Malice

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

“Nah, I imbibe every once in a while myself,” O’Toole replied. “I was just saying good-bye. I have to drive to Boise to start preparing for the trial with my lawyers. Good luck.”

  Ireland was soon puffing away as he leaned over the maps from one end so that the others could see from the other. “First thing, we’re not going to beat these guys with overwhelming firepower. We’ve been keeping tabs on the Unified Church, and I’d estimate there’s anywhere from forty to fifty of those idiots running around in there. I’d be willing to bet that ninety percent have never been in a firefight and will head for the hills as soon as things get real. But there may be ex-military, and some of these guys we’ve run into lately for regular crimes like assault and robbery have obviously had some training and are pretty aggressive. They’re pretty well armed, too. The main compound and firing range is back five miles from the highway and we’ve had a tough time getting anyone inside. But we’ve listened in a time or two from nearby hills, and they’ve got automatic weapons and what sounds like fifty-cal machine guns.”

  Ireland began stabbing spots on the map with a meaty finger. “Gatehouse, two guys, usually the numbskulls who fucked up—nothing like putting your best guys out as your early warning system. Guard tower, right where the main road splits—one goes to the compound, right here, the other to the gravel pit, a couple of clicks down that road.”

  “You’ve done your homework,” Marlene remarked.

  Ireland blew a smoke ring up at the rafters. “I’ve been figuring since day one that we’d eventually have to take these jokers down,” he said. “Of course, I thought I might get a little help from the feds. Anybody want to tell me why we’re not calling them in?”

  Nobody spoke. The big sheriff snorted smoke out of his nose and nodded. “Okay, I don’t like dealing with those guys anyway.”

  Ireland looked back down at the map and drew a rough circle with a black felt-tip pen. “Main compound. Three barracks. Some office buildings. And the private residence of the Reverend Benjamin “Benji” Hamm, the grand pooh-bah of this particular band of morons. Place is surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped by razor wire. Another guard post here…and here—unknown how many guys are on duty at night, we’ll assume at least two.”

  Pointing back at the barracks, Ireland said, “The one guy we ever got inside said the barracks were made of reinforced concrete, which will take a pretty direct hit from more than I’ve even got. But if plan A doesn’t work, and we have to go to plan B, our job will be to keep them pinned up inside, not try to take them.”

  “What’s the matter, Caveman, are you a cave chicken?” Marlene joked. She and Ireland had been butting heads since they’d met. He was hopelessly chauvinistic and didn’t want her involved in case “things get hairy,” until Zook took him aside one day and apparently told him what he knew of some of Marlene’s exploits against terrorists. The man had continued giving her a hard time, but it evolved into the sort of guff one soldier gives to another. And she’d given as good as she got.

  Gagging on a cloud of blue smoke, Ireland chuckled as he wiped his eyes. “Damn, I got to love your moxie, Marlene. Next thing you know, she’ll have us going after Osama himself.”

  Marlene smiled. “That’s not a bad idea. Think you could do it?”

  Ireland sucked on the end of the cigar and squinted at her through the cloud. “Maybe, with the right men and a plan,” he said. “But I don’t need to…my boys in Special Forces are hunting that little prick right now. It might be a month, it might be five years, but they’re patient…they’ll run him to the ground until he wakes up in his cave some morning with a knife at his throat.”

  He poked the map. “For the moment, we got plenty to worry about right here. I’ve got about a half dozen deputies and a pretty good four-man SWAT team I trained myself. With Jojola and Tran, especially if they can pull off plan A, we might be able to keep most of these guys occupied. But I’m worried about your security at the gravel pit, just in case some of these jokers bust out through our perimeter or you run into a patrol. These guys like to play army and maybe they’re smart enough to keep some people out in the field.”

  “Well, I have an idea about where to find more men,” Marlene said. But when she said what she was thinking, Ireland shook his head. “We have enough amateurs to babysit. And anybody that’s personally involved is a potentially loose cannon.”

  Marlene dropped it for the time. But after the strategy meeting broke up and the others were off talking, Marlene and Zook took Ireland aside so that she could make her case again. “I know he’s had some military training, and I’m betting a few of the others do, too,” she said. “And these guys spend their lives walking around in the mountains and won’t be tripping all over themselves.”

  “What makes you think this guy and his pal have military training?” Ireland said.

  Marlene hadn’t answered that night. But the next day, she introduced Ireland to Katarain, who’d asked to speak to the sheriff when she called the night before from O’Toole’s house. Leaving them now in the office to talk, she’d excused herself.

  A half hour later, when Ireland emerged, he’d given her a hard look. “This puts me in a funny position, lady,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied. “But you’re a father. Put yourself in his shoes for now.”

  Ireland looked back into the office. “All right, you’re in,” he said. “But under those conditions.” With that, the sheriff stomped out of the house.

  Katarain emerged from the office and gave Marlene a hug. “Thank you.”

  “You deserve to be there,” she replied. “What are the conditions?”

  “The same as I asked of you,” he answered. “That I be allowed to bury my daughter with her mother. After that, it doesn’t matter.”

  The next step had been to get a search warrant. Marlene, Ireland, Zook, and Jack Swanburg, who’d flown in with the other members of the Baker Street Irregulars team, had gone to see Judge Linda Lewis.

  “She’s all right. A full-blood Nez Percé Indian who has no reason to like racists,” Zook said. “But she’s not going to be a pushover for a warrant. Folks around here, including judges, are pretty protective of their privacy and see transgressions against their neighbors as a threat to themselves, even if they don’t particularly like the neighbors. There has to be a pretty good reason.”

  However, Zook had never seen Swanburg in action. In an empty courtroom, the little round man with the Santa Claus beard pulled out his laptop computer and soon had the judge mesmerized with his PowerPoint presentation.

  First up was the photograph of the Cadillac and the pit. He pointed out the thin lava shell and gravel deposit, which combined with the conifer forest in the background “makes this a pretty good bet for northwest Idaho.”

  Next was the blowup of the Bucyrus steam shovel. “My associate, James Reedy, placed a call to the company,” Swanburg said. “Their public relations gal was a big help. She said there’s only a half dozen still in existence in the United States, one of them located at what was formerly Payette Sand and Gravel until the land was purchased by the Unified Church of the Aryan People. She doesn’t think it’s still in operation.”

  Swanburg switched to the blowup photograph of Maria Santacristina at the wheel of the car, staring out at the people in the courtroom. “I turn the floor over to Mr. Zook, Your Honor,” he said quietly, and sat down.

  Zook quickly went over the series of events, beginning with the disappearance of Maria Santacristina. “There’s been no sign that she’s alive,” he said. “No calls to friends or family. No use of her credit cards or bank accounts. No one applying for work using her Social Security number. No police stops.”

  He went on to describe Maria’s reputed affair with university president Kip Huttington and the positive pregnancy test strip found by her father, and ended with Huttington’s report of his car being stolen.

  “The car in the photograph is a 2003 Cadillac Eldorado,” Zook said, referring to
a report provided by Jesse Adare. “That’s the same make, model, and year as the car Huttington says was stolen two days after Maria disappeared.”

  “All right,” Lewis said. “I’m convinced. You get your warrant. But have you thought about how you’re going to serve this, Steve? I don’t expect they’re going to welcome you with open arms, not unless it’s firearms.”

  “We’re going to sneak up on them when they’re sleeping, Injun-style,” Ireland said.

  Lewis laughed but then her face got serious. “I don’t want this turning into a Branch Davidian thing. That just breeds more nuts like Timothy McVeigh et al.”

  “I’ll do my best, Linda, I mean Your Honor,” Ireland corrected himself, and winked.

  The judge sighed. “Why do I get the feeling that everything I say that you don’t like goes in one of those big cauliflower ears and out the other?”

  “Maybe ’cause there’s not much in between,” Ireland said. “Which reminds me, are you going to the Elks club barbecue next Sunday after church?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Lewis replied. “See you there?”

  “Probably,” Ireland. “Save me a burger if I’m late.”

  The convoy swept down the road until they reached the first guard tower, where the SWAT team waited. Those going on to the compound got out of their vehicles.

  “From here we hoof it. Don’t want them to hear us coming,” Ireland said to Marlene, who also got out of the Hummer. He turned to one of the SWAT members. “Hey, Ryan, any problem?”

  Ryan spit a wad of tobacco on the road. “Hell, no,” he complained. “They were asleep. So we tied ’em up nice and tight, and let them go back to nighty-night.”

  “Good man.” Ireland looked at his watch and then at Marlene. “All right. We’re right on schedule. We’ve got to cover three miles before dawn, and then we’ll see if plan A works. So wait until it starts to get light before expecting to hear from me. If we have to go to plan B, you get ready to skedaddle in case things go bad. Either way, I’ll be talking to you.”

  Marlene stuck out her hand. “Good luck, Caveman.”

  “Who needs luck when you got looks,” he replied, shaking her hand. “See ya on the flip side, and thanks for inviting me in on your little picnic. I haven’t had this much fun in thirty years.”

  With that, Ireland’s team formed up and began running down the road at a fast clip. Marlene looked at her watch and walked back toward the other vehicles.

  One hour later, the Reverend Benji Hamm woke from a dream in which he heard hounds baying somewhere in the distance, feeling that something just wasn’t quite right. He felt for the warm body of the fifteen-year-old girl sleeping next to him, one of the perks of being the Supreme Leader, whose duty it was to propagate the white race. She mumbled something and turned away.

  Hamm sat up in bed and squinted. The gray light of dawn was just beginning to slip in through the window, but it was enough to see that a strange man was sitting in the chair at the foot of his bed.

  The man, a goddamn slant-eyed gook, put a finger to his lips in the international sign to remain quiet. Any ideas he had about ignoring the warning evaporated when he felt the muzzle of a gun pressed against his temple and heard the hammer being pulled back.

  “Good morning, Benji,” Jojola whispered in his ear. “We’re Payette County sheriff’s deputies and we’re here to serve you with this search warrant.”

  Tran held up the paperwork and placed it on the end of the bed.

  “You are also under arrest for covering up a murder, which qualifies you for a felony murder charge,” Jojola continued quietly. “And if my guess is correct, the young lady in bed with you is a minor, so you’re probably looking at sexual assault charges, too.”

  “How did you get in here?” demanded Hamm, a pudgy six-footer with weak eyes who’d risen to his position mostly due to his gift for demagogic racist oratory and his absolute obedience to his absent superiors.

  “That’s not important,” Jojola said, brushing off a good forty minutes of crawling through snow and pine needles up to the security fence, cutting a hole, and waiting for Tran to pick the lock after getting the signal from one of the SWAT team members that the security system had been deactivated. “Let’s just say that your security wasn’t state of the art. But for future reference, just remember that you will never be safe from me or my friend here. He wanted to cut your throat, and then serve you the warrant. But I thought we should serve you the warrant and give you a chance to cooperate first.”

  “You’ll never get out of here,” Hamm said, trying to summon his famous command of words but having a difficult time swallowing.

  “Then neither will you. What’s it going to be?”

  Hamm considered his options. “I’ll play along for now,” he said. “After all, my attorneys will tear you to pieces for this intrusion.”

  “I’ve had worse enemies, including the distinguished gentleman at the foot of your bed,” Jojola replied as Tran waved.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Jojola got up from where he’d been kneeling by the side of the bed. “Nothing much. If my guess is correct, you’re all set up from here with a public address system. So I’d like you to call an early morning rollout. Tell them you have an important announcement.”

  “They won’t buy that crap,” Hamm said.

  “Well, then, I guess my friend is just going to have to persuade you to do your best,” Jojola said, and nodded to Tran, who stood and slid a knife from a leg scabbard.

  Hamm considered his options. There were nearly four dozen men in the barracks; many of them had been training for months. And there were enough weapons—including handheld rocket launchers and machine guns—to make the event in Waco, Texas, look like a walk in the park. He had wealthy friends in powerful places who made sure the compound had the best weaponry money could buy.

  Then again, the Asian looked like he meant business. Better to live to fight another day, he decided.

  “All right, all right, I’ll try,” he said. He rolled out of bed, flipped a couple of switches. “Arise, Aryan people, a new day has dawned. Report to the parade field for an important message from your leader. All warriors of the white race must report.”

  Hamm looked at his captors. “How was that?”

  Jojola shrugged. “We’re about to find out. But if something goes wrong, and one of my friends outside gets shot, I won’t hesitate to blow what few remaining brains you have all over the grass.”

  Hamm stood and was allowed to pull on his underwear and T-shirt. “It’s cold out there,” he complained when they wouldn’t let him wear anything else.

  “Then you’ll want this to go quickly,” Tran said as he turned him around and bound his wrists.

  Jojola’s two-way radio beeped once. “We have the reverend,” he answered. “What’s it looking like out there? Really? Without a fight?”

  Suddenly there was the sound of gunfire outside and the phone went dead. Jojola put his gun against Hamm, who promptly wet his underwear.

  “Please, I did what you said,” he pleaded. “It must be those Valknut guys. They never listen to me.”

  The radio beeped again. “What happened?” Jojola asked. He listened to the angry voice on the other end, then flipped the phone shut. “All right, let’s move out.”

  Tran pointed to the girl. “What about her?”

  “Guess we better wake her up and bring her along,” Jojola said.

  A few minutes later, Jojola and Tran emerged from the house with their prisoner, trailed by a yawning teenager who’d been allowed to dress appropriately for the weather.

  They were greeted by the strange sight of forty men lying on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs. They’d been made to strip down to their underwear and T-shirts and were already shivering as four members of the SWAT team stood guard.

  “Wow, quick work,” Jojola said to Ireland, then noticed that the sheriff was bleeding from the side.

  Ir
eland noticed the look and shrugged. “Grazed a rib,” he said. “About eight of these guys saw us and took off running for that barracks over there. I was dumb enough to run after them when I was talking to you and one of them turned around and shot me. Now the morons have really pissed me off.”

  “What are you doing about the guys in the barracks?” Tran asked.

  Ireland shrugged. “Nothing. Four of my men have all the exits covered and there’s no way out. The clowns are probably hoping for a glorious last stand, but we’re not going to give it to them…at least not at the moment.”

  “Should we read them their rights?” the SWAT officer asked.

  “Yeah, one at a time,” Ireland said. “We’re in no rush. Set up a little table in the office and take them in one at a time. Get their names, dates of birth, place of permanent residence. Then read ’em the Miranda warning, and if they want to chat, let ’em chat.”

  “What should we tell them they’re charged with?” the officer asked.

  “Rampant stupidity,” Ireland responded. “No? Well, how about accessory to murder, resistance to a peace officer performing his duty, i.e., serving a search warrant, and I expect we’ll discover a few weapons violations when we go through those barracks. The important thing is to take your time and let those folks over in the gravel pit do their work undisturbed.”

  “They’re complaining about being cold,” the SWAT officer said.

  “Well, are they now,” Ireland said with a look of disgust. “Bunch of weekend warriors. Keep them just as they are. Cold men don’t think or act very quickly. Those that are cooperative, let them hang out in one of the barracks—as soon as we’ve cleared it of weapons. The others can freeze their dicks off for all I care.”

  “Well, things seem to be under control here,” Jojola said, and laughed as he turned to Tran. “I wonder how Marlene and the others are doing.”

  “Let’s go see,” Tran replied. “If you think you can still walk that far.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Ho Chi Old Man,” Jojola replied. “And by the way, your coyote-speak still sucks.”