Chapter 22

John looked at the calendar in front of him. It was three weeks to Midwinter’s day. The graduating class would present themselves to the Gods and Goddesses on Midsummer’s day. He checked his schedule. Today he was to help shutdown a number of radical organizations that were behind the assassination of several individuals that disagreed with their political agenda. These organizations included fundamentalists and environmental activists. A fundamentalist organization had been behind the assassination attempt on his life.

John sighed. He talked to the wall and said, “So much to do and so little time.”

Ed had been about to enter the room and heard John talking. He asked, “Talking to the wall?”

“Of course, it’s healthier than talking to yourself.”

Ed laughed and said, “I guess it’s important to know the difference.”

John sighed again. He sat back watching Ed take the other chair in the room. A careless wave of his arm closed the door behind him. John said, “Oliver Brown has obtained all three medallions. He can replace me now as Grand Druid.”

“I heard that he’s arriving here tomorrow.”

“Yes, he’s going to serve as my assistant.”

Ed stared at John for a moment and said, “John, don’t lie to me. Beth, little John, Kelly, and I know what is going to happen. I’m not sure if William or Betsy know. I do know that Ling, Linda, and Leroy are clueless.”

John sighed and said, “I know. I’ll be happy when Linda and Leroy arrive with William and little Ed. I want a chance to spend some time with them.”

Ed nodded and said, “I’ve made arrangements for us to return to Arizona in September. That will let Beth and little John finish the year. They’ll spend the next year with the family of Robert White Feather.”

“I’m not looking forward to this afternoon.”

“You are going to take down the Neo-Nazi organization?”

John nodded his head and said, “They’ve bombed several churches, killed a couple of doctors that perform abortions, and have threatened the Native American College. Other agents are taking down the other organizations in other parts of the country.”

A sense of quiet settled in the room as the men thought about the events that would take place. The men were comfortable just sitting together in the room. They didn’t need talk to fill in the silences. The silence was finally broken by a knock on the door.

John stood up and answered the door. It was agent Haroldson arriving exactly on time. John invited him in.

Agent Haroldson entered the room and sat down in a chair. He turned to John and said, “You were right. He was the head of the organization. We arrested him and found the evidence of all the crimes.”

John nodded and asked, “So has the call gone out?”

“Yes, we updated the web page and sent out the e-mail yesterday.”

“How did you know what to put on the page and in the e-mail?”

The agent laughed and said, “We found their code book at the house.”

John shook his head in disgust and said, “It doesn’t surprise me.”

“So are you ready to go?”

John nodded. Ed stood up and said, “I’ll be joining you.”

Agent Haroldson shrugged his shoulders and said, “That’s fine with me.”

The three men left the campus in Agent Haroldson’s car. John and Ed rode in the back. Agent Haroldson started a monologue as he drove, “The place we’re going to is an old abandoned rock quarry. There’s one road into it. They’ve used this meeting place many times in the past. We’ve put agents around the top of the quarry with two undercover agents at the gate. They would be suspicious if there weren’t guards.”

John asked, “Are there any passwords that have to be exchanged at the gate?”

Laughing, Agent Haroldson said, “Yes. We found a book containing all of that information. The great thing about having secret codes and secret handshakes, is that each person has to get a copy of them. It means written records.”

Ed said, “Except when the codes are so simple that you can memorize them without difficulty.”

Agent Haroldson got silent. He asked, “Do you think there might be some codes like that?”

“You can’t always carry a code book with you, wherever you go.”

John said, “Have the first two people that arrive there act as guards. It’s a good idea no matter what. You have the real bad guys letting in the real bad guys. They know each other and will feel more comfortable having one of their own at the gate.”

Agent Haroldson got busy on the cell-phone making a call. It didn’t take him long to convey the instructions to the agents that were waiting at the gate. After ending his conversation, he asked, “How come you think of these kinds of things?”

“You just have to think like the most distrusting person in the world. Odds are, you aren’t even close. Then you try to think crazy. You still won’t be right. However, you will be a lot closer than if you try thinking like a rational person.”

The rest of the drive was in silence. They turned down a small dirt road about a mile from the rock quarry. They were able to watch cars pass on the way to the meeting place. A dozen cars were parked there. John did a little mental arithmetic and realized that there were probably fifty agents present. An agent came out of the woods and knelt next to the car. A whispered discussion took place between Agent Haroldson and the other agent.

John tapped Agent Haroldson on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, but we would like to watch from above the quarry.”

“Oh, I thought you would want to be down there in the action.”

John said, “I’d rather move into the action from above. I don’t like operating in an environment that I haven’t scouted out.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

John said, “Give me a walkie-talkie. We’ll go over to there and scout out things. If I see a problem I’ll turn it on and contact you.”

“Okay.”

John and Ed got of the car and slipped into the woods. Ten feet in, both agents lost track of them. They eased their way to the rock quarry. The path was rather easy to find, the agents before them had not tried very hard to hide their tracks. The agents were also not very attentive to noises behind them. John and Ed were able to easily slip up to one of the agents. They lay down beside him before he even realized that they were there. He almost shouted in surprise.

John looked over the rock quarry. He realized that it looked bad for them. Individuals inside the quarry had no route of escape, but lots of cover. If they resisted, then any attempt to get them out of the quarry would result in massacre. They would have to shoot down at them since a frontal assault would leave the FBI agents totally exposed. Even worse, they had driven their trucks and cars into the quarry. They would be able to force their way out of any blockade that the agents might put up.

John moved away from the edge of the rock quarry. Ed backed off as well to have a chance to talk with John. When he reached John, he whispered, “That looks really bad.”

John nodded and said, “I don’t see how Agent Haroldson expected to accomplish the arrests.”

“I don’t think that he even scouted the area.”

“Right. They have so much cover down there they could hold off an army in a frontal attack. They have their cars so it would be easy to force their way out the trap. We’re expecting over a hundred of them.”

Ed nodded his head imagining what would happen. He said, “Very bad.”

John thought about the situation for a while. There had to be a way to impose some control on the guys below. John asked, “Do you think there is a way we can get them to leave there in some orderly fashion, so that we can take them as they leave?”

Ed shrugged and said, “Maybe there’s something that an appropriate person could say to them.”

John and Ed smiled at each other. John got out the walkie-talkie and turned it on. He said, “We need to get most of the agents together at the cars. I only want six agents at the rock quarry. There’s a change in plan.”

John and Ed made their way back to the cars. Agent Haroldson frowned when the two men arrived. He asked, “What’s the problem with our current plan?”

John asked, “How do you expect to get them out of the quarry?”

Agent Haroldson said, “We were going to call down to them and let them know they were surrounded. Tell them to surrender.”

Ed laughed and said, “And then they drive off. What happens next?”

Agent Haroldson replied, “They only have one way in. We put a road block there and they can’t leave.”

“They have a hundred cars down there. They’ve even got some monster trucks down there that can flatten a car. They are going to go through your barricade like a hot knife through butter.”

Agent Haroldson said, “Then we’ll have to reinforce the barricade with more cars. They’ll still be trapped.”

Ed snorted and said, “And then they open fire at you. What happens next?”

“We return fire.”

John asked, “How many of them would you have to kill before they gave up?”

Agent Haroldson said, “They’d never do that. They know they’re surrounded.”

Shaking his head, John said, “They are going to try and fight their way out. It’s going to be a massacre.”

“So what you are suggesting?”

John smiled and said, “We tell them that there is going to be an FBI raid in two hours. They should leave a few cars at a time so that the FBI won’t get suspicious.”

Ed continued, “We arrest them as they leave. They only have two ways to turn out of the quarry. We put agents down the road each way.”

Agent Haroldson looked very surprised as he thought their plan through. He actually liked it. He nodded and said, “Okay, we’ll do it your way.”

When the other agents arrived from the quarry, Agent Haroldson briefed them on how they were going to make the capture. Most of the agents looked very relieved at the change in plans. John and Ed weren’t the only ones that didn’t like the original plan.

The agents discussed how to implement the new plan. The discussion was intense, but the details were worked out quite quickly. There were still two undercover agents inside and they could be used to deliver the message. With the number of agents present, there were many great ideas on how to execute the mission.

The agents got into position. A call was made to the inside men. They were told to warn everyone that the FBI was planning to raid the rock quarry in two hours. In order to prevent anyone from getting suspicious, they were to leave a few cars at a time with half turning right and half turning left at the exit from the quarry.

The agents located above the quarry notified them as each set of cars left the quarry. The agents used a rolling mechanism for arrest. The first cars out were stopped well down the road. Later cars were stopped closer to the quarry. The individuals inside the cars were quickly cuffed and moved into a bus. Each stop took about ten minutes to accomplish. Once a team was free, they would move further down the road to make the next stop. It was a very hectic hour and a half. Tow trucks came to take the cars to a holding area.

Once everyone had been cuffed and put into a bus, the process of establishing identity began. Enough evidence had been found in the home of the leader of this group to convict nearly everyone they had stopped. It was now a matter of correlating the individuals with the crime. That activity would take place in a gymnasium that had been reserved for that purpose.

John and Ed watched the proceedings. It was slow and took most of the day. The suspects were fingerprinted, photographed, and then transported to cells at various jails within the county. The sheer number of suspects prevented them from being incarcerated together. It would have also been a dangerous situation, anyway.

Agent Haroldson came to John as the last suspects were being processed. He smiled as he said, “Well, we’ve taken a lot of scum out of circulation. The list of crimes they are charged with will keep them in jail for years.”

John nodded and said, “There are still so many groups out there to catch yet.”

Agent Haroldson said, “I like the way you put together the whole case for huge groups of people before acting. We would have been arresting them one at a time for years as we gathered evidence about each individual case. The organization would probably still be operating ten years from now under that old model.”