Chapter 14 – Operation Track The Mole
Jared the Mole had waited until around 8 p.m. before he left work for the meeting, and it had almost been dark by that time. Now, Chandler was driving his truck deeper and deeper into the forest on some dirt roads I had never been on before. We hadn’t seen a house or a street light for miles, and it was getting darker by the second. I monitored the GPS while Chandler drove, telling him when to make a turn or not. We stayed about a half mile behind Mr. Franklin’s car to make sure we wouldn’t be spotted. Faedra was flying ahead, keeping track of Jared the Mole from above.
The plan was simple; we would follow Mr. Franklin and Jared the Mole to the meet-up, then track the bad guys back to wherever they were hiding out, which we hoped was where they were keeping Faedra’s mom and dad. We also planned to use one of Chandler’s drones to record the meeting and hear everything that went on. Faedra had a drone with her, and when the mole stopped to meet with the other baddies, she was going to turn it on and Chandler was going to fly it right up to where the mole and his buddies were so he could capture audio and video. We had worked out a code to use when texting each other during Operation Track the Mole so that even if they were monitoring our texts, they wouldn’t know what we were up to.
“Lks like M stopd,” came a text from Faedra. ‘M’ was our code for Jared the Mole. “No 1 ls is ther.”
“The mole stopped,” I told Chandler, updating him on Faedra’s messages. “No one else is around.”
Chandler stopped the truck. “Do you think we should send the drone now?” he asked.
“Why not? If it’s a false alarm, Faedra can pick it up again.”
“Okay. Do it.”
“Snd the drn,” I typed in the chat window.
I turned on the hand-held controller and watched as the video feed came up. The first thing I saw was Faedra’s face. Even through the night vision lens that made her face look greenish-white, she still looked awesome. We had to have that talk about ‘us’ soon, or I was going to explode.
I quickly pushed those thoughts out of my mind so I could focus on Operation Track the Mole.
“Okay. Time to switch,” I said to Chandler. He put the car in park and we switched positions so that I could drive, if needed, while he navigated the drone. He has some mad drone flying skills.
He maneuvered the controls and the drone began moving. As I watched the video screen on the controller, the scene changed from showing Faedra’s face and pivoted in the direction of the mole’s car so that we could see the headlights. The drone glided down into the forest and continued approaching the road at a perpendicular angle
“Where’s Mr. Franklin’s car? I don’t see his lights,” I said.
“I don’t know, check the GPS. He has to be somewhere in between where we are and the mole’s car.”
I glanced at the GPS and confirmed what Chandler had said, then quickly looked back to the video screen to watch as the drone sped towards the mole’s car. Chandler stopped the drone right before it reached the road and lowered it down into the forest, using the trees and brush as cover so it wouldn’t be discovered. It wasn’t long before it was close enough to pick up an image of the mole. He was sitting in his car talking on his cell phone.
“Can’t you turn the microphone up so we can hear what he’s saying?” I asked.
“Sorry, this drone isn’t equipped with the Captain Crunch junior spy super-sonic eavesdropping microphone. I left that at home.”
“You’re being facetious, aren’t you?” I had picked up that fancy word in English composition class the week before and had been aching to use it ever since. ‘Facetious’ basically meant ‘funny’.
“There’s no fooling you, is there?”
“Ha, ha, Einstein. Just make sure you don’t lose the target.”
“Wht do u c?” came a text from Faedra.
“Nthg yet,” I replied.
Within seconds after I had finished typing I saw a second pair of headlights begin coming up behind the mole.
“That has to be Mr. Franklin. What is he doing? He’s going to blow his cover!” I lamented.
Chandler pivoted the drone so we had a better view of the approaching car.
“Wait a sec. Looks like more than one vehicle. Something’s not right,” Chandler said.
“See if you can pick up Mr. Franklin,” I urged.
The drone slowly moved away from the mole’s car and toward the next car. I could immediately tell it was Mr. Franklin’s.
The approaching car’s lights flashed once they were close to the mole’s car, and then the mole’s car started moving.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Then, as Mr. Franklin’s car drove by the drone, I saw the driver. He appeared to be wearing a silver jumpsuit with a hoodie very similar to the one we had used at Faedra’s house to retrieve the meteor.
“Why is Mr. Franklin wearing a silver hazmat suit?” Chandler asked.
As the cars continued to move, we saw another vehicle drive past. This one was a Humvee. Its driver also appeared to be wearing a similar hazmat suit. I began typing furiously on my phone.
“Get drn and follow cars,” I texted Faedra, telling Chandler at the same time, “I’m telling Faedra to get the drone. I think they’ve captured Mr. Franklin.”
I turned on the ignition and put the truck in gear, pulling back onto the road and putting the phone in the mounting cradle on the dash so I could track Mr. Franklin’s car.
“The mole must have figured out he was being tailed and called ahead so they could have someone waiting on a side road to intercept Mr. Franklin,” Chandler observed.
“Yeah. It’s a good thing we followed him,” I replied.
Chandler glanced down at the drone controller. “Okay, Faedra’s got the drone.”
We drove mostly in silence as the trio of cars wound their way through several more miles of twisty, mountainous road before they finally stopped. The GPS screen didn’t even show a real road where we were at. It looked like we were on a one-lane logging road at this point, so I simply stopped the truck and put it in park. Chandler took my phone off of the dash and began typing away.
I leaned over so I could see what he was typing. He was telling Faedra to get as close as she could and then turn on the drone. A couple of minutes passed as we stared at the drone controller, willing the video feed to come alive.
It seemed like thirty minutes had passed when the video feed finally came back on. We saw three parked cars appear on the screen. Several people were walking around, all of them dressed in the silver alien suits. One of them opened up the driver’s side passenger door on Mr. Franklin’s car and reached inside. Another one came up to help him. Moments later, they pulled out Mr. Franklin’s limp body and started carrying him towards the front of the car.
“That can’t be good,” I said.
We watched in silence as they marched towards what appeared to be a cave in the side of the mountain near where they had parked. They disappeared inside of the cave one by one. The lights on the cars had all gone dark, and as the flashlights they were carrying dimmed with each step they took, we were soon left staring at almost total blackness. Vague green-tinted outlines highlighted the cars, trees, and rocks where the people had been moments before.
“I’m going in,” Chandler said as he began navigating the drone towards the cave. As the drone got closer, it began picking up on the light from the flashlights shining somewhere ahead.
“Don’t get so close that they see you,” I warned.
“Got it,” he replied.
I texted Faedra that she should come back to the truck and watch the drone feed. A minute or so later, I almost jumped out of my skin when she opened the passenger side door. Chandler jerked up and almost dropped the controller.
“Geez! What the fudge-sticks!” he exclaimed. “Next time, let me know you’re coming or something.”
“Sorry. Dylan told me to come back to the truck,” she replied.
“It’s okay. Come on in so we can all watch,” I said.
Faedra got in and sat next to Chandler as we all huddled close and watched the video feed from the drone. The lights up ahead of it were getting brighter, and Chandler slowed the drone down to a crawl. He adjusted some controls, and we began hearing what sounded like voices getting steadily louder. The drone went around the next corner, and then we were staring directly into a large room where several people dressed in the silver hazmat suits were gathered. Chandler quickly moved the drone to one side of the passageway where there was a stack of metal drums, positioning it so that the camera could just see through a crack between two of them.
“Good thinking,” I said. “For a second there, I thought they were going to see it.”
“Yeah, well, they still might. We’ll just have to wait and see,” he said.
As the drone hovered behind the barrels, we could hear what they were saying.
“Put him in the cage with Sutherland, and then go back out and watch the entrance to the cave. The last thing we need is anyone finding out we’re in here when we’re so close to being done with this place.”
“Sure thing,” came the response. On the screen, we could see a woman taking Mr. Franklin’s body from the other two silver-suits. She’d picked him up like he was made of feathers and walked out of the room and deeper into the cave.
“So there’s at least one other super-strong in there,” Chandler said.
I thought I heard Faedra sigh, but my focus was quickly drawn back to the conversation we were hearing from inside the cave.
“How close is she?” one of the silver-suits asked. From the size and shape of the speaker, it looked like it was Jared the Mole.
“Pretty close. She’s got some kind of spray developed, but it’s not a mist fine enough to be used in aerosol form yet,” came the reply from another silver-suit.
“Let me talk to her,” the mole replied.
On the screen, we could see Jared the Mole leave the room in the same direction as the woman who had taken Mr. Franklin. The remaining two men sat down at a table, and one of them picked up a deck of playing cards and started shuffling them.
“I’ll be glad when we’re out of here. I don’t like being in a cave like this,” the other one said.
“Yeah, I’ll just be glad when we get paid for the job.”
“You said it.”
“Can’t you follow the mole?” Faedra asked. “I’m sure he’s going to talk to my mom. We need to know where she is.”
“I’m pretty sure these two would notice if I flew a drone right through the middle of the room,” Chandler replied. “Besides, if I go too much farther into the room, I’ll lose the signal from the drone. As it is, we’re near the operational limits right now.”
“Hey, what’s on that computer screen over in the corner, to the right?” I asked.
Chandler re-adjusted the drone to get a better view. When he zoomed in, we could see the screen showing four separate video feeds.
“Good eye, First Officer Spock,” Chandler replied. “Looks like some sort of security monitor. Let me see if I can zoom in a bit.”
As he fidgeted with the controls, the lens on the drone zoomed in on the monitor, and the image became clearer. We saw Faedra’s mom in one feed. She was working with what appeared to be some lab equipment. In another, a man was sitting in some sort of cage. I couldn’t see his face, but Faedra’s response cleared that up real quick.
“Dad and Mom! They’re both here!” Faedra exclaimed. I heard her inhale sharply and she put her hand over her mouth – she looked like she was about to cry. I reached over to put my hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Faedra, we’ll get them back,” I said.
The third feed on the monitor showed the entrance to the cave, and the last one showed a door with a keypad lock on it that appeared to have been installed in the cave wall.
Just then the cage door opened and Mr. Franklin’s body was put inside with Faedra’s dad. I hoped he wasn’t seriously hurt. I was just about to say something when Jared the Mole walked back into the room where the video monitors were.
What he said next changed everything.