The Standoff Read online

  The Standoff

  A Jack Widow Thriller

  Scott Blade

  Also by Scott Blade

  www.scottblade.com

  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

  The Standoff

  S. Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  Novels

  The Secret of Lions

  Copyright © 2019 Scott Blade

  Black Lion Media Publishing.

  All Rights Reserved

  Visit the author website: scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow book series and The Standoff at Cherokee Hill are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either 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 officially associated with or a part of any other book series that exists.

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

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The publisher and/or author do not have any control over and do not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission from the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published by Black Lion, LLC.

  Created with Vellum

  Author’s Note

  Hello from the open road.

  My backpack.

  The contents: MacBook, change of clothes, dog treats, bank card, passport, and one toothbrush. That’s what I carry while I’m traversing the west coast right now. I’m finding plenty of Starbucks around to stop and work in.

  I’m writing to say a quick hello, explain my tardiness for this book, and give an author’s note that might be helpful.

  First, the tardiness, writing so many books, so fast, has caught up to me. Instead of carpal tunnel, like you might expect, somehow I got lateral epicondylitis (Tennis Elbow) about eight weeks before writing this. It’s been relentless on my right arm, slowing my typing speed to a crawl. I think taking it slower for this novel has helped. Hopefully, it’ll clear up soon.

  The second thing is, in this book, we first meet Jack Widow directly after the events of Black Daylight—book 11 in the series. But this isn’t a direct sequel and you don’t need to have read that one first. Both books are separate, self-contained stories.

  All the Jack Widow books are stand-alone novels. You can start anywhere.

  If you want to see more, know more, and grab future free books, and exclusive stuff, or just want to send me coffee, then please sign up to the Jack Widow Book Club at scottblade.com .

  With much love from,

  Scott Blade and trusty dog-sidekick, Django.

  Chapter 1

  J OSEPH ABEL PALMED a heavy, jagged rock in one hand and followed behind the guy he intended to bludgeon over the head with it, staying five feet back, giving the guy enough space to tempt him to make a run for it, but staying close enough to taunt him.

  The guy wasn’t young, wasn’t old, but was right at the cusp of forty, which he considered to be the peak of his athletic lifespan. He played baseball in high school, which got him into college on a scholarship. But it didn’t get him into the major leagues. It didn’t get him into any leagues. He didn’t play anymore. He made a different occupational choice.

  His hair was fair, cut short. It was up off his ears, but coiffed and swirled like nature had decided that he would never need any hairbrush other than his own fingers to style it.

  In regular life, he was a good-looking man, almost to a fault. His peers often referred to him as “Pretty Boy.”

  However, he wasn’t that pretty anymore, not now. There was dried blood in his hair mixed in with the swirls. His nose wasn’t broken, but it was swollen. He was certain that they could’ve broken it easily enough. But, they didn’t. Not so far. That could change.

  Abel said things to tease the guy.

  “Think if you run, you can make it to the trees?”

  The guy stayed quiet.

  “I dare you. Go for it.”

  The guy did nothing. Abel continued taunting him.

  “You sure? Just take off. Go for it. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  Silence.

  “We could give you a head start?”

  Nothing.

  “Would you like that? I can have my guys close their eyes and count to ten, like hide-and-seek. Think that’s enough time for you to make it to the trees?”

  The guy did nothing.

  What Abel said or did to the guy depended on what the guy said or did.

  So far, the guy said nothing and did what Abel told him to do. No protest. No conspiring to run. No plotting to fight back.

  The guy knew that it didn’t really matter what he did. Abel was never going to really give him a head start. If he took off running, he’d get a bullet in the back.

  Either way, Abel was going to smash that rock over his head. There was no stopping it. An unstoppable force meets an immovable object . The rock was the unstoppable force, but his head was no immovable object. It was just an object, like pottery—very easy to smash with a big rock.

  The guy was Abel’s prisoner. He had been for eighteen long hours, ever since they set a trap for him, a trap he walked right into like a rookie cop, like it had been his first time.

  The trap involved a two-way radio the guy thought was well hidden in one of several abandoned structures that stood on the compound grounds. The structures were all there when they moved in. They came with the property, sort of an as-is kind of deal, like buying a house and having to take an old car that came with it.

  The prisoner chose an old shed to hide the radio in. He had chosen it before he had ever even been there. He had seen it from aerial photographs, taken by drone. It was part of his preparation before coming to the compound.

  The radio was a thin thing, black rubber with a hard plastic case.

  The same remote-controlled law enforcement drone, that took the recon photographs, flew over the compound overnight and dropped the radio from less than a hundred feet in the air. It flew in quietly, emitting no more sound than a hum. It flew just over the tree line in order to avoid being seen.

  Pretty Boy snuck out on his second night, while everyone else was asleep, and waited for it to show up overhead at a preset of approximate coordinates he had memorized before going undercover.

  The drone flew overhead right on time and dropped the radio. It landed in the snow, between trees. Not exactly wher
e Pretty Boy had rehearsed where it would land with his handler and agent in charge, but these things never went exactly according to plan, almost never. In fact, whenever something did go as planned, he usually questioned it as too good to be true. In undercover situations, when something’s too good to be true, it doesn’t just mean that it probably isn’t true. It also means that it is probably a trap. Things didn’t go off exactly how he planned, but it was close enough.

  He stumbled right into the radio on his way to the shed. He should’ve taken it as an omen.

  He should’ve known better.

  Everything seemed fine for a while until one of the children caught him sneaking out on another night. He had been heading out to make one of his nightly radio checks. He couldn’t make the radio check from inside the compound. At night, he slept in a huge room on a cot with twenty other cult initiates, all on cots like military boot camp.

  At first, he thought his cover was intact because the children weren’t supposed to be out after curfew either. He and the children had converged accidentally, a stroke of bad luck. They met on the same exit point in the main building.

  They all stopped dead in their tracks, the children too. They thought their parents had sent him out to find them, like a search party. And he thought he was dead in the water, busted right there. They were all concerned with covering their own butts.

  Like a good undercover cop, he struck a deal with them. He made them promise not to say anything, and he would say nothing, silence for silence. It was a good trade. They had feared punishment from their parents if he turned them in. And he feared death. So, they agreed. He thought it was a solid agreement—a verbal contract, but children were the worst assets to have in an undercover situation because they’re unpredictable and unreliable. Plus, kids don’t keep secrets very well. He should’ve known, but he thought he was in the clear. He thought that if he could trust anyone, it would be the children. They wouldn’t turn him in. He thought they would keep their end of the bargain. And they did…for almost one whole twenty-four-hour period—almost.

  He was busted the next night.

  The compound crowned the top of a thick forest in the middle of nowhere in northern South Carolina, twenty miles south of the border with North Carolina. It was nestled between a town called Carbine and a small county with miles and miles of half-abandoned farmland, dirt roads, and long stretches of unprotected forestland called Spartan County.

  Spartan County met all of Abel’s needs when he was picking out locations for his militant cult, which originally didn’t start with the purpose of raising an army but it evolved that way. Abel didn’t start out with an ironclad purpose. He just started the cult and people came—unexplainably, the way cults often go. Families came. The lost came and joined—willingly, happily.

  Over years, he grew more and more ambitious. Leading a cult was supposed to be part his retirement, a new chapter of life, but the longer time passed since his days in the Army, the more militant he grew.

  Pretty Boy knew this. He had read the files over and over. He had memorized them. The good thing about the Army for law enforcement was that they kept impeccable records. They had files on Abel the size of the Oxford Dictionary. This included comprehensive psychological records and tests. Apparently, the Army had thought it prudent to force him to meet with a psychologist for a period of months, during his tenure in the military. Perhaps, it was because his unit had had the highest body count in Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Perhaps because they had the highest number of allegations of cruel misconduct of any other security team during the long transition from the old Iraq to the new democratic version, post-Saddam Hussein.

  No one knows the whole story, the whole picture, of why they had had enough of him. It was a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire kind of situation. Something about him rattled the brass because they did assign him and his team members to psychological observations.

  Either way, none of it mattered now. None of the records he read, none of the preparation he did, made any difference. He was caught now. He was Abel’s prisoner.

  Both Pretty Boy’s hands were zip-tied tight behind his back. He knew the attack was coming. He knew that Abel wasn’t marching him battered and broken just to set him free.

  He was a condemned man.

  To have hope at this point would almost be a blatant betrayal to himself, but he couldn’t help it. Hope clawed at him. The human brain is a problem-solving machine, and self-preservation is the brain’s number one priority. As he marched to his death, his brain continued to work out ways to survive. It calculated and assessed every option to get away that came along.

  Hope is a tricky thing. It’s hardwired deep in the brain like roots. It can’t be shaken loose. It’s too deep, too hardwired. Even though he knew that hoping was futile, his brain latched onto that hope like a bad drug that can’t be beaten—once hooked, always hooked.

  Pretty Boy couldn’t make a run for it. But that was what he kept thinking about over and over.

  Go! Run! His brain shouted to him. It taunted him as much as Abel had done, as if they were working together, partners in torturing him. But he kept thinking it all out, calculating the odds.

  If he ran flat-out as fast as he could, could he make the tree line? Could he make it to safety?

  His instincts kept telling him to go for it—pushing him, but it would be pointless, and he knew it.

  He would never make it—not in the snow, not in the cold temperatures, not in his weakened state, and not with his shattered morale. That was the biggest gut-punch. They had broken him the night before. Abel and his guys had stomped out most of the hope he had of being rescued. They literally stomped on him until he had nothing left.

  Making a run for it wasn’t going to work.

  They would shoot him in the back.

  No way could he outrun a bullet, and Abel and the six guys who followed behind him had plenty of bullets.

  Pretty Boy didn’t count all the bullets present, but he did count four fully automatic weapons and two shotguns, and that didn’t cover all the guns on them.

  He knew that Abel had a holstered Glock, which told him that the six guards also had sidearms. Altogether there must’ve been thirteen firearms among them. That meant possibly hundreds of loaded rounds with four of the weapons firing full auto—if they so wanted.

  Not to mention the shotguns, which he figured were loaded with buckshot, most likely.

  Buckshot is deadly at close range and often still deadly at mid-range and can even be deadly at mid-to-long range. The guys with the shotguns behind him were close enough in range to cut him down before he ran to mid-range.

  They would shoot him dead without having to reload.

  There was no running away, not this time. His only hope was his backup swooping in at the last minute like the cavalry does to save the day in a movie.

  But real-life never works out like the movies.

  He had no chance to run and no chance of fighting back.

  Pretty Boy wore the same thick garb as the rest of the cult’s newcomers: brown tunic-like clothes, somewhere between robes and medieval peasant gear. From the looks of it, the clothes they all wore was picked straight out of a cult catalog.

  The cult’s winter fashion line, he remembered joking with Adonis when he first saw the clothes that he would be wearing.

  The cult’s garbs came in tiers, like military uniforms, each specifying one’s status in the chain of command.

  He was dressed in the lowest level of clothing offered to the cult’s newest members, which meant that his outfit screamed to everyone that he was a newbie.

  Even with the right garbs, Pretty Boy stuck out like a sore thumb to Abel.

  Abel was suspicious of him almost straightaway, which was sad for Pretty Boy because he had been an undercover agent for five years.

  Ten days ago, he showed up at the gate with a group of outsiders, all wanting to get in, all wanting to join the cult.

  In ge
neral, newbies showed up several times a month in small groups wanting to join. Many of them were militia rejects, the kind of people too extreme for typical militia groups.

  Most militia groups tended to walk a fine line between extremism and simply having a fear of government. Most were in the business of knowing weapons, learning survival skills, and engaging in an overall sense of family. They tried to avoid extremists because they weren’t in the business of terrorism. They only wanted to live their lives in the tradition of the American revolutionaries. Despite their political slants, they tended to live and let live. They kicked out extremists.

  Therefore, extremists tended to be the people who showed up at Abel’s gates. They were lost souls looking to belong, but lost souls with extreme views.

  Abel didn’t take on everyone who showed up. Unlike most militia groups, he sought out the extreme-minded as well as those who would die for their beliefs. Nothing’s more dangerous than crazed martyr-like followers seeking someone to follow.

  Many of those who sought out Abel were turned down. They didn’t believe enough or didn’t pass the smell test.

  Pretty Boy wasn’t the first undercover cop to try to infiltrate Abel’s group, but he was the first to succeed.

  When newbies showed up, the cult performed tests on them to make sure they were who they claimed to be. They wanted to make sure that newbies were earnest about their intent. They wanted to make sure there were no narcs.

  The cult accompanied the tests with an unofficial background check. Pretty Boy was the first undercover agent to pass. He passed the background check and all their smell tests. No problem. He was in.

  One of the tests was a series of questions. And one of the questions was how he had found out about the cult in the first place. The second was how he had gained entry to the testing phase.

  Pretty Boy had learned the answers back during the briefing phase, preparing to go undercover.