Stand Your Ground

by William W. Johnstone

  Was that worse than the chaos that might be unleashed by letting the prisoners out of their cells? Kincaid thought it was.

  And whether he liked the responsibility or not, he was the one making that call.

  When he and the two men accompanying him reached the armory, he swiped his pass to unlock the outer door, then keyed the day’s combination into the keypad on the inner door. He hoped he remembered it correctly.

  “Take as many rifles and as much ammunition as you can carry,” Kincaid told his companions as the doors slid open. “Head straight to the maximum security wing.”

  He loaded himself down with rifles, pistols, and a couple of boxes of ammunition, then trotted toward the cell block where the general population was kept. There were a lot more hardened felons here, men who wouldn’t think twice about shooting a correctional officer, no matter what the situation.

  This hand was going to have to be played a little differently, Kincaid thought.

  The alarm that had started going off as soon as it was obvious that trouble was imminent was still clamoring shrilly throughout the prison. Kincaid had gotten to the point that he wasn’t paying much attention to it anymore.

  The guards at the entrance to the main cell block certainly were, though. As Kincaid approached he found himself being targeted by eight men with riot guns leveled at him.

  Kincaid slowed. Bristling with armament as he was, he wouldn’t be surprised if the guards opened fire on him.

  “Stand down!” he called to them. “You men know me. I’m Officer Lucas Kincaid.”

  One of the guards lowered his shotgun slightly, but the others didn’t relax.

  “Kincaid, what is all this crap? Alarms going off, explosions outside, we can’t raise the command center—is somebody trying to stage a breakout?”

  “You could say that,” Kincaid replied. “The best anybody can figure right now is that a bunch of terrorists are trying to free the new inmates in maximum security.”

  That news drew an outburst of curses from several of the guards. One of them declared, “I’ve been saying all along that if the government wanted to put those crazy bastards here, they should have brought in the Army to guard them! It’s like the politicians just dangled them out there and dared their friends to come after them!”

  It seemed to Kincaid that somebody had made a comment like that more than once recently, and the more he thought about it, the more he believed there might be something to the theory. The idea that somebody at the Justice Department might have helped set this up should have been ludicrous, but ever since the Democrats had started running the show totally in Washington, anything was possible.

  Twenty years earlier, for example, nobody would have believed that the Attorney General of the United States would set up an operation to sell guns to the Mexican drug cartels that would be used to murder American law enforcement officers—and get away with it, to boot, receiving a pass from the media, who called it just another phony scandal, and inattention from a majority of the voting population.

  Kincaid thought about John Howard Stark, who was somewhere else in the prison right now. Some of the guns used by Stark’s cartel foes in his battles against them might as well have had that former Attorney General’s fingerprints on them.

  And nobody but a few people—too few to do any good, obviously—even gave a damn.

  But as disturbing as that was, it wasn’t the issue right now. Kincaid said, “I don’t care how it happened, we’ve got to deal with it. Leave the weapons you have here, go to the armory and get more, and then head for the maximum security wing. That’s where we’re making our stand.”

  “What about the inmates?”

  “I’m going to unlock their cells and let them go,” Kincaid said.

  The guards gaped at him in disbelief.

  “You can’t do that!” one officer exclaimed. “If that bunch gets their hands on guns—”

  “They’ll have a chance to put up a fight,” Kincaid interrupted. His voice was hard and flat. He didn’t like what he was about to do, but he didn’t have any choice. “They’re our first line of defense.”

  Looks of horror appeared on the faces of a couple of the guards as they realized what Kincaid was talking about. The others still just looked confused.

  “When the inmates realize their doors and the cell block doors are unlocked, they’ll come pouring out through here,” Kincaid went on. “They’ll head for the main entrance. If I’m right, they’ll run into the terrorists on the way.”

  “What if they get past the terrorists? You’re talking about turning loose a bunch of murderers, rapists, and God knows that!”

  “If any of them get past the terrorists, it won’t be very many. They’ll be outnumbered and outgunned.”

  Another man said, “That’s a death sentence you’re giving them, Kincaid. That’s cold.”

  “I know. But the minimum security inmates are on their way to the max wing, and there are guards and other innocent people there, too. I’m trying to save as many of them as I can.”

  He was like a general in the old war movies, he told himself, ordering a company to hold the line while the rest of the regiment pulled back. He was sacrificing good men—and to be honest, quite a few bad ones—to save as many others as he could. There was a certain brutal nobility to it.

  Not for the ones who were going to wind up dead, though.

  Kincaid pushed that thought out of his brain and snapped, “Get moving. If you’ve got a problem, take it up with the warden when you get to the max security wing. He’s waiting there.”

  The other officers still hesitated. One of them asked, “How are we going to let the inmates out?”

  Kincaid had considered that, too. He said, “I’ll wait until you guys have had a chance to get well on your way, then I’ll use the manual override to unlock all the cell doors at once.”

  “Those bastards’ll explode out of there once they realize what’s happened,” one of the guards warned. “You’ll have to get out of here quick to keep them from catching you.”

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do. And if I don’t make it . . .” Kincaid shrugged. “When you get to the warden, tell him what I did. He probably won’t like it, but it’s the only chance any of us have.”

  The grim realization that he was right put an end to any arguments from the other men. They set their riot guns and pistols aside so that the escaping inmates could claim them and use them against the terrorists. Kincaid planned to leave the weapons he had brought along, too.

  “For a guy who works in the library, you’ve got balls, Kincaid,” one of the men said as they prepared to depart.

  “I’ve done a few things in my time besides shelving books,” Kincaid said with a faint smile.

  Once the men had trotted up the corridor and then turned into another corridor that would eventually lead them to the maximum security wing, Kincaid stepped over to the control panel in the guard station. He looked at the video feeds that covered the cell doors. Inmates stood at most of the barred openings. They had heard the alarms, the shooting, the explosions. They knew something was going on. Speculation was probably flying around like crazy in there.

  Chances were that none of those men were prepared for the truth of what they would soon be facing, Kincaid thought. He knew a lot of them. Nearly every man in there had committed some sort of violent felony. Many were repeat offenders who had spent more of their lives behind bars than they had been out. Some were lifers, reptilian, sociopathic killers who up until now really had been wastes of perfectly good air.

  But maybe for the first time, they were about to serve a purpose that had some decency to it, whether they were aware of it or not.

  The other guards had had time to get clear. Kincaid took a deep breath and pushed the manual override button that unlocked every cell in the block. The shouts that went up as the inmates heard the clunking of the mechanisms and realized they were free blended together into an animalistic howl.

&n
bsp; Kincaid unlocked the main doors into the cell block and started to step out of the guard station, then thought better of it and paused long enough to grab one of the pistols left behind by the other officers. Carrying the weapon, he broke into a run along the corridor.

  Even through thick steel walls and bulletproof glass, he heard the frenzied clamor growing louder behind him as the inmates passed through the series of doors leading into the cell block.

  He turned the corner into the other corridor, heading left and skidding a little because he was hurrying so much.

  As he did, a startled shout sounded behind him. Kincaid’s head jerked around as he looked back over his shoulder.

  He was surprised to see that some of the terrorists had already made it this far into the prison. Half a dozen men were at the far end of the corridor, maybe fifty yards away. They hurried toward him, and as they did, the ones in the lead lifted the automatic weapons they carried and opened fire.

  There were no doors or alcoves in the concrete walls, no cross corridors for another thirty yards, no place to take cover. Kincaid knew that.

  All he could do was dive desperately to the floor as a hail of bullets sizzled through the air above his head where he had been an instant earlier.

  CHAPTER 32

  On the other side of the sally port leading into the maximum security wing was a fairly large reception room, and to one side of it was the small visitors’ room where inmates could confer with their lawyers.

  That room was divided in half by a sheet of bulletproof glass with a counter and bench butted up against it opposite each other. Inmates and visitors talked to each other through an intercom system, but no physical contact was allowed.

  Stark assisted George Baldwin into that room and then helped him sit down on the bench. He looked around, saw Riley Nichols watching worriedly from the doorway, and said, “You think you can find something else to use as a pad for the warden’s wound?”

  “I know I can,” she said. She started unbuttoning her functional khaki shirt.

  Stark frowned a little at that until he saw the lacy camisole Riley wore underneath the shirt. That actually made for a nice contrast, he thought, tough and all business on the outside, frilly and romantic underneath.

  He wondered if her personality was the same, not that he had any romantic interest in her himself.

  She pulled the camisole up and ripped a large piece of fabric from the bottom of it. She folded that into a pad and handed it to Stark, who used it to replace the blood-soaked handkerchief Baldwin had been holding to the wound.

  Riley ripped strips of cloth from the undergarment as well and said, “We can use these to tie the dressing in place. Move over a little. I can do it.”

  After watching her swift, efficient movements for a moment as she worked on Baldwin’s wound, Stark asked, “You’ve done things like this before, haven’t you?”

  “I had some medical training while I was in the Marines.”

  Stark grinned. “You were a leatherneck, too, Ms. Nichols?”

  “Semper fi, Mr. Stark.”

  That explained some things, Stark thought. It must have driven Riley crazy, working for a liberal news network and having to be around people like Alexis Devereaux all the time, but sometimes folks didn’t have much choice in the matter.

  Years and years of any economic recovery being stifled by Democratic policies designed to expand their base and erode the middle class had left America a nation of people who had to take any job they could get, just to survive. And anybody who worked a full-time job was extremely lucky.

  “Let’s stretch him out on this bench,” Riley suggested. She lifted Baldwin’s feet while Stark took hold of the warden’s shoulders. They maneuvered him into a reclining position so he could rest easier.

  Baldwin’s face was pale and his eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell, so Stark knew his old friend was still alive. Baldwin’s breathing was irregular, though. He really did need qualified medical attention, and the sooner, the better.

  But they all needed a lot of things right about now, Stark mused, most notably some reinforcements from outside.

  “I’ll keep an eye on him,” Riley said. “You should help that guard set up our defenses.”

  Stark nodded. He said, “Give a holler if you need me.”

  He went out into the reception room and found Mitch Cambridge directing the other guards to move the desks and a couple of filing cabinets into a line facing the entrance.

  “I know this furniture won’t provide much cover if the terrorists make it this far,” Cambridge told Stark, “but I figure it’s better than nothing.”

  “You’re right. That sally port’s your main line of defense, though. If they breach both doors . . .”

  Stark’s voice trailed off, but the grim import of his words was clear.

  “If they breach both doors, we’ll have to try to keep them from getting on into the cell block. I’m going to put marksmen on the upper level. Luckily the entrance isn’t very wide, so only a limited number can come through it at one time.”

  “They could throw grenades or fire rockets through it,” Stark pointed out.

  “If they do that, they risk injuring or killing the men they came to rescue,” Cambridge said. “I’m hoping they won’t take that chance. A smaller force can hold off a much larger one if you limit the number that can come at you.”

  “Gates of fire,” Stark murmured.

  “Thermopylae, exactly.”

  “Those Spartans wound up getting killed, you know,” Stark said.

  Cambridge shrugged.

  “I think this strategy is still our best bet.”

  “Long odds are better than no odds at all,” Stark agreed.

  One of the guards posted in the sally port between the two doors called, “Somebody’s coming!”

  Stark heard the despair in Cambridge’s voice as the young man said, “Already?”

  He and Stark hurried through the inner door, which was still open. They peered through the reinforced glass in the outer door’s window and saw a large group of men in bright orange jumpsuits hurrying along the corridor.

  “Those aren’t terrorists,” Stark said.

  “I know,” Cambridge said, and now relief was evident in his tone. “I recognize most of them. They’re inmates from the minimum security area.”

  “And there are more guards with them,” Stark pointed out. “Kincaid must have sent them.”

  Cambridge reached for the controls that opened the outer door, then hesitated.

  “What if it’s a trick?” he asked. “The terrorists could be right behind them, forcing them along at gunpoint and using them as shields.”

  “Wait until they get here,” Stark suggested. “That won’t take long, and we ought to be able to tell then.”

  He was right. The newcomers began crowding up against the entrance to the maximum security wing. The press of inmates parted to let one of the guards through.

  “Hankins!” Cambridge said through the intercom.

  “Is that you, Mitch?” the guard called Hankins responded. “Let us in. Kincaid said to tell you he sent us.”

  “Have you seen any of the terrorists?”

  “Not yet.” Hankins looked nervous, and some of the inmates were obviously flat-out scared, with good reason. “We heard a lot of shooting outside, though.”

  Cambridge glanced at Stark, who nodded. Cambridge pushed the right buttons, and the outer door began to rumble open.

  As soon as the gap was wide enough, inmates and officers surged through. Stark was glad to see that none of the inmates had tried to take weapons away from the guards. Evidently they were smart enough to realize that their best chance for living through this lay in cooperation.

  Some of the guards were carrying extra weapons. Stark reached out and took one of the semiautomatic rifles. The guard looked like he didn’t want to hand it over to a civilian, but Cambridge nodded for him to go ahead.

  “Got any extra magazi
nes?” Stark asked.

  The guard gave him one, and Stark slid it into his hip pocket.

  “Think I’ll go take a look around,” he told Cambridge.

  “Wait a minute,” Cambridge objected. “We were supposed to rally here, not go wandering around the prison.”

  “I’d like to know how close the enemy is. Right now we don’t have any idea how long we’ve got to get ready.”

  “That’s true, I suppose,” Cambridge said. He frowned. “Can you find your way back here?”

  “Well, now, that’s a good question,” Stark admitted. “I tried to pay more attention this time and take note of all the landmarks.” A grim smile touched his mouth under the mustache. “Worse comes to worst, I’ll just follow the sound of gunfire.”

  “You’re liable to get trapped on the wrong side of these doors with hundreds of terrorists.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Stark said.

  He knew it was a wild, grandstand play, the sort of thing he had done when he was a youngster in the jungles of Vietnam. He wished he had some of his fellow Marines from those days with him now. Rich Threadgill was crazy as a loon, but there was nobody better to have at your side in a fight.

  Maybe this foolhardiness was the cancer talking, Stark mused. In remission or not, he knew it was still lurking inside him like a time bomb. One of these days it would kill him, if he wanted to wait that long. Maybe it was whispering in the back of his mind that he didn’t want to go out that way if he had a choice.

  Or maybe it was just strategically smart for him to scout out the enemy. The chances of any of them pulling through this were small enough already without the terrorists taking him and his companions by surprise.

  “All right, go ahead,” Cambridge said. “But this door is going to be closed and locked behind you, and it takes a little while to open it. If you come hotfooting back with a bunch of killers right behind you, I may not be able to help you.”

  “I understand,” Stark said. He gave Cambridge a nod and then turned and started along the corridor at a trot.