The Rebel's Revenge

by Scott Mariani

  Squeezed into the aisle between the workbenches with inches to spare either side was the fruit of his labours, except Seth couldn’t see what sat hidden beneath the big tarpaulin draped over it. The object was nearly two metres tall and five metres long. Seth said, ‘What you got there? A big ol’ heap of guns?’

  Jayce replied, ‘Check this out.’ He walked up to it, grasped the edges of the tarp and dragged it away to reveal something that made Seth’s eyes pop.

  ‘We got plenty of guns,’ Jayce said. ‘Hell, this island’s ’bout ready to sink under the weight of ’em all. But this is what I call my piece de resistance.’

  At first Seth thought he was just looking at a truck, albeit the most impressive f-you beast of a truck he’d ever laid eyes on. The ex-military Humvee pickup had been heavily modified. It sat high off the ground on raised suspension and enormous knobbly tyres. The roof, windows and screen had been removed. So much thick armour plating had been welded over its bodywork that it must have weighed an extra ton. A further piece of plate was attached lengthwise across the middle of the open cab to separate the driver from the gigantic device mounted where the front passenger seat would have been.

  It took Seth a moment to realise that he was staring at the biggest gun he’d ever laid eyes on. He could only gape at it, speechless. The thing looked like a cathedral pipe organ rolled up into a cylinder, welded to a rotating mount made of riveted steel.

  ‘M61 Vulcan rotary cannon,’ Jayce said. ‘Like you see in all them war movies, Bro, except this ain’t no movie. She come off of a Starfighter jet that got used in ’Nam, that’s where my buddy who sold it to me brought it back from. These six barrels spew out a thousand rounds a minute each. Bro, you are lookin’ at a gun that can level a fuckin’ mountain in about as much time as it takes to use up the four thousand rounds of belt-feed twenty-mil cannon ammo I got stored in the back there. I got tracer, high explosive incendiary, armour piercin’, and somethin’ called “penetrator with enhanced lateral effect”.’ Jayce shrugged. ‘Gotta say, I don’t even know what that’s for. I ain’t never fired her. But she’s ready to rock. Ain’t she a beauty?’

  Seth had to agree that the monstrous weapon was the loveliest thing he’d ever beheld. He was almost weeping at the sight. He’d seldom ever seen his elder brother so entranced, either. It was like when they were little kids messing in the woods with their very first Uzi, stolen from their father’s collection while the old man was drunk as a skunk one day.

  Jayce clambered up onto the truck and caressed the silky-smooth, lovingly oiled metal of his pride and joy. ‘You heard of the Gatlin’ gun, right? First ever real machine gun, only back in them days you had to crank it with a handle. The Yankees used ’em against us in the war. Dude who invented it wanted to make a weapon that’d scare people so bad it’d make ’em stop fightin’ and give up havin’ armies. Like that’s ever gonna happen. Well, that’s what this is, a modern Gatlin’ gun. I call it the Garrett gun. You could blow up a fuckin’ main battle tank or sink a battleship with this baby.’

  ‘Oh, man, this is one righteous work of art,’ Seth breathed, finding words at last. ‘So this is what you been workin’ on all this time. How come you never told me?’

  ‘Wanted it to be a surprise,’ Jayce said. ‘Only finished puttin’ on the final touches a couple weeks back. Just in time for the battle of Garrett Island.’

  ‘Oh, man,’ Seth murmured. Then an idea struck him and he looked at his brother as if he’d just had a vision of God. ‘You know what this feels like, Jayce? Feels like the goddamn hand of fate.’

  ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself,’ Jayce agreed. ‘They can send all the cops they want. This baby fits right in with my plan.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Seth loved nothing more than a good plan.

  ‘Got three phases to it,’ Jayce said. ‘Phase one, when Hope and his asshole sheriff buddy get here, we’re gonna let’m eyeball the boys drivin’ off, and then they’ll walk right in. We won’t twitch a finger to stop ’em. Phase two, couple miles down the road the boys pull a U-turn and come right back to block off the bridge so’s they can’t escape. Just one way onto this island, and no way off.’

  ‘I love it.’

  ‘You ain’t heard the best part,’ Jayce said. ‘Phase three, once Hope and the cops are good and trapped just where we want ’em, that’s when we give the fuckers a good ol’ taste of the Garrett gun.’

  ‘They won’t know what’s hit ’em,’ Seth said, almost drooling with relish.

  ‘We’re gonna tear’m apart, Bro. Mow the fuckers down like crabgrass. None of them cops is leavin’ this island alive.’

  ‘What about Hope?’

  ‘Don’t you worry. That part of the plan still sticks, just like before. Hope goes last. He’s gonna suffer like nobody ever suffered in the history of pain.’

  Seth’s eyes were all aglow with excitement. He was grinning so hard that his cheeks were cramping. But then his eyes suddenly dulled and the grin faltered as another thought came to his mind.

  ‘Hold on a minute, though, Jayce. We kill a buncha cops here on the island, you know what’s gonna happen, right? The feds will be all over us.’

  Jayce sneered at him. ‘You ain’t gonna turn chicken on me, are you?’

  ‘They’ll send in the freakin’ army, Bro. They got bigger guns than this, plus fuckin’ assault helicopters, Black Hawks and shit. They’ll napalm the crap out of us so hard, it’ll make Waco and Ruby Ridge look like a possum shoot.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jayce said. ‘That’s exactly what they’ll do. Just like the Yankee forces of tyranny descendin’ on our ancestral home. They’ll raze it to the ground. You’re the one talked about fate, right? If that’s the fate of this island, so be it. But we’ll already be gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Take a look around you, Seth. This is a big territory, and nobody knows it like we do. Ain’t it already time we moved on anyhow? We’ll do what our great-granddaddy did when them blue scumbellies came for him. Hole up and lie low, rebuild someplace new, start afresh. Maybe find us a couple of nice bitches and get to makin’ some baby Garretts. They never caught ol’ Leonidas, and they’ll never catch us.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Don’t you never forget who we are, Seth. We got the brains and the money to do whatever the hell we like and there ain’t a man born who’s gonna stop us.’

  Seth seemed to be coming around to the idea. Then he frowned and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder in the direction of the dungeon. ‘What about the Hebert woman and her kids?’

  Jayce smiled. ‘I got my plans, Bro. Just like we talked about, remember?’

  Chapter 57

  Dusk was gathering as the raid team made their approach towards Garrett Island. After a long, hot day the evening was muggy and almost unbearably humid. Rainclouds were slowly gathering in the west as the full moon rose in the east. Everyone could feel the storm coming.

  The satellite image had revealed what turned out to be a tree-camouflaged deer trail on solid ground among the semi-tropical swamp and marshy terrain about a third of a mile west of their target. They left the SUVs and SWAT truck hidden there out of sight, with drivers on radio standby to move in fast at a moment’s notice, while the twenty-strong team made the rest of their way on foot, marching through the thick, tangled and wild countryside.

  They were heavily laden with all the weaponry, ammunition and equipment they could carry. Ben had selected an M4 carbine from the police armoury, the military A1 version capable of fully-automatic fire. He was wearing a ballistic vest under a black jacket with STATE POLICE in white across his back, and a navy LSP baseball cap worn backwards over which was attached the head harness for his night-vision goggles, plus radio earpiece and throat mic. Some of the team had opted for tactical helmets, including Officer Hogan, who, Ben suspected, wanted to look as much like a soldier as she could.

  Sheriff Roque had stubbornly rejected any paramilitary apparel and
insisted on sticking with his regular uniform and campaign hat, as well as his trusty Colt and a Winchester lever-action shotgun that was a century old, like a relic from the days of the American west. The beast was loaded with a fistful of ten-gauge buckshot shells that made regular shotgun cartridges look smaller than wine corks, each one loaded with twelve solid lead balls. Enough to knock a brick wall down with.

  ‘You can keep your newfangled plastic contraptions,’ Roque had said back at headquarters. ‘If you can’t get the job done with six rounds of ten-gauge you might as well be dead anyway.’

  The first objective was to position themselves at a useful vantage point where they could observe the sole access point on and off the island. Ben led the way with Roque behind him and the rest of the column following in single file, some of them now and then stumbling on the rough ground and softly cursing at having to be weighed down with so much gear. Not Hogan, though. Behind the look of ferocious determination it was obvious she was having the time of her life.

  Stalking through the thicket at the head of the heavily armed assault team took Ben straight back to a hundred SAS operations he’d led, back in the day, each of them still fresh in his mind. Fear of imminent violent death had a way of branding those experiences permanently onto the memory. The difference was, back then he’d been working with the cream of seasoned operatives, men he could rely on one thousand per cent and who couldn’t have contrasted more starkly with the motley crew he was heading up now. Still, he told himself, they were what he had. And they were the best chance Tyler Hebert had of ever seeing his wife and kids alive again.

  Ben spied the glimmer of dull moonlight on water ahead through the trees, and knew they were approaching the bank of the Bayou Sanglante. He signalled for the column to halt, and moved forward on his own to scout the OP.

  Fifteen yards from the black water the tree line gave way to a thicket of waist-high vegetation that dripped with humidity. Ben crept as close to the edge as he dared, and took his binoculars from the bag around his shoulder.

  It was a good vantage point. The island rose up humpbacked and ominous from the water, cut off from the shoreline like a river fortress. Its rounded top was too thickly wooded to make out any signs of habitation. Panning slowly down the island’s contour towards the bayou that surrounded it, Ben saw that he’d been right to decide against approaching the Garretts’ stronghold by boat. The banks, or at any rate what he could see of them, fell so steeply to the water’s edge that a marine assault force would have had a difficult time climbing up them. If things had gone badly and their approach been detected, the island’s defenders would have been able to pick them off from the higher ground like shooting crabs off a rock.

  At the point where the island lay closest to the shoreline, separated by maybe sixty or seventy yards of open water, was the old wooden bridge. Ben scanned it slowly from end to end. The Garretts’ sole access to their secluded home might have been erected more than a century and a half ago, but the builders had carried off a fairly impressive feat of rural engineering. Parallel rows of wooden posts as thick and gnarled as cypress trunks supported its length from shore to shore. It had been built wide enough for a wagon and two horses back in the day, and strong enough to withstand the transport of building materials, lumber and whatever other cargoes, illicit or otherwise, the island’s inhabitants had ferried back and forth through the generations since. All of which meant it would have no problem accommodating the weight and width of even a large truck such as the SWAT vehicle Ben intended to use to bring out the hostages.

  So far, things were looking promising enough. Then again, they were yet to set foot on the island. One step at a time, Ben told himself. But he kept thinking about Keisha and the kids, and the more he thought about them the more restless he became.

  He sensed someone coming up behind him, and turned. It was Roque, clutching his Winchester. Ben passed him the binocs, and Roque took them without a word. The sheriff crouched in the moist vegetation, laid down his shotgun and scanned the target much as Ben had done. He passed the binocs back to Ben, nodding as if he was coming to the same conclusions as he had.

  The sweat was shining on Roque’s brow and the muscles in his jaw were twitching. Ben noticed that the casing of the binoculars was slick with perspiration from the sheriff’s hands. He said softly, ‘Nervous?’

  Roque grunted. ‘I gotta admit, I’m wound up tighter than a three-day clock.’

  ‘Let the nerves work for you,’ Ben said. ‘Stay sharp and focused and you’ll stay alive. Let them get the better of you, and you’re done. I won’t be able to watch your back, if things kick off.’

  ‘That’s damned reassuring,’ Roque muttered.

  Ben fell silent and went back to watching the bridge through the binoculars. Nightfall was coming, precipitated by the dark and heavy storm clouds that were rolling across the sky and encroaching on the risen moon.

  Ben expected something to happen soon.

  And soon, something did.

  The bright headlamps of a vehicle appeared at the island end of the bridge. He tracked it as it crossed over. There was still enough light to make out the details of the bulky Rhino GX SUV with tinted back windows, jacked-up suspension and auxiliary light bar bolted across the roof sporting an array of big green spotlamps. For night-time hog hunting or some such activity, Ben supposed.

  He could plainly see the figures of a pair of men sitting up front, both wearing baseball caps. Right on cue, this had to be the Garretts’ thugs being sent out to the Big Q to pick him up. He could be pretty certain there’d be at least a couple more of Jayce and Seth’s henchmen sitting in the back, because there was no way they’d send out just two guys to deal with such an important task. Four altogether, at a conservative guess. Add that to the losses the gang’s numbers had already incurred, and it meant that their force remaining on the island was now significantly reduced. Just as Ben had been counting on. Another step of his plan had come together perfectly.

  The vehicle rumbled across the bridge, accelerated as it reached the dirt road on the other side, and disappeared off into the distance.

  ‘There they go,’ Roque said, grimly satisfied. ‘I reckon on ninety minutes to get to the Big Q. Another ten or fifteen before they realise you stood them up, then another ninety comin’ back.’

  That timeframe sounded about right to Ben. The team would have amply long enough to get into position and mount the attack before Jayce and Seth got the call telling them that he hadn’t shown up at the motel. That would be the moment of maximum danger for Keisha and the kids, but it could all be over by then. While the freed hostages were being whisked back to Villeneuve a police rearguard would stay in place to wait for the thugs returning empty-handed from their Big Q rendezvous, arrest them and haul them back to jail to join their friends. Then the confessions would begin.

  Roque slipped out his Colt, clicked the cylinder around to check the chambers. Then twirled the gun back into his holster and racked the lever of his Winchester and lowered the hammer to half cock, ready for action. ‘Let’s go and get this over with,’ he said, getting up.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, Sheriff.’

  Ben went on watching the bridge as the shadows deepened over the island and the water. No more vehicles emerged from the Garretts’ enclave. No sign of the Rhino doubling back, someone having forgotten their phone or gun or wanting to visit the bathroom. Moronic murderers were known to do things like that.

  Five more minutes of zero activity on the bridge was long enough to persuade Ben that the coast was clear. He slung the binocs around his neck. In doing so he felt the Voodoo talisman that Sallie Mambo had given him, still tucked under his shirt. Don’t never take it off, she’d said. The demons can’t hurt you then.

  How much truth there was in that, Ben supposed he was about to find out.

  ‘Okay, now let’s go,’ he said to Roque.

  Cha
pter 58

  The raiding party tracked along the shore to the mouth of the old bridge. Ben was the first one to set foot on it. The planks were warped with age, but tempered harder than iron and thicker than railway sleepers. The massive supports that jutted from the water were rimed with shiny algae.

  In single file and total silence they crossed the span of the Bayou Sanglante towards their target. The water each side of them was almost black and seemed mirror-still, blotted here and there with floating patches of green that gave off a stench of rotted vegetation and dead fish. Ben felt too exposed on the bridge and was glad when they reached the far side.

  There, they were met by a set of sturdy wooden gates, ten feet tall, faced with riveted iron sheeting and topped with curly coils of razor wire. A crude spray-painted sign across the front of the gates proclaimed PRIVATE PROPERTY – TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. A bravado warning that graced a million property entrances across America, but in the Garretts’ case Ben was perfectly willing to take the threat at its word.

  The gates had been left open when the Rhino came through. If they hadn’t, they would have been tough to get past without heavy-duty cutting tools. The raid team had just breached their first potential major obstacle. So far, so good.

  ‘This is it,’ Roque said in a low mutter, more to himself than anyone else. ‘Point of no return, I guess.’

  ‘You could always wait it out, Sheriff,’ Ben replied, sotto voce so the others wouldn’t catch his words. ‘Go back to your fishing boat and let us handle things from here.’

  Roque said nothing more. Ben led the team through the open gates. A driveway of crushed oyster shell wound through the thicket of overhanging foliage like a road through a jungle. Shadow was everywhere, deep and menacing, as though hidden monsters lurked in the darkness.