Mike Szymanowski and his partner drove up in his squad car. Nora looked over at it and realized that three of the four Patriots they’d arrested the day before were all sitting in the back. They were bandaged and cleaned up a little, but definitely not in prison where she’d expected them to be.
Nora looked over at Ben in surprise. “What’s this?”
Ford shrugged. “I told you they’d put together a plan.”
“What sort of plan?”
“Schacht is finishing out the details with Sanchez and Rogers.”
“What sort of plan?” Nora repeated, nervous.
“One that might get your boy freed,” answered Derek Ford. “Breathe.”
Chid nudged him, and he looked at the smartphone in his hand.
“Ten minutes til Prologue,” he called out.
Nora looked at Chid. “Prologue?”
“Prologue and three acts today.”
“So, four acts,” Nora said impatiently.
He nodded. “Four acts.”
“But they’re no longer telling us what anything is because we’ve hacked their network.”
He nodded again.
Schacht’s steely voice reached them. “Okay, here’s what we’re not going to do,” he was saying. “We’re not going to let Pete die, but we’re also not going to give these people the satisfaction of getting blown to pieces so that a thousand more militias can take up the banner. Now the way we are going to do that is a little unorthodox.”
Nora looked from face to face, trying to figure out what they were up to.
Mike Szymanowski suddenly stepped forward. “We have the requested suspects, sir.” He motioned to the squad car where his partner stood, his eyes riveted on the three would-be killers in his custody.
Schacht said, “Okay, people. For argument’s sake, let’s ask how can we best use three terrorists to get our man back?”
“Short of offering to webcast their executions?” Gray Rogers asked with an edge to his voice that Nora didn’t dislike.
Chid eyed the circle. “Maybe the real question is, can we ignore the law for a moment in order to ultimately enforce it?”
Anna said, “Baker doesn’t care if those people live or die. He doesn’t send them out with vests. He doesn’t expect them to come back. They exist to serve a purpose, that’s all. Not even white lives matter to this guy.”
“Maybe one of them matters,” said Ford.
They all stared at Ford.
“The woman. I think she’s his wife.”
“What?” Sheila asked. “Did she say this as you arrested her? Did she have some ID?”
“None of them carries ID,” Ford reminded her. “But her wedding ring matches his. I’ve seen Baker’s so many times, you know, when he makes that fist salute thing. Chid noticed her ring when he cuffed her. It didn’t take too much hunting to find out her name was Carly Baker.”
He and Chid shared a small exultant grin.
Sanchez and Schacht conferred a moment, then said, “We’ve been going back and forth on this idea since it was proposed last night. We’re going to tell Baker we have three of his people to trade for Pete, and that one of them is his wife.”
From the looks of things, Sanchez was already calling in this new offer. Long moments of silence descended. The circle dispersed into smaller clusters.
Nora walked over to Mike Szymanowski. “Thanks for helping out again,” she said.
He nodded. “I reckon we’re all helping each other,” he said. “We all live here, right?”
“Yes we do indeed,” said Nora, holding his gaze.
Anna said, “They’re getting ready to send them in. What’s their countdown clock say, Ford?”
He checked. “Four minutes, Anna.”
“Sanchez and Schacht and Sheila are going to walk the Patriots halfway up the drive. The others are supposed to bring Pete half of the way,” she said.
“Why those three? Anyone could do that. The SWAT guys could do that.”
“Baker requested the directors as a gesture of good faith,” Anna responded.
“Couldn’t they open fire on our guys?” Ben asked.
Anna nodded. “Sure. But they’re likely to hit their own people. Which is why they’ll all be in Kevlar, and why we’re keeping Baker’s wife back. Once Pete has walked past the wife, the wife will be allowed to run toward the barn. And why also Gray Rogers will be standing ready. Helicopter snipers are ready. Helicopter fast-rope team is ready.”
All of them swiveled their heads to look up at the hovering helicopter. In the distance, no less than six media helicopters waited to pounce on the scene.
“They’re showing remarkable restraint, aren’t they?” Chid asked.
“Rogers told the media point blank he would shoot down any helicopter interfering with this operation,” Anna explained.
“I like Rogers,” Nora said.
Schacht was strapping on anti-rifle Kevlar. He caught Nora’s eye and gave a small nod. A wave of nausea hit her. Mike Szymanowski and his partner had pulled the three Patriots out of the squad car and were walking them over to where Schacht and Sanchez stood. Sheila’s face seemed particularly white as she took the cuffed Carly Baker’s arm with her left hand. The palm of Sheila’s right hand rested just inside her blazer on the butt of her pistol.
Nora looked about. In addition to that of Mike Szymanowski, eight police cars sat with their engines running and blue and red lights flashing, sixteen cops standing alongside them, weapons drawn. Each SWAT team stood at the ready, rifles pointed in the direction of the barn. She watched them, admiring their black-clad patience under the morning sun’s blaze. She saw Rogers speaking into his cell phone, and wondered if he was conferring with the helicopter suspended above the edge of the bank.
“Zero minutes,” Ford said, shading the screen of Jane Doe’s iPhone so he could peer at it.
Schacht and Sanchez began walking with the two men.
Nora watched, mesmerized, as Tattoo-Neck started making his way up the drive under Schacht’s guidance. She recalled the smell of him—sweat mingled with fire. Her stomach turned.
In the distance, the agents could see a burly man just emerging from the lake side of the western barn. He dwarfed a still-limping Pete who sagged as he walked, head dangling, hands still tied behind him. She recalled April Lewis’s bruises. They must have beaten Pete badly. Nora wondered if they had freed his wrists since he’d arrived. She looked down at the red welts on her own wrists and felt a pang.
“He looks hurt,” said Anna.
“He looks half-dead,” said Nora, wishing they’d hurry.
Schacht and Sanchez had only gotten about two hundred yards away when Sheila took off walking briskly, dragging Carly Baker alongside her.
Nora watched Pete’s progress, trying to remember to breathe in and out. He and his escort had almost reached the group of four men walking up the winding trail through the weeds and shrubs toward the barn.
“His beard grew,” Nora said. “His beard—” She held up her phone and looked through the camera app’s zoom.
She looked at Ben in horror. “It’s not him! Ben, it’s not him!”
Ben bolted around the side of the car shouting at Rogers: “It’s not Pete, abort, abort!”
His voice carried, and Schacht and Sanchez whipped around to look, then seemed to realize in the same instant what had happened.
The land exploded in gunfire. They watched Schacht and Sanchez dart behind their charges as the two approaching men pulled out handguns. Schacht and Sanchez began firing, easily felling the burly man and the slim, bearded man they’d substituted for Peter. Tattoo-Neck pushed back, attempting to wrestle Schacht to the ground, while Sanchez’s prisoner head-butted him. Sanchez stumbled, vanished into the weeds, then seemed to have rolled back to where his prisoner was. He rose with the man grabbing him firmly by his cinched wrists and shoving the handgun against the base of his skull.
It was at that moment that Carly Baker launched herself
at Sheila.
With a shout of surprise, Sheila was suddenly sprawled on the ground, but Carly Baker had flopped on top of her, her hands, though tethered together, seeking Sheila’s gun. The two were immediately locked in a tangle of tussling arms and legs that none of the agents could fully make out through the brush.
Rogers began shouting at his men in the Bearcat. Some of them took aim at the scene, looking for a shot that wouldn’t injure the agents. Others slid the heavy locks of the armored vehicle into place as it began to move forward.
Sanchez and Schacht both turned, still holding their prisoners in vise-like grips, trying to make sense of the jumble of limbs that was Sheila and Carly Baker. Nora saw the two men raising and lowering their guns, attempting to get a clear shot at Mrs. Baker, who kept thrashing about and pulling Sheila with her.
Suddenly, a volley of shots poured out of Sanchez and Schacht’s weapons and Carly Baker’s body, that had just began to rise to a standing position, flopped down, disappearing, like Sheila’s had, into the tall grasses.
Gray Rogers was screaming instructions, even as the compound’s grassy lawn was suddenly thick with people in fatigues. Sanchez and Schacht half-dragged their prisoners toward the trees lining the trail as Patriots began showering the approaching SWAT team with gunfire.
Sanchez made it just to the forest’s edge. From where they stood, Anna, Nora, Ben, Chid, and Ford watched him fall. They quickly realized that Schacht, still hurtling through the trees with Tattoo-Neck, hadn’t seen him go down.
The man Sanchez had been guiding instantly attempted to divest him of his weapon, but as he grappled with Sanchez’s limp form, Gray Rogers himself took aim and shot him. The force of the round sent him reeling backwards. He collapsed on the tall grass.
Nora and her colleagues crouched by the car, using it as a shield from the random rounds that found their way all the way down the long, twisting path.
Chid and Ford began calling for more backup and ambulances as the scene unfolded.
Paralyzed, they all watched a man run out of the barn with an RPG-7 rocket launcher on his shoulder. He took direct aim at the SWAT truck. A fiery cloud of exhaust framed his figure from behind as a rocket streaked out of the tube and straight through the bulletproof windows of the truck. The truck veered left and continued a slow path toward the copse of trees to the left. Flames poured out of it from the front and the SWAT team streamed out of its back end; each man clutched a semi-automatic rifle and had donned riot gear, but each was also coughing and several were doubled over from the smoke that had invaded the vehicle.
Nora watched, stunned, as a helicopter sniper sent several rounds into the man with the RPG-7. He collapsed, holding his neck. His weapon, however, was taken up by a woman. She had burst onto the lawn from behind the barn and in a swift and practiced motion, she picked up the grenade the man had been holding and shoved it into the mouth of the rocket launcher. Then she mounted the weapon on her shoulder and shot it directly into the open door of the hovering helicopter.
With an explosion that Nora felt in her belly, the helicopter burst into flame and then plummeted onto the lawn only a few yards from the farmhouse. The crash rattled the windows of every vehicle around them. Triumphant cries filled the air from the Patriots, even though the woman who had fired the grenade had just been shot in the head by one of the snipers stationed in the trees lining the path.
The second SWAT Bearcat started making its way up the path. Rogers was shouting indecipherable commands into his phone.
Schacht was still dragging his prisoner as he burst out of the woods nearest Anna’s SUV. Each man was panting, his chest heaving; Schacht’s face was haggard.
Officers Szymanowski and Hegel ran over to reclaim the remaining Patriot and hustle him into the back of the car.
“You’re hurt, sir,” cried Anna.
Blood had soaked through the lightweight gray wool of Schacht’s trousers, from the thigh all the way down to his wing-tipped shoe. “I could use a place to sit down,” he said simply.
Four agents rushed to his side and began coaxing him into the car. Nora had the presence of mind to turn on the engine so that Schacht could sit in the air conditioning. As she did so a grenade whistled past her and plowed into the earth not fifteen yards away.
Ben asked, “Was that meant for us?”
“Of course it was,” snapped Chid.
Nora snapped back at him, “I think the CIRG approach isn’t working,” she said.
“It is for our opponents,” said Derek Ford.
An EMS worker swooped down upon Schacht from the waiting ambulance. He looked woozy as the tech cut away the blood-stained suit and exposed the gaping hole in his upper thigh.
“Derek, what’s their app telling them is going on in all this?” Nora called out over the gunfire.
“It’s footage of the helicopter—someone’s spinning it as a big win! Prologue: murdering high-ranking federal agents. Act One: taking down a whole chopper.”
She got up close to Ben and clutched his sleeve. “We have to get Pete out now. Ben?”
Ben scanned the area, thinking. He shook his head. “The chances of getting in and out are—”
“Probably better than hanging around here to be firebombed!” she exclaimed.
Nora grabbed Ben’s arm and dragged him over to Gray Rogers.
“Let us go in, Gray. We can cut up through the woods and then slip into the barn while their fighters are engaged with your SWAT teams. Please.”
Rogers shook his head. “That’s a death sentence.”
“They’re firing on the non-combatants back here—what’s to say they won’t fire on the whole civilian area beyond their acreage?”
“You Kevlar’d up?”
“Of course,” said Nora.
“Then go. But you’re going to have to move fast. The order from the attorney general to continue to hold off was last night. The newest orders are … different.”
He said these words with effort, and Nora suddenly realized that Pete’s life meant significantly less now that everything was going up in flames. Sheila and Sanchez were dead, after all. It was a different game. Gray Rogers had scores of agents under assault and a military threat that had to be dealt with.
Nora swallowed. “All we have are handguns,” she said.
Rogers pointed at the abandoned Bearcat, the one that, burning, had veered into the trees and come to a stop. Smoke was still pouring out of the front cab.
“It’s on your way. I was about to go secure it. Take anything you find in the back.”
Nora and Ben nodded. “We can’t be responsible for your safety,” he added.
Nora looked at Ben, who nodded. He said, “We know.”
“You have fifteen minutes,” Rogers said, his face grim. “I can’t give you any more than that. If you don’t find Pete, or if it’s impossible, you have to get out.” He looked at Ben. “Drag her out by her hair if you have to.”
“You call off the tree snipers, though,” said Ben.
Gray Rogers nodded, casting a glance into the trees beyond them. “But take some extra magazines for Spence’s assault rifle. It’s on your way.”
All three looked at their watches.
“I have 8:10,” Rogers said.
The other two nodded assent.
“Fifteen minutes,” Nora repeated.
They sprinted across the small clearing and into the back of the truck, coughing as the smoke within rolled out to meet them. Ben yanked two assault rifles off the rack, tossing her one.
“Four tear gas grenades,” Nora insisted.
He found them easily and, after making sure their safeties were on, tucked one into each of their blazer pockets.
He held her gaze. “We’d better go.”
She nodded.
“I’ll follow you,” he said.
She sprinted for the trees, wishing for the first time in her life that she had some camouflage gear. She darted from tree to tree but did not feel like the mayh
em on the lawn would allow anyone to follow their movements. She cast an eye up to where the one called Spencer was perched high in the smooth branches of a maple tree. He had his eye locked against the scope of his rifle.
“Spencer!” she called.
He looked down distractedly.
Ben waved the magazine at him.
Spencer held out a hand and Ben narrowed his eyes, calculating, then tossed the magazine high into the tree. Spencer snatched it out of the air.
“We may need cover, Spencer, in a few minutes. Keep an eye out for us.”
“You’re goin’ in there?” Spencer asked incredulously, gesturing to the barn.
But they had already taken off running. Nora crouched low, continuously looking to the right, trying to gauge how many of them were going in and out of the arsenal barn.
The SWAT truck was approaching and garnering most of the Patriots’ attention. No one had yet picked up the RPG-7 from alongside the woman’s corpse, and Nora wondered if this was because there were no more left who had trained on its use or if they were out of ammunition for it.
They gained the southwest corner of the barn. Chests heaving, they exchanged a look, then crouched low and stayed close to its wall, running as fast as they could toward the entrance. Nora would have done anything for a window to peer through, but she knew there was only the main entrance. She knew, too, that it was probably so designed for exactly this set of circumstances.
When they approached the lakeside, Nora stopped. She gazed at the lake peeking through the trees along the bank and fought for breath. Then she looked around the corner to the barn’s main entrance.
She saw several people just beyond the barn, and she could clearly see the arsenal barn’s entrance. People were running in and out, shouting words of encouragement or direction to whomever they met. She watched as two wounded men were dragged across the grass into the barn they were trying to enter. She looked back at Ben, eyes worried, then saw the same men who’d dragged in the wounded run out again to rejoin the fray.
“On your signal,” he said, his eyes clear, filled with resolution.
She nodded, then took three quick breaths.
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