General Stone nodded in satisfaction when it had been loaded aboard. “Thank you for your cooperation, son,” he said to the lead driver.
“Just following—”
That was as far as the driver got, because at that point Stone drew his gun and shot him in the head, killing him instantly. The driver was dead when he hit the pavement, so he didn’t hear the yells and the gunfire as the rest of his companions were wiped out.
Less than ten minutes later, the bodies had been tossed in the now-empty trucks. Some of Stone’s men got into the cabs to drive the vehicles out into the empty West Texas landscape and dispose of them in a ravine that had been located on satellite photos. A few expertly placed charges would collapse the wall of the ravine on the trucks, burying them and their grisly contents forever.
And no one would ever know what had happened on this lonely stretch of West Texas highway.
From several blocks away, Bud focused the lenses of the binoculars on the trucks parked in front of the police station. He grunted as if he had seen what he was looking for and said in low tones, “Check out the one on the left. See that little dish antenna on top?”
He passed the binoculars to Ford, who studied the trucks for a moment and said, “Yeah, I see it. You think that’s where the EMP is coming from?”
“I don’t know if it’s a regular series of EMPs or a continuous jamming signal of some sort, but yeah, that’s why nobody’s phones or computers will work. I’d bet on it, anyway.”
“You are.”
“Are what?”
“Betting on it,” Fargo said as he lowered the glasses. “Betting a lot of lives, in fact.”
Bud swallowed hard. “All right.”
“What’s the best way to disable a gizmo like that, anyway?”
“Well … the sure-fire method would be to blow up the truck.”
“Short of that?”
“It’s bound to have an on-off switch,” Bud said. “Worst comes to worst, I could kill the power to it.”
“And everybody’s phones would start working again?”
“Probably not all of them. Some of them are probably damaged and would need to be repaired. But as many cell phones as there are bound to be around here, some of them should work, yeah.”
The two men were crouched inside a big Dumpster at the side of the grocery store. A few minutes earlier, the two men had taken cover in the Dumpster to avoid being seen by one of the Rey del Sol patrols, and they had stayed there since it had proven to be a viable, if somewhat smelly, observation post for their needs.
Since they had found out what they needed to know, they climbed out and trotted around the back of the grocery store, carrying their rifles. The rest of the group had split up, since nearly thirty people couldn’t move around a town the size of Home without being spotted. General Garaldo had been tied up securely and left at the high school with Cochrum and the blond reporter, who had refused to join the fight. Jimmy and Eloise had stayed there as well to keep an eye on them.
Parker and Alex were waiting in a beauty shop called the Hairateria, which sat a block off Main, facing a side street. Alex and Delgado had deployed everybody else in specific places around town, contingent on the small groups being able to reach those locations without running into any of the patrols. Since they had no way of communicating with each other, they had established a signal that would mean everyone should converge on the police station and be ready to fight. That signal was three evenly spaced shots, followed five seconds later by two more. The invaders would be able to hear those shots, too, and might figure out that they were intended as a signal, but there was nothing that could be done about that.
Parker had broken the lock on the beauty shop’s back door, but the damage wasn’t noticeable. Ford and Bud slipped inside the darkened interior. Parker and Alex lowered the rifles they had trained on the door when it swung open.
“Bud’s pinpointed the truck we’re after,” Ford said. “It’s parked in front of the police station, just like we thought it would be. But if we can fight our way to it, Bud says he can disable whatever’s jamming communications.”
Bud nodded. “Yeah, shouldn’t be too big a problem. Other than staying alive, that is.”
“Yeah, that’s all,” Parker said dryly. He turned to Alex. “We’re going to need a distraction, like the one we came up with when we sprang you from Garaldo and his men.”
“Why are you looking at me?” she asked. “That sounds more like a job for you two spooks.”
Ford shook his head. “No, we’ll be leading the attack on the trucks. You know this town better than the rest of us. Surely there’s something here that’ll get their attention. I don’t think we’ll be lucky enough to find another tanker truck to blow up.”
Alex frowned in thought. After a moment, she said, “There’s a warehouse full of hay on the edge of town. If somebody set fire to it, it would make quite a blaze. It might even blow up. Hay will do that sometimes, when it’s been sitting around for a while and it gets too hot.”
“Sounds like it’s worth a try,” Ford said with a nod. “If nothing else, all the smoke will get them looking away. How long will it take you?”
Alex shrugged. “Fifteen minutes, maybe, to get there and start the fire.”
“All right,” Parker said. “We’ll use that time to get as close to the trucks as we can. When you get the fire going, give the signal for the others to attack the police station. The three of us will wait for the fighting to start, then make a run for the trucks.” He looked at Bud. “Are you up for this?”
The cameraman swallowed hard, but nodded without hesitation. “Yeah. I don’t know how good a fighter I’ll be, but get me in that truck alive and I can handle the tech stuff.”
“We’re good to go, then,” Ford said. “In fifteen minutes.”
Alex looked at him. “Fifteen minutes,” she agreed.
And she knew it might be the longest fifteen minutes of her life.
Jimmy wished there was something he could do to help his friend Eloise. She was pacing back and forth, and he knew she was really worried about Clint. So was he. He hadn’t seen any of the officers except Delgado, and he wished he knew whether they were all right.
General Garaldo was sitting in a chair at one of the library’s study tables. Not only were his hands tied behind his back, but he was tied into the chair as well. His shoulders slumped in defeat.
Eloise suddenly stopped pacing and pointed her rifle at the general. “I ought to kill you right here and now,” she said.
Garaldo lifted his head. He still had enough defiance in him to sneer at her. “You won’t do it,” he said. “You’re too weak, just like the rest of your countrymen. You let your own government do anything it wants to now, and you do nothing but whine and complain! In my country, the government does what those with real power tell it to. Men like me.”
“You’re not telling … anybody what to do,” Jimmy said. “You’re tied up.”
“That’s right,” Eloise said. “And if I want to, there’s not a thing stoppin’ me from blowin’ you away, mister.”
“Nothing except your own weakness,” Garaldo mocked.
Eloise glared at him for a moment, then turned away with an exasperated sigh. Jimmy was glad she hadn’t shot the general. The chief hadn’t said anything about shooting anybody.
Eloise went over to look out the window. Jimmy moved to stand beside her. “It’ll be all right,” he told her. “You just gotta … have faith.”
“I’m trying, Jimmy,” she said as tears ran down her cheeks. “I’m trying, but it’s really hard.”
Behind them, Garaldo caught the blonde’s eye and motioned her over with his head. Wilma hesitated, but after a moment she walked up to him.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Garaldo nodded toward Jimmy and Eloise at the front windows. Keeping his voice low, he said, “The woman is insane, and the man is mentally deficient in other ways. They’re going to kill me, se�
�orita.”
“I don’t think they will. If they wanted to, they would have done it before now.”
“You know this ridiculous tale about nerve gas and your American President isn’t true, don’t you?”
“Of course, it’s not. The President would never do anything like that.” Wilma frowned. “But you’re a bad man, General. You’re probably here after drugs or something like that, aren’t you?”
Even tied up, Garaldo managed to give an eloquent shrug. “I see no point in denying the obvious. It is true that I work for the Rey del Sol cartel. Our enemies are bringing a shipment of cocaine through here today, and we plan to hijack it. But that’s all, señorita. This talk of nerve gas is loco!”
Wilma crossed her arms and nodded. “I knew it. I knew the President couldn’t do anything bad. He’s so nice. I’ve met him several times, you know.”
“If you could help me get free,” Garaldo said, “I could stop all this killing right now. And you … you could get an exclusive for your network out of it, my dear.”
Excitement leaped into Wilma’s eyes, but only for a second. Then she said, “How stupid do you think I am? Never mind, you must think I’m pretty stupid. I’m not going to trust a Mexican drug lord.”
Cochrum ambled up behind her and grinned. “I was waiting to see whether you’d fall for his pitch, sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me sweetheart,” she snapped. “That’s sexual harassment. You’re a lawyer. You ought to know that.”
He held up his hands. “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it. I was just saying that you did good not to believe this guy. He’s not on our side.”
“I never claimed to be,” Garaldo said. “But I can speak your language, and I don’t mean English. I mean … one million dollars if you turn me loose.”
“You want me to betray my country for a million dollars?” Cochrum demanded.
“I’m sorry. I meant five million.”
“You might as well shut up—” Wilma began.
Cochrum stopped her with a curt gesture. “Don’t pay any attention to her,” he told Garaldo. “Keep talking, General …”
CHAPTER 47
Alex wasn’t sure what worried her the most: the dangerous mission she was on, the possibility that the deadliest nerve gas on the planet might fall into the hands of a madman … or the fact that in a few minutes her son, her only child, would be in the middle of a fight to the death. There was no way she could have talked Jack and Rowdy out of taking part in the battle with Garaldo’s men. At least they had gone with J. P. Delgado, and Alex knew he would do his best to look out for them.
In the meantime, she had a job to do, and she couldn’t afford to waste any time. She had already had to hide a couple of times to avoid the cartel patrols, and that had delayed her. But now she was at the rear door of the warehouse where Phil Pearson stored the hay he sold at his feed store. He kept a truckload at the store, but the rest of his stock was here.
“Sorry, Phil,” Alex muttered under her breath as she used the barrel of her rifle to wrench the lock off the door. The hasp came free with a screech of nails.
She stepped into the shadowy, cavernous warehouse. The piled-up bales of hay loomed on both sides of a narrow aisle like twin mountains. A forklift was parked in the aisle. The air was thick with the smell of hay and floating dust motes. That dust would help the fire burn with a fierceness that was akin to an explosion.
Alex had a cigarette lighter in the pocket of her jeans. She didn’t smoke, but like a lot of law enforcement personnel, she carried a lighter with her because it often came in handy. That was certainly the case now. She trotted to the far end of the aisle and flicked the flame into life. Dashing back and forth between the two piles of hay, she set the stuff on fire in several different places as she hurried toward the back door. Behind her, the flames began to crackle as the blaze caught hold.
Alex was running by the time she reached the door and burst outside, and it was a good thing because the hay went up with a gigantic whoosh! behind her. A wind sprang up in her face as oxygen rushed into the warehouse to fuel the conflagration, but that wasn’t enough to keep the heat from battering her back. Alex kept moving until she was a good hundred yards from the building.
She stopped and turned to look at the thick cloud of gray smoke billowing up from the fire. It would be visible all over town … hell, from all over the area, she thought. And some of Garaldo’s men would have to come check it out. They were probably pretty jumpy by now with their commanding officer missing.
Grim-faced, Alex set her rifle on single fire, pointed it toward the sky, and pulled the trigger three times, then waited and fired twice more.
No turning back now, she thought. The signal had been given.
Let the battle for Home begin.
“I can’t stand it no more,” Rye Callahan said. He started to climb out of the gully.
Earl caught hold of his arm and stopped him. “Wait a minute,” the little scientist said. “Ford and Parker told us to wait here.”
“Yeah, well, we been waitin’ for a couple of hours now, and there’s been all sorts of shootin’ in town. I reckon something could’ve happened to those boys, and it’s up to us now to put a stop to whatever hell-raisin’ is going on here.”
“I don’t know,” Earl said dubiously. “They told us to wait—”
“Yeah, you said that,” Callahan cut in. “You can squat out here if you want to, son, but I’m gonna get right in the middle of that ruckus.” The rancher nodded toward the town and then abruptly exclaimed, “What the hell?”
Earl looked and saw a column of smoke rising from something on the edge of town. Shots began to ring out again, more of them than ever now. He sensed that whatever was happening in Home, it was starting to reach its climax.
Callahan scrambled out of the gully and took off toward town, carrying the rifle at a slant across his chest. Earl hesitated for a moment as he pondered his choices. Plunge right into the middle of that violent chaos, he thought, or stay here by himself and maybe risk being alone when the bad guys came looking for him, as they inevitably would?
“Damn it,” he muttered. That was no choice at all. How come life didn’t offer a “none of the above” option?
But it didn’t, so he climbed out of the gully and trotted after Callahan, his short legs moving fast as he tried to catch up to the rancher.
With the rotors beating the air, the helicopter flew toward Home. General Weldon Stone opened the steel case that sat at his feet and looked at the hardened plastic canister nestled within it. The canister had a simple nozzle on it that could be attached to a hose. Stone had such a hose. All he had to do was attach it to the canister, run the other end out of the helicopter, fly over Home, and turn the handle on the canister’s valve. The gas would do the rest. It was possible that some of the people in town might survive, but the general and his men could dispose of them a short time later, after the gas had become inert.
It should have bothered him, the idea of killing fellow Americans. He had been a career military man, after all. He had devoted his life to serving his country. But over the years he had come to realize that those on the political left were right … sometimes the few had to suffer for the good of the many. Sometimes the many had to suffer for the good of even more. He had seen how the poor and those of color had flocked to the military because civilian life held nothing for them but injustice. He had seen how the rich and powerful—most of them Jews—always got richer and more powerful, and the unfairness of it ate at him. The politicians never seemed to do anything about it, even the ones who had once shown promise, like the previous president.
Then a special politician, a different politician, had come along, and General Stone had recognized at last a kindred spirit, although the man had no service experience and generally held the military in disdain, like most of his ilk. But he had a dream of transforming the country, of spreading the wealth and making the United States a kinder, gentler nation.
And when General Stone looked in the President’s eyes, he knew the son of a bitch was willing to kill anybody he had to in order to make that dream of tolerance and equity come true. The President, to Stone’s way of thinking, was the perfect blend of ideals and utter ruthlessness.
Kill for good. Murder for equality. Wipe out a whole town if you had to in order to be sure nobody found out the truth.
It was all collateral damage, and General Stone was enough of a pragmatist to know that such things were inevitable if true change was to come about.
“General!”
Stone looked up from the canister and all the dreams it held. “What is it, Lieutenant?” he asked his aide.
“There’s a big cloud of smoke up ahead. It looks like it’s coming from the direction of the town.”
Stone stood up, bracing himself against the side of the helicopter, and looked past the pilot and co-pilot. He saw the column of smoke rising in the distance.
“What do you think it is, sir?” the lieutenant asked.
“I don’t know, son,” Stone replied, “and in a few minutes, whatever it is won’t matter.”
Jack, Rowdy, and J. P. Delgado crouched behind a parked car on Main Street, trading shots with a squad of Rey del Sol killers. Jack was more scared than he had ever been in his life, but a certain calmness had descended on him when the invaders opened fire on him and his companions and forced them to take cover. He knew he might die at any second, but he also knew that he was fighting for a good cause, for the very survival of his hometown. For his mom and his friends and for everybody who lived here, even the assholes. They didn’t deserve to have a bunch of drug-running, power-hungry thugs come waltzing in and take over, slaughtering people right and left. It wasn’t right.
And if Jack had to die to put a stop to it, well, he supposed he could be at peace with that.
But he was still scared, and he tried to channel that fright into making every shot count.
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