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It's Dolly's Birthday
Chapter 12.
Drummond gets good news and bad news...
"OK," Pete was saying as she ran her fingers over the printout, pointing at various features as she spoke, "This is the latest satellite imagery from the MMREA unit."
She looked around at the faces circling her and sighed. The fight with the Sisterhood and the Mequillar was taking its toll on the TATs. So many new faces.
"For those of you who have never heard of MMREA, it stands for Micro-miniaturized Multiple Radiation-source Emitter Array. Briefly, it sends out radar-like signals on the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Those signals bounce back. And when the signal bounces back, it carries the signature of the materials off which it bounces. The signature of each object is unique. If we have the signature of a particular object on file, we can recognize and locate that object. It is completely passive and completely undetectable. Well, except for the massive burst of radio static, not unlike an electromagnetic pulse weapon, but that's minor.
"Anyway. TATAS (Troll Action Teams Agent Specialist) Dolly is wearing a piece of jewelry that is MMREA-registered. Such being the case, we can locate her. Given a rough idea of where she is, we can pinpoint her location to a particular building and, given time, even to a particular room in a building. The search is done from a satellite. Here is the printout of the final location."
An overhead view of a building. A church. An old church. Drummond took the print from Pete's hand and stared at it, his head cocked to one side.
"This looks awfully familiar," he said. "Can we get a map of where that is?"
"Sure the GPS data is there," Pete slid the computer keyboard around so she could read the keys. "We just ask for a map centered on those coordinates at... say... 300-to-1." She tapped a few keys and watched the display. When she was satisfied with what she saw, she grunted softly and pressed one more key. In a moment, the printer whirred another time and spat out a tongue of paper with a map. A street. Near a body of water... a river. The church was near a larger building -- a warehouse or a factory on one side and a vacant lot on the other, a street in front, and the River in back.
"Son of a bitch!" Drummond exclaimed.
"What? You know it?"
"Sure. And if you guys make one more trip between here and Lunken, so will you. We passed it coming in here. And it's, like, two minutes from my house. It's perfect."
"What do you know about it?" Pete asked for all of them.
"It's an old church whose congregation up and moved out of the neighborhood. Somebody bought it and is rehabbing the building for office space or something. Whoever's doing it must be short on cash, because it's been in the same state -- brick sandblasted, windows and doors boarded up -- for several years. But the area's being gentrified -- as much as you can gentrify a flood plain -- and the property's going to be worth some money some day. If nothing else, the bell foundry next door will need to expand sometime."
"How do we get at it?"
"As near as I can figure, we drive up, get out, and walk in."
"Frontal assault?"
"Over my dead body. Not as long as Dolly's in there."
"What then?"
Drummond sighed. It was a pretty problem. He rocked his head back and stared contemplatively at the ceiling. "OK. We can't go in openly. The cops'd be on us like stink on shit and quick. It's a high crime area with upscale inhabitants -- a real neighborhood of change. The police patrol heavily. And there will be people who'll call them. And doing it at night will do us no good. That area goes 'round the clock. There's always somebody stirring down there.
He looked around at the Trolls, who were watching him expectantly. So many of them so young. The force had changed immensely since Bobbo had taken over command. He no longer recognized every trooper he saw. They were all of a type, tall, muscular, thick-necked -- even the women -- with shorn heads. Shorn heads. Hair cut buzz-short or simply shaven. Why did that strike a chord?
"Of course!" he exclaimed and began to chuckle.
"What?" Pete demanded.
Drummond stood up and gestured for Pete to follow him. She did, the rest of the Trolls trailing along behind. Drummond led the way around the big loft, down aisles between boxes piled ceiling-high, around wooden packing crates and unidentifiable shapes shrouded in tarps and moving quilts. "I kept a lot of stuff just because it was neat and I couldn't stand to see it thrown into a landfill. I never could think of a use for a lot of it, but I just couldn't part with it, hoping that some day it would turn out to be handy. Looks like that little habit of mine is about to pay off." Finally he found what he was looking for and he tore open a box with his bare hands, revealing its contents... yard after yard of fluorescent orange, ripstop parachute nylon.
Pete stopped and took in the sight of the box of fabric. "What th'..." she began, then she got it and began to laugh.
The younger Troll troopers were a little slower on the uptake, and they looked at each other in total puzzlement.