Ken Goddard - Double blind

So after carefully strapping him down on the stretcher, taping a series of spinal-cord-protecting pads and blocks around his neck and head, and securing a similar set of pads around his swollen hand, the paramedics radioed the Jasper County sheriff’s deputy that they were transporting a John Doe with serious injuries to Loggerhead City Hospital immediately.

They'd leave it for the cops to figure out the who, what, when, where, why, and how.

When a thoroughly fatigued deputy finally arrived at the scene of Wilbur Boggs's accident — almost an hour later, because a frantically waving woman standing in the middle of the road forced him to stop and assist when she couldn't find her child — he found himself in possession of three significant pieces of information:

First and foremost, he now had four calls waiting, including a report of a man with a gun acting suspiciously outside the local 7-Eleven.

Second, the odds greatly favored the "injured party in a vehicle" situation being a simple, single-party-accident insurance claim requiring little if any investigation on his part.

And finally, a note — written by the reporting party to "whomever it may concern at the Loggerhead City Police Department," and taped to the partially destroyed mailbox — had informed the deputy that the reporting party had to go to work and couldn't wait any longer, so he'd backed the vehicle into his neighbor's covered carport to get it out of the street, and locked the truck so no one could steal it or the boat… and would keep the keys for safekeeping until someone came for them, if that was all right with the police.

Deciding that was perfectly all right with the police as far as he was concerned, especially since there was no such animal as the Loggerhead City Police Department in the first place, the overworked deputy sheriff quickly scribbled the reporting party's address on the note, folded the scrap of paper, stuck it in his notebook, and decided that was enough paperwork for a single-party accident on this particular morning.

As he did so, the deputy had no way of knowing that the emergency room doctor at the local hospital who examined Special Agent Wilbur Boggs, AKA "John Doe," had just ordered him transported to Providence Hospital in nearby Jackson County, where they were better equipped to handle potentially serious head injuries.

The deputy reached for his mike and notified the dispatcher that he was clear on the "injured party in a vehicle" call, and would respond immediately to the "man with a gun acting suspiciously" call — that was, by his calculation, at least twelve miles and a good fifteen minutes away — ideally with some backup, if any of the other units might possibly be available and in the area.

The dispatcher acknowledged the clearance with a chuckle.

Two units responding to a call for a man with a gun, no shots fired, in Jasper County, Oregon, where pretty much every man, woman, and child owned at least one gun, and the entire graveyard shift amounted to three patrol units when everyone was actually on duty?

That would be the day.

At precisely 0700 hours that same Monday morning, eight individuals dressed in jeans, boots, and flannel shirts gathered around a large octagonal table and waited for the waitress/owner to finish putting out the steaming stainless-steel pans filled with scrambled eggs, sausages, fried potatoes, and rolls in the secluded meeting hall.

She examined the buffet table critically, making sure that blue flames still glowed in all of the Sterno® cans, and that she'd provided sufficient plates, cups, and silverware to accommodate the group's needs.

"Okay, fellows, here's the way it works," she announced, scanning the buffet one last time. "The coffee's fresh — forty cups and plenty more where that came from — the food's hot, and the bathroom's clean. You want anything else, more food, coffee, cleanup, whatever, pick up that phone and dial '5.' It may take us a while to get here because my husband and I are all by ourselves today, but one of us will come eventually. If it's important, come get one of us. Otherwise, the place is yours until three, when I've got to start cleaning up for a card game this evening. We built this place off by itself, so feel free to make all the noise you want. Just don't break anything, or it comes out of your deposit."

"We'll be fine." Lt. Colonel John Rustman politely dismissed her, then waited until she retreated down the hill to the small bed-andbreakfast lodge before securing the door.

"Okay." He motioned toward the buffet. "Everybody grab something to eat. This may be your last chance for a decent meal for the next week or so."

Rustman waited until the entire team reassembled around the table with filled plates and cups of coffee. Then he walked over to a four-foot-square piece of black cloth covering a section of the far wall, carefully lifted the bottom edge of the fabric, and pinned it to the upper portion of the wall.

The retired military officer's actions caused one of the men to stop eating and stare at the block letters printed at the top of the suddenly exposed map.

"Jasper County?" Wintersole's voice sounded distinctly cold and foreboding. "You're bringing the operation into your own backyard?"

"That wasn't the original plan," the retired military officer replied evenly as he picked up a wooden pointer, "but some opportunities presented themselves which will provide us with some extremely useful advantages — the primary ones being time and terrain."

Rustman indicated a large circular area in the upper-right-hand corner of the map with the pointer.

"You've been conducting training exercises in this area for the past four weeks. You know the lay of the land, the local fauna and flora, the weather and traffic patterns, and the minimal local law-enforcement patrols."

He moved the pointer to a spot just outside the circle.

"The proposed ambush site is located here" — he tapped the map with the end of the pointer — "twelve klicks out from one of your existing hideaways, and within twenty-five klicks of two others and all but two of your reserve ammo and supply caches… which means we can simply leave all of that material in place.

"The surrounding mountains are high and close together with superb tree cover, which effectively negates any air-search capability. That's not a particularly relevant issue, because the nearest military base is in Klamath Falls, and the air-search capabilities of the local federal and state law-enforcement agencies are extremely limited and otherwise undependable. But we need to be thoughtful about the escape routes in any case, and local terrain might turn out to be a critical factor if we were ever to lose control of the situation.

"The ambush site is a small, mountainside compound near Loggerhead City occupied by an antigovernment, quasi-religious paramilitary group known as the Chosen Brigade of the Seventh Seal. They've been dug into the hills about twenty years waiting for the big curtain to go up. The group consists of approximately fifteen adult males, thirteen adult females, and a handful of kids. None of the adults are known to possess any formal military training, but they've had plenty of time to memorize their library of basic field manuals. All of the adult males hold the self-assigned rank of full colonel, lieutenant colonel, or major. Two young men above the age of fifteen are designated captains, and all of the adult women hold the rank of lieutenant. As far as anyone knows, they have light arms only — shotguns, pistols, and a few scoped hunting rifles — no night-vision gear, a few military surplus grenades that may or may not be functional, and almost certainly some rudimentary traps and trips out on the perimeter, if they haven't all been set off by animals or their own people by now.