Home Invasion (22 page)

Deal with that later, he told himself. One crisis at a time. And this was a real crisis, no doubt about that.

The President took a deep breath. “All right, Geoff. You know what to do.”

“Sir…”

“Execute the emergency plan” the President said heavily. “When will the trucks reach Home?”

The Chief of Staff checked his watch. “A little less than two hours from now. I’ll get in touch with them immediately and have them turn back to Casa del Diablo.”

“No.”

The Chief of Staff stared at his boss. “No?” he repeated. “Did you say no, sir?”

“That’s right.”

“But … that’s the emergency plan, and we have plenty of time to implement it.”

The President shook his head. “No, I’m talking about Operation Omega.”

The Chief of Staff was shaken to his core. “Sir, we can’t—”

The President seemed oddly calm now, as if he had accepted the inevitability of what had to happen. “We knew we’d be taking this step someday, Geoff. It’s the reason for Casa del Diablo’s very existence. It’s happening sooner than we expected, that’s all”

“But if we stop the trucks—”

“Whoever those men are who have taken over the town, they know what’s coming. They must, otherwise they wouldn’t be there, today of all days. If they know, then it’s possible some of the citizens of Home have found out by now, too.” The President shook his head again. “No, Geoff, I’m afraid this is the only way. I want a team of General Stone’s special operatives in the air ASAP. They’ll intercept the trucks before they reach Home and take charge of the canisters. They’re to bring all but one of them back to FPS headquarters.”

“All but one” the Chief of Staff repeated hollowly.

The President smiled. “I think one canister of the gas will be enough to make sure no one in Home ever reveals what they know, don’t you?”

Ford and Parker waited until what looked like a hundred or more armed men rushed out of the police station and headed down the street toward the site of the explosion.

Finding that gasoline tanker parked at the edge of town had been a stroke of luck. Neither agent knew for sure what it was doing there, but they could make a guess. There were several places in Home that sold gas. The truck had probably been stopped at one of them when the invaders came in and took over. Nobody would want stray bullets flying around anywhere near a tanker full of gasoline, so they had moved it to the outskirts of town to get it out of the way.

For men with their specialized skills, it wasn’t that hard to rig the truck’s fuel tank to blow, and when it did, the gas in the big tank went up, too. That made one heck of a nice distraction. The invaders had to figure that they were under attack, so most of them would rush to the scene to repel that attack. They wouldn’t find anything except a burning tank trunk.

But by that time, Ford and Parker would be in the police station. They wanted to get their hands on some communication equipment, on the off chance that the invaders weren’t jamming everything. If that were the case, at least they could grab some more weapons and maybe find somebody who could tell them exactly what was going on here.

They ran along the alley toward the police station’s back door. The guard who had been standing there before the blast had ducked inside, probably to check for new orders. He reappeared just as Ford and Parker reached the door. Parker’s hand shot out and grabbed the front of the man’s shirt. The guard was too startled to put up a fight as Parker jerked him forward and head-butted him.

Ford slammed the butt of his pistol into the back of the guard’s head a split-second later. The double blow, front and back, was enough to knock the man out cold.

Parker lowered the guard to the ground and took his rifle. They had left the rifles they’d brought from the ranch with Callahan and Earl, since the weapons would have been in the way while the agents crawled into town.

Parker looked at Ford and nodded, then went into the station, moving fast. Ford was right behind him, pistol gripped tightly and ready for use.

They were in a hallway that led past an open door into the station’s lobby. Several men armed with rifles were in the lobby, looking out the windows and the open front door. One of them must have spotted the two American agents from the corner of an eye, because he yelled a warning in Spanish. The men whirled around and raised their rifles.

Parker had already dropped to a knee and brought the rifle he had taken from the guard to his shoulder. He opened fire with it as Ford began shooting over his head. Their bullets raked the lobby and sent the gunmen tumbling off their feet, except for one who dived through a window in a shower of glass to escape the hail of lead.

“Damn it,” Ford said. “He’ll fetch his friends.”

“The shots would do that anyway,” Parker said as he lowered the rifle.

They had just started past the open door when shots blasted inside the room.

The explosion made Garaldo snatch up the gun from the desk, and Alex cursed herself for missing her chance. He sprang from his chair and covered her.

“What was that?” he asked as a snarl pulled his lips back from his teeth.

She shook her head. “I don’t have any idea.”

“If any of your people are foolish enough to think they can fight back, they will all die!” Garaldo practically spat. “They cannot interfere with destiny.”

“They don’t care about your so-called destiny nearly as much as they do their freedom.”

Garaldo laughed. “Then why did they allow their own government to come in and disarm them? Why have they allowed their own government to take more and more of their rights away from them? Your people willingly gave up their own freedom long ago, Chief, in return for cheap handouts.”

As sick as it made her to agree with this maniac about anything, Alex knew that what Garaldo had just said contained a kernel of truth. In return for more and more “entitlements” paid for by confiscatory taxes on anybody the government considered rich—meaning anybody who was actually willing to work hard and make a little money—people had handed over power to those who would insure that the system would remain in place. And now there were too few people working, and they were having to struggle too hard just to keep their heads above water, for that downward spiral to be reversed.

At the moment, though, politics was the farthest thing from Alex’s mind. Survival was front and center. With Garaldo’s gun pointing at her, she stood up slowly and backed against the wall when he gestured for her to do so. Outside in the hall, one of the guards trotted by.

A minute later, someone in the lobby yelled in alarm, and guns started to go off. Some of them were right outside the door in the hall.

The fight didn’t last long. As the shooting and the echoes died away, Alex heard something from the other side of the door. Voices … American voices. Two men, from the sound of it, and they were about to step past the opening, even as Garaldo leveled his pistol at the door, obviously intending to ambush them.

Alex wasn’t going to let that happen. She launched herself at Garaldo.

She got her hands on his arm and shoved it up just as he started pulling the trigger. Several shots roared out, deafening in the small confines of the modest office, before Garaldo jerked free from her grip and backhanded her with the pistol as he cursed frenziedly in Spanish. The barrel of the pistol smashed against the side of Alex’s head and sent her spinning backward, stunned.

Not too stunned, though, to hear one of those wonderful American voices order, “Drop it, you son of a bitch!”

Alex caught herself on the back of the chair in which she’d been sitting earlier. A man in jeans and work shirt, holding a rifle, came into the room and leveled the weapon at Garaldo. Another man, this one with a pistol, remained in the doorway, keeping an eye on the lobby.

Garaldo sneered at the men, but didn’t try to shoot again. If he had, the rifleman would have blasted him before he could pull the trigger. Garaldo set the pistol on the desk, and Alex lunged forward and snatched it up.

“Lady, what’re you—” the man with the rifle bit out as Alex pointed the pistol at the middle of Garaldo’s face.

She thought about how her friends and co-workers had been slaughtered wantonly by killers under the command of this man. She thought about everything Garaldo planned to do if he got his hands on that nerve gas, quite possibly including wiping out the lives of every man, woman, and child in Home. They would all be better off, safer, if she just pulled the trigger and turned that ugly, arrogant face into a crimson ruin.

But even after everything that had happened, she was still sworn to uphold the law, and killing Garaldo in cold blood would be murder.

She lowered the pistol a little and said, “He’s in command of the invasion. Who are you men?” They were dressed like cowboys, but something about them didn’t really fit the part.

“We heard about what happened and came here to help,” the man with the rifle replied, an answer which, Alex realized, wasn’t really an answer at all.

From the doorway, the second man said, “Hey, you’re that hot police chief … I mean, the police chief of Home. I’ve, uh, seen you on TV.” He stiffened suddenly and barked, “Hold it!”

“Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot!”

Alex knew that voice. “That’s Eloise,” she exclaimed. “That’s my dispatcher.”

The man with the pistol relaxed a little. “All right, lady, come on around the corner. Anybody else up there?”

“Just the … the men you killed,” Eloise said.

“Keep him covered,” Alex told the rifleman with a jerk of her chin toward Garaldo. She stepped past the other man into the hall and put her arms around Eloise, being careful with the general’s pistol as she did so. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I … I guess. Just scared.”

Alex gave her a smile. “Welcome to the club.” She turned back to the two men. “What are your names?”

“I’m Lawrence Ford,” the one with the pistol said. “My friends call me Fargo.” He nodded toward the other one. “That’s Brad Parker.”

“Well, Mr. Ford, Mr. Parker, as you know, I’m Chief Bonner, and I’m mighty glad to meet you. But now we need to get out of here before some of Garaldo’s men come back.”

“What’ll we do with him?” Parker asked.

“Bring him with us,” Alex decided abruptly. “He’ll make a good hostage.”

“Never!” Garaldo said. “You’ll have to kill me!”

Parker grunted as his finger started to tighten on the trigger. “That works, too.”

“Wait!” Garaldo held his hands out to them. “All right. I’ll come with you. But you might as well surrender and throw yourself on my mercy. You can’t win, only a handful of you. I have too many men. You’ll all die.”

“Maybe there’s more than a handful of us,” Alex said, thinking of how she had told J. P. Delgado to round up some people willing to fight and get them to the high school. “And maybe we’d rather die than let you win.”

They jerked Garaldo’s arms behind his back, fastened his wrists with plastic restraints, then hustled him out of the office and left the police station through the back door. Ford had gathered up all the rifles from the dead men in the lobby and carried them in his arms, except for the ones he gave to Alex and Eloise.

“Follow me,” Alex said as they trotted along the alley. “We need to get to the high school.”

“Why there?” Ford asked.

“Because that’s where the resistance is gathering,” she replied, hoping that was true.

“What resistance?” Parker asked. “I thought everybody in this town gave up their guns.”

“Well, I’m hoping not everybody did. And even if they did, we’ve got a start on re-arming, haven’t we?”

“Not a very big one.” Parker hesitated. “Do you know what this is about, Chief?”

“Do you?” Alex shot back at him.

“I think we should tell her the truth, Brad,” Ford said. “Hell, we’re all on the same side.”

Parker thought it over for a second and then nodded.

“We’re American intelligence agents,” Ford told Alex.

“Then this must have something to do with Casa del Diablo and that damn nerve gas they’re bringing out of there today.”

Ford and Parker both looked shocked. “How does a small-town police chief find out about something like that?”

“He told me,” Alex said as she waved a hand toward Garaldo. “What do you think they’re after?”

“Who in blazes
are
they, anyway?”

“Thugs who work for the drug cartel Rey del Sol.”

Garaldo snapped, “Visionaries who believe in the destiny of Mexico!”

“Don’t pay any attention to that line of bull—” Alex began as they darted across the mouth of an alley.

That was when somebody opened fire on them, steel-jacketed slugs whistling around their heads.

In the high school library, Jack motioned quickly to Rowdy and Jimmy. “Get on either side of the doors,” he told them in a half-whisper. “We’ll jump whoever it is when they come in.” He waved a hand at Cochrum, the blond reporter, and the cameraman. “You three hide between the shelves.”

“The hell with that,” the cameraman said. His name was Bud, Jack recalled. “We’ll help you grab them.”

“We will?” Cochrum said.

“Yeah, the odds will be better that way. Wilma, you should hide, though.”

The blonde didn’t argue. She scurried off and crouched nervously between two sets of bookshelves.

Jack and Cochrum joined Jimmy to the right of the doors, while Bud partnered up with Rowdy on the other side. The voices and footsteps were louder now as people came down the hall toward the library.

Jack knew perfectly well that if the newcomers were some of the heavily-armed invaders, he and his companions would probably be dead in a few minutes. But if they could take the men by surprise and get their hands on some of those automatic weapons, there was a slender chance a couple of them might survive.

Anyway, the alternative was to surrender, and Jack was in no mood to do that. Those sons of bitches had taken over his town and killed innocent people. He wasn’t going to stand for that.

The library doors swung open and a man strode in. Jack launched himself in a diving tackle at his back.

Unfortunately, the man twisted around with great instincts and reflexes, grabbed Jack, and flipped him with a neat wrestling throw. Jack came crashing down on his back, and an instant later the man’s knee dug into his belly, pinning him down to the library floor.

“Jack!” the man exclaimed.

Gasping to reclaim the breath that had been knocked out of his lungs, Jack found himself looking up into the startled face of Officer J. P. Delgado, his friend and the man who had taught him to shoot.

Commotion and angry yells filled the library. Delgado jerked his head around and ordered, “Hold your fire! Take it easy, these are friends.”

Jack looked around, saw that Rowdy and Bud had tried to attack some of the people with Delgado, only to find themselves looking down the barrels of several rifles and shotguns.

A dozen men and women had crowded into the library with Delgado. Each of them was armed and wore a grim expression that said they were willing to fight to the death. Jack felt a wave of relief go through him as he recognized most of them.

“Don’t shoot, people, don’t shoot,” Cochrum said. “I think we’re all on the same side.”

“I don’t know about that,” Delgado said dryly. “You’re the lawyer who represented Navarre, aren’t you?”

Cochrum looked nervous. “That, uh, doesn’t have anything to do with our current situation.”

“The hell it doesn’t. If the town hadn’t been mostly disarmed, we could have put up a better fight when those cartel thugs came in and took over.” Delgado got to his feet and extended a hand to Jack, helping him up as well. “These people may be the only ones in town who were able to hide some guns from the Feds.”

“I don’t make the law, Officer,” Cochrum said. “I just—”

“Shut up,” Delgado said. “Are you all right, Jack?”

“Yeah, I think so,” the young man replied. “It just, uh, knocked the wind out of me when you flipped me over like that. You gotta teach me how to do that!”

Delgado smiled. “If we live through this, I will. In the meantime, is there anybody else here at the school?”

Jack shook his head. “Just the six of us.”

“Well, that gives us almost twenty people,” Delgado mused.

Rowdy asked, “Can we put our hands down now?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Delgado motioned for his “troops” to lower their weapons. He turned to Jack again. “Your mom’s not here?”

“I haven’t seen her all day,” Jack said, trying not to let too much worry creep into his voice. He was trying to stay confident that she was all right. He asked hopefully, “Have you seen her?”

“Yeah, she was okay a little while ago. She was going to try to make it to the station.”

“No!” Jack couldn’t hold in the exclamation. “That place is full of those guys!”

Delgado nodded grimly. “That’s what I was afraid of. She sent me sneaking around town to gather a resistance force and bring it here. She said she’d meet me here.”

“She’s not here yet… but I’m sure she will be.” Jack tried to feel as confident as he hoped he sounded.

“Yeah, I’m sure she will be, too,” Delgado said, but Jack had a feeling that the older man was sort of whistling in the dark, too.

Cochrum said, “Listen, is this all the people you could get? There’s gotta be at least a couple hundred of those Hispanic guys, and I’ll bet they’re all cold-blooded killers.”

“Unlike that client of yours, eh?”

Cochrum’s face flushed in what appeared to be a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Emilio Navarre,” he snapped.

“I wouldn’t say that. Those are his amigos out there.”

“You don’t know that. Nothing has been proven. Anyway, my point is that you can’t fight an army with less than two dozen people! It’ll be suicide!”

“Didn’t you ever hear of going out fighting, Cochrum?”

The lawyer sneered. “That’s just another way of describing losing. I’d rather win.”

“So would I. You got any ideas?”

“Well… we could call for help.”

Delgado shook his head. “Won’t work. Somehow they’ve blocked all communication with the outside world. Radios, cell phones, computers, none of ’em work. My guess is that they’ve got some sort of machine broadcasting an extremely powerful electromagnetic pulse. No, Cochrum, win or lose, I think we’re on our own.” He paused. “But this may not be all of us. I couldn’t cover the whole town, so several men I talked to volunteered to try to round up some more fighters. If they’re successful, they’ll be rendezvousing here, also.”

“There still won’t be enough to make it an even fight.”

Rowdy said, “Hey, sometimes you’ve got to buck the odds, dude. We’re Texans. That’s what we do.”

“He’s … right,” Jimmy said. “We can … do it.”

Wilma had emerged from hiding by now. She stared at the group gathered in the library and demanded in astonishment, “Seriously, are you people actually going to listen to this … this retard? You can’t fight an army. You’ll just get yourselves killed! We’ll be better off just waiting. They don’t seem to know we’re here, and if we stay hidden, maybe they’ll just leave without bothering us.”

“The lady has a point,” Cochrum said. “They can’t hope to hold on to the town for very long. They’ve got to be here for some specific reason, and once they get what they’re after, they’ll go.” He shrugged. “We should just lie low. I say we put it to a vote. That’s the American way, isn’t it?”

One of the townsmen said, “You don’t know a damned thing about the American way, mister. You’ve proven that.”

“And you shouldn’t call Jimmy bad names, either,” one of the women said as she glared at the reporter. “He’s a fine young man.”

“He’s not playing with a full deck,” the blonde shot back. “None of you moronic hayseeds are, evidently.”

Bud stepped forward and said, “That’s enough, Wilma.”

She looked at him in surprise, then her face darkened with anger. “Don’t you talk to me like that. You’re just a cameraman. I’m on-air talent!”

Bud shook his head and looked disgusted. “I’ve always backed you up on most stuff, but you’re wrong here. This is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Whatever those invaders are up to, it’s got to be something really bad, and somebody has to stop them. Looks like that’s up to us.” He gave Delgado a nod. “I’m with you, pal, if you’ll have me. But … I don’t have a gun or anything. I don’t know what I can do.”

“We’ll have to find something else to fight with, for those who don’t have guns, I guess,” Delgado said.

Jack suggested, “How about baseball bats? There’s a closetful of ’em by the gym. The P.E. classes use them.”

Delgado nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. Get close enough to one of the guys, brain him with a bat, and take his gun.”

“Get shot, that’s what you mean,” Cochrum muttered. “That’s what’s gonna happen.”

“You can stay here, counselor.”

Delgado nodded at Wilma. “So can the lady. We can’t force you to join us.”

Wilma sniffed. “Of course, you can’t. We still have freedom of the press in this country, you know.”

That brought scornful laughter from several of the people gathered in the library. Wilma flushed a deeper shade of red, but didn’t say anything else.

“What about that vote?” Cochrum prodded.

“We don’t need a vote,” Delgado said. “These folks wouldn’t be here unless they were willing to fight. And they know they don’t have to come with us unless they want to.”

Jack asked, “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere, right away. We’re going to wait here for a while and give others a chance to join us. It’s not easy to move around town without being spotted, but we’ve all proven it can be done. They’ve spread themselves a little too thin. Even with guards out and patrols moving around, they can’t watch everywhere at once.”

“What about after that?”

Delgado grinned ruefully. “I’ll tell you, kid, I haven’t figured that out yet. There has to be
something
we can do that would help.”

Bud said, “I have a suggestion, if you want to hear it.”

“Sure, why not?” Delgado replied with a shrug.

“What you said about an EMP got me to thinking … one pulse strong enough would knock out most, if not all, of the communications devices in town, but they couldn’t count on the fact that they’d all be out for hours. There might be somebody with the know-how and equipment to fix whatever damage they did. “Delgado nodded. “That makes sense. So you think they’re broadcasting a continuous jamming signal.”

“That’s exactly what I think. In order to cover the whole town, it would have to be centrally located.”

“We saw unmarked trucks parked at the police station,” Jack put in.

“Did any of them have unusual antennas on them?”

“I don’t know.” Jack shook his head. “They were sort of, uh, shooting at us at the time, so I didn’t look real close.”

Delgado said, “That’s the most logical place for the jamming equipment to be. We knock it out, we can call for help.”

“Which probably won’t get here in time to save any of you,” Cochrum pointed out. “You’ll still die.”

“Maybe, but those invaders won’t get away with whatever it is they’re trying to do. That may be the best outcome we can hope for.”

Delgado looked around the room and received grim nods in return from everybody except Cochrum and Wilma. “You’re all crazy,” the lawyer told them.

“If that means we don’t think anything like you … I’ll take that as a compliment, counselor,” Delgado said. “Now we just have to wait and see who else shows up to join forces with us.”

If anybody did.