Home of the Brave (Raine Stockton Dog Mysteries Book 9)

by Donna Ball

  Oh, to live in the world of a ten-year-old, where everything always, always turned out okay. I hardly knew where to begin with the lectures about how important it is to do as you’re told, about how many things could have gone wrong, about how dangerous it was to go tramping through the woods after a runaway dog—so I did not begin at all. I suspected she had already been scared enough when she saw Pepper disappear into the woods. Besides, I had more immediate problems.

  “Here, take the dogs out of the way.” Mischief and Magic were already starting to sniff the goodies on the ground, so I transferred their leashes back to Melanie. I did not trust her strength, however, to hold onto Cisco once he became focused on jerky, so I kept him by my side.

  “I couldn’t find Pepper’s ball,” she said, winding the leashes of all three dogs around her hand. “But Cisco dropped this.” She thrust a dirty sock at me and then looked around the campsite. “Man, what a mess.”

  I stuffed the sock into my fanny pack, muttering, “You can say that again.” I blew out a breath. “Well, the least I can do is try to clean up before the owner gets back.”

  “We should probably leave a note,” Melanie agreed, “like when you have a fender-bender in the parking lot.”

  I wondered exactly how many fender-benders in parking lots she had had as I bent to start picking up scraps. Mischief and Magic resumed their curious sniffing and Pepper wasn’t far behind. Cisco’s leash was wearing a groove in my hand as he tried to stretch out his neck long enough that his tongue would reach the ground. “Dogs, sit!” I said sharply. The Aussies, looking not in the least put out, obeyed. Cisco followed more reluctantly. Pepper just stared at me.

  Melanie said, “Pepper, sit,” and Pepper obeyed.

  I made a face that she couldn’t see, but before I could comment, Cisco gave a short, staccato bark and lunged to his feet. Of course, that’s all it took for the Aussies to break their sits, and Melanie wrestled with the three dogs. I reached to help her, but was stopped cold by an angry voice behind me.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  I spun around, and found myself staring into the barrel of a shotgun.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Special Agent L.J. Manahan was a tall, square man with silver hair and a firm handshake. He introduced his two colleagues, Lydia Armstrong and Jack Donaldson, as members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Nothing in any of their faces suggested they might be here to enjoy the Smoky Mountain scenery. Meeting them, Buck felt that bad feeling start to expand again.

  The Hanover County Sheriff’s Department had hosted an FBI task force before, less than a year ago. That time, they had been after one man—a hometown boy who’d made it to the Most Wanted list. A man Buck once had called friend. It had not ended well. Sometimes, late at night, Buck would lie awake staring at the ceiling, listening to the sound of those gunshots over and over again in his head.

  Buck had not been in charge then. Now he was.

  He said, “I think you’d better fill me in.” He turned to lead the way to his office.

  Manahan stopped him. “That’s what we’re here for, Sheriff. But first we need to set up a headquarters. We need a secure building with power and plumbing. We’ll rewire what we have to. We have a van about twenty minutes behind us with more agents and equipment.”

  Buck cursed silently to himself, over and over again. No doubt about it now. This was bad. And it was on him. He said, “What about the old armory building on the edge of town? We’ve been using it as a kind of community center, but it’s empty now.”

  Manahan nodded his head toward Jack Donaldson. “Check it out.”

  They were in the main bullpen, with everyone staring and trying to pretend they weren’t, so it wasn’t hard for Buck to get the attention of one of his men. He waved Lyle Reston over and said, “You and Mike take Agent Donaldson over to the armory and give him whatever assistance he needs.” To Manahan, he said, “This way.”

  Once in his office, the female agent began unpacking her briefcase. An electronic tablet was hooked up to what appeared to be a miniature projector. In another moment a map of the southeastern United States appeared on the wall opposite. “You might recall that water treatment plant bombing in Alabama last year.”

  Buck nodded. “A little town called Bitter Branch, not much bigger than this. Crazy. You caught those guys, didn’t you?”

  “We caught two of them,” said Manahan. “This”—a new overlay appeared on the map on the wall, with half a dozen red balloon-like symbols in 3-D appearing over the names of towns in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee and Mississippi that Buck had never heard of—“represents similar attempts in other small towns that we’ve been able to stop.”

  “Similar attempts,” Buck repeated, staring at the map.

  “They weren’t all plots against municipal utilities,” clarified Agent Armstrong. “The modus operandi vary. Sometimes facilities are targeted, sometimes individuals. On occasion multiple targets have been planned in the same location.” She touched the screen of her tablet and a yellow arrow moved between a location in South Carolina and a location in southern Mississippi. “Here,” she said, “a church was targeted. And here, a school.”

  The silence that descended upon the room was palpable for a brief moment, rich with both the horror of what might have happened and quiet pride that, in fact, it had not. Then Manahan said, “The goal appears to be to spread chaos. That’s what terrorists do. And when they are successful, it doesn’t matter how many of them we catch. They’re like that snake with a thousand heads. You cut off one head and two grow in its place.”

  He nodded toward Armstrong, and another overlay appeared on the wall. It was blurred with red balloons, many of them so close together the geography itself was obscured. “These are the cells we suspect to exist, or to be in the process of forming, now. As you can see, the proliferation is primarily in the Bible Belt, although we’re seeing some significant activity in the Midwest as well. “

  No one, looking at that map, could avoid feeling a little sick. Buck said softly, “My God. How do you fight them all?”

  “One at a time,” replied Manahan somberly.

  Buck nodded slowly, beginning to understand. “And with explosives detection dogs from Homeland Security.”

  “Ideally, every law enforcement agency in the US would have at least one team like yours,” said Manahan, “and eventually they will. For now, we’re prioritizing according to strategic location and presumed threat. Your county met both those criteria. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

  Buck muttered, “Me either.” He looked sharply at Manahan. “I should have been briefed on what was going on. I can’t be expected to do my job if I’m kept in the dark.”

  Manahan said, “We try not to involve local law enforcement until it becomes necessary. Most of the time, it’s not necessary.”

  Agent Armstrong added, in a slightly less defensive tone, “We’re making great strides in interagency cooperation, Sheriff. This task force is one example of that. Your Officer Smith is another. We’re aware we have a way to go, but when we need to, we can still all work together to get the job done.”

  Buck couldn’t think of a pithy reply to that, so he decided to go the route of cooperation. “Why small towns?” he asked. “Because they’re easy targets?”

  “Partially,” agreed Agent Armstrong. “Partially because we think sentiment is already in their favor, and recruiting is easy.”

  Buck frowned. “I don’t mean to tell you your business, but if there’s one thing I can promise you it’s that foreigners don’t go unnoticed in a place like this. If a boy marries a girl from the next county it might take two generations before the neighbors stop looking at her sideways. I can tell you for sure that there is no way sentiment is in favor of terrorists around here.”

  Manahan returned mildly, “That would no doubt be true if we were talking about foreign nationals. These guys are as American as you and me. They call themselves
Patriots, and they’re building an army.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Instinctively my arm shot out to shield Melanie, which might have been effective if we had been traveling sixty miles an hour in a car that came to a sudden stop. It was, needless to say, no barrier whatsoever against a twenty-gauge shotgun. Nonetheless, Melanie drew close to me.

  “Raine,” she whispered, big-eyed, “that’s him. That’s the man I saw yesterday at the lake.”

  He was thin and bearded, wearing jungle camo pants, worn hiking boots and a perspiration-stained gray tee shirt. His arms were covered with tattoos. He had the kind of droopy dark eyes that always remind me of Abraham Lincoln, except that Abraham Lincoln’s eyes were kind. This man’s eyes were hard and angry.

  And then, when Melanie spoke, his eyes changed. It was as though he noticed her for the first time, and then the dogs, and he lowered the gun. My heart slowed to an almost normal rhythm, although his scowl was still far from reassuring. “What are you doing here?” he demanded fiercely. “Who are you?”

  I stepped in front of Melanie, keeping Cisco close and slightly behind me. “I—I’m sorry,” I said. “My dog got away from me. We were swimming down at the lake.” My gesture was choppy and uncertain. “I’m really sorry …”

  I looked around helplessly at the mess on the ground, and so did he. His expression changed again, from suspicion to dismay. He knelt on the ground, putting the gun beside his feet, and began to try to gather up the remainder of his provisions. The meat was covered with dirt and debris, slobbered on by dogs, and completely ruined. “You did this?” he said, and his voice sounded numb. He looked up at me with a fistful of meat strips in each hand and outrage in his eyes. “Why did you do this?”

  I took an instinctive step backward, bringing Melanie and the dogs with me. “I didn’t do it,” I assured him quickly. “My dog did. He didn’t mean any harm. I could pay you …” But even as I said it I wondered how I was going to pull that off, since the only thing I had in my back pocket was my cell phone. And I also knew something else: a man like this did not need money. Everything he needed was in that bag. And Cisco had destroyed it.

  I finished weakly, “Is there anything I can do?”

  He looked at Melanie, and at the dogs, and finally at me. He looked and sounded tired. “Just go home, lady. Just … go home.”

  “Maybe we could help you clean up …”

  “Did you hear me?” His voice was sharp and I startled. “Just get the hell on out of here!”

  I took Mischief’s and Magic’s leashes and said to Melanie with quiet urgency, “Let’s go.”

  I walked so quickly back down the path that she had to trot to keep up with me, but I think she was more excited than scared as she demanded breathlessly, “Are you going to call the cops?”

  We were by now well out of hearing range, and certainly out of sight, but still I didn’t slow down. “No.”

  “Why not?” she demanded. Her eyes were big behind the glasses. “He had a gun!”

  “Not everyone who has a gun is a bad guy,” I told her. And because I noticed her face was red and sweaty even in the relative shade of the woods, and all the dogs were panting, I did slow down as the trail leveled out. “The first time I met your dad he had a gun,” I added.

  “Oh yeah?” She looked surprised.

  “He was hunting behind my house,” I explained. “People are allowed to hunt.”

  She scowled. “Well, I don’t think they should be.”

  There was a part of me that privately agreed, but I also knew there were two sides to every story. “A lot of people around here feed their families by hunting.” I thought of the man we had just left behind, and the dried strips of meat that were probably hand-smoked squirrel or possum. And probably all he would have to eat for the next month.

  “My dad doesn’t.” She sounded angry and disappointed.

  “That’s true,” I agreed. I let the dogs go to the end of their leashes, and now that the lake was in sight, I relaxed my shoulders a little. “But, whether we like it or not, these days Man is the only natural predator for a lot of species. Deer, for example. Without hunters to keep the population down, the herds would eat all the plants that other animals need to survive. Pretty soon there would be so many deer they couldn’t even feed themselves and they’d starve to death too. It’s called wildlife management, and even though it’s hard to understand, it does help to keep nature in balance.”

  She was silent for a moment, and even though I knew the whole concept of natural selection and assisted husbandry was a bit advanced for a ten-year-old, I hoped at least I had done something to redeem her father in her eyes.

  Melanie said, “I still think we should call the cops. He pointed a gun at us. You’re not allowed to do that.”

  “No,” I said. “That was stupid. But that doesn’t make him a criminal. It just makes him an idiot. And my dad used to say that if you locked up every idiot there’d be nobody left to run the country.”

  A puzzled line appeared between her brows and I smiled, dropping a hand on her shoulder. “Look, the poor guy was just trying to enjoy the great outdoors when Cisco and Pepper came along and ruined his campsite and stole his dinner. If anyone’s the bad guy, it’s us.”

  She looked worried. “Is Cisco in trouble for tearing up the bag?”

  I shook my head. “He was just being a dog. And you know it’s pointless to punish a dog after he’s already gotten away with the crime.”

  “So if the guy with the gun isn’t in trouble, and Cisco isn’t in trouble,” she inquired reasonably, “who is?”

  I sighed. “I am,” I admitted unhappily, “for being the worst dog trainer ever.” But then I managed a brief bracing smile and injected an upbeat note into my tone as I added, “And we’re all going to be in trouble if we’re late for our next class. So let’s step on it, okay?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Buck said, “You’re talking about a homegrown militia.” But even as he spoke he was shaking his head. “Look, I’m not saying we don’t have our share of good old boys talking a bad game, and that talk might get a little rowdy down at the Legion Hall on a Saturday night, but that’s about as far as it goes. You’re talking about the kind of people who’d put a bullet through a federal agent’s head and then burn his body in a car.”

  “The FBI is aware that the vast majority of militia groups across the nation are mostly rhetoric,” responded Agent Armstrong. “We have no interest in those. But the number of radical cells capable of plotting and committing violence against the government and its citizens has grown dramatically in the past eight years.” She nodded again at the map. “And these we are very interested in.”

  “We think recruiting may begin with moderate militia groups, the kind you’re talking about,” Manahan said. “But then a selection process begins for the most radical, the most dedicated … misfits, mostly, usually ex-military. The cells are usually composed of members from a mixture of communities, which is why they’re able to go undetected virtually under the noses of their friends and neighbors in small towns like these. They use their acts of terrorism to accelerate recruitment. Frightened people tend to take up arms and seek retaliation, particularly when they feel their own government can’t protect them. The Alabama incident is a perfect example. It took those people months to put their community back together after the bombing. ”

  “And four new radical cells formed within two hundred miles of the incident,” said Armstrong.

  “And you’re telling me that one of these cells is operating right here, in my county.”

  “We believe so, yes.”

  Buck walked across the room to the small grimy window that looked out over the parking lot. He gazed at it for a moment, his hands in his pockets. Then he turned and looked at them. “What are we in for?”

  Manahan didn’t look happy. “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get much information from our agent before we lost him. We know there’s an active cell here an
d we suspect they’re planning something for this weekend.”

  “It fits the profile,” put in Agent Armstrong. “These people like to take advantage of significant dates and events to stir public emotion.”

  “Like a popular congressional candidate making a speech on the Fourth of July?”

  Manahan nodded tersely. “We’ve been in touch with Jeb Wilson’s office, of course. But we’ve asked him not to publicly announce a change in schedule. The last thing we want to do is to let these people know we’re on to them. In the past that’s been known to accelerate the violence, not deter it.”

  Buck said, “Do you have any names?”

  “Sheriff,” said Manahan with chilling frankness, “we’ve got nothing but a dead agent and a credible threat.”

  “These cells are structured like military units,” Agent Armstrong went on. “Each one has a commander, a second-in-command, foot soldiers who spend their weekends training and sentries to guard their resources and coordinate attacks. They use the Gadsden flag as their banner.” Agent Armstrong flashed a picture of the Gadsden flag with its familiar rattlesnake and “don’t tread on me” logo, just in case Buck didn’t know what she was talking about. “What makes this movement particularly dangerous, and to be differentiated from similar ones over the years, is that all of the cells seem to be organized under a single leader, a general, if you will, who’s coordinating all their movements. He’s the one we’re after, and up until now we thought we had a pretty good chance of closing in on him. That chance died with Carl Brunner.”

  Manahan said, “I presume you’re running a full complement for the weekend? Extra security for the parade?”

  Buck nodded. “The traffic doubles this time of year. My men have got all they can do to stay on top of the tourists and shoplifters.”