The party broke up and everyone went their different ways, slipping back after darkness fell. All of them had taken advantage of their parents' equipment, and were ready for anything. All were wearing face paint and camouflage. You wouldn't have been able to see them if you weren't looking specifically for them, and the Cobra troopers had no idea what to look for, except for maybe a couple of brightly colored pieces of clothing.
Some of the girls had intentionally done laundry, hanging it outside in the backyards to dry. It was spooky enough, and threw many a Cobra off, especially after a slight breeze began to blow.
Trini had actually done the unspeakable- she'd washed her dad's jeans. NOBODY washed Cross-Country's jeans but himself; not even his wife, Alyssa, messed with them. She and Trini would throw them into a pile for him to do, but that was the most they had to do with them.
"Trini! You got a death wish or something?" AJ yelled, laughing, as she hung her laundry up across the back fence from Trini.
"I was born with a death wish, AJ!" Trini yelled back, also laughing.
The younger Joe teens, with Sydney in charge, had already snuck off of the base and were out at the old fort in the woods, getting everything ready for the older ones, and taking care of the weaponry until the older teens got there. They flipped the switches charging the laser cannons, gathered the mortar rounds and filled magazines of ammo for the incoming teams, adults and teens.
After breaking up into pairs and heading for their targets, each of the older teens reflects on what was going to happen when their parents found out that it was their own children that were rescuing them. There was one odd man out, but she worked better alone than in a pair.
AJ just knew that her dad was going to kill her and her brother. Trini knew that she'd be grounded till she was fifty at the rate she was going.
Christine was thinking along the same lines as AJ, the same as most of the other kids were thinking.
Ericka felt the same as the other two, and so did Serena Armbruster, Rance Steinberg, Ritchie Provost, his twin sister Cheyenne, and Chelsey Wilkinson.
Jamie, on the other hand, didn't really care what happened afterward. She was dead any way you looked at the situation, so she figured that she had nothing to lose by putting herself at risk and into the middle of the trouble.
She was also playing mind games with the Cobras, rigging the base intercom to the radio in her jeep, playing off-beat and odd songs at the oddest moments and keeping them guessing where and when the next song was going to be. She'd burned a CD of midi files that she'd had on her computer, and had put it in on the random setting. From the heavy bass, causing light and power fluctuations, to the cartoon themes out of nowhere during the radio communications, she'd rigged things well. She said a silent thank you to the kids that had helped her by re-rigging and messing with the wiring.