Chapter 319: The Trap Turns on Them

Thursday, September 7, 2006 (Continued)

The assault on my home had been derailed and there was no immediate sign of it restarting, giving me time. Time was good, because sooner or later other people would start arriving and that would prevent the assholes from using deadly force. I decided I needed to quickly read the contents of the satchel to find out how deadly the Government's plan for my families was. If the orders were deadly, I might have to do something extreme now. If the orders were passive, I could relax.

I flew up a couple of thousand feet then used NP-plates to create a big room around myself to keep the wind out. I used NP to take the paperwork out of the satchel and spread it all over the floor so I could read many pages at once. I used NP so I wouldn't leave fingerprints. I'd been holding the satchel with NP for the same reason.

Staples were a pain because I would have preferred not to rip the pages off in case the Government claimed a fake page had been inserted. Another pain was that many of the pages were handwritten, but even with those problems, it still only took me a couple of minutes to get a good enough picture of the situation. The CIA's anal compulsion to document everything had laid it all out well.

I read about the CIA's request to the NSA to be alerted to internet activity between the Andersons and OSU's online lectures, the NSA spotting it and passing the information on, the planning for the two observation teams and their subsequent report, and the planning for this 'smash-and-grab'.

There were four aspects about it that made me particularly happy:

• The CIA had ordered the internet surveillance in obvious breach of the settlement agreement. That had clearly stated, "surveillance not to be resumed in the absence of unsought reasonable indication of criminal activity postdating the execution of this Agreement."

• This operation had no deadly intent. Not immediately anyway (see the next point).

• Presuming Mark had been found, there were several pages of questions the CIA would then ask my families about pretty much everything under the sun. The procedures for those questions were going to embarrass the Government (e.g., "Isolate the children from the parents;" and my particular favorite: "The possibility that the subjects might have been mind controlled by Mark Anderson may require the application of extreme interrogative techniques to break any conditioning they are under.")

• Some of the contingency plans (for example, if we fought back, or if biological warfare agents were released) made for horrific reading, so were sure to embarrass the Government even further.

I quickly stuffed everything back into the satchel. I'd been sneaking quick glances down to make sure nothing bad (or badder) was happening, but it wasn't. The machinegun tracers hadn't caused Mark's Wing to catch fire, and with their leadership down, none of the soldiers were initiating anything new. [[The Rangers were under orders not to advance onto the property, other than to take down our security guards, unless we fought back or some other unlikely contingencies it's not worth listing. The "stay out" order was overridden by the need to render aid to the crash victims, but other than that necessity, the Rangers kept to the spirit of the order.]]

Then I saw something I was hoping to see, two sets of flashing police lights tearing down Peoria Road toward this clusterfuck. I quickly put the documents together and back in the satchel (with thirty two minds directing many individual NP-fingertips, "quickly" is VERY fast), canceled the NP-room and started dropping to an altitude of five hundred feet. I heard an explanation for why everyone had run away from the wrecks a minute ago, the machinegun ammunition was exploding in the fires. It sounded like there was a war going on. (When I want NP-plates to join, they join so well their edges merge. I never get drafts through my flying sled's base or windshield, and the wind-proof box I'd just canceled had been airtight, so soundproof as well.)

[[The immediately preceding explanation for the NP-box being soundproof is a poor one. My excuse is that I had so much going on at the time that I didn't make the effort to think about it properly. I didn't think about it much thereafter either, because I'd already decided that airtight meant soundproof (during this autobiography I generally give my thinking at the time, even if it's wrong. You'll notice that my wrong thinking about this issue persists). The more thoughtful of you will have realized that just being airtight doesn't provide perfect insulation from sound. An airtight box made out of glass, for example, will certainly reduce the sound level therein, but loud sounds will still vibrate the glass, transmitting the sound to the box's occupant. I had heard nothing while I was in the box because it was both airtight and composed of a zero-mass forcefield (NP-points are a forcefield). Double-paned glass windows insulate sound much better than single-paned glass windows even if the single pane is as thick as the two panes combined, because the 'dead' space between the double panes decouples the vibration paths. When the 'dead' space is a perfect vacuum (which NP-points are, having no mass) the decoupling is perfect. The sound waves could not vibrate individual molecules in my box's surface because it didn't have molecules, so for sound to be transmitted the sound waves had to vibrate the entire surface of the box. The internal structural strength of each NP-square, plus the additional structural strength conferred by the panels being formed into a rigid box, was greater than the force exerted by the sound waves so the panels greatly resisted being vibrated, thereby providing almost perfect sound insulation.]]

I watched as the cops braked to a halt when they saw a dozen highly armed soldiers in the road.

The soldiers had nothing to fear from the cops - not militaristically or in any other sense as the soldiers believed they were doing a lawful, good deed - so a 1st Lieutenant and private jogged up the road to the nervous looking cops. Given the amount of apparent gunfire they could hear, from the erratic sound of machinegun rounds cooking-off, it was no wonder the cops were nervous.

I couldn't hear their conversation, but it came out afterward that the soldiers had said their commanding officer was dead, and asked the cops to send for some ambulances to help out the Ranger's medicos, while they [the Rangers] got back to the job of surrounding the property so the terrorist couldn't get away. [[The CIA hadn't actually said the target of the operation was a terrorist, instead using phrases like, "highest priority acquisition." Everyone had heard "terrorist" though, just like they were meant to.]]

"What terrorist? What property? Surely you can't be talking about the Andersons?"

"We don't know their names. That place over there," said the soldier, pointing to our place.

One of the cops got on their car's radio to call for EVERYBODY to come, telling them to bring help too. This was going to need a LOT more cops, fire trucks and ambulances.

Another cop, not believing there was a terrorist hiding inside the Anderson residence, tried to get more information out of the soldiers. A discussion that was interrupted by one of the Hellfire missiles in the northern wreck EXPLODING, taking the second Hellfire with it, and everything else in the area too.

The machinegun's rounds' cooking-off had kept everybody away from the wreck so no bad injuries resulted, just some small shrapnel wounds in the arms and legs of the soldiers who hadn't been behind hard cover, sore ears and a fair amount of material damage. Parts of helicopter were blasted in all directions, sending people diving for cover from the shower of metal. Our gate and much of the nearby wall was demolished, and a large crater was created in the middle of our driveway. The nearest trees were flattened and others farther away were stripped of their leaves. The CIA observer across and up the road a little was blown off his branch. He wasn't injured though, and immediately re-climbed his tree.

Once the cops had emerged from wherever they'd thrown themselves, they radioed for MORE HELP! The local cops had not signed up for and weren't equipped to be at ground zero in a war.

Speaking loudly because their ears weren't working well, the cop's questions about who the terrorist was resumed.

All the soldiers knew was, "A white, youthful-looking male."

The cop was puzzled, "There aren't any white youthful males living with the Andersons that I'm aware of. Only Steven Anderson who's nearly forty. Is that who you mean?"

"We were told he'd look in his early-20s."

"There's a Black guy that age: Ron Fisher. Mark would be sixteen, but the whole world would've heard if he was back at home."

"Ron Fisher and Mark? Is that Mark Anderson's home? The guy that's been on the news so much because the CIA was experimenting on him?"

"Yeah."

"There's something fishy about this. This is a CIA operation. They asked the Deltas to do a high-risk extraction of a white, youthful-looking male. There are a couple of agents in an OP near here; let's go have a talk with them." That was pretty much the moment when the military clusterfuck turned into a public relations and legal clusterfuck.

Two of the cops went with the two soldiers, the other car's cops staying at their car so they could call for even more help.

When they found the agents, the senior cop asked, "What's the name of your target?"

"We don't know what name he could be going under at the moment."

"What's his birth name?"

"I'm not able to answer that."

"Get on your radio and ask," suggested the anticipating-being-righteously-pissed-off Lieutenant.

"I can't do that without authorization from the Agent-In-Charge, who's dead."

"Give me your radio," demanded the cop.

"I can't do that either," replied the CIA agent.

Three equally helpful answers later, the cop had had enough. The cops in Corvallis, like everyone else in the town, think the Andersons are wonderful people. After the recent publicity, pretty much everyone in the world knew the CIA was a criminal asshole agency which had already illegally and immorally attacked Mark Anderson once. And the cop didn't for a second believe there was a terrorist hiding inside the Anderson's residence. Apart from anything else, the DHS had already played the "Mark Anderson is financing terrorists" card and it'd been shown to be a transparent lie. It'd lost its ability to inspire any cooperation at all.

The cop pulled out his gun, aimed it at the agents and told them, "You're under arrest."

"Don't be stupid. We're in the middle of an important operation."

The cop's partner and the two soldiers raised their weapons to back up the first cop. The Lieutenant got on his radio and called for reinforcements from his platoon. The two CIA agents were soon cuffed, frisked and under guard. Looking down from above, it made my day.

The cop used the CIA agents' radio to identify himself to whomever was on the other end, and to ask questions, but that person wasn't at liberty to divulge secret information.

The lieutenant was no longer anticipating being righteously pissed off; he was now all the way there. He believed the Rangers had been used by the CIA to continue their illegal dirty work, which had caused the death of the company's major as well as the four SOAR pilots; guys he knew because they often trained together. He got on his radio and told the Looey for the southern wall's platoon to detain the two CIA agents in the southern OP.

"They're already leaving."

"Stop them! This is Mark Anderson's home; the boy the CIA kidnapped and experimented on in Fort Dodge. This is nothing to do with terrorists - we've been used!"

"We're on it!"

A platoon of heavily armed and highly pissed off Rangers (their major had been killed) can be very effective at getting people to stop. The CIA head office radioed the transport chopper that was waiting to be called in, telling them to return to base.

I didn't see the southern CIA agents being captured, as I was too busy watching the scene at the north end of our property. It was only about three minutes since the first cops had arrived, but pretty much every emergency vehicle in Corvallis was on Peoria Road now. Everyone in the neighborhood had been on the phone to 9-1-1, so the local authorities knew it was a major incident. The reports of the first cops to arrive had escalated the situation to whatever the category about four levels above "major incident" was.

The newly arrived paramedics were being directed by the Rangers to where their two medics were working on the Deltas. All the Deltas had at least one broken bone, and some of them were considerably worse off than that. Nothing immediately life threatening, but fucked-up spines are very bad news. They had to be stretchered to ambulances for rides to the hospital, after being de-weaponed by the Rangers (hospitals tend to frown on patients having grenades hanging off their belts).

The exploding Hellfires had solved the cooking-off problem for the northern wreck as there wasn't a northern wreck anymore; it'd been blasted apart and spread over a square mile of Linn County (seriously! There's a shit load of explosives in two Hellfires). Helicopters are jokingly referred to as "A collection of spare parts flying in loose formation" (Ava's and my fixed-wing flight-training friends often said that in reference to the helicopter training that was also done out of Corvallis's airfield). For the northern helicopter, the collection of spare parts was now VERY loose and its flying days were over.

The front of the property was approachable now, which let the fire department get to work putting out the fires caused and spread by the explosion. It was the driest time of the year and there's a lot of vegetation in our general area, so dousing the fires quickly was important.

The southern wreck was unapproachable because the machinegun's ammunition was still exploding (the internal pod that carried the LONG belt of ammo had burst open during the crash so there was ammo all over the place). A fire truck drove across the neighbor's property to park behind the wall near the fire, to spray water over the wall into the wreck. The neighbors have a nice but very orderly and fussy garden, so they were going to be pissed off by having a fire truck drive through half of it.

A lot more police were arriving, mostly going for crowd control because the public were starting to arrive too. When the senior cop had been briefed, he and the sergeant who'd first arrived took it upon themselves to hurry down the drive to our house. That was my cue to contact my family.

To be complete, I'll mention that the attitude of the Rangers had clearly changed considerably. Many of them now had their weapons over their shoulders or put away in the cases of the larger weapons. They weren't looking at our two homes with anything other than occasional curiosity. They'd effectively stood themselves down, but stayed to render aid and because they had no orders to do otherwise. They were probably curious to see what happened next.

The Rangers near our security guards asked them to confirm that this was the Andersons, and whether Mark Anderson was at home. The security guards answered, although they weren't impressed by Military Intelligence.

Our guards' answers were circulated. The Rangers weren't impressed by CIA honesty.

I flew to about 350 feet above my home, then looked inside the tunnel. Everyone was present and accounted for. There was no way of communicating with them without Donna seeing it, so I moved my sight blob up into the space just above the ceiling panel, dialed the blob to emit the same shade of blue as the Boss Blob uses when he visits the family (I'll call it "medium-blue"; my apologies to any female readers), and had it descend into the tunnel. It instantly had all their attentions.

I got it to eject lots of little yellow blobs, which is the color it normally uses to inspect Donna with. They moved to spell out "HELLO". It waited a second, then the yellow blobs rearranged themselves to say, "FRIENDS" (that required the Boss to eject a few more yellow blobs). Pause, then "OF MARK."

I hadn't been able to tell whether my families had heard the crashes, gun fire or the explosion, but they'd certainly looked worried enough that I suspected they had. [They had. The tunnel's lower door let out next to my study, only fifty yards from where the machinegun's bullets were going off. They'd felt the Hellfires' explosion too, which had worried them even further because it'd been a BIG explosion.]

My Boss Blob's appearance had immediately cheered everybody up, except for Donna who didn't know that it meant I was alive and nearby. My families were clearly still worried, but most of their worst fears no longer applied.