“What?” I started to turn to look, but he laid a hand on my arm and said, “Don’t move!” He said it quietly, but the urgency in his voice caused me to freeze.
He raised a dessert menu that was on the table so just his eyes were peeking out over the top. “The guy who just came in and is at the counter, picking up his orders. Don’t look at him. Looks like he’s got quite a bit of food. Becucoup bags. Certainly enough food for several people. More than three. But I recognize him. He’s the brother I didn’t kill.”
Jim kept the menu in front of his face as the guy paid for his food and left. We watched him drive away, turning south as we expected.
We got a room at a motel between Oak Hill and Titusville, fairly close to the house off Lionel Road, and close to a cheap café where we’d be able to get a quick meal when we wanted one.
We drove to Lionel Road and up and down it, checking the area, looking for side roads. We left Fitz in the room. It was afternoon, and he slept most of those away anyway.
We came back to the room, and Jim spent time talking to his boss on the phone, making various requests. I spent most of the time eavesdropping. Eventually, Jim put the phone on speaker, the volume turned way up so I could hear. Jim said that since I was in this, I should be in it all the way. His boss didn’t like the idea one bit, but Jim wasn’t to be denied. I caught onto some of the relationship the two had. The guy may have been Jim’s boss, but Jim had as much say in how things went as the boss did.
Jim had asked me if I wanted to be part of what came next, really involved in what was going to happen, the rough parts, too, and I’d made it clear I was in. Now he was explaining that to his boss. He didn’t get a green light from the guy but didn’t get a red one, either. I guessed the guy just didn’t want any part of the responsibility should things go south.
We spent more time reviewing the satellite images of the house and surroundings. We’d done it before, but Jim insisted we do it again. It wasn’t difficult to locate Jerrod’s aunts’ house. We had the address and simply looked it up. From the satellite view, we confirmed what we’d seen before—there as a short, private road serving four houses and their driveways. We studied the location of the four houses—but this time we were concerned about the surrounding area and looked to familiarize ourselves with it.
It wasn’t good seeing how isolated and secluded that house was: the truth was, it was unnerving. But again, my fears were much more for Jerrod than for myself. I had to wonder how the hell we could get him out of there safely. I just didn’t see how the two of us could do anything with a house tucked away from its neighbors, filled with suicide-minded fanatics of an unknown number. Jim might be good, but that good? It seemed impossible.
I was supposed to be part of the rescue. I couldn’t quite see that, either. I wasn’t worried about being hurt—or killed even—but common sense told me that was a distinct possibility.
I’d been scared before many times before this. Growing up, there’d been times with my father and brothers where my survival hadn’t been at all certain. I’d done what I had to do many times, and I’d survived. If I could manage that when young, I wasn’t afraid to try it now. But the outcome would certainly be iffy. So I should be feeling fear. I’d experienced it first-hand in the past, and I knew it was a natural response to danger. I also understood that you had to continue to think when you were threatened, to act intelligently; you couldn’t just give in and become a trembling lump. I’d overcome my fear and acted when I’d had to in the past. I was sure I would do so again.
Jim was very serious, his mind going a mile a minute; I could see it in his face. “What we really need,” he said, “is time. We need to do surveillance, we need to develop a plan based on what we see, and with a plan in place, we need to get what stuff we’ll require to execute the plan. All that will take time. You’ve bought us some of that with your message to whoever has Jerrod. We now know it’s captors, plural, rather than singular. I think they’ve kept Jerrod alive, and I doubt they’ve killed the aunt all by herself. Both of them are probably still alive. We need to use the time we have efficiently. We’ve already learned where they are; they told us that by inviting us to them. We’ve got a feeling for the landscape there from Google. Now we need to scout out the place in person.”
Some of the stuff he talked about with his boss went way over my head, stuff about armaments and tactics and hardware, using jargon that was indecipherable. They spoke about stuff I only knew a bit if anything about. But overall, Jim asked for some specific stuff to be sent to him at the motel, and he said he had to have it ASAP.
I don’t think I even tasted the food we had that evening; I wasn’t very hungry. Nerves, I guessed. I was excited and scared and ready to go. Jim could see that and told me to take a deep breath and ease back a little. Take my foot off the pedal. We were still a ways off from any action. Our first order of business, reconnaissance, held some small risk, but it was very small, and it should go without incident. However, it was very important. We had to get a feel for where we’d be operating.
There was a Target store in Titusville, and we went there after dinner for things Jim said we’d need and could get locally. That included black-face makeup, insect repellent and black, long-sleeved shirts and long pants. I’d only brought shorts and tees with me, and none of them were dark. Jim said he wished they sold night-vision goggles, but they didn’t. He said we’d have to do without.
We got ready for a night in the woods. Every bit of exposed skin was now blackened, and we’d both been doused in insect repellent. Our clothing was black, and my excitement level was high.
“Nothing’s worse than being huddled down in the woods and having people you’re hiding from nearby, and you’re being eaten alive by mosquitoes and not daring to move your hand to slap them or brush them away,” Jim had told me as he was slathering the stuff all over my exposed skin, and part way up my ankles and arms into my trousers and sleeves.
We went back to the Google satellite images to get another look at the area we were invading, then set out, leaving Fitz in the room. The targeted house was the third of four being served by the long, private road we’d seen. I saw it did have a name: Cedar Lane. It had woods on both sides where it met Lionel Road, and it ran north to south, or really south to north because it started at Lionel Road at its south end and dead-ended at its north end where the fourth house was. The houses were strung out along Cedar Lane on the lane’s east side but weren’t all that close together. Each was separated from its neighbors by thick stands of woods. Jim said they were a mixture of trees, mostly Florida sugar maples and red cedars. He picked the strangest times to tell me stuff like that; maybe he was trying to calm me down.
We found a place to pull off of Lionel Road just short of Cedar Lane, then got out and started walking. It was a dark night. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. We certainly had less chance of being seen, but it was harder for us to see anything, either. If a guard was outside the property, perhaps just into the woods, we’d never see him.
We walked silently along the west side of the lane, which was on the far side from where the houses were. It took a while; the houses were that far apart. When we passed the second one and were about a quarter of the way to the third, which was our target, Jim put a light hand on my arm and nodded to the woods on our side of the lane. We stepped into them, and Jim continued walking, being careful with each step. I did the same. I couldn’t see much of anything below my waist; it was way too dark. I wasn’t scared, really, just nervous and focused, but my heart was beating a lot faster than I’d have liked.
Jim had told me to keep as sharp an eye as possible on the woods on the other side of the road, looking for any people or even any movement. He’d said if I saw anything to stop completely still at that point and hiss at him softly. He was going to do the same if he spotted anything.
Eventually, we came to where we could see the short driveway that led to the aunt’s house off Cedar Lane. It led through a gate, went past the side of the house closest to us and around to the front side of the house. I guessed that was where the front door was, as I couldn’t see one on the side of the house visible to us.
Neither of us had seen or sensed a guard. Jim had told me that the militant sections of terrorist organizations were usually pretty well disciplined and trained, but the fanatics who’d only joined the cause to wreak havoc, kill people and destroy things were not trained so rigorously. They were expendable, he guessed, and no one spent time training them for anything but their mission. The people here, he thought, wouldn’t be expecting any resistance; they didn’t think that anyone knew they were there. Posting sentries day and night had probably never crossed their minds, and if it had, they’d ignored the idea. That made sense because it was unlikely there were enough of them to post that kind of 24-hour guard.
Or, if they were posting one, he felt the person would be in a position inside the grounds. If not, if they were actually in the woods, they most likely would be stationed where they could observe the gate and the front side of the house, which we couldn’t see at all from the other side of Cedar Lane. We were seeing the side and would soon see the back of the house. So, any such guard would be quite a ways from us. We were pretty unlikely to be seen where we were right then, standing back inside the edge of the woods.
However, Jim had told me several times that we had to be sure we weren’t detected. Their mindset was to die a martyr’s death, and a part of it was to kill as many innocents as possible while doing so. They’d have no problem with blowing up the house and everyone in it. We had to be sure we didn’t give them any reason to do that. He’d impressed this on me many times by now. I guessed he wanted me to be sure I understood it.
Now came the tricky part of what we were doing that night, the scary part for me and the perilous part for Jim. My job was to start moving from right where we were then, to slowly make my way ahead, checking the backside of the house and then the far end of the house, the north-facing side. I was to keep going after I’d done that till I came to the fourth house, the last house on Cedar Lane. All the time, I was to stay at least behind the first row of trees. I was to note if I’d seen anyone at all, inside or outside the house, where they were and, if I could tell, whether they were armed or not. I was to wait for Jim to meet up with me there.
Jim was the one who’d be in the greater danger. He was going to backtrack some distance, then cross Cedar Lane and make his way back toward the house, staying deep in the woods, trying to get a look at the other side of the house, which was what I’d come to think as the front side. If there were guards, and they were stationed in the woods, he’d be in real danger. He didn’t have a gun. He had no weapons at all.
He left me and moved off, and almost instantly I could no longer see him. I was really happy to have almost no moon to light him up. Now that I was alone, though, my nerves started acting up. Alone in the woods with a bunch of killers within hearing distance? In a place I’d never been before? At night with about zero visibility? Yeah, I was scared. But I also had a job to do, and I reminded myself Jerrod’s existence could well depend on my doing what I needed to do.
I crept—well, I walked slowly—staying hidden from the house and occasionally peeking through the trees at it. It was a Spanish-style hacienda. Its roof was hidden behind a short wall; I assumed it was flat. Balconies were a decoration at each of the upstairs windows. A more decorative than security-intended short wall, maybe four-feet high, surrounded the property. I caught the faint scent of flowers and imagined there was a garden on the front side of the house. Jim would find out.
It was a large house on a large property. I could see five upstairs windows. If they were matched on the front side of the house, then we could assume there were at least eight bedrooms. I hadn’t known Jerrod’s aunt was rich. But she lived here by herself, and this was way too much house for a single woman. I guessed she’d had a rich husband, maybe had kids, too, but that was in the past; she was alone now.
The short driveway off Cedar Lane began with the front gate, one that had two halves that swung open together like a book being opened. I could see a chain holding the two halves from opening. It was too dark to see whether there was a padlock securing the chain in place, but I assumed there was. Why hang the chain there otherwise?
I moved on. It was difficult walking silently without really being able to see much of the ground ahead of me, but I was walking cautiously so I could feel with each step whether there was anything there before putting my foot down. I kept looking at the house, what I could see of it. There was a hedge on my side of the house, just behind the wall, that was tall enough to obscure most of the downstairs portion of the house. But it wasn’t a very dense hedge, and every now and then I could see places where the hedge didn’t completely mask the house, and I could see a dim light in some of the lower-floor windows. It looked like the light I was seeing didn’t come from the rooms facing the hedge but more likely was seeping into them from a hallway or rooms across a hallway, ones on the front side of the house.
I didn’t see any people, either inside the house or outside. When I moved past the backside of the house I was facing, there was a side yard, perhaps twenty yards wide, and then the wall and more woods. Those woods separated the house from the next one. From the view of the end of the house I had, I saw some dim light in one of the downstairs windows. There was no light showing anywhere upstairs.
I kept going, slowly because my heart was still beating hard enough that I doubted how much use my ears were. I could hear my own blood rushing around, but not much else. Slow, cautious and nervous—that was me.
It seemed a long way, but eventually I could see the next house across Cedar Lane from me, the fourth house from Lionel Road. I stopped, still just back into the trees. This is where Jim had said we’d rendezvous.
Then all I could do was wait. The house I could see had quite a few lights on. It was nothing like Jerrod’s aunt’s house. Having that light helped calm me down. I didn’t feel quite so alone now.
I waited, then waited even more. Jim hadn’t said how long it would take for him to complete his surveillance; he hadn’t known. He said if he was longer than an hour and a half, though, that I should go knock on the door of the house with the lights on and get inside where I’d be safer. He’d given me a phone number, his boss’s, and told me to call him and let him know what was what.
I didn’t have a watch with a lighted dial, but there was enough light splash from the house that I could just make out the time. I checked what it was, then just sat down and waited. I was scared for Jim, even though I trusted him to be safe. He did this sort of thing for a living. He should be okay. But would he be? I desperately didn’t want to hear gunshots. That would mean he’d been seen. It might also mean the house would blow up any minute after that—taking Jerrod with it.
Waiting was really hard, and the longer it was, the worse it was. I told myself to stop checking my watch every few minutes. That wasn’t helping. Instead, I forced myself to think about how we’d go about rescuing Jerrod. And his aunt, of course, but it was Jerrod I was concerned with. We were tight. Really tight. We’d been so for a long time, and we’d gotten closer since I’d been living with them. It might seem strange, like we should be behaving like brothers—and brothers don’t fool around with each other like we did—but that wasn’t really how we were. I mean, yeah, the fooling around part was true, although we didn’t think of it like that. We weren’t fooling. We were in love with each other. There was no question about that. We’d been attracted to each other and in lust before I’d moved in. We’d done a bit of fooling around then, too. But our feelings had grown much deeper with time and being together, and the ‘fooling around’ had become acts of love, where I was as interested in his feelings and emotions and pleasure as I was in my own. I’d wanted to make him happy.
Now, I wanted to keep him alive.
I glanced at my watch. Ninety-six minutes. Longer that the time Jim had given as his limit. I should go. But I didn’t. I sat and waited. Waited some more. Waited.
And then he was there. It had to have been at least two hours. I hadn’t heard him approaching, even though I’d been doing nothing but listening. But he was suddenly standing above me, just all at once, and he sat down next to me.
“Sorry. They didn’t have a guard posted, per se, but someone came out, maybe to stretch his legs. He smoked a cigarette, then just sat for a while before going back inside. He didn’t march around, so I don’t think he was doing anything but getting some air. He stayed inside the wall. The reason it took me so long was because he was looking in my direction when he was smoking, and I couldn’t move for the longest time, not even back farther into the woods. His eyes kept me stationary. I was pretty sure he hadn’t seen me, but any movement might have alerted him. I couldn’t risk it, so I stayed perfectly still.
“Eventually, he went back inside. When he did, I moved. Then I had to make a very wide circle and spend some time looking at the front of the house before getting back here to you. You didn’t call?”
When he’d sat down next to me to tell me all this, I’d grabbed him in a tight hug and hadn’t let go till now. He’d been speaking softly into my ear. With him there, I’d let myself finally feel the fullness of the fear I’d had for him.
Now, I pulled back from him a little and shook my head. “No, I didn’t hear any shots,” I whispered. “It didn’t feel like you’d been caught. So I just waited.”
He grinned. “You never were much for following orders. Good this time that you didn’t. Anyway, I learned what I could. Let’s go back and discuss it. We need to do this again tomorrow, Thursday, both during the day and at night, and then rescue them Friday night.”