There have been a few more changes to make this sit better with my mental image of this world, but most of them probably won't even register with most people. The most notable are likely to be the fact that the defense contractor for Red Mountain is now Emerald City, and Red Mountain is called Red Mountain. There's also a solar farm and solar research facility in Israel that was the cover for a secret Cold War B-52 staging and resupply base that they took over in Ninety Two that's called Emerald City. And their LA hangars are now in the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Center (their operating out of a busy commercial airport never made any sense but I couldn't identify a better alternative until a few days ago) and are owned by another one of their defense contractors, Emerald Air. Oh, and El Castillo is in Arcadia rather than Pasadena now as that works better with Los Alamitos and the girls' school.
Usual disclaimers, no rights to any characters portrayed and this is neither the real world nor a Disney Princess tale.
Chuck, Hank and the others had meetings with Special Operations and Intelligence groups from the United States and their trusted allies about Emerald City's Stealth Helicopter solutions a couple of weeks after the wedding, and as Chuck expected, they had commitments to order a range of Stealth Helicopters from Little Bird size up to Chinook size, plus Stealth Ospreys, from just about all of the people who attended. It was a done deal that they'd be getting orders from these groups, the only unknown was how long it would take them to get the budget approvals to proceed, so they began organising what they'd need to produce the parts for the conversions.
The first things Chuck did was to place priority orders for the specialised Multi-Million dollar fabrication equipment they'd need for the large scale precision fabrication of the titanium and carbon fibre components. At the very least they'd need a couple of hundred sets of the components to do the stealth conversions, but he knew that it would be more than that all up and the terms of the contracts included very harsh penalty clauses if all Stealth Helicopters ordered weren't completed within six months of the original agreement, so they needed to be able to guarantee that they could get all the components fabricated in that time frame. The Eighty odd Million that he invested into the additional plant and equipment may work out to more than the penalties would have been (perhaps not though, which was why he'd stuck it to the Army with the alternative incentive program he got rammed down their throats, he was essentially betting somewhere between Two Hundred to Three Hundred Million Dollars that they'd get every Stealth Helicopter completed before the deadline), but this way they had the equipment to fabricate just about anything needed, which would be of use to them down the track.
He also made arrangements with the manufacturers of the turbines used in the helicopters they were converting. The deal he made with them was that he would be making progress payments as turbines were delivered, but he expected to be getting bulk prices based on the size of the orders that would accumulate over the six months that the project would run, so they'd settle up at the end of the six months on that basis. Some manufacturers just agreed because they were sure that they wouldn't lose on the deal, but half of them were intrigued by his proposal.
As Chuck had said, getting the 145s they used for the trial as cheap as they did had prompted him to look into doing this on a much larger scale, and as 'The Diplomat' (This came out of the Russian Mobster on the rise persona he'd created for the mission where they took down the military auction in Ninety Six and he had made enough of a splash as Dimitri Volkovich that they'd decided that it was worth maintaining the persona for interactions with people in that world. The name had come from the fact that people who questioned why he wasn't picked up with everyone else after one big bust were told that he had diplomatic immunity because he was effectively operating under a Letter of Marque from the leaders of the his country. The kicker was that that was effectively true because he had insisted on having formal documentation authorising him to do this before he'd do anything when Auntie Di first told him to do it on an operation in Ninety Two, and that documentation had been formally, if unofficially, ratified when each new President came into office.), he called on his contacts around the Middle East to locate and buy up whatever inoperable helicopters they could find from the list he gave them, so long as they had sound airframes and were really cheap, as soon as the special ops and intelligence groups confirmed that they'd be ordering stealth helicopters. He also gave them another list of helicopters to look out for that could have damaged airframes so long as they had the latest avionics, if they could be had really cheap. No-one asked why, as they'd heard stories about what happened to people who crossed the Diplomat, they just presumed that he had a really big order to supply helicopters to someone and had a source for cheap turbines for them, so the helicopters would probably be fixed, cleaned up and passed off to his client in quick order.
As he'd expected, there were plenty of these helicopters laying about the Middle East, because being flush with oil money tended to make them rather careless with their toys so there were hundreds of helicopters that had just been discarded and left where they were when they failed. Hell, there were hundreds of helicopters operating and that was only a fraction of what had been discarded. They probably could have just picked them up (and he was sure that they did in many cases, but he required paperwork to show that they'd all been legitimately purchased so they usually took the easy way out and paid the owners a token price to salve their egos and get the paperwork they needed). As soon as his contacts let him know that they'd managed to scrape together enough structurally sound but inoperable helicopters to make up a full plane load for Albert, Chuck flew to Al-Sawda to pick them up. Several more plane loads of helicopters in a similar state over the next six months pretty much cleaned out all of the listed helicopter hulks that could be found in the region. Chuck's spotters were still looking for more like them, but by then they'd picked up every sound and slightly damaged airframe they could get cheap so they didn't expect to be able to find any more than one or two a month after that. They got those helicopters dirt cheap (around Sixty Four Million plus over a Million in fuel costs etc all up to get about two hundred helicopters with sound airframes and another two hundred that were damaged but probably repairable), because most of them had had their turbines, transmissions and other major components destroyed by flying them in sand storms and their owners had no use for them, but the airframes were all they really wanted. Chuck took the two hundred damaged airframes to make up full loads for the planes and get updated avionics for the converted helicopters cheap, so any of the damaged airframes that could be repaired and used for the conversions would be a bonus.
The ones Chuck bought the helicopters through had shipped them to Eilat via circuitous routes, and they were given the impression that they were being on-shipped somewhere else in the world from there on the Diplomat's ships. That was the ultimate plan for the majority of the helicopter hulls, but the first leg only went as far as Al-Sawda in the Arabian Sea so that they could be stripped down and readied for shipping. The times they brought Albert, the Guppy or the Mini Guppies over, they just ran them straight into the hangars there and loaded the helicopters and parts into the plane under cover. If they had one of the ships passing through that part of the world, they'd fill up containers with whatever they had on hand and ship them back to the States by sea. Their people from the Emerald City Facility at Eilat made sure that there was no trail left of what happened to the containers after they arrived in Eilat.
They'd had Lou's brothers running Emerald City at Eilat ever since they were released from their core military service requirements for the Talpiot program, so they had the security of having trusted family members running the facility for them, and through them Emerald City had been accepted as an approved IDF and government contractor in Israel as well as the US. Their father running roughshod over Lou and constantly abusing her for bringing shame on the family had been bad enough, but the final straw was when he falsified that marriage to his friend's son because they loved their little sister and nieces and there was no way that they'd ever allow them to be mistreated by a pig like that, so their father was dead to them when they learned about that. Ben and David had also been friends with Ellie in Arcadia, and to a lesser degree Chuck, Anna and Michael as well, because they had been their only intellectual peers at school. They weren't as close as Lou was to them of course, but they had still missed their friends when they were dragged off to another country against their will like that, so they were happy to be reunited with them, and the fact that they were family now just made it better.
Ben was supposed to be tied into his military service requirements for another couple of years after Lou and the girls went to America, and David would have been locked in for another three years after that, but when Chuck came back over with their mother a couple of days after she went to the States with Lou and the girls they were happy to agree to take over the Emerald City Facility at Eilat. Their mother stayed on in Eilat to oversee the creation of the new Emerald City Research Facility and returned to the States after their weddings four months later when they and their new wives moved to Eilat to take up residence. Their new wives Hanna and Rachel had also been in the Talpiot program and would be working with them at Emerald City, so the Emerald City Research Facility made a big splash when it was announced in February, all the more so when it was revealed that their mother and sister would be working at another Emerald City Research Facility located in the United States.
People in the government had known that this was coming, because the people behind Emerald City had been working hard to get the proof of Luca Palone's dishonest dealings accepted by the government so that Lou and her daughters, and Rebecca as well, would be released to return to the United States. Ever since the proof had been accepted, the government had been bending over backwards to try and ensure that the wronged members of the Palone family would see them as doing everything they could to right the wrongs that had been done to them. They'd had to accept the American government's prior claim to Louisa Palone and that she and her daughters were returning to the United States so that her daughters could grow up knowing their father, and they had no cause to hold Rebecca Palone in Israel, so they couldn't block her returning to the country of her birth with her daughter and granddaughters. They did have a way to hold Ben and David Palone and their fiancés in Israel, but luckily wiser heads prevailed so the path that they followed was to release Ben and David and their fiancés early from the military service requirements of the Talpiot program and agree to change Ben and David's names from Palone to Rabi when they did this for Rebecca, Lou, Charlotte and Charlene. They also convinced the Rabbinical Court that Rebecca had an irrefutable justification to be granted a divorce, then leant hard on Luca Palone to make him give Rebecca a get and sell everything so that she could be given the seventy percent of the family worth that the courts awarded her immediately. Their logic was that they'd already lost one eminent Israeli scientist in Rebecca Rabi and and an extremely promising member of the Talpiot program, so they were working hard to try and avoid losing another four extremely promising Talpiot program members when they had completed their commitments to Israel that were part of the Talpiot program. By the time Ben, David, Hanna and Rachel moved to Eilat to work in the Emerald City Facility, Emerald City had already been awarded a number of significant contracts, with the promise of more down the track, so the future of Emerald City in Israel was looking quite rosy.
Those who weren't privy to what those in the government fighting to keep their links to the six Rabis were though started asking a lot of questions about what was going on in the Palone family which had become so prominent in Israeli scientific circles over the last five or six years. Luca David Palone had been regarded as an eminent orthodox Jewish figure and businessman (even if he did try to affect a more Jewish image by using his middle name most of the time), but Rebecca was even more renowned and valued as a scientist, and all three of their children being accepted into the elite Talpiot program was unprecedented, so for the government to suddenly release Louisa Palone from her military service requirements and allow her and her daughters to leave Israel when she wasn't even halfway through, Rebecca Palone to be granted a divorce, change her name and move back to the United States with her daughter and granddaughters and their two sons to refuse to speak to or about their father made everyone look at Luca Palone and ask what he had done to cause this. Anyone who knew about Luca and his hidebound ultra-orthodox views knew that this had to be related to the fact that their daughter Louisa had been a teenage unwed mother, but the people who were upset about Israel losing Rebecca and Louisa Palone and quite possibly losing a four more promising members of the Talpiot program in Benjamin and David and their wives to be as well because of Luca Palone's actions told quite an interesting story...
This story told of how Luca Palone had demonstrated that born again Jews can be just as fanatical as born again Christians when he rejected his Roman Catholic background and embraced the most radical of the ultra-orthodox beliefs he was being taught by his bitter Jewish maternal grandfather when he was in his twenties... How he had arbitrarily moved the entire family to Israel without allowing even his wife any say in the matter and forced her to leave her position as a respected professor at Caltech in Los Angeles without notice. And how he'd torn his children away from everyone they knew and cared about overnight because he discovered that his teenage daughter had made a minor indiscretion and become pregnant to her best friend, whom she cared a great deal about. Then there was the story of how he and his ultra-orthodox hard liner friends had actually fabricated a case against his wife and children in order to misuse government resources and have strict travel and communications restrictions imposed on them, just to prevent them contacting anyone they'd known back in the United States, which they all naturally and quite justifiably resented and even worse, how he and his ultra-orthodox friends had falsified marriage records for Louisa to one of his friends' sons to try and stop her leaving Israel with her daughters. The falsified marriage records were the last straw for most devout jews, because these things were held sacred in Judaism.
These stories generated quite a bit of concern in Israel once they were verified, because important people who hadn't been part of the proceedings could now see that Israel had little hope of ever enticing Rebecca or Louisa Rabi as they were now known to return, and it was likely to lose another four of its best minds if Benjamin and David Rabi and Benjamin and David's wives to be decided to follow Rebecca and Louisa back to the USA. After that, Ben and David and their new wives were also released from their military service requirements early and Emerald City was made a formally approved IDF and government contractor by the second quarter of Two Thousand and One. Ben, David and their wives were still required to get official approval before they were allowed to travel outside of Israel as they were still bound by the agreements they'd made when they were accepted into the Talpiot program, but the government was bending over backwards to correct the injustices done to them in an effort to entice them to stay in Israel, rather than leave as soon as they were able.
They had no intention of telling anyone of course as all this was making life a lot easier for them, but Ben and David had no great desire to return to America and Hanna and Rachel were Israeli born and bred so they had no wish to leave. Their primary wish had been to get Luca Palone out of their lives and have more access to see Rebecca, Lou and the girls and they had that, and Emerald City had hit the ground running as a prominent government contractor with a number of significant contracts already awarded to it, so life was good. (For them at least, Luca was having a much harder time of it since he'd been forced to divorce Rebecca as he'd had to sell much of what he owned and give Rebecca Seventy Percent of everything, and on top of that his business interests had taken a dive and he'd lost just about all of his friends except for the few hard liners who agreed that he'd had every right to do what he had done to control his family.)
With everyone pitching in, it didn't take more than a day to finish stripping down the helicopters, mount them on the frames that had been made for the purpose in Red Mountain and load them into Albert. Turbines, transmissions and other heavy items were wrapped up and secured on the floor inside the helicopter bodies to keep the weight low. They fitted smaller helicopter airframes in between the rows of larger airframes so that most of the cargo hold was packed.
While the cargo bay was full though, they weren't carrying more than about three quarters of Albert's payload, so the flight home was easy….. Dealing with Auntie Di when they got home was a different matter altogether though, because she went ballistic when Chuck suddenly disappeared and flew off to Israel in with half of the team to dismantle the helicopters and haul them back to the States, and she'd been stewing over it ever since she found out that they were gone.
When she finally stopped to draw breath, Chuck managed to point out that, aside from any extra stealth helicopters they might want for their own group, they stood to make at least Two to Twelve Million profit off each of these helicopters they brought in when they were converted and sold, more if they could get the uprated turbines and such they needed cheap. She'd looked at him calculatingly and asked how many he was planning to keep for their group, obviously running the potential numbers through her head.
"None from of this plane load as we need to fill the existing orders first, we'll take some out of the ones that are coming. I doubt that we'll have any trouble selling however many we get, and this load alone should net us somewhere between a Hundred and forty and Two Hundred and Fifty Million clear."
She grudgingly conceded that this was a good plan and let the matter drop after another dig about the fact that he should have cleared it with her before he took himself and their crew out of the country.
It was easy to add most of the parts for the rest of the stealth helicopters to what they creating for the military, because the SOCOM commander and others had seen the value in their improved transmissions and the like so they overrode the original panel's rulings on that, and they'd had to set up production lines to be able to build enough parts to convert over a hundred helicopters into stealth helicopters for the United States Military alone. It only took the special operations groups and Department of Justice a couple of months to get the budgets approved and sign the contracts to start getting the helicopters converted, but that was enough time to get the extra equipment and set up the production lines they needed to cover the workload. They'd already started converting the first of the ones they picked up by the time the first of the contracts were signed.
As each plane load of dead helicopters came in, Chuck added more uprated turbines to the applicable orders with the turbine manufacturers because the Army was taking all the turbines and transmissions removed from the helicopters in the initial conversion run no questions asked and covering the turbine upgrade costs..… This was because the Army brass were just rubber stamping everything to avoid another reaming like the one they got from everyone over the way their people overseeing the project had refused to allow even a proper demonstration of the stealth helicopters' capabilities, and then trying to impose harsh penalties if all of the stealth helicopter conversions weren't completed and delivered before a set deadline. The fact that the heads of all four services (along with the Secretary of Defense and the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force) actually saw the capabilities of these stealth helicopters with their own eyes before the ones who were supposedly overseeing the project for the military did had been rather embarrassing for the Army, to say the least, so when Chuck pointed out that penalty clause and proposed an incentive plan if they did complete and deliver every Stealth Helicopter before the deadline, the Army was forced to agree to what Chuck proposed.
All the turbines, transmissions and such that they'd pulled out of the four hundred and fifty odd helicopters used for stealth conversions as at the end of the Stealth Helicopter Conversion contract were shipped off to the Army as part of the deal to cover upgrade costs. They were using the Army more than a little there but Chuck was still pissed off about those jumped up idiots on the Army oversight panel's refusal to give any real consideration to what they submitted (after they'd invested most of the Three Hundred and Fifty odd Million and thirteen years of effort that went into Emerald City in the property, plant and equipment needed to set up and run the stealth project for them and fabricate the components for the Stealth Helicopters) and trying to impose that penalty on them, so he decided that a little pay back was in order while he had them over a barrel. A Hundred Million or so wouldn't break the Army, they wasted more than that every month by refusing to get their house in order. Due to the fact that the orders added up to nearly eight hundred uprated turbines, they'd gotten the uprated turbines pretty much at cost, but the incentive plan that the Army had been forced to agree to was that they paid the price differential between the list price of the new uprated turbines and the valuations for the old, tired turbines which were pulled out of every one of the helicopters being converted as part of the Stealth Conversion Project. This worked out to around Hundred and Fifty Thousand per turbine, to be offset by the residual value of the turbines and transmissions pulled out of the helicopters. The Army had tried to be clever too, as the existing Army helicopters that were being used in the stealth conversion program had been selected because they needed expensive turbine and transmission overhauls after operating in Iraq, and they'd also taken advantage of the offer to buy converted Stealth Helicopters from Emerald City for fifteen of the Stealth Helicopters they were getting, but they didn't realise how much they were losing in the deal.
They were delivering the Stealth Helicopters as they were completed and tested, and as Chuck expected this resulted in more orders when people saw what they were capable of. He told his spotters in the Middle East to keep looking for more airframes because as he said to Auntie Di, he was pretty sure they could sell as many as they could make, in time if not as part of the original contracts. In fact they already had more foreign orders waiting on government clearance to sell the stealth helicopters to them.
The production and testing process for the Stealth Helicopters was gruelling, especially when they had to start dipping into the the airframes that needed to be repaired and re-certified before they could be used, but luckily the majority of the repairable airframes only needed minor repairs and the engineers had created the specialised jigs and equipment to do this, so they didn't slow the process down too much. The last of the four hundred and fifty Stealth Helicopters were signed off as completed six months after they started work though, and it was agreed by all and sundry that the Stealth Helicopter Project had been a resounding success. The military, Department of Justice and their allies, and even the CIA were quite impressed with the Stealth Helicopters' performance and accepted that they'd gotten value for money, and Emerald City had made over One Point Eight Billion Dollars in profit from the operation.
By the end of the Stealth Helicopter Conversion contract, the team at Red Mountain had built over four hundred and fifty Stealth Helicopters, about a third for the United States Military and Intelligence Agencies and the rest for their trusted allies. They had completed over two and a half a day on average and that was quite an effort. Chuck had been thinking about this and decided that they deserved to be rewarded for achieving all that in six months.
When the last of the Stealth Helicopters were completed for the contract, Chuck gave everyone working on the project a week off to recover and told them that they ('they' being him) had decided to implement a profit sharing scheme for the Stealth Helicopter conversions. Hank and other eleven who made up the core team that had made the project a success would be getting a quarter of a percent of the profits each, and the others who'd helped fabricate the components and assemble and test the helicopters would each get one tenth that much... and of course that would apply to whatever profit they made off the Stealth Ospreys as well.
John and most of the family laughed at Chuck when he couldn't understand why everyone at Red Mountain was falling all over themselves trying to thank him. Carina eventually sat him down to explain the facts of life to him.
"Chuck, just how much money do you think most people make?"
Chuck started mentally reviewing the pay scales for the on the books personnel that made up their groups. Carina was no fool though, she knew what he was doing so she quickly cut him off.
"No. I said what most people make Chuck! The majority of the personnel who make up these groups of your's are paid at least two to three times what most people make. For that matter your people at Red Mountain are paid more than most too."
She saw the surprise on his face as he processed that and internally breathed a sigh of relief, as it looked like she was getting through to him after all. But it was her turn to be surprised when he said. "I always thought that all that minimum wage bullshit Ellie, Auntie Em, Mom and I had to live with up until Ellie and I finished university was an exception and most people in America lived a lot better than that. The families of everyone we went to school with were all well off, we were the only poor kids at the school."
John laughed at that. "Come on genius, you must have known that you were set up in the one of the best established old money districts in LA to make sure that you and your sister got the best education, as the well established rich people always have the best schools and teachers. Of course everyone you went to school in Acadia with was rich! How can you be so brilliant and so thick at the same time Chuck?"
Sarah cut him off. "That's because whether or not she planned it that way from the start, Auntie Di made sure that Chuck and Ellie never had a chance to fit in so that she could keep her geniuses on tap all the time to work for her Casey! You've been around Chuck for at least fifteen or sixteen years now haven't you?"
"More like eighteen."
She nodded. "And in that time, how often has he been able to go out and be an ordinary guy, have fun and get to know people?"
Casey's jaw dropped as he processed what she was saying and tried to think of a time when Chuck had had a chance to lead anything like an ordinary life. His expression turned grimmer by the minute as he kept coming up blank. There had always been piles of work to do or missions to rush off to, and the closest thing to fun he could remember Chuck having was when he was racing cars or bikes or flying. When they went to a bar or restaurant with the guys after a mission he'd usually just sit there pretending to enjoy himself because he couldn't really relate to the way the others were having fun. Chuck could charm and play just about anyone frighteningly easily, especially women, but that was always in terms of the mission, he couldn't think of a time he'd seen him having a genuinely relaxed, casual conversation or having fun with anyone other than Skip, Jeff, Anna, Lou or the family.
When she saw he'd gotten her point Sarah went on. "When Chuck was trying to explain to me why he fought Auntie Di to make sure he got the Sonics registered for Ellie and the others to use, he mentioned that both he and Ellie have been working eighteen to twenty hours a day for most of the last seventeen years or so... I'm guessing the memories you just went through confirmed that, didn't they?"
He nodded grimly.
"After Chuck casually dropped the bombshell on the plane about you guys spending around a Hundred and Ten Million getting the organisation started back in Ninety and Ninety One, I knew that there was more to this operation than I was being told so I looked into it. By his standards the Ten or Twelve Million he spent to set up Emerald City in Israel in Ninety Two was petty change, but you would have been around when he paid out another Hundred and Forty Million or so to acquire Red Mountain and get it set up in early Ninety Four... When he was twelve! You were also there when he paid out Four Hundred Million to that arms dealer to buy everything at that auction, then turned around and took that back, plus another Three Hundred and Fifty odd Million on top of it off Volkoff in late Ninety Six, just after he turned fifteen. And I dare say you know as well as I do what sort of budgets Captain and then Admiral Carmichael has been managing to keep his special operations and intelligence groups going since Nine Eleven!... so why the hell would you be surprised that Chuck can't understand why the men and women he just gave several years' wages to as a part of the profit sharing scheme that he thought up and implemented to try and do the right thing would be so grateful? He's never had any frame of reference for ordinary people! You and Uncle Bry are probably the closest things to ordinary people he's known most of his life for god's sake and you're hardly ordinary Colonel!"
Casey hung his head in shame as Sarah turned to Chuck. "Honey, what Carina was trying to make you understand is that it's only to be expected that most people are going to be both shocked and extremely grateful to be given Four Hundred and Fifty Thousand Dollars unexpectedly, let alone over Four and a Half Million like Uncle Hank and the others got, because to most people that's an unbelievable fortune. It was the right thing, and a very good thing, to do for the people who made this work for the group, but you gave them one hell of a shock when you did it. Casually telling them that they can expect more yet if the Stealth Osprey project works out probably broke some of them. You have to remember that while you've been routinely dealing in tens or hundreds of millions as you organise these operations around the world and the concerns you've set up to pay for them over the last sixteen years or so, that's just something that most people can't understand..."
Chuck nodded thoughtfully, starting to get the point of what they were saying.
Most of the next half hour was taken up by the others trying to apologise for laughing at him, and asking about what Sarah said about the hours he and Ellie worked.
Later that night Sarah had her own apologies to make to Chuck, because that discussion had made a lot of earlier points fall into line for her too.
Chuck flew up to Red Mountain before dawn the next morning with Sarah to talk to Hank about the matter. Hank was delighted to hear the story of how Sarah had taken John down a peg or two, but he as aghast at what they shared about what Chuck and Ellie's lives had been like. It hit him all the harder because like John he realised that this had been going on right in front of him whenever he'd been working with those two and he'd never taken the time to see it.
They talked to the rest of the guys and everyone agreed to continue on a business as usual basis once they'd had a break. They still had plenty of work to do, fabricating the components for the two dozen Ospreys that they would be converting for the first batch, and maybe another two dozen after that if the Marines and Air Force got budget approval to go ahead. If they got the approval for more, this would most likely be repeated a few more times.
It hadn't been much of a surprise that the Navy, Marines and SOCOM wanted Stealth Ospreys after the modified Ospreys were displayed, because they eclipsed the standard Ospreys in terms of performance and range as well as being far quieter. The fact that new swivelling wing and removable nacelles and tail fins that they created for the Ospreys allowed them to be airlifted in C-5s or even C-17s (though a C-17 could only carry one), and that it took less than an hour to make them flight ready at the destination, meant that squadrons of Ospreys could be ready to deliver troops to the battle areas within an hour or two of the strategic airlift's arrival at the staging area. Very few of the commanders failed to see the value of that and they were pretty much demanding that their Ospreys be converted as soon as they saw the demonstration.
Hank and the team had worked out better ways to implement tilt rotor technology while they were getting the first XV-15 prototype working, and they'd just carried what they'd learned there over to the bigger Ospreys when they acquired the first four wrecks from the AMARC so no real development was required, just fabrication and assembly. They could have built the propfans at Red Mountain, but that would have taken a lot of their resources, and it didn't take much to convince Motor Sich to start gearing up to produce the propfans they wanted for the Ospreys. The initial order of fifty was enough for that, and hearing that the orders could well add up to hundreds of propfans (which was borne out by the fact that hundred and fifty were ordered in the first six months) meant that they made it a priority. Meanwhile, the team got to work building improved titanium transmissions for the Ospreys like they had for the helicopters, and the modified wings that they'd created for them. Once the Stealth Helicopter Conversion Project was completed, they switched the production lines over to fabricating the Stealth Osprey parts...
It was made clear to the Navy, Marines and SOCOM that, thanks to those penalty clauses the Army had had added into the contracts for the Stealth Helicopter Conversion project, work on the Stealth Ospreys would not begin until after the Helicopter Conversion Project was completed, and while they weren't happy about the delay, they understood, it gave them time to organise the Five Hundred Million that had been agreed for the first batch of Stealth Ospreys anyway.
The Stealth Ospreys were looking likely to become a big operation, because the Air Force wanted all of the Ospreys they operated for SOCOM converted to gain to the airlift capability and increased performance and range (and reliability, as they found over time) that the modifications gave as much as the stealth capabilities. So did the Marines, but they eventually agreed to start with just a dozen each for special operations missions, as even that was going to cost Five Hundred Million all up.
Boeing wasn't happy that they were being made to supply new Ospreys without the parts that were fitted for the stealth upgrade, or that the components this defense contractor had created for the conversion were both patented and officially classified as a national security matter, because that meant Boeing couldn't cut them out of the loop and use what they'd developed themselves. The fact that the Navy and Air Force used penalty clauses in the contracts to force them to transfer the agreed value of those omitted parts to the airframes just twisted the knife more.
Rolls Royce weren't happy either, because the Navy and Air Force had used the unreliability of their turbines to cancel their contracts, and made them come up with an agreed buy back plan for the faulty turbines they had supplied as they were being replaced.
Motor Sich on the other hand was quite happy, because they were looking at selling hundreds of their propfans, which was a much needed shot in the arm for their factories.
By the end of the year, they'd converted three batches of two dozen Ospreys, netting another Eight Hundred odd Million in profit for Emerald City, which in turn meant Two Million more for Hank and the core team and another Two Hundred Thousand each for the rest of them. Most of them had sought advice on the best way to invest their money and were doing quite well. Only a few had chosen to take the money and leave Red Mountain (and none of them had been part of the core team), because Chuck and Ellie were good role models for not letting money go to your head. After what they'd gotten for their own small cut of the profits from just the Stealth Conversion projects, everyone at Red Mountain realised that Chuck and Ellie, who owned much of the group's resources and companies between them, had to be worth Billions, but they had never let that effect how they dealt with anyone. So most of their people decided if those two could remain ordinary hard working folk as multi billionaires, they could do the same with their own meagre fortunes.
For all the hustle and bustle around Red Mountain and their clandestine trips to Israel and the Ukraine to get things moving there, the Human Intersect Team had a quiet period over the two or three months following their weddings, they were doing missions for the Spectre group and processing a lot of intel with the Intersect, but actual Intersect missions were few and far between, which let them consolidate Carmichael Industries and put more time into their Spectre work. It also gave Chuck and Sarah the opportunity to establish the Carmichaels as a well known couple in both the west and east coast society circles. There were several reasons for making sure that they were recognised at all of the 'in' places and events on both coasts.
Firstly, it allowed them to use their celebrity status to get them into events around the country without notice. Secondly, it meant that their arguments to keep Sarah away from anything she (all of them really) didn't want to do applied pretty much right across the country. And thirdly, it gave weight to the Carmichaels' back story.
The back story they'd created and established in all the relevant places for Charles Carmichael had him as heir apparent to an east coast old money family. He and his older half sister both had dual citizenship as they'd been born in England (they had both been citizens of the British Territories since Ninety One so it hadn't been difficult for the Piranha to move things around to show that they'd actually been born in Britain), but raised in the States as Chuck's father had been called back to take over the family's business interests when Charles was four. They were orphaned when both their parents were killed in a car crash, but their relatives just punted him off to military school and Ellie off to college after when parents died so they were all each other had left. From there Charles had gone into the Navy's ROTC program at MIT to become a Naval Aviator, following in his father's and big sister's footsteps, but he'd become a Navy SEAL before mustering out of the Navy when his active service was up. While he was serving, he did post graduate studies by distance learning at both Stanford (MBA) and Caltech (technical degrees).
His sister had been in the the Navy ROTC program too, coming down from Harvard to do her ROTC training at MIT. Her own father had disappeared when she was little, so Charles' father had been her Daddy for as long as she could remember and she'd wanted to follow in his footsteps as much as Charles did, but she'd transferred to Naval intelligence after serving a few tours as a carrier pilot.
Sarah Carmichael had a similar background to Ellie, in that her biological father had disappeared when she was young and her mother had found a far better man to replace him, but he came with a daughter from the woman who'd divorced him and got remarried while he was overseas serving their country. So like Ellie, she was in the ROTC program because she was following in her stepfather's footsteps, but her's was Army, not Navy. Charles had first met Sarah through ROTC at MIT when she was coming down from Harvard like Ellie did. They'd hit it off because they were both aviators, even if he was Navy and she was Army, and they'd been together on and off since then, getting married when they met again as he was nearing the end of his active service, they'd actually had a double wedding with his sister.
(Their wedding pictures had been photo-shopped into something they could display in the office, amending their ranks and medals to match their back stories. Jeff, John and Uncle Bry were the only ones who kept their real ranks and none of them kept all their real medals. Chuck worked being a SEAL into his back story to avoid insulting any SEALs who knew him who may see the pictures on display, they would understand why Ellie needed to keep it a secret.)
When he left the Navy, Charles used the majority of the money he'd received from his trust fund when he came of age to fund a major expansion of the company his father had started, Carmichael Industries ( as well as his sister's company, Noble House Consulting, because the Carmichael side of the family had all the money and the ones managing the Carmichael Family Trust wouldn't allow Carmichael money to be bequeathed to the illegitimate stepdaughter... no-one missed the fact that this aspect of the Carmichael family was obviously based on how the Beckman family had treated Emma when she was young), and that was why they were only now becoming prominent in business and Society circles.
This also provided the vehicle to show why the Carmichaels and Nobles always had security people with them for protection. They'd let it get around the security industry that Carmichael Industries had bought out Cinders Security's parent company, Quadling Security, to ensure that they would have security services on demand wherever Carmichael Industries operations or the Carmichaels or Nobles were, so while they still provided security for other clients, Carmichael Industries was now Quadling Security's biggest and highest priority client. It was also publicised that Emerald Air and Nonestic Shipping had been a part of Carmichael Industries since Nineteen Ninety, they had originally been created by his father to serve Carmichael Industries' transport needs but Charles had been steering and growing the businesses since before he started at university (which was true, and also showed that he was quite capable of successfully managing major business concerns).
They had incorporated as much truth as they could into their stories, as Charles Carmichael had completed degrees at MIT, Stanford and Caltech, Ellie and Sarah had completed degrees at Harvard and Rick had completed his logistics degree at Penn State and MBA with the University of Pennsylvania. Ellie and Chuck were Naval Aviators, Sarah and Rick were Army Aviators, Chuck was a SEAL and Rick had been in the Army Rangers, so they just modified their ranks (Ellie and Chuck went down to Commander, Sarah went down to Army Major and Rick went down to a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army) and the dates in their 'public' records and worked in some of the medals that they had been awarded to justify them gaining the ranks they had a little quicker. They also mapped out a history to show how Rick and Ellie had actually met through Chuck when she was on carrier duty in the Gulf and they were serving in Iraq, but she'd transferred to Naval Intelligence after that. Ellie had fun adding the wrinkle that Charles had introduced Rick to her because Sarah was over there flying helicopters for the Army at the time and he wanted to get rid of potential competition for her affections because he thought that Rick was a great guy, Chuck played along with that but maintained that the real reason was that he was sure that his big sister would like Rick as much as he did, which she did. They showed Sarah as starting out as an Army Aviator and serving a tour in the War in Iraq before moving into Army Intelligence and hence the DIA, Ellie and Chuck starting as Navy Aviators and then going to Navy Intelligence and SEALs, and Rick starting as an Army Aviator before going into the Rangers. Sarah was the only one who hadn't actually filled the roles that she was purported to before she joined the group but people would remember her from flight training and operations in the Middle East and it was easy to say that she couldn't talk about what she'd done, she could easily answer any questions anyway if pressed. The common threads of flying, special operations and intelligence, MBAs and the ROTC program (and missing fathers, because Rick's father was gone before he was born too) made it easy to explain why they all got on so well.
The validity of Alex's points about the believability of 'leggy model types' as receptionists in certain types of businesses had been accepted, but they'd created Carmichael Industries and Noble House Consulting as rather upmarket businesses, which made their executives having glamorous leggy model types as assistants rather more believable. So all of the girls except for Alex (who remained as her father's receptionist and assistant) became executive assistants in Carmichael Industries and Noble House. The shopping spree to get them all (including Alex, Maylene and Fi, who were the Carmichael and Noble House receptionists) suitably upmarket corporate wardrobes made a number of exclusive clothing boutiques on Rodeo Drive very happy, because they'd made three or four months' profit in one day. The wardrobe upgrades for Alex, Maylene and Alexis made them rather glamorous for receptionist roles (And Benji, who Phoebe had insisted on having as her receptionist, just as much to piss off John as anything else because Benjie and Alex were a couple now, was rather dashing in his new suits.), but they spun it on the basis of the new owners wanting to have an upmarket professional image for all their businesses, Phoebe and John upgraded their work wardrobes for the same reason.
As with all the multi-layered alternate lives that Chuck had been creating for over sixteen years, these would hold up to just about any scrutiny, they could only get caught out if people from the specific areas their records showed they'd worked at were dragged in to refute that, and they had ways of talking around that as well.
This highlighted another problem though, because while they had over two dozen of the family working in their core Information Dominance group (including Viv, Lottie and Charlie), they only really had Chuck, Anna, Jeff and Skip working in their core cyber group. Lou had changed her focus to different technical areas in Israel, and the while the girls had skills, they'd never really taken to the cyber side of things, preferring to work with Ellie and Emma.
This came out when Sarah came to try and get Chuck to come back to bed one night, but he just pointed out that he still had piles of computer work that he needed to get through. While initially pissed off by this, she saw how he was stressed he was, so she sat down and made him explain what why he had so much work to do. What it came down to was that the demands on them for the high end computer work that they were doing had kept expanding like all their other work, but he hadn't been able to find anyone suitable to help them with the workload. While he was talking, his screen dropped into the screensaver and an animated piranha began swimming around the screen, which brought another discussion they'd had to mind for Sarah. "What about Pete Chuck?"
"What?"
"Pete Tong, the Mongol, he has the skills you need doesn't he?"
"Yeah, but I don't really know the guy, and have you forgotten that he's CIA?"
"Do you trust my judgement Chuck?"
"You know I do!"
"Maybe if I give you some background on my history with Pete this will be easier to understand... you see Aunt Jane introduced me to Pete about seven years ago when I needed serious help to get out of a mess that Graham had dumped me in to try and make me fail a significant mission. Pete found the messages Graham had sent to the ones he had setting this up which indicated that he was planning to use that to argue that I obviously needed closer supervision so that he could force me to do whatever he told me to, because the fact that even though I was still at Harvard, I was already the most successful agent in the CIA wasn't enough for him, he was determined to have me totally under his control. Pete got me out of that mess, and as I've said, he's helped me quite a lot since then. I know Pete, and more to the point, I trust him, at the risk of being melodramatic, I trust him with my life Chuck. So, will you come and talk to him on my say so?"
He pulled her into his arms and kissed her. "Of course!"
She grabbed her phone (neither of them went anywhere without their phones, which was why Chuck made sure they were water and shockproof) and called Pete, setting up a dinner date with her and a friend the following night and asking him not to let anyone at work know about it. Pete had been in the game long enough to understand what she was saying and assured her that it would be just between them. Chuck noted the way that Pete was prepared to trust her enough to not ask any questions about her friend, and thought that that was a good sign.
He kept her in his lap as he sent a message to John, Carina, Zondra, Robin and Auntie Di to say that he and Sarah would be going to DC tomorrow, so presumably John and Zondra would have to come with them.
As expected, John, Carina and Zondra were knocking at the door within five minutes, and Robin wasn't far behind. They had access to get in, but it was partly being polite and partly self protection, because John didn't want to walk in and catch them doing what he'd caught Ellie and Rick doing a couple of times. They were all part of the sleeping set, but came awake at the slightest sign of trouble, like getting a text in the middle of the night.
Of course, they wanted to know what was going on, but Chuck held up a finger with a smile, and sure enough the screen lit up with a very testy Auntie Di sporting a bad case of bed hair in under half a minute. Looking at the assembled group, she grumped. "All right Chuck, you've woken us all up, what's this about?"
Chuck went to answer her but Sarah stayed him with a hand on his arm. "It was my idea Auntie Di, Chuck is spending all night in here because he doesn't have enough people to cover the cyber workload. As his wife, I'm not at all happy about that, so I suggested that we interview a suitable candidate to help with that side of things and have set up a dinner meeting in DC tomorrow night to do so."
"Who is this person and why didn't you tell me that you were having trouble Chuck?"
The second question was answered by the look Chuck directed at the camera and she deflated. "Alright, you did tell me that you didn't have enough people to keep up with the cyber workload and I promised to do what I could to reduce it…. but I couldn't…. but who's this person who just came out of the woodwork?…"
She suddenly realised the significance of the fact that it was Sarah who had set this up. "Not CIA? You can't be serious?"
"I was CIA Auntie Di, so was Uncle Bry, and Uncle Roan and Aunt Jane still are!" She matched her aunt's glare. "Not everyone in the CIA is as bad as Graham, even his own son is a good person!"
There was a snort from the door to the courtyard and Ellie said. "Thank you for that vote of confidence for my husband sis, but I thought we agreed to specify that he was only Ricky's biological father?"
Her reply came from the screen. "You're not helping Eleanora!"
Ellie just shrugged at her as she pulled up a chair and sat down. "What's the problem?"
"Chuck and Sarah are talking about coming to DC to talk to a CIA tech about joining the group!"
Ellie looked at Chuck. "Who?"
"The Mongol."
"Oh... he's good!"
Chuck nodded. "And Sarah's known him for seven years and she trusts him..." He looked up at the screen as he continued. "Which is good enough for me!"
Diane knew that look well, because for the last twenty five years or so it had signalled when her godson refused to budge on an issue, so she sighed. "Couldn't you have led with that?…. No... don't bother answering that! I know that I didn't really give you a chance to, but in my defence, I'm not at my best when people wake me up in the middle of the night telling me that they're going to do something crazy and dangerous. Can I at least get a real name for this Mongol person…. Please?"
"Peter Tong."
"She nodded. Chuck, could you send me through whatever information you have on him please? And as I presume that you'll be waiting until the afternoon to come in order to minimise your exposure in DC, why the hell couldn't this have waited until the morning?"
Ellie answered that. "Because you would have screamed the house down if you found out that we waited to tell you Auntie Di."
"I wouldn't ha…..."
"Oh do be quiet Diane! You know damned well that you would have! Good morning Charles, Sarah, Eleanora, John, Robin, Carina, Zondra."
There were a quick chorus of 'hello's and then he said. "Charles, while I have you on the line… Motor Sich have agreed to the same pricing model for the propfans as you have with the other turbine manufacturers so I'll be..."
Then they were forcibly reminded that Auntie Di was there. "You can talk to Chuck about your questionable business deals some other time Roan, at the moment we've got a serious problem here! Seeing as you're awake and have decided to join this conversation, what do you know about a CIA tech by the name of Peter Tong?"
"Mister Tong is one of the better technical people the CIA has, in fact he is quite possibly the best they have... I've always found him to be exceedingly capable and have never had cause to be dissatisfied with his work..." He paused as he put two and two together and worked out what this was about. "If you steal him away from the CIA Charles, you have to know that Graham will almost certainly go on a rampage!"
Chuck grinned at the screen. "Well the CIA's loss will be our gain Uncle Roan. We don't have him yet mind you but I'll definitely be doing my best to get him!"
Sarah laughed. "All you have to do is convince him that you're the Piranha and he'll follow you anywhere Chuck! I've told you how he hero worships the Piranha!"
John grunted then. "Well if we're going to DC tomorrow, I'm going to go and get some sleep!"
He looked at Chuck. "You can explain to Ellie's mother in law why El Diablo Rojo, Il Martello di Dio, De Blonde Reus and I, plus two dozen of the Cinders team will be disappearing for most of a day on a few hours notice tomorrow!"
"We don't…."
"No! We're not going into Graham's territory without a proper support team!"
Chuck just nodded, because John obviously wasn't going to shift on this and he had to accept the logic of his point. When John went to tell Carina, Zondra and Robin that they may as well go back to bed then, Carina was sound asleep, so he gently picked her up and carried her out, with Zondra getting the doors for them. Chuck shared a smile with Sarah and Ellie at that then looked up at the screen.
"Okay Auntie Di, the details on Pete will be there when you get up in the morning... Night."
There were a round of goodbyes and then they cut the link. Sarah looked at the blank screen musingly as Chuck put together the files on Pete and sent them to Auntie Di. "Chuck?"
She got a distracted "Yeah?" as he was working.
"Do you think that Pete could be like you, Ellie, Auntie Mary, Viv and the girls?"
"What do you mean?"
"I hadn't thought about the time when I called him, but Pete sounded wide awake and there was no delay as if he were waking up…. Auntie Di, Casey, Rob, Red and Zee though, as good as they are, took a few minutes to be really here and were having trouble staying awake once the initial panic was over... well Red didn't manage to…. That just made me wonder whether Pete might be one of you who don't need sleep..."
"I don't know Sweetie, like I said I don't know him past some on-line conversations, but I certainly wouldn't complain if he was, as that'd really help with the workload."
She nodded, then kissed him before climbing out of his lap. "I can see from that look in Ellie's eye that she wants to discuss what this is about but unlike you two I do need sleep, so I'm going to bed. Please come to bed soon Honey!"
He stretched up to kiss her and she started to stumble off to bed, but stopped and turned back with a smile. "Skip should be happy if Pete joins us too."
That just got her a confused look. "Oh... didn't I mention that? Pete is really smart, very nice, rather cute and quite gay!"
Chuck laughed at that. "No, you didn't mention that Sweetie. Well if we can convince him to come across I hope they hit it off, it's about time Skip got a chance to be as happy as Ellie, Anna and I am."
That got him another kiss before she toddled off to bed with a smile.
Chuck quickly filled Ellie in on what Sarah was proposing, and why, then Ellie gave him a hug and sent him off to bed with his wife as she headed back over to her own workroom.
She stopped to think about what Sarah had said about Pete. It would be great to have someone else who didn't need much sleep to share the load with Chuck on the cyber side of things. Anna, Jeff and Skip worked hard, but the fact was Chuck put in more than twice the time anyone else did and probably did three times the work. He had a wife now, he needed a chance to lead something like a normal life!
Thinking about that, she closed the files she had open and went back to bed with her husband, because so did she!
Though mostly asleep by the time Chuck got to bed, Sarah snuggled into him contentedly when he joined her, and he was surprised to find that he slept through until the girls came to get them for their morning run, which Sarah joined them for now. So did Casey, Carina and Zondra most days, but they decided to let sleeping dogs lie that morning.
They had to wait until morning to call in reservations for the restaurant, and they went along with Zondra's suggestion that she come with them to meet Pete so it looked like a double date, and they'd have another gun right there in case the CIA followed him there, so they made the booking for four. John and a couple of the other guys called in bookings as well, so they'd have another eight people in the restaurant for support.
They worked through until lunch, then headed off to Los Alamitos to board the fuelled and readied J Seventy for the flight to Tipton Field.
By the time they arrived at the restaurant, everyone else was in place, and they reported that Pete had arrived and there was no sign of anyone else from the CIA. Chuck, Sarah and Zondra were directed straight to their table and Sarah had fun introducing Pete to his 'blind date' and her new husband. They saw Pete visibly relax when Zondra went to kiss him on the cheek and whispered in his ear "Relax, I'm just here in case you were followed by the CIA, which as far as we can see you haven't been." but it was obvious he was still nervous about something.
Once they'd ordered and were alone, Pete looked nervously at Chuck and Zondra but Sarah assured him that he could say anything in front of them and he nodded. "Sarah… I have to apologise to you, you see I didn't know that you weren't partners with Larkin any more, so when he came to me four or five months ago to get some specialised equipment for an assignment, I got it for him…. I also slept with him because I knew from what you'd told me that you two weren't a couple like all the stories said and… well he was so damned cute!"
They laughed good naturedly at that and Sarah squeezed his hand reassuringly, but he had more to tell them. "A few weeks later though, I found that what Larkin had been getting the equipment for was to steal something from some place called the Intersect Facility. And I found that out because they brought in the device I'd set up for him to find out who the transmission had been sent to. The device was totally fried, whoever created it had been damned good, but I knew that it had gone to a Chuck Bartowski in Los Angeles because I'd set the damned thing up to do it. So I pretended to extract those details from the fried device a bit at a time so that they'd catch Larkin's accomplice at least…. I'm so sorry Sarah, please believe that I would never have helped that bastard if I knew that he wasn't your partner any more!"
He couldn't understand why Sarah and the others were laughing, until Sarah reached over to squeeze his hand reassuringly. "I'm sorry Pete Honey, I think I need to introduce my husband properly, you see Charlie is actually in the game as well, and back in September he was operating under a different name, Chuck Bartowski!"
Pete looked horrified at Chuck but Sarah went on. "No Pete! Chuck was never Larkin's accomplice! Larkin was blackmailing him to cover for him back when they were room mates at Stanford and he had Chuck framed for cheating and expelled just before they were supposed to have graduated, and then slept with the friend who he thought was Chuck's girlfriend, making sure everyone knew about both of those things to try and destroy him. We don't exactly know why Larkin sent that transmission to him, we believe that he was hoping to kill him, or at least severely damage him, because the program that he sent him had killed or brain wiped all of its known test subjects, but the CIA didn't know about the two other people who had managed to survive the experience. Graham sent me after Larkin's accomplice in Los Angeles to retrieve what Larkin had sent him, and you can imagine how shocked I was when I got there and found that this guy was my Charlie!..."
"Anyway, we don't know for sure how much time we have so I'll get to it, Zondra, Casey, Carina, Robin and I" waving to the table where Casey was sitting with Carina and Robin when she said their names "have all been detached from our agencies to work together on a special assignment that's related to what Larkin sent Chuck, that's why you haven't heard from me since September, because I'm not really CIA any more. Chuck and the team in Los Angeles also work on other things for the military and intelligence agencies and Chuck is in charge of their cyber group, but he's only got four people including himself in the core group and they're swamped, so he spends all night every night working and I want my husband with me sometimes at night….."
She paused at the look Pete gave her. "Yes, our marriage is very real Pete, we were kept apart for over eighteen years and we weren't going to be apart again!…. So I suggested someone I knew in the CIA who might be able to help. Chuck agreed that you're quite good… Mongol… so he agreed to let me to call you to set up a talk, and here we are."
Pete was looking nervous again. "How do you know about that name Sarah, for that matter how does he?"
Sarah smiled at him. "Who's your hacker superhero Pete?"
"The Piranha of course, what…."
He stopped when her smile widened into a shit eating grin. "No?"
She just nodded and reached out to take Chuck's hand. "Yep! I always thought that there was something fishy about my Charlie."
He looked at Chuck in disbelief and he nodded with a smile. "I'm afraid so Pete, and by the way, the Lotus, Rosco and Skippy said to say hi. So….. Can we interest you in leaving the CIA and your whole life behind and coming to join us?"
Pete shook his head sadly. "Are you kidding? I'd love to join you, but there's no way that the CIA would ever let me go."
"We haven't worked out all the details yet, but I can guarantee we can get you away from them. The only thing I'm worried about is whether they'll have anyone left who's good enough to track you after you're gone."
Pete looked thoughtful at that. "Sarah said that your cyber group's swamped with work Charlie, do you have room for more people?"
It was Chuck's turn to look thoughtful. "If they can fit in with us, sure, who are you thinking of?"
"Haxman, Gimli and the Krait, if we get them to come too, the CIA wouldn't have any hope of tracking us on-line."
Chuck nodded thoughtfully, because they were all around, or at least close to, Pete and Skip's level, and the Intersect wasn't throwing up any alarms on their hacker or real names. The fact that he actually hadn't known that Gimli or the Krait worked for the CIA was another point in their favour, because that demonstrated serious skill at covering their tracks. "If they're prepared to leave everything behind and start over again with new lives… yeah, we'll definitely make a place for them as well."
Pete pulled out his phone and after Chuck had checked it for bugs, spent the next half hour in whispered discussions. When he was done and no-one else was in earshot, Pete nodded. "They're all in, so how do we do this?"
They quickly finished their meals and settled up, heading back to Tipton Field so that Chuck could get access to the computers he needed to set this up. Chuck had Pete call them all back and get them to pack up and tag the things that they really wanted to keep and make sure they understood how the people coming to pick them up would identify themselves, while he took over a computer to build the case that they would be used to explain why FBI strike teams had broken into the apartments of four CIA technical personnel, ransacking them and taking the techs, computers and other items with them when they left.
Once everything had been set up, Pete rang the others to tell them what was happening and went home, to get ready for when he was arrested by the FBI. Half an hour later, he was wondering what he'd let himself in for when the door of his apartment was smashed in and a few flash bangs were thrown it ahead of what seemed like dozens of masked, black clad figures with lots of guns. He was trying to clear his head when he was thrown to the floor, roughly secured with zip ties and dragged to his feet again, and he could only just tell that it was Sarah's voice that was telling him to act frightened as he pointed to things around the apartment because of the ringing in his ears. He didn't need at act frightened, he was frightened, it was the most terrifying experience he'd ever had!
Sarah dragged him out the door while they were still ripping everything apart, but his apartment had already been trashed as they ransacked it. In the car, he was still trying to clear his head as Sarah released him and anxiously asked him if he was OK, apologising for roughing him up but saying that it had to be believable. He had to laugh at that. "Oh, it was believable alright! I knew the plan but I believed it was real up until I recognised your voice! I understand now why Chuck told me to make sure the others understood what signal you'd be using to identify yourselves, they must have been as terrified as I was!"
All the strikes were done inside an hour, leaving nothing but ransacked apartments with their doors broken in, and once they'd collected the last one, the Krait, they were taken straight to Tipton Field and hustled onto the J Seventy to be flown back to LA. The FBI records showed that they had all been arrested for hacking into highly sensitive military systems and that they and their computers had been handed over to the military. There was no record of what had happened to them after that.
They were all back in LA by the time the CIA found out that their four best computer people had vanished without a trace overnight. When people were sent to their apartments to check on them, they'd all been ransacked and the neighbours all told similar stories about being woken up in the middle of the night by teams of men in black SWAT gear breaking into the men's (and woman's, because the Krait was actually Lizzie Gupta, a young Indian woman who'd been rejected by her family for choosing an occupation that was unsuitable for a good Indian girl) apartments. Some of the neighbours identified the strike teams as FBI, and as Roan had said, Director Graham went on a rampage.
The fact that the FBI couldn't find any records of the operation other than that one of their strike teams (no indication which one) had apparently picked these people and their computers up for hacking into sensitive military systems and turned them over to the military infuriated Graham even more, and he went positively ballistic when he demanded that those people be found and he was told that the ones who disappeared were the only people that the CIA had had who had any chance of doing that.
Graham actually got incensed enough to pick up the phone and call the one person he attributed all his cares and woes to. "Where are my techs Beckman?"
Diane had no trouble acting confused, because she was... techs? Chuck was only supposed to be having initial discussions with one man, so why was Graham talking about losing multiple techs?
"I'm afraid that I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about Director, could you be more clear?"
"Four of the CIA's top technical personnel were grabbed by FBI strike teams on trumped up charges last night and handed over to the military. I want them back!"
"If your people were arrested by the FBI Director, you should be talking to the FBI, not me. What the FBI does has nothing to do with me."
"I've talked to the damned FBI! All their records show is that one of their strike teams, no-one seems to know which one, grabbed my people on some trumped up charges of hacking into sensitive military systems and then turned them over to the military, again no-one seems to know what part of the military. This has you written all over it Beckman and I want my people back!"
"I refuse to discuss this with you any further until you have calmed down Director Graham. I have already told you that I do not know anything about your people disappearing but you just keep making unfounded accusations! If you can't get the answers you want from the FBI, I would suggest that you contact the NSA, DIA or STRATCOM, as they have all the most sensitive military systems. Alternatively, take the matter up with the DNI, but do not attempt to contact me about this again Director, as I shall be instructing my assistants to reject any calls from you until such a time as the DNI has informed me that you are prepared to discuss the matter calmly and rationally, and even then I will be insisting on an impartial arbitrator to be present for any discussions. Good Day!"
She burst out laughing once she'd hung up the phone, then made the effort to compose herself before she called the DNI about the crazy accusations that the Director of the CIA was making in regard to some personnel he'd lost.
When the DNI asked her straight out whether she did have anything to do with the disappearance of those CIA personnel, she paused momentarily, because she'd just realised that she had to kiss her godson the next time she saw him as he had done this without her knowledge... as far as she had known, they were only planning to talk to one man, not make four of Graham's top techs disappear into the ether overnight! "No Sir, I will swear in court if necessary that I had absolutely no part in any operations to arrest or abscond with any CIA personnel… last night."
The DNI paused too, because he knew that he wasn't getting the whole story here, but he also had enough history with her to know that Diane Beckman was no fool, she was one hell of a lot smarter than most people realised, so if she said she was prepared to testify in court to the fact that she had had no part of what happened last night, that was the truth. Now if he'd asked 'do you know anything about' rather than 'did you have anything to do with' the answer may have been different, but there was no way he was going to ask that now, not when he currently had plausible deniability in this matter.
"Very well General Beckman, please inform me if you receive any intel on this matter. I will do what I can to make Director Graham understand that you had no part in what happened to his personnel."
"Thank you Sir."
"Goodbye Diane."
"Bye Mike, talk to you soon."
Once she got off the phone, she hopped up and did a victory dance, singing 'I feel good', something which would have totally shocked 99.999% of the people who thought they knew Old Iron Pants, then sat back down to send the recordings of the last two phone calls to Chuck in LA with a note. 'Thank you Honey. I hadn't realised until Mike asked me whether I'd had part in what happened last night that I could quite honestly testify that I didn't, in fact I didn't even know what really happened.'
A/N: Yes, The Krait is Lizzie from Chuck Versus the Marlin, 'cause she's pretty, petite and Indian, and around the same age as the other major players. The story line is that she chose 'the Krait' as her hacker name because they're Indian snakes that are supposed to be small but deadly.
I had considered Letcher Patel for the Krait, for about 5 seconds, but I think I threw up a little in my mouth and decided NOOOOOO.