Chapter 58: Arson. Anti-Aircraft Fire. Airport Sex

Mark

I had Lucas ensure a twenty-four hour guard on The Meadows and Darwin Architectural Group, plus KC’s gallery. He decided on a limited team of two at The Meadows during the day when workers were present, and six to eight guards circulating around the property and surrounding roads during the overnight hours. He also installed a series of security cameras and perimeter alarms in obvious and not so obvious places. All of it seemed like closing the barn door after the horses had left, but we did it any way.

Elsa learned that Darwin backed up all their computers four times an hour to an offsite server, so even if the building had burnt to the ground, they wouldn’t have lost the plans for The Meadows.

The Arson Squad confirmed what was pretty well known the night of the fire. The place had been torched using gasoline as an accelerator. A few days later, the Fire Battalion Chief called me, they had located a gas station where Myron Tanner had filled up his gas cans and been videoed on their security cam. It was definitely him. He was driving a stolen van. The gas containers were exactly like those left behind at the site. They had enough of a case to prosecute and had a warrant issued atop the one already in existence.

The guards on the girls were doubled again on my orders. Elsa, Cindy, and KC were the most exposed, because they worked in somewhat public buildings. KC reduced the number of hours the gallery was open during the day, putting up ‘By Appointment’ hours otherwise. We put two guards on the property when she wasn’t there with her full contingent of security.

Cindy carried on her normal work, only with a bevy of security guards paving the way ahead of her and covering her backside when she went anyplace.

Elsa’s office building got a guard force reminiscent of Fort Knox when she was there, and three men during off hours. Fortunately, the attempted arson had failed to destroy anything except a door and rear office that housed new paper products and cleaning supplies. The computers, printers, plans, and archives of the firm were intact and undamaged.

For the next two weeks after the fire, I talked to Doug three or four times a day. He had an engineering firm come out after most of the debris had been cleared away. They tested the foundation and declared that it was still fit to be used for the house. That was great news for a change. Doug had the concrete power washed and processed to remove most of the soot and odor; he then had it sealed and painted to complete the process and make it odor free.

We also made some further changes through Elsa’s architectural company in concert with our building permits from the county, and poured concrete pillars, walls, and floors. We would have a three story concrete structure with post-tensioned flat plate floor slabs and both load and non-load bearing concrete or cinder block walls throughout. This would make the resulting structure more fireproof and resistant than our original plans. We’d be way beyond the county fire code. The costs went up materially by not using wood, but I felt much better about what we’d be living in.

The changes resulted in further extensions of the estimated completion date. I upped my offer regarding the bonuses I’d pay if we made the July 1 move-in date to ten percent. Doug laughed at my foolish thinking, but I could see him renew his efforts on The Meadows. I could see the wheels in his brain working as to how he’d accomplish that impossible goal.

At my suggestion Doug had designed and gotten my approval to build a modern entryway to the property off the main road a half-mile away. The entrance included beautiful signage announcing The Meadows to arriving guests and deliveries. When the girls saw the new entranceway they cheered and made a huge fuss over the grand entrance. Eventually, it would also have some heavy iron gates on electric motors and coded entry to limit access to the property.

The pile of fire debris eventually left the site, and gradually the odor of burned house faded. New lumber, other supplies, new trailers, and a renewed effort got the ball rolling again on the construction process. With my insistence and money, Doug added a fourth crew. He also added another lift and a construction crane to speed up material delivery to the upper floors. He also brought in a catering crew to prepare snacks and serve free lunch and coffee to the crews; they worked through late afternoon to keep the workmen fueled for a push into the evening hours that now went to eleven o’clock. The crews were on site full-time six days a week. The men loved the extra overtime. Some of the crews even showed up on Sundays.

After the huge hiccup of the fire and the changeover from wood structure to concrete and cinder block, Doug figured the project had lost two months. With the extra help and equipment he hoped to regain some of those calendar days, weather permitting.

The weather did not cooperate. December 12th we had a foot of snow. Doug lost four hours but had the crews shoveling the snow out of the house and then using trucks and other equipment to move it further away. Doug added kerosene heaters to dry out the house and keep passable temperatures for the crews.

By Christmas the first two floors of the house had been poured, and the support walls and columns for the third were being prepared. We continued with concrete, cinder block, and metal studding throughout the holiday period except for Christmas day. Doug had the crews work New Year’s Day at a premium rate. We had more snow, and lost more time to shovel hours by the crews, but not as many after the roof trusses got installed and covered with plywood, insulation, and tarpaper.

Tossing the construction plan out the window, Doug started putting windows in as soon as the exterior walls were up, floor by floor. This let him keep at least some of the heat in the structure while the HVAC, electricians, plumbers, and security people did their magic between rooms and floors. Generally, the crews were literally tripping over each other.

Things were crazy. Electrical wires were strung before some of the interior walls were put in place. Walls were put in place in certain locations because of how the plumbing had been placed. Lucas and a couple of his security staff personally wired part of the house because he didn’t like part of the job the outside security outfit had done.

The holidays came to the city, so the girls and I kind of hunkered down at the condo every night after work. We had a gathering Melanie called the Christmas Sex Party four days before Christmas. We did not invite as many people as the one in early November. Besides the six of us, we had Izzy, the five guys we usually had at our parties (Carter, Deke, Ryan, Mike, and James), plus Andy and Margo, Greg and Kim, Sean and Pam, Wes and Vanessa, and Scott and Anna.

Elsa also arranged for Chloe and Zoé to help us with food and serving, and somehow they stayed around for the erotic festivities that followed. Their attendance brought the number of partiers up to thirteen women and eleven men.

I studied for and passed my private pilot’s written test, scoring a ninety-four. I missed a couple of questions because I misread them. I wasn’t flying as much as I wanted, but I was able to slip away for a lesson a couple of times a week when the weather cooperated. I soloed, and after a dozen practice flights took my solo cross-country on a rare winter day when the weather was nice over a wide area.

One day in February, Wes and I were up practicing for my flight test. He was pretending he was the examiner, and putting me through the paces I would have to do on my flight test. He had me out near The Meadows in a Cessna 172 doing steep power turns around a point. We were at five hundred feet altitude and I was working to compensate for a fifteen-knot west wind, but keep my circling still in the shape of a circle around my fixed point.

Suddenly, we heard a loud WHACK, almost as though someone had hit the side of the plane with a hammer. A second WHACK sounded from overhead ten seconds later. Wes was looking all around.

Wes screamed at me, “MY AIRPLANE.”

Wes nosed the plane over into what seemed like a near vertical dive and steep turn in the opposite direction I’d been going. I thought we were cooked. He screamed directions at me. “Dial in 7700 on the transponder, NOW.”

I fumbled with the radar transponder and got the emergency code entered in just as Wes pulled the plane level at about fifty feet above the treetops. Our airspeed was in the yellow arc. I wondered whether the wings would rip off of the plane.

Wes immediately got on the radio in an excited tone, “City Approach, Cessna 97 Lima with you near ground level. We have been shot at just behind our location. We have two hits to our plane. One of them has penetrated our fuel tank; we are leaking fuel at a steady rate. We are declaring an emergency and want immediate clearance to land. We request fire apparatus at the runway.”

I jerked my head to look outside the plane. I hadn’t realized we were leaking fuel. We weren’t just leaking, we were spewing forth a steady stream of aviation gasoline through what looked like a half-inch hole in the wing. If we caught fire, we would be doomed.

The radio reply was instantaneous, “Roger, 97 Lima. Radar contact. We copy your transmission and your emergency. Fire trucks are being deployed as we speak. You are cleared to land runway three-two. You do not need to contact tower; stay with us on this frequency until you are on the ground; tower is monitoring your progress to the runway on this frequency. All other traffic is being diverted.”

I could hear the radar controller start to turn some commercial traffic away from the runway and out of our flight path due to our emergency. I knew enough to know that a thousand bells were going off all over the airport and nearby police station, and that people were responding at a run.

As we got away from The Meadows, Wes climbed slightly. He explained, “I wanted us out of the line of fire. That was why I dove down low. Now say a prayer that we don’t set that fuel on fire as we get this thing on the ground.” We both looked out at the steady stream of fuel leaking from a finger-sized hole in the left wing about three feet from my cabin door. I wondered why the shot hadn’t already started a fire.

The runway for City Airport soon appeared a few miles in front of us. We were on a long flat low-altitude final approach, and in glacial time we made it to the runway and a smooth landing that brought us right in front of a dozen fire engines standing ready with nozzles and foam.

We taxied off the runway onto one of the side ramps and Wes killed the engine. We were out of the plane and running in seconds. No fire.

An hour later, we stood with several senior fire officials, three uniformed policemen, our friends Detectives Reinhart and Gunthrie from months earlier when we first dealt with Tanner, an FAA representative, our maintenance man, and Lucas and two of my security staff, looking at the airplane.

A temporary plug of some kind plus duct tape to hold it in place had been put over the hole in the wing. Fuel had been pumped from the tanks as the fire department stood by at the ready.

A second hole was found in the fuselage about six feet behind where I had been sitting. The bullet had wedged into a seat back, and after retrieval rested inside a forensic envelope in Detective Reinhart’s hands. The fuel tank bullet had gone clear through the wing, also puncturing a hole in the top of the wing; we’d been losing fuel from there as well thanks to Bernoulli’s principle.

Wes and I explained for the tenth time what had happened, the exact time, our actions to avoid further damage or injury, and why we’d declared an emergency. I explained what we knew about Tanner. No one faulted us for anything we did. I requested that the media not be notified for a number of reasons, most of all the encouragement of Myron Tanner.