Chapter 42

02:25 Wednesday, October 30^th, 1991
Rest Area, Interstate 5 Northbound
Camp Pendleton, CA

It went off, Lenore thought, pretty much without a hitch, up to now. After they'd left Chief Kostowe on the boat, they'd paddled ashore in the dark, trotted up the small creek, under the freeway, and formed up outside the cinderblock-and-chain-link fence enclosure. The top of the enclosure was topped with four feet of fence and on top of that was concertina – razor wire. Lenore eyed the wire, and thought, Its California, and there are crazy people everywhere here. No telling who you'd run into at a rest stop on I-5 at, oh, say, 0200 in the freaking morning.

Lenore managed to stifle her amusement.

Ansari had indeed managed to pick the lock, as the first fire team had made it inside five minutes before Lenore and the second team had arrived.

It's strange, none of these truckers are awake and watching what the people by the vans over at the funny building near the tower are doing. Or that there's too many people all of a sudden, and then they're gone. Maybe they are awake, and that PacBell logo on the van makes it all okay.

Ansari was on his knees, while Hoff was holding a penlight, when Lenore and the others trooped in silently. He was cursing, trying to work what looked like the back end of a Bic brand name pen into the center of a tee-shaped hinged handle in the center of a large free-standing metal cabinet with vents. The cabinet looked massive, the metal giving an impression of great weight and security. Lenore saw that Ansari was working with a lock, much like the type on a Coke machine, and that when unlocked, the tee handle could be snapped up, allowing him to turn it and pull open the door.

She quickly got bored while watching, and her eye was roving around the room, watching the intense looks on the men in the room, the anxious look on the PacBell engineer's face, especially. Maybe he could lose his job over this, she thought. I wonder why he agreed to let us do this? He wasn't happy when Rudolfs mentioned det-cord.

Just then, the headlights from a semi illuminated the interior of the building, as its light beams were aligned with the opening in the enclosure, reflecting off a plastic badge on the top of the door to the enclosure.

Frowning, Lenore stood on her tippy-toes, and touched the badging.

"Lieutenant Rudolfs?"

"What is it, Collins?"

"Didn't I hear somewhere that our card would sniff baseband traffic from a Northern Telecom base station?"

"Yes, that's right. Why?"

Beside him, Singleton gasped, and then snickered.

"Because, sir, this is an Ericsson base station cabinet." She was, she thought, rather proud of how evenly she was able to deliver that.

Singleton was laughing so hard, he was gasping for air.

"Chief, the boys and I took a poll," Ansari had an ingratiating smile on his face. Lenore felt her eyebrow rise, and she took on a "this'll be good" expression, causing the Chief to smile warmly at her in agreement.

"And the results would be?" the Chief inquired.

"We'd like fish for supper tonight," the smaller man said with a perfectly straight face. "Do you mind if I go fishing?"

Kostowe grinned an evil grin, Lenore was positive. She'd never seen quite the same expression on his face before. "You do realize, even if you have a license, that kind of fishing is very likely to get you arrested?"

"Chief, there ain't no listening array this close to surf. It's dark, and I doubt any cop on the highway would have a clue, anyway."

Kostowe nodded. "Go ahead. Guns!" he called to Gunner's Mate Second Dellinger, sitting at the rear of the boat, on the line locker. "We're going fishing. Ready a cooler, please."

A soft "Aye aye" floated back up, and there came the sound of the cooler hinges opening, and ice moving within.

"Watch," Ansari told Lenore. With a series of quick, economical movements, he pulled a small cube of brown matter from a zip-lock baggie in his thigh pocket. "Can I have one of your detonators?" Bemused, she handed him the baggie from her own pocket. He took a match fuse from it, and handed her the baggie back.

From his hip pocket, he fetched one of the twenty-four inch pieces of det-cord, and then wrapped the match fuse tightly to the small block, using half hitches to keep it snug. "TNT," he told Lenore. Nodding to the Chief, he said, "Now," and the Chief added power to the boat. "Fire in the hole," Ansari called, and pulled the match. A slight hissing sound came from the bundle, and almost negligently, he flipped the whole bundle off the port side.

Twenty-five seconds later, there came a metallic-sounding noise from the bottom of the boat, one that Lenore heard buzzing in the loose aluminum-clad gunwale. A short spout of water rose about twelve feet high, from forty yards behind them, and the sea turned white and smooth for a small circle, perhaps six feet in diameter, around the spout. Seconds later, a sort of hiss was heard as bubbles reached the surface.

The chief cut the power, and turned the boat about.

"There's one," Ansari said, as he first unlaced and then pulled his boots off. "Guns, I'll flip them in, okay?"

Lenore watched in amazement as Ansari hopped over the gunwale, and swam toward a fish, floating upside down in the water, obviously stunned.

"Got lucky," he said, as the chief maneuvered the boat near him. "Got a couple first try." He pushed a fish up toward Dellinger, who sort of cradled and scooped it into the boat, over the gunwale. "Wish I had a beer," he said, and turned back for another fish.

"Don't do this often," Kostowe told her quietly, "and usually not in domestic waters. Tonight was a disappointment, so a treat's in order."

"Aye aye, Chief," she replied, still stunned at the audacity of the method employed to catch fish.

08:30 Wednesday, October 30^th, 1991
Room 122 Building S-18
NAB Coronado, San Diego, CA 92155

"Listen up, folks, let's get started." Lieutenant Rudolfs called the day's meeting in the classroom to order. "This morning was a disappointment. Mister Singleton got a first-hand view of his government in action today, but the good news is he's willing to let us try on a different cell tower up on I-10. That one," he said with a bit of humor creeping into his voice, "we'll drive to."

After the amusement subsided, he went on. "Northern Telecom is supposed to have Latin and South America markets mostly sewn up. There's some Ericsson and some Motorola equipment down there, but only in the center of what they call 'major markets'. The Northern Telecom stuff is supposed to be dense in the cities and the only stuff in the rural areas for all the countries of interest. We're working on what to do if we come across some stuff we really need to penetrate and surveil and that we currently don't have equipment for. So, in the time-honored tradition of well-run programs everywhere, we'll just overlook this little glitch, and move on to the next phase. We'll come back to that other cell tower on the Ten Freeway next week, when we don't have our ace boat driver with us.

"Since we do still have her, we'll move on to the communications and protocol phase, so you'll know how to call her."

Lenore was kept busy taking notes, for the rest of the day.

11:40 Thursday, October 31^st, 1991
Room 118 Building S-18
NAB Coronado, San Diego, CA 92155

The small gathering was made up of Platoon Chief Vales, Electrician's Mate Novotny, and Lenore. They'd gotten together to discuss the remaining weekends in the workup.

"Chief, I've been invited to the Marine Corps' Birthday Ball the weekend after this one."

"Your Gunny, Lenore?" She'd been taking some good-natured abuse about what she'd told Delafuente just prior to passing out two days ago. And that seems like a lifetime ago, now. Fortunately for her, the chatter all seemed to assume she'd been talking about PT. She wasn't sure, but she thought the general consensus was that if she was crazy enough to want to work with the platoon, she was hard enough to do it.

"Yeah, I think he wants to propose to me, Chief." This got the expected laughter. If you only knew the truth, you'd know I was laughing at you instead, Chief. A girl's got to have some secrets, though, and both Kostowe and Rudolfs are keeping mine.

"Anyway, Chief, I'd just as soon not work on Thanksgiving weekend or the weekend before Christmas, also. The week after, I need to drive the boat down to ... wherever it is we're taking her first."

Chief Vales nodded. "Current money's on Honduras, Collins. No way are we going into El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Panama as asset-light as this evolution is. We're working our way south, Honduras first, then Colombia, and then Peru. The last one is going to be really sensitive, but the Honduras and Colombian stays are probably going to be dangerous as hell. Colombia's got a war going on with their narcoterrorists, and we're trying to limit the movement of individuals in those three countries, but they're based out of Colombia."

"Okay, Chief. I've looked at maps, and I'll need charts for all the coasts and harbors. I think it'll be seven days to Honduras, with a fuel-and-water stop in Mazatlan, Mexico. I think, but I don't know, that we'd actually want to get a berth for the Joy Redux in La Union, El Salvador, instead of Honduras, La Union seems more urban than anything on the Pacific side of Honduras."

Chief Vales seemed to reach a decision, Lenore thought, and then he, grudgingly, she thought, said, "Okay, Collins, we'll go meet with Lieutenant Osterweiss and Lieutenant Commander Albright, and you can bring all this up then. Anything else you'd be likely to bring up?"