Chapter 4

Jim found that he really didn't care for skiing. He was much more interested in what caused their plane to crash when the jets would not come back on at the pilot's command. In his official capacity as the bodyguard of a senator, he pestered the hell out of the plane's manufacturer until they finally invited him to join the investigation team.

He went along as a guard and general gofer to the crash site when they tried to recover the pieces of the plane. He was useful in helping to locate the various parts of the plane, so he wasn't a total pain in the ass. They found the fuselage and both wings, but not the tail section of the plane, but they thought that this was enough to tell them what had gone wrong. They were right!

It took only about 10 minutes for the crash investigators to determine that the tail section had come off as the result of an explosion originating on board the plane, but not an explosion of anything that was part of the plane. QED, the explosion was caused by a bomb that blew the tail section off the plane. Sabotage, but who did it?

With this information to work with, it only took another 15 minutes to determine that the jets had failed because of sabotage, but who did it? Jim was determined to find out!

He asked Jane a lot of questions about her life, her potential enemies, and her political ambitions. She was 27 years old, just barely old enough to be a senator. She had led a normal life for a Saunaian: she grew up on a farm, had the usual electronically implanted liberal arts education, had sex with several men including some relatives, but no lasting attachments, and had inherited enough money to live on without having to work. She had no enemies that she knew of, except for political foes, but she didn't think that any of them would try to kill her for political gains, except for the anti-water-rights people. She liked being a senator and wanted to stay one for as long as she could get reelected.

To Jim, this seemed to confirm his earlier estimate that Jane's political enemies were still trying to kill her and he was sure that there was more to it than just her water-rights position. He needed to get a list of names of her political enemies and track each one down until he could find out who was really behind these attempts on her life.

He thought he had found the key reason for the resistance to her water-rights bill—she had invested so much of her political capital into her water-rights fight that, if she had lost, her political life would have been over. So, the fight was not really over water, but over whether or not Jane Arbuckle would remain a senator. What he really needed to know was why it was so important to get her, personally, out of the Senate. Jim would have to talk with Jane, in depth, to find the answer to this.

Meanwhile, Jane, too, was getting bored with skiing. You could slide down a hill only so many times before you started looking for something else to occupy your time; therefore, she was ready to leave for home long before her two weeks were up. Jim wanted to get back to his farm to get the harvest out of the way so he could devote full time to protecting Jane, as if he wasn't doing that already. They made reservations on the next mag-lev train out, no more planes for a while!

What with changing trains and not-quite-meshed schedules, it took them three days to get back to Jim's farm, but it felt like home to both of them. Jane found that she felt that home was where Jim was. Was this love? Jane thought so. Now, she just had to convince him that he didn't really need to farm, he needed to be with her in Heinlein. Maybe she could convince Jim to mothball his farm for the next season so she could give him a taste of life away from it; she'd work on it.

It was no surprise to Jane to find that farm life was not for her; she'd known that since she was a child. But she had to be subtle; she couldn't bad-mouth the farm or she would drive Jim away from her. She would have to give this some careful thought and map out a well planned campaign. Meanwhile, she would be as helpful as possible in getting in this season's harvest.

With the two of them to work on the harvest, it went much faster than Jim had expected, so they were finished with it a week earlier than usual. Jane said that she needed to get back to Heinlein; she had already been away longer than she should. Jim agreed that he made a very good bodyguard and she needed him with her in Heinlein. He suggested that he mothball the farm and plan on spending the next year with her in Heinlein as her bodyguard. Jane nearly fainted when she heard this, what happened? She hadn't even started her campaign yet and he was falling into line. Was he in love with her? Oh, joy! Maybe he was!

Mothballing the farm was fairly simple, so they were back in Heinlein within a week. Temporarily, they moved back into Jane's apartment, but Jim wanted to find something more defensible. They looked around and found a small house, separated from its neighbors, and with a brick fence around a fair sized yard. Jim thought that he could clear the yard and get a good field of fire, and the house had a finished cellar that could be converted into a very comfortable bedroom/bomb shelter. It already had a bathroom with a large tub and shower combination, so all the place really needed was the addition of a downstairs kitchen. Jim and Jane combined their resources and bought the house; they planned to move in right away.

They furnished the downstairs first, with a king-sized bed as the first thing they bought and had delivered. They wanted plenty of room to play around in their new bed, as they both planned to use it from the first night. The rest of the house was furnished conventionally.

Jim improved the defenses by installing the same kind of retractable transparent polycarbonate protective walls around the house as he had at his farm. He also had a pillbox installed on the roof, equipped with two 40-mm auto-loading cannon. Bouncing-Betty antipersonnel mines were placed close to the wall and had optional remote control firing mechanisms installed to be operated from the central control room in the cellar. The cannons on the roof were aimed by video and fired remotely from this same control room. He found a neighborhood watch club that had their own assault helicopter and made sure that he could call on them at any hour of the day or night. He now felt that he was ready to withstand any attack short of a 1000-kg bunker buster bomb!

The house was too far from the senate building for them to walk, so Jim came up with the idea of buying a two-person hover craft and completely enclosing it in 10-mm thick transparent polycarbonate. This added over 250 pounds to the vehicle's weight and slowed it somewhat, but it was adequate for traveling to and from work. The polycarbonate wouldn't stop a rifle bullet, but it would stop buckshot and pistol rounds and any thing else traveling slower. The protection wasn't complete, but it would have to do; Jane would drive and Jim would "ride shotgun."

Jane returned to work with renewed verve, and found that her status had risen markedly as a result of getting her water-rights bill passed. This had been the first bill to address a planet-wide problem that had gotten through the Senate, and she was now regarded as a power to be reckoned with. Many Senators were eager to have her support their bills and there was some talk of having her become the president of the Senate. Jane discounted this, she thought that she was too young to get elected to that job, but it was fun to think about it.

Jim got a list of her political enemies and began to investigate the politicians on the list. Most could be discounted immediately, but there were four names that warranted further study. Foremost on the list was a man who had been a warlord during their heyday, but was now "going straight." John Kingman was not a candidate for any office, since no ex-warlord could ever be elected to any position, but he was the financial and intellectual power behind several "conservative" politicians. The more Jim learned about Kingman, the more he suspected that he was the one trying to kill Jane.

Life rocked along on a pretty even keel over the next three months, with Jim and Jane getting to know each other more and more intimately, particularly in bed, and their relationship was tightening into more than just casual sex-partners. Late one evening, they were cuddling in bed and nominally watching TV when the motion detectors in the yard set off the intruder alarm. Jim ran to the control room and activated the closed circuit TV that monitored the entire yard.

He counted at least 10 attackers crawling over the perimeter wall. Jim signaled Jane to call the neighborhood watch club's emergency number and alert them to the attack. He widened the scope of the TV surveillance and saw even more intruders crawling over other segments of the wall. This was a major attack!

He noted that several of the attackers carried flame throwers, which could reduce the polycarbonate shield to a burning pool of hot plastic in short order. He was going to have to target these people first. There were at least 30 attackers visible over the wall when Jim activated the first of the Bouncing-Betty mines. As Jim expected from a group this well organized, the attackers were all wearing body armor, so there were few fatalities from the mines, but there were some badly torn arms and legs. Jane sat at the controls of one of the roof-top cannon and Jim took the other; he told her to hit the flame throwers first, as they were the greatest immediate danger.