set to pick him up before sunrise.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Now I had one problem, OK I still had lots of problems, but one pressing one right now. There was way more of this stuff than I could carry. My original plan had been to pull a sledge in, just like how I had gotten everything out, and that was still what I ended up with as the best way, but I was a little worried about tracks. I didn't want to cache the stuff though, because multiple sets of tracks back and forth would be even more of a position give-away than one sledge track. So I unpacked the sled, which was one of the knockdown sets like we used in the teams for just this sort of work, and started putting it together, then loading it. All of this took until sunup before I was satisfied that everything was stable and ready to move out.

  The odd thing was, over the next ten hours I didn't have any overflights at all. It didn't bug me at the time, but in retrospect, it should have been a red flag. This being winter in the Pac Norwest, the sky was heavily cloud covered unless I was above them, which was about half the time. By the time I had pulled that sledge for that long, I was done in. I had been up for about twenty-four hours, and pulling a sled at four times my body weight for ten, up and down mountainous terrain at altitude. I don't give a damn how fit you are, that shit's going to take it out of you. So I found a hollow in the trees out of the wind and sacked out for several hours. At least now I had a bunk roll, I was bringing a few sleeping bags along in the load, and didn't feel at all shy about using one. I changed before I bedded down, just because I didn't want to spend too long out of human form. That was one thing they had beat into us in the teams, s
pend too long in animal, you WILL get stuck or partially stuck.

  It took me another day and a half dragging that sledge to get to the base camp. When I say we were off the beaten path, I mean WAY off. Once I made the first set of sentries, word was passed ahead, and guys came out to help take it in, while other guys went out to break up the tracks and chase a herd of elk across the path, just for added complications. Teador and Yoshi greeted me at the mouth of the mine.

  After the typical (for Yoshi) polite beating around the bush of "I see you are well, John..." etc., we went back into the office while the boys were unpacking and divvying up the spoils. The place ran more like a "real" communist group than Marx and the boys ever managed, but then I guess the military is actually a form of communist totalitarians, if you look at it a certain way, and the only form of it that ever even remotely worked. This place was run very much like a military unit that was on long term deployment, and out of touch with higher command.

  Well, once we got into the office, I dropped the bomb. "Here's the thing guys, I think we're at open war now." I then explained what had been going on while I was back in civilization (or what average folks called civilization, I'm not certain that what these guys had wasn't just as close to REAL civilization as what was passing for it out in 'the world') up to and including the groups of "humans first" types showing up, and what that would probably mean. "Look, guys." I said. "I'm not going to tell anyone that they have to abandon this refuge, and it is defensible, but if they know what they're looking for, they're going to find it. The mine is in the history books. They've got to have a good idea of how many of us there are, so when they can't find us by satellite..." About that time I realized that I was talking to a pair of men that hadn't been up on tech since Korea. I could see by their facial expressions that they had no idea what I was talking about.