The early morning had found Hooker sitting first at Willie’s, and then back at Stella and Manny’s, explaining what had gone down with his sister. By the time the sun had started its predawn lighting of the sunroom, Hooker was done. Stella had barely stuffed a few bites of leftovers into his mouth before he dragged himself to his room. As he sat on his bed, he remembered making a date for Sunday. With his last energy, he yelled to Stella to remind him about Candy and Sunday later in the day. He had no memory of falling back into the bed.
Hours later, Stella checked in. She gently picked up his legs, removed the last sock, and tucked Hooker into bed. As she softly closed the door, she wondered when he had started sleeping commando.
The evening took on an almost festive flavor, as the brainstorming session turned into an all-hands-on-deck sort of affair. The crime boards had been rolled into the large sunroom and flipped over to make room for the tactical maps. Stella had laid out enough food to feed a small army and was still playing catch-up.
“Manny, I don’t think you know John.” Willie pointed to the other officer in a white uniform. “John and Alex over there are technically in-ground fire control out at Moffett Airbase, but they both have extensive explosive and bomb-making experience from their days as Seals.”
“Glad to have you two aboard.”
Manny nodded toward the three men hunkered down with Paul, balancing plates on their knees. “Those three are from the squad that is the fire department interface for the bomb squad. You five probably have a lot in common. All of my expertise was in Nam and Foo Gas.”
“Nasty stuff, Foo Gas. The PD lost a couple of officers to it earlier this year.” He slowly shook his head.
Manny leaned back just a little more. “My boy and I were the consults on the incident.” Manny pointed out Hooker who had awakened and was just coming to the party. His uniform of the day was a crisply ironed white T-shirt, jeans, and bare feet. He was still blinking and trying to get a grasp on who was who.
“Hooker and his Squirt were the ones who finally took down the killer.”
The man slapped his forehead. “Romero. Of course! Sorry, I didn’t make the connection.” He pointed at Hooker and back to Manny. “So the sister is Hooker’s, and would make you...?”
“Someone who would like a chance to meet her...” He thought a moment. “It’s complicated.”
Paul returned to the room. “People, we have a lot to cover and more to figure out. So if you can wind up your sub meetings and clear the decks, we’ll get started in about ten minutes. There are bathrooms in any of the bedrooms. Hooker is up and awake, so that makes three heads for use. If any of you know the way to the basement, the plumbers today plumbed out the bathroom in the area across the garage.”
“Food?” Stella presented a full plate. Hooker’s head swam around and looked at her and then down at the plate. He took the plate and headed back to the dining table.
Stella followed and sat with him. “Do you want some coffee? It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
Hooker slowed his shoveling. He chewed and woke up some more. He wiped at his mouth.
“Who are all these people?”
“Your support team, honey.” She wiped her hand down along the side of his face. The motherly thumb wiped the bit of burrito his napkin had missed. “Willie and Manny were talking this morning and thought it would be best to make an explosive kill. So they invited people who know how to stop or produce just what we need.”
“Which would explain the two Seals out there and Willie?”
She nodded. “Along with a few of the guys from the bomb squad, a couple of firemen, and someone special Dolly arranged.”
Hooker stopped with a fork of food almost in his mouth. He put it down. He looked Stella in the face. Her eyes were dancing between evil and merely mischievous. “Special?” He leaned back and wiped his mouth.
She smiled evilly. “Remember a few years ago, the Shriners were in town, and they couldn’t get the Fire Marshal to sign off on the show because the magic act had a lot of flame and explosions?”
Hooker closed his eyes. He was looking for the answer on the inside of his eyelids. His eyes popped open. “The guy got pissed and took it outside to the Spartan arena and blew it up out there.”
“No.” The quiet voice approached from behind Hooker. “The magician decided to give the show away to anyone who would or could come. It just happened to be over capacity for the stadium. I only blew up the field.” The small man walked around in front of Hooker. “But I did make the elephant and brand new Corvette exchange places in their crates.” He stuck out his hand. “Thomas Thomason—better known as The Great Boombowski.”
Hooker smiled as he remembered the show and the political fallout from it. Three long-time council members never were reelected the next year.
The two men shook. “Very glad to meet you.”
“I could have just as easily made them both disappear.”
“How did Dolly find you?”
“I think it had something to do with telling the local Grand Poobah he would never get a parade permit in this town again if he didn’t find me. It wasn’t hard. His wife and mine are good friends. We live up in Half Moon Bay.”
“So you’re here to make my sister and her friend both disappear.”
“Well, more like a consultant. The heavy pyro-technicians are in there.” He nodded at the other room. “I just do smoke and mirrors. They play with the real stuff. And if I understand the circumstance, we’re going to have to put on one hell of a show.”
Paul called the meeting. Hooker and the magician joined.
“What we know about the group who will be observing is there are somewhere between twenty-five and as many as a hundred of them. They tend to like the near reaches of the salt marshes out near Milpitas and moving west around the end of the bay.” He indicated the location on the smaller map.
“Based on that, and looking for a place we could blow up successfully with some kind of impunity...” He placed his hand on the larger map, which looked more like a large blank sheet of paper with a few markings. “As you can see, there isn’t much here.” He looked up at one of the officers in Navy whites. “John?”
The man stood and stepped to the maps. “Right. What we are looking at was in 1938 an auxiliary air tie-down station for what the Navy believed would be a fleet of about twelve dirigibles. What we got was the Macon, for a short time.
“Originally, there were four of these platforms built out of the slated eight. This is the only one left not plowed over and turned into homes or truck farm. The Navy was still hopeful even after the war and airplanes had proved themselves far more capable than dirigibles. So, for our purposes this month, this is perfect in several ways.”
He turned and pointed to the small square drawn in off to one side of the center. “This is the access hatch at what would have been the bottom of the mooring mast where the dirigible would have been tied. The mast is either long gone or never erected, but I checked this afternoon, and the access hatch is still there and functioning.”
He reached up and curled a sheet over the top of the board. He brushed it out to hang flat. “This is the blueprint of the access area. The door is here, and as you can see, there are no stairs. It’s a ramp. Even a jeep could have been driven down into the warehouse beneath the five-foot thick concrete making up the bomb-proof reinforced pad. The warehouse is about twenty-thousand square feet of space. If the helium tanks had been installed, they were probably removed during the Korean War. We were still using some weather and bombardment spotting balloons back then. So, we have plenty of room to set up a hidden control base and a recovery base where we can spend some time. Any questions?” He pointed to one of the bomb squad.
“What will the Navy let us do out there?”
“The Navy will officially see this as a training mission on an old piece of land and equipment which can be totally destroyed and not impact our mission. In other words, they won’t know squat back in DC, and we aren’t going to tell them.”
One of the firemen raised a finger. “I know the bomb guys are under tight control. What kind of access could we have in the way of material?”
John looked to the other white uniform. “Alex?”
The other officer coughed into his hand in the universal code of every group of men. “C-4.”
The group laughed.
“What about large cannon charge, and maybe something that is a lot faster burning like small arms gun powder and even detonation cord?”
Alex frowned with a questioning look. “I’m sorry, you are...?”
Manny interceded. “Gentlemen, I’d like you all to meet The Great Boombowski.”
One of the firemen laughed and asked, “Was that a real elephant at the Trojan stadium?”
“Clarabelle? All two and a half tons of her. Would you like to come out to the house and muck out her stall? It will remove any doubt you may harbor about her existence.”
They all laughed at the fireman putting up one index finger and crossing it with the other hand.
Alex cleared his throat. “Why cannon charge?”
The small man stepped up to the map. “If I may?”
John stepped back.
Tom circled his hand around the perimeter of the layout map. “Let’s assume we have an audience completely surrounding us. There is nothing worse than to plan for your audience to all be out front, and it turns out you have people also behind or to the side of you. So we will look at a theater in the round, as it were.”
He took one of the push pins and dropped it into his open hand. Slowly he closed the hand. “Now, our master of the illusion is going to be Hooker.” He opened his hand, and there was a small red flower with the pushpin for a center. He took the pin and pushed it into the map. “If I understand things, he will be standing here with a very real shotgun.”
He pulled two more pushpins and waved his hand over them, and they became a pink and yellow flower. “His two lovely assistants will start here and run there.” He pointed at the access.
“When they are about halfway to the disappear point, he will shoot them. At that moment, it is critical to the show. First, everything must blow up, but in a progression. Let me demonstrate.” He shook his body, and in his right hand, a smallish hula-hoop appeared. He shook the hoop, and a small curtain appeared from it.
Stella stepped into the room, carrying a small stand with a top hat sitting upside down on the stand. The magician showed his open palm toward Stella. “Gentlemen, our lovely hostess with the mostess—Stella Romero.” They clapped and laughed.
He held up the hat. “Sorry, but there is no rabbit tonight.” He placed the hoop over and around the stand and lowered it below the top of the stand. Drawing it straight up with the hoop level, he hid the hat. “If we set everything off all at once, this is what it looks like—very uniform—and very unnatural.”
He pointed at Alex. “Admiral.”
Alex smiled. “Thanks for the bump in rank, but it’s just Captain.”
Tom smiled. He knew the rank on the man’s shirt. “There are sixteen-inch cannons on the Mighty Mo. How far can they throw a shell?”
“About twenty miles.”
“When the trigger man pulls the firing cord, is the bullet landing those twenty miles away?” He redrew the hoop strait up.
“No.”
“How long does it take?”
“About forty-five seconds for a class seven gun. Maybe a bit longer out of the Missouri.”
Tom now tilted the ring slightly, and as he raised the edge past the rim of the hat, he started making little bombing sounds that grew larger and larger as more was covered. “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.”
As he finally covered the hat from all watching, there was a flash inside the hat and a billow of white smoke boiled out of the curtain. He let the hoop fall to expose the stand with only a mouse standing on its hind legs and bottom. The hat was gone. He scooped up the mouse, petted it, and threw it in the air. And there was nothing.
“Misdirection, gentlemen.” He turned back to the map with the flowers that were now moved. The two had almost made it to the square.
“As you can see, our fugitives from justice are at a critical point.” Hooker raises his hand cannon and fires.
He claps his hand together. “In the control center, we set off the charges near him. Now, we don’t want to injure our good magician, so we use the slower burning powder used in cannons.” He pointed to Alex, who now smiled and nodded. “This looks like the explosion is coming from his magical hand cannon. The smoke and mirrors of these explosions take place each time he pumps a new round into the gun and fires. The explosion must continue around the perimeter of the kill zone—until there is nothing but fire, smoke, and a lot of noise. Inside the hat is a different story. Once the first round of the ring of fire is established, the doors are opened, and the two can run down. But remember, we must convince the audience of what they saw... really happened. So the last round of explosions must end up covering the trap door, thus sealing the illusion.”
The man stepped back over to the seat just inside the room and sat down.
The room was silent. Every person was walking through what they knew how to do and how it could fit in. Hooker had never seen so many smart people so struck into silence.
John stepped back up to the center and glanced over at the now deadpan Tom. He looked back at the room, and then a quick glance back at the unmoving Tom. Slowly he looked back around the room. “Umm... uh, any questions? Comments?”
“Question?” The younger of the bomb squad members offered.
John nodded.
The man furrowed his brow. “How did you make the hat disappear?” The room looked at the small man.
He opened his mouth and then closed it. And then he simply stated, “Very well, I thought.”
The group laughed at the expense of the young man, but also at the complete showmanship of the magician.
“I think,” John started, “in light of the hour, we have a game plan to start with. If you bombers can get together with Alex, we can work out what we have, what we need, and how to rig it. The Seals can work on the final rigging. Meanwhile, the doors right now are mechanical. So I’ll work on getting them converted to hydraulic or something that will allow them to open and close in a second or two.”
Willie raised his hand. “John, I know where there are about six large rams that would do nicely. They are rated for five-ton so a bank of two on each side should do it. But add a third on each side for safety. This is one act we don’t want to go FUBAR.”
“Great, Will. I’ll have the base maintenance guys drag some power out there. There had to be something at some time, so it can’t be hard.”
As the group started standing, Stella took control. “Saturday lunch is at thirteen-thirty. Those who are feeling their oats and want to help set up the outside canning kitchen, breakfast will be available, any time after oh-seven-hundred.”
She turned on the small magician who still hadn’t moved. He was just happy watching all the commotion. “Okay, Tom, where is the mouse?”
He chuckled silently and pointed at her left apron pocket.
Used to men and their games, she stuck her hand in but pulled it right back out. Her face went from shock to scowl. She pushed her hand back in and drew out a small porcelain mouse sitting up on his hind legs and bottom. She smiled and started to return it.
He put his hand up in the sign of stop. “It’s for Hooker—to keep his eye on the prize.”