by Scott Blade
In a fast, almost violent movement, Widow reached up and grabbed the seatbelt with one hand and buckled it .
Fifty yards. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten.
“Jackson! Get down!”
Jackson bunched over and ducked down against the center console.
Widow grabbed Jackson’s head and pushed him down, bracing him for impact.
The MPs started firing their M4s. All full auto.
A spray of bullets tore through the F150’s hood and ate into the engine block.
Widow ducked down, covering Jackson.
At the last five yards, he swerved the wheel.
Bullets sprayed into the cabin, into the dashboard, and into the rear bench.
The truck didn’t flip like Widow had planned, but it swerved right and slammed through a barricade and the chain-link gate, and crashed, hard, into one of the buildings, rocking it to the core.
No way did the airman on post not feel it.
Which was what he hoped for. He hoped they’d all come running out, locked and loaded. But he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Chapter 35
W IDOW HEARD YELLING and shouting. The guards were barking commands at the F150. Demanding him to come out with his hands up.
He was still on his side, covering Jackson, who was breathing. He was alive.
Widow slowly got up. The windshield was cracked and bubbled beyond recognition. He could barely see out of it in most places. What he could see was that the truck’s fender was smashed to bits. There were particles of brick falling off the sidewall of the building he’d rammed.
The truck’s hood was riddled with bullet holes.
Smoke steamed out of them. He smelled leaking oil, mixed with water, mixed with engine fluids.
The tires were blown, all of them.
It was a good thing that he’d fallen over Jackson because the steering wheel was crushed inward about six inches. He checked Jackson, who seemed all in one piece, but was unconscious, or at least pretending not to move.
The guards continued to bark orders.
More were piling out of the buildings. They weren’t all guards, but they were all armed with something. Some had assault rifles; some had handguns, some even had kitchen utensils.
Widow raised his hands so that they could be seen. He jerked his legs out from under the steering wheel. The footwell was safe, but the wheel got him a little stuck. After he got his feet up and out, he reached down and clicked the door handle, kicked the door open.
More screaming and yelling at him to come out slowly.
Widow hauled himself out of the truck.
It took him a second to get oriented. Then he did.
First, he looked at Arnold in the backseat. He was dead.
Widow knew that because the guy’s neck was snapped and his head was over to one side, the wrong side. It looked like the seatbelt had somehow ridden up to his neck or he slumped down too far. The belt had locked like it was supposed to do, but the side impact into the brick wall had jolted it. He nailed into it like he was hitting a close line at a hundred miles per hour, which technically was pretty close to the truth of the situation.
The MPs were still yelling at Widow. That ringing in his ears was back and angrier as if it had just rested and now was woken back up .
Widow stood up, hands in the air, but then he froze and turned so fast that the MPs almost shot him from the sudden movement.
He looked at the dust clouds. They loomed enormous over the road and the broken gate.
The smokescreen had worked, or so he thought.
But just then he heard the loud, deafening sound of a sniper rifle. The Barrett was unmistakable.
The sound broke all others. It overrode the ringing in his ears.
Widow heard several shots. He couldn’t keep track.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
They kept going. A second apart. Either the sniper they had was super-fast, or the Barrett didn’t have bolt-action. Which it may not have. He couldn’t recall.
Widow turned back to the guards.
He watched in utter horror as one by one; they were ripped off their feet.
He watched one’s head torn clean off.
The next one’s chest burst open.
Another’s torso from his solar plexus to his right arm and shoulder was torn clean off.
The bodies flew back several feet.
The box on the scope of the Barrett must have thermals.
The smokescreen did nothing to stop the sniper.
All it did was create enough confusion to slow down Warren and Mercer and Star .
Widow slunk down, lowering his profile. If the sniper was using thermals, he’d not know who was who.
Widow’s first instinct was to grab an M4. It lay on the ground, by the dismembered arm of one of the MPs, but he decided not to. Not yet.
That was probably how the sniper was deciphering his targets. None of the guys he was supposed to shoot were carrying rifles.
Widow went back to the truck, looked over the seat and took the MP5, a submachine gun with a smaller profile. The sniper might think he was Arnold.
He checked the weapon. It was fully loaded.
Then he snuck around to the passenger door. He had to scramble over the hood of the truck, kicking brick out of the way.
The Barrett continued to fire, taking out every airman who ran out of the Air Force buildings.
Widow had not counted the dead bodies or the gunshots. But five seconds later, he was standing above Jackson, trying to wake him, when he realized that the Barrett had stopped firing.
He figured they might’ve killed everyone in the compound except for the missileers fifty feet below in the silo, who were under thick concrete and steel. They probably had no idea what was happening on the surface.
Jackson was out cold. Not faking it. Widow grabbed him under the arms and jerked him, yanked him out of the truck and dragged him away from the rubble .
He dragged him fifty-plus feet and hauled him far to the back of the building.
There was a metal door. Widow opened it and checked it. No one was there. It opened to a back hallway.
Widow dragged Jackson inside and into a room. It was an office. There was a sofa. He rolled Jackson onto it and left him.
He ran down the hall, calling out.
“Is anyone here?”
No answer.
“Anyone here?”
No answer.
Widow ran from one end to the other, looking for survivors. There was no one. The building was empty.
He headed for the front door, but it was unpassable because one end of the truck had crushed the wall over it.
Widow ran back the other way and out the back door.
He huddled close to the back wall and looked at the gate. The dust was settling, wafting, and subsiding.
He saw the Jeep come through the gate, then the motorcycle guy. They parked their vehicles and Mercer jerked Star out of the Jeep. He held her by the arm.
The motorcycle man waited at the busted gate. One minute later three other men came driving through it in another pickup truck .
The Barrett was in the hand of one of the guys. He was the sniper. The magazine was gone from the rifle.
The driver of the truck K-turned and pointed the nose out the gate onto the road.
The sniper reloaded the Barrett and took the same firing position that he had had before, only now he was covering the road, a precaution to fight off cops or whoever might come.
The good news was the cavalry coming were guys loaded into two Black Hawks. They weren’t driving up a road.
The bad news was a Barrett fifty-caliber can fire through an engine block of an Army transport truck, which meant that he could blow the Black Hawks out of the sky from long range.
The worse news was that none of that mattered because the cavalry wasn’t going to make it in time. Mercer’s countdown had said fifteen minutes, which was about fifteen minutes ago.
The
missileers were coming up any minute, thinking that they were ending a forty-eight-hour shift.
Widow had to get to them first. There must be a security check where they radioed up before coming up.
He took the MP5 and ran back around the building, staying out of sight.
He hid behind trees and rocks and gullies and anything else he could find.
Then in the back of the other building, he saw the entrance to the shaft that led down to the missileers. It was a platform that came up out of the ground. It was all concrete.
It looked like a concrete pit that led down to an elevator.
Where was the communications room?
Then he heard voices from behind.
He saw Mercer and three of the four guys he’d brought and Star. He held her from behind. There was a gun in his hand. It was weird. It looked like a short-barreled shotgun, but it was different.
Widow focused on it.
It was a modified nail gun.
The situation was bad, but Widow had dealt with bad before.
Just then, it got much worse.
The elevator doors made noise, and a few seconds later they opened.
Mercer stared at his watch. A big smile came over his face.
The motorcycle guy held a big radio in his hand. He must’ve done the security check with the missileers before they came up. Somehow they had already hacked into the process.
Widow didn’t know how. But details didn’t matter. He was out of time. Mercer was going to fire at least five nuclear-tipped Minute Men III ICBMs. He was going to fire US nuclear missiles, and probably at US targets.
The two missileers stood in sheer terror when they saw the carnage above.
Chapter 36
M ERCER POINTED the nail gun at the missileers.
“We’re going back down, fellas,” he said.
Widow watched him and another guy, the one who was with the sniper, walked over to the missileers, who were trembling and protesting.
Widow couldn’t hear them.
He couldn’t let Mercer get down that shaft. If he made it into the silo, Widow had no idea how to stop him. He seriously doubted that he could break into a nuclear missile firing silo, deemed so top secret that ninety-nine point nine percent of the top brass didn’t even know it existed.
No way.
He had to act fast. He had to act now. Or it was all over.
Widow stood up and ran back around the undamaged building. He stayed close to the wall. He ran full sprint.
He switched the fire selector on the MP5 to full auto.
By the time he came around the corner, back to the destroyed gate, he was panting hard .
Widow didn’t stop for breath. He ran and ran.
He came right up behind the pickup with the sniper.
The sniper was facing the empty road ahead. He was staring over the scope of the Barrett, waiting for whoever was about to come so he could take them out.
He heard sprinting steps behind him, but he assumed it was one of his teammates.
It wasn’t.
Widow scrambled up the back of the truck.
The sniper spun around and saw him. He dropped his grip on the rifle and snatched a Glock out of a hip holster.
Widow was faster.
Widow fired the MP5 into the sniper’s chest. He pressed the trigger down and fired five rounds in quick succession.
POP! POP! They went.
Prescott’s chest burst open into five separate bullet holes, spraying red mist back at Widow.
No time.
Widow dropped the MP5 and ripped the Barrett off the roof of the truck. He left the bipod down.
Widow ran back, leaped off the truck’s bed, over the tailgate. He hit the dirt hard but landed on his feet. He kept running, past the dead MPs, through the buildings, past the wrecked F150 and the dead Arnold.
Mercer, Warrens, Allen, Jones, Star, and the two missileers all turned and stared at the cloud of dust pluming up from someone running at them like a ghost in smoke.
Widow stopped dead, fell to one knee.
Time slowed down.
He ignored everyone but Mercer.
He ignored the rifle’s scope. He didn’t need it, and it’d be tuned incorrectly for this close range. He aimed over the rifling and the barrel, to the side of the scope.
It turned out the Barrett wasn’t bolt-action after all because he fired in a fast chain of destruction like a madman, only he was a madman who could shoot straight and damn good.
He fired the first round at Mercer.
The BOOM from the first round probably saved his life because it stunned everyone but him.
The bullet ripped through the center of Mercer’s face. It created a massive crater where the man’s nose used to be. Forget about the H-shaped scars on his face. They were gone along with most of his facial features.
The dog tags came flying off his neck, and the rest of the body crumpled back and fell onto the floor of the elevator.
Widow didn’t pause there.
He moved left, fired another round and killed the one called Allen.
Then Widow jerked right, fired another round at the one called Jones.
Both men flew back off their feet. The bullets tore holes in both men the size of a paper cup’s rim from the front and exited through their backs, leaving holes the size of barstools.
Red mist splattered and sprayed everywhere.
The last man standing from Mercer’s group was the motorcycle guy, Warrens. He reacted, jerked up Star’s Glock and aimed it at Widow. He fired in panic, and the first round went past Widow and slammed into the brick wall of one of the buildings.
Before Widow could fire another round at Warrens, Star kicked the guy in the back of the knees. He toppled down onto his knees. She lunged on top of him.
Behind Warrens, while Widow was killing the others, she had scooped up a pile of dirt. Now, she shoved it into his face, over his sunglasses and behind them.
He started punching the air. She dodged his blows and scooped up her Glock.
She fired three rounds into his gut and one in his chest.
Warrens stopped moving. He was dead.
Star Harvard holstered the Glock, turned to Widow and ran over to him. The pregnancy didn’t stop her. He stood up, dropped the Barrett and intercepted her.
She slammed into him, hugged him close.
Widow looked over her shoulder. He looked over the dead terrorists and then up at the two missileers.
They stood there, still holding their hands up. They stared down at the beheaded Mercer, and they looked at each other, completely dumbfounded.
Chapter 37
W IDOW HUGGED Star Harvard tight. They found Jackson coming to inside. He shook hands with Widow, telling him he couldn’t express how grateful he was.
Widow told them he didn’t want to wait around. He didn’t want to be part of debriefings and reports and interviews and bureaucrats.
Star hugged him twice before he left.
She asked where he would go. He shrugged and left on Warrens’ motorcycle.
Why not? he thought.
Riding back to town, Widow saw Deputy Cole passing him by, headed back the way he’d come. Probably to Dorothy’s house.
He felt bad for her. She had it as bad as anyone from all this.
He pressed on. The wind blew through his short hair.
When Widow got to the edge of Hellbent, he passed the road with the unmarked grave.
He should’ve kept riding, but he felt he needed to know.
So, he turned and headed to the barbershop .
Widow parked the bike on the curb and went in.
The barber was there.
He looked at Widow, who was a bloody mess.
“Well, you look like you’ve been in a war.”
“I have. Basically.”
“Did you find that airman?”
“I did. He’s alive.”
“I’m guessing that you won?”
&nbs
p; “I did.”
“Bad guys?”
“They walk among the angels now. Or not.”
The barber nodded.
Widow said, “So what’s the deal with the grave?”
“It’s an old grave. From two hundred years ago, or so the legend goes.”
“So what’s the big deal?”
“She was a teenage mother who was burned at the stake. Accused of witchcraft.”
Widow listened.
The barber said, “This is a deeply religious town. At least the older people are, and they’re the ones in charge.”
“So?”
“So the young witch wasn’t just burned at the stake. The family was cursed with shame. And the witch’s grave was set up as a constant reminder of that shame. And even today, no one is allowed to alter the grave.”
Widow said, “That’s nuts. ”
The barber shrugged, said, “It stays where it is. It is as it is.”
Widow looked at the floor and then up at the barber.
He asked, “The name of the woman?”
“Mable.”
“As in Mable’s Diner?”
The barber nodded.
That’s why the lumberjacks and Mable were so bent out of shape when he asked about it. It was a sore subject for her.
Widow thanked the barber and left.
He mounted the motorcycle, checked the gas tank gauge, and rode away.
◆◆◆
O NE HOUR LATER, two Air Force Black Hawks flew into Hellbent. They were fully loaded with MPs armed to the teeth. They arrived at a secret installation that nobody was supposed to know about. They found six dead terrorists and a half dozen dead local MPs and service men and three living missileers, one who was barefoot and conscious. He was holding on to his wife, who was more than eight months pregnant. She looked like she was ready to give birth at any moment.
A Word from Scott
Thank you for reading THE DEVIL'S STOP. You got this far—I’m guessing that you liked Widow.
The story continues in a fast-paced series that takes Widow (and you) all around the world, solving crimes, righting wrongs.
Book eleven is BLACK DAYLIGHT (coming November 2018). Jack Widow walks a lonely, snowy road at night when he witnesses a heinous crime. The only glimpse of the culprit he gets are taillights that fade into the mist. Widow does all he can to help, but when he does the local South Dakota police and the FBI see him as suspect number one.
