“Let’s go. Move your asses, or I’m going to get the spoon on ya!” Grandma Goldie shouted at the throng of people in front of the door. “Something is wrong and that’s my baby out there.”
Once the doorjamb was cleared, they jogged to the workshop. Dante had scooped up Harry so he could go faster. The group barely was able to keep pace with Grandma Goldie, who ran with her large wooden ladle in her hand, forgotten in the worry she felt. They all piled in, seeing that Rob had gone into the back room. His cell phone had been discarded at the picnic table. Anna was the first to get it, and called a halt.
“Cell phones out,” she said.
Ranger whined, looking at Rob. “Go to him.” Anna said, pulling her phone out of her pocket and tossing it on the table. The rest of the group did the same, and everybody who had a radio on them left them there as well. Rob made a hurry up motion from within the doorway, but he hadn’t spoken. They hurried, and when they were all inside the room that hid the lift down to the large basement, he closed the door.
“Dad, where’s Mom at?” Harry asked his father.
Rob fell to his knees and started sobbing. Ranger looked at his human in surprise, then pushed his head under Rob’s hands and head, licking his face.
“They took her,” he said between sobs.
He hadn’t intended on spilling the story. For most of the trip home, he had planned on going along with them, but as he stood in front of his friends and family, the words just came as freely as the tears. They had come to him in worry and fear themselves. They offered to help, to get her back. They would journey through the fire for him, and meet him on the other side of Hell.
Harry was crying, but it was petering out. He understood what his father had said. The bad men, the hated, had taken his mother. They wanted what they had, and worst of all, they wanted the people there too. Harry was extremely bright for a little guy, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out they weren’t going to do that.
“We need to figure out where they took her,” Curt said softly.
“I’m calling Kerry and her boyfriend over,” Goldie announced, then rolled up the door and walked out, rolling it back down behind her.
“Do you think she can help?” Anna asked Steven.
“Kerry? Probably not, but Daniels might be able to,” Steven told her.
“What are you thinking?” Dante asked.
“Get all my guns and gear, when I know where she is, and take her back,” Rob said, sitting on the floor Indian style, his head staring at his feet in his lap.
“Do you want any help with that plan?” Dante asked him.
Rob looked up. The entire group was nodding, even Luis, who had been quiet up until this point. “You can count me in if you’re looking for help.” There was a chorus of me too’s from everyone.
“Until I know where she’s going to be held, I don’t even know what kind of help I need. I will need to visit a storage locker near Booneville before too long though.”
“Rob, is that where you’ve got goodies stashed?” Anna asked.
He nodded.
“If somebody snatched her, somebody from the government,” Andrea said softly, “they probably did it to provoke you into a response. That way they can send all the troops in.”
“I know,” Rob told her. “But if I play their game, we get the same result. I have to be able to get in there and get out without leaving any pecker tracks that lead back to the farm here.”
“I can think of a couple of things that might help. Untraceable ammunition and firearms. I even have some plans for some things that are quite nasty…” Anna told him. “The 3D printer and CNC stuff has just been getting dusty.”
“Nasty things?” Rob asked.
“Face front toward enemy,” Steven told him. “We have the plans.”
“I got that stuff covered,” Rob told him.
The way the men’s jaws dropped would have been funny to others, but Rob was thinking of his son and his wife. His mother and aunt would be joining them soon, hopefully with her new boyfriend with the state police.
“Would it be safe to start researching on the internet where they have been holding people?” Curt asked aloud.
“I doubt it,” Rob told him. “They probably are monitoring everything out here now. Something like that might trip them up that we’re thinking about something.”
Jeff Daniels was fuming. He’d heard the story from Rob and hadn’t doubted it one bit. It was what Rob and the group were planning that left him in hot water, mentally and morally. He knew what they were planning was not legal, but things had escalated so quickly that he wasn’t sure morals and laws held the same weight that they used to.
He’d joked with the tarred and feathered agents that if they didn’t cease operations in the area that hunting permits were going to be handed out. He was now facing a situation where that was about to become reality.
He had three ideas as to where Angelica could have been taken. The first was the camp up near Fort Smith. The second was near the old Japanese internment camp in Kelso, south east of Little Rock near the Mississippi River and the state border. The third was just vague rumors that a camp had been considered at one of the old auxiliary air force bases, but that was again near Fort Smith.
“We have to keep doing things normally here at the farm though,” Rob said. “Dante, I know you offered to help me, but I think I need you to finish the harvest. I’m supposed to be secretly working against everyone here, so we have to keep doing what
