To escape from the dark suited thugs, I slipped out the back window down into the creek gully, and ran for a quarter mile. Then hitching a ride in an old truck to a nearby wildlife preserve, I scrambled between the barbed wire and disappeared into the wilderness.
After covering several miles I set up camp near a shallow stream. I had brought my lighter, pocket knife, some twine, beef jerky and a tin cup for boiling water. Many a night I had sat by a fire to shape and work the sticks required to create a dead fall trap. Here I was doing the same thing again, but this time it was for real.
Setting up the trap and creating a lean too took more time than I was hoping for. As the night crept in, I wished for an ax to make the job easier. Eventually, I was able to sit down and eat some beef jerky and boiled water with pine needles.
As I stared into the fire, my thoughts raced back over the last week and recalled how I had also heard about the USS Donald Cook.
It is a guided missile destroyer whose key weapons are Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of up to 2,500 kilometers. The US destroyer is equipped with the most recent Aegis Combat System that can ensure the detection, tracking and destruction of hundreds of targets at the same time.
The ship entered the waters of the Black Sea and in April of 2014 a Russian Su-24 tactical bomber flew over the vessel triggering an incident that completely demoralized its crew. As the Russian jet approached the US vessel, the Russian electronic warfare device called Khibiny disabled all radars, control circuits, systems, and information transmissions on board the destroyer.
The entire system was shut down as if turning off the television with a remote control. The Russian jet then simulated a missile attack against the ship. As if carrying out a training exercise, the jet repeated the same maneuver a dozen times before flying away.
After that, the destroyer limped towards a port in Romania. Some 27 sailors from the ship requested to be relieved from active service.
As I returned from thinking about the things I had discovered, I threw another log on the fire and rounded up some more leaves for my sleeping area. I still had to figure this out but in the meantime, I would be safe here, alone in the woods.
