Stand Your Ground (22 page)

Colonel Tom Atkinson walked into a truck-stop restaurant next to the Interstate and found half a dozen men and two women waiting for him. They were seated in a circular booth in a corner, casually dressed, drinking coffee and talking. Not many people would have looked twice at them.

Nobody would have dreamed what they were capable of when they needed to be.

Atkinson slid in beside the attractive black woman on the right end of the circle and said, “You folks made good time.”

“When you call, Colonel, we come a-runnin',” one of the men said. He was in his thirties, with a roundish, deceptively friendly face to go with his southern drawl.

“I appreciate that, Sergeant Porter.”

“This is about what's going on in that little town south of here, isn't it?” asked one of the other men. His half-Japanese ancestry wasn't very visible in his features, but if you knew him you could see it in the slight slant of his eyes.

“That's right. The governor wants us to take a look around and be ready to go in there if we need to.”

“Oh, we'll need to,” the black woman said. She nodded toward the flat-screen TV hung on the wall behind the restaurant's counter.

Atkinson looked at it and saw that the camera was focused on a large mob of people clogging a street somewhere, yelling angrily and waving anti-American signs.

“Somewhere overseas?”

“Chicago,” the woman beside him said. “There have been similar demonstrations in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. All within the past hour.”

One of the other men, burly and bald with a little goatee, said, “Right now the over/under on how long it takes for them to turn into full-fledged riots is forty-five more minutes.”

“These demonstrations didn't spring up simultaneously,” Porter said. “Some of the signs mention the Sword of Allah. That's what the bunch that's taken over Fuego is calling itself.”

Atkinson nodded and said, “I heard about Dr. Hamil's broadcast. I didn't see it myself, but I can't say I'm surprised that he's part of this. He's been apologizing for Islamic terrorism for years now. I always figured he was tied in with some of the terror networks. His buddies in Washington refused to open their eyes and see that for themselves, though.”

“Demonstrations like this take time to put together. They were prepared. They knew exactly what was going to happen today. Anybody with any common sense ought to realize that.”

“You're talking about Washington, Porter,” the other woman said. “The ones who aren't actually trying to undermine the country are willfully blind to anything done by the ones who are.”

A waitress approached the table. Atkinson told her to bring him coffee. He didn't have much of an appetite right now.

Besides, if they were going into action, as they very well might be, he didn't want a bellyful of food weighing him down.

Once he had his coffee, Atkinson said, “No bet on the over/under. Those so-called peaceful demonstrations are going to turn ugly, sooner rather than later. And they'll have exactly the effect they're supposed to have: they'll scare all the liberal politicians and make them think we have to give the terrorists whatever they want, just to maintain a false illusion of safety and security.”

“What the hell happened to this country?” Porter said, his voice edged with dismay and disbelief. “How did things get like this?”

“Media and popular culture made an alliance with the Democrats,” Atkinson said. “As for the rest of us . . . hell, boy, we were just voices crying in the wilderness. That's all. Just lonesome voices crying in the wilderness.”

 

 

The President spoke to the nation from the Oval Office a few minutes before three o'clock. He knew exactly what he was going to say, and he was calm as he faced the camera and waited for the red light to come on.

The Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the majority leaders of the House and Senate were on hand, out of camera range. There were no representatives from the permanent minority party in the room . . . but hey, who needed Republicans to do anything, anyway, the President thought. He had enough votes locked up in both houses of Congress to cram through any legislation he wanted.

Lately he hadn't even gone to that much trouble. Why bother passing laws when he could just issue an executive order or have one of his agencies write a new regulation to accomplish whatever his goal happened to be this week?

It went against security protocols for this many top-level members of the government to be in the same place at the same time, especially on an impromptu basis like this when the Secret Service hadn't had time to put the usual precautions into action.

However, the President wasn't a bit worried.

He knew they were in no danger.

The red light came on, and with practiced ease he put a solemn, concerned, but confident expression on his face. He said, “My fellow citizens.”

Not “My fellow Americans,” as previous presidents had traditionally opened their statements to the country. That was too nationalistic, too . . . patriotic.

“I wanted to let you know that the government is aware of the events taking place today in the town of Fuego, Texas. At this point we have few details, and it is not the policy of this administration to engage in rumormongering.”

No, when this administration wanted to lie to the American people, it just lied straight-out, as the previous several administrations had—all of which lying had been given a pass by the media and enough members of the public to keep them in office. The President knew
that
quite well, too.

“It appears that there has been some sort of civil disturbance in Fuego, fueled by the spontaneous protest of what is considered a grievous wrong by certain segments of our population. As a free and open society, we must always allow for the expression of dissenting points of view.”

Unless it was a point of view that disagreed with the opinions of the ruling elite, in which case it would be silenced and quashed as quickly and brutally as possible—all for the common good, of course, as the President and his cronies constantly assured themselves.

“However, when dissent takes the form of violence, the authorities have no choice but to step in and put a stop to it. But only after careful consideration of everything that is involved and in a manner designed to protect the rights of everyone, including any citizens who are upset by the unjust treatment of their brothers.”

The Vice President frowned and shuffled his feet a little. That “unjust treatment” phrase bothered him, as the President had known it would. That was like the government admitting that it had been wrong to throw all those terrorists who wanted to destroy the country behind bars. That idea made the Veep uneasy.

But he wouldn't do or say anything about it. The President was confident of that. The man craved power too much to rock the boat, even the illusory power of the vice presidency, which was about as much use as a bucketful of warm spit, as an ancient legislator had once termed it.

The President, you see, knew his political history, whether he respected it or not.

“Because of this need for caution, I have directed the Department of Homeland Security to establish a ten-mile perimeter around the town of Fuego—”

Making it sound like his own idea, rather than giving in to Phillip Hamil's demands.

“—and the Air Force is enforcing a no-fly zone over the town while our investigation into this matter continues. Both the Attorney General and the Secretary of State are taking leading roles in this investigation, and they will be reporting directly to me as we work out the best way to proceed. Rest assured that this matter
is
being dealt with, and it is absolutely no threat to the sovereign security of our nation. Thank you, and good afternoon.”

No “God Bless the United States of America,” either.

But at least he hadn't said anything about Allah.

This time, he thought to himself with a secret smile.

The day was coming, though, when the infidels would discover just who they had elected in return for promises of free . . . well, free
everything.

But for now, things were proceeding according to plan, and by the time the authorities got around to actually doing anything about what was going on in Fuego and at Hell's Gate, it would all be over.

 

 

Lee stood up and turned to see what Pete Garcia was talking about, but Flannery said, “Help me up, damn it.”

The lieutenant lifted a hand. Lee clasped his wrist and hauled him to his feet.

Together they hurried to meet Pete, the Mules' placekicker and backup quarterback. Over his shoulder, Lee told his wife, “Janey, you stay back.”

She looked like she wanted to argue, but she nodded and then bit worriedly at her lower lip.

“What is it, Pete?” Lee asked.

“There are jeeps coming, Officer Blaisdell,” the young man replied. “There are guys with guns in them.”

“How many?”

“I couldn't really tell, the way they were packed in there—”

“How many jeeps?” Lee interrupted.

“Oh. Uh, two. That's all I saw.”

Lee nodded.

“Can't be any more than four or five men in each vehicle,” he said.

“That means we outnumber them,” Flannery put in. “Do we have guns enough to go around?”

“We do,” Lee said. He turned his head and looked along the arroyo, which had a bend in it a couple of hundred yards away. “Are you thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?”

“Ambush,” Flannery said.

“Yeah.” Lee licked his lips, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called, “Martin!”

Martin Corey and the boys at the mouth of the arroyo looked at him. Lee waved for them to come on in. They did so, breaking into a trot as they hurried along the sandy bed of the dry wash.

“Everybody climb into the pickup,” Flannery ordered. “Where's my rifle?”

“In the truck bed,” Lee told him. “That's where all the weapons the kids recovered from the helicopter are.”

As the others began clambering into the back of the pickup, Ernie Gibbs came over to Lee and asked solemnly, “Are we gonna fight now?”

“Yeah, we're gonna fight now,” Lee told him. “Are you all right, Ernie?”

Grim-faced, the big young man nodded. “My friends call me Gibby. Sometimes Chuck called me that, too.”

“All right, Gibby. Get in the truck and drive up there past the bend. We're gonna wait around there for them.”

“Hold on,” Flannery said with a frown on his face. “That's not going to work. They'll follow the tire tracks into the arroyo, all right. They're obviously out looking for anybody who got away from town. But if they've got any sense at all, they won't go charging blindly around that bend into a trap.”

Spence asked, “How do we know they have any sense? They're just a bunch of sheet-wearing camel jockeys.”

“I haven't seen any sheets or camels,” Lee said. “Just guns. A bunch of guns.”

“From everything we know about them, they're not amateurs,” Flannery said. “They'll stop before they get to the bend and send some men to check it out. That's when some of us will hit them from behind.”

Flannery pointed to an area where part of the bank had caved in, leaving chunks of sandstone as large as boulders scattered around, and went on, “We'll be hiding over there.”

Lee understood now what the Ranger was getting at. He said, “Then when the shootin' starts, the rest can open up from farther along the arroyo, and we'll have the bastards in a cross fire.”

“Exactly,” Flannery said as he jerked his head in a nod. “I'll stay back here. The ones who stay behind will be running the biggest risk of discovery.”

“I'll stay, too,” Lee said without hesitation.

“Lee, no,” Janey said. “It'll be safer around the bend.”

“I'll be fine,” he told her, wishing that he felt as confident as he was trying to sound. “We need a couple more volunteers.”

“I'll do it,” Spence Parker said.

“And me,” one of the Rangers put in.

“All right,” Flannery said. “Let's get busy. We don't have much time.”

Lee knew that was true. He could already hear the growling of the jeeps' engines as the vehicles approached the arroyo.

The four men remaining behind took rifles from the back of the pickup and ran over to the big sandstone slabs. Erosion had softened and rounded the rocks, but they were still large enough to provide some cover. Lee and his three companions knelt behind them as the pickup, with Gibby at the wheel, Janey beside him, and everybody else packed into the back, roared off around the bend.

As they waited, Lee looked over at Flannery and said, “I know we're lawmen, but we don't have to read 'em their rights before we open fire on those sons o' bitches, do we?”

“The only right they've got is for us to blow their damned brains out,” Flannery said.

Only a couple more minutes passed before the jeeps appeared at the mouth of the arroyo. They had slowed down, and now they stopped as they entered the dry wash.

The terrorists were being careful, Lee thought, checking the place out before they drove in any farther.

Lt. Flannery had been right. Men that cautious wouldn't have just driven blindly around the bend without doing some reconnaissance first.

Lee glanced over at his companions. Flannery looked a little shaky, which wasn't surprising considering that he had been knocked out for a good while. Anybody hit hard enough to be unconscious for that long was at risk for brain damage.

The other Ranger, whose name Lee didn't know, seemed to be okay. Spence was obviously scared—the kid had probably never had to deal with anything worse in his life than the righteous wrath of the daddy of some cheerleader he was messing around with—but he noticed Lee watching him and gave a nod to indicate that he was all right.

Lee's hands were a little sweaty on the rifle he gripped. In the fight at the police station, he hadn't really had time to be scared or even think that much about what was going on. He had just reacted and done what he had to in order to save his life.

Now he had a chance to ponder what was about to happen, and he was scared, too. Not so much for himself, although that was certainly part of it, but more for Janey and for little Bubba, as they jokingly referred to the baby growing inside her.

What would happen to them if he didn't make it through this fight?

What would happen to everybody who was left if the monsters who had invaded Fuego weren't stopped?

Why didn't somebody come to help them? The outside world couldn't have just
abandoned
them, could it? Surely help was on the way from somewhere.

Lee wished he could believe that, but some instinct told him that might not be the case. He and the others might truly be on their own, outnumbered by a brutal, bloodthirsty enemy.

He forced himself back into the moment. He and his companions could only fight one battle at a time.

And that battle was imminent, because the jeeps were on the move again, rolling forward slowly as the armed men riding in them watched the arroyo's banks. They were alert to the possibility of an ambush.

But they were looking too high, Lee realized. They didn't see him and the other three men hunkered behind these rocks.

Lee kept his head down as the jeeps went past. He didn't catch more than a glimpse of the men in the vehicles, but that was enough to tell him they were the same sort he had encountered back in town. Terrorists of Middle Eastern origin, no doubt about that.

He wondered briefly whether they were in the country legally or had been smuggled in, most likely across the Mexican border. Such things were more common than most people realized. In fact, a year or so earlier a group of Islamic terrorists had come too damned close to setting off a suitcase nuke in downtown San Antonio.

Of course, it was possible these killers were the homegrown variety. Despite all the bad things some folks said about the country, the United States was still the most welcoming nation in the world—sometimes to its own detriment. Some of these terrorists might well have been born here, sons and grandsons of legal immigrants who repaid their adopted land's generosity and hospitality by raising their offspring to hate America and want to see it destroyed.

We are all immigrants
, the liberals liked to say, and there was some truth to that.

But the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Poles, and all the other various countrymen who had come to the United States in the past two and a half centuries had not done so with the express intent of remaking the country into a new version of their own homeland. They had come to America to take part in it, to become the building blocks of a new culture that for a time had been the strongest and most vital in the history of the world.

Too many of the immigrants in the past fifty or sixty years hadn't wanted that. And some of them actually wanted to bring it down.

It was entirely possible that was what the people of Fuego were facing today, Lee thought as the jeeps rolled on toward the bend in the arroyo.

The vehicles slowed again and then stopped. Lee heard the gunmen calling to each other in their native language, whatever that was.

Carefully, he rose enough to peer over the rock that sheltered him.

The jeeps had halted about ten yards short of the bend. A couple of men had hopped down from one of the vehicles and were now proceeding warily on foot, the automatic weapons in their hands held ready.

The other members of the bunch were visibly tense as they waited for their scouts to have a look around the bend.

Lee glanced over at Flannery. The Ranger gave him a curt nod.

It was time.

Lee, Flannery, Spence, and the other Ranger all stood up. The terrorists hadn't thought to have somebody keep an eye out behind them, so no one noticed as the four men aimed their weapons. The range was about eighty yards, not easy shots, but not that difficult, either, for experienced shooters.

Flannery didn't give an order.

He just opened fire.

The other three men did likewise. Lee had settled his rifle's sights on the back of a man sitting in one of the jeeps, and he didn't hesitate in pulling the weapon's trigger three times, fast but controlled. The rifle was a semiautomatic, and the three shots ripped out in less than two heartbeats.

Without waiting to see what effect those three rounds had, Lee shifted his aim and fired three more, then did that again.

Only then did he pause and look to see that half a dozen of the terrorists had toppled off the jeeps and now lay sprawled on the ground.

The other two men who had still been with the vehicles had jumped off and were now using the jeeps for cover as they opened up with their machine guns. The two who had been about to reconnoiter around the bend now came running back, the weapons in their hands spraying lead as well.

Lee and his companions ducked quickly as bullets smacked into the sandstone boulders.

With a full-throated roar from its engine, the pickup came around the bend, sand spitting up from its tires. The football players in the back opened fire with hunting rifles and shotguns, a couple of them shooting over the top of the cab and the others in the back leaning out to the sides. Martin and the other two Rangers joined in, but Lee didn't see Raymond.

That was all right. The kid didn't need any more blood on his hands.

To Lee's surprise, he saw Janey extending her arm out the pickup's passenger window. She held the service weapon he had given her earlier, and it jumped and spit as she fired it at the terrorists.

The barrage killed three of the men in a matter of seconds, knocking them off their feet to land in bloody heaps next to their comrades.

The lone survivor broke away from the jeeps and tried to run in blind terror, but Gibby slammed the pickup's grille into his back, knocked him down, and ran over him.

Then backed up for good measure.

Lee and the others left the boulders and trotted over to join their companions. Flannery and one of the other Rangers checked the bodies to make sure all the terrorists were dead.

They were. The odds against the Americans had just gone down by ten men.

Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to mean much.

“Everybody all right?” Flannery asked. He got nods and a chorus of assents in response.

Lee went over to the pickup and said to Janey through the open window, “I figured you'd stay back there around the bend where it was safe.”

“You did, did you?” she asked. “Well, you should have known better.”

He tried to keep a tight rein on the anger he felt welling up inside him.

“You weren't just risking your own life, you know,” he said.

“You think I don't know that?” she snapped at him. “But what kind of life is Bubba going to have if we don't stand up—all of us—and fight back against the monsters who want to destroy us?”

Lee didn't have any answer for that.

Flannery leaned against one of the jeeps as he seemed to be dizzy for a second, but then he recovered and said, “We've got more weapons now, and a couple of jeeps, to boot. Officer Blaisdell, you know where people live around here, don't you?”

“Sure,” Lee said. “There are some farms and ranches around. Plus some oil and gas camps. Are you thinkin' we need to recruit some more folks?”

“You need an army to fight an army,” Flannery said. “Do you think they'll fight?”

Lee couldn't help but grin.

“They're good Texans,” he said. “They'll fight.” He glanced at Janey and thought about what she had just said. “Ain't nothin' like a bunch of Texans for standin' their ground.”

 

 

Inside Hell's Gate Prison, George Baldwin said, “Where is it we're going again, John Howard?”

Stark had an arm around Baldwin's waist, helping him along a concrete-walled corridor. He worried that his old friend was going into shock because of the loss of blood from that shoulder wound.

In the movies and TV, people got shot in the shoulder all the time without its seeming to bother them all that much, but somebody could bleed out from a wound like that just as they could from any other injury.

Mitch Cambridge was leading the group. Alexis Devereaux, Travis Jessup, and Riley Nichols followed him, then Stark and Baldwin. They had run into several other guards along the way, and Cambridge had sent them to find Lucas Kincaid and help him get ready to defend the prison.

“We're going to the maximum security wing, George,” Stark said.

“Why there?”

“Kincaid thinks it'll be the easiest place for us to defend, and I agree with him. From what I saw, I don't think we're going to be able to keep those fellas from getting into the prison.”

“The inmates . . .”

“Kincaid's going to round up as many of them as he can,” Stark said. He couldn't keep the grim expression off his face. There was only so much Kincaid could do to get the other inmates to safety.

It was likely there would be a bloodbath inside Hell's Gate before the day was over.

They came to the recreation room, and Stark was surprised to see that several inmates were still there, along with a couple of guards. Albert Carbona, the old-time mobster, saw Baldwin and exclaimed, “Mother of God, Warden, you been shot!”

One of the guards asked in a nervous voice, “What's going on? We heard all sorts of commotion.”

“The prison's under attack,” Cambridge told the man. “It . . . it looks like terrorists are trying to take it over.”

“Terrorists!” Billy Gardner, Carbona's massive bodyguard when they were both still on the outside, gaped at the newcomers. “You mean like . . . blow stuff up and kill a bunch of people, that kind of terrorists?”

“There ain't any other kind,” Cambridge snapped. He frowned, looking like he was in way above his head here and knew it, but after a second a new determination came over his face. “Come on. You're all coming with us. We're headed for the max security wing.”

Stark approved of that decision. Sending the prisoners—Carbona, Gardner, J.J. Lockhart, and Simon Winslow—back to their cells might well be the same as signing their death warrants.

And none of them, as far as Stark knew, had been sent to Hell's Gate to be executed.

“Wait a minute,” one of the other guards said. “Who put you in charge, Cambridge? The rest of us all have more experience than you. Warden?”

Baldwin stood a little straighter. He said, “Mitch has already fought those bastards and lived to tell about it. Do what he says.”

That was enough to make the guards cooperate. They, along with the four inmates, fell in with the group and hurried through the corridors toward the maximum security wing.

Stark was glad somebody was leading the way who knew where he was going. Even though he had gone along when Baldwin had shown the wing to Alexis Devereaux and the news crew, he might not have been able to find it again, even with his good sense of direction.

Cambridge took them right to it, however, slapped the button on the intercom to communicate with the guards inside the sally port, and said urgently, “Let us in!”

A helmeted guard looked through the bulletproof, steel-mesh-reinforced glass in the door's small window, staring at the desperate group in surprise.

“What's going on out there?” a voice crackled over the intercom. “Warden, is that you?”

“Help me, John Howard,” Baldwin muttered. Stark tightened his grip and moved forward so that Baldwin was in the forefront of the group.

“The prison is under attack,” Baldwin said. His voice was weak but still held an undeniable note of authority. “We're going to fort up, here in this wing. Reinforcements are on the way.”

“Under attack?” The guard inside the sally port sounded like he couldn't believe it. “We heard some sort of racket and felt the ground trembling but never dreamed . . . Hell, Warden, we'd just about convinced ourselves it was an earthquake!”

“Believe me, there's nothing natural about this disaster.” Baldwin took a deep breath and winced as it hurt him. “Protocol is out the window now, boys. Are all the inmates in lockdown?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep them that way. Under no circumstances are any of them to be let out.”

Trembling, Travis Jessup said, “Why . . . why don't you just let them go? That's what their friends are here for, isn't it? They just want to turn those other terrorists loose.”

“Political prisoners,” Alexis said, stubborn in her mind-set even now. “They're political prisoners.”

Jessup ignored her and went on, “If you just turn them loose, maybe the others will go away and leave us alone.”

Riley said, “That's not going to happen, Travis. Even if they get what they want, they're going to kill us all. That's just . . . what they do.”