A Long December

by Donald Harstad

  My eyes were becoming better adjusted to the dark. From my new perspective in the shadows, the front half of the house was between the yard light and me. In the golden glow, I could see through the thinly curtained front windows on the upper floor, and into what I guessed would be the kitchen on the ground floor. There was no movement there, and the back half of the building was pitch black.

  We’d left some pretty clear tracks leading right to where we were. Great. Nothing to be done about it, but I was beginning to feel that a white Christmas was a little overrated.

  It always becomes quieter when the snow starts to fall, but the deadening effect of the snow-filled air was emphasizing the shriek in my ears caused by the nearness of the shotgun blast. It was a little distracting.

  The crab apple tree that had become our little bastion wasn’t nearly as thick as I was. I seemed to remember reading somewhere that an AK-47 round could easily penetrate ten inches of wood. Not good, but it was definitely time to stop moving around. In the dark, movement is the tattletale.

  A staccato clang behind me just about scared me to death.

  “What…?” escaped from Hector.

  I twisted around and caught a silvery shape in the darkness. The hog feeders. We were almost at the wooden fence that separated the hogs from the yard. There apparently was a hungry hog behind us. “Hog feeder,” I said, with a long breath I hadn’t realized I’d sucked in, and turned back toward the house. Just in time to catch a flicker of movement in the upper window. It was one of those things that happens in the dark, where you just aren’t sure you’ve actually seen anything. I looked back at the hog feeder, and then brought my gaze back to the house. I did that three times, and never once caught a hint of movement. That pretty well satisfied me that I’d actually seen something.

  But what had I seen? Whatever or whoever it was, it wasn’t there now.

  I was beginning to wonder where the cavalry had gotten to. I placed my ear as close to the mike-receiver as I could, and called Sally.

  “Three to Mobile Comm?” I heard something like a response, but it was too faint. I pressed the little speaker right to my ear and adjusted the volume upward.

  “Three to Mobile Comm?”

  This time, I heard Sally say, “Three, go ahead!”

  Hector punched me in the arm, apparently to let me know the walkie-talkie was receiving. Just like I’d asked him to do. “Okay, uh, where’s everybody at?”

  “Some of them are there already,” she said. “Where have you been? We’ve been calling…give me your exact ten-twenty.”

  My exact location. I did the best I could. “We’re kind of southeast of the residence. About a hundred feet.”

  “Stand by.”

  Like I had a choice.

  “Three,” said Sally, after about five seconds, “would you be near a small tree?”

  That was a surprise. “Ten-four, I am.”

  “Stand by.”

  I did. The “some of them” she’d referred to must have night-vision equipment.

  “Three?”

  “Go.”

  “Three, a team member has you in sight. Remain where you are if at all possible. And who’s this ‘we’?”

  “The Hispanic male subject is with me. We’ll sit tight, ten-four on that.” That’d be pretty easy. “Be sure they know there’s two of us.”

  There was a pause, and then, “They know.”

  I looked around me. Nothing moved. No indication of where the team member might be. I was hoping I didn’t have to “remain” all that long, as the cold was starting to seep through my clothes.

  “Stand by one moment, Three…” and it got quiet again. Then she was back. “Uh, and, Three, be advised that there’s an unidentified subject just entering the yard from the east side of the residence, apparently armed, and about twenty-five yards from you.”

  Holy shit. I stopped talking and just clicked the mike button in quiet acknowledgment.

  I could tell Hector had heard the conversation, because he instantly looked in the right direction. I wasn’t sure about Hector’s younger eyes, but I looked as hard as I could into the deep shadow cast by the house and didn’t see anybody. I tried looking to one side and then the other, hoping to catch a movement in my peripheral vision. No go. But if he was on my side of the house, my tracks ought to be pretty apparent in the yard light. I fervently wished it hadn’t snowed.

  A moment later, Sally’s voice was back. She spoke very fast. “Three, he’s spotted you, get down!”

  Since I was kneeling already, I just dropped down on all fours and then kicked my feet back. I was as down as I could ever get. I was aware of Hector flopping to the ground, too. He had good ears.

  I kept looking toward my right, at the house, and heard a loud voice from my far left say “Police! Put your weapon down! Police!”

  I saw the man with the gun, then. He was crouched down and had just stepped about two feet out of the shadow of the house. I heard a crashing sound, and saw an orange muzzle blast leap out of his shape, first horizontally and then vertical so fast it described a bright orange arc, and then it was gone as he fell backward, back into shadow.

  “Holy shit!” said Hector.

  “The unidentified subject is down, Three,” said Sally. He sure was. I could very faintly make out his lower legs and feet. There was no movement.

  I risked a 10-4.

  “They advise stay put, Three. They think there’s another suspect in the residence.”

  “No problem,” I said, and meant it.

  Now that I was stretched full length on the ground I was getting colder. A lot colder. Snow was beginning to fall on the exposed back of my neck, and I was reluctant to reach back and turn up the collar. Lord, that was cold. I stayed put, though. I hadn’t seen a flash or heard a report, but I was certain that somewhere there was a very good sniper who had taken out the “unknown subject” with one shot. I could stand by as long as they wanted. I was in absolutely no hurry to get up and move at this point.

  “Three, there’s movement again,” said Sally, just as I saw shadows near the kitchen area. The shadows continued to the porch, and the door opened.

  Exposed to the yard light, two men stood crowded together in the doorway. One was Jacob Heinman in a shirt and overalls. The other was dressed in a heavy parka, and had a ski mask pulled down over his face. He also had a weapon, which looked an awful lot like an old shotgun. He was holding Jacob in front of him.

  “I have this hostage!” he yelled. I recognized the voice. It was Odeh. “I am armed.” He held the shotgun out at arm’s length, just to prove it. As he did, I heard a crack, and his gun just kept on going, out of his hand, off to his right and onto the ground. It looked for all the world as if he’d thrown it. That sniper was a really great shot.

  He hollered something I didn’t get, and pulled Jacob Heinman back into the house with him. Instantly, I could see HRT people going up the little cement steps and into the door right behind him. I saw lots of movement, a flash, and then two HRT members came hustling out with Jacob and Norris Heinman. They hurried them off to my left and disappeared behind the barn. Immediately, there was a loud noise that apparently was a combination of a shot being fired and the yard light blowing up, and the barnyard was plunged into darkness.

  It got vewy, vewy quiet, as Elmer Fudd would have said. I could imagine the HRT members going from room to room in complete darkness, using their night-vision goggles. Spooky, but very effective.

  After about five very long minutes, I heard a helicopter approach. It sounded like “mine,” but since I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t tell. I heard it make three passes over us, and then fade as it began to circle quite a way out from the house.

  A moment later, lights started coming on in the house, and two cars and an ambulance appeared in the driveway.

  “It’s all clear, Three,” said Sally. “One suspect in custody, two hostages secured.”

  “Ten-four!” I said. “Can we get up now?”

/>   “Yep,” said a male voice, very near. “Name’s Howell,” said the black-clad figure that stood up on the other side of the fence that separated the hogs from the house. As he stood, a hog squealed in surprise.

  I stood, too, but Hector stayed down. “Christ, man,” I said. “How long you been there?”

  “Too damned long. He came over the fence and scraped his boots in the fresh snow. “Glad it’s not summer. Frozen hog shit is bad enough.”

  Hector got to his feet, and the three of us walked together over to the cars, which were rapidly being covered with snow.

  The Heinman brothers were being escorted back out of the barn.

  “You’re still alive,” said Jacob when he saw me.

  “Glad you two are, too,” I said, noticing a large swelling on his forehead.

  “Too old to go easy,” he said.

  The ambulance crew hustled past us and into the house.

  “Better have ‘em check you out, too, Jacob,” I said.

  He indicated one of the HRT members. “He’s already told me to do that.”

  “Shit, I cannot believe this, man. I saw you running, and I thought, ‘what is going on with him,’ and then you said to come on with you, and I thought it was a good thing to do, and I didn’t know where we were going to…and they took that dude out, man. They snuffed his ass like that. And then when this dude comes up behind us from nowhere, man, and scares the living shit out of me…” Hector was talking very fast, coming down from an adrenaline high. He wore an enormous grin. “This was just so fucking cool!”

  “Glad you liked it,” I said.

  Volont came over to us. “You do tend to get into deep shit, don’t you? “he asked.

  “I do what I can,” I said.

  “Just FYI,” he said, coming a little closer, “our prisoner is Odeh. For sure.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Somebody shot him in the thigh,” he said with a broad smile. “You?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Too bad you missed his nuts,” he said. “The dead one over by the house is the one they call Chato. Odeh’s told us that already.”

  “That was just stupid, Odeh holding the gun out that way,” I told him. “I thought you said he was a trained terrorist.”

  “Oh, he is. He is. But he’s not one of those who’s at the tip of the spear, not by a long shot.” Volont glanced around. “It helps if you think of him as a middle manager. Sort of their version of Hawse,” he said with relish.

  EPILOGUE

  IT TURNED OUT THAT THE HEINMAN BOYS HAD TOWED THEIR CAR INTO a garage in Battenberg about a week before. It had a broken timing chain, and they’d just raised the back end up and towed it behind their tractor. It was taking a long time to fix because it was a 1975 Dodge Dart, and the parts were getting a little scarce. Odeh and Chato had clobbered Jacob Heinman because they thought he was lying about the missing car. It seems they thought that Hester’s car, which was a Plymouth, belonged to the Heinmans for two bad reasons. First, it had the same pentagonal logo as the key that hung on the nail in the brothers’ kitchen. Despite what Jacob and Norris said, they didn’t believe Hester’s Plymouth was a cop car because Hester has one of the undercover radios that fit in the glove box. You can’t see it from the outside, and it uses the same antenna as the commercial radio. My car, on the other hand, has a pedestal mount for the cop radio, in plain sight through the window.

  Thanks to my having the young trooper check out the “media van” that had followed us toward the Heinman brothers’ farm, Judy Mercer of KNUG was on the scene and she and her cameraman got almost all of the action at the farm on tape. She’d apparently thought my reference to being very tired was for the benefit of the other media team, and it had been her headlights I’d seen behind us. Inadvertent though it was, it was nonetheless her scoop. I was glad, because they’d caught me thundering out the door and heading toward the pigpen. I refer to that sequence every time somebody implies that I’m slow.

  Odeh, I was told, talked pretty readily. I can’t prove that, because I never got to talk to him again, myself. What George told me, though, was that Odeh and Chato had been in the van, the one that Hector told us about. They had four others with them. They’d parked it, and walked in after one of the people who’d surprised us in the barn had called them on a cell phone and warned them that we were there.

  Volont had been right. The ricin cans were at the farm, and their distribution had been delayed when we began working the area because of Rudy’s murder. They’d apparently tried to get in twice, and there were either lab agents or cops there both times, so they just kept on driving. The DCI lab team had been within fifteen yards of the little fruit cellar, but the entrance was nearly impossible to see. When we went on our little picnic to the old Dodd place, the people who started shooting at us were actually in the process of pulling the ricin cans out of the cellar and taking them to the shed where they’d parked the car. Odeh and company were supposed to meet them there, but elected to walk in when they were told that we were on the scene. It was a risk for Odeh, but it was either that, or have the whole operation with the ricin go down the tubes.

  Odeh and Chato originally fled the scene when the ambulance was blown up. They were headed over the hill to the hidden van, but saw four or five cop cars parked just about on top of the hiding place. We didn’t know the van was there, but Odeh and Chato couldn’t know that. They’d circled around, trying to avoid cops, and eventually came out onto the roadway near the media vans. There, they sort of mingled, and then got to the east side of the road and began walking north, away from all the commotion. The helicopter hadn’t keyed on them because they were on the cop side of the fence, so to speak.

  The ambulance was blown up solely to create a diversion for Odeh and Chato. There was no other reason. They’d used a terrorist named Aba, who along with Odeh was the only really thoroughly trained terrorist present. He’d been hit in the leg, so his injury was legitimate, and the explosives had been inside the rolled rim of his stocking cap. In the dark, and in the hurry, it had just been missed. We reviewed the tapes. One of the victim HRT guys actually did something at the bomber’s head just before they released him to the ambulance. George thought he’d probably felt the cap to see if there was anything under it, not part of it.

  We found lots of remains of the people who’d been either in or just by the ambulance when it went up. The driver was virtually intact, for instance, but under a part of the cab. Those who were actually inside at the time of the detonation were reduced to parts. We never found the head of the bomber, but got his torso, eviscerated abdomen, and legs. Terri must have been leaning over him when he set himself off. We think that because most of her head and torso had just disappeared. If anything about the whole incident pissed me off the most, it was that. Here she was, knowing he had tried to kill some of us, and still putting herself at risk to help the man. So what does he do?

  Chato, as it turned out, was supposed to be affiliated with FARC. He was trained, but not a fanatic like Mustafa.

  Odeh pled guilty to assault, attempted kidnapping, and wrongfully pointing a gun at another. That was me. I didn’t believe that was all, but the feds needed him elsewhere, and Iowa wanted to get rid of him. He went into federal custody immediately after our trial, and I have absolutely no idea where he is today. Volont didn’t volunteer anything, and I didn’t ask.

  Speaking of Volont, Hester woke up after surgery in Dubuque to find a huge bouquet of flowers in her room with a big blue ribbon that said, in gold letters, “Lady Agent.” It came from the FBI Field Office in Cedar Rapids, but it had to have been George and Volont who were behind it. She was charmed.

  Juan Miguel Alvarez, also known as Hassan Ahmed Hassan, pled guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Rudy Cueva.

  After his sentencing, he was transferred into federal custody, and tried in the Northern District of Iowa for Terrorism. He pled guilty there, too. Last I heard was on the news, and he was bein
g transferred to a federal prison.

  Linda Moynihan pled not guilty. Well, what’s an innocent girl to do? I guess the plan was that, since everybody who could testify against her was either dead, in federal prison, or had been deported, she had a good chance of skating. Our federal attorney friend Dirty Harriet shot that one down when she announced in a news conference that any federally held witness who was needed to testify in Iowa would be made instantly available. True or not, it worked. Linda changed her plea and got five years. I expect her to serve eighteen months.

  Skripkin turned state’s evidence for every governmental agency he could find in the phone book. We got him a fifteen-year sentence as an accessory, and then he went to trial in the federal system for “terrorism.” I don’t think he’s actually been adjudicated yet, but I’m sure he’s happy as a clam.

  When the news got out that the packing plant had been a victim of a terrorist act, their business actually improved. Ben was flabbergasted, but happy. Me, too.

  Although my shooting of the two terrorists at the Dodd place was ruled by the District Court as “justifiable,” I got sued. The suit was brought by two sets of attorneys who were supposedly representing “familial interests” of the deceased. Only the court knew the actual families, as they were afraid of “retribution.” They must have been really interested, though because each suit demanded a hundred million dollars. Both dead men, as it turned out, were from Honduras, and had been known to associate with the drug trade. During depositions, it became clear that the plaintiff’s attorneys were going to maintain that their clients, far from being caught by my return fire while they were reloading, were actually unloading their weapons while preparing to surrender.

  Don’t you just have to wonder sometimes?

  Anyway, the feds let us have Juan Miguel Alvarez for a witness. He was deposed by the plaintiffs, with suitable restrictions, and claimed that the dead men had been reloading because they intended to advance to the barn door, throw in more grenades, step in with guns blazing, and kill all of us. He ought to have known, as he was standing right beside them.