Chapter 04
Grindstone Island
St. Lawrence River
New York state
October 2011
The next morning the invasion force, for that was all it could be called, set out as dawn was barely touching the horizon.
Emily, JJ and Morgan had elected to go out with the other FBI agents, leaving Hotch and Rossi back at base to coordinate. There were three old landing areas where boats still might be able to dock. The RCMP was taking the northern one at what used to be Grindstone Village, the Americans were taking the southern two, the old upper and lower Town docks. Coast Guard from both countries were covering the western and eastern ends of the island, to make sure no one tried to get away. Morgan got the Upper Town group, while JJ and Emily went with the Lower Town group.
They used landing boats from the military to pull up to the docks. As the lead units pulled the fences out of the way they unloaded jeeps, the better to get around. It took more time than any of them liked, but eventually they got moving. The road up over the hill led into gentle countryside, glowing with the last of the summer's energy, the brilliant colors of fall. "It's gorgeous here." Someone murmured.
"Hopefully it'll become a vacation spot again." Someone else said.
They had been in constant radio contact with the other units, now someone started a slow, steady cursing in French into the radio. The RCMP rep with them took the radio and cleared his throat, pointedly. "Say again Unit One?"
"We've come up to the first cluster of buildings." The man on the other end of the radio said. "There are children everywhere!"
"Son of a bitch!"
"That's what I said!"
There was a quick re-grouping, and the decision was made to find the nearest someone in charge and see what was what here. The last thing anyone wanted to do was start shooting around children.
But that was very nearly what happened with the first group they found.
They came around a curve and found the first of those big estates laid out before them. It looked like one of those big British manor houses, the main pile surrounded by smaller buildings. And people, people in strange clothes who stopped and stared at the jeeps as they pulled up the road. And lots and lots of children.
They pulled up to where a man was doing some repair work on the gate. He was a younger man, his hair shaggy, his clothing ragged and his feet bare. "Who's in charge here?" The head of the unit asked.
The young man took them in with a scared look on his face. "Master Johnson." He said.
"Where is he?"
The younger man looked up at the house and shrugged. "Ask the Overseer." He pointed to a cluster of buildings around the back of the house.
The group revved their engines to head that way, but Morgan stopped their jeep. "Hold up." The others went on while he got down with the RCMP guy, the LEO's standing guard. "Kid, what's your name?" Morgan asked.
The younger man shrugged. "Don't got a name. Too low for that."
"What do they call you?"
"8753." The kid replied. He hooked his thumb into something around his neck and held it up so Morgan and the RCMP guy could look. "See."
They looked. There was a tag attached to a sturdy metal chain around his neck, stamped with the number '8753'. The chain was not locked, it had been welded in place. As he shifted they saw the back of it where two more tags held. One read 'Property of' and the other 'L. Johnson.'
Morgan looked at the RCMP guy, his eyes wide as he swallowed. "These are plantations." He said. "These people are slaves."
They ended up at the forward command posts at the docks, video conferencing everyone in. "They've hit three of the houses so far." Hotch said. "They've found roughly eighty slaves at each one, anywhere from newborns to fifty year olds."
"So we're looking at approximately six hundred victims?" Morgan said. Damn, that was a lot of bodies.
"Closer to seven hundred," Rossi said. "You have to take into account the children and grandchildren of what they're calling the Patriarchs and the Elders, as well as the Overseers. These people have been breeding like rabbits out here."
"I know what an overseer is." Morgan said. "And I'm guessing the Patriarchs are the plantation owners."
"The Elders look to be a class in between." Emily said. "Not wealthy enough to set up a plantation house, but still considered human by the plantation owners. They seem to be living in those small housing developments we saw on the surveillance photos."
"Could they have kidnapped this many children?" JJ asked.
"Only about a hundred and twenty children are the victims of a conventional kidnapping in the US every year." Andi Swan said. They had brought her in to the video conference when they realized what was going on. "Even if you account for the Canadian side of the border, what are thought to be runaways, kids missing from the foster care system and never reported, re-homed children..."
"Re-homed children?" JJ asked.
"Sometimes people adopt out of the foster care program thinking they have a handle on their children's problems. Then something shifts and everything goes out of control. They can't handle it anymore so they get on net forums and offer the child up for a new family, no questions asked."
"Is that legal?"
"It's not illegal. As you can guess it's predator central."
"Lovely."
"Even with that we're talking big numbers here. My guess would be that the majority of them have been born on the island."
"How are we going to sort this?" Emily asked.
"DNA," Hotch replied. "We're moving the victims down to Ft. Drum, they have room to set up shelter housing there. Then they're going to start matching children to parents, or to the NamUs database."
NamUs, Name Us, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. "These people are going to need a lot of help moving forward." Morgan said. "They've been raised to be slaves."
"I know." Hotch replied. "But first we need to get them out of there. How many arrests so far?"
"Forty-seven," Emily replied. "All of the adult plantation owners, Overseers and 'elders', any of them could have gone to the cops."
"Yeah, but some of the women are showing signs of Battered Women's Syndrome." JJ said. "Still, in each of those groups the adult males were openly carrying. That makes them complicit. How can this happen? I mean something this big in this part of the world."
"Money," Rossi said. "Enough money will buy you a lot of privacy. Rocheson has probably had like minded families moving there for decades now, into his own private fiefdom and off the grid."
"But why?"
"There has been a strain of conservative politics that has always lionized the Old South, the last great Christian Nation, where people lived according to true Biblical principles, including slavery. Seems like Rocheson and his wealthy friends threw enough money at the problem and re-created the Confederacy for themselves."
"Biblical?"
"Even Christ said 'slaves, obey your masters'."
"Agent Morgan?" One of the other agents was calling him over.
"I'll report back if I find anything new on this end." Morgan said to the video conference. He logged out and went over to the other table, "Yeah?"
"We raided another plantation." The younger agent said. "One of the slaves is saying he's an FBI agent."