Chapter 20

Wheeling myself out the door, I went back to my bus, and drove to the rest area where I was supposed to meet my partners. They should have been there by now. I knew that they wouldn't worry about me being late, as they knew what I had been doing.

This wasn't going to be the best way to meet up with old friends, but I was glad to be seeing them again, anyway. We'd worked together for a long time while in the service.

I saw Hawk waiting next to his old camper as I pulled off the freeway and into the rest area. I parked a few spaces over from his rig and opened the door. He looked over and saw me. I knew he recognized me, even though he hadn't seen me without my beard in over five years.

Getting out was a bit of work as my leg was a bit stiff and sore, but I managed with the cane. Once down the steps, I waked over to Hawk.

He looked me up and down a couple of times and said, "I see you forgot to duck, again. You're going to have to learn that stopping bullets with your body, isn't very healthy."

I laughed at him and said, "Well at least I don't have as many of them badges as you do."

He just shook his head and said, "Bear's a bit late. He got caught in traffic, on his way through Seattle. He should be here in an hour or so."

I nodded, and gestured to the bus as I said, "Well, you may as well join me for a cup of coffee while we're waiting for him. Bear always was late to things, anyway, so I'm prepared. I've got some Colombian beans that you ought to like. I also have a generator in that monstrosity and a drip pot that makes one pot in about or three two minutes, so it won't take long."

At the mention of the Colombian coffee, Hawk smiled. I knew he liked it at least as much as I did, and was glad that I had that Bun coffee maker. I figured that the first pot would last about ten minutes which would give the machine a chance to warm up the reservoir. If I had to guess, that guess would be that we'd be on the third pot before Bear arrived. And that was if he took less than half an hour. Hawk and I loved our coffee!

We climbed into the bus, and I hit the switch to start the generator. Hawk took a look around. He didn't say anything, but I could tell that he was liking what he saw. I liked this bus, too. I missed the Beast, but it didn't have a kitchen in it. Of the two rigs, I had no favorite. The Beast could go a lot of places that this monstrosity couldn't, but I could take a shower before going to bed in this thing, and I couldn't do that in the Beast. If you took the seats out of the Beast, there was plenty of room for a mattress and such, but it didn't have the goodies that the bus did. They were both great vehicles for what they did, they just didn't do the same things.

I made the first pot of coffee while Hawk was still looking through things. He'd already found some of the weapons I had stashed in odd places, and a few things that I hadn't known were there. It seems the DEA had missed a stash or two of money, when had they searched it. Finders keepers would be the rule on the money that Hawk found. He found a lot of it, too!

There were two stashes that had large gym bags in them. Both were full of rolls of $100 dollar bills. It looked like I wouldn't be financing this party, after all. I figured that there had to be a couple of million in each bag, at the least.

He sat down at the table and started counting one of the rolls out to try to figure out how much we had.

I poured us both cups of coffee while he was counting. He'd occasionally pause for a drink until he was finished. Then he rolled it back up, and started counting the rolls. By the time he was done, he was shaking his head.

"Do you know how much is here?" he asked me.

I grinned and said, "Lots."

Hawk snorted at that and said, "If the rolls are all the same, then there's about two million in each bag."

Shaking my head, I said, "Leave it to the DEA to miss the stash. I haven't had a chance to really look through this thing, to see what got missed, but that's a lot more than I would have expected. It'll help, though, with the job I have for us."

Hawk nodded and asked, "What's the job?"

"We have a group of people who are targeting a family that took me in while I was recovering from getting shot in Iraq. They tried to kill a fourteen year old girl at least twice, now. I suspect that they killed her parents, and an uncle, too. We're going to teach them better manners in how to treat young kids. When Bear gets here, I'll show both of you the files that I got from the local NCIS unit."

Hawk nodded, poured himself another cup of coffee, and then topped mine off. With the size of cups we were using, that finished the first pot, so I started another.

We sat, drank our coffee, and chatted about old times while we waited for Bear. We'd known each other for over twenty years, all the way back to when we'd been in high school together. We'd even joined the Army on the same day. He'd gone into the Infantry and I'd gone into the Artillery. We'd even finished training within a few days of each other.

That had been fifteen years ago, now. Two years in Germany, and another year at Fort Lewis, and we had still been together. Then came the mission. I was grabbed up by a senior officer for the Special Forces unit at Fort Lewis, and so were Bear and Hawk. Bear for explosives, Hawk because he was jump qualified, and me because I knew radios.

We'd been put in with ten others. One was a lieutenant, and the others were all enlisted. This was the birth of our team. We were together for over ten years before Hawk and I were retired. Bear got out a few months later. The others that were still alive at that point, had since been either killed in action, or had died from something else. The Lieutenant got killed during the first war in Iraq. With him, we lost two others. They were the first casualties on the team. We lost a few others during the time between then, and my retirement. Now there were just the three of us left.

I was thinking about this when Bear pulled in. He was hard to miss on that motor cycle that he rides. He'd had it since before the mission in the sand pit. It was an old Harley that his father had left him when he'd passed away.

Hawk got up and went out to meet him where he'd parked, next to the camper. They climbed into the bus a few minutes later. Bear was wearing the old bomber jacket that would fit just about anybody else like a tent. He took it off and tossed it into the drivers seat and walked over to me. Reaching down, he grabbed me.

He gave me a hug and said, "It's been too long. I sure am glad to see you, Sticker."

He let me go, and sat down in a chair that Hawk had brought up, since Bear was too big to squeeze onto the bench seat on either side of the table. He was 6'6" tall and must have weighed at least 350 lbs. All of that weight was still muscle. too. He hadn't gained an ounce of fat in all the years we'd know each other.

Hawk got a coffee cup out for Bear and handed it to him. He then poured Bear a cupful, out of the pot I'd made, just before he'd pulled in. Then he filled our cups and sat down.

"I'm glad you two could make it," I said. "I've got a job and I need help."

Opening with that, I put the file for the entire case, on the table. I explained the entire thing to Bear, with Hawk listening to it for the second time. We spent the next couple of hours going over the entire collection of files, and talking about the situation.

When we'd finished, I told Bear what the one had said before I interrupted them when Sally had been jumped at the liquor store. I went on with what I'd been told by the NCIS people, and what they suspected. When I finished, I asked if either had any questions.

Bear asked, "Is the whole family in danger or just the kid?"

"I suspect that the whole family is targeted," I answered. "I think they went after Sally first as the easiest target. But since they missed at least twice, they will probably go after all three of them. I intend to stop them. Hard."

Bear and Hawk nodded and Hawk said, "I'm in. I don't like people who go after kids like that." Bear nodded again but didn't say anything.

"Okay," I said. "At this point, they think that someone is trying to take over the company that the parents owned. It's part of the total estate, and won't be divided between the sisters, until Sally turns twenty-one, or in about seven years. I think that's the reason she was the target after the uncle and the parents were killed. With her gone, the estate would be split between the surviving sisters. At that time, I think that the person behind all of this would have attempted to buy them out. That failing, I think the oldest sister would have been targeted next. With her gone, they might have tried the buy out option again but at this point, I'm only guessing. Now, though, with two failed attempts on the youngest sister; I think they might just try to remove all three of them. But that's just a guess."

Bear said, "I guess it's our job to make sure that doesn't happen, then."

I nodded and said, "Not only that, but we're going to remove the threat, permanently. I've already told the person I'm working for, that I was going to do just that. I'm not worried about prisoners on this. I'm going after them, and they are going down, permanently."

Hawk and Bear nodded. They knew me well enough, after the years we'd served together, to know that I meant what I'd said. I wasn't going to try to capture these people, and I didn't care about the consequences. I kept remembering that man with the knife, telling Sally how she was going to scream before she died. That was enough for me.

We spent another two hours making plans and working out how we were going to identify the people behind all this. We then fixed a meal and got some sleep in the bus.

The next morning, we drove to Everett and headed east on Highway Two, toward Stevens' Pass. Hawk owned a cabin up there, and that's where we were going to set up our base camp.

The next couple of days were busy for all of us, as we went through all the equipment in the trailer, and in Hawk's camper. Hawk had brought a lot of interesting toys with him, too. All Bear had was his bike, and his pair of Desert Eagle .44 magnum automatics.

After we finished our inventory and had separated out what would be useful, we did a complete search of the bus. We found two more bags of money, and a few weapons, by the time we were done. The total amount of cash hidden away was over five million dollars! That was twice what I had in all my accounts, combined!

We set aside two million for expenses and divided up the rest, giving each of us a bit over one million. That would make for a very good nest egg for a rainy day.

Now came the planning. We went over the files that I'd been given and set up our plan. The person that had been identified as the leader of the group attempting to take over the Brandt Company was a man named Scott Mayfair. The NCIS unit had no hard evidence but what they did have was pretty conclusive to us. We decided to start by putting a tap on his phone at his house, and seeing if we could get any information that way.

After that, we intended to try to isolate him from his people by removing them from the game. If we could, we intended to take them alive but that wasn't a primary consideration with what they'd already done to Sally and her family. My only requirement on this was that the entire family would be protected. That would be Bear's job while Hawk and I took out the pawns.

We managed to get the tap installed. We caught most of the hirelings in two days, without any real fighting. We even managed to get confessions out of a few of them, and linked all of the rest except for Mayfair. We kept them locked up, and that gave Mayfair only about five men left free.

Bear was staying close to the kids, and George was watching the two older sisters during this time. That was the weak point of the operation, and it turned around and bit us. Bear was shot three times with a high powered rifle, and all four girls were kidnapped.

Hawk managed to get a location from a call to Mayfair, and we loaded up and headed there. This was probably going to be the finish, whether we succeeded or not, so we took the heaviest weapons we had.

The address was for an old warehouse on the Everett water front that had apparently been abandoned for several years. When we got there, we could see at least five guards around the building but they were out of site of each other and we couldn't see any radios or other type of communications between the guards. It was obvious that they were amateurs.

Hawk started on the southwest end of the building and I was on the northwest. We worked our way east, and removed the guards as we found them. I had two on my side and Hawk reported two also. There were two more on the front, and the back had been unguarded.