The Standoff Read online

  All around her, dead bodies lined the ground, slumped in the snow. They were everywhere. Some whole. Some not. Some burned without moving. Some still moved. One man was on fire, far in the distance. She watched him for a short moment as he ran around in panic until he stopped and fell flat on his face. He was so engulfed in flames that she couldn’t identify him as an agent or Athenian, friend or foe.

  Screams from the living filled the air, but she hardly noticed them. Her ears continued to ring and her eardrums pounded.

  Standing, Adonis could barely see the helicopter in the sky until it was coming down on her, partially because of her vision, but mostly because of the black smoke. She was amazed that Ramirez was able to pilot it.

  The helicopter came down slowly through the smoke. She felt the rotor wash over her face. It whipped her hair back behind her head. She stepped away and watched it land right behind where she had been lying, about ten yards from her SUV.

  She saw Ramirez in the pilot's seat. She automatically smiled at him because she was glad to see a face she knew, and he was alive. She watched him land the helicopter and waited until the skids touched the snow before approaching. The rotors kept turning, whirling a hole in the smoke above it. The rear door slid open and several agents she didn't recognize and whose names she didn’t remember hopped off one by one.

  Adonis stumbled toward them, desperate. She almost fell off balance twice.

  One of them ran over and caught her, helping her back to the helicopter.

  "Don't worry, Adonis. Help is on the way," the ATF agent shouted over the noise. She instantly felt bad for not remembering his name. He grabbed her by both arms to keep her steady.

  She shouted, "It was a trap."

  The agent nodded.

  "I need to sit down."

  He nodded again and helped her stumble back to the helicopter.

  Ramirez stayed in the pilot's chair. The engine stayed running. The rotors slowed to a crawl but continued to rotate.

  ATF policy would dictate in a case like this that Ramirez remain in the pilot's seat in case he needed to perform a quick takeoff. But there was no case like this one. Still, that's where he stayed because he realized that one trap could lead to another.

  Adonis climbed into the back of the chopper and dumped herself down on an empty chair.

  The agent looked her over quickly. He checked for wounds, checked for bleeding. She was all there, all intact.

  After he was certain that she had no external injuries, he shouted again so she would hear him.

  "I'm going to run out and help the others. You stay put. Okay?"

  She nodded.

  Once he was out of the helicopter, she reached into her pocket and called her boss. She put the phone on speaker and cranked the volume up all the way. She could barely hear it ring, but she did hear it over the ringing in her ears.

  The phone rang and rang until she got a busy signal and it cut off automatically. No voicemail. No error message. No nothing. It just died as if the phone call had never been made in the first place.

  Adonis waited for a callback, but there wasn't one. She stayed staring at it expecting the answer to what to do next would come from the phone. It didn't.

  She didn't realize at first that Ramirez was saying something to her. Then she looked up and saw his lips moving. He was shouting, trying to speak to her over the rotors, but it was no use. They were too loud. She could barely make him out.

  She showed a hand to him, signaling him to hold on a second. He nodded and stopped shouting.

  Adonis picked her phone back up, looked at the screen, and texted her boss.

  Her message read: I'm alive .

  Chapter 16

  A FTER THEY MURDERED a highway patrolman on a backroad not far from the Athenian compound, Abel and his guys headed east and slightly south through a network of backroads, slowly and steadily until they were twenty miles away from their crimes.

  Abel knew it would take time before the cops and the ATF figured out what had happened. The highway patrolmen would be faster since they were all stationed at an outer perimeter. Plus, the poor bastard Abel had shot was a highway patrolman, just in the wrong place at the wrong time—unlucky. Once his body was discovered, the highway patrol would be out on the hunt for Abel and his guys in full force.

  Abel wasn’t worried. He was still ahead of the cops.

  He ordered Dobson to stay the course and take all the backroads they could, just as they had laid out in their contingency plan in case they had to run. Dobson knew the destination, but none of the exact routes to take. The backroad system in Spartan County was largely unmapped. Dobson had driven them in several test-runs so he could learn them. He had slacked on that detail. He hadn’t memorized the exact routes, not down to the fine details, not like he should have. He did several trial runs. He thought that would be enough, but it wasn’t.

  He started to sweat but hoped that no one noticed. At this point, he wasn’t quite sure if he was going the right way or not, but he knew the destination, the coordinates, and the direction he was expected to head. So far, no one seemed to notice that he wasn’t exactly on track.

  He was a little scared. He hid it as best as he could, trying to take advantage of every stop sign to look like he was pausing so he wouldn’t raise suspicion, but really he was navigating his next turn, trying to remember his trial runs. He hoped something would click, but it hadn’t yet.

  So far, no one was on to him.

  One thing working in his favor was how fast the ATF had raided them. They weren’t expecting it, not until they caught that agent. The fast raid and need for them to vanish quickly sped up Abel’s terror plot. The whole thing acted as a smokescreen for Dobson to hide his inadequacy.

  The ATF raid was a stroke of bad luck for them, but things always went to hell when the first bullet was fired. That’s just the way it goes in war, and they were at war.

  When asked if he had done his part and memorized the correct escape routes, Dobson had lied to them. He wasn’t going to tell them that he wasn’t exactly sure which way to go. He wasn’t stupid.

  Thus far, he had taken them in the right direction, he thought.

  They headed southeast from Carbine toward the coastline where they had a large boat anchored in Hague Marina, about thirty miles south of the coastal North Carolina border.

  On the way, they had one stop to make, the most important stop. There was a guy whose name was unknown to Dobson. They were supposed to hand over all forty-one pipe bomb packages to him.

  The unknown guy would disperse the packages for Abel, mailing them from twenty different locations around the Eastern Seaboard, no more than three at a time, in order to keep the number small and unnoticeable to postal workers.

  The man was a no-questions kind of guy. He was reliable. They had worked with him before. He knew nothing about the packages, nothing about Abel’s lieutenants, personally, and they had the same lack of knowledge of him, keeping everyone in the dark and keeping the mission safe.

  The unknown guy was good at that. For a large fee, he would deliver anything to anyone within the US, unnoticed, and without asking questions.

  Abel would insist that one of his guys go along for insurance, but the guy didn’t know that yet. Abel planned to alter the arrangement when they met with the guy in Florence, South Carolina.

  First, they had to survive the dragnet unseen, but Abel had it all planned out. That’s why they were taking the backroads. They would find a big hole in the net to slip through, and then the plan would proceed.

  It was the ATF and the South Carolina Highway Patrol versus seven highly trained US Special Forces turned militant cultists, and the ATF was crippled. A bunch of backwoods, unorganized, late-night patrolmen were no match for Abel’s crew. They had been running covert missions all over the world, beating out some of the world’s best-trained soldiers. What were South Carolina Highway Patrol going to do?

  Abel stared out the window at the darkness and the
snow-covered landscape. First, he saw endless fields of trees and dark. Then he saw farms—empty, large farmlands that looked abandoned resembling something out of a post-apocalyptic world.

  He checked his watch. They were on schedule with time to spare, a whole day if they needed it to lay low—perhaps two at the most.

  It didn’t look like they would need spare time. Barring another stroke of bad luck, they would be right on time to meet with the unknown guy and mail the bombs. Then they would head to the boat, where he planned to spend the rest of his days sailing the coast of South America, reading news clippings of a US thrown into terror, searching for him.

  They were chasing their own tails. That was the goal, anyway.

  Abel considered himself to be a patriot, not a terrorist.

  He wanted his country to pay for two hundred forty-three years of tricking its citizenry that they were in charge.

  The truth was, though, he was an anarchist. He didn’t really care how the world was governed, or by what type of philosophy. They were all shit. None of them were acceptable. He wanted the world to have no government. That was the only way to be truly free. Even the anarchist ideology was too deep to describe him.

  Deep down, Abel had no deep down. He was just a guy who liked to blow shit up and see people suffer.

  Abel looked back out the window at the abandoned farms, which reminded him of a government that burned its own people in the 2008 bailout.

  He had a plan, but plans always go to hell when the first bullet is fired . That was a Navy SEAL motto, one he didn’t know. Too bad.

  Just then, the headlights on the van flickered and the dashboard flickered and the engine idled as if they had been hit by an EMP attack. If it was jamming from an electromagnetic pulse attack, they could be dead in the water. It was just a quick succession of events, but they all noticed.

  Dobson held his breath, hoping it was nothing.

  Abel said nothing. He just stared forward, but Dobson could see his hand had formed a fist.

  Dobson finally took a breath and then held it for a long moment.

  The engine idled again and kicked and thumbed and whirred.

  The dashboard lights flickered again, rapidly as if the engine was going to die. The tire pressure light flicked on and the fuel light and then the engine light. The radio had been playing low music, but now it flickered on and off. The volume shot up to full blast and then it died back down to nothing.

  The van sputtered like the engine was fighting to stay alive.

  “What’s going on?” Abel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dobson said.

  “You said the engine was good!”

  “It is good.”

  Abel said nothing.

  Dobson said, “I can’t predict everything.”

  “Will, we make it?”

  But Dobson didn’t have to answer because right then the van answered for him. It sputtered once, and twice more, and then the engine light lit up bright and flickered. The engine ran like it was back to normal for a few seconds, but then everything died. The engine, the interior lights, the heater, the radio, all of it cut off.

  Dobson pumped the brakes and pressed them down slowly to avoid an abrupt stop, possibly followed by a skid. He kicked the emergency brake pedal seventy percent down to the floor, and the van slowed and stopped dead in the middle of the snowy, backroad.

  Dobson slammed the gear into park and switched the ignition to off, even though the entire van was dead anyway.

  “What now?” One of the guys from the back asked.

  “Could be the battery. I suppose.”

  Abel said nothing and undid his seatbelt. Dobson undid his. They both stepped out of the van into the cold, empty night. The side panel door followed suit, and all five of the other guys stepped out. The interior light flashed on, which shocked them.

  “What the hell?” one of them asked.

  “Guess it’s not the battery,” another said.

  Four of the men from the back went around to the rear of the van and opened the rear doors. They started taking out their assault rifles and distributing them as if they were headed to combat, a precaution.

  The five from the back, including Flack, weapons handler, circled out and around the van, setting up a defensive perimeter, ready for any attack. The whole thing went down like an operation in Afghanistan or Iraq, like they were on just another military convoy that broke down.

  Dobson popped the hood and opened it and set it down on the prop bar and studied the engine, trying to keep the look of surprise on his face.

  Smoke billowed out from under the hood and from more than one exact location on the engine. Seeing that actually did baffle Dobson, making his pretending less work.

  Abel joined him at the nose of the van.

  He asked, “Battery?”

  “No.”

  “The smoke doesn’t look good.”

  “That’s nothing. It’ll clear,” Dobson said, hoping it was true.

  Abel stood back. They both waited to see if the smoke would clear. Lucky for Dobson, it cleared.

  Dobson stuck his head in under the hood and over the engine and studied everything, thoroughly, as if his life depended on it, which it did.

  After five minutes of touching things and shifting wires and inspecting hoses and critical engine parts, most of which was for pretend, he came out and gave his professional opinion.

  “I think it needs a reflash. Gotta be electrical.”

  “And what about all the smoke?”

  “Just a side effect. The engine overheated. It was like a chain reaction from the onboard electronics bouncing around faulty signals from one system to another. It’s gotta be. The interior lights are on now. So, it’s not a power issue.”

  “All that was caused by an electrical problem?”

  Dobson nodded.

  “So, you’re telling me that the engine got confused and set off an electrical disturbance?”

  “That’s pretty accurate. Yes. I’d say the onboard computer got confused.”

  “So it needs a reflash?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew that just by looking over the engine out here? You don’t need a diagnostic machine?”

  “That’s my guess. Just a guess, but it explains the power failure.”

  Abel said nothing.

  Before Dobson spoke again, he gulped hard. Abel heard it.

  “Any major mechanical interruption wouldn’t have affected the power inside the van.”

  “I don’t suppose you can do the reflash here?”

  “I’ll need special software to do it. No one’s gonna have that but an auto shop. I won’t be able to do it out here unless we find an auto shop.”

  Abel palmed his face very animatedly like he was on stage, playing a part. He rubbed his forehead in frustration, all part of the melodrama he loved.

  Dobson had seen him behave this way before. They all had. It was the same expression he made before he flipped out and murdered Iraqi prisoners. He liked to toy with them and then fly off the handle.

  He had never murdered one of his own guys before, which gave Dobson some reassurance. And Dobson lucked out because Abel didn’t murder him.

  Abel stayed standing there like that, making the same gestures of frustration and disappointment, for a long second, face buried in his palm.

  One of his guards said, “You okay, General?”

  “Give me time, boys.”

  Abel raised his head and then stepped away from the van. The headlamps were back on. He walked the cone of light out in front of the van and traced the white snow until he was out of range. He stared around in the darkness and looked at the road ahead and the road behind and then the empty farms.

  He returned to the van, to his men, and gave them new orders.

  “Boys, regroup. We’re setting up camp for the night.”

  Dobson asked, “Camp?”

  “We can’t get the parts we need tonight, and we can’t just sit here
in the middle of the road. The cops are steps behind us. And worse, once they find the dead patrolman, they’ll be searching everywhere for us, like exterminators hunting rats. We need shelter till we can sort out transport.”

  Abel paused a beat and looked around and put his hands out like he was a wizard showing off a spell.

  “We need to commandeer a new vehicle. We’re not gonna find one. Not out here, middle of the night. For now, let’s requisition one of these farms. They look abandoned. We can scout for a vehicle at daylight.”

  Dobson nodded, as did Flack and the others.

  “Brooks, you and Jargo go check out that one.”

  Abel pointed out the closest farm in view to Jargo, his sniper, and Brooks, who was just a great all-around soldier, a wingman. Brooks was Abel’s right hand.

  Brooks was a tall black man. His skin was darker than the shell of his rifle. He stood tall, just over six-foot-five, but not quite six-foot-six. He was taller than many professional basketball players.

  Brooks had been with Abel for the longest time of them all. They went way back. Abel’s guys were long out of the military, but there was an established, respected chain of command and Brooks was second from the top. They all knew it, and none of them ever questioned it.

  Brooks was tall but wiry, loose in the joints, with long arms. He was also the second oldest, next to Abel, but he remained in incredible shape for a man over fifty. He put in serious exercise time, but none of it was inside a gym. He liked to lift and pull things outside. At the Athenian compound, during warmer weather, that’s where he could be found every morning, outside lifting heavy tires and rocks and pulling things.

  Out of all of Abel’s guys, Brooks was the most terrifying. No one wanted to go up against a six-foot-five-plus guy with fists like sledgehammers and skin that camouflaged him into darkness.

  Brooks had graying temples and a tight fade, but he was slightly balding on top, which he usually covered with a baseball cap. At the moment, he wore a black ball cap, unmarked so that no witnesses could identify him by saying they saw a giant black man wearing a baseball cap with a specific sports team logo on it.