Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [73]
“Hello?” Danny picked it up hoping to hear Warren’s voice and then immediately realizing that if he did, that they would all soon be dead instead.
“WHAT THE HELL?!” Warren screamed. “You guys have royally screwed up! You are ALL assigned a condition of CONFUSION! Oh yeah, the security chief is OFF POST!” Danny did not need to say a word. That was the end of the conversation. Warren hung up.
“We are screwed,” Danny said. He was right. They were in fact screwed.
Turns out that Religious Technology Center hired some private investigators to break into the property and “pretend kill” Warren McShane. They were not told how to break in or given any information on the base. They were provided with a picture of Warren and an “X” where his office was located on a crude hand drawn map of the property.
These private investigators weren’t even superfragelistic former criminals or anything. They were a bunch of yahoos that follow people and do your normal P.I. stuff. Well, Security got tested all right. As a result of this disaster, Security got a new truck, new rover bikes, new radios with spare batteries and about ten more security guards. Like that was going to make a difference.
Fire Drill #1
When we came in on the bus, it was like any other day. The only exception was that on this particular day the entire hillside behind the base was on fire!
The base crew were in a frenzy. People had fire hoses out at every building. All buildings on the entire base were being hosed down. By lunch time the fire was still going strong. The fire department had brought in several truck loads of fire crews. These particular firefighters had a unique quality: they were convicted criminals that were used to fight fires. There must have been four or five busloads of these guys right outside the perimeter fence making their way up the mountain. Because of this, the fire drill was turned into a security/intruder drill at the same time and we had people spread out all over the base with radios in case any of the prisoners decided to break into “Desert Disneyland” as they called it.
The state prisoners saved the property and got most of the fire out by the time the sun had gone down. It was actually kind of ironic: here you had the “most ethical people on the planet” and they were being saved by people that had been convicted of crimes serious enough to get them locked up. The fire was now burning on the other side of the mountain and the base was in little danger. The mountain was still smoldering and glowing with a bit of a red hue to it.
Marc Yager, Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messenger organization, had been in the main booth running the fire drill and was telling everyone what to do. At around 8:00 p.m. it looked like several smaller fires had started back up on the hill above the base. From the ground, it looked like there were firefighters near the fires. Marc Yager wanted it checked out. I was asked to go up there and see what the hell was going on. Another guy, Erick, was sent with me. We were given a radio and were told to drive up to the top of the mountain, find out what was happening up there and report back.
We jumped in a Jeep Wagoneer and made our way up Lamb’s Canyon. There was an access road that you could take to Lamb’s Canyon that eventually made its way around the mountain and placed you directly above the base. It took us a bit to get up there. From the top of the mountain, we couldn’t see anything. No fires, no base, no nothing. All we could see was lots of smoke. We would have to run down the front of the mountain a bit before we would be able to see what was happening with the fires. We did. After about five minutes of running, I started puking my guts out. I had, after all, been working a desk job for the last several years and running down mountains in thick smoke was not my specialty. While I stopped and puked, Erick had a chance to catch up.
Finally, we got to the edge of the mountain and we