Perez solves all my problems. By midweek she's got a map of Camp Lejeune and alleged information on the building, which has two basements. No intel about access routes, alarms, etc., but I do have to do something to hold up my end.
Then she tells Flaherty that we are taking a date night without tail, and just like that we are parked Saturday night in Upland.
"Remember the plan." I am apparently a five year old superhero. She packed my lunch in a brand new camo backpack, along with my camera and Colonel clothes.
"Yes, mom."
She'd hit me, but it would hurt (her that is). I'm sure I'll get it later.
"Don't do anything stupid."
I push her hair back, give her a quick kiss, and exit stage vertical.
Just under four hours later I am cruising the woods of North Carolina, what should be cool night air lost on me, as is what is probably beautiful scenery in a pitch black night. I manage to get my camera out of my backpack without dropping anything, and take a set of pictures of a Marine base.
Lots of woods in and around the base itself, I find a secluded spot, drop quickly to the earth, freeze until I am certain no one saw or is around. Takes about 10 minutes of wandering to find a solid looking tree that I think I can find again, and hide the back pack high up in the branches. Clothes and camera inside, memory card cradled carefully in my hand.
A little before sunrise I am waking a sleeping beauty in her Mustang, hopefully her Prince Charming, and drive back home, the only damage a long not too pleasant phone call from Rona Flaherty berating Kiana for staying out all night and not calling. I guess we both have a second mom now. Sunday we stay home except for the usual mom and dad visit and check out my photos of the base.
Monday I land in Kona about noon (that's in the airplane), already five p.m. east coast time. Everybody is going to Honolulu for the day, so it's easy for me to beg off. I have lunch, check into my room, get my swim trunks on, head to the beach, take my trunks off once I'm safely in the water, leave them on the ocean floor, then head toward open water. Once I am well away from shore, I punch some molecules in their asses, and rocket into the air. More detail than you probably wanted, but I am the one writing this tale so live with it.
Perez pointed out plan B to me, which I would never have thought of – I can go hypersonic from Hawai'i to Panama, cross the 50 miles of land more slowly, then go hypersonic again across the Atlantic to North Carolina. In other words, dumbass superhero takes four hours from California, smart superhero can be there in an hour from 2,500 miles further away.
It's eight local time or thereabouts when I reach the camp, the sun settling down in the west, but no visibility. A squall line of thunderstorms is in the area, and it's raining pretty hard. I am soaked, though I'm betting my hair is completely dry.
It takes a while to find the tree where I hid my back pack, given the darkness, rain, wind, and general pain in the air stuff going on. I have no idea how waterproof it is, but it's supposed to be real military issue according to one Kiana Perez. It seems ok when I heft it on my back and fly slowly toward my target.
Headquarters building is two buildings in from the tree line, five stories, red brick, a few vines to give it character. Nobody around outside, not surprising given the weather even for Marines. I find the top of the stairwell on the roof and, to my amusement, discover that Marines are smarter than everybody else. The door is actually locked.
I spend as much time as I can trying to figure out if it is also alarmed. I don't think it is, but I can't be sure. The lock does not appear to be anything stronger than normal, commercial grade, with a normal looking round doorknob, normal deadbolt above it. I grab it and rip it off.
Dumbass confirmed. I get my half of the deadbolt in my hand just fine, but the other half drops off and hits the concrete on the inside of stairwell, bounces a couple times, and comes to rest after a series of what I think are deafeningly loud clanks. I freeze and do my best to listen, but can't hear a thing given the rain and the normal person ears.
My little finger fits just fine into the lock mechanism, I push it to the left and the deadbolt slides back. Doorknob turns easily, and I am standing in the landing area. I manage to close the door and get the deadbolt back in place from this side, though there is no way for me to really fix it. Idiot.
My Colonel outfit goes on and I am quietly walking down the stairs until they unceremoniously stop at the first floor. Now I have a choice to make. I need the basement or basements, but I have to find another way there. If there are people around the first floor is the most likely spot for them to be, and if there are guards around, the first floor is most definitely the most likely spot.
The Perez plan is look around for something obvious, then try to find an elevator on a higher floor that goes down if I can't be sure, so I wander back up to the third floor, and open the door into the building.
It's quiet, quiet and dark, everyone gone home. No idea what they do here, not really interested. There is one long main corridor, and I walk quickly down it past a 1950ish array of wooden doors with white frosted windows, gold numbers stenciled on them, until I find the elevator. It appears to be older than me, my dad, and my dead grandparents. One shaft, tiny door, round metal buttons that were shiny once, probably before the Civil War. I push the down one anyway.
The noise is horrific. Anyone who is there to keep people out surely now knows that someone is in. The motor sounds like the death throes a half dozen elephants, though that assumes I actually know what an elephant death throe would sound like, but if they don't sound like that it would at least scare the bageebees out of them. Finally, an equally loud bell, the door slides mercifully quietly open, and I enter.
There is indeed a button for the basement. With a nice key slot next to it. Curse those Marines and their actual attention to security. Off the elevator, I wander down the length and breadth of the corridor looking for another stairwell. No luck.
Must be a stair on the first floor going down to the basements. Tiptoe back to the stairwell, then down to floor one. Gently, as if all of my prior noise was quiet, I push down on the door handle and peek out one-eyed into the corridor. Two men, armed, standing guard at the far end of the hall by the front door, fortunately facing the wrong way, staring out the window at the rain and wind at the second I pushed the door. Even more gently than I pushed it open, I help it close as noiselessly as possible. No way those gentlemen will let a guy with Air Force ID from Nevada wander around alone, regardless of his alleged rank.
Time for plan D, we all know what that stands for.
So it's stairwell, roof, head shake at my stupidity with the deadbolt, air, and off toward the forest. There was a manhole cover in the pictures I took behind the headquarters building, which is also behind another building facing the opposite direction. Kind of like an alley, but 50 feet wide and with dirt not pavement.
I wait until I am sure it's clear, zip over, lift the cover and try no to notice what I end up standing in. There are cameras at the doors to each building, but actually little in the way of actual video coverage of the roads. Not sure why that is, but I will assume the USMC knows its business in these matters.
We packed a flashlight in my stuff, and when I turn it on, I feel like the happiest man alive. The sewer tunnel is as old as everything else. The walls are bricks, not concrete. I remove a sizeable number of them easily, no noise, no muss, no fuss, and start digging into the soft black North Carolina soil behind. Before I jump in, my brain reminds me to get out of my clothes which I put away into my pack.
Takes me 10 minutes to dig the 25 feet to the wall of the headquarters building, another five to turn a two foot circle (not really round, but you try it and see how you do) into concrete dust and I am standing in a pitch black room. My flashlight comes back out and I do a careful survey looking for security or cameras. I don't find any, and the light is giving me crap the whole time because it knows we're safe.
There's a light switch next to the elevator and I turn it on. Bare florescent bulbs wiggle their way to work, and the room is awash in light. I was unintentionally brilliant. The walls of the room are covered with file cabinets, except for about 20 feet which is luckily where I came through. There are two additional rows of cabinets, back to back, down the center.
The only thing we know is that Ali's kids were in the 1st Marine Special Operations Battalion, we're praying that Ali's colleagues came from there. They've only been around for less than a decade making me hopeful that there aren't too many files, but it is a government operation so this entire room could be just the index.
Each drawer is carefully labeled, and it doesn't take too long to find the 1st MSOB section. I also find an open staircase to the second basement and do a survey there, but that appears to be base records from before the dawn of computers.
The MSOB files are in heavy duty locked file cabinets with solid iron bars down the front. Must have been a big order for these things, because they are identical down to the locks with the ones at Nellis. I am a happier man even than I was a minute ago.
We start at the far end, which has the only file drawers with the letter "K" on them. There are long combinations of letters on each drawer, all meaningless to me, but I am thinking that K might stand for Killed, though I was hoping there'd be an IA or something around it.
My magic fingers do their fog thing, and I quietly take first the bar off, then the locking mechanism. I grab the first folder in the top drawer. Corporal Nick McLouth. Killed a week ago trying to save a chopper pilot shot down on a secret mission. Fuck me, I need to spend more time in Afghanistan.
Two more folders and I know I'm good to go. Chronological order, last one in the top drawer way too recent to be our guys. Drawer two and I'm getting closer.
Third file in the third drawer (possibly channeling the ghost of Dale Earnhardt in North Carolina) starts a string of four: our blond friend before he was blond, his dark haired friend, Naziri, and Hassan. Perez said photograph. I stuff them into my pack.
Near the end of the drawer I find the two Ali brothers, Jefferson and Jackson. I open the file on Jefferson for no particular reason. Then I have one. He's smiling up from his official photograph. The same smile I saw when he was standing with our blond friend in Long Beach the day I first spotted them. A quick flip through the folder to confirm it has fingerprints, and then it goes into my pack as well, along with its brother.
I seal the cabinet up as carefully as I can, then have a flash. The 3rd MSOB is on the opposite wall, near where I came through. There's a pocket knife in my pack, the blade and file useful to mark up the area around the lock and the bar, not too much, hopefully just enough to distract any forensic's guys who come in. I leave one nice sock print by the cabinet as well, making sure that the others in the room look as random as I think they can be, and I tilt the cabinet forward and back, which should mess up the contents a little and disturb the dirt on top.
I pop back down my little tunnel, only to find heavy running water in the main tunnel, and rain dripping through the manhole cover. A little thunder as well booming through the iron. Normally a problem, but tonight a big help. Up to the cover, I trust the light when it says go, and I am shortly headed back to my coast. I can't go hypersonic because it would burn up my treasures, it's four boring hours later by the time I hide my pack in the woods behind my favorite spot in Upland, then turn and burn for Hawai'i.
Chapter 28
Officer Perez is once again at my gate when I land, almost 10 Tuesday night, our flight slightly delayed by a cargo door that did not want to close. I ride shotgun in her Mustang back to my place, the FBI guys almost certainly screaming for dear life in their car while trying to keep up.
Much as I want to get to Upland immediately, Perez wants me to stay in and talk her through my adventure first. When I get to the "they're alive" part, she clearly regrets thinking that way.
"Tomorrow, Air Force," she's as serious as I have ever seen her, "Tomorrow I'll get rid of your tail, and you get your tail out there."
I nod, then pick up her hand and lead her to bed.
Morning run is interrupted briefly by two flashes of the old being watched magic, both quick, and I can't stop and look for too long or my FBI tail might wonder why. I like it though, because I'm only going to find them when they open a door that a normal person can't walk through, but a superdumbass can, and I very much want to find them before the FBI does.
When we're ready to go, Perez just tells the feds not to follow me, and stands there while I drive off. They'd laugh if I tried that trick.
Traffic is good all the way out along the 10, and my back pack is right where I left it. I take the files to Copies and More right there on Central, my favorite spot for copying top secret documents. They get a little pissy at me when I rip open a ream of three hole punch paper so I can copy on it, and open a package of binders before I pay for them, but we work it out.
