The Devil's Stop Read online

  SCOTT BLAD E

  THE DEVIL’S STOP

  A Jack Widow Novel

  a Black Lion Media publication ©

  New York · London · Paris · Berlin · Sydney · Toronto

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  www.scottblade.com

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  Novels by Scott Blade

  The Jack Widow Series

  Gone Forever

  Winter Territory

  A Reason to Kill

  Without Measure

  Once Quiet

  Name Not Given

  The Midnight Caller

  Fire Watch

  The Last Rainmaker

  The Devil’s Stop

  Black Daylight

  S. Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  Other Novels

  The Secret of Lions

  Copyright © 2018 Scott Blade

  A Black Lion Media Publication

  All Rights Reserved

  Visit the author website:

  scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow book series and The Devil’s Stop are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken with permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or fictitious characters, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This series is not associated or a part of any other book series that exists.

  For more information on copyright and permissions visit scottblade.com .

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  Published by Black Lion, LLC.

  Chapter 1

  T HE MAN HAD FORGOTTEN HIS OWN NAME. But not because of some sort of traumatic brain injury like a car accident or a plane crash or falling off a ladder. It was nothing like that. It wasn’t from a baseball bat to the head. Although, that wasn’t out of the question. Not yet. It wasn’t from a gunshot to the brain, which was what he was hoping for. Still.

  The man wore a US Air Force flight suit. At least that’s what it looked like to the others around him. That’s what it looked like to anyone who didn’t know any better. The suit’s fabric was all green, standard issue for the men in his crew, in his line of work, which is a small, elite group of airmen.

  This man was in that group. He was an airman. The uniform he wore was standard issue for most of the airmen in crews like his, and there were lots of crews like his.

  The uniform he had been issued was all green, but the one he wore now wasn’t all green anymore. When he had left for work the day before to work a twenty-four-hour shift, it had been. It had been pristinely washed and ironed and ready for a workday’s wear and tear.

  That may not seem like a lot, but for a guy in his profession, it was. It was a lot because he didn’t work in a nine-to-five shift like the rest of the professional world. He worked in twenty-four and forty-eight-hour shifts, and sometimes even as many as seventy-two hours. It all depended. It was all relative.

  Like his coworkers, he often had to sleep at work in split shifts. Usually, there was one man awake and one man asleep. And then there were both men awake, at the same time.

  This was how it went. Work, sleep, repeat.

  The longest shift he’d ever worked was five days. But that was only once. And not at this installation. That was back in North Dakota.

  The shift he’d just gotten off from early that afternoon was a forty-eight-hour one. And the next shift was also forty-eight hours, which he had told his captors. He had told them when the next shift ends. They had needed to know that. He was sure he told them, pretty sure. He must have because they weren’t asking him about it. Not anymore.

  His uniform had been in the same condition when he left work, before he got here, in this situation. But now, it wasn’t.

  Now, his Air Force uniform was no longer pristine, no longer clean, and there was not much green left visible, not anywhere on it. Now, the uniform was a hue of blood reds and dried blood blacks .

  The man’s name patch was no longer legible. The letters on the patch, like most of his uniform, were smeared and pasted over by an outside substance.

  It was blood. His blood.

  The man was having problems remembering his own name, but he knew his own blood.

  Blood is the kind of thing that is self-evident.

  It was splattered across his name patch and uniform. It was splattered all over his chest and neck and face and waist. It was probably all over his pants too, but he couldn’t be sure. He was having problems craning his head forward so that he could see his legs.

  His legs were no longer mobile so he couldn’t raise them into view either. They had been beaten and smashed so severely that they were either paralyzed or broken or both. It wasn’t clear to him. Either way, he could no longer feel them or move them.

  A hazy, black, smoky odor filled his nostrils, along with a discernable smell of over-barbequed meat. The smells were carried by the hard wind. It was impossible for him not to notice. It was pungent and bitter and harsh.

  One of his captors stood close to him and repeated the same question he’d asked before. He remembered that much. It hit him like déjà vu. He remembered answering before and in detail. He remembered giving latitude and longitude. He remembered giving landmarks, which weren’t many, a mountain to the north, another to the south, a lake twenty-two miles in one direction, a little house on the corner of the next road over, but that was it. There were no main roads anywhere in sight. There was only one way in and one way out, besides helicopter access.

  “Where is it?” one of his captors asked him.

  Like before, the airman repeated the same answer, giving up coordinates and a road name and a description of the little house nearby. But, like before, he reminded them that they’d never get past the armed security, and even if they did, they’d never get past all the computerized checks, nor would they be able to do any of it without an airman of his qualifications.

  The captor ignored his warnings, also like before.

  The airman went back to his one previous desire. He wanted to die. He wanted it so badly that he would’ve told them anything they asked. If he knew the answer. And if he didn’t, then he’d lie about it.

  He prayed for a quick death. The faster, the better. The sooner, the better.

  He wanted death, unlike anything that he had ever wanted before in his life. He wanted it more than breath. He wanted it more than freedom.

  Death superseded everything else. It superseded his training and his life.

  The man was technically from the 320th Air Expeditionary Wing. Used to be anyway. Before this new
assignment. The 320th Air Expeditionary Wing’s motto was Strength through Awareness .

  He was an airman .

  The airman had lost his strength two hours and thirty minutes ago. He only knew that because he had been counting the seconds in his head. The only thing you could do to distract yourself from immense pain and torture was to recite something in your head, something memorized, something unforgettable. That’s how they had taught him to do it. Only they had taught him to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He couldn’t do that anymore. Not today. Instead, he switched to counting. Hard to forget the number system. It was easier to forget his own name.

  As for the rest of his unit’s motto, he had no awareness left. That left him right after his strength.

  His natural survival instinct gave up on him hours earlier.

  They trained you for this, he told himself.

  Remember your training. He repeated, over and over. But it was useless. His training had abandoned him too.

  He wanted them to kill him. He pleaded for mercy, not for his life, not to be spared, but for a quick death, an end to it.

  “Kill me! Please!” he thought he had said, but he had not.

  He’d said nothing. Not for a while now. He had gone limp a few times. Maybe he had blacked out. He couldn’t remember. Perhaps he had blacked out, and they had woken him up.

  He thought about a bullet to the head, or to the heart, or anywhere to make it all stop, and stop now. It became the only thing that mattered to him. It became the only thought in his brain.

  There was almost nothing he wouldn’t tell them or do to get a single merciful bullet. There wasn’t any question he wouldn’t answer at this point.

  He remembered that he was supposed to say his name and rank.

  Did he say that? He couldn’t remember. His head hurt.

  He had top security clearance of the highest order that a man of his rank and station could get. He remembered that. He had to have top security clearance. It was critical to his job description. Your crew needs top security clearance when they have a direct line from the president. And his crew had direct access both to and from the president of the United States, himself. Not a staffer. Not an underling. Not a cabinet member. Not even to the vice president. The access was simple, direct, and clearly marked. No interference between the president and his crew. Day or night, the president could contact him.

  Full stop.

  But his captors hadn’t asked him about that. They hadn’t seemed the least bit interested in his security clearance or his access or the reasons why he had direct access. They weren’t interested because they already knew.

  He had already told them .

  The pain he felt was so unbearable that if they had asked him, he would’ve given up his presidential access, easy.

  Anything for that bullet.

  Midnight darkness loomed everywhere, all around them, around the vast forest, surrounding the nine men outside the wood cabin. Violent rain beat down for miles in every direction. It poured and slammed down on the cabin’s high, shingled roof, and the ground outside, and through the trees. The rain thumped into the trees like loose bullets falling from the sky. Mud loosened and flowed in long, uneven streams down the footpath back to a parked F-150, engine off, headlights on, coning out into vivid beams of wet light.

  The rain clattered and stomped and slammed into the trees and terrain so hard and his head hurt so bad that he couldn’t recall a time when the earth wasn’t covered in torrential rainfall.

  The only thing louder than the rain was the laminating, cascading wind. The wind stormed and yowled through the trees like a nuclear siren, fading into oblivion.

  Nuclear sirens, he knew something about that. They all did, his whole crew. It was their nightmare scenario. The only thing worse than the screeching of nuclear sirens was that direct line to the president ringing. It was the nightmare of his entire crew. It was what they were trained for, but it was what they dreaded the most. They had the only job in the world like that. Their jobs required cold, calculated actions, precise actions. They were trained to endure the worst-case scenarios. They were trained to eat a bullet before they gave in to terrorists, to the enemy.

  They were the last line of defense. Their jobs made them the most revered and the most feared men on the planet.

  And he was sure he had betrayed all of that by giving in, by giving up information that he wasn’t supposed to give up.

  Lightning strikes cracked infrequently far in the distance, on the horizon, lighting up the sky, the tops of the immense trees, and the shadowing mountains, which loomed massive and mammoth like the shallow graves of giants.

  No thunder. Not anywhere. Not that any of them could hear. There was only the rain, the wind, and the sparse lightning cracks, and then there were the fires.

  The things in the fires were the only things that mattered to him other than his own life. At that moment, all he cared about was the things in the fires and a quick death. The things in the fires mattered to him because they had been more than his friends. They had been his crew, his guys. They had been under him in rank.

  This was all his fault.

  His wrists were nailed to the hard, wet timber on the porch’s wall. He hung, crucified by nails fired out of a nail gun.

  He had once been a Marine, a tough breed, long before he transferred to the USAF.

  He was proud of his Marine Corps years. He always thought that that had made him tougher than his counterparts. But no one would know that now, not if they looked at his face. His face was bludgeoned and bloody. His one good eye was utterly void of all hope. Nothing about it registered as a former Marine.

  His right eye was bashed and battered closed. The truth was he’d never see out of it again. The cornea was cracked and splintered to the point of grayness, to the point where it would have to be enucleated, not amputated, like an arm or a leg, but enucleated. The internal nerves were dislocated and ripped. If he had ever opened that eye again, it’d have no color left.

  If he ever opened it again, but he wouldn’t.

  He stared down with his left eye at four severed fingers and one severed thumb plopped down on the porch’s planks. Rain and blood pooled together between the removed digits, making them look like pieces of meat covered in cooking oil, waiting to be fried, like sausage links.

  The fingers and thumb had been cut off using a pair of butcher shears, the kind used to cut through animal bone and pretty much anything else placed between the curved blades.

  He stared down at the lost extremities. He knew they were his, but he felt nothing. No panic. No sense of saving them. No desire to even think about it. Nothing.

  He would never have them again. No one was going to reattach them. He knew that for sure .

  He knew that because his captors had seared his new stumps with a hot poker that they had pulled from out of a wood-burning stove in the cabin’s modest kitchen.

  Several feet away from his fingers, he saw some of his broken teeth. He saw two incisors and three molars. They were scattered in the mud. The man who had done this to him had jerked them out with pliers and tossed them like salt over his shoulder.

  The airman had lost count of how many teeth he had left. He knew there were some because they had scraped his tongue as he licked his lips and coughed. He spat blood that was from a stream of blood rinsing down his face from a viciously broken nose.

  They had broken it with a good old-fashioned knuckleduster.

  All the horror that he had experienced that night, personally, wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it had been watching his two crewmen getting the same and then getting far worse.

  He craned his head one last time and looked over to the right. Right there, out in a small clearing in front of the cabin, he saw them, the things in the fires. He watched the last one die. He heard the last one scream for the last time until the screams became part of the screeching winds.

  Now, all he saw were two separate, raging fires. One of the fi
res still moved. The thing in the fire still twitched, involuntarily.

  The airman said, “Mitch? ”

  He watched his crewmembers, his friends, burn alive. Then he saw the man with the blowtorch step back into view. The sight of him was worse than a nightmare. It was worse than a monster under the bed because it was real.

  The airman spit out blood again. This time splinters of one of his remaining teeth came out with it.

  Barely audible, he spoke, taking deep, quick gasps of air in between words.

  “No! Wait! I told you. I told you where it is. The coordinates are right. I gave you what you wanted. What else do you want?”

  A second man stepped behind the man with the blowtorch. He was taller than the one with the blowtorch. His face was long, horse-like. Two wicked H-shaped scars gashed across his temple like ticks on a chalkboard. Two parts of his eyebrow were missing where hair didn’t grow there anymore. He had a big, thick beard like the others. His eyes were deep-set and brown, but far closer to black than brown.

  The man’s skin was pale, like a ghost’s. So was his blowtorch man’s. His skin was also pale. The rest of them were all dark tan like cowboys who worked out in the sun all day, but under the clothes, they were equally pale.

  The man with the H-shaped scars was obviously the leader. He was the one giving the orders. He was the one asking the questions. He was the one who spoke. He was the first man that the airman saw when they ambushed him .

  At first, he’d wondered if it was because he wore his uniform out in public. If that was how they identified him. He wasn’t supposed to wear his greens in public. That’s why he had been ordered to keep them in his locker, but he hadn’t listened. He had driven back to the house with them.

  It turned out not to be the reason he had been identified because his crewmembers were already captured. They were already shoved into the bed of the pickup truck, hands and feet and mouth already duct-taped.

  The airman didn’t know how they had been identified or captured or ambushed. He guessed it was as easy as anything. Most ambushes are easy because of the element of surprise, that and trust. He had walked into the house he shared with the other two crewmembers and trusted that it was all good, that it was all normal. It wasn’t.