Shining, Ace, and Rough hung around Silver’s Sweets for a few more minutes while they waited for a few Port Talon officers to arrive. The scene where a suspected murderer was apprehended was important enough to canvas thoroughly.
Silver took the news better than Shining would have thought, although still not well at all. Finding out your boyfriend might have killed someone was a serious blow.
The Royal Guards handed over control of the scene to the police and then went on their way.
Soft worked on Abernathy for the rest of the afternoon. Since arresting the suspected murderer, the Guards had risen in the eyes of the Port Talon Police. The griffons very much wanted to interrogate Abernathy about the murder, but it wasn’t like he was going anywhere. They let Soft have first crack at him so she could ask questions that related to the piracy.
Back at the temporary HQ, Shining took off his armored uniform and had a shower. He felt the satisfaction of an arrest, but knew he couldn’t get complacent. The big prize was still out there.
As he waited for the results of the interrogation to come back, Shining watched Mag and Dim work on the directional radio equipment the team had brought with them. Now that they had some idea of the frequencies the pirates were using, they could start closing in a little tighter.
Soft came back that evening, escorted by the Guards assigned to go with her. Without much preamble, she stated, “Abernathy killed Ganymede. After I got that confession out of him, the rest was comparatively easy.”
She didn’t look particularly pleased at spending a few hours across the table from a murderer, but forged on with her debrief. “Abernathy was trying to move up in the organization. At his current low position, he wasn’t allowed to know much, but he had heard that the pirates have some operations out east. He doesn’t know where exactly. I did get a list of frequencies and radio protocol from him, though.”
This set off a flurry of activity from the intel staff. With programming the radio direction finders and coming up with a plan, it was a few hours the team before was ready for the next step.
Shining let Mag take the briefing, as he had drawn it up. Gesturing to the drawings and maps he had drawn, Mag began. “We’ll need our three able pegasi to carry these direction finders aloft. For protection, I recommend you stay within sight of each other. We’ll send you on a loop of the land east of the city. The equipment has built in recorders so we’ll be able to track what you pick up. I’ll need you all to pay careful position to your location and heading. Take watches and compasses so you can navigate precisely.”
Skydancer, Ace, and Airborne began to get kitted up. Mag had drawn a course for them over the fields and land east of Port Talon. It consisted of two concentric ovals. This would allow them to cover the most ground and have some redundancy in their signals.
The three of them slipped into dark flight suits to conceal themselves against the night sky. They took off to the east, a package of electronics slung beneath each of them.
Then, it was back to waiting for the rest of the crew. Báistí showed up, and after getting her updated on the situation, the team enjoyed the selection of local teas she had brought. It was getting late, but none of them wanted to rest. If this plan worked, they might be able to pin down the location of the pirate stronghold.
It took hours. The regular status reports from the air team helped break the monotony, but they still had to thoroughly cover a lot of ground, and that was no simple task.
Finally, the three tired pegasi returned to HQ and the data they had collected could be reviewed. That in itself was no simple task. After syncing the playback of the audio with the direction beacon’s recording and the path of flight, hard results could finally be obtained. In real time, however. They playback would only go as fast as it had been recorded.
With a little creative circuitry, Dim managed to get the tapes moving a little faster, accelerating the recorded voices to chipmunk speeds. They were just barely understandable, but it took two unicorns writing as hard as they could to make sure they had a solid copy on the recorded conversations.
It was nearly sunrise when Mag finished pushing pins into the map. They had managed to come up with rough locations for every radio signal recorded. There were a few outliers, but in two areas the transmissions were clustered together. Mag marked them BIG and SMALL.
The names were appropriate. Location BIG had much more traffic. In fact, the conversations recorded seemed to indicate that the elusive Gaston might even be there.
Location SMALL did not get as much traffic, but much of it was transmitted from BIG. That was interesting. It was almost as if someone at BIG was reporting to SMALL.
As the sun started to come up, the haggard team met to discuss strategy. Shining laid out what they knew.
“If we go to location BIG, I think we stand a good chance of catching Gaston. However, based on traffic, it’s possible that we may find Hookbeak at location SMALL.
“Based on the sheer volume of traffic, we might be facing quite a few pirates. We may get some help from the cops, but I still don’t know if we’ll have the resources to conduct simultaneous raids on both locations.
“Ordinarily, I’d want to go with the sure thing and visit a target like BIG where we can count on something valuable being there. The problem is, with so many potential pirates to escape, they could warn the other place and whoever is there would disappear. Or maybe the large group of police showing up would tip them off.
“So we need to decide which place to go,” said Rough.
“If we do get police help, we might try to do both at once,” Mag countered.
“Either way, we’ve got rest to think about. We’ve been up all night,” put in Skydancer, stretching her tired wings. “Waiting a while could also help us come up with a better plan and give us the cover of darkness.”
“But if we wait that long, the data we collected might be worthless,” Dim replied.
Shining processed all their arguments while looking at the map, thinking hard.
