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 g
ood 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.”
“Ms. Nichols is right,” Stark said. “Our only chance to survive is to hold them off until help gets here. This place gives us the best chance of doing that.”
“You heard the man,” Baldwin said.
“Yes, sir,” came the response over the intercom. A motor came to life, and the sally port’s massive outer door began to slide back.
Baldwin motioned for everybody else to go through first. He and Stark hung back to be the last ones into the maximum security wing. As they entered haltingly due to Baldwin’s injury, the warden said, “Do you really think help is on the way, John Howard? The way the country is now?”
“I’d like to think so, George,” Stark said. “But to tell you the truth . . . I just don’t know.”
CHAPTER 31
As Lucas Kincaid hurried through the prison, he heard an occasional muffled explosion, as well as the rattle of small-arms fire.
The thick walls couldn’t keep all the sounds of the battle going on outside from reaching into the building.
That unholy racket gnawed at Kincaid’s guts. He knew that good men were fighting and dying out there, sacrificing their lives to slow the terrorists’ advance into the prison compound.
Unfortunately, there weren’t enough guards to stop the attack. Kincaid knew that sooner or later the terrorists were going to penetrate into the prison, and more than likely it wouldn’t take them long to crush any opposition.
Before that happened, he and the others who were trapped in here had to be ready to defend the maximum security wing. Their only chance to survive was to hold out until help arrived from outside—if it did.
Unfortunately, Kincaid had seen with his own eyes how the top brass, for the most part, whether military or law enforcement, liked to dither around and consider every angle—most important, how this problem was going to affect their own careers—before taking any action.
It was just that sort of politically correct navel-gazing that had prompted him to disobey orders at the village of Warraz al-Sidar. He’d had to go off-book in order to save lives.
That deadly firefight had uncovered something that landed him in hot water with some really bad guys. Powerful guys with friends in high places. Very high places. That was why he had been lying low ever since.
Hell’s Gate had three distinct areas as far as the inmates were concerned: minimum security, general population, and maximum security. The minimum security cell block served as a buffer between the administrative area, where the library was located, and Gen Pop. As Kincaid came running up to the guard station at the entrance to minimum security, he found several officers he knew wa
iting there with guns drawn.
“Kincaid!” one of them exclaimed. “What the hell is going on out there?”
“The prison’s under attack,” Kincaid said. “Round up as many weapons as you can and get the inmates over to the max security wing. That’s where we’re going to mount a defense.”
“Wait just a damned minute, librarian,” one of the other guards said. “You’re telling us to release the inmates and give them access to guns?”
“That sounds pretty crazy, Kincaid,” said the first guard who had spoken.
“Look, there’s no time to argue about it. There’s a whole army of terrorists out there, if you want to take it up with them. But I’d rather save as many lives as we can.”
Several of the guards looked like they were starting to agree with him. The others still appeared stubborn.
“Where’s Warden Baldwin?” one of them asked.
“He was wounded by an assassin who got into the prison posing as a member of the news crew that was here today,” Kincaid replied, trying not to give in to the impatience he felt. “He put me in charge. I want a couple of you to come with me to the armory and help me gather more weapons.”
“I think you’ve gone nuts,” the most obnoxious of the other men said. “I’m not gonna get in trouble on your say-so.”
“Fine,” Kincaid snapped. “Whatever happens—whoever dies—it’s on your head, then.” He looked at the other men. “I still need two volunteers.”
A couple of them stepped forward.
“We’ll come with you,” one said.
“Then let’s go.”
As Kincaid continued toward the armory, he thought that the guy who’d been complaining actually was right: his plan was crazy. A lot of the inmates, even the ones in minimum security, couldn’t be trusted. They might try to seize the opportunity to arm themselves and take over the prison.
But if the terrorists found them locked in their cells, they would massacre the inmates, slaughtering them a cell at a time by firing through the bars with automatic weapons, simply because the prisoners were Americans.
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