Stand Your Ground

by William W. Johnstone

  “This is a chance to hit those bastards without them knowin’ that it’s comin’,” Lee said. “When’s this gonna happen?”

  “It’ll take a while to set up,” Atkinson said, “but that’s all right. If everything goes according to plan, the drop will be about an hour before dawn. We’ll be there in time to stop Hamil.”

  “We?” Janey repeated.

  “I’m not going to miss out on the finish,” Atkinson said.

  “Neither am I,” said Flannery. “Anyway, if we launch an attack of our own, it’ll serve as a distraction to help the paratroopers get down safely.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking. So you’re in, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m in,” Flannery said grimly.

  “So am I,” Lee declared.

  Janey took hold of his arm and said, “Don’t you think you’ve done enough already, Lee?”

  He shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, Janey, but I don’t. Not by a long shot.”

  The argument continued most of the night, with Lee insisting that he had to go along with the small force led by Colonel Atkinson, while Janey tried to persuade him not to risk his life again.

  When she played the pregnancy card, the “leave your son to be raised without a father” card, that had almost been enough to sway him.

  But then he said, “What kind of world would it be if folks won’t stand up for what’s right?”

  “This kind of world!” she said. “Look around you, Lee. Relatively speaking, do you see anybody but a handful of people who even worry about what’s right and what’s wrong anymore? Most of them are too busy wondering what the government’s going to give them this month!”

  “That doesn’t change things,” Lee insisted stubbornly.

  “All right!” Janey said as she threw her hands in the air. “I give up. Go and get your head shot off! See if I care. But you can bet I’ll tell Bubba what a reckless fool his daddy was.”

  Those words hurt, sure enough, but as Janey stomped off, Lee told himself it didn’t matter. Nothing really worthwhile came without pain and sacrifice.

  And Lee couldn’t think of anything more worthwhile for a fella to do than to stand his ground against evil.

  Before even the faint flush of gray in the eastern sky heralding the approach of dawn appeared, Atkinson gathered the men at the farm. They all carried as many guns and as much ammunition as they could. There was no point in holding anything back. One way or another, this was going to be the end.

  Lee was about to climb into Gibby’s pickup. The big youngster had been freshly devastated by the news of Andy’s death, along with those of the other members of the team who had been executed by the terrorists. In less than twenty-four hours, Ernie Gibbs had lost his brother, his best friend, and half a dozen more friends and teammates. It was entirely possible that Gibby’s parents were dead in Fuego, too. How could any young man cope with that much loss?

  Gibby was behind the wheel, though, apparently ready to go. Lee paused with the door open and asked, “You okay, Gibby?”

  “No, sir,” Gibby answered without hesitation. “I don’t figure I ever will be again. But takin’ the fight to those terrorists is the only thing I can still do for Chuck and Andy and everybody else.”

  “I reckon you’re right about that,” Lee said.

  He was about to climb into the cab when he heard his name called behind him.

  He turned and Janey rushed into his arms, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him. The kiss shook Lee right down to his toes.

  “You come back safe and sound,” Janey said when she took her mouth away from his. “Don’t you dare do anything else, you hear me, Lee Blaisdell?”

  Lee grinned and said, “I hear you. Don’t worry about that. I hear you loud and clear.”

  Letting go and stepping away from her was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.

  But there were monsters waiting in Fuego, monsters that had to be exterminated if there was ever going to be any justice in the world. It was up to Lee and the men with him to see that it was done.

  A few minutes later, the heavily armed convoy started toward town. The drivers steered by starlight, since the headlights on all the vehicles were dark.

  Earlier, Atkinson had said, “If the terrorists have a pipeline into the NSA and Department of Defense and can access their satellite intel, they’ll be able to use infrared to see that we’re on the move. So they may be ready for us.”

  “That’s what we want, isn’t it?” Flannery had asked. “We want them concentrating on us instead of watching the skies.”

  “That’s right. But it does put us in sort of a precarious position.”

  “Not as precarious as those poor folks in that football stadium,” Lee had said. No one could argue with that.

  So none of them had any doubt that they were doing the right thing as they headed for Fuego. They would do whatever was necessary to break the terrorists’ hold on the town.

  At the same time, Lee was going to do his level best to stay alive, too. For Janey, and for their child. No way he was gonna go and get himself killed when he hadn’t even had a chance to say hello to that little rascal.

  The lights around the football field were visible for a long way in this mostly flat West Texas terrain. That was their destination for two reasons. The terrorists would expect them to head for there, since that was where the hostages were being kept, and so that would serve the purpose of being a distraction. Not only that, but maybe when the force sent by the governor arrived and launched the real attack, Lee and his group would be in position to free some or all of those prisoners . . . perhaps without getting themselves and everybody else blown up in the process.

  Atkinson and Sgt. Porter were leading the convoy in the pickup they had stolen in town the previous afternoon. Porter brought the vehicle to a stop when they were about a mile from the stadium. Lee and Flannery joined the colonel next to the pickup.

  Atkinson was chewing on a cigar again. He said, “All right, we’ll spread out in a line to advance from here. I want at least fifty yards between each vehicle.”

  “That’s spreading out, all right,” Flannery said. “Spreading pretty thin.”

  “They’ll have to devote more resources to stopping us that way,” Atkinson explained. “Also, a lucky shot won’t take out but one vehicle. And they’ll make some lucky shots, I think we all know we can count on that. We won’t all come through this alive, gentlemen. But then, that’s true of life itself, isn’t it?”

  “Are we ready to go?” Lee asked tensely. “I’m ready to get this over with.”

  “Patience, Officer. I’m just waiting for a signal—”

  As if on cue, the satellite phone buzzed. The colonel took it out of his pocket and said, “Atkinson . . . Yes, I understand . . . Thank you, Governor. We’ll do our best.”

  He broke the connection, stowed the phone away, and looked at the men gathered around him in the starlight.

  “The planes have successfully penetrated the no-fly zone at high altitude. The drop will be in approximately seven minutes. From that high, it’ll take about three minutes for our men to reach the ground. So we have to keep those bastards busy for the next ten minutes or so. Let’s go!”

  CHAPTER 43

  Lee’s heart pounded in his chest as he got back in the pickup with Gibby and stuck one of the AR-15s out the open window. Engines rumbled as the vehicles in the convoy began spreading out, following Atkinson’s orders. It didn’t take long until everyone was in position.

  Atkinson and Porter led the way. The sergeant’s foot tromped down on the gas, and the pickup spurted forward. All the other drivers in the long line followed suit, and the sound of engines turned into a deep-throated roar.

  The terrorists would hear them coming, thought Lee, and even in the starlight, they could probably see the big cloud of dust that rose from the wheels.

  Lee saw a flash through the windshield, and off to the right an explosion bloomed redly in the p
re-dawn darkness. That was a rocket or a bazooka or some sort of artillery round. No telling what sort of armament the sumbitches had, Lee told himself. They certainly had plenty of money behind them, so they could buy whatever they wanted.

  Middle Eastern oil money. Some of our so-called allies, Lee thought bitterly.

  Then he put that out of his mind. He saw more flashes up ahead and knew he was looking at muzzle flashes. The terrorists had set up a defensive line to keep them from getting to the stadium.

  Suddenly, Porter flicked his pickup’s lights on. That was the signal for everybody else to do the same. The lights would give the terrorists something to aim at, but for a few moments the unexpected glare would blind them first.

  Lee leaned out the window and opened fire with the semiautomatic rifle. On the other side of the seat, Gibby kept his right hand on the wheel and stuck his left out the window with a pistol in it, firing as he drove.

  Lee tried to keep his shots low. He didn’t want any of his bullets ranging into the stands around the football field. There were enough gaps between the bleacher seats that slugs might go through them and hit some of the hostages.

  There was no road where Gibby drove. The pickup bounced and careened over the open ground. That played hell with a fella’s aim, but under these conditions nobody could hope for any real degree of accuracy, anyway. They were just here to make a lot of racket, at least at this point in the attack.

  Another explosion sent one of the pickups flying into the air. It landed in a fiery rollover crash. As the rest of the line raced past it, Lee knew that the men in that truck couldn’t have survived. Atkinson had warned them there would be more casualties to go with all the people who had already been murdered by the terrorists. He’d sure been right about that.

  Lee’s mouth was dry, and so was the magazine in his rifle. He swapped it out and kept shooting. They were only about a hundred yards away from the perimeter established by the terrorists, and closing fast. Lee heard bullets thudding into the pickup around him. The windshield shattered, spraying glass back across him and Gibby. Lee didn’t even have time to throw an arm up to protect his face. He felt the sting as the shards cut his face, but none of them found his eyes.

  That was all that mattered. He could still see to shoot.

  The pickup gave a great shudder and lurched to a stop. Steam billowed up from the bullet-pierced radiator.

  “Grab a rifle, Gibby!” Lee shouted. He flung the passenger door open and rolled out of the cab. As he stood up, he used the open door for cover and continued shooting at the muzzle flashes he saw.

  There seemed to be as many of them as there had been stars in the sky earlier, the last time he had held his wife in his arms and tasted the sweetness of her kiss.

  Phillip Hamil had slept the sleep of the just. The hundreds of deaths he had set in motion didn’t haunt his dreams. He knew that his bloodthirsty god approved of them.

  The alarm on his phone went off an hour and a half before dawn. He had to look good for the cameras, so he had showered and was shaving when the knock came on the door of his motel room.

  Hamil frowned when he opened the door and found Jerry Patel standing there. The motel owner looked sick and hungover and scared. He said, “There’s shooting.”

  “Where?” Hamil asked curtly.

  “Out by the football field, I think. I thought you would want to know—”

  Hamil stepped out onto the concrete sidewalk in front of the rooms and listened. He heard the gunfire, punctuated by grenade blasts.

  “The Americans are attacking again,” he snapped. “The men monitoring the satellite feeds must have been warned. Why wasn’t I notified?”

  “I . . . I’m sure I don’t know, Doctor. Maybe—”

  Hamil waved away Patel’s stammering response. He said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll go find out what’s going on.”

  He knew there had been no new developments at Hell’s Gate. Raffir would have called him if there were. But something was happening here in Fuego in advance of his dawn deadline, there was no doubt about that.

  He shooed Patel away and went back into the motel room to finish getting dressed. When he emerged a couple of minutes later and started toward his car, he wasn’t quite as dapper as he would have liked, but history was sometimes messy, he reminded himself.

  He had just reached the car when some instinct made him look up. His eyes widened as he saw large black shapes blotting out part of the stars. It took him only a second to realize what they were.

  Parachutes.

  And those weren’t his men dropping into Fuego.

  Those damned Americans! He couldn’t believe they were attempting such a double cross. He had been assured that there were enough sympathizers—indeed, enough active agents—within the federal government that no one would interfere with whatever the Sword of Islam did.

  Someone would pay for this treachery, Hamil thought as he jerked the car door open. He would take particular pleasure in beheading the dog himself, if that was at all possible.

  In the meantime, what was happening at the football stadium wasn’t as important as the situation at the prison. As Hamil started his car, he thumbed a button on his cell phone. When one of his lieutenants at the stadium answered, he said, “Blow up the place! Now!”

  The man sputtered a little, but Hamil knew he would do as ordered. He broke the connection, tossed the phone on the seat beside him, and gunned out of the parking lot.

  He hadn’t gone a block when two black-suited, body-armored soldiers landed on the street in front of him with black parachutes billowing down around them. Hamil’s foot came down hard on the gas as the Americans tried to right themselves and bring their weapons to bear. He didn’t give them time.

  He hit one man straight on, full force, and clipped the other with the car and sent him spinning away. That slowed Hamil down for a second, but then he accelerated again and sent the car screaming down Main Street and out the other end of town. He veered hard onto the road leading to Hell’s Gate.

  He would rain down bloody vengeance on the Americans, he thought as his hands tightened their grip on the steering wheel and the speedometer needle climbed past ninety miles per hour.

  But behind him, it was justice that continued to descend on Fuego.

  Everything was ruined, Jerry Patel thought. His faith had deserted him. The Sword of Islam was going to fail. At the very best, he would spend the rest of his life in prison.

  He stood there in the dimly lit motel office and looked down at the gun he had placed on the counter in front of him. It was a revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38. He had bought it years earlier to keep in the office in case of an attempted robbery. He had fired it a few times on the range, then hadn’t touched it for a long time. He was fairly confident it would still work, though.

  He picked it up and wondered if he could find the courage to do what needed to be done.

  He put it back down.

  Behind him, his wife said anxiously, “Jerry, what are you doing?”

  He jumped a little, said, “Lara!”

  “Were you going to kill yourself ?” she asked. Her voice sounded cold and angry to him.

  “I . . . I . . . The Americans are attacking the football stadium. Dr. Hamil left. It’s all going wrong, Lara. It’s going to fail.”

  “You pathetic coward,” she said. “Allah can never fail.”

  “No . . . but we are just men. We can make mistakes.”

  “I made the mistake when I married you. I never dreamed you would turn out to be such a weakling.”

  Her words cut him to the bone. He had thought they were happily married for a long time. Now he realized that had all been a lie.

  At least something happened then to distract her. She exclaimed, “What’s that?” and hurried past him to the big window that looked out on the parking lot. Patel came out from behind the counter to join her. He muttered a curse as he saw the big black shapes floating down onto the parking lot like giant bats.
<
br />   “American soldiers,” he said.

  “Take the gun,” Lara said. “Go out there and fight them.”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “You dog!” She wheeled around, went to the counter, and picked up the revolver. “If you won’t fight them, I will!”

  As she started toward the office door, Patel moved hurriedly to stop her.

  “Lara, no!” he said as he clutched her arm and tried to turn her toward him. “You can’t—”

  The gun went off.

  Patel felt as if a huge fist had punched him in the belly. The slug’s impact doubled him over, unhinged his knees. He collapsed as searing pain filled his body.

  He didn’t lose consciousness, though. He was still awake and aware as he watched his wife rush out of the office in her nightgown and bathrobe, crying, “Help me! Help me!”

  In the glow of the lights scattered around the parking lot, Patel saw the soldiers disengaging themselves from their parachutes. They turned toward Lara as she hurried toward them, no doubt seeing only a hysterical woman who represented no threat.

  Then she proved them wrong by taking the gun from the pocket of her robe and opening fire. One of the soldiers fell. She had taken them by surprise.

  But only for a second. Then their automatic weapons came up and flame danced from the muzzles and Lara fell backward as dozens of bullets tore through her body. She hit the parking lot pavement hard and didn’t move again.

  Inside the office, on the tile floor, Patel sobbed, both from the pain of his own wound and his grief at his wife’s death. He couldn’t help but wonder, though . . . had she pulled the trigger by accident when he grabbed hold of her?

  Or had she meant to kill him because of the disgust she felt for him?

  He died without knowing the answer.

  Lee heard Colonel Atkinson shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” He and Gibby lunged out from the cover the stalled pickup had given them and raced through the predawn gloom toward the stadium, firing as they ran.