Lee was going to cling to those hopes, even though logically he considered them unlikely.
Now Flannery had regained consciousness and Lee was more than willing to turn over command to him. He said as much to the Ranger.
“You’re in charge, Lieutenant. What do you think we should do?”
Flannery frowned in thought and said, “We need to get in touch with somebody who can help us. Did you get any radios out of the chopper before it blew up?”
Lee looked at the kids. A couple of them shook their heads, and Spence Parker said, “No, we just grabbed guns and threw them out. That’s what Ernie’s brother told us to do.”
“What about cell phones?” Flannery asked. “You’ve got to have cell phones.”
“Already thought of that,” Lee said. “Nobody’s getting a signal. My guess is that bunch took out the towers somehow. They want to control all the communications in and out of town. Classic military strategy.”
“You served?” Flannery asked.
Lee grimaced slightly and said, “Uh, no, not really. But I’ve played a lot of war-themed video games, and not just first-person shooters, either.”
Lee thought he heard Flannery mutter something that sounded like “Lord help us.” He tried not to take offense. Sure, he wasn’t some ex–Navy SEAL or anything, just a small-town cop who’d barely made it through the community college classes to get certified, but he thought he had done all right so far.
He was alive, wasn’t he? A lot of folks weren’t. Maybe that was just the luck of the draw, but it was something to consider, anyway. He had gone up against those terrorist bastards and survived.
It might be a different story next time, though.
“There’s communications equipment at the police station, right?” Flannery asked.
“Well, yeah, sure, but I don’t think we can reach it. Even if we did, the enemy is bound to be in control of it.”
“Who is the enemy? Do any of you know?”
“Not for sure,” Lee said.
“They’re Arab terrorists,” Ernie put in. “That’s what Chuck told me.”
“I’ve seen some of ’em close up.” Lee tried not to shudder when he remembered how he’d blown that fella’s head off with the Mossberg. “Too close for my taste. They all looked Middle Eastern to me.”
Flannery nodded and said, “I think there’s a good chance that’s what we’re facing, all right. How many of them?”
“A lot. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Maybe even more. It’s a small army, Lieutenant. And before you can ask me what they want, I don’t know. Maybe just to kill a bunch of Americans. They’ve been doing a pretty good job of it so far.”
“No, it’s got to be more than that,” Flannery said as he shook his head. “It must have something to do with the prison.”
Janey said, “Of course it does. The government just took a bunch of terrorists out there and locked them up. Didn’t it ever occur to them that something like this might happen? What were they thinking in Washington?”
“They were thinking about how they can get reelected next time, so they can continue transformin’ America into something it was never meant to be,” Lee said. “That’s all they ever think about in Washington. You can’t expect any common sense from that bunch, Janey, you know that.”
“Yeah, but it’s like they—” Janey paused, her eyes widening in realization. “It’s almost like they expected something like this to happen. Wanted it to happen.”
“Let’s don’t get ahead of ourselves,” Flannery warned. “Right now let’s see if we can think of some way to strike back at them, weaken their hold on the town.”
Lee doubted if that was going to be possible. He’d been giving some thought to continuing to flee. Getting as far away from Fuego as possible. It wasn’t like they could do any real good here, and he had a couple of very important people to consider: his wife—and their unborn child.
They could all get back in Ernie’s pickup and head for the interstate highway, which was about fifty miles away. If they went across country and avoided the roads, he didn’t think anybody would stop them.
He was about to suggest that when Pete Garcia, one of the football players who had been standing guard at the mouth of the arroyo with Martin, came running toward them and called urgently, “They’re coming! The bad guys are coming!”
CHAPTER 29
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 loneso
me 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 b
astards 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.
CHAPTER 30
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.
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