B00C74WTKQ EBOK (13 page)

“The good is that while I’m gone the Admiral has agreed to keep you girls here on the ship, safe and protected and well-fed. You won’t have to fend for yourselves. I won’t have to worry about you while I’m gone, and you’ll have a blast living on ship. Showers and clean clothes and three meals a day. You’ll live like Queens.”

“Jesus, Adrian!” Race said with anger, her chair falling to the carpet with a dull
thud
as she jumped to her feet. “We’ll be fucking prisoners! You taught us to look after ourselves then you put us in a steel-hulled prison!” Tears were flowing steadily while Race stared at Adrian with anger.

“Prison?” Adrian asked in confusion. “I thought it would be a life of luxury and safety! How in the world could you call this a prison? For one thing the ship is huge, you won’t be confined to a single room, you know. You’ll be able to roam the ship as you please—barring secured areas, of course. Plenty of food and hot water. Most people out there would kill to take your place. What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about us being confined to this ship, that’s what I’m talking about. Okay so it’s a big prison, with lots of benefits, but it’s still a damn prison.” The other girls were nodding their heads in agreement, mostly because they trusted Race’s judgment.

Adrian was stunned. He had actually thought the girls would be happy and relieved to be taken care of by the U.S. Navy while he was gone. There was a long silence as everyone thought over what had just been said.

Race, understanding that she had a small window of opportunity, went into negotiation mode.

“Here’s the deal Adrian. We’ll agree to stay, but on our terms. Otherwise we split and take our chances on our own. We want freedom. We want to be able to leave the ship whenever we want to, and stay gone as long as we like. We want the truck, our guns, and all the food on the truck. We want it parked nearby and ready to go whenever we get the urge. Say no to this and there’s no deal.” Race crossed her arms and stared stubbornly at Adrian. The other girls chorused in agreement.

Adrian stared back just as stubbornly. He deliberately crossed his arms mimicking her body language. He was well aware that Race had the upper hand, her threat of pulling out was intolerable to him and she knew it. “You have a point I guess. If you’re not prisoners then you have to be able to come and go as you wish. I just don’t see any point in your leaving such a great set-up, and I’ll be a lot easier in my mind knowing your safe.” Adrian was going for the emotional appeal.

Race knew she was in the driver’s seat too and almost smiled, but she was a better negotiator than that. “We spent a lot of time training and I don’t want that to go to waste, we don’t want to get rusty,” she said, countering his emotional appeal with logic. “We’ll need to go out for a few days at a time every couple of weeks to continue drilling and training, to keep that sharp edge you always talked about. We can’t live here forever and we need to stay independent.”

Damn, she’s too good at this.
Adrian was stumped. She was right and he knew it, yet he suspected there was more going on here than she was showing. “Okay, two days every two weeks for training, and you have to take an adult along with you.” He was bluffing with a bad hand and knew it, and knew that she knew it as well.

Race countered, “Four days every two weeks and no adults. If we’re going to be self-sufficient, we can’t take a crutch to lean on.”

Adrian made his last offer. “Three days every two weeks, you show the Admiral where you’ll be on a map, you take a radio and check in every twelve hours with an update and current situation report, no adult—and if you’re not back in three days, the Admiral sends out a crew to bring you back in and you don’t get to go back out again.”

Race made her final offer. Adrian could see in her face that this was going to be the bottom line. “I’ll stipulate to that, but we need camouflage uniforms and what I said about keeping the truck and arms and food handy still goes, and we get hand-to-hand combat training from the Marines.”

“You agreed to all of that?” said the Admiral. “Have you lost your mind? I’m having second thoughts about you Adrian…can’t even handle a group of girl scouts by God.”

“Either that or they bail. You have no idea how tough those girls are, and Race…she’s a terror at negotiating. You watch, in two weeks or less you’ll quit having second thoughts and realize that it was the best deal I was going to get. She’ll have you in knots before you know what happened.” Adrian said with a big smile. “If you’re not careful she’ll be running the ship in a month.”

“Damn it Adrian, this is a U.S. Navy warship. Playing nursemaid to a bunch of little girls is outside my job description. I’m only agreeing because I need your help and you know it.”

“Word of honor Admiral, I didn’t intend to be in this situation either, but it’s either take them back to Fort Brazos right now and forget about heading south for months, or…”

The admiral, with obvious irritation interrupted. “I get it Adrian. So it shall be.”

Adrian spent the next two weeks discussing the upcoming trip with the Admiral, Jose Anterres, the intelligence expert, and Ryan Thomas, the ship’s historian. He immediately liked the two men. Jose was multi-lingual, speaking six languages including “Mexican”. Ryan was a surprise. Adrian thought the Admiral’s logic of having detailed reports was a bit overboard but was willing to go along with it. But Ryan, Adrian soon learned, was far more than a mere recorder of events. They had already gotten into many long discussions about historic events and Ryan’s perspective on them was unique. He specialized in what he called “Critical Moments”, and how the future could have been radically different so many times in so many ways, depending often on bizarre and seemingly inconsequential events and decisions.

“For instance” Ryan was saying, “The outcome of the Civil War could have been so different many times. The future isn’t ordained you know; small, simple things can cause big, radical changes.”

“Like what?” Adrian asked.

“A simple example. The first battle of Bull Run, also called the first battle of Manassas, was a resounding Confederate victory. The Confederate troops had the Union troops in a panicked retreat. The south, conceivably, could have won the war at that point by going straight to Washington D.C. and capturing the seat of the Union government. It was within their grasp, but not within their imagination. If the Confederate troops had taken D.C., it’s very possible that the war would have ended right there with a negotiated settlement. What would the future have looked like if that had happened?”

Adrian also spent a lot of his time with the girls, making sure they were settled in. The girls had quickly captured the hearts of the ship’s crew. They had virtual free rein to roam the ship and charmed everyone they met. Adrian suspected that Race had planned this out. When the girls were outfitted with their camouflage uniforms they were even “cuter” in the crew’s eyes. Adrian was skeptical.
They only see the surface, underneath is a scheme of some kind. They’re up to something.
But he had to admit, the girls had been on their best behavior. The two weeks were blurring by fast and Adrian was eager to get started.

Before leaving Jose showed Adrian the small but powerful radio sets they were taking along to provide the potential spies. “They are long range, use very little power and have collapsible solar panels for charging the batteries. These little guys have encryption built into them. No one will be able to understand what is being said. They also include a burst recorder.”

Jose explained that a burst recorder was a device that allowed the sender to record his message prior to transmitting. The message was converted into a high speed burst that, for a simple message, would take only seconds to transmit. The receiving end would record the burst, slow it down and then the operator would listen to it at normal speed. The advantage of this was to make the radio impossible to triangulate, due to its very short duration of transmission. Given the short duration of the transmission it would also be far less likely for a transmission to even be discovered, denying the enemy knowledge that a radio was in use.

Chapter 15

A
drian, Ryan and Jose put
their heads together to come up with a mode of transportation for the trip. They considered horses and ruled them out, they had too much to carry without adding a string of pack horses. Ultimately that would be too slow, there was a sense of urgency about this mission. They thought about another truck like the one the girls had, but it was too big for what they wanted. The three of them drove around the city in a jeep looking for a likely suspect.

“That’s it!” Jose shouted, pointing at a UPS truck.

Ryan said, “Hell, yeah, that’s the ticket. It’ll carry everything we need out of sight, and leave room to sleep in if we need to. Those things were universal back in the day, they went everywhere. I bet they kept the maintenance up on them as well as the Navy does, being a fleet and all.”

Adrian looked and nodded “Let’s see if we can find their fleet headquarters, then we can look through all of the inventory that’s still parked and choose the best one. Probably pick up oil and filters and other maintenance supplies in their shop—and any tools and spare parts we might need too.”

It didn’t take them long to find a phone book in one of the abandoned stores, look up the address and check it on their map. Within two hours they were walking along rows of UPS trucks, dozens of them. First they checked the mileage, looking for the lowest mileage they could find. They were in luck and found one that was nearly new. The tires looked new, too, although dry-rot was beginning to set in, as it was on tires everywhere.

They towed the truck to the vehicle maintenance shed and opened the bay doors for light. They chose one tool box, a large rolling-style that appeared to have every tool imaginable inside. Then they loaded up spare tires, oil, filters, belts, spark plugs, plug wires, and anything else that looked useful. Even with all this gear stored in the built-in shelves in the back, the truck still had room.

They towed the truck back to the ship and asked the Chief Engineer to come see it.

When he arrived Adrian said, “This is the truck we want to use Chief. It will need several modifications, though.”

The Chief had been ordered by the Admiral to give the men whatever assistance they needed. “What kind of mods do you want”

Adrian handed the Chief a list of items that the three men had come up with together. It included repainting the truck a light tan color, removing the storage racks in the back, replacing the engine with a multi-fuel engine or modifying the engine it had—whichever would be best, a larger alternator and battery, spotlights on all four corners of the top that could be adjusted from the cab, rifle racks in the front and back, hammock connections for three hammocks, a small cook stove, foam filling for the tires and extra foam to take on the road, and a powered antenna suitable for the radio they would be using.

“And” Adrian said “We need a wood gas generator installed so that we can run the truck on wood gas after we run out of diesel. Wouldn’t mind some armor plating around the cab either, if you can swing that.”

“All easy enough” The Chief replied, “but that plating is heavy stuff, it’ll slow you down and burn fuel—I can do it and will, just want to let you know.”

“That’s expected Chief. When can we have it for a test run?”

“When do you want it? Admiral said it’s priority one.”

Two days later Adrian was admiring the truck.

The Chief was pointing out the modifications his crew had made. “First thing we did was change the suspension to support the armor plate. Almost called you to ask if you’d rather start with an armored truck, but they don’t have much room in back. Notice we put the wood gas generator up front so you can keep an eye on it while you drive. It’s a horizontal generator instead of vertical, but it does the trick; we tested it. Making it horizontal lowered the center of gravity, makes it easier to see over, and let us mount it closer to the engine. Notice that it’s armor plated, too.”

Adrian inspected the generator, and nodded his approval.

The Chief continued. “We made some modifications to the existing engine so that its multi-fuel. There’s a bank of switches under the hood, here…” he raised the hood and pointed to the switches, “These switches change the computer system to account for the different fuels; just switch it to the fuel you’re using. It turned out to be easier to do this than to completely re-configure the engine support and drive train system. It’s a good engine and will work out just fine.”