John Campbel parked his rented car in the Loveland Airport's parking lot. In the passenger seat, Jesse Wapati checked his camera bag. Inside, a nice five megapixel digital camera with good zoom waited. Jesse wanted to make sure he could see rivets on the BATF's IA-58 COIN planes. He had already spent most of the last week in the mind-numbing task of reconnoitering the airport and its neighborhood and watching the ground and air traffic surrounding the BATF's six airplanes. Now he was going to get a chance to see them from much closer.
He and Campbel walked into the civil aviation terminal. They approached one of the airplane rental counters. The clerk behind the counter looked up at them with a mildly perturbed expression.
"Hi. I'm John Campbel. I reserved a Cessna one fifty-two for four hours today to practice touch-and-gos."
The clerk checked his reservation computer. He punched a few buttons, looked at the display a little more with a glazed expression of boredom, then turned to an old dot-matrix printer that had started grinding away. After several seconds, the clerk tore a sheet from the printer and placed it in front of Campbel.
"You need to sign here and here. It's currently ten o'clock, so the plane is due back at two-fifteen. You need to fill it up before you return the key or there's a ten dollar per gallon surcharge. Rate's fifty an hour for the rental."
Campbel hurriedly scribbled his name onto the form and took the offered keys. "Nice day for flying, huh?" he asked Jesse as they walked onto the tarmac on an already-warm Wednesday morning.
"Nice day for photography," Wapati replied.
Campbel checked his sheet for the tail number of the aircraft. He scanned the planes on the apron for a couple of minutes before he spotted the right one.
"Here we go. Kinda beat up little thing," he observed as they approached the airplane.
"Yeah. But it's not too obvious, either," Jesse replied.
"I'm gonna give it a pre-flight walk around. Go ahead and get in the left seat so you have a better view."
Jesse opened the door and placed his camera bag inside. He pulled out the digital camera and scanned around the airfield. There we go. He pointed the camera towards the south end of the main runway and zoomed the camera to its maximum.
Near the south end of the runway, on the other side of it, were several twin engined planes in an area fenced off by tall chain link fence. Jesse snapped several pictures before climbing into the plane and across the co-pilot's seat. He shot a couple more pictures before he buckled the lap restraint.
John climbed in a few minutes later. "Find them?"
"They're by the south end of the runway. Looks like just four of them there right now."
"We'll go right past them on the way out. Runway Thirty-four is usually used for take off and landing, so you'll get a few good closeups right before we start rolling down the strip."
Several minutes later, the small plane was taxiing towards the south end of the runway. Jesse continued to watch the fenced-off BATF tarmac, making an inventory of items as they approached.
Four guards patrolling the fence line. Two on the interior. All in BDUs. M16s, body armor, Kevlar helmets. Hmmmm. There's throat mikes -- tac radios. Jesse took a few moments to write some comments in a small note pad, then took the camera and shot a couple more quick shots of the area. Two Hum-Vees parked by a single-wide mobile home outside the perimeter. Four planes, there's room for two more. Three semi-trailers. Two are together on the north side in the perimeter, one more on the south side. Tracked, armored vehicle by the south trailer. Damn, what are those called? Ammo carriers the Army uses to haul shells for self-propelled howitzers. I'll look it up back at The Bunker. There's two more people in coveralls working on one of the planes. Jesse shot a quick picture of the back of one of them as the mechanic walked towards the two trailers parked side-by-side in the northwestern corner of the fenced perimeter. Okay. Those are probably parts, then. Yeah, there's a forklift by the trailers.
Campbel had aligned the Cessna with the runway. They looked around to make sure nothing else was near the runway. Jesse noticed one of the guards was watching the plane, so he kept the camera in his lap. Campbel revved the engine to full power, and the small plane rushed towards the far end of the runway.
Several hours later, after several practice approaches at the nearby Greeley Airport, Campbel had flown back to Loveland. "A couple of touch-and-gos ought to do it for us today. You'll have plenty of opportunity to shoot."
Campbel spent a few moments talking to the control tower of the small airport, then started aligning the Cessna with the runway. Jesse sat forward, making sure he had an unobstructed view of the BATF area as the plane approached. By the time the Cessna had passed the threshold of the runway, Jesse had another dozen pictures. A brief jarring thump signalled a touchdown, and Campbel quickly opened the throttle up and pulled the plane back into the air. As he started circling in a wide left circle to make another approach, he pointed out the cockpit to the south.
"The tower just radioed and told me to hold off on my next approach. The Pucaras are coming home."
Jesse scanned the sky for a few moments before spotting the two aircraft in close formation. They approached the Loveland airport from the south, taking a direct approach over Interstate 25. One plane touched down while the other entered the holding pattern half a lap behind Campbel's Cessna.
"Smile for the camera," Jesse muttered as he snapped a couple of quick pictures of the airborne plane.
A few minutes later, the Cessna again touched down. This time, Campbel slowed the plane down and turned off the runway onto a taxiway, heading for the Union 76 gas pumps.
The IA-58 that had landed ahead of them was at the pumps, filling up on av gas. As they waited for it to finish, Campbel spotted the second Pucara behind them waiting its turn at the fueling station.
"They get their gas here. They don't use a fueling truck?" he wondered aloud.
"Guess not."
After fueling the plane, parking it, and paying for the rental, Campbel and Jesse returned to the rented automobile.
"They're fairly lax, all things considered," Jesse observed. "They don't have a hardened site for the planes, and I didn't see any security other than the guards walking around. The maintenance people looked like contractors. It might be pretty easy getting someone inside the perimeter, if we're smart about it."
"Yeah. That shouldn't be too bad. Same time Friday?"
"No. Let's try earlier. I want to be airborne when the planes leave to see where they head."
Jesse walked into the converted meeting room adjacent to the DJ's booth in The Bunker. Its placement on the inside of the building next to the dance floor made it difficult to eavesdrop from outside the room, especially with the heavily insulated walls. Jimmy the Fixer had chosen this meeting room to be his offices for just that reason.
Jimmy looked up from one end of the table as Jesse walked in. The rest of the team was already there, lost in several small discussions. Martina sat with her chair leaning against the wall, crutches haphazardly discarded on the floor. She was complaining again about the crutches. Michael made a few condescending noises towards her as he continued talking to Ellen. JC and KC were sitting on the other side of the table, talking engines or something. Jimmy's new admin, Alexandra Merced, was standing near the far end of the table, facing away from the door and towards Jimmy. She seemed to be trying to explain something to him. Jesse gave her another appreciative glance: she was about 5' 10" with dark hair to about the middle of her back. Jesse guessed her age as early thirties. She wasn't skinny, but she was fit. She tended to wear skirts that were just above knee length, the better to show off some very nice legs that just screamed "dancer". She was not just fluff, though. She had a competence and a presence that she could turn on at will, and she could make people jump when she wanted them to do something.
Currently, her back was towards him, and he noticed that her hair was gathered with a oval-shaped shiny brass clip. He looked closer at it when he realized that it had an odd pattern on it. A grin crossed his face as he recognized the crossed cannon of the artillery branch.
"Artillery, huh?" he asked.
Alexandra turned around and smiled. "Yup. I commanded a battery of divisional artillery for a few years to pay for my business degree. Sure beat being one of the grunts up on the front, right?"
Jesse grunted. "I was never on the front. My jobs put me a couple days ahead of the front."
Jimmy chimed in, "Artillery? I knew you were in the service."
Alexandra turned back to him, "Yes, artillery. You think a dainty thing like me's too little to be playing with eight inch howitzers and lobbing two hundred pound shells ten miles downrange?"
Jimmy looked stymied for a couple of seconds as he tried to come up with the right answer. He finally shook his head and looked past her at Jesse. "Well, what's news?"
Jesse plugged his digital camera into the large-screen television at the far end of the room. As he dimmed the overhead lights, the conversations in the room stopped. Jesse began his presentation, showing pictures he had taken during the last week of observation.
"The ATF has six of these IA-58US Pucara counter-insurgency planes at the Loveland Airport. They're under guard at all times in a fenced off area by the south end of Runway 16 dash 34, which gives them a very short time to flight once they're armed and warmed up. You can look over the specs of the plane from several sources, so I'll skip the details.
"There are six armed guards inside the perimeter at all times. Four walk the fence, two more wander around the planes. They are lax, but not lazy. Sometimes a couple will stand together and talk, but they keep their eyes out and moving at all times. It looks like three shifts a day. All are armed with M16s with plenty of ammo. They have military-issue fatigues with Kevlar vest and Kevlar helmet. They wear tac radios like we use. The night troops have night vision goggles. I think they're ATF, not military.
"The planes are parked three per row, two rows. They're a little pressed for space, so the second row is blocked off until the front row moves. Inside the perimeter, there's also two semi-trailers that I think are parts trailers on the northwest corner of the lot, with a forklift by them. There's one more trailer on the southwest corner, along with this armored track. What is it called, Alexandra?"
"M992 Field Artillery Ammunition Support Vehicle. Ammo carrier for the self-propelled guns. They're phasing some of them out, since the Army's finally retiring the 203mm guns."
"Okay. That track and the trailer by it are the ordnance storage for these planes. I watched them load ammo for the cannons from the M992, and they pulled some rocket pods and drop tanks from the trailer.
"There's a trailer outside the perimeter that's a ready room. The pilots go in there along with some non-uniformed people -- ATF agents, my guess -- before the flights. They also have two Hum-Vees. They usually keep one by the ready room trailer, the other one usually comes on site from whereever these people stage themselves.
"I couldn't get close enough to the pilots to ID them for certain. I believe they are ex-military working for the ATF, but I couldn't say for sure. They wear standard Air Force flight suits.
"From what I saw over this last week, they run at least some planes on Wednesday and Friday for patrols. Probably getting familiar with the area. Monday mornings they arm the planes and head south. I'd guess they head to Fort Carson in the Springs for livefire training, since I was able to track them visually a ways south of Denver.
"Maintenance comes from some contractors. There are two people from DynCorp who spend Monday through Friday maintaining and tinkering on these birds. There are another six who come in on Mondays to handle ordnance. They're contractors, too," he said as he showed several slides of the contractors with fairly good clarity.
"The new hangar going up on the north end of the civil aviation wing is big enough to park all six planes inside if the weather's bad, but it'll be too tight to do anything with the planes if all six are in there. It looks like there will be a hardened munitions bunker in the corner of the building. All told, it will be a lot harder to get into that hangar once it is finished."
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