I found I needed one more scene in Chapter two, and here it is. I have put the combined .pdf file of Chapter 1 and 2 over on the right hand navigation menu. Chapter 3 will begin soonest on the blog as usual.
I had an exciting few days where I found that my driver's license was expired and could not be renewed by mail as I'm over 50, thus requiring an eye test. Thus Sunday I flew in the Portland where Dianne picked me up. We did the DMV thing Monday morning and I flew back to Phoenix Tuesday night. Expensive mistake. Oh well. Also, my starter failed on the truck - first thing to break on this truck. I love this truck! I had my mojo working, luck holding, and I was able to get it started - get to the little NAPA parts store in town (not shutting off the motor, thank you), and then out into the desert where I changed it. A starter swap should be 1/2 hour or so. It took me about an hour and twenty due to the fact that the giant 460 Ford motor takes up ALL the usable space in the truck engine compartment. The back bolt of the starter motor is in a very very tight spot. Got it though. Good luck continues, have to return the old starter for the core charge this morning.
Without further ado, here is the last scene of Chapter 2.
Foreign Body Reaction, Alan McNeill Chap 2, scene 4
“Kill him. “
Arthur said nothing, standing with his arms crossed, across his vest. He was dressed completely in black. Lightweight waterproof black boots, his security pants tucked in to their speed laced tops. A simple black belt wrapped around his narrow waist. A black Global Security T-shirt was covered by a dull black armored vest, inserts above the heart and lung for higher velocity bullets gave his chest a segmented look, like the shell of a tortoise. Unlike his men he didn't wear the Global black baseball cap with the Global logo. The cold drizzle didn't seem to make him uncomfortable. His close cropped buzz cut was beaded drops of water, but his head was angled down, thinking.
“Did you hear me,”
“What is so important here?” he said, his voice low, almost absorbed in the thick wet night of the Pacific Northwest.
Patricia moved close in to him, her eyes even with his chin. She was not small, at five foot seven, but his six foot two inch frame seemed bigger up close.
“That is not your concern,” she hissed. “He needs to be removed permanently. Do you understand?” she said, moving in even closer.
Arthur did not step back, but instead leaned forward. “Sign an order, and he'll be dead tonight.”
Patricia stepped back a half step. “Nothing written, nothing taped, no video, nothing, just make him go away. Of course we'll cover your company's exposure should there be any problems.”
Arthur snorted back a laugh, the sound rumbling in his chest. “That's rich.” He dug at the soil with the toe of his boot. He was well aware that nothing was going to be written down about any security work that Homeland Security farmed out. They used companies like his because they were fare outside of Congressional oversight. He waited.
“You're bidding on the Gulf job in Louisiana, right?”
“Yes we are.”
“I think we both know why you are here personally tonight Arthur, or perhaps you just missed me? Is that it Arthur, you're horny?”
Arthur looked up. She was right of course, on both counts. He was here because she was here. She was the key to a large contract in the Gulf of Mexico for his firm. He was also horny, but it had been a long time since he had been excited by her. This was work.
“Yes, I missed you. We'll win the contract anyway. You know we provide the results you want.”
“Then fucking prove it!” she hissed. “Kill him, show me proof instead of the incompetent shit I've seen here tonight. Quick, clean, done, that's what I want to hear. You do that, you won't have to wait for any bid result, the contract is yours.”
Without waiting for her reply she spun on her foot, walked past the blood on the ground where Jacob had so recently laid and got into her SUV and left.
Foreign Body Reaction, Alan McNeill Chapter 2, scene 5
Arthur was well aware that there was nothing here except the gas pipeline and a secret hazardous fluids pipeline. The first was public knowledge and the second transported gasoline, jet fuel, diesel and kerosene and was therefore somewhat secret. With the price of gasoline at thirty five dollars a gallon, the pipeline was transporting liquid gold in this new fuel scare age. It was standard practice to hide the location of these fuel pipelines, starting back in 2007 when all the maps of pipelines became need to know only. Still, this was not enough to bring someone of Patricia's importance out here at three in the morning.
He shrugged, turned and signaled to the two men, invisible in the surrounding brush, to begin sweeping down the flanks of the ridge towards town. This was the only possible escape route for Ben. They would set up electronic traps on all the exit roads then sit back and catch him as he came through. Arthur knew that he had left the wreck of his truck without a shirt, phone, water or food. He would have to come out soon.
Concerning the request to kill Ben, well, that would be after he learned what Ben knew. There was something bigger than pipeline security going on here. Of course that was why he was here himself at three AM. He was the owner of Global Security, one of the three largest security firms in the country, and yet Patricia never commented on his presence tonight. How odd, indeed, there was something to discover here and it involved big money.
#
The first man brushed by Ben, just a few feet away. Ben lay frozen in fear on the wet ground. After he heard Patricia's car coming up the grade he had hastily repacked his pipe cache and snaked himself into a blackberry thicket just off the clearing near the outhouse. Small animals had beat out a hollow in the middle of the thicket for safety from the coyotes hawks, owls, raccoons and mountain lions. Ben's cache next to him. Ben pulled loose debris over the tube to hide it's whiteness. He lay perfectly still sure that a bullet would shatter the back of his head. Ben assumed they had night vision equipment, and from his position Ben had clearly heard the woman order him killed.
But the figure, a quiet phantom in the dark slid by and continued on down the mountain.Ben worked to control his breathing. All thoughts of the cold and wet were gone. He had to act but the second vehicle was still up the mountain. He had watched Jacob struggle to his feet while the woman and security guy spoke and make his way back to his vehicle. He had driven off a few minutes before Patricia had followed. He wasn't safe to go down the mountain yet he couldn't stay here. They would eventually find him come daylight.
He watched Arthur return to the SUV. The SUV's wheels chattered as they sought purchase on the loose gravel, found it, and the vehicle sped down the logging road towards town.
Ben lay as still as he could until the sound of the second SUV passing faded. A few moments before he had heard a second man somewhere off to his right, but that noise had faded. Ben lay still, a little warmer now, the plastic garbage bag was damp but actually pretty warm, and it was drier under the thick canopy of the blackberry leaves and canes. Ben knew he had to get moving. He was just now aware of aches in his shoulder blade and one knee. The crash had shocked him, but his body was waking up to that pain now, and stiffening.
He just couldn't believe this shit. In just a few short hours, one single day really, his simple perfect life had changed to unimaginable chaos. Ben hated chaos. He was a planner, a list guy, a project person. Finish a thing, cross it off the list. But now, he was completely confused. He had seen Jacob show up and talk to the very people who were trying to kill him apparently. He had seen his friend get pistol whipped across the face. Who was that bitch? He struggled to remember who the security guy was. He was familiar, someone he had seen on the news.
Ben tried to focus on what he should do now. Jesus, there were people who wanted to kill him, what do you do when people want to kill you. Call the cops, but what if they are the cops, bigger than cops? Shit! There in the small protected area of berry canes, his cache tube alongside, Ben grappled unsuccessfully for a way to solve this, to simplify this, to retain control. He had only one choice right now. Run. Instead, his body betrayed him and he slid into sleep.
#
Sunlight penetrating the thicket woke Ben hours later. Damn he was cold! He froze at the sound of something crashing through the brush. A deer bounded into the gravel road way and began working down towards him. He could see it was a doe. Soon two more does followed, then a beautiful four point buck.
Ben began wiggling out of the canes, carefully not to avoid as many of the thorns as possible. The deer watched for a while then began then fled down the road as he emerged. The deer were a pretty sure indication that the ridge was deserted.
He was thirsty and had to pee, but first he wanted to get some distance from the burned trailer site.. He had heard the security guy sending the searchers down back toward the main road, but he knew they would be back. At least that is what he would do if he was hunting him.
He tried to jog, but found that his back, hip and shoulder were too stiff. He limped up the road towards the ridge, away from town as quickly as he could. In a half hour he made it to the pipeline road and moved off towards the west, off of the pipeline. His GPS was gone, his cell phone gone, but he had his little emergency survival kit in an altoid's can that he had carried everywhere, and he had his cache.
He stopped where he left the road, took the ranger beads and rubber bands off the outside of the Altoid's tin, and opened it. He took the small compass out and set a course that should take him back around the peaks of the pipeline trail; the same route that had ended his normal life yesterday.
Ben's crossed a small seasonal stream that was flowing now due to the November rains. He found a thick stand of big leave maple that hung down over a dry gravel bar, forming a canopy. There was about six feet of gravel leading from the edge of the stream to maple thicket. Ben dropped the caceh pipe and searched for a few minutes. He found the inevitable cans and trash, debris that is ever present in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. There was an old coffee can, rusted but still sturdy, and some smaller cans about the size of Campbell soup cans. He took two of those and the rusted coffee can.
Ben worked his way back to the gravel spit under the maples and began gathering some dead small twigs. He knew he had to hurry, but he also knew that his body needed heat and water. He made a quick three rock fire. He used small twigs, pounding them into fiber on a rock, and a little dry bark to build a small tent of tinder in between the rocks. He used a birthday candle stub from the Altoid's survival can, and one of the waterproof matches to start the fire. The small fire still made smoke as it first lit. The overhanging big leaf maple vines dispersed the smoke in the morning mist, and no column rose to give his location away.
Ben scoured one of the smaller soup cans as free of rust and grime as possible, using gravel from the stream bank, rinsed it in the stream, and filled it. He placed two larger branches across the rocks and set the can to heat.
While the water heated Ben unpacked his cache for the second time since unearthing it. Three feet long, six inches in diameter, it was simple a section of six inch PVC pipe that he had found discarded at a construction site. He bought two caps from the hardware store and glued one end on permanently, and used a second cap coated with wheel bearing grease to seal the other end when he was ready to bury the cache.
Ben's pipeline job meant that he was almost always away from the trailer for most of the day, and since he lived alone, he had finally decided to make the cache to store things that would be stolen if the trailer was broken into. In the “old days” as Ben thought of them, before the collapse of the dollar and banking, he would have stored his money and valuables in a bank or safety deposit box. That was no longer safe for anyone to do. Because of the rapid inflation of the dollar it was worth less and less as you held it in your hand, so Ben had been converting the cash to anything that held it's value and was small. He favored gold coins, silver coins, ammunition and hand guns. All were appreciated constantly, even appreciating faster than the price of gold itself, which was once again, the real standard of currency exchange between nations. Well, the Yuan and Ruble still kept their value pretty well, and even the Loonie, the Canadian dollar did pretty well, but you had to go to a bank to get them, and you lost value with every transaction. The ammunition, guns, and precious metals were the new standard, and they fit quite well into Ben's cache.
Ben had learned how to make the cache by reading how the Australians had done it when their gun laws had become more restrictive. Many refused to comply with the law and turn handguns and rifles in to the government, so that I had buried their weapons in plastic PVC pipe caches. That idea appealed to Ben and suited the remote locations his trailer was sited. Ben's adaptation was that he didn't dig a hole straight down but instead cut a small trench through the top soil and buried the pipe horizontally, but on a slight angle with the greased cap slightly uphill. After he he had dug one three foot hole he saw that it was not a process that he would likely repeat, yet he moved often. A trench was easy and fast. The danger was that someone with a metal detector could easily find it just a few inches down in the soil.
Ben slide everything from the cache out onto the dry gravel, and untied the plastic bag that served as a condensation barrier inside the tube. A small coin tube of gold American Eagles, a larger package of silver coins, five boxes of nine millimeter bullets, a half dozen boxes of .22 ammunition and a heavy cotton work shirt bundle lay exposed. Ben unrolled the work shirt to reveal two Smith and Wesson 9 millimeter pistols, and six spare ammunition clips.
He carefully unpacked the other small items and put them into his pockets. There was a heavy strap belt with ammunition pockets. Ben stripped off the plastic bag that had saved his life last night, and put the warm heavy work shirt on. He loaded four of the 9mm clips and slapped the magazines into the receivers. He put on the web belt and tucked the pistons into the waist band of his pants.
The water was boiling now and he pulled it off the fire to cool. As thirsty as he was he didn't want to be on the run with diarrhea. Streams in the lower elevations often were usually infected with intestinal parasites.
He sipped the warm water from the can, burning his fingers. He pulled the cuff of his sleeve down to serve as a glove. Crouching low over the fire he tried to think of why someone would want him dead, no. why important people wanted him dead. This whole mess had started with with yesterday's section of pipeline and what he had discovered at the top. He crouched low over the small fire, feeding it only small twigs. He wanted a hot, smokeless fire, not a long lasting one.
There was no doubt that his only thing to trade was the knowledge of what he found up there. It didn't seem all that important, just unusual. Time for him to get a closer look and see what was worth so much money and effort to Homeland Security.
