Chapter 318: The Trap Closes on Us

Thursday, September 7, 2006 (Continued)

I had to try to find out what the soldiers intended. My loved ones were all relatively safe in the tunnel, but if I waited for the action to start, by the time I understood what it was that they were doing it could be damned difficult for me to stop it. If the soldiers had lethal intentions - and they'd certainly come equipped for that! - the tunnel safety wouldn't last long. If I took my eyes off the soldiers to get involved in doing some research about their plan, there'd be a risk of my missing the start of anything - damned random numbers! I'd just have to be careful not to get too focused on my research. I'd check the soldiers frequently, because it was pretty obvious that they'd all advance quietly to the wall before starting anything.

I could think of four places where I might be able to get hold of some useful information: The CIA boss's satchel, from one of the two south trucks, from one of the two north trucks, or from the boss of the soldiers - who I hadn't identified yet but there had to be one somewhere. Satchel guy was closest and probably the best choice, so I decided to try him first. I flitted that way.

The northern lookout point was getting crowded, as three soldiers had joined it, one obviously the boss soldier [[a major]], one a communications guy judging by the gear he was carrying, and one a guard, who was helping the other guard look at the house whose property they were having their party on.

#7: <The reporters should've been here by now. The police too, if Prof called them.>

#21: <We have to assume they're not coming. Maybe the baddies have blocked the road at the far end.> [[Prof had been unable to call because the baddies had cut our telephone lines and had a cellphone jammer running, so no member of the public who happened to see the soldiers could call to warn us.]]

The CIA boss's satchel was in the hands of his driver, so a little hard to rummage through. I was debating what to do about that, or whether to look for information elsewhere, when the body language of all the guys changed. The Army communications guy had said something, and they'd all become instantly alert and were looking up into the sky toward the south.

If you'll forgive a slight digression: Normally you know when someone's looking at you because you see their eyes are pointing straight at you (that seems obvious). That's often not the case with me. My sight blob was down beside them, close to the CIA driver but pulled back so I could see everyone while I thought about how to get the satchel. The driver was standing to the group's west, so my sight blob was at ground level a few yards farther west of them. They were all looking south up into the sky, so my sight blob couldn't see any of their eyes, thus they didn't appear to be looking at me at all. But "me" isn't my sight blob; we're in two very different locations.

I have to keep very good spatial orientation when I use ki-effects, otherwise they self-cancel. My proximity sense helps me a great deal because it shows where blobs and NP-points are even when they're beyond my 24-foot range, but I still have to be very aware of my surroundings and orientations. (Actually, I learned from when my subconsciouses started sharing their ki-effects management information that my proximity sense wasn't detecting my distant ki-effects. The subconsciouses just made it seem that way by injecting the remote effects' locations into my proximity image in a way that told me where the effects were. My subconsciouses were cheating, but it worked very well so I forgave them.) I've had an enormous amount of experience at keeping track of my effects relative to my body, so it's second nature now. If the baddies had all looked directly at the sight blob, I wouldn't have emotionally reacted at all (it'd taken quite a few accidental reactions until I'd learned not to react to that). But looking the way they were now, I instantly knew they were looking very close to my body, which scared the crap out of me.

My immediate reaction was to zoom upward to get out of sight, but I'd barely started on that when I changed it to zooming sideways so I could keep the sight blob where it was. After a couple of seconds of very rapid sideways acceleration, none of the baddies were tracking their heads sideways or looking confused. They were still looking in the original direction, so I started decelerating.

The observer lowered the binoculars, said something while pointing. I quickly aligned the sight blob behind his pointing. I couldn't see anything, so zoomed the sight blob about seven hundred feet along the line of sight. I caught glimpses of something in the sky much farther away. A couple of seconds later I was able to make out two helicopters heading toward my house at an altitude of a couple of hundred feet. They were blacked out, but their canopies were reflecting street and house lights.

#5: <FUCK! The pilots of those things are bound to have damned good night-vision goggles. There's no way we can stay up here if those things are flying around. We need to get miles away, thousands of feet above them, or onto the ground, asap.>

#15: <We can't do anything miles away or thousands of feet up, so where on the ground?>

#30: <It can't be inside our walls or we'll be caught up in whatever it is they're going to do. We have to be outside the walls, so we can remain free and mobile.>

#7: <Outside the walls means avoiding the soldiers all over the goddamned place. We'd have to be so far back we'd barely be within range of the house.>

#9: <We need somewhere to hide close to the house. In the crops to the south is no good because the helicopter pilots will probably be able to see us. Ditto for on the roof of our neighbors' house. Maybe we can land on the opposite side of the neighbors' house, then sneak closer enough to get within range. If we can get to inside their front doorway, we'll be about three or four hundred feet from our house, and the helicopter pilots will think we're a neighbor come to investigate.>

#23: <We won't be able to spy on the satchel or anything else like that.>

#29: <There's nowhere we can land to have our house and the command group in range. We have to choose, and it has to be our home. I can't think of anything better. We'd better get it done before those helicopters get any closer.>

#All: <Agreed.>

I zipped to the far side of our neighbors' house, landed behind it, then used several bushes they had growing to cover me while I ran to their front door area. It was a large, recessed and covered area, so a good place for me to pause while I considered whether I could safely sneak closer. As I knew all too well, hiding behind bushes is a joke for anyone looking down from above. That'd been amusing when I'd been using my sight blobs, but it was a pain in the ass when I was trying to hide from two fucking helicopters. [[They had FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared vision systems), so my trying to hide behind a bush from them certainly would've been a joke.]]

I sent a sight blob up to check on the helicopters. They were farther away than I'd expected, maybe a quarter to half a mile although it's hard to judge distance in the sky, especially when you don't accurately know the size of the thing you're looking at (I didn't add "especially at night" to that description because it was effectively daytime for my big sight blob). They'd slowed somewhat, but I guessed they'd still be overhead in less than half a minute. I zoomed the blob toward them, for a closer look.

#5: <Fuck! These guys are ready to start a war. To think we were worried about the soldiers' machineguns.>

In the doorway of both helicopters was one of those multi-barrel machineguns that you see in war movies. The choppers had something different mounted on their other sides. On one chopper, two HUGE looking missiles, wider than I was [[Hellfires]]; on the other chopper, a round tube containing a dozen and half small rockets [[M260, with 19 x 2.75" rockets]].

Other than the two pilots, there were five guys sitting in the back of each small chopper. I couldn't see much detail, but they were dressed in black rather than as ordinary soldiers, and had ski masks pulled over their faces.

#20: <They're up to far too much no good. That's a shit load of firepower and too many guys just to buzz around on overwatch.>

The helicopters slowed almost to a stop, still about a quarter mile out, and we saw what they intended. The guys in the back got to their feet, crouching in the small cabin, waddled to the doorways, attached ropes to buckle-things on their belts, then moved to stand on the helicopters' skids.

#18: <They're going to do that macho zipping down the rope thing, probably throwing grenades and God knows what else in through the windows and bursting in like they're rescuing hostages from terrorists. It's over the top to a FUCKING insane degree!

I had a HUGE problem in not knowing whether my families were considered innocent bystanders to be protected, like the hostages in a bank siege would be; or my families were what the baddies considered baddies. In which case the assault would be very ugly and very, very short. And even if they thought my families were innocents, the assault they were about to do had to be risky. There were FAR too many weapons that could make VERY big holes in things, and an insanely large number of guys running around with guns, doubtless with the safety catches switched off. Our tunnel was just made of ordinary drainage pipes and was only a couple of feet below the surface of the mound. If the authorities knew about it - which they would if they'd done any homework at all about our property - then one rocket into the ground above the tunnel would almost certainly collapse it. They had enough rockets to utterly destroy everything, and kill everyone, in seconds.

^

[[I'll explain the situation. We had expected the CIA to want to know if Mark turned up again, but we'd vastly underestimated how desperate they were. When I'd broken out of Fort Dodge, I'd created a fake break-in. Knowing it was fake, none of us had given it much thought, but the CIA CERTAINLY had! Every government in the world knew that if one or more of those weapons was released in the US (presumably the most likely target), then the contagion would almost certainly spread to other countries. Those other countries - pretty much every country in the world - were extremely unhappy to have horrible deaths hanging over their heads and they missed no opportunity to forcefully express their unhappiness at the CIA's slow progress in identifying and apprehending the raiders. The CIA was under MASSIVE pressure from the US Government, from virtually every other government in the world, and those governments' secret services too.

Letting enemies take state of the art bioweapon information and an unknowable selection of samples was unforgivable. Whoever had raided the lab had shown no hesitation in killing everyone in it, even taking the time to hunt down every single person in the complex, no matter where they had hidden. The executions had been done using one of the lab's own bioweapons, so the raiders were demonstrably willing to use them. That was deemed to be a very clear message to the US Government that the raiders WOULD use the weapons, and presumably against America!

The penetration and escape was chillingly professional, apparently using some sort of ultra-quiet high-tech aircraft because the escape was almost certainly made by air - one proof of that was that the stolen weapons had been dropped from a considerable height - but without anyone hearing anything. The local airport's tower closed at 6pm, as is common in small airports, so there was no nearby radar, but FBI agents had been tracking down and checking every blip on every radar in half the country, and had found nothing yet. It's easy for raiders to land on an objective covertly using parachutes or hang gliders - James Bond does it all the time - but to covertly get away aerially implied a level of technological support that had chilling implications for the ability of the raiders to conduct other missions, including launching a bioweapon attack on America.

For the last few years the CIA has been concentrating on the Middle East, almost to the exclusion of everywhere else, so they'd been caught flatfooted and weren't up to the task forced on them now. They didn't know who had the capability and motivation to do such a raid, but they were being SCREAMED at to find out.

Making the job considerably harder (it was actually impossible, but the CIA didn't know that) was that America's enemies were having enormous fun planting false information all over the world, jerking the CIA's strings mercilessly, and sometimes doing considerably worse than jerking strings: setting lethal traps they knew the CIA had to rush in to investigate. The CIA was taking casualties, were using up resources and spending money like it was going out of style, were getting nowhere, and were being screamed at to go faster. If a bioweapon attack was carried out against Americans, the CIA was going to get ALL of the blame, so they were FRANTIC.

One of their minor ideas was to find out whether I ever turned up again. Almost certainly I was dead in the lab's rubble, but in the absence of confirmation of that, I - and every other unaccounted for person - was a suspect. Heck, even the accounted for corpses were suspects, such was the CIA's desperation. The CIA's steps for locating me if I surfaced included using the NSA's vacuuming of America's internet traffic as I've already described, and they had lots of other signal flares set up too, for example, triggered off repeats of my freakily impressive entries in any hospital's database.

Once they'd surveilled the Anderson home and had nearly confirmed that Mark was hiding there (thanks to the breakfast delivery), then the information needed to be acted on quickly because the implications of my being alive were HUGE! Never mind the freakish healthiness and mind control issues, if I was alive while everyone else had died, then I must've been brought out by the raiders. I was certain to have priceless information, whether I was associated with the raiders or not.

Another reason - not that any more reasons were needed - was that the CIA had suffered a series of terrible black eyes because of their imprisoning, experimenting on, then losing me. If they could find me now, it'd be a major exoneration for them. Which would become a huge coup if it turned out that my families and I were part of a foreign power's illegal operation, which was looking very likely as how else to explain my survival and my families keeping me under cover now. So the CIA LEAPED at the chance to grab me.

They were extremely reluctant to put anything about an operation against Mark Anderson in their computers. That bastard Majestic Countdown made that very ill advised (I'd caused several leaks by now, but it was the first one from deep within Eclipse's VERY secure system that had the CIA scared. There was NO trace of how I'd fooled their system into thinking I was sending it from their own office. They had video surveillance of so much of Eclipse's offices that they knew it hadn't been done physically). For the same reason, it was no good getting the DHS or any other federal agency involved, and neither did the CIA want to risk exposing the operation by doing what it should have done before conducting a covert op: apply through the National Security Council for presidential approval. All things considered, it was much better to use the military. Majestic Countdown hadn't shown any ability to get into a military computer, and the CIA would get it done with very little computer involvement and nothing that mentioned my name.

Delta Force was sounded out, without explaining the situation exactly in case the Delta commander refused. Some parsimony with the truth was required. The story was that the CIA had a STRONG lead on a guy who was closely linked to weapons of mass destruction, they'd been searching for him extremely urgently all over the world, and he'd just popped up in America. Everyone in America knew terrorists could be about to conduct a bioweapons attack on America, so that got the army guy's URGENT attention. The CIA continued, "He's in a walled compound of two houses connected together with an underground tunnel. One house is in an elevated position commanding the area. We're unsure of the loyalties of the people in the buildings..." You get the idea: the CIA made it sound very bad, although they did put in writing that they wanted no one to be hurt, because that's a very useful thing to have in writing in case someone got hurt. (The quote I gave above had actually started, "He's in one of five militarily strong compounds..." Only one of the descriptions was of our home. I'll explain about the multiplicity of locations shortly.)

Delta Force agreed to do a rapid capture-and-extract, allocating two teams to the job. They'd partner with the 75th Rangers as they often did (the troops around the perimeter were Rangers). The Deltas flew to Fort Lewis in Washington, home of the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment (the only Ranger Regiment not deployed overseas at the moment), and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), providers of the two MH-6 Little Bird helicopters.

The CIA provided the Deltas, Ranger and SOAR officers with plans and photos of five highly defensible buildings in the Albany, Oregon area (Albany being the city to our east; slightly smaller and farther from our home than Corvallis to our west). The CIA explained, "We won't know what building the target is in until late at night." The CIA's idea of was to disguise that this operation was to do with Corvallis, a town that'd been in the news a great deal recently. By concentrating on buildings around Albany, the Army wouldn't suspect that Mark Anderson was involved. If the Army thought of that name, they'd talk with their boss, who'd talk with his, etc., and the operation would turn into a political nightmare.

For each of the five impressively strong and difficult to assault buildings, the CIA had identified the room I was likely to be in at the time of the assault, saying, "We know when the Target goes online. That'll be the go signal." I was called "Target".

The Ranger and SOAR officers then decided on the operation's plans, force and equipment requirements, etc. As a result of the way the CIA had 'sold' it, the military had equipped themselves to have overwhelming odds against the level of threat they thought they might be facing. They didn't like the underground rooms, garages and tunnel, didn't like that the approach was across dominated open ground with motion sensors and guards (that describes our house, but the other four houses had descriptions that were just as worrying, or more so). Also worrying the Army was that the CIA had been very vague about the residents' loyalties and possible numbers of people inside the buildings. The CIA thought it extremely unlikely that any of the Fort Dodge assailants might be hiding out in our basement, but it MIGHT be possible. They'd been highly professional and deadly in their assault on Fort Dodge, so if they were in our basement, they had to be feared. The CIA didn't answer the Army's questions specifically, but still managed to convey the impression that a lot of force might be a good idea.

The trucks contained hazmat gear and the CIA did have the nearest hazmat emergency response teams on readiness alert, but the risk or threat of samples being released wasn't considered significant. People as capable and well resourced as the raiders could have easily smuggled everything out of the country, and smuggle anything they wanted back again, so leaving any of it behind didn't make sense, especially not at a location associated with the lab. The CIA had told the Army they didn't want the house fired on unless absolutely necessary, but the main reason for that was to preserve evidence and witness lives. Just to play safe, the command group was currently with the northern observation team as the wind was blowing more from the north than from the south.

Once the plans were decided on, the Rangers, their trucks and other gear, were flown by a C-130J Super Hercules from Fort Lewis to Salem, Oregon. They were joined by the two Delta teams (both five-man teams), and two MH-6 Little Bird helicopters. The Rangers drove to near Albany, waiting for the CIA to discover which building I was in. The Rangers would then move to contain it, while the extraction teams took to the air to be ready to hit as soon as they got the go signal.

The plan for the "West Albany residence" (i.e., our home) was for a five-man Delta team to secure "Building B" (the Main House), two rappelling down to the rear door, three to the front. Gain and secure the entrances. Two men from the front door to enter the house, disable the elevator and secure the stairs to the garage and games room. Any people encountered were to be subdued, handcuffed and laid on the floor.

The other Delta team was to drop two to the front and rear doors of the lower half of "Building A" (Mark's Wing), after which the fifth guy to drop would secure the top door outside the master bedroom. The first four guys to burst in and catch the Subject in the study. If I wasn't found, there was to be a sweep through the two houses, looking for "a white, youthful-looking male." There were many contingency plans, but none of them mattered for now.

If the house occupants cooperated, the Rangers would have little to do, just secure our guards just before the helicopters came in and stand guard to capture any runners from the house. The Delta teams hoped to be in and out very quickly, ideally carrying the Subject. If the occupants resisted with weapons, the Rangers would make sure the resistance stopped.

The outcome the CIA hoped for was that the Deltas would very quickly secure the occupant of the study, would leave the building and property with him - the Rangers would provide cover for that - and deliver him to the CIA. The helicopters would land, extract the Delta teams and leave. The CIA had a large transport helicopter a few miles away containing several goons. It'd be called in, land and the goons would be used to subdue the rest of my family, put us in the transport helicopter and take us away for interrogation, then the Rangers would leave. Under this plan, the Deltas would never seeing any of us other than through their night vision goggles (our electricity would be cut preventing normal lights), so should not recognize us. The Rangers might see me well enough but the CIA people would try to stop that. That was less important because I'd already be secured by then. There were scenarios for if Mark Anderson was recognized, but for that to happen I had to be there. Given that the whole country thought I was dead, my parents lies about that would support the CIA's story. The CIA just didn't want to talk about me in advance of the operation to avoid it turning into a god-awful mess.]]

^

Software-Mark started studying. The NSA reported the activity to the CIA, who alerted the field team. They issued the "Go" order.

My body was hiding in the neighbor's front door alcove while my sight blob was looking at the choppers, so I didn't see the soldiers move quietly forward the thirty feet to the wall and up the few rungs of their ladders. (It's great that I can run a sight blob as well as my eyes, but it'd be REALLY useful if I could run another sight blob or two at the same time. I had the mind power to concentrate on thirty two different things at a time, but I just can't handle the damned superimposition problem.)

The first thing that happened was all the Rangers popped their heads and weapons up over the wall. Imagine you're a rent-a-cop security guard, walking the perimeter for the 5,000th time chatting to your partner, when soldiers' heads and weapons appear all along the wall. Admittedly it was fairly dark, and there was only one soldier every twenty five feet, but they were still scary as hell. Night-vision goggles are freaky, and it's no fun have several rifles pointed at you either. Whichever soldiers were in front of each pair of guards ordered them to "FREEZE! Move one muscle and you're dead!" Not many guards valiantly fought back.

Some soldiers leaped over the wall and secured the guards' wrists and ankles with plastic handcuffs, searched them and removed everything that might be used to sound an alarm or communicate.

I also hadn't seen the northern observation group split in two. The original two CIA guys (the observer and guard) stayed where they were, while everyone else rushed diagonally across the road to reposition themselves in our driveway so they could look through the gate's bars to see what was happening. They had no need to open our gate yet and it might be alarmed, so it was left closed.

I heard some noises from the soldiers' movements, so leaned out of the alcove to look. Foliage and darkness stopped me seeing much, but I could make out some soldiers aiming their weapons over the wall.

My sight blob was positioned to look at the helicopters, so I saw them suddenly start to accelerate toward their objectives. I flipped my sight blob around to look at our property, seeing much more clearly that our wall was now dotted with armed men pointing weapons at our houses, and that our security guards were all being neutralized.

I had decided to hit the alarm's panic button when there were guys on the property. There were only a few of them inside the walls, and they were close enough to the wall that they were outside the range of the motion sensors, but I decided to do activate the alarm anyway. I moved the sight blob instantly to one of the locations inside the house where there was an alarm button and pressed it. My eyes saw the sudden glow from all our exterior lights going on, and my ears certainly heard the siren going off. We have a VERY loud siren. I knew the cops would also be getting alerted. [[Nope, our telephone lines were cut.]] I also turned on the Dictaphones and the webcam on my computer (even the far end of the mansion was within my maximum range).

I moved my sight blob to the tunnel. The girls were huddled in the middle, with the pairs of adults bookending them facing the doors. Donna was closest to Mom and Dad, so I made a light blob message to Vanessa and Prof, "Soldiers starting. Stay calm."

I didn't know what else to say, because other than that there would be guys sliding down ropes, I had no idea what was going to happen. The worst possibility was utterly destroying the houses and everyone in them, something even just one of the helicopters could easily do. Even the BEST possibility I could think of still had the rope guys EXTREMELY aggressively entering the house, so every scenario I could think of was very unwelcome.

Our lights went out. [[There'd been a soldier poised to cut our power to make it harder for the occupants to get organized. That was meant to happen just as the Delta guys reached the bottom of their ropes; not before in case the Subject was alerted by his computer dying. The soldier acted on his own initiative to cut the power now, figuring that the SCREAMING siren had probably alerted the Subject more than enough already.]]

As a result of the casino kidnapping and how easy it'd been for those guys to disable the house alarm, this house's alarm was considerably more robust, including having a battery backup as is common with home alarms. Cutting the power killed the lights but the siren carried on screaming.

It'd taken me less than five seconds to turn the alarm on and try to reassure my families, but it was time for me to see what was happening up top.

The soldiers hadn't moved, which was a relief. The helicopters and the guys in them could kill my families dozens of times over, but I still felt better not to see soldiers charging in over the walls from all directions.

The helicopters were charging in though. Their pilots had seen the lights go on, could possibly hear the siren, and had heard the Army boss yelling into his radio for them to move it. The pilots had accelerated at their crafts' maximum rate toward their targets. They'd have to have damned good brakes to stop themselves vertically above the houses (I could see they were heading to be above the middles of both houses).

#17: <Two thoughts: Do we want to turn this into a clusterfuck for the Government? And I think those helicopters will be quite easy to push so they crash together.>

#24: <I wish we fucking well knew what they intend!>

#30: <They've come loaded for a ridiculous amount of bear and what little we know about their plan is that it's stupidly aggressive. They're already acting insanely and I'm not willing to put our families' lives at risk by trusting the intentions of insane idiots who're already charging in with guns.>

#18: <I vote for erring on the side of protecting our families. I don't trust the CIA to have ANY idea about decent, moderate behavior.>

#3: <We'd better act fast. Do it?>

#All: <Agreed.>

#15: <Don't push them together, because a double malfunction or double pilot error wouldn't be believable. Make one go into the other.>