Part 6: The Kidnap Victims
He keeps them focused
on the task ahead of them
and for their own good.
Waiting on the proscenium of the amphitheater classroom in the groom dorms, Duke paced back and forth waiting for all the grooms to settle down. There were over a hundred seats in the classroom and the room was filling up quickly. Full grooms took their places in the front rows and journeyman grooms filled up most of the rest of the auditorium. In the back rows apprentice grooms grabbed what seats they could, and the ones that couldn’t find one milled around in the back waiting to fill up the aisles on each side once everyone else got seated.
Duke was not the only High Lord in attendance either. Jackson McMal and Woodrow Greenway were up on stage with him. Jackson was the Estates’ Administrator and Woodrow was the Estates’ Requisitions Coordinator. Both were Duke’s friends and were helping him get together what he needed to see to the High Council’s request for the abduction of 12 very important women. Once everyone settled down, Duke tested his lapel mike and got the meeting started.
“Good morning my fellow grooms. Yes, I still consider myself a groom, even though I bought my way into becoming a High Lord. You all know the reason I did it so we can skip to the reason we’re all here.
“The High Council has asked me to kidnap and train 12 specific women. They were determined to be significant to the mental well-being of many of the leaders of Tangram-Tessera International. Our High Council wants TTI’s leadership in disarray and has determined that this is the most efficient way to go about causing that disarray. We’ll get to the exact list of who these women are a little later. Everybody here today has some part in this project. There should be between 120 and 150 direct participants here today. The exact number I have calculated that will be necessary to abduct these women will be 144 grooms, including myself. That’s 12 grooms for every one woman. That may seem excessive, but I want to be successful, and I want all of my grooms to come back here alive and healthy. I would rather over saturate a task force than have my men trying to scramble, short-handed, to get the job done.
“Now, not all of those men will be out in the field. Lee, you all know Lee, will be coordinating 54 Intelligence and Communications personnel, 11 of which are full grooms and all the rest are journeymen. These men will give us eyes in the sky, real time intel, logistics support, and electronic superiority.
“The rest of us will be broken up into 14 groups tasked to special purposes. Seven groups will be the primaries who will do the actual abductions. They’ll consist of myself, and 15 full grooms, along with 29 journeymen. Seven other groups will give support on the ground helping to cause diversions and running interference for the primaries. Fourteen journeymen and 31 apprentices will be doing this for us. That utilizes all 26 of our full grooms, 86 of our journeymen and 31 of our apprentices. All of our other grooms will be maintaining the situation here. The few remaining journeymen and most of the apprentices will be doubled up on guard duties making sure that we have a secure facility to return to, and all of our beginner grooms will be preparing the new detention center for the incoming slaves, not to mention the incidental duties that must still be done around here.
“It took months to build, and although we are still putting the finishing touches on it, this detention center will be the state-of-the-art facility to train incoming slaves for years to come. I’ve talked it over with a few of the members of the High Council and although we’re skimming 12 women off the top of TTI in one fell swoop, they have suggested that we can snipe away at other vulnerable spots in their hierarchy of wives, mistresses and daughters for years to come. If we can force them to spend inordinate amounts of time, money and manpower to protect their home-fronts, then they will be less productive as our competition in the business world. This project will be the acid test to show the High Lords and Ladies that we earn our money and privileges.”
With Lee’s tech assistance, mock-ups, from photo intelligence, and floor plans for each assault were shown on the large screen that was lowered from the ceiling. Duke used a laser pointer to give specifics to his briefing.
“Now, let’s get down to some specifics. I’ll be leading task force A. I’ve selected Ben, Robbie and Sergei as my full grooms and for my journeymen I’ve selected Jim, Aaron, Steve, Adrian and Charlie. Because of the potential for an armed response, I’ll be in sniper position one with Jim as my spotter and Ben and Aaron will be my secondary sniper team. We’ll be getting direct, real time intel from Timothy, Lee’s intelligence groom for task force A. We will be going after the O’Connor women, Jackie, the current wife of TTI’s Chairman of the Board, Francis O’Connor, and his two oldest daughters from his first marriage, Malory and Ariel. His third daughter Zoe is too young to take so we’ll be leaving her behind.”
Multiple pictures of each woman came up on the screen, showing the audience the various ways each woman presented herself to the outside world.
“The mansion has a standing guard unit of between eight and twelve, heavily armed ex-military guards at any given time. Lee’s team will give us an exact number the day of the op, so we won’t worry about that until then. That is why I’ve scheduled two sniper teams to cover the infiltration.”
With a floor plan up on the screen, Duke used his laser pointer to give specific directions to his grooms. Little stick-figures, in green, each with a label showing the groom’s name appeared at the appropriate places, showing ingress and egress later on.
“Robbie will go in the front door with Steve as cover, while Sergei will go in through the patio doors with Adrian covering his six. Charlie will enter through the kitchen door and subdue the servants with knock-out darts.”
These figures were shown in yellow on the screen.
“Once we have secured the property, and both Francis and Zoe, we will again use darts containing our capture formula to immobilize the three primary victims. Once restrained for transport and egress, Ben, Jim and Aaron will drive down to the mansion in three ATV’s and pick everybody up. I will be covering any last-minute resistance from my sniper position and I will be picked up on the way out. At that point all 15 of us will rendezvous with a helicopter and that copter will take us to a waiting plane to get us back here.”
On the screen, large portraits of the women appeared.
“This is Jackie. She is 5’5” tall, 28 years old with dyed blonde hair, brown eyes and weighs approximately 120 pounds, with a double-D rack. This second picture is of the oldest daughter, Malory. Malory is also 5’5” but only weighs in at 110 pounds. She wears her brown hair in a short pixie cut and has brown eyes. She is 19 and Ariel is 18. Ariel is only 5’1” and weighs in at 105. She has shoulder length brown hair and brown eyes like her sister’s. Taking these three women is designed to throw the chairman of the board into fits of fury and eventually frustration and depression when no ransom demands will be offered. He is madly obsessed with Jackie and his daughters mean everything in the world to him. You guys can do the math on what his mental state will be after this.
“Lee will have three Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the air over the mansion giving us real time logistics and Timothy will cut all communications out of there like a guillotine on a French noble’s head. Also, Alan and Floyd, will disable the cell towers closest to the house so that we not only have electronic decapitation but actual signal disruption on the ground. After they do that, their diversionary team will be covering the two roads in and out of the area so there will be no surprises from that avenue.
“My teams have been going over this plan since I formed them about two months ago. I’m convinced they’re prepared. Now, does anyone have any questions about this first stage of the abductions?”
From the back of the room an apprentice groom asked, “Duke, you’re a High Lord now, so why are you going out on this mission?”
“First off, we’re stretched a little thin due to the scope of this operation, so another trained man on the ground can’t hurt. Secondly, this project was offered to me by the High Council when I was still a groom, and I’d feel bad playing armchair general back here where it’s safe. Thirdly, I won’t ask any man to do something that I haven’t already done or won’t take the time to do. Personally, I believe in leading by example. And lastly, I have a personal score to settle in all of this. This company, TTI, killed my friend and mentor in a very cruel and unusual way, and I mean to make them suffer. This is a good start at that. Does that answer your question Max?”
“Yes, thank you Duke,” and sitting down he turned to the groom sitting next to him and whispered, “He knew my name!”
His friend replied, “He knows every groom’s name and their bio’s, Max. I’d follow that man to the far side of the moon on no more than a wave and a ‘come on’.”
Back up on stage, Duke waited for other questions and when no one asked, he went on.
“My friend Paul is the leader of task force B. Paul would you come up here and tell everyone about your objectives, introduce your team and explain your plan of attack?”
Paul was the martial arts instructor for the groom corps and although he was 6’4” and 280 pounds, he moved like a big cat, seeming to float up to the stage and take the proffered wireless mike.
“I have been selected to lead task force B. My two full groom partners, Yuri, Giorgi and I have been assigned to take another group of three women. Our intelligence tells us that they will have appointments at a very exclusive spa in a strip mall setting in the Oakbriar Center. We will be abducting Geneva Majan, Leigh Harrelman and Serenity Lipton right in the middle of their mani’s and pedi’s.”
Lee put their pictures up on the screen and Paul went on.
“Geneva is a private flight attendant for the company. She stands 5’6”, weighs approximately 105 pounds, is 26 years old and has collar length brown hair and blue eyes. She is the mistress of one of the members of the board and is stunningly beautiful. Victim number two is Leigh Harrelman, the sister of the CEO of TTI, Phillip Harrelman, and the mistress to the head of TTI’s Human Resources department, Jay Ninevox. Leigh is a model, 5’9” tall, and weighing in at 110 pounds. She is 24 years old and has blonde hair to her shoulders and blue eyes. Number three on my hit parade is Serenity Lipton. Serenity is the reason we have to be very careful with this abduction. She is the mistress of one of the members of the board of directors, one Nikita Petrovich Machinko. Some of you may have heard of the infamous head of the Russian mob on the East coast. He will, without a doubt, have at a minimum of two bodyguards outside the spa and at least one inside. That is why we have an eight-man infiltration team for this. At any rate you can all see how beautiful Serenity is, and I hear she carries Machinko’s nuts in her coat pocket. She’s a hellcat at 5’6” and 120 pounds. Her black hair goes down to the middle of her back and those bangs distract from the raw intelligence behind those 29-year-old predatory blue eyes of hers.
“We will distract the two outside guards with a pair of gorgeous escorts we’ve contracted to be with us on the target date. Actually, we’ve bought them for the entire weekend, so we’ll be sure they don’t back out on us. With this distraction we should be able to slip some knock-out juice into the guards with some long-range darts fired by Brent and Johan, and then Bart and Phillip along with other members of the distraction team will put them nicely back into their limo. At that time, two ambulances will pull up driven by Stan and Teddy. Yuri, Giorgi, Rostov and I will come out of the back of the ambulances in uniform, wheel in three stretchers and once in the door we’ll start darting everyone that’s in there with these automatic dart throwers disguised as the drug boxes paramedics carry. Then we’ll go through the place carefully to make sure there are no witnesses still conscious and when we’re sure our six is covered we’ll load the three women onto the gurneys. We’ll take two in one ambulance and Serenity in the second ambulance. While we’re doing that, Brent and Johan will climb on a pair of motorcycles made-up to look like police motorcycles and they’ll give us an escort all the way to the airport and then a waiting private jet will bring us all home.”
While he talked, Lee’s team put up the appropriate visual aids for everyone in attendance.
“Thank you, Paul. Now on the task force C, led by my friend Miguel. Miguel, would you please come up and tell us about your mission?”
“My team, consisting of myself and two other full grooms, Dave and John, and four journeymen, Ernesto, Bernie, Dan and Tony will be kidnapping one woman, Diane Stennerson. Diane is the oldest of all the women we will be going after. She’s 41. At 5’4”, 120 pounds with blonde hair and green eyes, she is another stunning beauty. She is also probably the most treacherous of the women because she has been the secretary and wife of the chief of TTI’s security for the past 23 years, and he has trained her not to be a liability to him. She can shoot probably better than all but a few of the men in this room, she’s a black belt in several systems, speaks 5 languages, has an IQ bordering on genius and has been a plastic surgeon’s construct all of her adult life. She’s the poster-child for ‘constructed trophy-wife’. I dug up pictures of her from high school and you wouldn’t recognize the woman except for the color of the eyes and the shape of her ears. She’s been remade from the toes up. I’m not sure what Duke has in mind for her, but I wouldn’t want to be the one training her. However, that’s not my job. I just have to take her off the roads, spirit her to a plane and get her back here without losing any of my men. Thank god for A-H-#11 knock-out gas,” and many started to laugh with him.
“At any rate, the plan is to swoop in along her normal route from her mother’s house, who she visits regularly, with a Hercules twin-rotor sky-crane that has an electro-magnet underneath it. We’ll connect to the top of her car and pick her and her car up and fly her into a nearby forest. There, we plan to put her car into the bed of a dirt hauler, fill it up with dirt and debris from a wood-chipper, tarp it and drive her right back here. The ride will be slow, so we’ll have to keep her knocked out for an extended period of time. Luckily, the A-H-#11 is rich in oxygen so we won’t have to dig her out until we get back here.”
Woodrow stepped up and asked, “How are you going to keep such a resourceful woman from escaping while you bury her in the dump truck?”
“Oh, I plan to gas her on the road with a hidden gas bomb. I’ve got it all laid out and it’s worked in all of our computer simulations so far.”
“Okay, thank you Miguel,” said Duke. “Now let’s move on to Dennis who will be leading task force D. Dennis?”
Dennis came bounding up the steps, took the mike and said, “Phyllis Harrelman, wife of the Chief Executive Officer of Tangram-Tessera International, is 23, 5’3” and 110 pounds of constructed trophy wife, with auburn hair, green eyes and a pair of expensive double-D’s. This one being taken, along with his sister will hurt the man.
“Stony, my other full groom, along with my journeymen Arnold, Bill, Fred and Pete will assist me in clearing the four outside guards from the perimeter, entering the house, securing the target, shooting Phillip Harrelman in the foot and staging our egress in one of Harrelman’s vehicles which will take us to our own vehicles parked a few miles away. Dale and Jesus with their four apprentices will be putting up our UAV coverage and covering the roads in and out of the estate and Basil will cause a communications blackout to the whole neighborhood. Any questions?”
“So, you’re saying it’s a straight up military snatch and grab out of the black-ops handbook?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Good enough, so let’s move on to task force E led by George. George?”
“Dmitri, my co-captain and I are leading a large group to fetch two of the women on the list. The first one, Vivian Monroe is the secretary to and mistress of the new TTI CFO. For those who keep up on these things, the new CFO is one Carlson Bonneville. Vivian is a bit older at 37, but again she’s a well-constructed trophy. At 5’4” and 110 to 115 pounds, with short dirty blonde hair and sparkling emerald green eyes she’s very attractive. However, the other one that will be with her is even more beautiful. Amelia Steiner is a lawyer for the company. She specializes in financial concerns, which is why she’ll be hanging around with Vivian when this goes down. Amelia is also the mistress of the Chief Operating Officer, Marcus Mandollen. He’s married but Amelia is his life. She’s 32, 5’4”, 120 and stunningly gorgeous. She has blonde hair to her shoulders with black streaks highlighting it. On her it works. Oh, and the eyes are a sapphire blue to die for. And she’s exceptionally smart too.
“My distraction team, led by Eddie and Richard, will be doing most of the work on this one. We’re going to set a small fire in the building, pull the alarm and as we, Dmitri and I herd Vivian and Amelia out to the back parking lot, my diversion team, in groups of two and dressed like security guards will be herding everyone else out the exits on the opposite side of the building. My primary journeymen, Frank and Bob will be setting off smoke bombs, to cloud the halls, and darting anyone trying to get out the rear exit. When we get the targets out in the parking lot, we’ll dart them with sleeve guns, load them into the SUV that Jesse will be driving and transport them out to the airport. The distraction team will exit out the back and disperse into waiting vehicles hidden in the neighborhood.”
Again, every visual aid was shown up on the big screen so all of them knew how this would play out.
“Thank you, George. Now we’re up to Sam who is leading task force F.”
Before Duke could call him up there, Sam jumped up on the stage and started his briefing.
“Lee, would you come up here too please. As we talked about this directly affects your efforts too.”
Sam was a big man at six-foot and 260 pounds of rock-solid muscle, but Lee was bigger. Lee looked like a soft man at 6’2” and almost 300 pounds, but when you watched him move you could tell there was serious muscle under his fleshy exterior. Lee took the stage with an iPad in his hand and started talking.
“Of the 53 men under my command, I have a coordinator for each task force. Each of them has two apprentices under them and they’ve been drilled as a team, by me, for a couple of months now. I also have a 3-man team to handle the feds, the police and the local emergency response teams. They will handle misdirection and false reports. I also have at least two and usually three pilots sitting at consoles flying UAVs per team or area. Once the distraction teams send them airborne in the field, my men will take control and send all relative data to the primaries on the ground. No one will be able to sneak up on our men without them knowing about it. I will sever all communications except ours in every one of the target areas for at least a 3-mile diameter circle around the areas involved. We will have electronic superiority with one exception.
“Henry Wilkson is my counterpart for TTI and he’s good. He’s not as good as me, much less my teams of electron-pushers, but I cannot discount the man’s talents. His wife Kristi is his surrogate mother. She keeps him fed, cared for and even gives him what little sex he requires. Taking her away from him will cripple him. She’s been with him for well over a decade and he’s totally dependent on her. Rumor has it that he designed a special tracking chip and inserted it under her skin, so he’d know where she was anywhere in the world. That’s our first worry. Sam and I have talked about this so at this point I’ll turn this over to him. Sam?”
“Thanks Lee. Kristi Wilkson is a big woman and not an arm-piece like the other eleven women we’re obtaining. She is not particularly pretty, but she is a handsome woman. Kristi is 5’10” tall, weighs 165 pounds plus or minus 10 or so, has waist length brown hair, thick bushy eyebrows over steel blue eyes and like her husband is very computer literate. She’s 31 and wears glasses.
“My team will pull a Dennis style infiltration, because there are normally only two guards on duty on a 12 on, 12 off schedule, so the three journeymen I have with me, Mike, Dillon and Gus will just break in and then wait for Henry’s trap. He has his house rigged to let intruders in, contain them in special rooms, call for help and then wait for the cavalry to arrive. Knowing this, because we got the plans for his house, we’ll let the traps fall, be prepared to bust through them, and then snag the primary target. Our secondary target will be Henry’s computers and the server farm, on the same property, that houses all of the information needed to run TTI. We plan to make many large holes in his delicate electronics. Our distraction team will have set up some explosives on his personal cell towers and relay stations and when they blow, he should be effectively blind. Our exit strategy is to put a compliantly gassed Kristi into her SUV and drive all of our primaries out of there and to a waiting vehicle to drive us back here.”
“OK, thank you Sam, Lee. Anything else we should know?”
Lee again started speaking. “Before we bring her back here, I’m going to go over her body with every known detector I can buy or make, and we’ll see if his microchip implant can be conveniently dealt with. Other than that, we’re done for now.”
“Thank you, Sam and Lee. And finally, let’s hear from Bruce who is leading task force G to get the last target. Bruce?”
When Bruce took the stage, everyone listened a bit more carefully because of the quality of his voice. There was no nonsense in this man and although he was smaller in stature than most of them at only 5’10” he had a commanding presence.
“My target is Cecelia Gomez, who is a double threat to their board of directors. She is married to one of the board, a man named Bernardo Gomez who loves her very much. However, she is the mistress of another board member named Sanford Sewell, known as Sandy. Cecelia is a 30-year-old, five-foot tall 110-pound brunette with blonde streaks to highlight her long hair. She has brown doe-like eyes and is another one of those stunning beauties.
“Bernardo and Cecelia live in a modest mansion without any guards on station. He has a driver in the mornings and during the day, but there is no protection for her at all. My three journeymen and I will break in, gas him, dart her and make our egress in one of the family cars, like Sam and his team. Geoff, Salvador and their three apprentices will set up just two UAV’s and cover the neighborhood roads for surprises. Like everyone else, one of Lee’s men will sever all communications out of the area and this should be a quick snatch and grab with little to no resistance, although we will be prepared if there is. Thank you.”
Duke stepped up as Bruce left the stage and continued. “Over the next few days, I want all of the team leaders to help me quiz the individual task forces to make sure that we are as ready as possible for this. We will continue our preparations and test training, and everyone should know everyone else’s job, just in case we have to double up. Lee hasn’t given us a green light yet, but when he does, I want to be able to move within one day, so let’s be ready. For the rest of the day today, I want all the team leaders, Lee, Timothy and the others from Lee’s team to start quizzing me and mine so that they have confidence in what we will be doing. Any questions? Any questions about anything?”
Their missions are set.
Preparations have been made
and victims chosen.