Chapter 236

The week seemed to drag on. All the trial participants were sequestered at the Air National Guard base near Baltimore. The gang leaders were held at a maximum security jail in Baltimore. They were transported to the base each day in a convoy. We talked with Jenny every night.

On Friday morning a car bomb exploded next to the lead vehicle killing the four state police officers in it. The four officers in the second car were in critical condition.

Two cars and six gunmen tried to break the gang leaders out of the armored van. Four died in the attempt. Both cars got away to be found abandoned later.

Jenny called before noon, very shaken and scared to death. The state was building cells in two separate barracks to keep the prisoners on the base and separated. The state had given up on the convoy arraignment.

I talked to her for two hours before she calmed down. I told her to call me any time - day or night - she needed to talk.

I filled her in on the sting that was going to happen Saturday at Dover using Janice and Sly. Ty and Kathryn were running the show and I knew that either of the girls could quickly put Bobby Blackstone in his place so I was not worried.

Janice and Sly were pumped that they would be working for Homeland and with Kathryn and Ty.

I asked if she wanted a couple of us to come and stay as her personal bodyguards for the weekend.

"Please."

Jenny was staying in a guest officer's quarters by herself. She called whoever was in charge, only to find out that it would be tomorrow morning before arrangements could be made.

On the way home I stopped by the airport construction site. Tony had kept true to the updated schedule he gave me last week. Two pours had been done for the NE/SW runway. A slab of concrete 50 feet wide and 8000 feet long was down.

I stood at the end of it, looked to the other end and just thought, "Wow"; on paper it was just numbers. Standing there looking down that slab put the immensity of what we were doing into prospective.

The text that he had sent me said, "Everything went great. We are going to pour on Sunday and Tuesday to finish that runway." That explained the line of tractor trailers refilling the Portland concrete storage tanks at the three batch plants tonight.

Those three tanks needed to be full to do one pour. Tony was ordering the deliveries to start by noon on the day of the pour to make sure there was enough.

I had counted forty as I drove by them and I was sure there were more on the way or coming tomorrow. I counted 50 concrete mix trucks in a row that carried the stuff from the batch plants to the roadway machine.

There were two huge cranes with big funnel looking thing that dumped the mix in front of the machine near the center of the runway and a belt elevator that emptied near the edge. Sometime before they finished I needed to take some time off just to watch this equipment in operation

There were still a lot of J&J people working tonight. They were putting down rebar and welding everything in place on the SE/NW runway and adding the expansion joint material.

The hanger people had started on Tuesday like they promised. They had a couple of cranes of their own and to me it looked like all the main steel framing and girders were erected at our hanger. The pile of materials at the agency hanger was still growing.