“Wait just a minute, mister,” Lee said. “I don’t know who you are, but we’ve got to get into that police station and see if we can make any of the radios work.”
“If it’s a comm line you want, I’ve got a sat phone with state-of-the-art encryption,” the stranger said. “What I don’t have is a lot of time. By the way, I’m Colonel Thomas Atkinson. Retired.”
He added that last in a dryly amused way. He might not be on active duty anymore, but he was still every inch a soldier, Lee thought. And he had to make a decision, right now on the spur of the moment, about whether he was going to trust Atkinson.
“All right,” he said to the men with him. “Let’s go.”
“I agree,” Flannery said. “I’ve heard of Colonel Atkinson.”
They hurried over to the pickup. Atkinson held out a hand toward Raymond and said in a gentle voice, “Why don’t you ride inside with Sergeant Porter, son? That’ll give me a chance to talk to these other fellas.”
Raymond looked at Lee, who nodded.
“You go ahead and do what the colonel says.”
“Is he the boss now?” Raymond asked.
Lee longed to surrender all the responsibility to somebody else, but at the same time, he had been running things reasonably well so far, he thought, so he said, “We’ll see.”
Atkinson grunted. Lee realized after a second that the sound was a laugh.
“Head for open country, Sergeant,” Atkinson said through the open window to the driver, who looked more like a small-town lawyer or high school football coach than a noncom. He had handled the pickup with great skill, though, and was a good shot. The terrorists he had gunned down testified mutely to that.
As the pickup bounced over the curb and out of the parking lot, Lee introduced himself to the colonel.
“I’m Officer Lee Blaisdell, Fuego PD,” he said.
“How many are left from your department, Officer Blaisdell?”
“I don’t really know,” Lee admitted. “Me and Raymond, he’s our dispatcher, and one other officer. I know one officer is dead, and I haven’t seen the chief or any of the other fellas since all this started, so I don’t feel very optimistic about them.”
“Unfortunately, I’d agree with you.” Atkinson looked over at Flannery. “And you are . . . ?”
“Lieutenent David Flannery, Texas Rangers. Out of the El Paso office. I brought a Special Response Team in here earlier today by chopper.” Flannery grimaced. “For all I know, I’m the only one left, although a couple of my men were with another force of defenders earlier this afternoon.”
“And you two look like football players,” Atkinson said as he glanced at Gibby and Spence.
“That’s because we are,” Spence said. If he was intimidated by Atkinson, he didn’t show it. “But we can still fight.”
“I don’t doubt it, son.” Atkinson turned his attention back to Lee and Flannery. “Tell me everything you know about what’s going on here and what you’re doing about it.”
“First—and with all due respect, Colonel—I’d like to know what you’re doing here,” Flannery said.
“Fair enough. The governor sent me and my team to find out what the situation is here and advise her on what she should do next.”
“You’re talking about Governor Delgado?”
“She’s the only one Texas has got right now.”
Lee said, “You’re not with the federal government?”
Atkinson’s snort eloquently conveyed his contempt for that idea.
“I’m a Texan,” he said, “and you may not be aware of it, but Texas is about that far—” He held up his thumb and forefinger, a short distance apart. “—from saying to hell with the federal government. We still believe in a little thing called the Constitution down here, even if most of the people in Washington don’t.”
“That’s good to hear . . . maybe,” Lee said. “But what can the governor do?”
“Tell me what we’re looking at here, and maybe we can figure something out.”
Lee glanced over at Flannery, who said, “Go ahead, Lee. You’ve been on the ground here right from the start.”
“All right,” Lee said. Colonel Atkinson was the first person who had offered any real help since the attack began, so Lee decided he might as well trust the man.
As Sgt. Porter stuck to back roads in town and then took off across country when he reached the edge of Fuego, Lee told Atkinson all he knew about how the attack had taken place around the middle of the day. Atkinson asked questions about the enemy’s strength and capabilities, and Lee answered them as best he could.
When he was finished, the colonel thanked him, then said, “You may have to go over all that again with the governor, Lee. Once she hears it, I can’t imagine that she’ll let this stand.”
“What can she do about it?” Flannery asked.
“You might be surprised,” Atkinson replied with a faint smile. “For now, we need to hole up somewhere. What about this farm where you say the women were supposed to wait?”
“I can tell your driver how to get there,” Lee said. He was relieved that Atkinson had suggested going to the Simmons place. He wanted to see Janey again and assure himself that she was all right. “By the way, you fellas did steal this pickup in town, didn’t you?”
“I’m afraid we did. Are you going to arrest us, Officer?”
“I’ll let it pass . . . this time,” Lee said with a weary smile of his own.
While they were on their way to the Simmons farm, Atkinson told Lee and the others about everything that had happened outside Fuego that day, from the attack on the prison to the official response—or non-response—from Washington.
“You mean to say the Feds just threw a ring around the whole area and are going to leave us in here to stew?” Lee asked.
“Muslims are rioting in major cities across the country in support of Hamil and his bunch,” Atkinson said. “The President’s afraid to do much because he doesn’t want to make things worse, I suppose. He doesn’t want to go down in history as being blamed for an American jihad. Although when you get right down to it, our government’s been sympathetic to the extremist Islamic movement for a long time. Remember Benghazi? Remember the Muslim Brotherhood?”
“I’ve heard of that stuff in history class,” Gibby said.
“Well, it’s not history to some of us, son. We lived through it. We couldn’t believe what was happening then, what this country was becoming without most people even seeming to care. And somehow it’s just gotten worse.” Atkinson paused. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were people pretty high up in Washington who knew what was going to happen in Fuego today. But anybody who said that in public would be crucified by the press as a paranoid conspiracy nut.”
“Yeah, but you know the old sayin’,” Lee said. “You’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you.”
Atkinson grinned.
“Truer words were never spoken, son. Truer words were never spoken.”
They were following a narrow dirt road now. The sun had dipped below the horizon, but its lurid glare remained, shining through the geographic formation known as Hell’s Gate in the distance. In that reddish light, which would soon vanish, the Simmons farmhouse came into view.
Everything about the place looked normal, Lee thought as the pickup followed the lane toward it. But the police station had looked relatively normal, too, before it erupted with terrorist gunmen, he reminded himself. There was no telling what waited for him up there . . . the welcoming embrace of his wife . . . or bloody, unspeakable horror.
Lee swallowed hard. His hands were slick with sweat on the rifle he gripped. One at a time, he wiped them on his uniform trousers.
“Back there at the police station, they knew we were comin’,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but they had to know, otherwise they couldn’t have set up that trap for us. That means they’ve got eyes in the sky.”
Atkinson nodded and said, “Yes, i
t’s likely that someone is feeding them satellite intel. One more reason to think that the NSA and DOD have moles in them.”
“How can we fight something that big?” Flannery said. “How can we fight those terrorists if they have people in our own government helping them?”
“We don’t give up,” Atkinson said. “We try to remember that most Americans—even the ones who’ve been taken in by all the leftist bullshit propaganda—are still decent people. We keep hoping that there’ll come a time when they realize what they’ve allowed our enemies to do to us from within, and then they’ll rise up and put things right.”
“Do you really believe that, Colonel?” Lee asked. “Or is it already too late?”
“I guess we’ll find out over the next few years, Lee . . . starting now.”
The men were all on edge, with their weapons ready to fire, as the pickup drove up to the old farmhouse and stopped in front of the porch. The house seemed to be deserted. The front door was closed, and curtains were pulled over all the windows.
Then someone jerked the front door open, and the screen door banged back as a slender shape burst out onto the porch.
“Lee!” Janey cried.
Lee vaulted out of the pickup bed and ran to meet her. At the bottom of the porch steps, he swept her into his arms and brought his mouth down on hers. The kiss jolted Lee to the core of his being as all the relief packed into both of them flowed into it.
Finally, Janey pulled back a little and whispered, “You’re all right.”
“I’m fine,” Lee told her. He was vaguely aware that several other people had come out onto the porch from inside the house, but nearly all of his attention was focused on his wife as he held her close to him. “Nothing’s happened here?”
“No, not . . . here.”
Her hesitation warned him that something was wrong. He frowned and said, “Janey, what is it?”
“Some of the others . . . they’re back from town already, Lee,” she said. “They have news.” She took a deep breath. “Bad news.”
CHAPTER 39
Kincaid stood looking at the hatch Mitch Cambridge had uncovered earlier in one of the wing’s maintenance areas.
“There was always the possibility that the wing would need to be evacuated for some reason, but nobody could go out through the sally port,” Cambridge had explained to Kincaid and Stark when he first showed them the hatch. “It was even more likely that the warden would need to get officers in here without going through the main entrance, like in a case where the inmates rioted and took over the wing.”
“I thought the procedure there would be to pump tear gas in through the ventilation system and storm the place, as long as no hostages were in danger,” Kincaid said.
“Yes, but if there were hostages, or if you couldn’t use tear gas for some other reason, you’d need a way to get armed men inside. Anyway, even with the tear gas, if you sent in men wearing gas masks, they’d be able to round up the prisoners pretty quickly.”
Kincaid had nodded in understanding and said, “Yeah, I suppose so. Where does it go?”
“It leads to a tunnel with several branches. You can get to administration from here, or to minimum security or Gen Pop.”
“How do you know about this?” Kincaid asked with a frown. “I’ve been working here for a while, and I never heard anything about secret tunnels.”
That had put a grin on Cambridge’s face.
“That’s because they’re secret,” he said. “No, seriously, the warden and the guard captains know about them, but the thinking was that regular correctional officers didn’t need that information unless it became necessary to use the tunnels.”
“Which leads me back to the question I just asked you: how do you know about them?”
“I’ve studied this prison, everything about it. One of these days I’m going to be a warden, either here or in some other facility like it, and I want to know everything there is to know about running it. So I went back and looked at everything I could find about it online and checked out all the physical records in the county clerk’s office. I found some plans in the permitting office that mentioned those access tunnels, as they’re called. But I figured out what they’re really for.”
Kincaid had been surprised by the amount of ambition the mild-looking young guard possessed, but Cambridge’s career goals wouldn’t mean anything if he and the others didn’t survive this siege.
The information Cambridge had uncovered just might help with that.
Stark had said, “The important question is, will folks fit through them?”
“Sure. The tunnels are four feet wide and eight feet high. Room to spare.”
“The problem is that the terrorists seem to be in control of the rest of the prison,” Kincaid said. “Wherever we come out, we’re liable to run right into them.”
“Might be able to wage a little guerrilla war against them that way,” Stark mused, “even if it’s not an actual escape route.”
That comment had been percolating in the back of Kincaid’s mind ever since. It would be sort of fitting, he thought now, if he and his fellow Americans became the insurgents in this war.
Stark was posted at the sally port at the moment, to pick off any of the terrorists who tried to clear away the debris at the far end of the corridor. For the time being, that was working, but Kincaid knew it wouldn’t last. Sooner or later the terrorists would risk using explosives to blow the junk out of the way.
Kincaid and Stark had been communicating by walkie-talkie, shifting around the frequencies so the enemy wouldn’t be as likely to listen in on their conversations. As Kincaid stood there contemplating the hatch and trying to figure out their next move, the unit clipped to his belt suddenly crackled and an unfamiliar voice said, “Warden Baldwin or whoever is in charge of the infidel forces inside the maximum security wing. This is Dr. Phillip Hamil, leader of the Sword of Islam.”
That showed how confident the guy was, identifying himself bold as brass like that, Kincaid thought. He grabbed the walkie-talkie, lifted it to his mouth, keyed the mic, and said, “What do you want?”
“To whom am I speaking?” Hamil wanted to know.
“That doesn’t matter,” Kincaid said. “Spare the rhetoric and tell me what you want.”
“Is Ms. Alexis Devereaux unharmed?”
That question took Kincaid by surprise. He said, “As far as I know.”
“Bring her to the inner door of the sally port, please. Right now. And you and anyone else in there who is in charge should see what’s about to happen.”
Those casual words made Kincaid go cold inside. He didn’t know what the terrorist mastermind was up to, but it couldn’t be anything good.
“Wait a minute,” Kincaid said quickly. “Don’t do anything crazy.”
“I assure you, I’m absolutely sane.”
Kincaid had serious doubts about that, but he didn’t say so. Instead he told Hamil, “I’ll get Ms. Devereaux. Just hang on.”
He ran out of the maintenance area, which was at the far end of the maximum security wing, and hurried toward the sally port. The guards and inmates he passed watched him with worried frowns. They could guess from his haste that something was up.
He came to where Alexis Devereaux was sitting on the floor with Riley Nichols and Travis Jessup, looking very unhappy about her plight. Kincaid paused and said, “Ms. Devereaux, come with me.”
“I don’t have to follow your orders,” Alexis snapped. “I’m a civilian, in case you haven’t noticed. I shouldn’t even be in here.”
“If you hadn’t been in here in the first place trying to stir up trouble—” Kincaid stopped short. He knew he was wasting his breath. He went on, “Look, you have to come with me. The leader of the terrorists called me on the walkie-talkie. He told me to bring you to the sally port.”
Clearly, Alexis was confused. She said, “What . . . How would he know about me?”
“He sounded like he might be a friend of yours. At leas
t he asked if you had been hurt. His name is Hamil. Dr. Phillip Hamil.”
Alexis gaped at him.
“That . . . that can’t be true,” she said. “Phillip Hamil is a good, decent man—”
“Who’s the leader of the Sword of Islam, the group responsible for what’s happened today. Now, are you coming or not?”
Riley got to her feet and said, “Hell, yes, we’re coming.”
She extended a hand to Alexis.
After a moment, Alexis gripped the other woman’s hand and climbed awkwardly to her feet. They hurried along the wing toward the guard station and command post. Travis Jessup stayed behind, muttering to himself in fright.
Mitch Cambridge was at the console in the command center. He stood up as Kincaid and the two women came in.
“Mr. Stark and I heard Hamil on the walkies, too,” Cambridge said. “Ms. Devereaux, do you have any idea what he wants?”
“No, and I still refuse to believe that Phillip Hamil would have anything to do with this atrocity,” Alexis said. “This madman has to be someone pretending to be him. You’ll see.”
“That’s right,” Kincaid said. “Let’s see what he wants.”
They went through the reception area where Stark stood with the barrel of his rifle sticking through the door’s narrow opening. He had his eye to the sights, watching the far end of the corridor.
“Nobody moving around down there,” he reported.
Kincaid’s walkie-talkie was still set to the same channel. Figuring that the terrorists would be monitoring it, he said, “Hamil, do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Hamil’s voice came back.
Alexis’s shocked gasp was enough to tell Kincaid that she’d recognized the voice.
“Ms. Devereaux is here with us,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Well, first of all, I’d ask that you don’t shoot me when I step out into the open.”
“It’ll be tempting,” Stark muttered, “but I’ll hold my fire.”
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