by Black, Sean
‘What about the six defendants?’
‘They’re staying in a different part of the same building.’
‘Isn’t that risky?’
Lock took a step back, another sniper coming into focus on a different rooftop. A police helicopter buzzed low, chasing off a couple of television news helicopters that were hovering above the courthouse snatching some overhead footage before nightfall completely engulfed the scene. ‘Right now, everything’s risky.’
Carrie sighed. ‘At least Jalicia got through most of what she wanted.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Lock. ‘Tomorrow’s about tying up some loose ends and then the defense having their opportunity to pick it all apart, but as far as the jury’s concerned the damage is pretty much done.’ He looked at Carrie. ‘Which is just as well for you.’
She glanced up at him, puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it took one hell of a lot of persuasion, and I had to throw in my best friend almost being killed, but I got you the interview you wanted with Reaper.’
Carrie’s mouth fell open. ‘No way. Jalicia agreed?’
‘Reluctantly, but yes. Coburn, Ken’s boss from the ATF, showed up when I was talking to her about it. He thought that Reaper on the tube might get the bigwigs in Washington to start paying some more attention to the threat white supremacists pose to domestic security, which would mean more money for his budget.’
‘And two bombed Federal Buildings won’t do that?’ Carrie said.
‘Body count wasn’t high enough, plus, as far as the politicians are concerned, it ain’t real unless it’s on primetime, right?’
Carrie smiled. ‘And what does Reaper think about this?’
‘Seems like he’s turning into quite the attention-whore. Now he’s started talking, no one can shut him up. He’s said that nothing’s off limits. You can ask him anything.’ He paused. ‘There are some conditions, however. It can’t be broadcast until after the verdict. In fact Jalicia and Coburn don’t even want it mentioned that you’ve done it until the jury are back.’
‘That’s fairly standard. Anything else?’
‘You’re not going to have a lot of time to prepare.’
‘How come?’
‘Because it’s scheduled for tonight at midnight.’
‘That means I have less than six hours.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Lock, leaning in to steal a kiss. ‘You’re like me.’
‘In what way?’
He grinned. ‘You always do your best work under pressure.’
35
It was two minutes to midnight in downtown Medford. With Lock behind him, Reaper walked into the blaze of TV lights, a prize fighter staking out his spot at the weigh-in. Still clad in his suit and tie, he looked more like an aging rock star than an avowed neo-Nazi psychopath. He settled into the chair opposite Carrie as Lock and two US Marshals took up a position directly behind him.
Carrie flicked through her notes as the camera settled over her shoulder to capture Reaper’s answers. While the interview was a major coup for Carrie, Lock had thought that it might also serve as a way of drawing out Reaper’s true motives for betraying his former brothers-in-arms. But before they got to that, Carrie had told Lock she wanted the viewers at home to know exactly the kind of person Reaper really was.
‘Mr Hays, why are you currently serving three life sentences without possibility of parole?’
Lock watched Reaper straighten in his chair, the muscles in his back tightening visibly as he did so.
‘Like I said in court today, I was standing up for the most beaten-down minority in America today.’
‘And who would that be, Mr Hays?’
‘White people.’
‘But you did commit a crime – several crimes, in fact.’
Reaper opened his mouth to say something, but Carrie cut him off with a wave of her hand. Lock tensed. Reaper was a man used to being heard.
‘According to the record, Mr Hays, while serving as a Navy Seal, and with a once proud record of service to your country, you planted an explosive device in the vehicle of your commanding officer which killed both him and his two young daughters. Your commanding officer was African-American. Was that why you murdered him and his family?’
Jalicia had briefed Lock on some of this but the details had been left sketchy. He’d known that Reaper had served in the army, but not with such an elite unit. He’d also known about the murder of Reaper’s commanding officer and his two daughters, and heard something about it being racially motivated.
Reaper lowered his head. ‘The two kids were collateral damage. They weren’t supposed to be there.’
‘But you did intend to kill Lloyd Thomas?’
‘Lloyd Thomas was an incompetent who climbed the ranks because of positive discrimination, because of the colour of his skin, and because of bleeding-heart liberals like you. As a result, men died. Good men.’
‘Good white men?’ Carrie prompted.
‘Yes, they were white. White men like the ones who built this country. With their own blood and sweat. And now it’s being torn from us, swamped by the mud people who want everything for nothing.’
There was a sudden crackle on the radio of a Marshal standing behind Lock. Carrie looked up from her notes in irritation. Lock turned round to see what was happening. The Marshal had his finger up to his earpiece, listening intently.
‘We’re going to have to finish this up later,’ the Marshal said. ‘We have a situation in the street outside.’
A sudden current of tension ran through the room. Everyone fell silent. Lock noticed Reaper’s back straighten, as though he was getting ready for action.
‘Kill the lights,’ Lock said.
The cameraman hesitated, glancing at Carrie for approval.
‘Now,’ Lock ordered.
He did as he was told, reaching down to click off the three high-powered tungsten lights arranged in a triangle around Carrie and Reaper. Immediately, the room was plunged into semi-darkness.
Lock crossed to the door and flicked off the main light, reducing everyone in the room to shadows.
‘If you move,’ he said to Reaper, ‘I’m going to shoot you.’
Crossing to the windows, he peered out. There was a black van parked in the middle of the street, surrounded by several police cruisers. Hunched behind the doors of the cruisers were four police officers, their service weapons drawn and trained on the van.
‘What’s going on, Ryan?’ Carrie asked, stepping towards him.
Lock reached back with his left arm, pushing her away. ‘Stay away from the window. That goes for everyone.’
He narrowed his eyes, trying to get a bead on the driver. It was difficult. The storm that had been building through the afternoon was now in full effect. Rain lashed the street, pummeling the sidewalk with heavy bullets of water which shrapneled upwards in a thousand fragments or dug themselves into rapidly expanding pools of water.
The Marshal in charge handed Lock a pair of binoculars. He put them up to his eyes and racked the focus wheel between the two lenses with the pad of his thumb. It looked like a woman was in the van. Dark hair. Dark complexion. One of the cops was shouting instructions to her. Lock could just about guess from his body language and demeanor that he was ordering her to get out of the van with her hands up. But she wasn’t moving.
Lock turned back to the US Marshal, who was right behind him, his finger still at his earpiece. ‘What’s the situation down there?’
‘This van just ran the roadblock, then it stopped. Single occupant driving, as far as we can tell.’
‘It’s a woman?’
The Marshal met Lock’s gaze. His expression suggested he was holding something back.
‘Who is it?’
‘Raise your hands where we can see them!’
‘Toss the keys to the ground!’
‘Keep your hands up and exit the vehicle!’
A litany of instructions. None of which she could follow. Sh
e looked down at her hands, which had been secured to the steering wheel with cuffs. Heavy-duty gaffer tape bound her tightly to the seat. After a hell of a struggle she’d finally managed to extricate her feet from the tangle of tape securing them, at an angle, to the gas pedal. Thank God, or she would have ploughed straight into the police cruisers racing towards her.
Jalicia’s heart was pounding, and her shirt was soaked in sweat. She’d never been so terrified in her whole damn life.
Lock watched the van from the window of the makeshift TV interview room, then turned back to the Marshal and nodded in Reaper’s direction. ‘Let’s get him back in a cell. Get on the radio and tell the people down there to fall back to the building. Also, get on your cell phone. We’re going to need every single member of law enforcement we can round up down here. Tell them to bring every weapon they have, plus all their ammunition. I want every gun cabinet and rack within a ten-mile radius emptied.’
‘It’s Jalicia in the van, isn’t it?’ Carrie asked. ‘What’s going to happen to her?’
Lock took Carrie’s hand. ‘Dime to a dozen that van is rigged with explosives. There’s nothing we can do for her. Not right now anyway.’
‘But we can’t just leave her,’ she said, defiant.
‘We can and we will,’ Lock said, grimly. ‘It’s a come-on. The guys who’ve rigged the van plan on drawing everyone in. Then they’ll blow it up. That gives them a window to get to their real target, which is this asshole here.’ He hauled Reaper to his feet.
‘And if you’re wrong?’ Carrie asked him, clearly unused to seeing this side of Lock, his ability to choose life for some and death for others.
‘If there are no explosives then she’ll be fine.’
‘But what if they’re on a timer?’ Carrie pressed.
‘Listen to me,’ Lock said. ‘These are classic terrorist tactics. It sucks, but we have to leave her. We don’t leave her, a lot more people die.’
‘OK,’ Carrie said reluctantly.
‘Goddammit!’ the Marshal erupted, staring at his cell phone. ‘I can’t get a signal.’
‘Same here,’ said one of the cops standing at the door. ‘My radio won’t work either.’
‘They’re using a jammer.’
Lock could see the beginnings of panic in Carrie’s eyes.
‘They can do that?’
Before Lock could explain that pretty much anyone with a credit card and an internet connection could purchase the technology to block communications these days, he froze, aware of a sound beyond the keening of the wind and the splashing of the rain outside.
‘Listen,’ he said, and the room fell silent.
Lock concentrated hard, separating out first the atmosphere of the room, then the roar of the storm. What was left was a low, rhythmic thwump that was increasing in volume. Accompanying it in the skies above them was a point of light. The pinprick quickly expanded so that Lock was at first dazzled, then all but blinded by it.
He narrowed his eyes and brought up a hand to shade them from the worst of the glare, which allowed him a clearer view of a black helicopter turning so that it was side on to the building. A man was sitting on the floor of the cabin, his legs dangling out, his feet almost on the blade of the skid. He was clad in full body armor and holding an assault rifle. With his free hand he was feeding out ropes which twisted and dangled in the wind like tendrils of overcooked spaghetti.
Lock twisted round so that he was staring into the saucer-wide eyes of the Marshal, who’d joined him at the window.
‘They’re not our guys, are they?’ Lock asked.
All the Marshal could manage was a slow shake of his head.
Mid-shake, the missile pod mounted at the front of the helicopter lit up with a fiery roar, punching out what Lock guessed had to be an RPG. It whistled downwards, leaving a ghostly yellow blaze burning across Lock’s retina.
Less than a second later, the van holding Jalicia disintegrated in a fiery blaze of distended metal. The blast wave thumped so hard into Lock’s chest that he and the others in the room were momentarily lifted off their feet and deposited ass-first on to the floor. The walls of the courthouse vibrated.
Ears ringing, Lock stood back up and went over to Carrie.
‘You OK?’ he asked her as she struggled into a sitting position.
‘What the hell was that?’
‘RPG.’
She gave him her reporter’s stare. ‘In English please, Ryan.’
‘A rocket-propelled grenade.’
He looked back to the window. Down below, flames licked around the skeleton of the van, and he could see the charred outline of Jalicia’s corpse slumped over what was left of the steering column. He tore his eyes away. By the time he looked skywards again, the light was gone. But up above them, the thump of the helicopter’s blades slashing through the storm grew louder, drowning out the sirens below.
36
Lock moved fast. Dragging Reaper towards the door with his left hand, he unholstered his SIG Sauer 226 with his right. Carrie had kindly brought it to Medford for him, and it felt good in his hand. Solid. Reliable. Deadly. He pointed forward with it, motioning for the others to follow.
At the door, he turned to one of the younger Marshals who was toting an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. ‘Give me your side arm.’
The Marshal hesitated.
‘Son, unless you can fire both of your weapons simultaneously, hand it over.’
The Marshal in charge shrugged a ‘go ahead’ and the younger man handed over his Glock 40 calibre. Lock took it, business end first, and palmed it off to Carrie.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘Hey, what about me?’ grumbled her cameraman.
‘Just because you have a dick doesn’t mean you can shoot for shit,’ Lock said, staring at him.
Carrie set about checking over the Glock with the grace and speed of a career soldier. Lock had always regarded the ability to defend yourself as a more crucial set of skills for women than men, seeing as women were more often prey than predator. Hours on the range with Carrie had transformed her from merely competent to a crack shot who regularly scored higher than Ty – much to Ty’s annoyance.
‘But—’
Lock cut the cameraman off. ‘She knows what she’s doing, so do everyone a favour and get over yourself. Tell you what, you do your shooting with that camera you’re toting. We come out of this alive, you might just snag yourself an Emmy.’
‘What about me?’ Reaper said. ‘I can shoot.’
Lock yanked on Reaper’s restraints, almost lifting the bigger man from the ground. ‘No gun for you, but I’ll give you a bullet any time you want one.’
‘So where we going?’ asked the Marshal in charge.
Lock poked at Reaper with the barrel of his gun. ‘We’re going to make sure that Elvis here ain’t going to be leaving the building.’
The SWAT team sniper posted on the roof tossed his Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee to one side and peered into the blinding spotlight projecting from the front of the helicopter. He readied his weapon, all the while keeping his eyes on the powerful airborne spotlight bearing down on him, God-like, from a storm-ridden night sky.
He raised his assault rifle and leaned out from behind an air-conditioning unit. Still the light kept coming, the thump of the rotor blades drowning out the chaos of noise from the street below. He sighted a point at the very centre of the glare and fired off a round. Nothing. Just the light bearing down on him without mercy, the ever-increasing roar of the blades, and the chop of the air stinging his eyes.
A moment later there was another blast of fire from the helicopter and he was blown off his feet, shrapnel pinballing around him, cutting him to ribbons.
In the helicopter, Cowboy punched the air as beneath them the sniper’s position disintegrated and a big hole opened up in the roof. He keyed his mike, which looped round the side of his face, finishing a few inches from his mouth.
‘He’s second floor, right?’
Cowboy climbed a little, steadying the helicopter over the rooftop. Behind him, Chance, her weapon drawn, clipped on to the ropes that had been slung over the runners, swung out of the helicopter and rappelled the short distance to the roof.
Trooper followed, zip-lining at speed to join her. While he provided cover, Chance placed the first charge next to the locked door of the rooftop stairwell, and ran back.
Cowboy gained some more height. A second later the charge detonated, the shockwave buffeting the helicopter. Spinning the copter round ninety degrees, for a moment he just caught a glimpse of Chance before she disappeared into the building.
Cowboy spun the helicopter back round and let loose a fusillade of .50-mil rounds towards a SWAT sniper position on the building opposite, which lay to his immediate right. That done, he took the helicopter down on to the roof. By the time they’d organised another effective firing position he’d be long gone.
He checked his watch. Ten minutes past midnight. At seventeen minutes past midnight he’d take off again. Anyone who wasn’t on board by then was staying behind. That was the deal.
Chance and Trooper clambered down the stairwell, a couple of the higher treads blown away by the charge she’d planted. Lights flickered overhead.
A solitary jail guard ran towards them through the dust. ‘Stop where you are!’ he shouted, with all the authority of someone used to dealing with the unarmed.
Chance raised her M-4, found his outline easily with her night sights, and dispatched him with a single round, his anti-stab vest no match for a sub-sonic CQB round. His chest opened up, his intestines spilling out over his utility belt.
Lock and Reaper had reached the one-man cage where Reaper had been spending his downtime. Thirty seconds earlier there had been another two explosions, both of which had sent plaster dust cascading down on them. One of the guards opened the door.
‘I’m going to need at least two more pairs of cuffs, and two more sets of leg restraints,’ Lock barked.
‘But he’s already double-cuffed.’
‘Just get me what I need.’ Lock turned to the cameraman. ‘You have gaffer tape on you, right?’