Power (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 8) Read online

  He looked out through the torn lumber. At the end of the corridor of stalls was a sheet of steel crushing the old wooden wall of the barn. He recognized the source. The steel shredder of the harvester combine, the one he had seen parked alongside the road, was running full speed into the barn.

  Someone had started up the huge and powerful tractor and had crashed it against the wooden barn. In front of Loggerman were ribbed tractor tires as tall as he was, their brutal treads crunching wooden beams like matchsticks.

  Loggerman flattened himself against the earth floor to keep away from the flying wood splinters.

  Behind him, the door to his cell snapped from its walls, skidding across the corridor floor, still upright but cracking as it did so. Machine guns held by the guards and the woman visitor began to spurt rounds at the tractor. A guard screamed in pain as the steel of the harvesting rotating blades chopped into his body and fed him into the internal chopper mechanism.

  The engine idled. Machine guns still chattered.

  “Loggerman.”

  He knew his rescuer. “Ringo!” he called back. “Over here!”

  Far up on the tractor he saw his friend grinning at him.

  He crawled behind the large tire in front of him. He found a metal rung and pulled himself up.

  “Having fun? “ Ringo yelled. “Haw. Haw.”

  Loggerman fell into the passenger seat.

  Ringo ran up the engine and backed the huge tires. Bits of metal flew off the steel of the cab as bullets tried to hit them.

  As the tractor backed, the barn walls fell inward and the roof crashed, bringing the structure down into a mass of timbers. Screams of one of the guards came from beneath. Fire raced through the boards, creating a bonfire. The smell of burning flesh added to the chaos and screams from broken bodies.

  “Got this for you,” hollered Ringo as he tossed Loggerman’s knife back to him. “Found it on a guard I killed. He tried to keep me away from this nice machine. Haw. Haw.”

  “Thanks.” Loggerman said, catching it with his free hand, the other holding the rumbling machine.

  The combine turned to its left, the wheels throwing clods of soil behind. Behind them, the woman guard stood up from the wreckage and aimed her machine gun at the operator cabin. Unfortunately for her, the large spinning wheel was still sliding in her direction. Before she could fire a burst of rounds, her left arm was grasped by the cutter blades. She was pulled into the machine, her horrible terror drowned in the engine roar.

  Loggerman watched, unable to save her if he had really wanted to. The rest of her body disappeared into the internal drive, a splat of blood staining the soil behind.

  The tractor tires gripped the earth. The machine tore into a forest of pines, moving away from the pyre of a barn. When it ran into a large tree, it stopped. The large tires continued to grind into the earth, spitting dirt behind.

  “You go, my friend,” Ringo repeated as he reversed the combine. Loggerman jumped down. “Get to the water ahead. It’s behind those trees, about a mile.”

  The woman from the car ran around the combine fender. She came at Loggerman, a small pistol in her right hand.

  “You die!” she yelled.

  “No, lady,” said Loggerman, calmly staring into her eyes as his right hand thrust his blade into her stomach. As he moved it upward, she snarled, blood spitting from her mouth. She fell to his side, impaled.

  Loggerman moved back, retrieving his Ka-Bar.

  Two more guards appeared in front. The machine was moving forward to the forest. Ringo engaged the front harvester cutters and the blades caught one guard. He was pulled into the conveyors, screaming in pain as his arms and head parted from the trunk of his body.

  The other man, seeing the horrible death of his associate, stood back from the cutter and threw his body at Loggerman, hollering threats. Again, Loggerman, with precision, stabbed his knife into the man’s left eye, then cut down the side of his face into his neck.

  The man fell back into a sitting position in the dirt beside the harvester, holding his bloody head as his life flowed out to the ground.

  Behind them the barn was an inferno. “More guards will come,” Ringo said. He climbed down from the combine. “Let’s go. Haw. Haw.”

  The woods grew thicker. Ahead of them were only black trees, some of their top-most branches and leaves illuminated with flashes of the roaring fire behind.

  “You would have gone up like a torch if I had not got there.”

  “You know it. I owe you my life.”

  “The captain planned it. I left him and Doctor Mike in the boat. He just said, “They got him up there somewhere. They come up from their boat. You find a way to get him rescued.”

  Ringo ran farther, dodging trees, “They went to the Tinker boat. Nobody there. They sank it. Doctor Mike, she’s a determined lady. You should have seen her chopping through the fiberglass hull with her axe. Wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her. Haw. Haw.”

  After they had run for a few minutes, Ringo came to an opening in the line of trees. The Bertram was before them, idling, its water jets gurgling in the shallow water of a creek.

  Doctor Mike splashed in the water to get to Loggerman. He clasped her tightly.

  “You turn up in the damndest places,” he smiled.

  Captain Jimmy waved from aboard. “We got work to do,” he said. “You best get aboard.”

  As he sped the engines, they moved quietly away on the water.

  Loggerman looked at him and asked, “Stephanie?”

  “They found her. The others know where she is.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Bertram handled well in the shallow water. Captain Jimmy kept the engines at low revolutions to makes less noise. The boat’s running lights were also turned off.

  Captain Jimmy said as he steered, “No need to make us a target in this narrow water. We got shorelines not more than fifty feet on either side of the boat.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “We knew you were giving a speech tonight. We brought the Bertram up the harbor to a convenient mooring by the museum submarine. She’s kept there for the tourists. Then I went over to the conference center and got a ticket. So many angry people in front of the door. Some for and some against and nobody happy. Anyway I went inside. In the lobby I saw this lady with red hair wearing a necklace of a black and white dog. She looked like the doctor you told me about. I followed her in and sat behind her. When the trouble started, I went up to her. I said to her, ‘Are you the vet doctor from River Sunday?’ ”

  He laughed at Doctor Mike, “You didn’t know what to do.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course the place was so jammed with upset people, I had no other place to go.”

  “I told her who I was and a friend of Loggerman. She smiled and said, ‘We got to save him, Captain.’ So I brought Doctor Mike with me from the theater.”

  Her paused, adjusting the steering to starboard. “Now then, I had my people back at the boat. They spotted Loggerman being dragged to a boat. They called me. Afterwards, it was just a matter of following them. They weren’t much sailors. One time they ran aground and we had to stay back and hide. We followed them to the landing near the barn.”

  “So I got to drive the big tractor, too,” grinned Ringo.

  “Hold on,” said the captain.

  A light beamed out over the water from the shoreline on the left. The light moved across the water and picked up the silver foam of the Bertram wake. Captain Jimmy shut down the engine and the foam from the jet water pumps disappeared.

  He whispered, “The guy on the shore may think the fluorescence of our wake is from a fish or one of these double heads swim around here.”

  Ringo added in a low voice, “It’s a small stingray swims around these rivers. Makes quite a splash, I think. Haw haw.”

  The flashlight stayed on for a few more minutes, searching the shoreline on the side where it was located.

  “He’s looking for
something or someone.”

  The light went out. Captain Jimmy waited for a few minutes. He throttled the engine jets as quietly as possible.

  The river grew much wider and they were able to move along at a good speed in the channel. They did not see any other boats. Starlight glinted off the roofs of distant farmhouses among the trees along the shore.

  With a roar, a red and white Coast Guard helicopter stopped and hovered over the Bertram.

  “Must be friends. If he was an enemy we’d be dead by now.”

  Captain Jimmy was able to see a large shadowy boat anchored in the distance.

  “Now we got real trouble.”

  A searchlight from about a hundred yards ahead flashed on the Bertram. A voice announced “US Coast Guard.”

  Captain Jimmy called back, “We’re friends.”

  “Stand by. We’ll board.”

  A rubber raft with a light pulled up beside the Bertram. A uniformed sailor threw a line and stepped aboard.

  He looked around, saw Loggerman, and asked his name.

  “Loggerman.”

  “Follow us. We have been searching for you.”

  They came alongside a Coast Guard patrol craft about fifty feet long. Loggerman noted the ship’s lights revealed an M60 machine gun mounted on the foredeck. The Bertram made fast. The four of them were brought aboard and escorted below to a small sitting room which the Guard sailors referred to as the survivors’ compartment. They sat in the jump seats.

  A captain in camouflage dress, well tanned, and with a short haircut, said, “I’m Anderson. Let’s get you some coffee.” Another Coast Guard soldier came in with cups, served them, and went back upstairs.

  Loggerman sipped his coffee and looked at his own captain. “Jimmy, maybe we should get one of the Coast Guard motor boats to race over on the Niger River.”

  Captain Jim grinned. “Order one with the M60, too.”

  Several persons stood along the sides of the room. Anderson introduced them. First was a woman, gray haired and in white summer pantsuit, who introduced herself as Deputy Collins of the Department of Energy. Eddison stood next to her and the commander of the patrol boat.

  “Ringo got you clear of those bastards,” Anderson said to Loggerman with a grin. “First project done ok,”

  “Glad to see you’re free,” the familiar voice of Eddison said.

  Loggerman tried to scrape some of the mud and blood off his left arm. “I’m damned glad to get clear of those goons.” He stopped cleaning and looked at Eddison, “Once I saw Tinker start to fall, I figured out why I was standing next to him. They had me. The whole thing was fixed.”

  “They promised you your daughter and Ferrars never intended to come through,” Eddison said. “Unfortunately, you were blackmailed. These people are good.” He went on, “Don’t worry. We have security video from the convention hall. You are cleared from being blamed for killing him. The police say it was the woman, Elizabeth.”

  Loggerman nodded. “I figured she was in on it.” He paused, thinking back. He remembered the hands pushing him into Tinker. He had felt those hands before.

  “When I was trapped in the barn, I heard Ferrars’s speech. My captors played it loud enough for me back in my little cell.” He made fists. “These people are evil. I’m sick Stephanie is involved with any of them.”

  Eddison, in his patient voice, explained, “You got it right. I’m sorry, too. However, if it’s any consolation, Tinker may not have been as nasty as the others. Maybe it’s why they killed him. He might have made trouble if he knew about the plans of Ferrars.

  “We think he thought the members of the Tinker Institute joined up out of interest in the people. Ferrars and the others did the espionage and blackmail behind his back. Tinker only wanted a political change in the laws, perhaps a way to get more free energy or fuel to the poor. In other words, he wasn’t in this for the money. The others wanted money. On top of all this, Cole was a drunk. So we think he was ambushed, and made a hero to the followers.”

  Collins, the Energy official, spoke up. “In the wrong hands, the Tinker Institute is a very powerful threat to the nation. They are compromising the energy system and grids. We suspect key employees at these electric firms and grids are blackmailed by the espionage work of trained volunteer men and women. These volunteers send home information for the Tinker computers to manipulate, disable company grids, and change the codes so the companies can’t get them repaired. Some very sophisticated software is set up for the Tinker Institute to use.”

  “The volunteers like my daughter are part of an intelligence gathering system?”

  “The FBI thinks so. Even with all the security plans these companies may have, the human element is always the weakest part.”

  “You’re telling me the people working inside the plants were spied on to get computer information.”

  “Key personnel are the targets. These are engineers who have access to the internal computerized programs to turn the power on and off.”

  Loggerman remembered the accountant’s fiendish grin at the street reception in River Sunday. Whithers had grinned when he said, “All they had to do was turn a switch.”

  Eddison said, “So, to review, spies find the key to the local grid. They return the secrets to the Tinker computer system. The Tinker management can turn on and off the local grid as they wish. The local company is powerless. Somehow the Tinker computers can lock the local codes form being corrected. It then becomes a powerful control of the local firm.”

  Eddison hesitated. “The President considers this an attack on the country, a form of cyber-warfare. The President is preparing for Ferrars’ demand to come to his office. We are working on a way to fight Ferrars. If Ferrars is made powerless, the blackmail is over. If not, he will hold out for a lot of money.”

  “How do the protesters know where to assemble, what energy facility will be hit?”

  “Volunteers operate Tinker offices across the country. We think they are directed from River Sunday. Remember the barn building?”

  “The one I entered.”

  “It’s like a war. All over the country. Ferrars and his people can shut down the electric grids. Most of the country will be in darkness.”

  The Deputy said, “It’s blackmail of the worst kind. We’ll be forced to pay this Ferrars’s price to get the grids back in action. We surmise his program will be to threaten to shut down a great number of electricity providers throughout the country. He will want the government to agree to reimburse these firms to maintain a free energy program. He’ll have his propaganda going and the free energy fans, millions of them, will be on his side, will go into the streets so to speak.

  “Unless the government agrees, he will continue to keep the country lights out, at least in the parts Ferrars controls. By the time we find a solution to the blackmail and the sabotaged computer grids, the country will be in severe trouble.

  “What’s in it for Ferrars and his gang? Think of the money paid to an electric provider. Part of the money will go to the Tinker Institute so supposedly supervising the compliance. You can bet a lot will go into the pockets of Ferrars. So, our only choice is to destroy his blackmail. We need to stop those computers he has in River Sunday.”

  “I’m beginning to understand,” said Loggerman. “We have to get the computers. The same ones I hacked before.”

  “You named your poison. You are the only one who knows the layout. You know how to get in there and not tip them off.”

  Loggerman looked around the room. “I’ll need some computer experts.”

  Anderson raised his hand and said, “We have a Coast Guard special team to go with you. They will download the computers and provide military backup. They know their stuff.”

  Eddison continued, “We could just blow up the whole place. However, the Tinker computers might be rigged to set off all the grids. So we have to go in here and shut it down before Ferrars and the others find out.”

  Eddison said, “Once it’s done, we
can invade the town. We have regular troops prepared. We hope you’ll be able to download the data on those machines. We need the volunteer lists so we can eradicate the volunteer networks. We need the bank accounts Ferrars operates with Tinker Institute money. We can seize their money and holdings - essentially put them out of business.”

  Doctor Mike added, “You should also know. I called Father John. He said Scotty had been killed and his girls kidnapped. My brother knew about the treatment of young girls up there. They will be hostages but maybe more. You might be able to free them.”

  “Hostages, hopefully, I think,” said Eddison. “These people would keep hostages for use if their plans run into trouble.

  “Here’s the immediate plan. We have located your daughter, Stephanie. We think you and Doctor Mike can get to her and convince her to help us. We think she can guide us into the barn to shut down the computers. She’s been there since childhood and we think she can help to guide your team on the computers.”

  “Suppose she won’t do it? These kids are very loyal to Cole Tinker.”

  “You’ll have to convince her.”

  Loggerman said, “What is her assignment?”

  “The cutter will take you back to Baltimore. Doctor Mike and you will enter the city and find her at her place of employment. When you return to the Coast Guard, we will bring you back across the Chesapeake Bay to the River Sunday area. You’ll enter the area of River Sunday in your own boat quietly to avoid any guards in the area. Our patrol boat is too big. Besides, you have a jet boat drive for the shallow water. You’ll carry the special attack team Anderson has assembled.

  “You will enter the compound secretly and disable the computers with or without your daughter’s assistance. After you enter the computer section and insure the computers are under control, you’ll report to us. We will attack the town and the compound.”

  Eddison nodded to the Coast Guard officer.

  Loggerman looked into Doctor Mikes eyes as the engines of the cutter began to rumble.

  “We’ll convince her,” she said to him in the stubborn voice he admired.