Home Invasion

by William W. Johnstone

  It felt so good to rest and catch their breath at Rye Callahan’s ranch, though, that they allowed a couple of days to slip past.

  On Saturday morning, though, Ford called a summit meeting of him, Parker, and Callahan. The three men nursed cups of coffee on the ranch house patio while Earl stayed inside to put away a huge plate of pancakes, scrambled eggs, and bacon. For a little fella, he sure could eat.

  “We need to get out of here,” Ford said.

  “Not on my account,” Callahan replied. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you want.”

  Parker shook his head and said, “We know that, Rye. But by now the men who are looking for us are bound to have found those bodies and that burned-out pickup. They’ll know that we’re probably still somewhere in the area, and they’ll start checking out the ranches around here.”

  Ford gestured toward the slate-tiled roof that overhung the patio. He and his companions had been careful not to venture out into the open while they were here, and the SUV they had brought with them was stashed out of sight in one of Callahan’s barns. They had gone over the vehicle, making an intensive search of it to be sure there were no tracking devices hidden in it.

  “They’ve probably got an eye-in-the-sky satellite up there right now, taking surveillance photos of the whole area. I know you’ve been going on about your business, but they’ll still wonder if we’re here.”

  “Maybe you could slip out durin’ the night,” Callahan suggested. “I’ve got a couple of pickups. You can use one of them.”

  Parker shook his head again. “Those satellites have infrared capability, too. It’ll look bright as day out here.”

  “Then what are you gonna do?”

  “You have any friends you could invite over for a fandango?” Ford asked, drawling out the last word.

  “So you can mingle with them and slip out that way?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Callahan rubbed his angular jaw. “Yeah, that might work. It’d have to be folks I trust, but there’s a few of those around here. Not as many as there used to be. A lot of the old guard’s died out.”

  “You don’t have to tell them anything about us,” Parker said. “Maybe just that we’re cousins visiting from somewhere. Would the guests know you well enough to know that wasn’t true?”

  “Not really. I’ve never been a real talkative sort, I guess you could say.”

  Ford grinned. “All right. Can you get them here tonight?”

  “That’s short notice … but most people will turn out for a barbecue.”

  “All right. We’ve got ourselves a plan.”

  They went inside and found that Earl wasn’t just eating breakfast. He had turned up a map of Texas from somewhere and was poring over it.

  “What are you looking at, Earl?” Parker asked.

  The young man frowned as he studied the map. “I got to thinking about that town called Home.”

  They had kept up with the story on the news channels the past couple of days. After a few scattered incidents of violence, the Federal Protective Service had succeeded in disarming the town. According to a statement issued by the commander of the FPS forces, Colonel Charles Grady, all firearms in Home and the surrounding area had been either turned in or confiscated, and so the FPS had withdrawn the previous afternoon.

  Neither Ford nor Parker believed that everyone in the town had turned in their guns. A few people probably had some stashed that the FPS storm troopers hadn’t found. By and large, though, the town probably was disarmed.

  Except for the tiny police force. That good-looking female chief had been interviewed several times, and she had declared that she and her officers would keep the town safe until everything was settled and the people had their guns returned to them.

  The CIA agents knew that was never going to happen. Not with the way the President was smirking and preening for the cameras, obviously filled with arrogant pride that he had succeeded in taking away the guns of a whole town.

  “What about Home?” Parker asked Earl.

  “Look.” Earl put a finger on the map. “This is where Home is.”

  Curious, Ford peered over the little scientist’s shoulder. “Yeah. So what?”

  Earl moved his finger over a short distance, into a range of small but rugged mountains. “And this is where Casa del Diablo is.”

  Parker frowned. “How far away is that? Fifty, sixty miles?”

  “Yeah,” Earl said. “And the highway that’s closest to the lab is the same state road that runs right through Home.”

  Ford and Parker glanced at each other, and each of them knew that alarm bells were going off in the other’s head.

  “What exactly are you getting at, Earl?” Ford asked.

  “I don’t know. I just got this uneasy feeling all of a sudden…. The project was getting pretty close to finished when I decided to jump ship. Enough time has gone by since then that they could have finished up the prototype batch of the nerve gas.”

  “How much of the stuff are we talking about?” Parker asked.

  Earl took a deep breath. “I don’t know for sure. I was high enough in the pecking order to be privy to some of the details of the project, but not all of them. My guess? Maybe a hundred canisters.”

  “How big would those canisters be?”

  Earl held up his hands to indicate dimensions. “About the size of an oxygen tank like the ones you see old guys using sometimes.”

  Parker’s voice was sharp. “How would they be transported?”

  “Very carefully,” Earl said. “Lots of protective packing, to make absolutely certain that they wouldn’t be jostled around and spring a leak.”

  “What about temperature?” Ford wanted to know.

  “Best to keep the stuff cool. It’s less volatile that way.”

  Ford frowned in thought as he tugged at his earlobe a couple of times and then ran his thumbnail down the line of his jaw. “So we’re talking about refrigerated trucks, big enough to carry, say, fifty canisters each.”

  “Yeah,” Parker agreed, “they wouldn’t put the whole shipment in one truck. They’d split up in at least two, maybe three or four.”

  “And they’d have to take it somewhere, because it doesn’t do them any good just sitting in a lab,” Ford mused.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Earl said. “Homeland Security and the FPS put a ton of money into this project. The bosses are going to want to have the stuff where they can get at it easily in case they need to use it.”

  A shudder went through Ford. “I hate to think about Weldon Stone having the capability to wipe out a whole town so easily.”

  “Son of a …” Parker said in a low, stunned voice. His finger stabbed down on the map at the dot marking the location of Home. “You think there’s going to be a test, Fargo? Is that really why the FPS disarmed the whole town?”

  Ford thought about it for a moment and shook his head. “No, if the stuff is really as fast and lethal as Earl says it is—”

  “It is,” Earl said. “Don’t doubt it for a second.”

  “Then it wouldn’t matter whether the people in Home still had their guns or not,” Ford went on. “All the FPS would have to do is fly over the town, release the gas, and then waltz in a little while later to collect the bodies. The citizens wouldn’t ever know what hit them.”

  Callahan spoke up. “Wait just a damn minute. I been listenin’ to what you boys are saying, and while I’m as upset about what’s goin’ on as anybody, you’re talkin’ about the U.S. government murder-in’ a whole town-ful of its own citizens in cold blood. You really think they’d do that?”

  “I’d like to believe they wouldn’t,” Ford said, “but I’m convinced it’s the FPS that’s been trying to kill the three of us for the past week. I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

  “You’re right, though, Fargo,” Parker said. “It’s not going to be a test. That doesn’t make sense when you factor in the business of disarming the town. I think it’s
just a coincidence. The President and his cronies saw their chance to make a move when the lawsuit came up, and they grabbed it.”

  “Yeah, but there’s something going on here,” Ford insisted. “My gut tells me there is, and I’ve learned to trust it.”

  “Mine, too.” Parker’s finger tapped the map again. “I think when we leave here tonight, we’d better head for Home.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Callahan called six of the local ranching families and invited them for a barbecue at his place that night. Five of them accepted. The other family already had plans.

  But that was enough. Counting the kids, there would be more than twenty people at Callahan’s house that evening. With the two agents and Earl dressed in boots, jeans, Western shirts, and Stetsons, they would blend right in and be able to leave without being noticed when the barbecue was over.

  That was the plan, anyway. They would just have to wait and see how it played out.

  Ford and Parker had mapped out the route they would take in Callahan’s old pickup. They checked the guns and ammunition they had taken from the dead FPS agents. Callahan used his tractor to haul a trailer loaded with bags of feed and fertilizer up to the patio. They unloaded enough of the bags to form a hollow, then concealed the weapons in it and covered them with some of the unloaded bags. Callahan drove the tractor back into the barn and hid the guns under a tarp in the back of the pickup. The truck was full of gas and ready to go.

  All that was left was waiting, and while they were doing that, they tried to figure out the connection between the disarming of Home and the town’s proximity to Casa del Diablo. As Parker had said, the whole thing might be a coincidence, but the agents were going to try to prepare for any eventuality.

  That was the way they had stayed alive in such a dangerous profession.

  That afternoon, Callahan asked them, “What’re you boys plannin’ to do once you get there?”

  “We’ll get the lay of the land, figure out what’s going on there, if anything.”

  Callahan snorted. “No, I mean about this whole nerve gas shit. You can’t let those people in Washington get away with plottin’ against our own citizens.”

  “We have to get proof, and we have to get the word out,” Parker said. “If the public knows about the gas, the government won’t dare use it. They wouldn’t be able to cover it up. There would be such an uproar, the President would probably have to resign.”

  Callahan shook his head. “I don’t know about that. I ain’t sure you’ll ever get that fella out of office, now that he’s there. If he can get enough of the military on his side, he’ll just up and declare himself President for life, like those little tinpot dictators down in the Caribbean.”

  “The country won’t stand for it,” Parker insisted.

  “And while General Stone and the FPS may have signed on to do his dirty work,” Ford said, “there are enough members in the regular branches of the service who have enough sense to know they’re not supposed to be fighting their own countrymen. Remember that mess at the Alamo a few years back?”

  Callahan nodded and said, “Hard to forget about it. You’re talkin’ about a military takeover, though. That ain’t the way we do things in this country.”

  “I know. And so do enough members of the President’s own party, or at least I hope so. I hope enough of them still have enough decency to stand up to him once they find out what he’s been doing. They’re the ones who’ll have to throw him out of office, if he won’t go voluntarily.”

  “You fellas are more optimistic than I am,” Callahan said with a sigh. “His own bunch won’t ever turn on him. And you’ll have a damn hard time get-tin’ the word out, anyway, what with all the TV folks kissin’ up to him all the time.”

  “There are still some honest people on the radio,” Ford said.

  “And don’t forget the bloggers,” Parker added. “They’ve shown that they can spread news the mainstream media doesn’t want heard. All it’ll take are a few brave men and women at first who are willing to tell the truth. It’ll mushroom from there.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Callahan said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  The guests began to arrive while the sun was still up. Callahan already had meat smoking in a barbecue pit, and delicious aromas filled the air. Ford, Parker, and Earl were dressed in their cowboy clothes. Callahan introduced them as his cousins from Houston, as they had planned. None of the guests seemed to doubt the story.

  As they stood near the barbecue pit, Earl complained under his breath, “I look like an idiot in this getup. You two can pass for cowboys, but me …” He shook his head.

  “You’re right, Earl,” Ford said. “You look like a little kid in a Hallowe’en costume. Or you would if kids still dressed like cowboys for Hallowe’en.” Ford grinned. “You just need a cap pistol.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Earl said dryly. “That makes me feel a lot better.”

  Parker took a pull on the beer he held. Callahan had filled a big washtub with ice and shoved a few dozen bottles of beer down into it.

  “We’ll leave when everybody else does, right?” he asked.

  “Yep,” Ford said. “I doubt if anybody’s watching close enough to notice there’s one more pickup leaving than drove up earlier.”

  Earl said, “Uh … guys? What’s that thing?”

  The agents turned to him. He nodded toward a range of hills about half a mile north of the ranch house.

  Ford’s eyes narrowed as he spotted the aircraft flying slowly over the hills. It had an odd, streamlined look about it, and Ford recognized it instantly.

  “Drone,” he said as the craft swung toward the ranch. “Damn it! Somebody’s decided to take a closer look.”

  “You mean it’s a remote-controlled plane?”

  “Yeah, with high-powered cameras mounted in the nose,” Parker said. “We’d better get in the house, otherwise it can look right into our faces from that altitude.”

  Moving unhurriedly so as not to attract attention, the three men turned and walked across the patio into the house. Outside, Callahan’s guests noticed the drone plane as well and started pointing and talking about it.

  “You think the guys flying that thing saw us?” Earl asked nervously once they were inside.

  “I hope not,” Ford said. “Maybe we made it inside before it got close enough.”

  He had a bad feeling, though. The cameras on a surveillance drone like that were powerful enough to zoom in from a long distance and pick up quite a few details. Even before the drone finished its pass, it could have captured digital images of everybody at the gathering, and right now somebody could be running those images through government computers at mind-boggling speeds, searching for matches.

  The drone circled back over the hills. Ford thought for a second that it was leaving, but then it swung around again so that its nose pointed toward the ranch house. He grabbed a pair of binoculars Callahan kept on the mantel over the fireplace and lifted them to his eyes, peering through them and locating the drone in time to see the hatch in its belly slide open so something could poke out.

  “Damn!” he exclaimed as he threw the binoculars aside. “It’s armed with a missile.”

  “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no!” Earl babbled. “Not again!”

  Ford slammed the sliding glass doors aside and ran out onto the patio. “Everybody out!” he bellowed. “Get out of here! We’re under attack!” It made him sick to think the lives of all these innocent people were in danger because of the plan he and Parker had come up with. They had known the government—or at least, certain people inside the government—wanted them dead at all costs. And yet they had brought these civilians into the line of fire because there was no other way.

  They hadn’t counted on a surveillance drone discovering their presence on Callahan’s ranch before they could make their getaway. Now it was too late for second-guessing. All they could do was try to scatter the people caught on the bull’s-eye.

  Parker and
Callahan joined in on the yelling, too, shouting at the guests to move. Ford saw a sudden plume of smoke in the air near the drone and knew the missile was on its way.

  “Incoming!” he roared. “Incoming!”

  Screaming and yelling incoherently, the guests ran toward the barn as Parker waved them in that direction. They had only seconds, but at least they put some distance between themselves and the house before the missile came whistling in and slammed into the building. The massive explosion shook the earth, sent debris flying high into the air, and created a cloud of dust and smoke.

  Ford and Earl were the closest ones to the blast. The impact knocked them off their feet. With his ears ringing, Ford grabbed Earl’s arm and hauled him upright.

  “Are you okay?” he shouted.

  “What? “ Earl was deafened.

  “Okay?”

  Earl must have read his lips, because the little scientist nodded his head.

  The drone flew overhead and swung around for another pass. Ford knew some of the drones carried only one missile, but some were armed with two.

  Just their luck, this craft was a two-fer.

  As the drone lined up for a second missile run, Parker stepped out of the barn holding the RPG launcher that had been in the SUV belonging to the Federal Protective Service. He lifted the weapon to his shoulder, lined up the shot, and fired. The grenade streaked through the dusk toward the drone.

  The second missile launched, but it had barely cleared the drone’s nose when the RPG struck it. Both of them detonated, and the huge, mid-air explosion was close enough to the drone to send it spinning crazily out of control across the sky. A couple of seconds later, the drone slammed into the side of a hill and blew up in a brilliant burst of flame.

  Realizing that they had gained a few moments’ respite, Ford shouted to the stunned party-goers, “Move! Get in your trucks and get out of here!”

  Everyone had arrived in either a pickup or an SUV. They were parked in the open area between the barn and the ranch house. The house was on fire now from the explosion. That was good, Ford thought. The blaze would confuse the footage from any heat-sensitive cameras pointing down at them from orbit. With a big, intense source of heat like that, it would be harder for the camera to pick out individual figures.