Rose City Free Fall

by DL Barbur

  I could feel it coming, like some kind of storm just over the horizon. I was going to run into Todd, the elder Marshall's Cascade Aviation, the CIA, whoever wanted to come to the party, and I was going to destroy them all. Hopefully, it would be a good day to die, because I didn't much feel like coming back.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Eddie was sitting on a bench outside the safehouse when I pulled up, meditatively eating a sandwich.

  I parked my ride and walked over to him. He was wearing different clothes than the last time I saw him. His hair was wet and he smelled of soap.

  Eddie swallowed.

  “He’s in a bag with about a hundred pounds of logging chain, in the Willamette.”

  “You put any holes in him?” If Marshall’s body slipped out of the chains, decomposition gases could make his body float to the surface.

  Eddie looked offended like I’d asked him a stupid question. “You mean other than the ones you put in him? Of course, I did.”

  I got the feeling that maybe this wasn’t the first time Eddie had made a body go away.

  “Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to say to a guy who had helped me cover up a murder.

  “No problem,” he said as he stood and brushed crumbs off his shirt. He clapped me on the shoulder.

  “Look, I think it was a good idea to waste that guy, but all I’m gonna say is, next time let’s have a plan, ok?”

  With that, he walked into the house.

  There was a tense quiet in the basement of the safe house that I recognized. It was the quiet that fell over people who realized all their training, all their preparations, all their planning, was about to get tested. They realized that very soon, a few short minutes of chaos were going to decide whether they could cut it or not.

  I'd felt it before, before that fateful raid in Mogadishu, before any one of a dozen police raids. You would think after a while it got routine, but it didn’t. The human animal never gets used to volunteering for the risk of imminent death. You either get so sensitive to it you can't do it anymore, or you get addicted to it. In one fashion or another, I'd been doing it for twenty years, so I'm not sure where that put me.

  Everyone was sitting around a table, waiting for me and Eddie, apparently, as there were two empty chairs and Bolle had an impatient look on his face. I recognized most of the crowd: Henry; Casey, still looking pale and tired; Al; Bolle; Frederico; Micky; and not least of all, Alex. There were a couple of guys sitting by Frederico and Micky. I hadn't seen them before but it wasn't hard to recognize them for the thugs they were.

  Alex seemed to be intentionally not looking at me. Great. One more thing to worry about.

  As soon as Eddie and I took our seats, Henry killed the lights and turned on the big briefing screen. Once again it filled with a picture of Todd sitting in his black SUV. The picture had that grainy, flat quality of something shot through too much magnification.

  "We got lucky and nailed Todd talking on his cell again with our laser. We missed the first few seconds. Our hide is several hundred meters away, on top of an empty industrial building and it takes our guys a little time to get the laser on his window. But we got most of it."

  He hit a button and the video and audio started rolling. "… wait much longer." Todd's voice had a tinny, metallic quality on the recording. He held the phone up to his ear, listening for several seconds before speaking again.

  "I'm proposing that we honor our commitments to people on both sides. These relationships have taken years to develop, but can be destroyed in a heartbeat. I think we need to make one more flight. This incoming cargo is vital to our plans. The outgoing cargo will take care of our immediate obligations. It will leave a few customers unsatisfied, but they were near the bottom of the waiting list and we've always made it clear that we can't be held to a firm delivery time. We can solve several different problems with this one flight and then take some time to regroup and rethink our operations."

  The focus tightened even further. Todd was holding the phone to his left ear and I realized the operator was hoping to pick up some sound from the phone’s speaker. The image jittered wildly for a second. The problem with using magnification that high was the slightest movement made the picture swing wildly.

  When Todd started speaking again, all we heard was a garbled mess. The operator jerked the magnification back a notch or two, re-centered on the window and we were able to hear again.

  "… no sign of him or the last package. I've got my best people looking for him. I think we have to face the possibility that your son has decided to go off on his own. He can compromise too many parts of our operations to take that lightly. That's why I think we should get one more flight in, then roll up our operations for a while. Hopefully, we'll find your son after that, but at the very least I think we need to reconstitute our operations in a manner that will limit the amount of damage he can do."

  Interesting. The "your son" bit made it clear Todd was talking to the elder Marshall. Of course, taking any of this to court would bring up some embarrassing questions about what, exactly had happened to the younger Marshall. Involuntarily, my eyes flicked to Bolle. I wondered what plans he had to cover that contingency. I wondered if they involved letting me hang.

  On the screen, Todd was talking again. "No. If he was in custody, or if the woman had escaped, I would have heard about it. The Bureau's operational security is slightly better than the Boy Scouts'."

  Bolle pulled a face at that one.

  "I'm glad you agree," Todd said. "They are taking care of a few odds and ends on the other end. I expect the plane to land at about 0400 this morning. It will take maybe a half an hour to fuel and make the transfer. They should be wheels up and on the way back by 0430, taking a great many of our problems with us. By dawn, we'll have our entire operation packed up and moved."

  Todd was silent, listening. He stared straight ahead, sitting rigidly with the phone pressed to his ear. Something tickled at the back of my mind, something that seemed wrong that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

  "Very good, sir," Todd said. "I'll call you when we are mission complete and we'll start working on the next phase." He nodded once, then closed the phone and put it inside his jacket. The sound of the SUV's engine blared out of the speakers for a few seconds before Henry silenced it. He hit a button and the lights came on.

  "There it is," Bolle said. "Our window of opportunity opens at 0400 and closes at 0430. We're going to take Cascade Aviation down. I want what's coming in on that plane.”

  Bolle stood up and paced around the room.

  “Todd was right, the Bureau's operational security is only a little better than the Boy Scouts. The local police are even worse. Todd has some of their key people in his back pocket. This operation will be limited to the people in this room. Once we've taken the Cascade facility down and secured it, then I'll present it to the Bureau and local law enforcement as a fait accompli, but not before."

  He fell silent, looked around the table, looked everyone in the eye.

  That sense of the ground rushing up to meet me was the strongest yet. I'd done operations like this plenty of times in the past. Those had always been sanctioned law enforcement raids.

  Something stunk about this. I wondered if Bolle had any official sanction for what he was doing at all. Al trusted him, but maybe Al was wrong. I wasn't terribly well connected with the Feds, but there were people I knew. Within a few days, a week maybe, I could have a discreet report on who Bolle really was.

  I didn't have a week or even a few days. By dawn tomorrow it was going to be all over. I needed to decide whether I was in or out.

  Al stood up, cleared his throat and all eyes were on him. I felt a wave of nostalgia wash over me. How many times had I watched Al give briefings just like this one?

  I couldn't count the number of homicide suspects, sex offenders and robbery crews we'd taken down together. Al was like magic. Every operation he attached himself to seemed to run better.

&
nbsp; "Listen up," he said softly, and every eye was on him.

  That was a trick Al had, he could walk into a room where there were fifteen conversations all going on at once, with nobody paying attention, and within thirty seconds he'd have everybody listening to him. Most people would start yelling to get everyone's attention. Not Al, he always did the opposite. It seemed like the softer he talked, the more people listened to him.

  "We're going to keep this simple," Al said. He clicked a computer mouse and a satellite photo popped up on the screen behind him.

  "This is the Albany airport. Cascade's complex is here, south of the main East/West runway."

  The view zoomed in and we were looking at a large square of tarmac with planes parked on it, surrounded by hangars on three sides. There were a couple of other buildings, probably office scattered around a road leading out to a gate in the airport fence. I didn't have a good sense of scale until I realized the plane parked in the center of the tarmac was a C-130 Hercules. It wasn’t the biggest plane in the world, but it was still almost 100 feet long.

  The complex was huge. I looked around the room at the dozen or so people sitting there. We didn’t have enough shooters. I'd want the better part of a SWAT team just to clear one of the hangars, much less the outlying buildings.

  You'd need even more people to maintain even a semblance of perimeter control. I started doing the math. I wouldn't want to pull this off with less than 75 people. I'd feel better with a hundred. I'd want entry teams, snipers, staged medical assets, prisoner handling teams, perimeter control, hell, for something this big you'd need one person in charge of bringing in water, soda and pizzas. After the initial excitement was over, it would take hours to search a complex that big and people needed rest and something to eat.

  Al must have been reading my mind. Come to think of it, he probably was. He taught me everything about this sort of thing the Rangers hadn’t.

  "We're going to have to limit our objectives on this operation, at least initially. We don't have enough people to establish total scene dominance the way we'd want. This means some suspects will probably escape; some evidence will probably get destroyed. We're willing to accept that. Our focus will be on that airplane, its cargo and the van that will be driving out to the tarmac to meet it."

  My stomach did a slow roll. Yeah, Al was right. Some evidence might get destroyed, some suspects might escape. What he was leaving out was that the suspects might very well outnumber us and decide to stick it out and fight.

  "We going to have two teams make a simultaneous assault on the airplane, with the third team in reserve. Team One is going to go right in the front gate."

  I looked at the photo and felt my stomach flutter again. We would be barreling down a straight road with multistory buildings and hangars on each side. Nice place for an ambush.

  "Team two is going to be in charge of blocking the plane's escape," Al said. "As soon as we get word the plane is ten minutes out. Frederico is going to borrow one of the airport fire department's engines. They're going to block the taxiway back on the runway, and move in on the plane. As soon as they are close enough they will use the water cannon on top to blast high-pressure water into the C-130's air intakes. Ideally, you'll get all the engines, but if you can shut down just one side, that should be enough."

  Frederico nodded. At least somebody had done some thinking there. All this was going to go to hell if the plane just took off again while we were all standing there with dumb looks on our faces.

  "Team three will be in vehicles back at our hide sight. Henry will be handling communications and surveillance. He'll have the plane's transponder and will be able to let us know when the plane is due to arrive. May and Alex will be our medical element. They will take charge of any hostages we recover."

  He looked around the room. Everyone was silent. I looked around and saw a bunch of expressionless faces. I replayed Al's plan in my mind. I almost couldn't believe I'd just heard it come out of his mouth. There were a million places where this thing could fall apart, a million ways where somebody could get killed, hell, we could all get killed.

  I almost stood up, walked out and left the house, leaving them all to carry out their little suicide mission. This was crazy. Al could tell me to trust Bolle all he wanted, but if this was all the resources he had for an operation like this, I wasn't interested. I'd take my chances with prison.

  "Listen," Al said. "I need you all to realize something. This operation may not go the way many of you are used to." He looked at me as he said this. "We don't have many of the resources I wish we had. We haven't had the luxury of training together. We're doing this thing on a shoestring. But I want you to remember something."

  He flipped a switch on the remote and there she was. It was a picture of Heather Swanson. I realized who she was with a start. It had only been a few days since I'd found her dead in the weeds, dumped like so much garbage.

  It was her driver’s license photo, and it took me a few seconds to recognize her. For a brief moment, I was ashamed of myself. The second I stepped onto the ground where she lay dead, she'd become my responsibility. Somewhere along the way, I'd forgotten that. Marshall was dead, but he was just the beginning.

  Al, you bastard, I thought. He knew me better than anybody. He knew I'd never been interested in promotions, better carpet for my office, any of that. I just lived to catch the truly bad guys.

  "I want you all to look at this picture," Al said. "These guys may not be the ones that strangled her, but they had a hand in it, and we think there's another van full of girls just like her ready to get shipped off to God knows where. So, this operation may not be perfect. But it's worth it."

  Nobody said anything but you could feel the atmosphere change, feel the resolve come together.

  "Ok," Al said. "I want everybody to stay here, get some rest. We're going to get back together at midnight for a final mission briefing and movement to staging areas. There's food upstairs and enough beds, couches and cots laying around for everybody."

  Papers rustled, chairs scraped as everybody got up at once.

  I looked up at the screen. Heather's face still hung there, I'm sure not by accident.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and almost jumped, I'd been so deep in thought. It was Al.

  "You ok, man?"

  I turned to look up at him, struck anew at how old he looked. "Yeah, Al. I'm ok."

  "You up for this? You look tired. You've been through a lot lately." We both knew what he was really asking. He wanted to know if I was willing to follow him again, only this time with a bad plan, not enough resources and a greater than usual chance of dying.

  "Yeah, I'm up for it, Al," I said. "I just need some rest."

  "Good." He clapped me on the shoulder again. "Find a place to crash upstairs."

  I opened my mouth to say something, what, I'm not sure, but Henry walked up with a big stack of maps and computer printouts and soon he and Al were deep in conversation.

  I got up and walked upstairs, feeling Al's eyes on me the whole way. There was a big glass sliding door at the back of the house, looking off the West, the directions the storms came from. I stood there a long time, turning things over in my mind.

  The question in my mind was this one: if I followed Al, and everything went to hell and I died, would it matter?

  Everything I had was gone. Audrey was gone, although even then I was honest enough with myself to realize I could go on without her.

  What I really missed was the weight of my badge hanging on a chain around my neck, under my shirt. In the Army, my Ranger tab had kept me from being one more white trash redneck from Tennessee. Later it had been that badge. It made me special, a little apart from other men, to be honest, made me feel a little better than them. I lived to catch criminals. Everything else in my life could be messed up, but it was all ok as long as I was taking care of guys like Wendt and Marshall.

  Life as something other than a cop seemed unthinkable.

  The wind blew
and rattled the glass in its frame. It was cold in the house like nobody had thought to turn on the heat. I rubbed my eyes and yawned. I could only handle so much heavy thinking at once. I needed a sandwich and a nap. Sometimes if you focused on where your next meal and bed were coming from, the big stuff took care of itself.

  I had one more thing to do first. It was an idea I'd had rattling around in my head for the last few minutes. I'd finally decided it couldn't hurt.

  I stepped through the big sliding glass door to the porch behind the house. I dug the business card out of my wallet and dialed the number. Mandy's father picked up on the second ring.

  "It's Dent Miller. I need a favor."

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It was time to get ready. I think I managed to sleep for an hour or two, but I wasn’t sure.

  My gear was in a big pile. I took my time sorting it out, checking each piece before putting it on. First came the soft body armor. It was new stuff, very light and flexible, a far cry from the vests we'd worn back when I first started as a cop. Then came a set of black Nomex coveralls. They were cut generously enough to go on over my jeans and t-shirt. I didn't even have to take my boots off to get them on and off. Outstanding.

  I buckled on the pistol belt next. The holster hung down and had a strap that went around my thigh. I didn't care for it too much, but it was what all the cool tactical kids were wearing these days. I snapped a flashlight onto the grooves molded into the frame of my Glock and slid the gun into place. Spare pistol magazines and a regular flashlight went on the belt, along with a Leatherman multi-tool and a first aid pouch with two gunshot bandages inside. If I had to dump my shotgun and tactical vest, I still had enough stuff around my waist to keep any bad guys entertained for a little while.