Chapter 30 – TAKEN
The summer was coming to an end.
Cathy and Matt sat on the fence under the morning sun watching the horse trainer train Judge when a dust devil rose. “Whoa . . . whoa . . . .” Cathy’s mom shouted as she descended in a candy apple red craft, swaying like a drunken sailor as she landed.
“I’ve heard of helicopter moms but this is ridiculous,” Matt laughed.
“You’re just the one I want to talk to,” said Mrs. Kozacky, unbuckling and throwing her helmet off.
Matt stood admiring the marvel. Three electric fans which resembled jet engines stood mounted around a pilot’s seat and harness system; two fans for vertical control and one for directional.
. . . “Let’s see, you killed my husband . . . You almost killed me and my little girl and her brother. What do you think I ought to do about that?” she fumed.
Matt gulped.
“You should leave and never come back.”
“Mommy!”
The prospect of never seeing Cathy again sent a shudder through him.
“I’m sorry Matt. We’ve been through a lot lately. I don’t know how much more I can take.”
Matt got an idea . . . “Mrs. Kozacky … remember in Yellowstone you said when we get back I can have anything I want?”
“You did say that mommy.”
“I know what I said,” said Mrs. Kozacky.
“I know what I want …”
“Dare I ask?” she replied.
Cathy held her breath.
“. . . a Luminox Navy Seal watch with the orange face and tritium hands guaranteed to glow in the dark for twenty-five years . . .”
Cathy sighed with relief.
Both Cathy and her mom eyed Matt strangely.
“Okay,” her mother agreed.
“And . . . a thousand dollars . . .” Her mother stopped walking.
“Okay . . .” She resumed walking.
“Each - for me Chase, Zak and Cathy . . . and new bikes, too . . . each. Make mine titanium - mountain.”
“Now wait one minute! . . .” Carolyn Kozacky snapped.
“And Google Glass . . . for everyone.” Cathy giggled.
“And . . . .
Matt was about to leave when he looked doe-eyed at the wearable transport, “What do you call this thing?”
“If you must know, it’s a turbofan,” said Cathy’s mother. “Her name’s Betsy and don’t even think about it.”
“Mind if I take Betsy for a spin?”
“Bring her back in one piece.”
Matt buckled himself in and after a brief video tutorial was good to go.
The neighbors had complained often. One had even tried to shoot Betsy down as evident from the buckshot. Mrs. Kozacky told him where to avoid but he forgot. Matt rocketed through the countryside skirting the edge of town where he spotted a swimming pool where two girls were sunning themselves. As any red-blooded boy would do he dropped in for a better look.
Three white streaks made their way toward him. Then three more. His eyes bugged as he made a sharp climbing left turn. He might have had a chance had he turned the other way. He splashed down.
It was a bit past two when a light blue Ford van bearing the graphics of the You Dirty Rat Pest Control Company pulled to the gate. Over the gate com the driver informed Cathy he had an order to fumigate. Cathy told him she wasn’t allowed to open the gate for strangers. Then the driver told her he would call her father and come back later. The van backed away.
It happened so fast. A battering ram breached the front door.
Matt woke on his back, his shoulders wedged inside a fresh pine box. The sun in his eyes, he could make out the flaking green paint of a weather-beaten shack. Three men towered over him. He struggled to sit up. A blue rattlesnake skin boot pressed him back.
“I didn’t say get up mate,” said the thug wearing a shoulder holster, black tactical pants, a neon blue Hawaiian shirt with bright yellow flowers and a black cowboy hat with a band of round turquoise and silver medallions.
A powerfully built man with a nasty scar running from a glass eye to his square dimpled chin stood beside the man in the blue rattlesnake skin boots whistling Sukiyaki. A scarred hand with broken black nails held a pine lid, in the other a burlap rice sack. Nearby a third man was digging what looked like, oh no, a grave.
“Jes tell us what we wanna know and we’ll let ya go mate. It seems you have a certain someone in a bit ‘o a bother over a certain ring. Now be a good mate and tell us where it is or this nice ‘ere gentleman’s gonna fill that nice ‘ere box of yers with these nice ‘ere poisonous snakes and put the lid on,” the man laughed, obviously enjoying himself. Matt gulped at the writhing sack. He tried to sit up again but the rattlesnake skin boot pushed him back.
“It’s at the bank,” Matt squeaked. After ZNN his aunt had taken him to First Tennessee Bank & Trust to put the ring in a safe deposit box.
“What bank?”
What’s the harm. What are they going to do? Break into the safe deposit boxes? Shouldn’t they be wearing hoods?
“No worries mate,” said the Aussie. But as far as Matt could see there were plenty of worries. He had given them what they wanted. Shouldn’t they be letting him go?
Carolyn Kozacky arrived home to find Cathy, Zak and Chase hog-tied on the floor. Within hours of receiving the news, Lena Legend was on the next flight and did what any good mother would do. She joined the search.
“Malvic’s got plans for him. I wouldn’t want to be that kid,” scarface howled.
“You’re not going to let me go, are you?”
“You kiddin’ me, mate. We have orders to bury you alive with snakes,” scarface smirked. Matt gulped.
All of his170 IQ points went into high gear.
After a few rounds of whisky his captors stepped outside to take pot shots at an albino alligator sunning itself by a stream. Matt seized his chance. A dirty plate of leftover bacon fat was his salvation. Using the gun blasts he wrenched free of his handcuffs and the iron wood stove. Four hours later, upon flagging down a passing deputy sheriff, the nightmare was over.
Fearing the worst he rushed with his uncle to First Tennessee Bank & Trust. Nervously he thrust his key into the lock. He threw back the lid. The box was empty! The bank manager was only too happy to assure him he had either forgotten to put anything into it or had removed whatever had been there and forgotten. “It happens all the time,” he said. Could that have happened? Oh, pray it be so. Yet he knew it wasn’t. He had been kidnapped and made to divulge Solomon’s Ring’s whereabouts. Now it was gone.
As people do, he had assumed bank safe deposit boxes are – well, safe. Most of the time they are. But he was dealing with international criminals. Men who were accustomed to getting what they wanted. Men for whom breaking into someone’s safe deposit box was even easier than stealing credit card data from lazy store chains with lax computer security.
The kidnappers had gained information about the bank manager’s family and had threatened to do terrible things to him, his wife and their eight-year old daughter Salem if he didn’t open a certain safe deposit box and surrender its contents.
The next day Lena Legend returned to California, her son in tow. Only two months earlier Chickasaw had been a punishment. Since then he had learned any place is only as interesting as the people you know there. And Chickasaw had become very interesting. Without him knowing, he was discovering something - people.
As he laid on his bed he relived everything that had happened – the mound, the giant, the ring, ZNN, Cheyenne Mountain, General Anders, Yellowstone, the kidnapping, the safe deposit box, completely unaware of the terrible things that would be soon be happening, all because he had knocked Hotas Rapfmussen colder than a witch’s heart on a Halloween full moon. He thought also of Chase, Zak, Father Brainard, Father Herzl, the Academy and Cathy . . . Cathy.
“I have to go back,” Matt blurted.
“What! After all you’ve been through! I don’t think so!” said his mother.
“I have to go back!”
Matt tried for the eleventh time to convince her.
“Have you lost your twelve-year-old mind? The kidnappers are still out there.”
What was it going to take to make her understand he wasn’t her baby anymore?
“They were going to bury me alive!”
“What?” Lena flashed to her encounter with Madam ‘Mad Marie’ Bouvier. The same Mad Marie to whom she had divulged her son’s fear of being buried alive.
She told Matt of her encounter.
“How could you!” Matt demanded.
“I didn’t know, Matt. I’m sorry.” Matt stormed from the room with a new loathing for the mother who had borne him.
Chapter 31 – PARTLY CLOUDY WITH 90 PERCENT CHANCE OF ROCKS
0911 hours; October 7th – Huairen Air Base, China; Headquarters of the 15th Fighter Division of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force. Northern Shanxi province
Eighteen-year old Technical Sergeant Jin Xiao had just finished refueling the Chinese J-31 stealth fighter and was sitting in his fuel truck when a horrific blast rocked it. His first thought was something somehow had gone terribly wrong with the refueling and the punishment would be severe for the loss of such a valuable aircraft.
He raced around the truck to check that he had attached the grounding leads which prevent static electric discharge. What he saw made no sense. The state-of-the-art aircraft was reduced to a heap of shattered carbon fiber, aluminum and plexiglas. In the midst of the sparking avionics sat a dark reddish-brown boulder. As personnel scurried in all directions Xiao looked for any clue to the absurdity.
A thousand gallons of jet fuel from the fighter’s ruptured tanks washed across the ramp. Another blast shattered the air. An aircraft on an adjacent flight line also took a direct hit . . . then a third aircraft . . . then a fourth. Basalt boulders rained down, each striking a different plane. Razor-sharp shards sent personnel scurrying for cover. A landing fighter-bomber attempted to escape the madness by hurriedly taking off but to no avail, exploding in a disintegrating mass as it cartwheeled down the runway. Two aircraft returning from a training sortie were taxiing single-file with their canopies raised between rows of parked aircraft when they too were struck, their hot jet engines igniting the fuel-washed field as seventy-two thousand gallons of burning jet fuel soon left little trace of what had been a busy flight line. It was clearly a preemptive attack. But boulders? Seriously? With such precision! How? From where? By whom? Six minutes later it was over. Seventy-two boulders had rained down leaving seventy-two aircraft destroyed, ninety-seven dead and twenty-two injured.
Foreign spy agencies viewing satellite imagery of the destruction thought it a horrific accident until the Chinese government denounced it an act of war, vowing all-out retaliation as soon as it determined who was responsible. Foreign leaders waited nervously for the outcome wondering what country had been brazen enough to launch such an attack and why and how. What country would dare incur the ire of a country with China’s military might? What outcome could it possibly bring besides annihilation? Foreign leaders secretly feared their country might be next.
Matt smelled a rat.
Meanwhile Chinese scientists were busy analyzing the basalt using spectral analysis geo-fingerprinting. Being volcanic in origin basalt contains elements that differ slightly from region to region. All the Chinese scientists had to do to find the culprit was to match the basalt samples from the destroyed airfield with samples taken from volcanic sites around the world. Leaders of almost every country with volcanos, having nothing to hide and anxious to be declared innocent, readily agreed to allow samples to be taken from their volcanoes. Those that refused were unable to prevent Chinese inspectors from sampling them anyway. Nations held their breaths. The fate of the world hung in the balance.
Another attack came six days later. At Anshan Air Base, headquarters of the 1stFighter Division in Liaoning province, China, again seventy-two aircraft were destroyed, this time with eighty-seven dead.
Then again. Six days after that another seventy-two boulders rained. This time on the Party Congress at the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Held amid great secrecy and security it demonstrated nowher