The Standoff Read online

  White didn’t notice this time.

  Widow looked back at the trees and the snow to the right and then forward to the road they were on. It was a single-track snow-covered dirt road. There were no streetlights on the shoulders. In fact, there were no shoulders or ditches on either side, just more huge trees.

  “Are we on a dirt road?”

  “Yes. We’re taking the backroads. It’s faster than going all the way around down the highway.”

  Widow stayed quiet.

  White said, “It’s not a route you’ll find on Google Maps on your phone. That’s for sure. That app used to send me all over the place back here. I got lost once coming back because I tried to use it.”

  Widow didn’t own a phone, but no reason to mention that, so he didn’t. He just nodded along.

  Out the window, after they’d gone about a hundred yards, Widow started to see farmhouses and long rolling plots of land with overgrown grass blades sticking out of the snow. The plots of land were huge, surrounded by long, snow-covered wooden rail fences, some broken in places, some rotten from years of neglect.

  There were long winding driveways and far-off structures that looked like well-built homes, only like the fences, were forgotten and unlived-in and unmaintained. Beyond the houses were barns and long, snaky fields, all covered in snow.

  After they drove past the first and second farmhouses and plots and then the third and fourth, Widow noticed an obvious pattern.

  “What’s going on with these farms? They all look empty.”

  White answered big and loud as if he was talking over the roar of a tank engine.

  “I’d say fifty percent of the farms around here are still empty.”

  “That many?”

  “Oh yeah, my family’s farm is one of the only ones left. Tons of our neighbors had to leave back when the banks were foreclosing on everyone. It was a massacre. They pulled the notes on hundreds of farms in the area.”

  “You mean back in 2008? The financial crisis?”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t just a fast thing. There was an initial wave of foreclosures, but then it slowed to a lingering thing for many. Most of us held out. But the ones who didn’t make it ended up going out the second and third and fourth years. The rest all went over the next ten. Sad thing.”

  “Strange.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “People gotta eat. I didn’t think the food industry slowed just because the banking and housing ones did.”

  “We all got hit. Just like everyone else.”

  Widow looked around, and on both sides, he saw nothing but emptiness, like a post-apocalyptic world. It made him think of what rural civilization would look like after nuclear fallout. It was a nuclear winter, a human-less earth, a world gone to shit. Despite the grim thought, it was strangely peaceful, the way the earth was meant to be, perhaps.

  “Looks like your family really got lucky.”

  “We did. But not just luck. Our primary business isn’t food or agriculture like the rest of these farms. We grow something different. Something that’s stayed lucrative for us.”

  “What’s that?”

  White thought for a moment. The answer seemed visible on his face. He almost blurted it out but stopped himself.

  “Nah. You know what. I think it’s better for you to see for yourself. It’ll be a nice surprise.”

  Widow’s first thought was that White was a pot farmer, which added up when he thought about the reference to drug-dealing earlier. Was marijuana legal in South Carolina? He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure. It was becoming legal in a lot of states, so eventually, it might be here. However, he figured that would be far in the future. The South was always the last holdout on every national issue.

  He didn’t ask.

  They drove on down long, winding backroads, turning left once and right twice and snaking around countless loops and near corners until the road straightened out to a long, endless track ahead.

  Finally, White slowed the truck like he was preparing to turn onto one of the empty farms, but he didn’t turn. Instead, he looked over to the left side of the road down a long, snowy-white and tree-covered plot of land to a farm in the distance.

  There was an old, forgotten For Sale sign out front, posted to a dilapidated wooden fence.

  “Huh, that’s weird.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The lights are on at Pine Farms.”

  “It’s weird?”

  “The Pines left years ago like everyone else. They were one of the first to go. It was the first sign of trouble for the rest of us, like the first lifeboat to go into the water.”

  Widow stared at the lights on at the Pines’ farmhouse.

  “Looks like candlelight, not electricity.”

  White squinted his eyes like focusing the scope on a rifle.

  He said, “Yeah. You’re right.”

  “We should check it out. Might be squatters.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “They’re squatting on private property.”

  “The bank’s property.”

  “Does that make it better.”

  “In a way, hell-yeah, it does. The banks screwed us all over.”

  Widow shrugged and said, “That’s a fair point.”

  “Plus, it’s been a cold night, and it’s Christmas season. Whoever’s squatting probably just wanted out of the elements. They needed a place to sleep for the night. We should be kind.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re already here anyway. Cops won’t come out right now. Let them stick it out. I’ll call the sheriff in the morning.”

  Widow nodded and stared out the window at the candlelight. He let his gaze follow it as they drove past. He had a strange feeling that they were being watched.

  Chapter 20

  T HROUGH THE SCOPE of his sniper rifle, while lying in a prone position, Jargo watched as two guys in a white Toyota Tundra drove up and then stopped on the road that he and the others had come up.

  The vehicle drove at around thirty-five miles an hour at first, right over the rise of a hill just before the Pine Farms property line and fences, but then it slowed just at the foot of the driveway and stopped like they were lost or couldn’t make a decision on which way to go. There was a driveway across the street that led to a farm that wasn’t abandoned. They could’ve continued straight, but they could’ve done that without stopping. So, why did they stop?

  Jargo watched, with a bullet standing by in the rifle’s cold chamber. His finger was in the rifle’s trigger housing. His index fingerprint brushed the rifle’s trigger. They were old friends, and both his trigger finger and the rifle’s trigger were eager to go.

  Jargo breathed in, slowly, and he breathed out, slowly. His heartbeat slowed in seconds the way he had practiced and practiced controlling it for years. It was from years of Army sniper service. Just as much as practicing breathing, heart rate control, and shooting, Jargo also practiced restraint.

  Restraint was probably the hardest skill in his sniper arsenal for him to learn. It was in his nature to shoot and be restrained later. He wanted to fire. He wanted to see the red mist that smoked out of a human head when shot from his weapon. He wanted to squeeze the trigger, and it wanted to be squeezed. He felt it. But he didn’t fire. He just watched—for now.

  There was enough early morning sunlight to make out the driver, face, and all. But not the passenger. He was obscured in shadow and darkness.

  First, Jargo targeted the scope reticule on the driver. The man was ginger and in his early thirties, probably. He had a jolly look to him like he was full of Christmas spirit or something.

  The rugged work truck, the area, Jargo figured the guy for a farmer.

  Jargo watched him for a second more, left both eyes open, but envisioned the guy’s head exploding like a pumpkin from an accurate bullet. One shot, cold too, but he could blow the guys brains out the back of his head—easy.

  Jargo made a silent bang sound
with his lips, an intimate whisper, just as he’d done many times back in Iraq, before he joined up with Abel’s team because, before Abel, he operated within the confines of the Army’s Rules of Engagement, which dictated that he was almost never lawful in shooting a bad guy whenever he felt like it. He was glad those days were long behind him. Still, he couldn’t just shoot the Tundra driver for no reason. Not without Abel’s orders. Doing so would be far worse than violating the Army’s bureaucratic bullshit.

  Disobeying Army law came with court marshals and hearings and investigations. Being found guilty came with jail time, which came with three squares a day, daily recess time, and a warm cot. Crossing Abel came with none of that. It came with a bullet to the head and nothing else.

  Even though he couldn’t shoot, didn’t mean that he couldn’t imagine the squeeze of the trigger, the rocketing bullet, and the explosion of the red mist surrounding the Tundra driver’s head.

  Jargo smiled at the thought; then he slowly panned his aim up and to the left. He stared through the windshield and waited. He couldn’t see the face of the second man, but he could still kill him. There was no clean headshot, but the guy was tall, which meant that from Jargo’s angle, he could see the man’s gut from the scope. A perfect gut shot would kill the passenger without fast medical help—no question. But it would be a slow and painful death.

  He stared through the scope, into the darkness of the cabin and aimed at the passenger’s gut.

  He whispered to himself once again, and, once again, it was intimate.

  “Bang!”

  Jargo waited a long moment to see what the riders in the truck were going to do. They were stopped dead on the middle of the snowy road. The driver was staring at the farmhouse behind Jargo, inspecting it.

  The candlelight. They must see the candlelight , he thought.

  It was good that the candlelight was what made them pause. It was good because it meant that they were locals, probably neighbors because only neighbors would stop in the middle of the road to be suspicious of lights on a property that had been empty for years. A passersby wouldn’t have noticed because they wouldn’t have known.

  The guys in the Tundra were doing the concerned neighborly thing—good Samaritans watching out for their neighborhood. Maybe they were even charged by the house’s owners to watch over the property from time to time.

  Short of them being police, Jargo wasn’t sure what to do about them. If they were cops, he’d shoot them on sight—no questions asked—but with nosey neighbors, he simply marked them, logged them into his memory, and watched to see what they did next.

  He needed further instructions. So, without moving away from the gun or the scope, without compromising his shot, he called out.

  “Brooks?”

  No answer.

  “Brooks?”

  Nothing.

  He took a mental snapshot of the neighbor’s exact location in his mind as if his mind was an accurate tracking system, then he broke off his gaze and took a quick look back over his shoulder for Brooks.

  Brooks was curled up twenty feet back, up against the barn’s cold wall in the loft space, near the ladder going back down.

  He was sound asleep and snoring.

  “Brooks?”

  No answer.

  Jargo pedaled his right leg up and back down to a pebble on the floor behind him. He scooted the rock along the floorboards and up to his stock hand. Quickly, he scooped it up and tossed the stone at Brooks and returned to his rifle.

  The stone zipped through the air and nailed Brooks right on the chin.

  Brooks’ eyes shot open fast, like a pair of airplane doors being blown out at twenty thousand feet. He was wide-awake in a split second, a soldier’s natural reaction to being woken up abruptly.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Get over here. Intruders.”

  Brooks hopped to his feet in one fast effort. It seemed almost like fancy martial arts move. He was surprisingly limber for a huge guy in his fifties. His M4 rifle rested against the wall, butt on the floor.

  He left it where it was, walked over, and joined Jargo down in the prone position. He picked up a pair of small field binoculars that cost as much as a used car and spoke.

  “Where?”

  “Dead ahead. The road. Front of the driveway.”

  Brooks looked through binoculars, while Jargo returned to peering through the scope.

  They both watched at the same time at the Tundra stopped in the front track across the street, brake lights lit up.

  “They been there long?”

  “Maybe a minute. No longer.”

  Suddenly, the brake lights dimmed as the driver took his foot off the pedal and the truck started to roll away slowly.

  “Who are they?”

  “Neighbors. That’s my guess.”

  Brooks paused a beat.

  “Saw the driver for a second.”

  Jargo said, “Yeah. He looks like a farmer.”

  “Did you see the guy in the passenger seat?”

  “I couldn’t make him out. Too dark. And too tall. His face was covered by the roof. What about you?”

  “All I can see is his gut.”

  “Same here.”

  “That means his head’s close to the roof then. He’s tall like me. I got the same problem. When I drive, I gotta sink down in the seat in order to see up high enough for street lights.”

  Jargo made an inaudible affirmative grunt.

  “Get the plates and watch to see where they go. If they’re nearby, then they just solved our problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “Transportation. That’s a big truck.”

  Jargo cracked a smile.

  “True. Good thinking.”

  Brooks got up abruptly like he was leaving a conversation. He returned to his wall, slammed his back against it, slid down to his butt, closed his eyes, and gave one last order before going back to sleep.

  “Wake me if there’s anything else.”

  “Affirmative,” Jargo replied. He memorized the license plate, as ordered, and logged it into his memory. Then, he watched the truck pick up speed and drive along the bumpy track and uphill for about another football field length, past a large mailbox. He had thought they were farmers who lived in the neighborhood, maybe even on the same street, but he was shocked that they lived, basically, across the street.

  The Tundra drove some ways past the abandoned farm they were holed up in, but then it stopped at the end of a narrow, private drive. The truck turned onto the snowy drive and drove past a big, metal mailbox stuck up on a red wooden post with writing along the side.

  He watched the rear lights as the truck vanished down the drive and into the trees.

  He smiled.

  They were neighbors after all, which meant that maybe he was going to get to see the red mist sooner than he imagined.

  Chapter 21

  S PARTAN COUNTY ENCOMPASSES a large area of land smack on the border of South Carolina and North Carolina.

  Flying over Spartan County by air would reveal long stretches of abandoned farmlands and sprawling forest trees and networks of backroad country. There seemed no clear design when they were plowed, and the ditches were dug like a bunch of guys with heavy equipment had gotten together, drunk lots of beer, and just started plowing roads.

  The roads spiderwebbed into hundreds of uncharted branches and dirt tracks, all going nowhere in particular.

  Spartan County was one of the smallest counties in the state and the least populated per square mile. The locals often joked that a man could walk for a whole day along the backroads and never come across a single vehicle.

  That was what Joseph Abel was counting on.

  Ninety percent of the county was farmland, forests, and backroads, while the remaining ten percent included a handful of small towns where the tallest building among them was three stories, not a sprawling metropolis by any means, just the way locals liked it.

  Spartan County was ho
me to quintessential small-town America that politicians always boast about supporting, but hardly ever visited except for photo ops.

  The local towns had everything the locals needed and nothing they didn’t. For some, it was a laid-back fairy-tale kind of life. For others, it was drive-through country.

  The towns’ main streets were lined with shopping centers and churches and local branches of government and public schools and community centers. There were hospitals, naturally, but none of them was equipped to handle big patient loads from a catastrophic event like a commercial plane crash, a convoy of overturned school buses, a major terrorist attack, or a hundred cultists blowing themselves up along with dozens of ATF agents and local cops.

  The local hospitals weren’t the ATF’s first phone call.

  First, they contacted the nearest major hospitals immediately after the explosions were reported. One was located across the border in North Carolina and the other was to the southeast. They both had emergency helicopters—one each. Both were in the air, bound for the Athenian compound in Carbine to airlift injured agents and police and Athenians. They picked up only the most critical cases. The second criterion for who went in the helicopter was selecting patients who were most likely to survive a helicopter ride in the first place. There was no sense in evacuating people who were going to die in minutes.

  An unwritten, unofficial request that Adonis’s boss had made clear to the general managers of each hospital was that injured children came first, before everyone else, because children being children meant they were innocent. The second priority was the injured ATF agents and police. The rest of the adult Athenians were not to be given any special treatment. They brought this disaster on themselves.

  The hospital’s general managers didn’t argue.

  The closest hospital to the Athenian compound and the explosions and the dead and injured was the hospital in Carbine, which had only six ambulances.

  It was overrun with injured and wounded within minutes of the explosion.

  There weren’t enough ambulances and hospitals on the ground to handle a level of injuries from a major explosion like the ones at the Athenian compound.