Chapter 38: Oops, a BOAT!

Oops, a BOAT!

“Colonel, I don’t care what mud hole you have to crawl through, or what dumbass county sheriff country bumpkin you have to light a fire under to get what you need.”

Dr. Alan Lipscomb had commandeered Colonel Kevin Price’s office in the new CID-SI building, deep in the heart of Ft. Sam Houston. The basement of the building, which once served as an old library, now served as an interrogation area for the previously captured man who seemingly appeared, out of thin air, into a top-secret, underground laboratory.

“Colonel, you have cover from your commanding officers in the Pentagon for everything and anything short of civilian deaths to find me that man.” The doctor’s voice was rising with each word he commanded. “Do you understand, Colonel?”

Sergeant John Thomas, Colonel Price’s right-hand man, was actively clenching his fists and grinding his teeth while he was standing just outside of the closed office door. He was currently fighting every instinct of his being to throw open the door and give that damned bureaucrat the beating of his life. In the sergeant’s mind, no one spoke to his Colonel like that – especially someone not in the military.

“Affirmative, sir. Do you have a specific timeline of when you need him returned?” The colonel, immediately after asking that, knew it was the wrong question to ask. He could not keep the shock of his own stupidity from showing on his face.

The doctor calmed down when he saw that at least this dull, dim and simple-minded moron knew it was a stupid question. “Colonel, I want this man yesterday. I’m actually still trying to figure out why it took you or your team so long to notice these abnormalities during your interrogations and report them up the food chain, but your own notes and video sessions clearly show the unique qualities of this man appeared as soon as you began your enhanced interrogation techniques. You were either too enamored with your own work to notice, or you were trying to see how this could be used in your favor.”

The doctor realized he was standing at the Colonel’s desk and, while leaning forward to make his points, he had begun to dislodge and shuffle about different papers that previously were placed perfectly upon the desktop. Dr. Lipscomb’s own personal battle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) tended to occur during highly stressful situations. The current events were definitely qualified to make Dr. Lipscomb spend minutes at a time stacking and re-stacking the same sheets of paper before they were correctly placed where needed. His secretary at the home office was usually able to get his head back on track rather than entertain the efficiency and order he thought he needed to see.

He took in a deep breath and sat down, indicating the Colonel should also take a seat. “Colonel, there was no need for me to berate you like that. I apologize for that. It is just this entire ordeal has caused a lot of trouble. I don’t like trouble. I like accomplishments. Accomplishments tend to disappear whenever trouble rears its ugly head. I really truly am sorry for blowing up at you like that.”

“Not a problem, sir.” Col. Price leaned in toward his superior and snickered. “Between us, I’m kinda surprised Sgt. Thomas hasn’t barged in here defending my unit’s honor.”

“Well, if he did, I’d tell him what I’m going to tell you.” He visibly relaxed into the chair, leaned back and started to put his feet on the desk when he suddenly remembered he was not in his office. “Colonel, you did a great job with what they gave you. Those in the know understand, but your unit’s image has been tarnished. You need to find this man. Not only for us but to regain the honor of your unit.”

“Yes, sir, I understand. I will get it done, and we will get him back.”

“And you won’t have me breathing down your neck since I’m going back to D.C. to make sure the security for the other labs is still intact, but I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. If you have updates on the capture of our guest, please let me know, but know that when I do return, it will probably be with more brass wanting personal updates on what is going on. I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks making sure that number does not balloon too high.”

He stood and picked up his briefcase and moved to shake the colonel’s hand. They shook, and the colonel opened the office door. “Excuse me, men, excuse me,” he announced to the room full of Colonel Price’s CID-SI unit. “I’ve given Colonel Price his orders, and he’ll give them to you. I just wanted you to know, right from my mouth, you men did nothing wrong and persevered through a difficult situation. Admirably – you performed admirably,” he accentuated his praise with clapping, gesturing for the men in the room to applaud themselves. It was not raucous but subdued when they did.

“Ah, don’t worry men. I am confident you will succeed, and you will get to go back to doing what you do best!” The volume of the applause rose to a higher level which Dr. Lipscomb considered appropriate. He marched out the door, into his waiting vehicle and, as far as anyone knew, he went straight back to his waiting jet at Randolph Air Force Base.

Sgt. Thomas was watching a security feed on the monitor in front of him and, when Dr. Lipscomb’s vehicle peeled out on the loose gravel from just outside the side door of the CID-SI headquarters, he nodded at Col. Price. “Holy Fuck! Thank the good lord above that waste of space is finally gone.” The laughter was loud and raucous. Col. Price let it go on for a few moments, then he got the meeting back under control.

“Okay, like he said, we have our marching orders. Officially, we don’t have a time limit, but he basically is giving us a couple of weeks to get the fat bastard back in our custody. Once we do that, I don’t think he will be our problem for much longer. It seems the spooks in the Pentagon want to ask the man a few questions of their own.”

“Alright, then. Where are we with identifying the late-night visitor to the home of our head of security?”

“Sorry, sir. No matches -- even with the good pictures the recon team were able to get.”

“What about the fingerprints? I know you went early that morning and got them.”

“Inconclusive, sir. There were lots of George Johnson’s prints and a few of the neighbors we already collected as well as some city employees who must have leaned on the fence sometime in the past while going through the back alley. The grass was recently cut so it might have been then when they grabbed the fence, but all prints we collected were identified.”

“You can’t find any matches to this guy? Did he just appear out of nowhere or something? We know he spent the night in the house! He slept on the couch! We can go there right now and find out who he is by busting down the damn door and dragging him out by his hair!” Col. Price was brooding over the shoulder of his sergeant while they both waited on the computer search of government files for any matches to the man seen interacting with the main suspect to the escape from the secret laboratory. “Are you sure there is no match in the service?” the agitated and bewildered Colonel asked.

A prisoner had just escaped from a secret laboratory working on the possibility of time travel for the U.S. Government. The experts working in the lab had anticipated a possible first test of their machine in approximately six months. Many of the components for the device were not yet installed when, one night, the on-duty technicians working on other portions of the machine were alerted to a return from the machine. When the alarms ended, and the smoke subsided, a large man wearing a uniform nearly identical to the laboratory’s security personnel emerged from the embarkation pod with an awfully confused look on his face. Lab security arrested him and contacted their management who immediately got ahold of their benefactors in the Pentagon.

The reactions in halls of power in Washington D.C. could easily be described as the chaos of a kicked-up ant hill. Everyone knew something was wrong and, according to the descriptions of what happened, that event could not have occurred.

“Do me a favor, Sarge, and run it again, but go ahead and loosen the restrictions to see if we get any other type of hits.”

“Can do, sir.” The Sergeant punched a few commands into the terminal and gave his commanding officer a quick update. “The progress bar on this new search shows it should be finished in about an hour, with the new parameters.”

“Good. Now, everybody else listen up please.” The colonel turned his attention from the terminal to the men seated in every chair in the room. These men did not look like the types who spent much time sitting in a room full of office cubicles. These were the types who burrowed themselves into a small bluff with an outcropping of bushes for days at a time, not moving more than a few inches a day, waiting for the right time to fire that one shot for that one kill. These were the types of men who could start a war or just as easily end one.

“Okay, we are going after the fat fuck, and we have open permission to do what needs to be done.” The enthusiastic reaction to that statement told the colonel he should probably add a few caveats. All right, settle down. Settle down now! No, we can’t tactically nuke the east side of town hoping to say we got him. No, what that means is to use all of our know-how to find him or at least get on his tail. The investigative arm of our services has failed to find him, so we get to play the game again.”

“So, what we need to do now, gentlemen, is to come up with a plan of attack to get this person back under our control. Then we can get on with our lives, doing what we do best. Remember, there is no box.”

A few minutes of silence ended with a Corporal Edmond Buck, near the back of the cubicle bay room. “Sir, have we tried recreating the escape. I mean, have we honestly tried to do the escape ourselves to see where we would go if we had escaped like he did?” the corporal offered, awaiting the answer.

“Explain your idea a little more for us, Buck.”

“Yes, sir. Well, I know we have all gone over in our minds what happened and when it happened, but have we tried to see it from his point of view -- I mean, actually re-run the escape but with a fresh perspective? His perspective. We might be able to see where he was going and why he did what he did.”

The men around the room all looked at each other and smiles soon shown on many faces.

“Corporal Buck, that is the kind of outside-the-box thinking I was talking about,” the colonel said.

The colonel made his way over to the cubicle where Cpl. Buck was seated. While the colonel approached, Cpl. Buck stood at attention. The colonel pointed toward him and smiled. “Your idea. You get the lead role.” Several high fives and slaps on the back from the men showed the corporal. that his idea was widely respected.

The colonel made his way back to the head of the room. He looked at his watch and continued the meeting. “Yes. I think we can do this today. Alright, what we need right now are roles. We select others among us to play the roles in what happened that day. We record the entire goings-on and see if Buck might be able to think like a fat fuck escape artist and find us a new trail to follow.”

“Colonel, does that mean I get to have seconds at lunch? You know, for ‘getting into my role.’”

It had been a while since the men of the CID-SI had seen their commander laugh, and that loud roar from the ordinarily stoic leader did more to charge up morale than the capture of a terrorist on the most wanted list.

Corporal Buck, clad in a prisoner uniform stuffed with pillows to give him the basic form as the man they are hunting, had just broken out of his wrist shackles and knocked out the team of guards escorting him for his return from the CID-SI headquarters to the prison cell across the hall from the laboratory’s security office. Cpl. Johnson, playing the head of security for the lab, George Johnson, was able to get a shot off with his shotgun but it went high. Luckily, they were using blanks. A quick hand-to-hand combat skirmish with Cpl. Johnson ended with the corporal sprawled out on the floor acting like he was knocked out and the prisoner searching the pockets of each of the knocked out guards in the hall outside the security area of the lab.

Buck pulled the wallets, keys and any cash from each guard. The exact inventory was recorded in the interrogations after the escape. Buck rumbled down the hall and out the faux exit like the prisoner had done at the end of the security footage of the escape.

Col. Price and a couple of others from CID-SI were following along the action from the security office and from the CID-SI headquarters. Once Buck had finished with them and left the building, the guards ran down the stairs, jumped onto the service cart and drove from the lab back to their basement headquarters to follow along with what was happening.

Once outside, Cpl. Buck tried each key fob to see which key belonged to which car. He threw the other keys at their respective cars. The alarms dinged as he pressed each button – a new blue Ford Explorer; an older, faded, blue Ford Explorer; a re-creation of “The Pussy Wagon” pickup truck from the movie “Kill Bill”; and the keys to a Kia Sedona minivan. Buck chose the Kia Sedona just like the prisoner did. Four military-issued Cherokees, identical except for a make-shift sign stuck under the windshield wipers for each Jeep, sat in the exact spots where the labeled cars sat on the day of the escape. They were listed as new Explorer, old Explorer, Pussy Wagon and, of course, Kia Sedona.

Cpl. Buck calmly drove out of the employee parking lot in the Jeep Cherokee with “Kia Sedona” written on a piece of cardboard stuck under the window wiper. It also helped to find the correct car since Sgt. Thomas was sitting in the passenger seat waiting for Cpl. Buck. Col. Price followed Buck in another military-issued vehicle.

“Why didn’t you head straight for the exit just in front of the hospital and onto the highway?” Sgt. Thomas asked, a few moments into the ride, while calmly driving down the road. Cpl. Buck knew the question either came from HQ or the car that had been following him from the start.

“I think going straight out onto the highway might be the easiest thing to do, but that will also be the first place security will head to try to corner me,” he said while risking a quick glance to his sergeant. “I remember the profiles made before we took over that said he probably knew all about the base itself since he knew the layout of the lab. I figured he would know Ft. Sam as well and pick the most nonchalant way of getting away.”

The sergeant smiled and nodded his head yes to show his agreement. He then nodded to remind Buck to keep his eye on the road.

A few minutes later, Cpl. Buck started a new explanation of what he was doing. “I think it will go easier if I try a different exit. One where no one would suspect me. Not an empty one where someone could remember me but most probably a very busy gate. The guards would be head-down to get everyone through as quickly as possible.” He paused in thought for a moment. “I think I’ll go to the N. New Braunfels road gate. There are always lines trying to get in so no one will pay any attention to me leaving.” That got another nod from his sergeant in the passenger seat.

“Sir, I honestly cannot think of a good reason why he would change cars. The van is nondescript enough to get away, but they may be able to get a description of the van out to the military police or maybe even the civilian police if they really want to box me in ... but hey, hold the phone just a sec, that Grand Marquis is even better! No one knows that it could have been me who took it until I am far away from here,” Cpl. Buck said over the radio to headquarters.

The discovery of a set of tire depressions in the dirt was a long shot, but they were actively grasping for anything and made castings of them around the large tree to the side of the church parking lot. The tree was far enough from the church that no one usually parked there except for Sundays, and no one would park there very often because people usually parked close to the building.

A couple of weeks into the investigation, after sending in the impression for analysis, they got lucky, and the tire impressions gave them a probable make and model of car. A Mercury Grand Marquis. When they checked with base Military Police, there were no reports of a missing or stolen Mercury Grand Marquis anywhere on post. How it got there was still another unanswered question in the disappearance of the prisoner.

When Cpl. Buck reached the church parking lot, across the lot from the back entrance of the CID-SI headquarters, nearly everyone rushed to the back door or a window to actually see what would happen next. Cpl. Buck, with Sgt. Thomas in the passenger seat, parked the Jeep marked as George Johnson’s Kia Sedona minivan in the spot where it was later found. The two moved to yet another Jeep Cherokee marked with another now infamous cardboard sign. This one read Mercury Grand Marquis. The wide door entrance and deeply set back drivers seat were perfect for a rotund man looking for the most comfort while driving.

Col. Price announced during the car switch that this was when the escape was reported. Three other members of the CID-SI jumped into three separate Jeep Cherokees and sped down N. New Braunfels Ave., toward the busy gate to quickly make the round trip to get to the outside gate and hopefully keep the prisoner from getting off base. It wasn’t a very good plan, but the CID-SI were generally men of action and waiting for others to stop their prisoner was not going to happen.

Here was the second instance of something going right, for a change, in the investigation. One of the guards on duty that night remembered the three military vehicles driving at a high rate of speed out to the highway. They had stopped the traffic at both ends of the base to use their binoculars and get the plates for all three vehicles before they got out of sight. Most of the people who had to stop and wait while they filled out a quick report and sent it off to MP HQ were upset. The guard remembered joking with an obese guy in a Grand Marquis who asked what was happening – nothing out of the way -- he just remembered the guy was one of the biggest guys he had seen in a while, and he seemed to be the only guy who waited patiently to leave the base.

The same guard was on duty again and, when the three single occupant vehicles sped past, it jarred his memory. After thinking about it for a few minutes, the guard remembered noticing the Grand Marquis go all the way to the other side of the bridge over the highway then turn left to go north -- not south before the bridge as most thought. The three speeders went the same way, and he remembered joking to himself about how the fat guy would need a Ferrari to catch them, but he was too fat to fit in any kind of Ferrari. Going south was the smart way to go. It was away from the base, and that side of town tended to have more places for a fleeing fugitive to find a place to stay without anyone asking questions.

Buck got into the Jeep Cherokee with the cardboard sign in the drivers-side window saying Mercury Grand Marquis. He drove calmly out onto N. New Braunfels Ave., which is a major gate for Ft. Sam Houston both coming onto and leaving the base. He drove calmly off the base, and with the latest intelligence saying the car turned north, he did the same. The rest of the way would be what Buck would think this guy would do if he were escaping. They were playing a guessing game from here on out.