The Standoff Page 35

  Widow saw on the furthest set of horse stalls, near the feeding trough, a ladder that went up into the loft. He crept toward it. It was nearly fifty feet away. At the ladder, he stopped because of what he saw next.

  In the horse trough, stuffed in like garbage, was a corpse. It was a guy, white, and dressed all in black. Widow lowered his rifle and turned it. He used the barrel to turn the head so he could see the dead guy’s face.

  The bones in the guy’s neck CRACKED! as if they had turned brittle. There were dark, deep cuts and bruises around his throat. He had been strangled to death, no doubt about that. The weapon used was a garrote. No doubt about that either.

  Widow looked over the face. The eyes were rolled back in the head. But it didn’t matter. He had never seen the dead guy before. And he was pretty sure the guy wasn’t one of Adonis’s men.

  The corpse’s clothes were all wrong. He wore black, but none of it looked like official ATF.

  Widow removed the barrel of the rifle from the guy’s dead face. He glanced beyond the trough and the corpse and saw Adonis’s men. He had found them. They were all dead. Four dead bodies were stacked haphazardly in one of the horse stalls. He abandoned the ladder and went into the trough. He saw three of the men had been executed, double-tapped—one in the center of the forehead, dead-on, and the second bullet in the heart, or vice versa. Without forensics, Widow couldn’t be sure which bullet came first. If he had to guess, they were all shot with a nine-millimeter handgun, probably the same handgun.

  All four men were half-naked.

  On the bottom of the pile, Widow saw a face he recognized. It was the only one without a bullet hole in the center of the forehead. It was the South Carolina highway patrolman he saw with Adonis.

  Widow grabbed the top corpse by the foot and gently pulled him off the pile and dragged him to the side. He did the same with the second one and the same with the third one, dragging each corpse to a different side, so they weren’t piled on top of each other. He came back to the one he recognized and stared down at him. It looked like the man was killed by a major bullet, heavy grain, heavy caliber.

  The bullet had exploded straight through the guy at a downward angle.

  Sniper killed him , Widow thought. Had to be because of the caliber bullet.

  The dead highway patrolman had a jarhead haircut. He looked like a former Marine. Widow didn’t know for sure, but he whispered to him anyway.

  “Hoorah, brother.”

  Widow got back up and looked up to the loft. He couldn’t see anything from the first floor over the railings. He stepped back to the ladder and looked up again. He listened. He heard the sniper readjusting his sitting position again and he heard the last swig of the beer can because then there was a crushing sound. After, the crushed beer can came flying over the railing near the loft window. It clanked on the ground at the rear of the van.

  The sniper burped again, loud and vulgar, like a drunk at a party.

  Widow now faced a problem. The Winchester didn’t come with a shoulder strap, and he needed both hands to climb the ladder if he was going to avoid making noise. He set the Winchester out of sight, back in the horse stall with the dead agents, leaned it against a wall.

  He returned to the ladder and used both hands to test the rungs, checking for squeak level. They were all right. Not too loud.

  He began climbing, slow and steady. One hand in front of the other. One foot at a time. Halfway up, one of the rungs squeaked as loud as if he’d stepped on a bird.

  He froze and looked up and behind him toward the loft window. He saw no one. No movement. He waited a long, long beat, holding his breath. Then he heard another cough and another set of creaks from the sniper moving around. He heard another beer can popping open, followed by a loud gulp and another burp.

  The guy settled and was back to watching the road.

  Widow thought if he had more time, he could just wait for the sniper to get completely hammered. It would be easy to take him down.

  But he didn’t wait. He couldn’t wait. There was no time. He moved on, ascending the ladder until he was over the lip of the second floor. Once, he got to the top rung, he rolled onto the second floor and found himself on a catwalk that tunneled to his left with two routes splitting in opposite directions, one to the right and the other to the left—where the sniper was perched.

  Widow stayed low to keep himself out of sight. He crawled on hands and knees, staying as close to the deck as he could. The railing next to him covered enough to keep him hidden. The boards under him squeaked, quietly. It wasn’t loud enough to give him away. He made it to the corner and stopped. He sat back against the railing and took out the Beretta M9.

  The wind blew from the open barn door. It whistled loudly.

  Widow rotated out on one foot and pointed the M9 at the sniper’s nest. The nest was dark from lots of shadows, but he saw the sniper laid out, not sitting. The guy was short and stumpy-looking. He wore a backward ball cap on his head.

  Widow crept slowly down the walkway to the loft window. He saw the rifle still pointed out toward the southwest.

  Widow was nearly ten feet away when he stopped and froze. The sniper looked strange. He looked almost like a crash test dummy. There was nothing lifelike about him. Nothing animated. Nothing real.

  Suddenly, Widow heard a board creak behind him from the opposite way. He didn’t turn around. He leaped forward off his feet, landing in the middle of the sniper’s perch and hitting the wooden floorboards hard. Dust kicked up into the air. He rolled to the left.

  Alongside him, the sniper on the ground exploded in bursts of dust and chicken feed. The air around him clouded in dust. The explosions were small holes from a nine-millimeter gun. Someone behind him was firing a suppressed gun at him.

  Widow scooted all the way back to the railing. He was inches from the edge that turned into the catwalk back the way he came.

  The wood exploded next to him and then above him and then behind him. Wood splintered and dusted up all around him. He felt the bullets hit the other side of the wood, directly behind his back. He was suddenly very grateful that the loft’s skeleton was constructed with solid wood.

  Dust clouds from the wood and the chicken bags used as a decoy sniper filled the air. Widow couldn’t fire back. If he got up to the dust cloud, he would be blind. He stayed where he was.

  The gunshots stopped.

  A voice from beyond called out.

  “You still alive, buddy?”

  Widow stayed quiet.

  “You know you’re pretty dumb. I can’t believe you fell for the beer cans. I just poured them out the window and then crushed them so you’d think you were fine.”

  Widow said nothing. In his brain, he heard himself shouting. He felt utterly stupid.

  Silence fell between them.

  The sniper shouted out again.

  “Hey, buddy. You still with me?”

  Widow hadn’t even counted the shots from the guy’s gun. He couldn’t. It all happened too fast, and the gun’s silencer made it especially difficult. But he knew the sniper was using a handgun. He knew the guy had reloaded because he heard a magazine fall and bounce off the floorboards. Any standard, modern handgun that will take a silencer will generally hold around fifteen bullets. Some hold more. Some hold less. But fifteen was a good average.

  Had this guy fired fifteen?

  Widow didn’t think he did, but he wouldn’t swear to it. Plus, the guy may have fired half the magazine before this encounter. What he could rule out was a typical 1911 model that many guys preferred because a 1911 holds seven bullets and the sniper had fired more than seven. He could also rule out any revolvers for the same reason. No revolver he ever heard of could hold as many bullets as he had counted.

  Widow struggled to think of what to do.

  The sniper shot several more bullets, all of them hammered on the other side of the railing, pounding into the wood at Widow’s back. He couldn’t stay there for long.

  Th
e way he saw it, he had two options. Neither of them was ideal. He could either make a run and jump out the loft window, which led to a long drop to the ground below. He couldn’t remember how far it was, but it was survivable. He remembered skydiving training in the SEALs. He knew that a man in good shape could survive a fall from about three floors if he landed and rolled and if he fell on the ground and not concrete or some other hard surface.

  The good news, with this option, was the ground was covered in snow. The bad news was it was still a long distance down.

  More bullets fired and the boards behind him cracked and splintered. His back muscles fired red alerts in his brain. He had to move.

  Widow opted for the second option, a slight twist on the first.

  He spun around, faced the loft’s railing and reached his hand up over the railing and fired the Beretta blindly at the sniper. He fired several rounds, providing cover fire.

  With his other hand, Widow grabbed the top of the railing and heaved himself up and leaped over it into the interior of the barn. He had hoped that the van was parked where he remembered it.

  Luckily, it was.

  Widow landed on the roof of the van, on his side. It hurt, but not as much as a sprained ankle or a broken chin from hitting the driveway out front of the barn would have.

  As soon as his right arm hit the van’s metal roof, he rolled in the opposite direction of the sniper.

  Widow rolled off the back of the van and landed on his feet. His right bicep hurt from banging on the van’s roof, but hurt was better than broken.

  He whipped back and planted his back into the van’s rear doors. He got low and threaded the van’s corner until he saw the nearest horse stall, under the walkway. He scrambled to it and went in and turned right and climbed the wall to the next one. He scrambled to the next wall and climbed over and repeated the run and wall climb two more times, scrambling through two more horse stalls until he was back at the stall with the dead bodies and the Winchester rifle. He pocketed the Beretta M9 and took up the rifle. He stopped at the ladder and waited.

  Silence.

  Widow came out beside the ladder, aimed at the railing above and waited.

  The sniper said, “You still alive, buddy? Come on, say something.”

  Widow was at a loss. He wasn’t sure what to do next. He couldn’t climb the ladder again. He would never make it to the top. No question.

  Then, he heard a sound that changed his mind.

  A staticky voice CRACKLED! above and back to the front of the barn from the sniper’s nest.

  It was a radio. The sniper had a radio. He’d left it in the sniper’s nest with his rifle and the old chicken feed bags he had set up as a decoy.

  The voice on the radio said, “Jargo, status report. See anything out there?”

  Silence.

  “Jargo, come in.”

  Jargo? Widow thought. What a stupid name.

  The sniper said, “Oh, shit. I need to get that. You wanna step out so I can kill you, buddy?”

  Outside the barn, thunder boomed heavy and loud, full of dense weight like a giant clobbering another giant to death with a club.

  Widow stepped out and aimed at the only exposed part of the walkway between Jargo and the walk back to his radio. He squeezed the trigger, once—fast, and levered the action.

  The gunshot blasted and echoed through the barn, like they were inside an acoustical sound stage.

  The bullet ripped into the barn wall.

  Jargo called out.

  “Whoa, buddy! You almost got me. Here I thought you were dumb, but I gotta admit, I’m the one who left the radio over there.”

  Widow stayed quiet.

  The radio hissed and the staticky voice returned.

  “Jargo, come in?”

  Silence.

  The voice ordered, “Come in!”

  Jargo said, “If I don’t answer, they’ll send some guys back here. You can take off now. That’s what I’d do. Start running before they get here and kill you. Let me tell you, buddy, if they catch you, they’ll kill you slow.”

  Widow had fired a lot of guns in his life, including a Winchester lever-action rifle. And he’d fired a lot of different bullets with a lot of different calibers and a lot of different grains. A thirty-thirty bullet was surely one of them, but he couldn’t remember. No one used them anymore. Not in his Navy circles, anyway. They were normally found in Granddad’s gun, which was the Winchester rifle.

  Off the top of his head, Widow didn’t know if a thirty-thirty bullet with a hundred fifty grain would punch through the wooden floorboards. Even if a bullet punched through, would it punch all the way through, maintain velocity and hit Jargo?

  Probably not. But staying in low ground and trying to outwait a trained sniper was about as stupid as staying up in a tree and hoping a hungry bear would leave. Bears climb and they’re damn good climbers.

  Widow wasn’t going to sit around and wait for Jargo to make a break for the radio. He had to make a move.

  Silently, trying to keep his position unknown to Jargo, he left the ladder and threaded around the van to the rear, near the barn doors. He returned to the rear of the van, behind its rear cargo doors. He stepped up on the bumper, stowed the rifle on the roof, and scrambled up. He moved as fast as he could. For a second, he thought of Hell Week in the SEALs. They made him do crazy things that week. Some of them, he’d never had to do since, not on a mission, nowhere. Some of them were exactly things he had to do over and over. But they were all useful.

  One thing they made him do was scramble up a stack of giant truck tires and they timed it. Every time he successful climbed a stack and stood straight up on top they would use a crane to place another giant tire on top of the pile and make him climb that, also timed. Every new tire, they shortened the allotted time, making it shorter and shorter.

  Widow had climbed the tires over and over. He did this for hours. To his knowledge, he still held the record for the most tires and the highest stack climbed. But Widow failed this exercise, as did all the other guys who’ve ever taken it. That was the point. The whole endeavor was like stacking rocks in a prison yard and then being told to restack them somewhere else over and over. The purpose of climbing the stack of giant tires wasn’t to be the fastest or climb the highest stack. The purpose was to teach him to fail and to learn to accept it, embrace it, and learn from it.

  Widow’s record in this exercise wasn’t a thing to brag about. It meant that he was the idiot that kept going like the definition of insanity, repeating the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

  Still, the tire climbing exercise did prove to him that he could scramble up a stack of giant tires pretty fast. He did the same with the van.

  Widow climbed the back of the van fast and got up on the roof and stood straight up. He aimed down the barrel of the Winchester, taking aim. He waited. Suddenly, he glimpsed the top of Jargo’s head.

  Widow called out.

  “Jargo!”

  The sniper stood up tall and looked over the railing. He looked right at Widow standing six-foot-four, stretching out as tall as he could on the top of the van.

  Widow squeezed the trigger and racked the lever forcing out the fired cartridge and chambering another fresh bullet.

  Jargo’s head exploded between the cartridge ejection and the new chambered bullet. It was so fast, Widow missed it, but he saw blood and bone fragments and probably brain matter, all sprayed on the barn ceiling behind where Jargo had been standing just a second before.

  Widow kept the rifle aimed at the kill spot and called out again.

  “Jargo?”

  Silence and wind.

  Widow said, “Jargo? Buddy? You still alive?”

  No answer.

  Widow walked the length of the van’s roof toward the ladder. He hopped onto the van’s hood and climbed down off the grille. He set the rifle down by the base of the ladder and climbed the ladder as fast as he had the rear of the van. He stopped at the t
op, Beretta out and pointed at the back of the catwalk, where a shadowy heap was sprawled out.

  The heap used to be a sniper named Jargo.

  Widow kept the Winchester pointed at the heap until he confirmed the guy was dead, a precaution. You never know. But there was no need. The sniper named Jargo was dead.

  Widow pocketed the Beretta and looked over the body. He checked the pockets but found nothing of interest, just a wallet and an ID from the great state of Kentucky. The guy’s real name was Jargo—Vincent Jargo.

  Widow thought nothing of it. He tossed the wallet and ID back on top of the dead body and left it there. He went back to the loft and picked up the sniper rifle. He looked through the scope. He looked both ways, up and down the road. The snow was getting heavy. He couldn’t see much farther than a quarter-mile in both directions. He stepped back from the rifle and ejected the magazine and the bullet in the chamber. He took them with him. He picked up the radio and climbed back down the ladder. He picked up the Winchester off the roof of the van and stared at the vehicle.

  He opened the doors to search it.

  The first thing he saw, which he couldn’t help seeing, was a roll of duct tape stuffed into a cup holder. Which made him think that one of these clowns had paid attention in Special Forces training. Duct tape was a Special Forces operator’s best friend—a universal tool. It was up there with fire and the invention of the wheel, more useful than bullets.

  Widow got inside, dumped himself down in the driver seat. He thought there might’ve been a small chance that these guys had left the key under the visor. But they didn’t; at least he didn’t check because the keys were dangling right there in the ignition. They never took them out.

  He put the rifle down on the passenger seat and pushed a foot down on the brake. He grabbed the key and tried to start the engine. It cranked and whizzed, but didn’t start. He turned it back to the starting position, paused, and tried again. It was a hard start, but it fired up. The dashboard flickered for a second, but the engine ran. He gassed it up and closed the driver’s door. He reversed the van, hitting the gas hard. The van’s rear bumper slammed into the barn doors and shot them straight open.