The Standoff Read online

  Widow figured if he was gagged, then his hands were restrained as well. Why gag a person and not restrain their hands?

  Walter didn’t look back at Widow. He just stared forward as if his life depended on it. The old guy wasn’t gagged, but he also had the same hopeless look on his face. He must’ve also been restrained with handcuffs or duct tape.

  The thing that was obvious, without a doubt, was the old guy was a prisoner, like Walter. It was obvious because the guy had a black eye swelling up on one side of his face. And a couple of bruises on his cheeks and chin, like he had been roughed up. Not too badly. Not fatally. But someone delivered several good punches to the guy’s face.

  Suddenly, Widow saw something he hadn’t expected. Two ATF agents exited the barn and a third one came out after.

  They wore ATF gear he had seen in newspapers before—all-black gear like SWAT. They were armed with only side arms in holsters.

  Widow stayed where he was. He wasn’t sure what was going on. These agents weren’t acting the way cops acted at crime scenes. They weren’t on edge or arresting bad guys. They were casual, which made no sense.

  Widow had never known any cop anywhere act nonchalant and blasé around cop-killing terrorists before.

  Widow watched as the third one skipped out in front of the first two, quickly. He got to Walter’s truck and lowered the tailgate. The following two carried packages—wrapped up, addressed and stamped like post office mail. The two guys carried as many packages as they could hold, but they were careful with them. The third guy climbed up into the truck’s bed and took the stacks of packages from the tailgate and stacked them close to the cabin. After the other two finished with a stack of packages, they returned into the barn and came out again with another stack. This went on for three trips each.

  The ATF agent in the truck’s bed carefully set each package down, toward the back of the truck, near the cabin. He stacked them neatly as if they might explode. After the last of the packages were arranged and stacked orderly, the ATF agent in the rear of the truck secured them down using Walter’s hauling cables and bungee cords, already in the back of the truck. The same ones Widow had removed hours ago in Abe’s barn.

  The final ATF agent exited the back of the truck and closed the tailgate. Widow had counted the packages loaded onto the truck as forty-one. Each was equal in size, equal in volume. They were probably equal in contents.

  Widow stayed where he was—baffled, but not by the packages. He figured those were something sinister, but why were Adonis’s guys loading them onto Walter’s truck?

  Like a ghost that had walked through a wall, Widow saw a face he knew. It was a man dressed in all white—white garbs and a heavy white winter coat. He stepped out of the barn behind the ATF agents.

  It was Joseph Abel, the crazed cult leader behind the whole Athenian explosion and Adonis’s hell-bent obsession.

  Widow crouch-walked all the way to the corner and stopped and stepped out three inches from the wall. He lifted the Winchester and aimed it straight at Abel.

  He waited. His finger slipped into the trigger housing. He started to squeeze. He could’ve killed Abel right then. He had a clear headshot. One bullet would do it. He could take him down right there. But he didn’t because Abel held onto Agent Adonis by the collar. Tears streamed down her face. Blood seeped out her nose from being punched in the face.

  Unlike the sheriff and Walter, she didn’t have an expression of hopelessness on her face. She expressed nothing but fear.

  Widow thought of POWs he had seen over his career. The ones who never gave up, never gave in to the torture, only to finally break years into their captivity. That’s the same look on her face.

  Widow still had the shot. He could squeeze the trigger and blow Abel’s head clean off. But then Adonis was dead if he did.

  Widow retracted the rifle and ducked back behind the corner.

  Abel suddenly felt the hairs on his arms standup. He felt that tingle that follows the suspicious feeling that you’re being watched.

  He looked around. He glanced in at the corner of the farmhouse where Widow had just been aiming a rifle at him. But he saw no one. No one was there.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that there had been someone standing there, staring at him.

  Chapter 44

  L IGHTNING STRUCK on the outer edge of the Whites’ property line and thunder rolled. Abe and Abby looked out different windows on different floors in the direction of the lightning strike. Foster glanced back to a wall with no window. It was a simple reaction to the thunderclap. She returned her focus forward. She looked out the front of the house, from the second floor, using the hunting rifle.

  Dark gray clouds rolled in overhead, fast. They streamed over and covered the sky like a dark presence. The farm was covered in gray, shadowy darkness.

  They had no working phones and the cell phones were useless, so they had to yell out to communicate.

  Right when the power went out, Abe headed back out to the shed and uncovered a power generator. He cranked it up and the lights in the house came back on, as did the clocks on the oven and microwave. After he went back inside and locked the slider behind him, he moved from room to room, switching off lights and unplugging things they didn’t need sucking up gas from the generator.

  Abe called out.

  “Foster, everything okay?”

  “Yes, Dad. Still no sign of anything coming down the drive.”

  Abe called out to Abby.

  “Abigail, you see anything?”

  Abby went to the master bedroom door and opened it and called back out. She left the door open behind her so she could hear better.

  “I’m fine. Nothing to see from the back.”

  “Okay. Everyone just hold your positions till we hear from Widow.”

  Abby stayed quiet.

  Foster shouted back.

  “Okay, Dad.”

  Abe paced from window to window, from room to room. He checked out the front, the sides, and the back. He saw and heard nothing.

  BROOKS LEANED against a tree, out of sight and comfortable. He had been on many, many stakeouts and recon missions. This was a cakewalk by comparison, and it was better than sitting up in the loft with Jargo, who constantly mumbled to himself.

  It was only five more minutes until he heard trucks coming up behind him. He turned and walked back uphill and stepped behind some brush. He saw Walter’s truck pulling into the drive, heading toward him. Behind it was the sheriff’s truck and behind that was Shep’s police cruiser. Adonis was at the wheel with Abel in the passenger seat; his Glock was pointed at the side of her head. The muzzle was in her ear.

  Abel didn’t have a suppressor on his weapon.

  Brooks backed out of the brush and stepped onto the driveway. He crept back down toward the entrance, back toward Abel and the vehicles. He crouched, staying out of sight of the house windows until he was sure he was completely over the hill and not visible to them.

  Walter’s truck rolled up first, kicking up snow.

  Flack drove with Walter in the next seat. He was handcuffed using cuffs from one of the ATF agents. The same hopeless fear painted his face a ghastly white. Brooks noticed and chuckled at the thought of a white guy named White, who was white with fear. Brooks didn’t consider himself sadistic, not compared to Abel, but he did enjoy what they were doing.

  The vehicles took it slow and pulled up alongside Brooks. Flack rolled down the window.

  “Everything good?” he asked.

  “They’re in there. Power came back on. They must be running a generator.”

  “See any weapons?”

  “I can’t see anything from here, but I’d bet on rifles at least.”

  Brooks stepped back and smacked the door with the palm of his hand, twice.

  He said, “Keep going. See you there.”

  Flack smiled, rolled up the window, and pressed on. Walter’s Tundra bounced and drove away, up the hill following the drive to the house. />
  Brooks saw the packaged pipe bombs, stacked and fastened down in the bed of the truck.

  He called out behind Flack.

  “Be careful!”

  Weapons expert, my ass , he thought.

  Brooks waited on the side of the long drive in the snow. Thunder clapped again in the distance, way up in the sky. Then he saw a lightning crack to the south.

  It BOOMED! Once. Twice. Thunder rolled far above.

  The sheriff’s truck came next with Cucci at the wheel, the sheriff handcuffed with his own cuffs in the middle of the front bench. Tanis sat next to him in the passenger seat. There was no weapon pointed at the sheriff because what was he going to do? Nothing.

  The truck drove past Brooks, slowly, like they were staying back from Walter’s truck in case one of the pipe bombs exploded from the bumpy drive. Which was a valid concern. If one pipe bomb exploded, while stacked on top of forty other pipe bombs, there would be a huge explosion. It would probably kill several of them.

  Cucci stared at Brooks as they passed. Brooks gave him a quick nod but stayed quiet.

  The third car was the South Carolina Highway Patrol car. Adonis looked both terrified and angry.

  The cruiser came to a complete stop. Abel barked an order that must’ve been, “Roll down the window,” because Adonis rolled the window down.

  Abel leaned forward over her lap, close to her face. He kept the Glock in her ear. His cheek was in biting distance, which crossed her mind.

  He said, “Anything to worry about?”

  Brooks said, “They know something’s up. But I’ve seen no movement. Nothing to indicate they know who we are. I suspect there’s guns on the premises.”

  “They expecting us or the cops to come back?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Okay. Get in.”

  Brooks sidestepped to the back of the car and opened the back door and slipped in. He adjusted his M4 to rest in his lap with the muzzle pointed to the right of the car.

  He sat back, no seatbelt.

  “Keep going,” Abel barked.

  Adonis slipped her foot off the brake and gassed, slowly. She followed behind the sheriff’s truck.

  She asked, “Why’re we coming here?”

  Abel said nothing.

  She said, “These people don’t know anything. We don’t need to come here.”

  Abel said, “We took their son. They probably heard your dead friend shoot his shotgun. This shotgun.”

  Abel patted Shep’s Mossberg like it was a trophy. It rested against his thigh, and between his legs in the passenger side footwell.

  “You don’t need them. What difference does it make if they heard anything? The whole FBI and ATF are looking for you. It makes no difference what some backwoods family saw.”

  Abel smiled.

  “Agent Adonis, that Quantico psychobabble, reverse psychology bullshit won’t work on me. All the book-learning you got won’t match up to me. Just save it. These people’re a liability right now. And if you don’t watch your mouth, you could end up one too. Like your friends.”

  Adonis stayed quiet. She kept her head forward and drove on.

  Just before reaching the house and the barn, Abel gave Adonis one more command.

  “Switch on the light bar. No sirens.”

  She didn’t protest. She reached up to the roof and flipped a switch. The light bar came on, flashing blue lights over the terrain. It wasn’t as pronounced as it would’ve been at night, but right then, snow started falling hard again. Within seconds, it was beginning to mound on the roof of the car. Abel thought that if they hadn’t been in a polar vortex and it was just a normal South Carolina winter, then the snow might’ve been hail.

  FOSTER CALLED OUT to her father while staring through the hunting rifle’s scope. She watched an entourage of vehicles come up the drive.

  “Dad! They’re coming back! On the driveway! Walter’s truck is first!”

  Abe was already at the front door. He had the Winchester ready. He tried peering through the peephole in the door but saw nothing but gray beyond the porch.

  He squinted. He could make out movement coming up the drive but saw no details. He stepped back. Suddenly blue lights from a police light bar strobed around outside. He saw them through a set of stained-glass windows next to the door. The blue lights strobed through the front foyer casting shadows of approaching doom.

  Abe’s skin crawled.

  He decided to open the front door to take a better look. He stepped out onto the porch against his best judgment, but he needed to know if his son was alive. It was undeniable, unavoidable. The force drawing him to know if Walter was dead or not was even inevitable.

  He watched the vehicles pull up the drive onto the circle in front of his house.

  Headlights beamed out in cones of bright white lights like the high beams had been left on. Abe threw up a hand to block the light shining in his face. Then he put it above his eyes like a human visor.

  First, Walter’s Tundra pulled up and circled around the tree in Abe’s front yard. Abe saw two men in the front cabin. He couldn’t make out their faces beyond the bright headlamps. The driver turned the wheel, circled the drive, pulled the Tundra’s nose way up toward the barn, and slowed and stopped in front of the doors.

  The next truck to ride up was Henry’s Spartan County Sheriff’s truck. Abe watched it and saw three men crammed in the front seat. Henry’s truck didn’t ride with the high beams on, but the light bar strobed on top.

  Abe saw Henry stuffed in the center of the front bench just under the rearview mirror and in front of where his radio would be. His hair was disheveled. It looked like he had a bruised eye, almost like a black eye forming. But Abe only got a glimpse of Henry because the truck stopped out in front of his house. And Henry’s face fell under a dark shadow.

  He saw both the other two men and their faces but didn’t recognize them. They were both white; both had facial hair. One had a beard—the other stubble.

  The last car was the same South Carolina Highway Patrol car that Shep and Adonis had arrived in. The blue lights streamed from the light bar on top, just like Henry’s car.

  Abe stepped left on the porch, leaving the front door wide open behind him. He squinted and struggled to make out who was in the patrol car. He saw nothing but figures in dark shadows. The driver was a short woman. He could see that. Her hair was wild and disheveled like Henry’s. The driver might’ve been Adonis, only when he had seen her twenty minutes ago, her hair had been neat and pulled back out of her face. Now, it was a mess. It looked so wild he first thought she wore a wig probably titled: Jungle Woman.

  There were two other figures in the patrol cruiser. Abe saw one in the backseat and one in the passenger seat. The one in the back was a big guy. The outline of his head disappeared into the ceiling. The guy in the passenger seat was also tall, but gangly and bony-looking.

  All three drivers threw their vehicles into park. Abe heard emergency brakes being pushed down all the way and clicked into place. He glanced back at Walter’s truck. He saw the driver park it, kill the engine, open his door, and step out. Abe couldn’t see his face. The driver walked around the tail of the Tundra to the passenger door and stopped. He turned and faced Abe.

  The driver of Henry’s truck also stepped out, leaving his door open and the engine running and the blue lights flashing. He threaded around the nose of Henry’s truck. The snow on the driveway must’ve been plowed aside from the vehicles because Abe heard footsteps on gravel.

  The driver of Henry’s truck stopped on the passenger side and stayed there, facing Abe. The passenger door opened next and the other guy he didn’t recognize stepped out.

  Both truck drivers stood by, carrying military or law enforcement weapons. Abe was no gun expert, but he recognized one as an M4 Carbine, military-grade. The other was a tactical combat shotgun. He didn’t recognize the brand. He didn’t recognize the model. But he knew expensive military weapons when he saw them.

  A
be stayed where he was on the porch. He lowered his hand back to the front stock of the rifle. He slipped his trigger finger into the housing, ready to squeeze it. But he didn’t point the weapon at them. He kept it up near his chest.

  The patrol cruiser’s doors all opened at the same time. The driver with the wild hair got up and out in a downhearted, forlorn way. The tall guy in the backseat got out behind her. He was tall, like Widow. At first, Abe thought it might be Widow, but then he saw it was a black man and he was tall.

  The tall black man shut his door behind him and stepped up close behind the woman with the wild hair. It looked like he whispered something to her. Then he shoved her forward. She plummeted past the open driver’s door and past the hood. The tall black man slammed the driver’s door shut and walked past it. He came up behind the woman again and kicked her in the butt—not hard, just enough to shove her forward again.

  The woman with the wild hair lunged forward, rolled down the hood of the car, and slammed into the snow and gravel. She stopped on her hands and knees, her face down. She was about thirty feet from the porch steps. She sat back on her heels and looked up at Abe.

  He saw her wrists were handcuffed together. The short-chain rattled as she moved. Her hair was wild. Her face was dark, partially from being punched in the face and partially from tears.

  He instantly knew who she was. Her head bandage was gone, ripped away, but it was her. It was Agent Adonis.

  The bony guy in the passenger seat got out behind the tall black man and Adonis. He casually shut his door and stepped out toward them. He came up side by side with the tall black man.

  It was Joseph Abel. Abe recognized him from his picture on the internet.

  The tall black man was the same guy who had come to their house earlier, telling a lie of a broken-down car.

  The thing that was different about him now, different about all of them, Abe supposed, was that they were all dressed in stolen ATF uniforms. Except for the tall black man. He wore most of a South Carolina Highway Patrol uniform that was a little too small and a little too snug in some places.