Defiant (an Ell Donsaii story #9) (23 page)

Her mother was frightened as well; Elsa could see it in her eyes.

Lucia timorously said, “Hello?” then, “Tomas!”

Elsa’s heart leapt. Papa’s uncle calling couldn’t be bad. But then Lucia’s face fell and tears brimmed in her eyes.

It took a while for Elsa to understand. At first she’d thought her father had died. He’d fallen off a roof she knew, though it took a while for Elsa’s stricken mother to even explain that. It seemed that his only serious injury was a broken leg. The Americano doctors had already done surgery to repair the leg, putting a rod inside the bone. Papa would be able to walk soon, but it would be months before he could go back to construction work. Tomas wanted to know if Lucia could send money for Papa’s rent until Enrique
could
get back to work. Tomas said he would buy Enrique’s food.

The rent money would be a frighteningly large amount.

At first hysterical, Lucia had calmed, then asked Tomas to keep the phone turned on so she could call him back. Then Elsa and Lucia had waited for Grandmother to get home from her evening job at a restaurant.

Grandmother had outlived two husbands and one child so she had a certain stoicism in the face of tragedy. Still the old woman seemed to shrink even further in on herself when she heard about Enrique. When Lucia asked her what to do, Grandmother shrugged hopelessly and said, “Go on. Go on living, it’s all anyone
can
do.”

In the morning, Lucia announced that she was going to go to El Norte herself to care for her husband. Frightened that she would be left behind, Elsa clung to her, “How will we get there Mama?”

“You can’t go. I’ll ask your Grandmother to take care of you while I’m gone.”

“No! I want to go too!”

Though Elsa and Lucia argued about it, the argument came to naught when Grandmother got up from her bed and refused to even consider taking care of Elsa. She didn’t think Lucia should go to America, and she wouldn’t help her go by caring for her child.

Lucia stormed out of the house. Elsa tried to follow Mama but Grandmother caught Elsa by the arm and told her to let her mother have “some time to cry.”

Lucia didn’t come home until it was time for Grandmother to go work her Saturday evening shift at the restaurant. Lucia spoke calmly to Grandmother before she left but as soon as Grandmother had gone she turned to Elsa and said, “Do you still want to go to El Norte?”

***

Night fell and Ell thought about having something to eat. She really wanted some pizza or a hamburger. “Allan, get me Shan… Shan, I have a craving.”

Shan’s voice came over her new headband. He was laughing, “You only just found out you’re pregnant and you’re
already
hassling your husband about cravings?”

Ell tried to sound pouty. “Yes. And a loving husband would be trying to take care of his poor, on the lam wife.”

“On the lam? Did you escape then?”

Ell said, a little flat, “Yeah.”

“Yeah! How can you make it sound so, ‘of course’?”

“Well, I had a lot of advantages. My guards are probably in pretty deep shit.”

“How can you be worrying about them?”

“They were just following orders. I’ve really left them in the lurch.”

Shan laughed, “You’ve got to be the first prison escapee who was ever worried about her guards getting in trouble over her escape.”

Ell chuckled, “I’ll bet there’s been someone else,
sometime
in history. Are you gonna order me some pizza or not?”

“Oh! You were serious! How would I get pizza to you?”

“I’ve ported myself a bigger port. I’ll port a six inch port through that. You can port me slices through your six inch port that goes to my waldo and he’ll pass them to me. We’ll have dinner together.”

“OK, I’m ordering now. Pepperoni and black olive?”

“Yeah! From Amante.”

“OK, I’ll call you back when I get it?”

“Order it, then call me back, I’m hoping you’ll send me some more stuff.”

Once Shan disconnected, Ell told Allan to have the waldo send her a fifteen centimeter (six inch) port through the 7.5 centimeter port she already had. Then she accessed one of the online aliases she’d set up and ordered some things delivered by port from Amazon. When she first heard of the Amazon ports months ago, she’d used a big port to send an Amazon port to the waldo hidden in the West Virginia tunnel. Setting up an online Amazon ordering alias hadn’t been difficult because a lot of people used them to order embarrassing medical items and sex paraphernalia.

You could use an untraceable cash chip to fund your Amazon alias in hundred dollars units and put more money into the alias account when it ran low. That way embarrassing charges didn’t show up on your home account for your spouse or others to ask about.

Ell had funded her Amazon alias with $25,000. She trusted Amazon and the funds then were effectively hidden away at Amazon. There they could serve as another resource if and when she had to go into hiding. Ell used that fund to buy some fine metallized Mylar tinsel, a pair of scissors and twenty 10cc syringes.

When they arrived she had the waldo send them to her through the big port. She used the scissors to cut the ends off of the syringes so that she just had a piston and an open ended tube. Then she pulled the plungers back and set them in her helmet open ends up. Cutting the tinsel into pieces somewhere between one and four centimeters long, she loosely stuffed the tinsel into one of the open syringes. She passed that syringe back through the port to the waldo. She had Allan use the waldo to line the syringe up at the other end of her one ended umbilical port. Allan had gotten quite good at using the waldo to deliver things through the one ended port, but using a syringe would take some practice. Ell used her HUD to watch the waldo and offer suggestions to Allan on doing it. Once the waldo had lined up the syringe on the port once, he would be able to quickly do it over and over. Eventually, Allan had it lined up and Ell set her umbilical port for twenty meters. Twisting around on her seat to point the umbilical port into the sea breeze just above the trees she had the waldo slowly push the plunger on the syringe. As she’d hoped, a puff of the tinsel appeared over the trees, floating away from the end of the port’s opening in the breeze.

Shan called then, “Hey there lady, I’ve got some pizza. Ready for a slice?”

“Oh yeah! Wrap it in some aluminum foil so it doesn’t get the waldo’s hand all messy.”

A moment later a slice of pizza wrapped into a burrito like shape by the aluminum foil slid through the port. “Oh man! You wouldn’t believe how great that smells after eating crappy food for so long!”

She and Shan sat eating, Shan passing her slice after slice. “What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Coke, of course,” Ell said with an embarrassed laugh.

“I should have known. Delivered through the port in your tummy? I’ll bet you were going through Coke withdrawal there in prison, huh?”

“Oh yeah!” Ell snorted at herself. “That first hit of Coke when I got free was
awesome
.”

Ell and Shan talked about what had been going on in Shan’s life. He’d only had to fend off a few questions about her whereabouts, using the excuse that she was travelling for D5R which had worked well enough so far. They were both astonished that, despite the FBI searching her home and work, and questioning a lot of people, they hadn’t tumbled to the idea that she used more than one identity. They’d both assumed that someone would let it slip, even though the FBI wasn’t questioning them on that particular topic. Either no question had come close enough to bring it up, or her friends that knew had managed to keep the secret close to their vests.

After Ell passed the foil back to be disposed of, Shan hung up. Ell filled the rest of the syringes with tinsel and had the waldo pass the used one back for a refill so that the waldo had a set of twenty ready to go.

Another search on Amazon turned up a small 28 gauge flare pistol. At fourteen millimeters in diameter, the flares would just go through Ell’s fifteen millimeter umbilical port. Amazon didn’t have the flare pistol packaged to fit through the standard four inch Amazon port yet, which made Ell glad that she’d outfitted the tunnel with one of the larger eight inch Amazon ports too. Deliveries for the eight inch port took longer to process, so she was glad she’d thought of the flares quite a few hours before she planned to leave for Mexico.

Just before midnight the flare pistol arrived in the tunnel and the waldo passed it through to Ell. Ell unpackaged it and the flares, a task very difficult for a waldo being operated by an AI. Then she spent time coaching Allan to use the waldo to load a cartridge into the flare gun and hold the pistol up to the waldo’s end of her umbilical port. She didn’t have him actually fire a flare, not wanting to set one off where she was and really hoping to not have to need one at all. Having prepared as well as she could, Ell stretched out on her coverall and took a nap until three in the morning.

When her AI woke her, Ell opened the compartment under the seat and pulled out the dark gray Kevlar flotation suit and her helmet. After looking about the area to be sure she hadn’t left anything, she put them on and got on the hoverbike. Spinning up the fans and giving it plenty of throttle, she lifted the handlebars until the bike lifted about five feet above the low scrub. Turning southeast she pushed the bars forward and the hoverbike slid toward the beach and then along it, moving east. She followed the rocky shore until Allan told her she was fifteen miles from the radar installations at the Guantanamo Naval Air Station. At that point she was below the horizon from Guantanamo so she turned south and moved out over the sea, staying only feet above the wave tops on this calm night. She curved around toward the west, staying fifteen miles from Guantanamo. She kept her speed low, knowing that military radar typically used AIs to filter out slow moving returns so they didn’t get notified of every bird, wave and bit of flotsam. In fact, if radar wasn’t filtered the operator would be presented with so many reflections he or she wouldn’t be able to make sense of the morass of data. Current radar systems relied heavily on AI computations to weed out the returns that didn’t meet specified criteria. If you were looking for missiles you filtered out things that weren’t going really fast. If you were looking for boats, you looked for things moving slowly. Aircraft would be somewhere in between. Ell, going twenty knots right on the deck hopefully looked like a fast boat, not an airplane. The stealth features of the hoverbike meant that any radar reflections off the skirts of the fans were angled up into the sky. They would get some reflections off Ell and her Kevlar suit but the suit also had some radar absorption properties. So any return they got should be weak, more like a big bird than a small aircraft, another reason to keep her speed to something a pelican could make.

Ell was getting bored at these low speeds though. When she reached a point directly south of Guantanamo and her heading was directly west, Ell started to feel pretty safe and she raised her speed…

***

Above Guantanamo one of the Naval Station’s venerable old Hawkeye AEWs circled. Its altitude allowed it to look far beyond the horizon that limited the air station’s ground based radar. Admiral Whitt had it up watching for any evidence of someone flying in to retrieve Donsaii. Or, taking her away. Ensign Nolling looked over the radar operators’ shoulders at the screens displaying data filtered by their AIs. He didn’t really hope to see anything they missed. Instead, he hoped to learn more about what to look for in the future by seeing their reactions to what came up on the screens. Nolling wasn’t afraid to ask questions, but when he saw a small return out over the Caribbean, he first waited to see if the operator would comment. The return the AI had displayed was on a bearing of 175, or almost due south. It was just a few feet over the water. When the operator didn’t say anything, Nolling asked, “Hey PO, what was that return? A bird or something?”

The operator had his AI scroll back to it and said. “We’ve got the AI filtering out things moving as slowly as birds. Got to be going over forty knots to show up. But, that was
probably
radar clutter from several different wave actions that spoofed the AI’s algorithms into
thinking
something was moving faster than that. The AI should reject wave clutter but it gets fooled pretty often… Damn…”

The PO had cursed because the AI had now put down another return just west of the first one. It had connected the two with a dotted line and a velocity flag for 130 knots, much too fast for a bird or a boat.

Nolling asked, “Could that be two wave action spoofs, just coincidentally linked, PO?”

“Might be, sir. But the AI
thinks
they’re the same object. It isn’t coming toward or moving away from Gitmo though. It’s headed pretty much due west.”

Nolling had the AI train the Hawkeye’s new infrared camera on the radar bearing. His hopes for a coup were dashed when nothing appeared on infrared, but then as he watched a little longer he decided that he might actually be seeing a faint signal that was a little bit warmer than the waves. The LT looked over his shoulder a minute and said, “Nolling, if that’s real, it’s a big, really fast bird. It ain’t hot enough on infrared to have an engine and its radar cross section ain’t big enough to be a plane.”

“Could it be a stealthed airframe sir? Don’t they tend to flicker in and out of view like that when one of their surfaces happens to line up so it reflects something back?”

“When we build stealthed airframes, Ensign, we fly them faster than 130 knots. Besides if it were ours, its IFF transponder would have told us that by now.”

“A drug runner that somehow stealthed his plane?”

“Drug runners don’t fly west to Mexico.”

Nolling didn’t have an answer for that, although he still had a feeling they were missing something.

Then the PO said, “Sirs, we have more of those weak returns on the track that the AI has designated as a possible. Same vector, same speed, a little further along. It’s looking more real.”