A Maidens Grave

FBI count to eleven. Half the men were in navy-blue tactical outfits, the rest in their pseudo Brooks Brothers.
    The military jet bearing Potter, reserved for civilian government transport, had touched down in Wichita twenty minutes before and he’d transferred to a helicopter for the eighty-mile flight northwest to the tiny town of Crow Ridge.
    Kansas was just as flat as he’d expected, though the chopper’s route took them along a wide river surrounded by trees, and much of the ground here was hilly. This, the pilot told him, was where the mid-high-grass and short-grass prairies met. To the west had been buffalo country. He pointed toward a dot that was Larned, where a hundred years ago a herd of four million had been sighted. The pilot reported this fact with unmistakable pride.
    They’d sped over huge farms, one- and two-thousand-acre spreads. July seemed early for harvest but hundredsof red and green-and-yellow combines were shaving the countryside of the wheat crop.
    Now, standing in the chill wind beneath a dense overcast sky, Potter was struck by the relentless bleakness of this place, which he would have traded in an instant to be back amid the Windy City tenements he’d left not long before. A hundred yards away was a red brick industrial building, like a castle, probably a hundred years old. In front of it sat a small school bus and a battered gray car.
    “What’s the building?” Potter asked Henderson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Wichita resident agency.
    “An old slaughterhouse,” the SAC responded. “They’d drive herds from western Kansas and Texas up here, slaughter ’em, then barge the carcasses down to Wichita.”
    The wind slapped them hard, a one-two punch. Potter wasn’t expecting it and stepped back to keep his balance.
    “They’ve lent us that, the state boys.” The large, handsome man was nodding at a van that resembled a UPS delivery truck, painted olive drab. It was on a rise overlooking the plant. “For a command post.” They walked toward it.
    “Too much of a target,” Potter objected. Even an amateur sportsman could easily make the hundred-yard rifle shot.
    “No,” Henderson explained. “It’s armored. Windows’re an inch thick.”
    “That a fact?”
    With another fast look at the grim slaughterhouse he pulled open the door of the command post and stepped inside. The darkened van was spacious. Lit with the glow from faint yellow overhead lights, video monitors, and LED indicators. Potter shook the hand of a young state trooper, who’d stood to attention before the agent was all the way inside.
    “Your name?”
    “Derek Elb, sir. Sergeant.” The red-haired trooper, in a perfectly pressed uniform, explained that he was a mobile command post technician. He knew SAC Henderson and had volunteered to remain here and help if he could. Potter looked helplessly over the elaborate panels and screens and banks of switches and thanked him earnestly.In the center of the van was a large desk, surrounded by four chairs. Potter sat in one while Derek, like a salesman, enthusiastically pointed out the surveillance and communications features. “We also have a small arms locker.”
    “Let’s hope we won’t be needing it,” said Arthur Potter, who in thirty years as a federal agent had never fired his pistol in the line of duty.
    “You can receive satellite transmissions?”
    “Yessir, we have a dish. Any analog, digitized or microwaved signal.”
    Potter wrote a series of numbers on a card and handed it to Derek. “Call that number, ask for Jim Kwo. Tell him you’re calling for me and give him that code right there.”
    “There?”
    “That one. Tell him we want a SatSurv scan fed into—” he waved his hand at the bank of monitors—“one of those. He’ll coordinate the tech stuff with you. All that loses me, frankly. Give him the longitude and latitude of the slaughterhouse.”
    “Yessir,” Derek said, jotting notes excitedly. In seventh heaven, techie that he was. “What is that, exactly? SatSurv?”
    “The CIA’s satellite surveillance system. It’ll give us a visual and infrared scan of the grounds.”
    “Hey, I heard about that. Popular Science, I think.” Derek turned away to make the call.
    Potter bent down and trained his Leica field glasses through the thick windows. He studied the slaughterhouse. A skull of a building. Stark against the sun-bleached grass, like dried blood on yellow bone. That was the assessment of Arthur Potter