Chapter 361: War Comes to Us

Tuesday, June 5, 2007 (Continued)

Over the dinner table, with the Faraday cage activated, we first discussed whether we still wanted to go to war.

My enthusiasm for the idea was even stronger now, because I loved the idea of me being able to use much of the $216 billion to develop an incredible science lab when I was ready to do that. That'd take a few years, but it could take about the same time to drag the Government all the way through the courts to force it to pay for breaching its agreement with us. That timing would work out quite nicely, assuming the Ninnies' exorcism doesn't send me back to Hell in the meanwhile. Not even one of my toenails had been sent there thus far, so I was probably safe to dream about the breakthroughs that my lab could produce. Prof had used getting to Alpha Centauri as an example, but even just a practical way of getting around our own solar system would have PROFOUND consequences for the human race.

Everyone agreed that the UAV had to go, and using it to attack ourselves was unanimously thought to be a great idea, as it'd get rid of the UAV, embarrass the Government enormously, and it should make us incredibly rich. The most important decision was really how aggressive we should be after that. We could just call the Government bad names in a press conference, or we could go to war, or somewhere in between.

Julia, Carol, Donna and Dad were enthusiastic over my causing mayhem. Prof and Vanessa were more cautious and logical, their motivation being intellectual. You can probably imagine what Mom felt about my going to war, but she did agree with the necessity of forcing the Government to get its nose out of our business.

We didn't hurry the conversation, as starting a war isn't the sort of thing that you want to change your mind about afterward.

If all we wanted was to get rid of the UAV and have a shot at getting a truly insane amount of money, that could be achieved easily. Apart from the dramatic crash itself, the process to be gone through to get the money would be a fairly simple and boring: The UAV would crash, we'd hold yet another press conference where we'd show the TV cameras the wreck and all the evidence we'd accumulated so the entire country would know that the Government had been spying on us, and we'd make "We're outraged!"-type comments. Then we'd send the Government a bill for $216 billion. Assuming it didn't respond by saying, "You're right, we're sorry, here's your check," we'd then sue them for it.

What we were most concerned about was that the Government obviously wasn't letting financial risk restrain its actions. The FBI had been using multiple surveillance methods in the full knowledge that they were risking discovery, and they hadn't been scared off. If the risk of losing $216 billion hadn't stopped them before, it seemed likely that even when they were embroiled in a lawsuit for that amount, it wouldn't stop them risking it again. They might even increase their surveillance efforts in an attempt to catch us out in some way that would let them defend themselves from the lawsuit by showing that spying on us had been necessary. If all we did was crash the UAV and hold press conferences, the only 'improvement' we could realistically hope for from the FBI was that they became sneakier. We needed to do something to provide them with a much greater disincentive than losing the taxpayers' money.

We also worried that the FBI's continuing to spy on us despite being exposed several times might indicate a level of determination that was irrational. If we put pressure on them they might irrationally respond in some very aggressive way, such as by planting false evidence on us to prove that we were a threat to national security, drug traffickers, terrorists, or whatever. Once we were 'caught' like that, we'd be prosecuted, which could send us way up shit creek. It was too easy to imagine that exposing the UAV operation and taking the FBI to court could result in them defending themselves this way. Putting pressure on them from another direction, which my idea did, would reduce this risk considerably.

Complicating the issue was that we didn't know for a fact that the UAV was acting for the FBI. The only indication of that was the timing of its appearance being concurrent with other activities known to be FBI. That's why my idea had two stages, because the first stage was to find out for sure which organization was responsible for the UAV spying on us. Only then could Stage Two be used against the culprits. Given the nature of my suggested Stage Two, the results of Stage One had to be publicly known and accepted first.

I could follow the UAV back to Beale AFB, snoop the base thoroughly, getting leads from whatever I found, track those leads down, etc., until I had found everything there was to find. One worry was that such evidence wouldn't be convincing. I doubted, for example, that there were any documents that ordered "Surveil the Andersons." They probably used code names for everything, and had doubtless thought of other safety measures. Majestic Countdown's snooping effectiveness had made the Government very cautious about their documents, and it had to be doubly so when its documents were about us given that Maj had leaked about and for us before, so there wasn't much chance of finding a "smoking gun" type of document.

Another worry was that doing it that way was what Archangel Michael would do. The Guardian Angel was a different creature and it should perform in much more direct, dramatic ways. It was a good idea for the Guardian Angel to be dramatic, because that made future openly dramatic actions more acceptable. Everyone would know that was the Guardian Angel's modus operandi. So the plan wasn't for me to search for evidence of the FBI's involvement. The plan was to 'encourage' the Air Force to announce who was responsible for their UAV being where it was. It was how we supplied that encouragement that we had to think about carefully.

People react badly when on the receiving end of forceful encouragement, so one of the consequences of our going down that road was that we'd better go down several other roads, i.e., we couldn't remain at home. It was difficult to imagine that the Government wouldn't come swarming all over our home when the encouragement started. Their getting their hands on us too early would be bad enough, but their discovering that I was elsewhere would be extremely bad, so the families were going to go on the lam, to stay hidden until the Government had accumulated so many lessons from the Guardian Angel that it'd have to call "Uncle". Whether "Sam" or not, we didn't care, just so long as they took so much damage that they named who the UAV was working for. A sufficiently strong application of force now would also serve as an extremely good lesson to discourage the Government from pissing off the Guardian Angel in the future.

There was virtually no risk to anyone in my crashing the UAV, or in my families hiding out when I was inflicting my lessons on the Government. The risk started when we reappeared, so that's what we discussed the most. We took guesses at what harmful actions the Government might try to take, and what we could do to counter them. We controlled when we would reappear and the method of our reappearance, which gave us a great deal of flexibility. Ideally we'd like to return in time for the kids to take our exams. I didn't think that mattered much, as we should have the Government on the ropes so much that if we missed the exams we could tell the Government we wanted A+ recorded as our grades for every exam, but I didn't say that out loud as the parents wanted the girls to study hard between now and exam time, and it'd give the girls something to do while I was out fighting the war for us.

We weren't trying to solve every potential reappearance problem now, because we'd have nearly a week to think through those issues. We were concentrating on trying to think of anything that ruined the plan entirely.

By the end of dinner, no one had come up with something that bad. We agreed that meant the plan was a goer.

#18: <Oh boy, this is going to be interesting.>

#12: <It's about time we took the fight to the enemy rather than letting them intrude on us all the time.>

There was a period of conversation around the table similar to my internal thoughts, while we all reacted to the idea of creating so much mayhem.

Every person had to make a mental list of what to take, the parents insisting that the girls include all their schoolwork. My schoolwork too, but that was just for appearance's sake for any outsiders. The girls were going to be roughing it for a few days, so they'd have to leave their fourteen different types of shampoos and conditioners behind, plus their countless creams, lotions, balms, mud packs, and God knows what else (with the girls having more money than they knew what to do with, they used it to buy - I swear - every female beauty product on the market. That was a LOT of products! I've seen pharmacies that carried a smaller range than my bathroom). It truly was going to be a rough time for the girls, because the parents were insisting they packed light. Not light as fashion conscious girls think of it, but barbaric light.

I was going to have a very busy night, so we wanted to start as early as possible. That would be as soon as my parents could reasonably be expected to go to bed, because that's when the bad Government was going to attempt to assassinate them. Darkness in Corvallis at this time of year lasts from 9pm to 5am, only 8 of the 24 hours, unfortunately.

My wives returned to my upstairs study to continue their schoolwork, leaving several of the lights on in the Kids' House to indicate that they were there. Donna studied in Prof and Vanessa's study, well out of the way of any trouble, and a reasonable place for her to be studying, it being a "study".

At 9:15pm, the four parents will walk through the Adults' House, turning all the lights off, moving to their bedrooms, where they'll turn the lights on, get undressed and into bed, exactly like they would normally, except earlier because, if asked later, they'll say they'd had a tiring day.

At 9:25 all the parents will get out of bed, and without turning any lights on, move into the spare bedroom across the hallway from Vanessa and Prof's bedroom, Dad doing a quick diversion to make sure Donna is in the study with the door shut. He'll go to the spare bedroom, shut its door behind him, and get into the closet with the others. They'll be diagonally opposite where the UAV is going to crash, so almost certainly taking excessive precautions, but that's fine.

The parents have to be in the bedroom wing when the crash occurs because the house will close some internal steel shutters, one of which will seal off the bedrooms from the rest of the house. It'd contradict our story if the parents are outside that wing when our staff came to rescue them.

We'd decided to make the crash even more spectacular than I'd originally intended. I'd previously though of having the UAV come straight down and impacting on the ground immediately outside Mom and Dad's bedroom window, so close that one wing would hit the roof. The four parents had decided they preferred the UAV to crash directly into the window aimed at Mom and Dad's bed. I'd crash it so one wing hit the wall to the left of the window. The wing would break off, and I'd make sure it 'bounced' far enough away from the house to survive a fire. The wing was distinctive enough to easily identify the exact model of UAV. Given that only one of them had been sold by the developer so far, it's ownership will be easily pinned on the Air Force thanks to their helpful press statement. Our houses' walls are VERY strong, so there was no chance that the UAV's wing impacting one of them would cause a collapse.

There were various possibilities for what might happen during the UAV's attack. First, if the sirens went off before the UAV impacted, then Mom and Dad would NOT head for the panic room because they wouldn't know how much time they'd have between the siren starting and the crash occurring. It wouldn't be long so there was too much chance of their being caught in the open hallway and injured (the spare bedroom had no escape chute, requiring them to use the hallway to get to one). They'll hide in the spare bedroom's closet until after the crash, and then they'll immediately run for the escape chute.

Assuming no alarm sounded then the parents wouldn't go for their panic room. The next unknown was whether or not the UAV would penetrate the room's bulletproof windows. We were pretty sure it would because there's a shit load more momentum behind a UAV than a bullet. We didn't have any specs for the windows, or most of the specs for the overhead UAV, but other UAVs with similar wingspans weighed several tons. This one presumably did too, and several tons at a few hundred miles an hour was surely more than any glass would be able to withstand. We knew our houses' windows were exceptionally strong, but we doubted they were strong enough to be able to resist a UAV crashing into them.

If the UAV penetrated the window, a fireball might blast down the hallway, which was why the parents would be behind two sets of doors. If Mom and Dad's bedroom was rendered unsurvivable, they'd need an excuse not be dead. Mom and Dad would say they'd JUST got up to tell Donna to go to bed and because they wanted to have some ice cream in bed before going to sleep. Dad has a sweet tooth and they do that sometimes. They're getting on in years so that's about as depraved as they can get, although Dad was still fit enough to chase me around the room when I said that.

If their bedroom was not too badly damaged, Mom and Dad would return to the room and say they'd been in bed at the time of the crash. Or if the bed was totaled, they'd say they'd been in their bathroom or closet, whichever had survived best. They'd rush back to their room from the spare bedroom's closet so they could be discovered looking stunned and confused when our guards arrived.

Prof and Vanessa had it easier. If the sirens had sounded, they'd say they'd gone to the panic room. If the sirens had been silent, they'd say they'd been in bed when the attack occurred. I was fairly sure that they really could stay in bed rather than shelter in the other room's closet, because I should be easily able to steer the UAV for an accurate impact, but there was no reason for them not to gain the additional safety of being with Mom and Dad.

Our house has excellent fire-fighting systems. Even if a fireball blasts down the hallway and the carpet or walls catch fire, it'll be very quickly doused. Mom and Dad's room might end up severely damaged, and Mom might have to buy a lot of new clothes, but that was a sacrifice she was willing to make to help the cause look convincing.

The first part of the plan having been roughly described - what I've left out should be fairly obvious - I'll now recount my actions.

While my four parents were watching TV in the living room, I monitored our radar operator's schedule for toggling our radar between "Follow the UAV" and "Wide Area Search" modes. I saw that the latter was only for one minute every fifteen, which was fine with me. That's how it'd been on previous days but it was important to check that it hadn't changed without my hearing about it. We wanted our radar to record the UAV's attack so we could use the recording in our media statements and in court against the Government, and also to increase the chance that our security staff would activate the alarm during the UAV's attack as that made my parents' absence from their bedroom during the attack more believable than their getting ice cream. I'll be taking control of the UAV roughly in the middle of the "Follow the UAV" mode to make sure that our radar operator will see the UAV behaving strangely enough for him to know not to flick the radar into wide-area search mode, because he'll never be able to reacquire the UAV if he does that.

At the appropriate time, I put on my black flying clothes, a couple of layers of shirts, and then a security uniform, took the elevator down to the tunnel, and borrowed one of our motorcycles to ride out of the tunnel and out of the gates (we've told the guards they can borrow our non-personal vehicles if they want to, and they often do). With my face covered by the tinted-visor crash helmet not even our guards knew who I was. It wouldn't have mattered much if they had stopped to check me at the gate because we had a variation of the plan worked out to explain that, but they didn't so I won't bother you with it. I had the same lack of trouble leaving the cordon. The cordon guards were freely letting people pass outward; it was getting back inside which required being identified and checked against the list of authorized people.

I rode into town, mingled with other traffic for a few minutes, then south away from town so I could find a suitable spot for an unobserved takeoff.

I hid the bike, helmet and keys, but did something unusual with the leathers, extra shirts and uniform after I took them off. I laid them out flat on an NP-sheet, with another NP-sheet on top to hold them from flapping around, then I raised the 'sandwich' until it was about three feet over my head, making it a type of umbrella. When the UAV went offline I expected the satellite to look down to see what was wrong. Its seeing a man-sized infrared shape near the UAV would be bad, so I'd fly upright and with the 'umbrella' over me to block the satellite picking up any of my radiated infrared. (NP-plates are transparent to infrared, so I needed the clothes.) If the satellite had amazingly good low-light cameras, they'd see a very confusing shape, but I couldn't imagine they'd be able to see anything. At the UAV's height, there would be virtually zero light to bounce off the top of my clothes and all the way up to a satellite.