Authors: Ken Goddard
"Well, it looks like this contraption just might work," Paxton commented with a decided edge of skepticism in his voice.
They waited patiently — for one minute, a second, and then a third — for the tarantulas to drop into the terrarium.
Nothing.
"Now what the hell's going on?" Paxton finally demanded.
"They're not going into the terrarium," Mike Takahara observed.
"I can see that," Larry Paxton retorted as he knelt down by the terrarium and turned his head sideways to try to see inside the black corrugated pipe. "What I want to know is why."
"I don't know, maybe they're afraid of strange new environments," the Tech Agent suggested as he gently tapped the thin, flexible four-inch-diameter pipe. They heard the whisper sound of scurrying feet within the tube, but not a single tarantula ventured into the terrarium.
"Bullshit," Paxton muttered. "Spiders are the primary reason everybody else is afraid of strange new environments."
"Maybe they don't see it that way," Thomas Woeshack offered.
"Hit it harder," Stoner suggested.
Takahara cautiously shook the flexible pipe, causing considerable more scurrying but no giant spider appearances. The terrarium remained empty.
"No, no, not like that. Like this." Paxton grabbed the pipe and gave it a hard shake.
"Wait, Larry, don't. . . !" Mike Takahara tried to warn his boss, but it was too late.
To the horror of all four agents, the ten-foot length of thin, corrugated black pipe pulled loose at both ends.
"Oh SHIT!"
Larry Paxton and Dwight Stoner instinctively lunged for an end of the pipe. Without stopping to think, they lifted the ends off the floor and quickly covered the four-inch opening with their free hands.
The enormity of their error struck the two agents simultaneously as they both looked down at their exposed hands, and then back up at each other. But Stoner — whose reflexes had been honed by twelve years of diving for loose footballs — reacted first.
Reaching out, the huge agent yanked Paxton's hand away from the end of the pipe, slapped it around the pipe end he was holding, used his overwhelming strength to bring the two open ends of the pipe in his supervisor's resisting hands together, and then quickly stepped back.
Larry Paxton was still staring at the closed loop of four-inch-diameter corrugated pipe in his hands — his eyes bulging with shock as the sound of rapidly moving giant tarantulas caused him to clamp the two pipe ends tightly together — when someone knocked loudly on the warehouse door.
Immediately, four sets of eyes focused on the door.
"Who that hell is that?" Dwight Stoner whispered.
"Can't be Henry," Woeshack reminded them. "He said he and Bobby were going to stay away from here for a while."
"I don't care who it is, I want somebody to get me some . . ." Larry Paxton started to yell, but then fell silent as Stoner quickly brought his forefinger up to his mouth.
As Paxton remained frozen in place by the frantic scurrying inside the ten-foot closed loop of pipe, Stoner drew his semiautomatic pistol from his concealed shoulder holster. Taking a protected barricade position against one of the warehouse pillars, he directed Woeshack to the far side of the rental car and nodded to Mike Takahara to open the door.
Paxton, Stoner, and Woeshack all tensed as they watched the team's tech agent cautiously approach the door, pull back the curtain on the small window, then open the door and go outside.
Four minutes later, Takahara returned with a FedEx envelope and a single piece of paper in his hand.
"You know," he announced thoughtfully as he approached Larry Paxton, who had a decidedly dangerous expression in his dark eyes, "the next time we set up a covert operation, we probably ought to pose as FedEx agents. Save everybody a whole lot of time and effort . . . not to mention a certain amount of grief," he added, glancing meaningfully down at the loop of plastic pipe in his supervisor's shaking hands.
"I . . . don't . . . care. Get . . . me . . . some . . . goddamned . . . duct tape . . . right . . . now," Larry Paxton ordered through clenched teeth.
"Who's it from, Jennifer again?" Dwight Stoner asked, ignoring his team leader's furious glare. "What did she do, suddenly remember another piece of crucial information she forgot to tell us?"
"No, this one's from Henry." Mike Takahara handed the paper to Stoner to read while he rummaged through a nearby storage box.
"Oh yeah, what's he doing now?" Thomas Woeshack asked as he tried to read the paper over Stoner's muscular arm.
"I'm not really sure," Takahara confessed as he retrieved a roll of duct tape and began to examine the ends of the corrugated pipe clenched in Larry Paxton's shaking hands, "but if I read that note correctly, I'd say he's trying to tell us that we've got a serious problem on our hands."
Chapter Thirty-four
At a little after one that Friday afternoon, Larry Paxton, Dwight Stoner, Mike Takahara, and Thomas Woeshack stood in the hallway as the assistant manager opened the door to a three-bedroom suite located at the far end of the top floor of their hotel.
"I think you'll find our executive suites to your liking, Mr. Stanley," the assistant manager assured Dwight Stoner as he motioned for the four men to enter the suite, then followed with the luggage cart.
"Actually, I kind of liked our old rooms," Stoner remarked wistfully as he examined the luxurious furnishings, not at all surprised to discover a set of upright wooden chairs of some indeterminate European vintage instead of the less formal overstuffed chairs that had decorated their previous, more comfortable but much less elegant rooms. "Unfortunately, though, our corporate director has developed more refined tastes in his declining years."
"Damned right he has," Larry Paxton muttered under his breath.
"I beg your pardon?" the assistant manager turned to Paxton.
"I said I can't wait to see how the boss likes these rooms," the covert team leader replied cheerfully.
"Ah, yes. Well, I think he'll be pleased. And your suite, of course, connects through this doorway." The hotel executive banged his knuckles lightly on a dead-bolted door. "Almost an exact duplicate, and just as nice, really."
"I'm sure we'll all be very happy here. Think you could rustle up a half dozen barbecued beef sandwiches and some chips from that little slow-cook place down the street?" Dwight Stoner asked. He slipped four twenties to the assistant manager, who scanned, folded, and pocketed the money in an admirable show of one-handed dexterity.
"Would a half hour be soon enough?"
"Perfect." Stoner nodded agreeably as he gently guided the young man toward the door.
They waited until the assistant manager's footsteps died away. Then, while Stoner and Woeshack searched the adjoining suite and Paxton watched out the window, Mike Takahara reached for the phone, punched in a local number, and spoke into the mouthpiece.
"Room 1012, top floor, end of the hallway to your right."
Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock at the door.
Mike Takahara checked the peephole, opened the door, stepped aside to let Henry Lightstone enter, then bolted the door behind him.
"You clear?" Larry Paxton asked as Lightstone pulled a bottle of cold beer out of the open ice chest, briefly examined the high-backed wooden chairs, and then sat down on the floor with his back against the wall.
"Far as I know." Lightstone took a deep, satisfying swallow of the cold beer, then looked around. "I see we're spending Halahan's money with our normal indifference to government rules and regulations."
"You have any idea how hard it was to find two adjoining rooms at the end of a hallway in this place?" Paxton asked irritably. "Considering all the shit we've gone through on this operation so far, the government auditors can kiss my ragged butt."
"Spoken like a true bureaucrat." Lightstone nodded approvingly as he turned his attention to the team's tech agent. "Did you check the place out anyway, just to be sure?"
"Absolutely." Mike Takahara nodded. "Telephones, lamps, outlets, switches, and electrical lines are all clear. Nothing in the overhead that I can spot. The walls are solid, the room below us is occupied by a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company, and I disconnected the radio and TV.
Add what I hope was a random move on our part to the picture, and we're as clean as we're ever going to get in a public hotel . . . unless, of course, we've got a seriously professional technical type on our ass, in which case all bets are off," he added thoughtfully.
"I'll settle for that." Lightstone accepted the tech agent's assessment of the situation. "Sorry if I sounded overly paranoid in the message, but the last twenty-four hours have been pretty bizarre." His eyes swept the room again. "You guys got anything to eat around here?"
"Sandwiches are on their way," Stoner informed him, but studied Lightstone's bandaged forearm. "What the hell happened to your arm?"
"Never mind his arm. We'll get to all that later." Larry Paxton surveyed the team with a no-nonsense look in his eyes. "First thing I want to know is what the hell's going on with Charlie Team."
Between sips of beer, Henry Lightstone described his initial contact with the two apparent soldiers at the Dogsfire Inn and the subsequent military-like surveillance of Charlie Team at the restaurant, leaving out only his personal involvement with the cat woman.
He paused when someone knocked at the door, waited for Stoner and Takahara to collect the sandwiches from the well-tipped assistant manager, and finished with a description of the devices he'd found under his truck.
For a long moment, the five Special Agents looked at each other.
Mike Takahara broke the silence.
"Can you draw me a rough sketch of that second device?" He tossed Lightstone a pencil and pad of paper.
Bravo Team's wild-card agent made a few quick passes with the pencil, thought for a minute, added a few more details, then handed the pad back to Takahara.
"You sure about these holes at the base?" the tech agent asked after studying the sketch.
"Yeah, they were definitely there. I'm pretty sure four on each side."
"How big?"
"Maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter."
"What about this rectangle above the holes?"
"It looked like some kind of cutout. There was one on each of the two long-dimension sides, about one inch by three inches, with some kind of seal that definitely attached from the inside. Based on the slightly irregular surface, I'm guessing the seal was foil or some kind of metallic-coated paper. I didn't want to poke it to find out."
"Good thinking." Takahara nodded approvingly. "What about the base? Magnetic?"
"I don't think so. As best I could tell, some kind of adhesive pad, maybe an eighth of an inch thick, held the device in place. Looked like one of those peel-off-strip kinds of systems, but I didn't find any of the strips in the immediate area."
"Only the really dumb ones leave their trash around. Unfortunately, these guys don't sound like dummies," Mike Takahara commented dryly. "How was the device camouflaged? Standard military green?"
"Right."
"Any insignia, markings, numbers?"
"No. Or at least none that I remember."
The tech agent nodded and looked around the room at his companions.
"Okay, what I think Henry found is an MTEAR-42 device. Military, training, explosive, arm-switch, remote." He rattled off the military terms. "The crucial word is 'training.' The military uses a lot of these for their war games. What they do is mount these things under all the tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, Humvees, then the referees set them off whenever they want to indicate a hit or disabled vehicle. A small charge blows out those foil seals to create a decent concussion and a nice loud bang, then red smoke pours out of those quarter-inch holes, basically to let the crew know they're either on fire or dead . . . or both. It's a very instructional little device."
"So these things aren't real explosives?" A look of relief crossed Henry Lightstone's tanned face.
"Depends on your definition of 'real,'" Mike Takahara responded. "There's certainly enough of a charge in an MTEAR-42 to give that little truck of yours a good bounce, and all that red smoke pouring out of the engine compartment probably wouldn't have done much for your nerves, especially if you didn't know what it meant. But it wouldn't spread pieces of you and your truck over a couple of acres . . . assuming, of course, that what you saw wasn't a modified MTEAR," the tech agent added after a moment.
"What would they modify it with?" Thomas Woeshack asked.
Mike Takahara shrugged. "I don't know. Probably a standard detonator and a half pound of C-4."
Another long moment of silence ensued.
"Is there any way to tell if the one I saw had been modified?" Lightstone asked.
"One good way, if you don't mind the obvious drawbacks." The tech agent grinned wryly. "Just drive your truck over to the warehouse, and I'll take a look . . . after maybe an hour or two."
"Ah."
Yet another moment of silence filled the elegantly furnished room, this one finally interrupted by Larry Paxton's barely audible voice.
"It's a game. It's gotta be a game."
"What?" Lightstone and the other three agents all turned to stare at the Bravo Team supervisor.
"Think about it," Paxton insisted. "First, there's the obvious factor: Charlie Team isn't ready to work anything serious yet. They know it, Halahan knows it, and we certainly proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt. So how likely is it that Halahan would send a rookie team that isn't ready out on something serious — not just somewhere in Oregon, but in the exact same Jasper County, Oregon, we're assigned to — without putting us on standby just in case they run into some kind of trouble?"
"Not very likely." Lightstone admitted, and the other three agents nodded in agreement.
"Okay, so stay with me on this," Paxton went on patiently. "We know that Halahan and Moore went to a lot of work to set up that series of training exercises for Charlie Team — using us as the crash dummies — and what did we do?"