Chapter 13

There was a little town called Squawbottom, Manitoba, that was a suburb of Winnipeg. As near as we could tell from the information we had, the terrorists were planning a major strike at Winnipeg. The plan was to disrupt and close down the city completely. This was another situation where we didn't know whom we could trust. We were not familiar with Canadian politics, so we decided to act on our own. The problem was that the attack on Winnipeg was to take place in four days!

That gave us no time to reconnoiter and plan. We were going to have to go in virtually blind and hope that our luck and skill will be good enough to carry us through. At least, Alice had the foresight to put us through a familiarization course on weapons like the AK-47 that were so popular with terrorists, so we could use one if we needed to. We were invulnerable within our TK armor, but that did not mean that we could not be taken down if enough people jumped on us at the same time. If I should not be around at a particular time, it might be necessary for one of the women to fight with a captured weapon.

It appeared that there were nearly 400 terrorists collected at the camp near Squawbottom. I sure would like to know what cover story the terrorists are using, since it must be a doosie. Anyway, we needed to get to Squawbottom as soon as we could get there. Thank God that it was still reasonably warm weather—the Avengers didn't have a winter uniform. I needed to work on that.

We had not been any farther north than Chicago, so we got ready, and I TPed us to the roof of the Palmer House, since I was very familiar with that. Each one of us was wearing a pack with items that would be necessary to our mission, but were not the kind of thing that we would wear. There was spare food and water, spare ammunition, sleeping bags, and that sort of thing. We planned to find a place to hide the stuff, and I would TP it in as we needed it. We could have left it at home, but it was comforting to have it along with us. No extra effort was needed to transport it, so why not?

I TKed everybody up to about 300 feet above the roof of the Palmer House and we started winging north. This was not as high as all of the buildings in the city, but it was good enough to avoid casual notice. Once we were out of the city, I dropped us to about 200 feet above the ground so that we would not be picked up on radar, even the Doppler weather radar. I hoped that any radar that did pick us up would dismiss us as a flight of birds.

We continued to Milwaukee where I wanted to establish a gate. We set down for the few moments required for me to do that, and we were off again as fast as I could conveniently fly us. We were wearing face masks, so that we could move at around 200 MPH. If I had to, I could move us faster than that, but that required more effort than I wanted to expend, short of an emergency. The whole trip took two days, since we had to stop to eat and sleep, as well as to shit and piss. I also took the time to find places for gates along the way, trying to be prepared for any sort of emergency.

We reached Squawbottom the day before the attack on Winnipeg was planned, so we had little time to work out a plan. I had available a sky-blue sheet to wrap myself in while I flew over the camp at about 300 feet. I wouldn't be invisible, but I would be hard to see. Even if somebody did see me, what was he going to say? That a man was flying around over the camp without an airplane?

I identified eight large buildings that had to be barracks. Off to one side, there was a large building which I marked off as a mosque. There were a couple of smaller buildings that I was sure were the armory and administration buildings. I ignored several even smaller buildings that I assumed were sentry boxes and such. I found the motor pool, and dallied long enough to TP water into the fuel tanks. Whether diesel or gasoline powered, the engines were going to have problems with 99% water for fuel. That, alone, would prevent the attack tomorrow even if we were not able to do anything else to interfere.

I hurried back to our camp and sketched a crude map in the dirt. I wanted us to use the same sort of tactics that we had used the last time. The women would go after the administration building while I took care of the barracks and mosque. Prisoners would be nice, but were not a high priority on this raid because we were sticking our necks out so far as it was.

We waited until about 11:00 PM before we attacked. I boosted the nine large buildings about 2,000 feet into the air and dropped them. I then turned my attention to the armory. I looked through a window and saw rack after rack of assault rifles. These, I picked up and dropped from 2,000 feet into Lake Winnipeg. That should keep them out of the way for some time, even if they could be salvaged.

The women attacked the administration building while I was doing all of that. Here, they ran into some resistance. All of the women had entered with pistols drawn and ready for trouble. They were shot at by assault rifles, and the women returned the fire with their guns. The return fire from the women was much more accurate than from the terrorists. The terrorists seemed to subscribe to the "spray and pray" philosophy which meant that few bullets actually hit the target.

The women rarely needed more than two shots to put down an enemy, and they were progressing through the building with relative ease until some fool fired an RPG at them. The rocket had barely armed itself before it hit the far end wall of the corridor they were in. Of course, the place started to burn like tinder, so Alice screamed mentally for me to pull them out before they were trapped in the fire. I got every one of my women out before they were harmed by the fire, but it sure played hell with the terrorists who were still trapped inside. A few tried to bail out through windows, but the women shot all of those.

Uh-oh, sirens were heard approaching the camp, so it was time for us to leave. Before we left, though, I did scratch a large message on the ground where it could be easily seen. The message simply said, "The Avengers were here." I TPed us back home and brought in all of our packs, too.

Daylight was breaking and we were all very tired, so we decided to put off fucking until tonight. I left it to the women to decide whose turn it was to sleep with me tonight, but I did announce that I wanted to be alone in bed for now. Nobody seemed surprised at that, and we all trooped off to the shower and to bed.

Life went on for the next few days pretty calmly. We reviewed our actions at the last raid and tried to see where we could do better. None of us could find any major changes we wanted to make as long as the terrorists continued to maintain such sloppy security. Surely we would have to change if they tightened up their security, but we had a good system with what the terrorists were doing right now.

I was really surprised when nothing was reported on TV about our attack on the Squawbottom terrorist camp. Was this an effort by the Canadians to keep the public from knowing how close they had come to disaster, or was the silence part of a plan to capture more of the terrorists? With my current limited source of information, I would probably never know, but it did not encourage me to want to cooperate with the Canadian government.

With that in mind, I decided to try to clean out St. Louis. We had information on several large Al-Qaeda cells in and around the city, so that was a good place to start. I knew that we could never eliminate every person who meant to harm the people of the US, but we could make a start.

We had that gate in the St. Louis area, so we could operate almost as if we were staying at home. That made things a lot more convenient for everybody. When it was dark enough, I donned my Avenger uniform and jumped to the St. Louis gate. I TKed into the air and flew toward the headquarters of the nearest cell. It was quite late at night by now, so I had no trouble gaining entry to the building. As usual, it had been an empty warehouse that the local cell had taken over without telling the owner. When he found out what happened, he was easily intimidated into keeping his mouth shut, or he might have been induced to take up active cooperation with the cell.