“And if there are more HSF officers hiding there or they’re well-armed?”
“We call in the Army to handle it.”
“Ralph, with all due respect, I think it would be better to get the Army in here to take them down. We know approximately where they are, we know for a fact that there are two wanted targets operating in this area. The Army is better equipped to handle the apprehension, and it prevents the chance of anyone knowing that we were involved in this.”
Ralph thought about it for a moment. There are risks with going into the woods blindly to see where the two targets are hiding – perhaps unnecessary risks. It’s safe to assume that the targets were well-armed, which makes apprehending them at their hiding place dangerous. It’s also a very bad idea to attempt to apprehend them in broad daylight in the middle of town. Ralph had to agree that Billingsly’s argument made sense.
“OK, I’ll call Colonel Burkhart with CID and have him send in a team.”
The team agreed, and Ralph put a call into Burkhart.
“Burkhart,” Ralph heard him say when he answered the phone.
“Colonel, Ralph Gardner here. I have a couple of wanted HSF officers hiding down here. Can you send a team to pick them up?”
“Ralph! Good to hear from you. Two HSF officers, you say?”
“Two that we’ve spotted, Oddly enough, they were stationed in Charleston. That’s how we spotted them. One of the Charleston guys from Navassa recognized them.”
“Do you know where they’re hiding?”
“Pretty close.”
“I can have a team there early tomorrow.”
“Great! Call me when you get here and we’ll show you what we have.”
“Fantastic. See you tomorrow, Ralph.”
“Good bye, Colonel.”
Colonel Frederick (“Fred”) Burkhart was the Deputy Director of the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigative Service (CID) and a fairly new member of the Order. Ralph had known Burkhart for years, having served with him in the Army. Burkhart was responsible for dismantling the HSF, bringing its former officers to justice, and going through the mounds of records and paperwork to create the total picture of every crime the HSF committed against U.S. citizens. President Sheppard had personally assigned him to this role. He wanted to know every victim of the Sanborn administration, so he could determine what needed to be done to make restitution.
Burkhart felt that the task was overwhelming at times, but he appreciated the necessity of getting it done right. The country could never heal until a thorough accounting of the acts committed by the HSF was completed.
Burkhart had been given all the resources he could need to complete his assignment. This included access to several Special Forces units that he was using to capture former HSF officers in hiding. He picked up the phone and called the Captain responsible for these units. “I need Team Two ready to fly in six hours. Full gear. We’re going hunting.”
The plane took off just before midnight. Burkhart had briefed the team that there were at least two HSF officers located by “civilian contractors.” Their hiding place was generally known, but no one knew what may be waiting for them once they arrived. Burkhart joined the team on the plane. He wanted to be there when these criminals were captured.
It was close to 2:30 in the morning when Burkhart and his team arrived to meet with Ralph and his team and review the photographs and footage. Tom was there as well. He and Burkhart were both part of the effort with the Order to look for trends and patterns, and both were keenly interested in determining what the former HSF officers in hiding had been up to.
By 4:15, Burkhart’s team was making its way through the woods towards the clearing where Ralph and the team thought the targets were hiding. There was no moon that night, and the team’s night vision goggles helped them see and avoid a number of booby traps that had been planted around the perimeter of the clearing. There were several sentries patrolling the clearing, but they were taken down quickly and silently.
The Army team cautiously entered the clearing. There were a number of cars parked on the edge of the clearing, and the team confirmed that two of them were the ones used by the targets.
At about 4:50, the Order was given, and the team stormed the barn and the farm house next door. The HSF officers in hiding were taken completely by surprise, and none of the Army team members were injured in the raid. The captured HSF officers were dragged outside and bound and gagged, just as the morning sky began to get lighter and the sun rose above the horizon in the east.
8
Each of the captured HSF officers was placed in a row along the outside of the barn. The sentries that had been knocked out were also bound and placed with their comrades. Several of the team members went back into the woods to disable the booby traps that had been set, while the others looked for booby traps and other security devices in the farm house and barn.
Once the area had been secured, Burkhart, Tom, and Ralph and his team moved in to look over the scene. The prisoners were looked at and identified first. As the sky got lighter, Emily and Ralph immediately recognized one of the men sitting next to the two targets that Billingsly had identified. It was Agent Mims, the HSF officer that they saw rape an innocent girl in her parents’ house while he was disguised as a gang thug. Emily and Ralph had been targeting the gang for an intervention when they discovered that the gang was actually part of the HSF. Ralph pulled Burkhart aside and told him what he knew about Agent Mims. Billingsly was able to identify two other captured HSF officers as being from the Charleston office and part of the squad that had captured his team. In all, 22 former HSF officers were captured.
As several of the Army team members moved inside the barn to take inventory of the captured equipment, Burkhart called Tom and Ralph over to the edge of the clearing so they could speak in private. “This is disturbing,” he said in a low voice so they couldn’t be overheard. “Five of those prisoners are HSF officers that had already been tried and released. It looks like they’re still helping their former colleagues.”
One of Burkhart’s team members came up to him and saluted. “Colonel, I think you had better come and see this,” he said once Burkhart had acknowledged him.
The three men followed the soldier into the barn. What they saw was incredible. There were weapons of every kind, from small arms to assault rifles to mortars and rocket launchers. There were bundled cubes wrapped in plastic filled with cash. There were vehicles with armor plating welded to the doors and hood to prevent gunfire from penetrating. There were several scaffold-like contraptions being assembled in a corner. They looked oddly familiar, but neither Tom nor Ralph could identify what they could be for.
“It looks like an arsenal,” Burkhart said after looking at the cache of arms. “Whatever they’re planning, they’re going to be using a lot of firepower. They have enough equipment here for a small army!”
Burkhart returned to the prisoners to begin the interrogation. He wanted to know how they had stayed hidden for so long, what they were doing there, and what the arms and equipment in the barn were to be used for. Tom followed Burkhart, leaving Ralph and his team to make a quick inventory of everything in the barn. The Army was doing the same, but Tom needed this information for the Order.
Emily was still staring at the scaffold contraptions when Ralph walked up to her. “Do you know what these look like to me?” she asked after a moment. “They look like the folding ladders that some rescue departments use to get up on top of buildings quickly.” She pointed to two curved pieces of metal at the top of each contraption. “These look like what you’d use to hook the ladder to the roof or to a window sill. It starts folded, and you straighten it out when you’re ready to use it, hook it in place, and climb up.”
“What made you think of that?” Ralph asked.
“The