Code Name: Buffy and Buddy
Chapter Ten
The plan we developed was more intricate and I risky than I liked, and there were way too many things that could go wrong with it, but by mid-afternoon, we had a plan. We ate at a fast food restaurant relatively confident that we would be spotted. I put the battery back in my cell phone and turned it on. I used the restaurant’s Wi-Fi to log on to my “Buddy” page. I posted a message. “Big Night Tonight. Come watch the fireworks.” I had more messages and emails waiting than I wanted to deal with, but I had told everyone that mattered I was alive and to be alert for surprises.
I called a friend from the camera club. “Hey, Ben, it’s Tommy.”
“Tommy! Oh My Freakin’ God! Everyone at school is talking about you. Are you in as much trouble as they say?”
“The last couple of days have been strange.”
“Did you know that Beth Anne is missing?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Does this have anything to do with your ability to fly?”
“How do you know that?”
“Basketball. When you got excited, you wouldn’t come back down after sinking a layup. Talk about hang time. Every once in a while you would travel half the court without touching the floor. The whole camera club knows. We’ve known since middle school.”
“Yes, Ben, the answer is I am in deep trouble.”
“So what can I do to help you get out of it? Will this make me any points with Beth Anne?”
“She’s probably so mad at me right now, it won’t matter.”
“So, what do you need.”
“If I stream you a video from my phone can you conference Chief Johnson and record it at the same time?”
“Easy.”
“If I turn on the phone finder function, can you track it and sync it with the video.”
“Not as easy, but yes.”
“Can you send the recorded video to that guy at the all-news television station we talked to at the club last month.”
“Yes. Tommy, you’re scaring me.”
“Ben, use your fear. It will make you strong. Do not let it use you.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. I’ll call you back.”
After I hung up, one of the sharpshooters asked, “Can you trust Ben?”
“I can trust Ben to blab all over town what I just told him.”
“I don’t know if that’s smart.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s the club’s resident gizmologist. I need his skills.”
* * * * *
Just before dusk, we drove to the storefront. It was empty as I expected, but the drone circled overhead. I looked up at the drone, waved and got back into the car. I turned on my phone locator function.
We drove to the warehouse. I noticed the second drone and waved at it. It wiggled its wings.
Game On.
The sharpshooters took their positions with unobstructed views of the loading doors and a clear view of each other. They knew that their mission was to disable without killing and to keep each other from being captured.
I dialed Ben’s number. “Hey Ben, is Chief Johnson on the line?”
“Tommy, where are you?” Chief Johnson asked.
“Use the phone locator and get here as fast as you can. Bring backup.”
“Do you know what you are doing?”
“Not totally.”
I clipped the phone to my belt with the rear camera pointed forward. It had never left my belt, but without the battery, it was just so much dead weight. Now it was a vital piece of the plan. The first step was that I had to be invited into the warehouse. The second was that I had to provide evidence of contraband. The third was that I had to prove the girls were being held against their will. The fourth was that I needed to be held against my will and finally, I had to get us all out. Ideally, if I could demonstrate that the plan to attack the rocket could have worked without my intervention and destroy the missiles in the bargain, that would be the best outcome.
The worst outcome, of course, was that I would be shot on entering the warehouse’s loading door.
The sign on the gate announced this as McGuffin Industries, although I knew that there was no McGuffin. A truck parked outside the door carried the same logo. It was the bogus dark blue surveillance truck.
I walked in the warehouse’s loading door. “Hello!” I called out.
A large man who had not participated in any of the activities of the past few days strode toward me. “How nice of you to drop in,” He sneered. “Please come in. You will find the inside most interesting.”
“Thank you for inviting me.”
“Not at all. I had expected you sooner. Took you this long to figure it out did it?”
I did not rise to his taunt. I was much too tired for that. “Look, I’m here. The least you can do is show me around. You must be very proud of your enterprise.”
“I am. Too bad you will not get to be a part of it.”
“That does not stop me from being interested in what you are working so hard to protect.”
A missile sat on a launcher at the far corner of the warehouse. Other partially assembled missiles were on workstations around the room. I ambled to a workbench. I picked up a circuit board. “What does this do?”
“It’s part of the missile’s guidance system.”
“Custom design?”
“Russian.”
“Very nice.”
“And this?” I picked up another circuit board.
“Tracking and target acquisition.”
“Russian?”
“No, custom. It’s my own design.”
“Very nice.”
“Enough of this. Get in the cage.”
“Let the girls go, and we can chat about whatever you want like reasonable adults.”
“That would be hard because I’m not reasonable and you’re not an adult.”
“You’re not winning any points as a stand-up comedian.”
“Big man walking in here like you’s some superhero or something. You’re mine now, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me from shooting down that rocket.”
“So you didn’t want my help taking the bird down? I’m disappointed.”
“No, I wanted you and your girlfriend out of the way.”
“I find it hard to believe that two high school kids could somehow spoil your magnificent grand plan.”
I eluded his grasp and trotted to the missile mounted on a launching rack by the other loading door. “When you launch that missile, it will incinerate everything in this building. So why are you still here?”
“I’ll be long gone by the time the missile launches, but you’ll be in that cage with your pretty little friends.”
Four large men had taken positions behind me. This was what I had expected would happen. “I’ll get in the cage quietly if you let the others go.”
“Is that what you want?”
“What I want is for you to tell me what I could do to interfere with your plans. Since you plan on killing me anyway, I can’t say as it matters to you if you tell me.”
“Such a romantic. You really believe that you can save the world.”
“No, just a few of my friends.” I turned my back on him to face the thugs.
“You can’t even do that.”
“So, why do you care what my friends and I do?” I visually sized up the thugs.
“Because your little girlfriend disabled the sensor we need to detect and track the rocket launch.”
“The one on the top of Pad 34?” I asked. I waved my hand as if I was planning on snatching the thugs’ weapons. They grabbed their belts.
“Yes.”
“The missile is a heat seeker I assume.”
“Yes, it is a McGuffin Industries original design. The heat-seeking is augmented by triangulated ground tracking nodes to improve accuracy. One of the nodes was on Pad 34. Just think how much money I could make from these if I could demonstrate that I took down a NASA rocket.”
“Very clever. How did you find her?”
“The other night wasn’t the first time she’s watched from that pad. After she left we followed her home.”
“If she was such a threat, why didn’t you just kill her and let her body drop into the ocean?”
“That was the plan until you showed up. We couldn’t kill her and not kill you, and we had no idea who you were. Now we can kill you, too.”
“That’s a lot of dead bodies. So you kidnapped her to find me.”
“Exactly.”
“It all makes sense. So, if you will kindly open the cage and let the ladies out, I will take their place.”
He motioned to one of the guards to unlock the gate. Buffy and Beth Anne were prepared to run out when a guard pushed me inside.
“I can’t believe you are that stupid,” the big man sneered.
“Not as stupid as I look,” I said as the lock snapped into place.
I still had lots of stalling to do, but I had to keep the thugs from looking outside and seeing what I hoped was happening out there. Gathering the troops would take time, and I could not make too many steps in the plan too quickly.
Buffy and Beth Anne hugged me and began telling me in excited, breathless broken sentences what had happened since they had been captured. They were thrilled to see me but horrified that I had let myself be caught. They had been fed. Although, judging by the amount of trash from the local fast food places, if they ever saw another cheeseburger, it would be too soon. They had not been mistreated which was more than I could say for their cellmates.
Mrs. Carson lay on the floor. She had been beaten hourly to learn my location and quietly moaned with her pain. The woman who had accompanied her on my porch had also been beaten. She had been beaten less often, but the beatings were more severe. She lay unconscious in a heap in the corner. The woman I had interrogated at my cousins was in another corner terrified of me. Her clothes had blood on them.
I grabbed the most massive metal cabinet I could find that would move and pushed it against the side of the fence toward the missile.
“What are you doing?” Beth Anne whispered.
“Getting us out of here.”
“How?”
“That is a solid-fueled rocket. It’s easy to set one off by an accident that I will cause.”
“You’ll kill us all.”
“Not if you’re gone first. Push as many of these metal shelves and cabinets as you can this way.”
The exterior wall of the tool crib was a single thickness of corrugated metal held in place by self-tapping sheet metal screws. They had been painted over a couple of times on the outside, and so they were difficult to remove, but I eventually removed enough to create an escape. The scrawny remnants of what had been a hedgerow would hide the girls’ getaway once it was time to exit the loose panel that would become the escape hatch.
The big man wandered over while the girls were pushing the metal shelves into a giant pile by the fence hiding the escape hatch I was creating. “Do you really think that little bit of metal will protect you when the rocket goes off?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
The man laughed and walked away.
I pushed out the sheet metal wall enough for Beth Anne and Buffy to fit through. I only needed hand motions to give instructions. Buffy went out first. She reported that the exit was clear. Beth Anne led the woman I had interrogated out through the hole. She never took her eyes off me. Buffy took her hand on the outside. One at a time, I passed the two injured women out to them.
I whispered, “Abandon them at the far corner of the parking lot. Buffy, find Cordelia and the others. Beth Anne just run as fast and as far as you can. I will find you.”
“What about you?”
“Just go. You don’t want to hang around and see the fireworks.”
As soon as I was sure they were away from the building, I “reached out” across the room pushed the button to open the loading door in front of the missile. No matter how much the panicked men tried to push the stop button, the door continued to open until it jammed in its fully open position. I released all the missile’s tethers except one. On my walk around the shop, I had spotted an extension cord near the missile that had a repaired end. I tore the cap off the cord.
Many years ago, two NASA engineers died when they were removing the plastic cover from a rocket as they prepared it for launch. Generally in Florida’s humidity, especially along the coast, static electricity is not a big deal. This day the weather conditions were not in these guys’ favor. A spark jumped from the plastic cover to the rocket seeking the nearest grounded point. Usually, the way to ensure that an electric charge would not pass through the ignition coil on the solid-fueled rocket is to ground both ends to a bonded earth ground. That spark found its path to ground and set off the ignition coil. The ignition coil set off the fuel and, still securely fastened to the pad, the rocket exploded.
The missile on the stand in front of me was solid fueled. It did not need much of a spark to set it off. The extension cord, moving like a cobra under my control would be more than adequate for the task. The guards saw the cord with its open ends snaking its way toward the missile. One shouted a warning, and they all began to run. I touched the cord to the missile, and a great, glorious spark jumped from the cord to the missile. I heard the fuel start to burn. I dove through the escape hatch and rolled into a ditch. As the fuel ignited, the remaining men raced outside to the waiting arms of representatives of several law enforcement agencies. I heard a few gunshots including the deep boom of the assault rifles.
Soon, however, the only sound was the roar of the missile as it tore free of the last tether and blasted off. The missile passed a few thousand feet over its intended target and, not finding the heat signature for which it had been programmed, splashed into the ocean.
I hopped the fence intending to walk home. A long walk would be good for me about now. Angel dropped down in front of me. “Good show!” He shook my hand. “You’re amazing.”
“Hey, I’m glad it’s over. Did you see Buffy or Beth Anne?”
“Buffy is with us. Willow saw Beth Anne run away and should have her by now. Hey, man, you’re a hero.”
“I’m not a hero. You know what I am? I’m tired, hungry and I stink. I want a shower, and when I wake in the morning, I want to forget any of this ever happened.”
“Not happening. Oh, we found out who was informing on you. You won’t have to worry about them again.”
“Who was it?”
“Spike’s girlfriend. We took care of it.”
“Thanks.”
“Look, Willow will find Beth Anne. Fly home and go to bed. Your parents are probably worried sick about you.”
“Thanks. I will.”
* * * * *
I flew home and entered through my bedroom window. My mother was sitting on my bed. She had been crying. She jumped up from the bed to hug me. “You’re alive! Chief Johnson thought you died in the fire. Dad went to see if he could find your body. He was so upset.”
“I love you, Mom. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you. How is Beth Anne?”
“She’s with some girl named Willow, and they’re waiting at a restaurant for Chief Johnson to pick them up.”
“That’s great news. Look, Mom, don’t tell Dad I’m here. Angel will tell him I’m alive and that I flew off in this direction. I don’t want anyone to know where I am until I have a shower and a good night’s sleep.”
“You know we love you.”
“I know. Mom and I love you, too. It’s what kept me going.”