ROGUESTATE, page 7
Ilyas Talkhadov, commander of the Chechen Presidential Guards, was killed this February. Unconfirmed reports suggest he was assassinated by a long-range sniper shot. This writer’s assessment of the Russian Federation soldiers suggests they do not possess the wherewithal to accomplish such a mission.
Deputy Field Commander Idris was surrounded outside Ulus-Kert in theArgun Gorge in early March. Pieces of Idris have been showing up in packages sent from Kmayshev. It is curiously reminiscent of the tactics used in the Afghan War.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Monday, October 2, 2000
8:00 A.M. CDT
Damon Layne drove his Suburban into the ramp next to Dayton’s on 8thStreet. He found a slot on the third level between a Honda and a Cavalier. The morning downtown traffic wrapped him in a comfortable anonymous blanket where he could quietly vanish into the waves of uptight businesswomen, bored consultants, and yuppies bemoaning the last good golf days.
He had stopped outside of Des Moines yesterday afternoon. It was important he take time to relieve his road-tired muscles. He checked his hair color, tinted contact lens, and wire rimmed spectacles. A refreshing shower and a decent nap between clean sheets left Damon ready for the trip’s last leg.
In his wallet, he carried an Arizona Driver License identifying him as Harold Friar from Tempe, Arizona. The ID did not disclose Harold was eighty-nine, confined to a wheelchair, and spent most of his days drooling. The twin dragons of Alzheimer’s and stomach cancer left Harold trapped inside a mind and body determined to rob him of his last days. Arizona had a higher per capita of Harold Friars than the rest of the country, providing Damon with a seemingly endless supply of false identities.
Settled on the passenger seat was a padded computer case. It was an expensive black leather affair with slots for pens, zip disks, cell phones, papers, and an armored slot for a laptop. The side slots had pens, pager, and phone. Instead of a seven-pound laptop, he carried a Smith & Wesson Sigma Model 40F. The sleek, dull black polymer pistol held a full magazine plus another round up the pipe, and a Velcro strap secured a spare magazine next to the weapon.
Damon kept a twelve-ounce Taurus PT 22 strapped to his right ankle. He preferred the Taurus to the competing Beretta model, because the Taurus did not sport an external hammer. If Damon reached the point where he needed the Taurus, he did not want to worry about snagging it on his trouser leg.
The surveillance cameras and the bored policeman seated at the kiosk on the main level of the parking ramp did not notice the weapons Damon carried. The cop was engrossed in the normal Minnesota Monday morning quarterbacking assessment of the Purple People Eaters Sunday performance. The general assessment was that the Viking’s defense was in need of new dentures.
Damon walked by the cop and through the glass doors leading to an escalator running up to the Minneapolis Skyway System. He turned towards the City Center and avoided the route leading into the IDS Center and the Crystal Court
popularized thirty years ago on theMary Tyler Moore Show . He shunned the Crystal Court
with its extra camera pods at each entrance and preferred the less secure City Center’s Food Court
.
During his government service, Damon never discovered one of the Bureau’s most intrusive surveillance systems called CYCLOPS. The system was an image recognition system that worked in real time at selected east coast airports. However, the Bureau continued to expand its reach. It was a simple matter to propagate satellite systems to a pilot set of offices around the country. The Minneapolis office was located a couple of blocks from Damon, but the coaxial cable connecting the camera system throughout the Minneapolis Skyway system ran inside a conduit less than one hundred feet from the Bureau’s local computer room.
The video signal was pirated from the Skyway surveillance network. It snaked into a local CYCLOPS database, and quietly reported to the main database located behind the stone-faced Marine guards at Quantico, Virginia. If CYCLOPS had been searching for Damon, the tinted contacts and colored hair would have had little deterrence effect on the cybernetic bloodhound. CYCLOPS worked on a thirty-six–point verification matrix based on physical characteristics and not cosmetic coverings. For the moment, Damon remained anonymous, as the Bureau did not realize that it should be hunting him.
There was one problem plaguing the satellite CYCLOPS system. The Minneapolis Skyway system is monitored by hundreds of video feeds. The signals flow over the coaxial cable with the same efficiency of automobile traffic during a Los Angeles rush hour. To compensate for the clogged bandwidth, the local Bureau technicians installed a quarter-terabyte disk buffer.
Budgetary constraints and Bureau standards dictated the disk buffer be a RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) set of six disk drives on a single SCSI channel. RAID technology was a great idea ten years ago when disks were expensive and drive densities small. The current configurations tended to emphasize RAID’s longer write times. The effect was to create a weekly data backlog that did not clear up until Sunday night.
Due to the scheduled time for a system backup and a programming error that caused image data to be handle on a LIFO (last in first out) basis rather than the intended FIFO (first in first out) algorithm, data received during the Monday morning data spike ended up in the image queue and rarely made it to the CYCLOPS processor before Sunday afternoon.
CYCLOPS did not know about Damon. It did have one of the people Damon was meeting in its data banks, but it would be another seven days before the data would be routed to the interested party.
Damon made his way to the McDonalds on City Center’s third level. Tucked away from the street windows, this McDonalds was not adorned with happy meals and shiny clowns. It was a dark and gloomy place—perfect for Damon’s work.
Damon had no desire to attract attention. He figured correctly that no one bothered to establish surveillance on a fast food place catering to the business crowd for breakfast and lunch. Most crooks chose dingier places along Central Avenue
or the warehouse district to conduct their business. The crack houses and pot dealers were on the other side of downtown stretching from the shadow of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome along Chicago Avenue
past Abbott Northwestern and Children’s Hospitals.
He ordered a sausage egg McMuffin, and a large orange juice. Damon settled the computer case between himself and the wall. He positioned himself to have a view of the entire restaurant and the food court beyond. He checked his watch. His appointment had another ten minutes.
Damon selected Minneapolis for its reputation as a town where little happened that might interest his former employers. He shuddered considering the dangers of appearing in public. The Lexington Compact had run an operation calledSpanish Poppy through the National Security Advisor’s office. The NSA’s office was three doors down from the Oval Office in the West Wing. Simultaneous with the Compact’s operation, Damon found himself freelancing for a Chinese spymaster known to Western intelligence agencies asGoldenrod. Spanish Poppy andGoldenrod ’soperation collapsed on the same day last August.
Damon was a veteran of enough covert operations to know when it was time to leave. He received a single phone call from Conner Fadden informing him thatSpanish Poppy was out of business. He never had time to pursue Conner’s phone call, because the FBI had arrived and they were blowing down the doors onGoldenrod ’s operation.
Overnight he developed powerful enemies. The Lexington Compact did not leave people breathing who could be interviewed in blackout onSixty Minutes.Goldenrod had enough problems eluding the FBI spy hunters, andGoldenrod ’sproblems allowed Damon to walk away from the mess. Officially, the FBI classified the incident as domestic terrorism. Damon was fortunate that Assistant Director Feldman ran the Bureau’s Domestic Terrorism Unit. It seemed everyone except the people on the Hoover Building’s top floor knew Feldman was an idiot.
Damon arrived in Dolan Springs, Arizona, three days later. Dolan Springs was a ramshackle trailer town dotted with Joshua trees and populated with more dogs and stray cattle than people. The nearest town of any size was Kingman, a little over forty miles to the south, and the only other notable feature was the Grand Canyon’s western rim on the Hualapai Indian Reservation. Damon hugged the desert to his being. He vanished behind the forty-year-old aluminum trailer shutters, and the rusted chainlink fence bordering his property.
After six weeks of solitude and hundred-plus-degree days, the trailer became little more than a prison sweatbox. Damon monitored the anti-government newsgroups and websites along the digital landscape. He knew the Bureau’s web wizards cruised the same dark corners searching for specific phrases and keywords. Damon had a fair idea of what terms to avoid. He use a private/public encryption package to set up a meeting in Minneapolis—after all, the biggest news coming out of Minneapolis would either be a tornado or a blizzard.
His contacts were easy to spot. They wandered into the McDonalds dressed in faded denim trousers and work shirts, sporting NASCAR caps. At least they had the good sense to leave the stars and bars behind. Stock car racing was mainly an amateur sport in Minnesota confined to the offerings on ESPN and TNN, and the summer races up north in Brainerd.
The two ambled to the end of the booths and settled in across from Damon. He moved his empty food tray aside and asked in a hushed voice, “What can I do for you?”
Damon was struck by their bland appearance—no earrings, no tattoos, and nothing shaved into the side of their heads. If they traded their NASCAR caps for Corn King hats, they could have been farmers from Iowa.
Irv Fredricks was well known to the FBI. His grisly face bristled with gray stubble served to camouflage a keen and demented intellect. Hate fueled his passion, and Irv hated a lot of people. The recent flap over the Civil War Battle Flag during the presidential primary season inflamed long-buried thoughts. It was bad enough that the two southern Presidents elected in the last quarter century had been captured by the dominant northeastern mentality. Carter proved he did not have the fire in his belly to take on the Iranians, and Clinton ran at the mouth like a Yankee gun-grabber.
Ron Babcock was thirty years younger. He never participated in the Klan’s church bombings and cross burnings. Ron had never ventured out of the country or incurred a traffic ticket. He worked for a local factory as the financial officer. He kept pace with his receivables, payables, and general ledger. His biggest headaches appeared to be a bi-monthly payroll and the increasing cost of health benefits. The FBI did not even know Ron existed. He seemed a bit too preppy for Damon’s taste.
Damon examined his company from behind his tinted contact lens and waited.
“A little crowded in here,” groused Irv.
Damon gave a sidelong glance to the ten people waiting behind the counter and two elderly couples sharing breakfast several tables away.
“The FBI doesn’t watch places like this very much. They concentrate on the bars in the warehouse district,” observed Damon.
“How do I know you ain’t a fed?” demanded Irv.
Damon let his hand rest on the computer case and the Sigma just below the Velcro flap. “You don’t,” explained Damon, “but I could just as easily put two bullets into each of you and walk away. Don’t waste my time.”
Irv pondered Damon for another few seconds before his lips crinkled into a grin, “A fed wouldn’t talk like that,” he declared.
Ron had heard gruff talk and petty threats his entire life. While he had never purchased a firearm from a licensed firearms dealer, he kept two rifles, a shotgun, and a pair of pistols. He wondered if this man with the fake eyes and hair was as tough as he sounded.
Irv lowered his voice a notch. “We need special services.”
Damon waited.
Ron twisted his head about examining the food court offering tacos and gyro sandwiches.
“We’re tired of the Washington humanists,” Irv began.
Damon resisted the urge to let his eyes roll towards the ceiling.
Surprisingly Ron piped up and announced, “We intend to force the government to repeal the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments, resign from the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, and return to the gold standard.” Ron had an ambitious agenda.
“Like prohibition?” queried Damon. Ambitious people always worried Damon.
“Precisely!” snapped Irv.
Damon maintained a bland expression, and wondered if he had followed Alice into Wonderland instead of the AAA maps to Minneapolis.
“It’s the sixteenth amendment that authorizes the international bankers to control our system through the income tax,” continued Irv.
It did not take long for Ron to follow up a conspiracy theory concocted by the Illuminati, the Council of Foreign Relations disparagingly called the CFR, and the always-available Trilateral Commission. They made sure to name the usual suspects including Henry Kissinger, the Rockefeller Trust, and the Rothschild Family. Their grand conspiracy layered the loss of sovereignty due to the meddlesome United Nations and the advent of a cashless society.
As far as Damon could figure, the income tax was a scam put into place by Woodrow Wilson and enhanced by competing Republican and Democratic Administrations, The latest incarnation was the people versus the powerful. He never heard anyone blame the CFR for the income tax. Quotes from various Federalist Papers sprinkled their revolutionary rhetoric.
Irv and Ron moved on to the seventeenth amendment suggesting the national political scene would improve when senators could no longer be elected by popular vote. Evidently, prior to the seventeenth amendment, United States Senators were appointed by state legislatures.
It was news to Damon.
The heady banner of state’s rights flitted through their explanations. Damon found it hard to believe corruption would lessen or better representation would result from getting rid of the seventeenth amendment. The framers never envisioned the professional politician or the immense power gathered about the Federal Government. Besides, political action committees would simply funnel millions of dollars into state war chests instead of federal ones. There were crooks at both levels, and probably more at the state level.
The States Rights rhetoric inevitably led back to the Civil War andthat slave lover— Abraham Lincoln. These two morons wanted to fight the War Between the States again. Damon did not bother to tell them the South had lost the Civil War a hundred thirty-five years ago.
They seemed most upset at the rise of Yankee influence across the South. The discussion naturally led to Eisenhower and the Little Rock schoolhouse. In 1957, Ike enforced a federal judge’s order to permit black teenagers to attend Little Rock’s Central High School. Ike understood the explosive nature of the confrontation between angry white mobs and kids, but Ike was a president for all the people—black and white. He sent the 101stAirborne—theScreaming Eagles who landed at UTAH beech, dropped behind enemy lines in OperationMarket Garden, and answered the German demand for surrender at Bastogne with one word: “Nuts!” Ike was deadly serious that the public schools were just that—public. Neither man spoke against Ike. After all, Ike beat the Nazis. Instead, they chose to assign blame to Ike’s advisors and a misguided attitude towards anyone different from their experience. It was ancient history resolved over forty years ago, and today no one except white racists and black civil rights leaders remembered.
Their conspiratorial tone held a deadly serious undercurrent. Damon never quite followed how the direct election of Senators violated state’s rights or the exact connection between the CFR and the income tax system. He had a vague concept of the United Nations and national sovereignty. After thirty-five minutes, he became convinced he was seated next to a pair of certifiable nutcrackers. If they ventured into one of the parks around Minneapolis, they had better watch out for the squirrels—it was autumn and the bushy tailed rats were busily gathering acorns for the winter.
Damon did his best to keep his eyes focused and stifle the yawn threatening to bloom across his face. Ron meandered through an explanation of indirect versus direct taxes. He used his fingers a lot to itemize the sales tax, property tax, death tax, and consumption tax.
Their eyes blazed brightly as they cruised into second amendment territory and their utter distrust revealed itself. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) came under microscopic criticism. They liberally sprinkled Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City into their diatribe. Damon found himself quietly nodding at their conclusions. In his experience, BATF was a poorly managed agency more intent on harassing the average citizen than catching bad guys.
Factual nuggets were buried under the harsh rhetoric and maniac gaze. Ethnic slurs peppered their speech and vulgarities became the punctuation on their ill-formed thoughts. A Bazooka Joe bubblegum wrapper held more promise for cogent thought than the cluttered ramblings spewing forth from Irv and Ron.
“So what do you want from me?” asked Damon.
Irv hunched lower and closer. “We want a bombing campaign.”
“Yeah,” echoed Ron.
Damon nodded slowly and echoed, “A bombing campaign?”
“Yeah,” answered Ron. He seemed stuck on a single word.
“You know, like the IRA. They just fired a rocket at the British spy agency a couple of weeks ago. We want a bombing campaign,” declared Irv.
“Remember Eric Robert Rudolph?” asked Ron.
Damon gave him a blank stare.
“He’s the fellow the feds have been after for a couple of years. He bombed the Olympics in Atlanta and a couple of abortion clinics,” Irv finished with relish.
“They’ll never catch him in the Carolinas—too many places to hide, and too easy to live off the land. The feds tried a couple of times, but Eric Robert, he got away both times,” explained Ron.
“You want to blow up abortion clinics?” asked Damon tentatively.
Irv shook his head, “Nah, what do we care about baby killers?”
