With his personal bodyguards trailing him, he strode into the hospital, where Raffir met him along with several other men. A machine gun hung on its sling from Raffir’s shoulder.
“The hospital is secured, Doctor,” Raffir reported. “All the captives are being held in the cafeteria.”
Hamil nodded in satisfaction.
“Did we suffer any losses?” he asked.
“None,” Raffir replied with a smirk.
“Excellent. How many of the infidels did you have to kill?”
“Only three or four. And none of the medical personnel, as you instructed.”
“Very good. Some of our men have been wounded already. I’ll have them brought here.”
Taking over the town’s medical facility was an important component of the plan, Hamil knew. Not the most important part, certainly, but still, he was glad to hear that this part of the operation had been successful.
“What about the police station?”
“Also secured, Doctor. But . . . we lost four men.”
Hamil frowned.
“The Americans put up that much of a fight?”
“They were lucky,” Raffir declared. “But in the end our forces took the station.”
“And executed the infidels, I hope.”
When Raffir hesitated, Hamil knew his new lieutenant had something displeasing to report. But after a second, Raffir forged ahead bravely.
“They fled. We found no one inside the building except one of our men . . . dead.”
Hamil’s jaw tightened in anger. He asked, “How many of the Americans were there?”
Raffir shook his head and said, “I can’t say for sure, Doctor. None of the men who led the initial assault survived, and by the time the others got there, the Americans were gone.”
Anger turned to fury and welled up inside Hamil. In an icy but controlled voice, he said, “You sent only four men?”
“The others were only a few minutes behind them. A whole truck full—”
Raffir stopped short and gulped. Perhaps he read in Hamil’s eyes the desire to kill him as an example. That was the first impulse Hamil felt.
But he forced down the urge and said, “All right. At least there will be no more communication between the authorities and the outside world.”
He squared his shoulders. Time to move on.
“Take me to the prisoners.”
Raffir led him to the cafeteria, where approximately eighty people stood in a frightened, huddled mass on one side of the big room. Half a dozen armed men guarded them.
Hamil strode in front of them. He felt hatred emanating from them, along with their terror.
It was good that they hated him, he thought. The more righteous a man was, the more the infidels hated and feared him. He wore their loathing like a badge of honor.
Raising his voice slightly, he said, “I want hospital medical personnel on one side of the room, patients and visitors and other hospital staff on the other. Doctors, nurses, technicians, move over there, please.”
He pointed to the other side of the room.
Nobody moved at first. Then a tall, fair-haired man in scrubs stepped forward. He said, “What are you going to do with us? Why are you doing this?”
Hamil moved closer to him, read the little name tag pinned to the green scrubs.
“Dr. Conley,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You are a doctor here?”
“Of course I am. I was working in the ER this morning.”
“Doctor, you need to take your people and move over to the other side of the room. You need to do that . . . right . . . now.”
Conley looked like he wanted to argue, but instead he turned and gestured vaguely, saying, “Come on, folks. It’ll be all right.”
One by one the medical personnel parted from the others. They were probably starting to realize that their expertise was valuable to the invaders. They straggled past the watchful, impassive guards and gathered on the other side of the room.
That left the patients, visitors, cafeteria staff, and maintenance workers where they had been when Hamil came in. Many of them glared defiantly at Hamil, none more so than a young man with one of his legs in a cast. He balanced on crutches and kept one arm tightly around the shoulders of the pretty American girl beside him.
Raffir eased up beside Hamil and asked, “What do we do with the others, Doctor?”
Hamil smiled.
“Allah will be pleased by their deaths,” he said.
CHAPTER 21
Sheriff Jim Wallace took his foot off the gas and let the SUV slow as he spotted the flashing lights up ahead. As he came closer he saw that a Fuego PD cruiser was angled across both lanes of the highway. A man sat behind the wheel with the driver’s door open. He appeared to be talking on the radio.
Maybe now he’d get some answers, Wallace thought. He had been trying to contact the Fuego police station on his radio ever since he’d left the county seat. He hadn’t been able to raise anyone, and calls to the station’s landline hadn’t gone through, either.
The roadblock confirmed that something bad had happened in the little town. Clearly, the local authorities were trying to keep people out.
That wouldn’t apply to Wallace, though. They would tell him the story, or he’d raise holy hell with Charles Cobb.
Wallace liked the Fuego police chief. Always had. Cobb had a solid background as a law enforcement officer. He had a sly sense of humor, too, that Wallace appreciated. And he never acted like the fact that he was black earned him any special privileges. Wallace tried to be as color-blind as possible, in both his personal and his professional life, and Cobb was the same way.
Wallace brought his SUV to a stop. Leaving the engine idling, he opened the door and stepped out.
The Fuego cop lifted a hand and gave him a friendly wave. Wallace couldn’t see the man that well yet, but so far he didn’t recognize him.
As Wallace came closer, the cop hung up the radio mic and started to get out of the car. He said, “Everything’s under control, Sheriff.”
Wallace definitely didn’t know the man. He looked Hispanic, which certainly wasn’t unusual anywhere in Texas. Wallace wondered how long the fella had been working for the Fuego PD.
“We had reports of a shooting,” Wallace said.
“Yeah, there sure was.”
The sheriff ’s mouth was a grim line as he asked, “Anybody hurt?”
“Just a few hundred infidels.”
It took a second for the odd answer to penetrate Wallace’s brain. By the time it did—by the time he realized this man in a cop’s uniform wasn’t Hispanic at all but something else entirely—by the time Wallace reached for the service revolver on his hip . . .
Two more men stood up from behind the car and opened fire on him. Wallace felt the tremendous hammer blows of the slugs that spewed from the automatic weapons. They threw him backward, filled him with an incredible heat that blazed up like the sun.
When that heat burned out, it left nothing behind but a bloody husk that had been a lawman.
Lt. Dave Flannery wore a Kevlar vest and leg protectors over the gray SRT uniform. A helmet was strapped on his head, and goggles covered his eyes. He had a 9 mm Glock holstered at his waist, a couple of flash-bangs attached to his belt, and an AR-15 in his lap.
He leaned forward to ask the chopper pilot, “How far out are we?”
The pilot worked for the Highway Patrol. He glanced over his shoulder and said, “Just a couple more minutes, Lieutenant. You can see Fuego up ahead.”
He pointed, and Flannery looked through the canopy. The little town looked peaceful from the air . . . but wisps of gray smoke rose here and there, as if things had been on fire earlier and were dying down now.
“Still no luck raising the Fuego PD?” he asked.
“No, sir. I talked to the sheriff’s office in the county seat. They said the sheriff himself had come over here to check out the reports of a shooting, and the
y had a couple of other units on the way, too.”
Flannery nodded. He looked around at his companions in the first chopper.
There were six men counting himself. Three others were Texas Rangers, and the remaining two were Highway Patrol officers. Flannery knew all the Rangers well but was acquainted with the troopers only from joint SRT training exercises.
The other six members of the twelve-man Special Response Team were in the second helicopter. They were divided evenly: two Rangers, two state troopers, two investigators from the Department of Public Safety’s Criminal Investigation Division.
It seemed pretty likely there was going to be a crime that needed investigation, but first the scene had to be secured. Flannery didn’t know if twelve men would be enough for that, but he was counting on assistance from the local authorities.
More Rangers were on their way, too, but they wouldn’t arrive for at least an hour and a half.
“Where do you want me to land, Ranger?” the pilot called back to him.
“The high school parking lot ought to be a good place,” Flannery replied. “It should be empty since today’s Sunday.”
“You got—Shit!”
The pilot’s startled exclamation made Flannery lean forward to look out the canopy again. He saw something streaking toward them through the air, rising at an angle from the ground.
The pilot threw the chopper hard to the left and down. The thing flashed past them, and a split second later Flannery heard an explosion behind them.
As the helicopter continued to turn, Flannery caught a glimpse through the side door of flaming debris falling through the air. Horror washed through him as he realized the second chopper had been blown out of the sky.
“That was a missile!” the pilot yelped. “It missed us but got the other guys!”
Flannery had expected to find trouble here in Fuego, but he’d never dreamed they would encounter such an explosive welcome in the form of a surface-to-air missile.
Grief and anger at the deaths of his fellow lawmen in the other chopper threatened to overwhelm him for a second, but he forced those emotions down. He had to think clearly, because he and the rest of the men were still in danger.
“Continue evasive maneuvers,” he barked at the pilot. “Find a place to set us down.”
“Yes, sir. Looks like there’s the high school—Incoming!”
Another SAM targeted the chopper. The missiles didn’t appear to be laser-guided, so there was a chance the pilot could dodge them. Flannery and the other men were thrown hard against their restraints as the chopper heeled over.
The next instant something blasted close by. The helicopter gave a big lurch.
“We’re hit!” the pilot cried. “It got our stabilizer!”
Indeed, the chopper was beginning to spin out of control. Flannery’s stomach twisted.
“Can you get us on the ground?”
“I can try! One way or another, we’re gonna be on the ground in less than a minute!”
The cruiser turned out to be too easy a target, but on foot, Lee , Martin, and Raymond had covered less than two blocks in the past half-hour. At this rate it would take them the rest of the afternoon to reach Lee’s house.
Fear for his wife and their unborn child threatened to consume him. He couldn’t do Janey and the kid any good if he was dead, though, so every time one of the trucks full of gunmen rumbled near, he and his companions scurried for cover.
Lee knew what the invaders were doing. They were patrolling the town, making sure it was secure. From time to time he heard bursts of automatic weapons fire. More than likely, some of the citizens were trying to defend themselves . . .
Only to find that they were outnumbered, outgunned, and doomed.
Every one of those bastards was going to rot in Hell, he thought. Lee wasn’t a very religious man. Sometimes he wasn’t sure he even believed in Heaven.
But he believed in Hell, all right, and no matter what happened in this world, that was where those invaders were going to wind up.
That was scant comfort, but it was better than nothing.
They were crouched behind a wooden fence around somebody’s backyard when Martin said, “You hear that?”
Lee listened, heard a faint whup-whup-whup sound that seemed to be coming closer.
“Those are helicopters,” Raymond said.
The kid was right, Lee thought.
And maybe choppers meant that help was on the way.
Even if that was true, Lee still wanted to get home. He motioned for the other two to follow him and led the way around the fence.
He paused, looked to the west, and saw two helicopters approaching.
Something flashed through the air. The first chopper banked violently to the side, and the second one blew up in midair in a massive fireball.
“No!” Martin said.
“The sumbitches got missiles,” Lee said. His sense of despair got even worse at that realization.
What the hell were they up against, anyway?
The second chopper looked like it was trying to turn around and flee, but then another missile caught its tail. The explosion was smaller this time. The helicopter appeared to be badly damaged, anyway. It spun around and around so much that just looking at it made Lee a little queasy.
Steadily losing altitude, the chopper went out of sight. If it went down, the crash would be over by the high school, Lee thought. Since he and his companions were headed in that direction, they might be able to check it out later.
There might be survivors.
Officer Chuck Gibbs looked around the locker room in the Fuego High School field house.
Counting himself and his little brother, Fuego’s “army of liberation” numbered fourteen—and some of them were barely old enough to have driver’s licenses.
They were all husky, athletic young men, though, and they all had guns. That had to count for something.
They were desperate, too. They knew that their lives and the lives of their families might well depend on their being able to drive the invaders out of Fuego.
Chuck had his doubts about whether that was possible, but they couldn’t just roll over and give up. That probably wouldn’t get them anything in the long run except a couple of bullets in the back of the head.
No, they had to fight back, even if it was futile. He went around the room, taking a quick inventory of their armament. Shotguns, hunting rifles, even a couple of .22s not good for much more than plinking at cans or jackrabbits.
That would have to do.
“All right, we can’t stay here,” Chuck told them. “They’re gonna be patrolling the town, looking for pockets of resistance, mopping up on anybody they find. So what we’re gonna have to do is stay on the move. If we see a bunch of them we can hit, we do it hard and fast and then get the hell out of Dodge. Find a place to hunker down again. Don’t take chances. And follow my orders.”
“Yeah, well, who put you in charge?” Spence Parker asked. He played wide receiver, the same position Chuck had played several years earlier, and he was an arrogant little snot whose father owned the bank. Chuck happened to know that he had knocked up a couple of girls and gotten away with it. He didn’t like Spence, but the kid had an AR-15 of his own and Chuck was glad to have him on their side.
“I’m the oldest,” he said as if he were explaining something to a little kid. “And I’m a cop, so I have experience in dangerous situations. If you don’t want to accept that, you can go home, Spence.”
“I didn’t say that,” Spence replied sullenly. “I was just making sure everything’s clear, that’s all.”
“It’s clear. We’re in deep shit, that’s what’s clear.” Chuck decided it wouldn’t be fair to pull his punches. “And all of you should know, too, that there’s a very good chance none of us are gonna live through this. But we may be the only ones left fightin’ for our families and our town, and I’m willing to risk it.”
“So am I,” Ernie said, and several others
of the young men nodded.
“All right, then.” Chuck was about to tell them that they’d go see if they could find any of the invaders, when he heard a sound that struck a chord of hope inside him.
A helicopter. Maybe more than one.
And they were coming toward Fuego.
Chuck figured choppers had to be bringing help from outside. Maybe even the Army. The others heard them, too, and muttered excitedly among themselves.
“Let’s go have a look,” he said. “But be careful. Keep your heads down.”
Chuck led the way out of the building, checking first to make sure none of the enemy were in sight. When he was sure it was clear, he motioned for the others to follow him.
They ran along the front of the field house. When they turned the corner, Chuck spotted the two helicopters flying toward town.
Then he saw a plume of smoke, a streak of light, and the first chopper darted out of the way.
The second helicopter blew up.
“Whoa!” Ernie said.
Burning pieces of wreckage plummeted to earth in the distance. The other helicopter started to swing around, then a second missile homed in on it and blew part of the tail off. The chopper began to spin wildly.
The young men tilted their heads back to watch as the out-of-control helicopter passed above them. Dropping steadily, it disappeared beyond the field house and the rise of the grandstand on this side of the football stadium.
“Come on!” Chuck called as he broke into a run.
The gates in the chain-link fence around the stadium were locked except for the one beside the ticket office, which was left open so that recreational runners could get into the stadium on the weekends to use the track around the football field. Chuck headed for that gate.
He heard a terrible, metal-rending crash, but it didn’t sound like the helicopter had blown up on impact. He ran underneath the stands and then up a ramp. Ernie and the others trailed behind him.
The chopper had gone down on the field, about the east 40-yard line. The skids had torn up the turf. It looked like the pilot had tried to put it down without crashing, but the helicopter had tilted over and the rotor had ripped a great gouge in the field before being torn loose from its mooring.
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