Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2021 19:33:50 -0700 From: Boris Chen Subject: Response Team Chapter 21 Alternate Chapter 21 Alternate. David spent forty minutes a day on the treadmill trying to re-gain stamina, about two thirds of the time I ran with him. We got a phone call from the cop we hiked across that gully near Pueblo about the cult we spied on with our spider drones. He said they determined the reports about child abuse and deaths were false and the person that made them up (and told dozens of people in town) eventually came into the police station and reported it so they arrested and charged her with false informing. She later admitted she tried to cause a SWAT team to invade and shoot up the place. He found out she was (untreated) Borderline Personality Disorder and had a long history of troubled relationships and three divorces. That was why that cult kicked her out and her little dog too. He said the local prosecutor was tough on false informers but they couldn't do anything that would make public how they investigated the rumors in town. He said at county expense they packed up her belongings and moved her to a church based women's shelter in Los Angeles where she would go unnoticed. She was threatened with prison if she ever returned to Colorado for any reason for the rest of her life, even driving across Colorado on the highway was illegal. ---- Things were quiet in the superhero business except for the day we went to see a movie at a mall theater on Transmountain Road at New Highway 54. During the movie the film was paused and they announced there was a vehicle on fire in the parking lot, then the movie resumed. David walked outside to check and saw it was near ours so he went out and saw it was my little Toyota on fire, he texted my cell. Long story short was the fire department found a large partly melted metal cross on the roof of my car which I interpreted as some sort of message. I suspected our friends in Sinaloa were the senders, but we hadn't been in Mexico since we rescued McKenzie. And since they had some idea what kind of weapons we had, why risk another crater? The fire department said it looked like someone pried open the gas cap door, stuffed a rag in the tube and lit it on fire. Luckily the Kitty Case was at home. We really had no idea what would happen if the case was put in a big fire, some of it would certainly explode, but not the atomics. We got a ride from city police and called our captain. The next day I went car shopping and bought a new Toyota 4Runner. They only had one in stock, it was black but I got it anyway (black vehicles are not a wise choice when you live in the desert). While I was negotiating a price with the dealer I called home and had David measure the garage door opening and the space beside his truck to make sure it would fit and leave us room to move around, open the doors, etc. Then he drove over with cash to pay for the vehicle. Luckily, this model had the deluxe interior, we paid $32k or 320 hundred dollar bills. He brought them over in a Ziploc bag. ---- At work my car fire was the topic of the day and the possible ramifications. Captain Johnson said he called in a popular DOD consultant to review safety at the office and our homes (if desired), they flew a team of three people to the El Paso airport. Over the next four days everything was checked, even our house, our internet connection, and everything at work. They also inspected the homes of several of our higher ranking officers (home electronics, networks, and scans for listening devices). They used these neat sniffer devices that detected radio signals and displayed them on a handheld unit. The newer 'switching power supply' wall warts were the worst makers of radio noise. But they were looking for spy devices hidden inside walls, cabinets and even inside other devices. They also inspected every packet that crossed over the internet connection for where it was going or coming from. They recommended improvements to our house, some of them could be added without being visible from the outside. They said there was a new house wrap on the market that was Kevlar based, they suggested remodeling the inside walls that faced the street with that sheeting. And they also suggested we re-roof the house and install it on the bare wood under the shingles then have new felt and shingles installed. Like everyone else's home they checked our internet service, router, and our three home computers. They also scanned the entire house for electronic devices and scanned our back yard too. They only found one piece of software in David's laptop that needed to be removed. Our phones were fine, but their scans showed that the front of our house was seen by three neighbor's front door cameras so everything outside, even standing in our driveway and talking out loud was recorded. He found there were a few places inside our living room that were constantly (poorly) seen and recorded by one neighbor's doorbell camera. He upgraded our router to include an app that monitored all the domains we interacted with, and blocked any known to harvest data that went overseas of any other domain we wanted to block. I went inside and the first domains I blocked were owned by Microsoft and Facebook. The security guy asked what Nifty.org was for and I told him it was a famous old internet site with erotic stories that we liked to read. He added it to his cell. With one sensor on a tripod in the living room and another device on a tripod in the front yard they monitored the image from the neighbor's front door web camera and fired bursts of high power IR laser light at it and watched the results on their camera output. They burned pixels in their camera's CCD so the places in our front windows it could see turned into a dark grey blurry area. He gave us the numerical internet address for their cameras and the passwords so we could check them every six months ourselves. Before they left we had a roundtable discussion about our history with Sinaloa and our suspicion that my car fire was done by them as a way to say they found us and know our secrets. They suggested it was more likely an attack by an immature young man that lived in his mom's basement and hated displays of showy wealth, which my Toyota model 86 car certainly had. Most of the strangers in parking lots that commented on my car said it was too small to be safe. They said that cartel was known for leaving severed heads of their enemies in strategic places, if that had been Sinaloa messing with us it would have been more dramatic. They didn't think that fire was ordered by Sinaloa, but if we found a dead body at our front door soon, then they might change their opinion. ---- After weeks of checking costs with contractors we decided to do the recommended home retrofit. Not counting the garage we only had four rooms that faced the street and hired one contractor to do the job, he was the only one familiar with the new Kevlar sheeting and had installed it on a bank building already. He recommended a roofer (that had experience with the new sheeting) but we hadn't called them yet. The plan for our house was to do the master bedroom and bathroom first. They would move all the furniture to the far corner and cover it with plastic, then cover the floors and strip the wall to the studs and install the new sheeting and drywall. While they were re-doing the walls we also paid them to replace the windows and check for signs of termite damage too. Our bedroom had one large window that faced the street, so we got a smaller one which made it necessary to update the outside of the house too, which was brick and would eventually match the existing brick. They also installed sprinklers throughout the entire house (and basement), especially the garage by running steel pipes in the attic. The windows in each of those rooms were upgraded to lead-lined and blast resistant. On the outside they'd look somewhat mirrored during the day. The drywall they used was also lead sheeted to block most forms of radiation. We'd heard of a couple assassinations that were done by parking a truck outside the victim's home and shooting x-ray radiation at it in heavy doses, over and over. You can't see it, feel it, smell it, taste it, or hear it but it easily passed through walls and lots of old portable x-ray machines were available to anyone on the used medical equipment market. We also purchased a new front door and frame, it was upgraded to bullet proof and blast resistant. The new door looked nearly identical to the original door but the new one cost a lot more money and had to be retrofitted with our home security locks. The door installer said he never saw the auto-locking feature before where you just held pressure outward on the door knob and the locks engaged after five seconds. And we also found a radiation alarm that we hung on the wall in the hallway that alerted for sustained bursts of Beta, Gamma, and X-ray radiation. Everything on earth get pelted 24 hours a day by naturally occurring radiation but this one alarms if it runs longer than 1/10th of a second of exposure. ---- While that was going on we asked Captain Johnson to let us go back to Sinaloa and hit their factory buildings. He said it would take DOD and State Department authorization, but it might be more appropriate to have the Air Force do it. The captain ordered a new set of intel photos taken over Los Mochis, and we talked to the DEA about their data on the cartel. I was surprised to learn all they knew about the organization. It appeared the Fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine that came into the USA on trucks and train cars came from different sources. The so-called Chinese Fentanyl precursors came from China but the actual production happened in Mexico. There were several companies making the narcotics for transport to the USA, and the CIA was involved in some of it as a means of funding secret operations in other countries. Many, but not all of the drug companies had given up on marijuana importation as a business but still did it to a much smaller extent than they did in the 1980s. Poppies grown in Afghanistan were shipped to Los Mochis for processing into narcotics too. He showed us two factories in the state of Sinaloa that produced Fentanyl and Meth, and said if someone destroyed them that cartel might collapse and allow the Mexican government to re-take control of that state, but it would put a lot of locals out of work and be very unpopular locally (like the situation in Chicago just before Saint Valentine's Day Massacre). We shared the intel with our captain and asked for permission to attack them from the air with an EMP device. Part of the problem with a mission like this was its 400 miles from El Paso to Los Mochis. How could we fly that far, land safely, fire one weapon, and fly back home without starting an international incident, threaten the CIA, endanger ourselves even more, and not get shot down on the way? While we were designing a mission one day when we arrived home there was a box at our garage door. David was a little worried about it being another gift from Sinaloa but somebody sketched a tiny Kitty face on the outside, which told us it was from friends. Inside the box was a rectangular welded aluminum frame with large U-shaped magnets, two at each corner. Cemented to the frame were five sealed shaped charges, they were wired to a small plastic detonator control box, which contained a nice Casio multifunction watch with a calendar alarm, and the instructions. I guess we weren't the only ones in the DOD that strongly disliked people that kidnapped children for profit. The shaped charges formed a rectangular box with one diagonal charge from corner to corner. At a glance it looked like a bare copper picture frame. The inside of the control box was potted, meaning it was full of some sort of grayish looking epoxy that was hard as rock and smelled like poop, but sticking partway out of the epoxy was a Casio watch with a calendar-alarm function. That was the type you could set to alarm at 3pm on July 1st. It was exactly what we needed. All I needed to do was set the alarm and fasten the cover back on the box with six screws, making sure the gasket was intact. There was a lanyard on the outside tied around the head of a nail. The nail shorted-out the firing circuit wires making it impossible to detonate. The sequence would be to: set the time and day to detonate, then screw down the lid. The next step was to place the device, the magnets were U-shaped so it only sat against a hull one way. Once in place carefully remove the pin by pulling the lanyard and once that was done it was armed and counting down to the specified date and time. This watch had a vibrating mechanism like inside a pager, that was the circuit they tapped into to trigger the firing mechanism which was made out of a photo strobe. Once the alarm went off the electricity triggered the photo strobe, which charged-up and flashed, except the flash tube was gone, that voltage fired the blasting caps inside the shaped charges. About four seconds after the alarm went off it went kaboom! The shaped charges were used to cut heavy steel I-beams to demolish buildings, but the spacing had to be exact for them to work. These charges looked like copper clad angle steel, about one and a quarter inch on each side and thirty inches long. There were five rails glued to the aluminum frame. It would cut a hole about the size of a 32 inch TV display. All the wires were securely glued in place, and using it should be super easy, just press into place and pull out the pin, then when the alarm went off the charges would do the rest. We read the hull of the freighter was one inch plate steel, so the shaped charges should cut through it with no problem, even under twelve feet of sea water. The only problem we could see was if the hull was covered with barnacles there'd be no way to place the device correctly. With modern steel coatings now few freighters had marine growth on the outside unless they sat parked for months or years, that's kind of a thing from the past. Green algae might grow but would not stop the device from mounting or working correctly as long as the magnets sat flat against the hull because the space between the hull and the shaped charges was critically important. Just in case, I brought along a scraper to clean four spots. But I think I'd run out of air before I got that involved. ---- While both projects were in the planning phase I kept a closer eye on the movements of that oil tanker. During the week the captain informed us our request to do business in Los Mochis was rejected in part by the CIA and the DIA. He said there were over a dozen secret intelligence agencies in the federal government, many of them relied on income from the sale of narcotics to fund their exploits around the world. We were not surprised by that decision. Probably the only reason why we were allowed to bomb their fortress was there was no drug production done there, although there might have been back in the 1970s and earlier. ---- On Columbus Day weekend David and I drove to Corpus Christi, Texas to examine the Industrial Canal and refinery piers where that freighter unloaded its cargo of diesel fuel, and loaded about fifty shipping containers (and kidnapped American children if they had enough ready for transport), then left for the Red Sea. The place was easy to find on the Industrial Canal near the Chemical Turning Basin. The canal was about 900 feet wide and fifty feet deep in the middle. We assumed it was a one ship at a time canal, but there were lots of terminals and oil refineries along its banks, plus there were lots of places with unrestricted and unmonitored access to the water, presumably some locals fished the canal for those huge carp that lived in the turning basins. We found a set of publicity photos that were taken the day it was launched after being built in Karachi, Pakistan. Being a tanker meant it varied how much hull was below water depending on the cargo. We also theorized that they probably took on seawater after leaving port to stabilize the ship for the journey back to Arabia. We needed to avoid a situation where we placed the weapon too high and was above the water on their trip back east. We'd have to swim to the ship and then dive down and place the charge then swim back to shore late at night. It would also require us to arrive early and watch the ship for signs that would indicate how close they were to the end of the offloading task. Since that was not a container port but still loaded containers it might take hours to load the deck. After loading was finished two tugs came up and pulled it sideways to the middle of the canal, then they 'tugged' it out the waterway and onto the Gulf. If it was too windy the tugs would wait for the weather to improve. Both of us speculated the waterway might have some sort of traffic control dispatcher but we didn't know where that was, hopefully they weren't near the refinery piers. Looking at the piers on G-Maps I decided the containers could not be loaded from the land side. Either it sailed to a different port or a barge with containers and a crane parked alongside while it was off loading its liquid cargo, they could easily load the containers with a simple crane at the same time to speed the process and get that pier available for the next ship even sooner. I'd have to set the watch alarm for five days and twelve hours after placement which would put them well out into the Atlantic Ocean when La Bomba blasted a large hole in their lives. We also learned that we could possibly identify which container was the little prison because when they welded steel bars inside it burned the exterior paint which left black burn marks in patterns on the outside. Those burns were outlines of the cells, if we saw it onboard we might decide to call the police instead. David and I inspected two places to park and get in the canal. The area around the canal was almost free of trees since it was a huge and old industrial area with lots of large oil tanks and refineries scattered around the area. The water in the canal looked filthy so we'd need to wear wet suits along with flippers and face masks and snorkels. Since it was salt water I'd need a weight belt too. ---- Back at the hotel I looked online at the ship's location and saw it was on the Mediterranean Sea heading away from us. I jotted down its next two planned arrival dates in Texas. We didn't want to risk it sinking in the Gulf of Mexico or anywhere near Florida so we decided to set the device to fire after six days, which would put them much further out on the ocean. With a big hole in the side it could sink in less than half an hour, but it should sink stern first. We drove home the next day, I-35 to San Antonio, then I-10 the rest of the way to El Paso. It took about 19 hours to cross the state. The good part was we talked a lot about stuff and had some great conversations. And David liked taking long trips in his truck, it was very comfortable. We blasted the stereo and had a great drive home. We maintained the same speed as the semis on I-10 so we didn't get ticketed. The Kitty Case was at home in the Tac-Room.<>xx On the long ride home I had him to lean his seat back and slide it further away from the wheel so I could enjoy his parts. I bought David a set of driving clothes for long trips in the truck with very stretchy waistbands so I could access him without fighting with clothing. He still wasn't a huge fan of 'coming and going' but sometimes I did it anyway. His dick was one of my top five favorite flavors in the world, and that didn't even include the pleasure of the feeling of him in my mouth or rubbing it around my face. I did him twice, first on I-35 near Beeville, Texas, and on I-10 near Fort Stockton. We also had a discussion about how the hole in the ship's hull would sink it, David asked, "Why wouldn't the engine room flood, the ship settled by the stern but sat there while the crew abandoned ship and eventually it got towed to a port for repairs?" "The internal oil tanks aren't designed to withstand the pressure of the sea against an empty tank, one at a time as the stern sank lower and lower the inside tanks would crack inward and fill with seawater, which would cause it to sink stern first. They'd probably hear a few explosions as she went down and the internal tanks imploded," was my answer. We didn't talk for a bit then I added, "One thing we are not taking into account is if there was something large mounted right at the place we set the charge and blasted the hull. If there was a large fuel tank welded there and only left a small gap for the sea water to rush in then it would slow the sinking and give them more time to get into lifeboats and maybe call for a rescue, but we won't know until it happens. Even if people survived it might take weeks until that made the news." ---- Two weeks later we went to Idaho for a security consult at a natural gas electrical plant. We flew commercial with one layover in Denver. We were home the next day. I've said it before, I'll say it again: I hated flying on the commercial airlines, and all the security theater in the airports and their shrinking seats. Every time they made the seats smaller and thinner we cancelled flights and drove instead. We can drive to almost any point west of the Mississippi in a day and a half, in comfort and at a fraction of the cost of flying, plus we don't get any of the airport bullshit. Plus, David loved to drive, especially long distance runs. The cockpit of his truck was like a rolling living room with ultra expensive materials and almost every comfort feature known to man. ---- Things came together three weeks after our consulting trip to Pocatello and we made another quick trip to Corpus Christi with a special gift on behalf of the people of Tulsa. On the drive down I made sure the Casio watch exactly matched mine still set for El Paso time. We stayed at a motel near the refinery and decided to take a swim that night (we really didn't have a choice except to not do it). We found the one public street that went all the way to the canal, at 1am there should be nobody else out there, we parked and got dressed for the party. If there had been people there fishing we would have been forced into Plan-B which was a similar place on the other side of the canal in the turning basin. We never saw any small boats on the canal, just these older Panamax size cargo ships. We weren't sure if small private boats were allowed on the canal at all. David said he thought this place was big enough for those enormous crude oil tankers. ---- I'd be lying if I said my heart wasn't pounding in my chest as we stood beside his truck, under the starry sky, and got into our gear: wet suits, face masks, snorkels, gloves, weight belt, and flippers. We tied a short cotton rope to the upper corners of the frame so I could run it behind my neck so the frame hung in front of my stomach when standing. Let me tell you, it was freaky standing around with a bomb hanging in front of my stomach! And for a brief moment I knew what it felt like to be a suicide bomber. The first thing I did after we parked was to carefully remove the lid on the control box and set the alarm (6 days from now), then carefully that the seal was in the right place and gently set the lid on top and screwed it back down tight. On the outside it had a small string lanyard that when pulled removed a large nail from the box and enabled the firing circuit. It would not fire until that nail was gone. I asked David, "You notice there's like nothing growing anywhere around here? No tall weeds or trees anywhere?" "I think that's from two hurricanes they've had down here and flooding in the past ten years." "Oh, that makes sense." I replied. We walked backwards (holding hands) with flippers on and slowly stepped down into the warm stinky canal water. Our target tanker was being unloaded at a refinery pier while a barge with a crane was on the canal side placing containers on the top deck. The bottom of the canal was steep and it went from a foot deep to over our heads in about two steps. We silently swam away from shore then past an empty mooring site. The water was stinky and the entire area smelled like oil refinery and rotted fish. We swam with our heads partly underwater the entire way. We estimated the distance from the truck to the tanker was about half a mile. It took us an hour to swim to the tanker, the area around it was very well lit, even the canal side was lit but not as much as the refinery side. We stopped about 400 feet away and watched the stern of the Yemen Globe to see if any crew were standing around, but we never saw anyone so we dropped down and swam to the canal side of the tanker. I felt a mild current that was also headed out towards the Gulf, the tide was going out. Based on the keel depth scale near the stern we could see that the offloading was almost complete and containers were still being loaded from the canal side. This old ship looked like it was retrofitted to be a tanker. Most tankers today had decks covered with plumbing but this one had its cargo hold divided into three large tanks and they offloaded all three at the same time, but it had room on the deck for fifty containers, stacked two high. Back when it was used for hauling grain it was loaded through large steel hatches on top, now those were welded down and turned into places to set containers. The inside walls of the fuel tanks were no way as thick as the hull, so they'd rupture easily. They were built for grains, not diesel fuel. We carefully swam up to the left side of the ship, the closer we got the bigger it looked. The area was full of noise from the diesel crane and the engine plant inside the freighter. It appeared they'd be fully ready to sail home in less than eight hours. Judging by the water level on the scale it said the keel was 18 feet down. We floated beside the hull in the stinky water whispering after we pulled out our snorkel mouthpieces. "How deep?" David asked after he spit water from his mouth. I didn't want to get any of it in my mouth either but it was impossible to avoid. "I'm thinking like ten feet down or so." "How's your buoyancy?" David asked and I told him if I didn't keep kicking I'd start to sink, so I was good. He wasn't wearing a weight belt. "Remember, be careful you don't get pulled under the hull, the current is moving that way." He said pointing towards the steel hull beside us. "Yes, my plan is to sink beside the hull and keep my fingers and the tips of my flippers against the hull so when I get to the bend suddenly the hull will disappear. I'll rise up a few feet and place the frame, that should put it about eight feet above the keel, but above the double bottom." I whispered to him. David looked at me and leaned in and kissed my lips, and admonished me to be super careful. He said the device would probably accomplish our goal even seven feet down, this ship would only rise maybe another three feet, then they'd pump in water once they got underway. The entire time I kept seeing mental images of the hole this device would cut through the hull and all the water rushing in. I pictured flooding scenes from the movie Titanic. I started to breathe fast and deep to blow off more CO2. I felt the device in front of my chest and stomach, I felt around the control box for the lanyard to pull to activate the detonator, and I checked that all eight magnets were faced the right way. I told David I loved him and pulled my face mask down and turned around to face the black steel hull and with both hands against the hull I stopped kicking and sunk into the blackness. When I looked up I caught a glimpse of the lights on the crane but they quickly vanished in the murky water. On the frame of my face mask was mounted at tiny underwater LED flashlight that was powered by one AAA battery but with all the silt in the water it didn't do much good unless my mask was within a foot of the hull. David put in his snorkel and went underwater too, probably to watch for the tiny light on my mask. He wanted to listen for the sound of the magnets hitting the hull. I tried to force myself to relax and concentrate on the sensation of my flippers scraping down the side of the ship. ---- I kept my palms against the hull to get some feeling for how far down I went. I got the idea that what we were doing was super dangerous, maybe David was right, it really wasn't worth the risk. At that point the outgoing tide kept me pressed against the ship. The place we stopped was about thirty feet ahead of the rudder. I leaned forward and could sort of make out the steel slipping past my facemask, then suddenly my flippers felt free and very cold, so I started to kick, I'd gone too deep. With one hand on the hull I reached down and unclipped three belt weights and started to feel my hand slide upwards on the hull, moments later my flippers hit steel again and the water felt warmer. But I was starting to feel short on air and scared for my life so I reached down and grabbed the frame and pushed it against the hull and heard it go CLUNK. I felt for the lanyard and it gently pulled it out, I leaned my head down and felt the rope slip over my head and my snorkel tube. While I was kicking towards the surface I reached down and dropped my last two weights and started to kick hard for the surface as I felt my body start to panic and scream for a breath of air. My heart pounded in my chest and I started to see stars. I looked up but all I saw was silt and blackness, then suddenly I collided with David and he grabbed me and shoved really hard straight up. When I broke the surface I took in several desperate deep breaths, then suddenly David emerged nearby, I closed my eyes and breathed heavily. My heart was still pounding hard in my chest and my entire body trembled with fear and adrenaline. I raised my hand above water and showed him I had the bright yellow lanyard and the nail in my right hand! He smiled and shushed me because I was breathing rather loudly. I threw the lanyard towards the middle of the canal and saw it make a small splash and disappear. David came close beside me, cleared his snorkel then submerged and grabbed my belt and started to swim us away from the freighter, he pulled me along. I floated on my back still panting but reached up and shut off the tiny light on my mask. In fifteen minutes we were away from the lights. I floated on my back and David was underwater kicking hard, breathing hard through his snorkel. After a few minutes to catch my breath and calm my nerves I rolled over and patted his back to get his attention. We stopped briefly and I dumped out my snorkel and put my mask back over my eyes and we swam independently past the last mooring pier, then further down the canal, towards the truck. Since we were swimming against the current it took a lot longer to swim back. It was hard to tell where to climb out because it was so dark, but he recognized some rocks along the edge of the canal. Out in this area near the start of the Chemical Turning Basin it was totally dark here, everything was shades of black, silhouettes, and dark outlines blocking our view of stars on the horizon. We would be too low to see the shape of his truck which was parked about 80 feet from the canal along the side of a dirt road across a weed covered field. We paused about two hundred feet from shore to look around to make sure nobody drove up while we were in the water. I was getting creepy feelings about the giant carp that lived in the canal that might be swimming below us, fish that were longer than we were tall. Of course I pictured images from the movie Jaws too, being eaten alive by a fifteen foot giant man eating carp. I didn't know if they even had teeth! ---- I replayed everything in my head: did I pull out the arming cord, did I hear all eight magnets hit the hull, was it flat against the steel, was it deep enough but not too deep, did I shove it against the hull too hard and break the frame. My mind replayed thoughts of how I nearly got sucked under the ship and started to panic. When we got into shallower water I noticed the sky to the northeast was starting to turn dark blue, we'd been in the filthy canal water for almost two and a half hours. The closer we got to the shore the warmer the water felt. David climbed out first, he stepped up the bank and onto the weeds and reached down and pulled off his flippers then turned around and reached out his hand to help me climb out since the mud beside the water was super slick. I duck walked to his truck and took off my flippers and tossed all my gear in the back of his truck. One piece at a time got tossed in back as we stripped naked. I opened the door and got out a case of bottled water and a bar of soap. One bottle wet him then he started washing his entire body while I drizzled water on his head. After he was done I poured two more for the rinse. Before we started my wash my skin had started to tingle and itch from all the chemicals and shit in the canal water. After the rinse we squeegeed each other by hand then got back into our clothes. David threw the bar of soap into the canal where one of those carp would probably eat it. Then we drove back to the motel. In the room we took turns showering because it wasn't big enough for two. I reminded him to scrub his boy parts carefully, I did the same when it was my turn. By the time we had all the canal crud washed off the sun was almost up and it looked like daytime outside. We were both tired so we closed the curtains and fired up the big AC unit and got in bed. David said there was something like an oily/sandy residue on the shower floor. We both went in the bathroom and looked and saw little drops of brown crud floating in the water in the corner of the shower, there were also grains of sand scattered around too, probably off our feet. There was a brownish powdery layer on the floor that was probably canal silt that got stuck in our hair. Whatever it was it looked gross. When we got in bed the second thing I did was to taste his flesh on his chest and stomach to make sure he got all that crud off his skin. I went down on David and extracted a load for myself, when I was done he did the same to me. We napped for a few hours and got up and went to breakfast at a little greasy spoon diner near the refinery. The chow was good and cooked in front of us. Breakfast burritos, bacon, sausage links, and orange juice (oranges grown in Texas). We were the only guys not carrying hard hats inside that diner. It seemed like a fun bunch of guys, most of them spoke Spanish. It's funny but they assumed the Gringos didn't speak Español, so they tended to be more vulgar but when one of them noticed David chuckle at their comments one of them suggested they clean up their conversation. They were going on about a new supervisor last night and the old tanker they offloaded, which was the same one we worked on too. I wanted to tell them in Spanish that they'd probably never see that tanker again but decided to keep it to myself. ---- We checked out of the motel at 10:50am and left for the Interstate to San Antonio. I had a good feeling about our mission, but we couldn't tell if the prison container was on board this time. If it was they were sailing towards death anyway, this just lessened their time in captivity. We were certain some of the kidnapped kids were used for recreational murder, like prisoners in the Roman Coliseum. Sicko people paying thousands for a healthy kid to torture and kill any way they wished. If I had the money I had today and wasn't married I'd quit my job and spend the rest of my life tracking down people that murdered and tortured for sport, and slit their throats. I'd let them sit there and watch themselves bleed to death, unable to stop the bleeding. Lucky for them it doesn't take long until you passed out after a major blood vessel was sliced. The lady at the motel office was rather curious about our one night stay. They often saw specialty people hired to do something for the refinery, that's what David told her was the reason for our visit but he never elaborated. We drove south on Buddy Lawrence Drive and got back on I-37, then its 140 miles north to San Antonio. When we got on I-10 west of San Antonio that afternoon I felt exhausted and nauseated and asked him to stop in Fredericksburg and get a motel room. During our drive we discussed placement of the device. "Best I can estimate is I placed it about seven to eight feet above where the hull curved. I think that would put it ten feet below water when they left the canal, so it should be around fifteen feet down out on the ocean." "That should work. Was it one clunk or did you hear the magnets hit one at a time?" "It was just one big clunk, I shoved it pretty hard. Then I had to be super careful when I pulled the lanyard so it came out correctly." "Then what?" He asked. "I reached down with both hands and felt the release tabs and dropped the rest of my weights, while I did that I was kicking and felt my flippers hit the side of the tanker, but once the weights fell between my legs I kicked harder for the surface, about three seconds later I crashed into you." "Yeah, we should have planned that a little better." "I agree." I replied. "Should have used a safety rope between us in case the current pulled you under the hull." That exact thought went through my mind while we were swimming to the ship. I reminded him our plan was hurried but the good part was we successfully placed the device, now we had to wait for almost a week to see if it worked. We stopped at a big chain hotel and got four grilled cheese sandwiches across the street at a Village Inn since it was late in the day and most of the area restaurants were closed. We got in bed at 10:15pm after a shower. I licked his tits for a while then nursed on his dick for half an hour then fell asleep with my head on his stomach, his dick near my lips all night. David said almost every time I moved around I'd grab him again and kiss his head. David was disappointed that he couldn't turn the AC any colder than it already was. We could only sleep that night under one sheet. When you're used to sleeping in an ice cold room under heavy blankets, just a sheet just felt wrong. I could tell David was not happy. The room felt like it was 76 degrees and rather humid inside, but outside it was 94 and very muggy. ---- The next day when we checked out he mentioned the room AC and the desk lady said it was an energy saving feature, he said we've stayed there a few times in the past because we took frequent trips on I-10 but we'll never come back since their AC doesn't work. Why even have it? She just smiled at him and acted like she didn't care. He politely asked what her name was, then we left. Walking to the truck David said we'll never stay there again. We stopped for breakfast and later on for lunch and at each stop we threw away another piece of snorkel gear so it was dispersed across the state and gone by the time we got to El Paso. ---- Late that afternoon (5:45pm) we arrived in El Paso and unloaded the truck and went to bed again after a soak in the hot tub. That evening in our dark and cold bedroom I explained in detail what it was like in the blackness beside the ship's hull, going too deep, the fear, the cold water, dropping weights, I admitted I started to panic. He said he heard the clunks when the magnets hit the hull, but it was not like he expected. I raised my arm and looked at my watch which was set to alarm at the exact time the device detonated. I told him it should go off Thursday night just before midnight, but there was a five second delay from alarm time until the thing detonated. We both guessed that if there were no additional engine room explosions the ship should be gone within an hour. We were in bed under the heavy comforter with our heads facing, on our thick pillows. The comforter was pulled up to our arm pits as we softly whispered to each other, maybe two feet apart, laying on our sides in bed. As we talked we sort of took turns caressing each other, adjusting hairs, gently rubbing nipples, caressing shoulders and arms, holding hands. All that time we whispered more about our adventure in Corpus. David said that ship was built in 1991, after the Exxon Valdez wreck, and was built with the newly required double bottom hull, but that was only under the ship. He said if my estimate was correct La Bomba was about seven feet above the curve in the hull, that far back on the ship would put the blast in the engine room, which was the largest open area in the ship aside from the cargo holds. He said he would bet it would 100% for sure sink stern first. They'd lose power early on and probably have enough time to get into lifeboats on the right side. But he said it would probably start to roll too and capsize while going under. He said blasting into the engine compartment meant no pumping, no electricity, and no distress calls on the radio. He said that after the blast they'd start pumping out sea water ballast trying to lighten the ship and slow the sinking, but that would only speed it up because it made the liquid cargo tanks more likely to burst inward making them open to the sea. Hopefully if they had a container full of stolen children on board they'd have the decency to let them out of their cells and put them in life boats too or risk being charged criminally back in Arabia. Certainly one of the crew would speak out. I asked him, "If they did that, and they were rescued by someone's navy, how would they explain having twenty kids on board?" "They could claim they were cargo stowaways, and all the evidence would go down with the ship, only the crew could testify otherwise." About the time we got too tired to talk he rolled over and I scooted close behind him and we slept like two spoons all night. I had my face pressed into the hair on his head most of the night. ---- The next day at work I felt better and David looked rested. I think the fear and panic did something to my soul I wasn't fully over yet. The mental images of getting dragged under that freighter and running out of air were still repeating in my mind. The good part was it never happened but it came close, it was like goin' swimmin' with the Grim Reaper. We talked to the captain about Sinaloa but he said he was still working on a plan but it was going slowly because it was very complicated. We almost needed to make it look like someone other than the US bombed the place, but that required intelligence about the drug trade none of us had, or had access to. "Maybe we should have blasted their factories while we were down there rescuing McKenzie." I told the captain. He looked at me with a rather serious expression, leaned towards me a little and in a rather quiet voice he said, :"If you had, your car fire, they would have found your severed head in it too." We sort of stared in each other's eyes for a moment, and that's when I knew they'd never allow us to attack Los Mochis. ---- The days went by slowly. We spent Wednesday at the gym on Fort Bliss, we ran for two hours, seven miles and we were drenched in sweat and were panting, but David was smiling. I think he was about 85% back to his pre-surgery self. After showers we went back to the airport office and were handed a piece of paper, a copy of a newspaper article. The young Indian girl that shot David was arraigned on all charges and was being tried as an adult, she was moved to the only maximum security prison (in Iowa) that held children, and the doctor was being tried on felony charges and was unable to bond out. Trial was set to start next year and was expected to end up with both of them spending a decade in prison. They were both requesting trial by jury. That evening was the first time I checked tracking on the freighter, it was only 40 miles northeast of West Palm Beach, Florida. They had a little more than one day left. Online I subscribed to headline news from Tulsa just to see, if the sinking made the news if there was any coverage in Oklahoma. That evening David told me he called the national office for the hotel chain and explained the room AC situation and the response we got from the desk clerk, he mentioned her name. They said Marcia's response was wrong and they credited him with one free night and promised to have a tech check the AC unit in that room and discuss the matter with the employees. Then he said he's still not sure he'd ever go back. ---- I had an overall sense of anxiety Thursday when we got out of bed, we used the basement treadmills and got to work two hours late. We reviewed more documents about the survey we did in Idaho and their review of our review. They hired a contractor to replace their perimeter fencing and add more alarm systems and hired a local security designer. Some of those plants were so far away from where they should be they literally had to hire someone with a bulldozer and remove everything they had around the property and start completely over. The smaller plants could do that one section at a time. At lunch time David had more of those lottery cards with him. We ate lunch with some of our coworkers at a restaurant near the airport, we took turns scratching off cards. The bag had fifty cards but we only did fifteen that day, and won five bucks on one, but that was it. David cashed it in at a gas station and bought us two beers in tall cans. ---- Thursday night we connected my laptop to the TV projector in the basement and pulled down the screen. David sat at one end of the sofa and I lay down after he took off his clothes and nursed on him for almost ninety minutes. When I got him close a couple times he softly groaned each time. I felt his thigh muscles tighten when he got near an orgasm. On the screen the freighter appeared as an icon on a map of the central Atlantic Ocean slowly inching northeast towards Gibraltar. Their current location was 300 miles straight east of Bermuda. If I hovered the cursor over the icon a dialog box soon appeared with some information about the ship: coordinates, speed, direction, maritime registry ID number. When I first checked it was 307 miles east of Tucker's Town, Bermuda. We were on the sofa watching the projection screen. I checked my watch just as my alarm chirped. About twenty minutes later the dialog box turned into a blinking question mark. The question mark blinked for a couple minutes then the dialog box returned and said: `Loss of tracking data.' In my mind that meant they lost power on board within 15 minutes. We watched the news headlines but there was never a mention of it. It simply disappeared and that was the end of their story. It never received any mention in Arabia, Texas, or Tulsa. I checked tracking on it for the next week and every day it appeared in the same place (307 miles east of Bermuda) with a question mark blinking beside it. Eventually it disappeared from the map and the online record of their trips back and forth vanished from online databases. It surprised me that I never felt any sense of accomplishment when it vanished from the online maritime records. On one of the maritime industry blogs the Yemen Globe was listed as lost at sea along with its crew and cargo, no known survivors, no information. We ran an anonymous personal ad in the Tulsa World newspaper that said: 'That's what you get for messing with our kids.' We ordered it by mailing them a form and paid in cash. I wondered if anyone noticed, I hoped Detective Shirley noticed. Contact the author: borischenaz gmail