Chapter 12

Yes, Alice spent the night with me, and we did begin the day with a quickie. Of course, it was not as intense as the night before, but everybody in the house enjoyed it.

After breakfast, Alice found a spare bedroom that she thought would be suitable for a training room. Alice moved in with Nancy, so we still had enough rooms for everything we needed, but I could see that we were going to need a larger house before too long. Todd was doing well with our investments, even during the latest downturn in the market, plus Winning Software was doing even better than I had hoped; thus, it appeared to us that we could afford a larger house.

Mary promised to start the hunt for a reliable agent and for a new house. Moving would be no problem with my new TP (teleportation) ability, and I was secretly wondering if I had enough control to move the swimming pool. Wouldn't that be a wonderful joke?

The first thing we needed to do was to clear the room that Alice was going to use for training. Nancy and Tami went shopping for a temporary storage shed and found an inflatable shed that could be rented by the month and could be installed that afternoon. The bubble was in place by the time for supper, so I was going to move things after we ate. That afternoon, Mary, Susan, and Alice cleared most of Alice's stuff from her furnished apartment. I TPed the last few bulky or delicate items, like her HDTV, so Alice was completely moved in before supper.

That evening, it only took me a few minutes to shift the stuff from the room to the storage shed. With the TK armor protection I was going to provide to all of us, we did not need mats or other things, but I did TK armor the floor and walls to protect them. We didn't have the weapons, yet, that we would need, but Alice assembled us in the training room and walked us through the training that she had in mind. Initially, she was just going to concentrate on the disabling stuff like the police, etc. used, but I asked her to forget that and go for the fatal stuff. My argument was that if we ever needed the skills, it was going to be a life or death situation, and no place to pull punches. She was OK with that, so that was what she planned to concentrate on. In fact, that was really easier to teach and learn, because you did not have to worry about how hard you hit.

In the room, we would be practicing bare handed, stick, and knife fighting. The stick fighting would be done with a stick one inch in diameter and 22 inches long. The knife fighting would be done with the Fairbairn-Sykes Commando knife. Also, everybody including Alice was going to learn to shoot.

Alice had some sticks custom fabricated for us from hickory. They had a small hole at one end so that they could be hung from a belt. The knives were a little more of a problem because of some ridiculous laws in our state. We had them shipped to a UPS Store just across the state line, and I TPed them to our home.

On the other hand, we were able to get a gun license for a concealed weapon with very little trouble. Go figure! We got shoulder holsters for all of us and thigh holsters for the women to wear under a dress.

We spent three months in intensive combat training until Alice and I were satisfied with our abilities. Nancy was still our best shot, and Alice was the best at the other forms of combat, but all of us were more than just competent. We were now ready to go hunting for terrorists!

In the meantime, Mary and her agent had found us a new house. It was really a mansion on two acres of land surrounded by a security fence. We got it for a good price because it was part of an estate that had been a drag on the market for over two years. The house had 14 bedrooms, each with its on bathroom. There was a recreation room full of exercise equipment that Nancy and Alice had pronounced to be of first class quality. I thought that the house was a lot more than we needed, but Mary wanted it, and we could now afford it, so who was I to argue? I was happy with the Olympic-sized swimming pool. OK, I was a little disappointed that I did not get a chance to try to move the old swimming pool.

There was an elaborate security system on the fence and scattered throughout the house. Alice said that it was as good as we were going to find, so we decided to live with what was there. We could always add dogs if we needed them.

I had taken the opportunity to spend a lot of time with the tapes that I had made while I was in Chicago. I combined some commercial software with some stuff that I had written so that I could convert the voice to text on the computer. That made it easy to do correlations throughout the data without having to depend on my own memory. This let me come up with some connections that I would probably never have recognized on my own.

One of the things I found with the program combination was the location of several regional offices of Al-Qaeda in the Central States and Southern Canada. I considered just passing this information on to Homeland Security, but I decided to keep the information to myself, since I was afraid that some selfish politician would mess things up. I now had a small army of my own with my five women, and I should qualify as an army on my own.

I talked it over with Alice, and we agreed that our first target would be a relatively easy one: the cell headquarters located in a St. Louis suburb. The data we had said that there were approximately 40 members of the cell, if we included the two Imams and the immediate recruits. I was bothered by the fact that two of the recruits were known computer geniuses. I worried that the USA would experience even more attacks on its computer system. So far, the attacks had only been annoying, but a little better application of imagination would result in disasters.

Every one of my women now had her own full Avenger uniform and complement of weapons and tools in her own utility belt. I was now fully confident in my ability to TP my people anywhere I wanted to go, with the sole limitation that I had to have seen the target. That meant that we were not going to be able to TP directly into the enemy headquarters, but there was a way to get around that.

I had been making trips around our area to set up temporary jump points that I was calling "gates." On the night of our attack, I TPed us as close to St. Louis as I could get. We were on a high hill covered with trees about five miles from St. Louis. We launched from there by TK toward the Al-Qaeda enclave. We were looking for a large farm that the terrorists had taken over. The farm had been used for raising pecans and other tree nuts; thus there was plenty of room between the trees for training, but it was hidden from the air by the tall trees. Whatever went on under the trees was invisible to drones and satellites. What more could terrorists ask for?

My women scattered out as soon as we landed so that we could get a good picture of the layout of the headquarters and training facility. The original farmhouse is being used for administrative offices on the ground floor and upstairs is being used for living quarters.

There were no questions, so we jumped into action. When all of my people were in position, I TPed the barracks into the air and released it. We moved on the house. We were inside by the time the barracks building crashed into the ground. The crash was loud enough to wake anybody for miles around. We had to hurry to be through before the police arrived to investigate.

Tami was the first one to meet opposition. She was stitched across the belly with bullets from an assault rifle, but the bullets were stopped by her TK armor. The guard was astounded when she kept walking toward him and hit him across the throat with her stick. This crushed his windpipe and would kill him in a few minutes. She kicked him in the temple with her steel-toed shoe to make sure that he was no longer a factor.