The Standoff Read online

  “A black chick. She’s some kinda big shit with the ATF.”

  Cucci grinned another involuntary reaction, like he was thinking back to shooting the dead agents. He was relishing it.

  Widow felt that trigger itch again. He was tempted to kill him. But he didn’t. He barked an order at him instead.

  “Put the cuffs on!”

  Cucci took the cuffs out and started to clip them behind his back.

  Widow barked, “In the front!”

  Cucci stopped and moved his hands to the front. He did as he was asked.

  Widow said, “Tight! All the way down to the wrist.”

  Cucci racked the cuffs till they wouldn’t go any farther.

  “Good. Now, I’ve got a question for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How much do you weigh?”

  “I don’t know. Two hundred pounds?”

  Widow smirked and nodded.

  “Good,” he said. He stomped up to Cucci, fast, and wrenched his torso to the right like a major-league baseball pitcher throwing the hardest, fastest fastball ever thrown in his entire career. He used the force and momentum and speed to wrench back hard; only he wasn’t throwing a fastball. He was swinging the Winchester. He swung, hard. The butt of the rifle slammed into Cucci’s jaw, almost as hard as Widow could swing it. A fraction more turning of the screw and he would’ve broken Cucci’s neck.

  The butt slammed so hard into his jaw that there was an instant CRACK! It was loud. It echoed over the snowfall and the running engine of the police cruiser. It bounced off the trees like a plank being slammed into the side of a rock.

  Several of Cucci’s front teeth flew out of his mouth. His jaw broke. The bones in his left cheek dangled in his face. Later, when being seen by a doctor—if he was going to be seen by a doctor—someone would think he’d been hit in the mouth with a wrecking ball.

  Cucci flew off his feet into the air. The force of the blow was so hard that his consciousness checked out the second of impact. He landed with his eyes half open.

  Widow lowered the Winchester. No reason to point it at a half-dead guy who wasn’t going to move.

  Blood seeped out of Cucci’s mouth.

  Widow set the rifle down against the police cruiser and returned to the keys on the ground. There was also a cell phone and a wallet and some folded cash in a clip, separate from the wallet. Widow had no idea why and didn’t care. He scooped it all up and pocketed the keys and the money. He popped the cruiser’s trunk and tossed the wallet and money clip in. He tried the phone for a signal and got nothing. It was useless, so he left it in the passenger seat of the cruiser.

  He went back to Cucci and lifted the guy up and dragged him across the snow to the trunk. He heaved him up and rolled him into the trunk. Cucci fit, but it was a little tight. Widow propped the guy’s head up so he wouldn’t choke on his own blood or possibly other broken teeth fragments that he might swallow.

  The gesture was merciful, but if he did choke to death, Widow wasn’t going to cry about it.

  Widow returned to the van and got out the radio. He tore the duct tape off it, stuffed it into his pocket, and listened. He didn’t want the others to get suspicious.

  He heard nothing but static. Then after a moment, a new voice came over the air.

  “Cucci? Cucci? Come in? What the hell was that? Who held the talk button down like that? Hello?”

  Widow had to answer. He had to keep them feeling safe and unaware of him as long as possible, so he answered, keeping his voice low, putting his lips right up to the receiver, and using his best smoky radio disk jockey impression. And he added paused breaks to make it seem like the weather was bad enough to disrupt their radio communication. He did this by pressing and depressing the talk button while saying complete sentences—an old, cheap trick he didn’t learn in the SEALs. He’d learned it as a kid, using his mom’s police radio, despite knowing he would later be punished for it.

  To anyone listening, it would sound like he was breaking up, like bad weather ruined the radio signal.

  He said, “I’m here. Sorry. Weather bad.”

  The voice said, “What was with the talk button being held down?”

  “Sorry. You’re breaking up.”

  The voice asked, “What was with the talk button?”

  “Weather bad out here. I don’t know.”

  “Where’s Jargo? You find him?”

  “I found him. He’s fine. He dropped the radio off the roof. Dumbass.”

  Silence.

  Widow hoped his impression of the guy in the trunk was believable enough.

  The voice came back on.

  “Okay. Get back here. Bring Jargo with you. This weather might get worse before it gets better. No reason for him to stay out there.”

  “Affirmative.”

  That was the end of the transmission. He wasn’t sure if they bought it or not. He thought so. He hoped so.

  Widow switched off the radio and left it in the van. He didn’t suppose he would have use for it again. Then, he went back to Cucci’s boots on the road. He looked in both and found the folding knife. It wasn’t like the one Abe had. It was only a three-inch blade, but a good one. He pocketed it in his coat and looked at the boots. He could pick them up. But what for? He left them on the road, as well as Cucci’s coat, and returned to the car.

  Widow slammed the trunk lid closed. He scooped up Cucci’s Glock and the M4 and his Winchester. He laid them across the backseat of the cruiser and shut all the doors, after that he dumped himself down in the driver seat. He threw the car into drive and peeled out from the road, up the mouth of the Whites’ drive. He switched the headlamps off and used only the fog lights. He drove as fast as he could, bumping and racking around in the seat. At one point, he had to slam on the brakes because of a huge oak tree that forced the driveway to half-fork to the right before the largest hill.

  Chapter 48

  W IDOW SPED until he was close to the farmhouse. He slowed Shep’s cruiser all the way to a crawl about fifty yards from where the Whites’ drive opened to the circular driveway.

  At the end of the circle, he stopped and killed all the lights. He scanned the terrain. He saw the parked trucks, all with the engines off. He looked around for outside patrol.

  The wind and snow pounded on the exterior of the car. He saw no one. He scanned the upstairs windows and didn’t see Foster. He didn’t see Abe. He saw none of the White family at their posts, which he already figured being that Abel’s men were there.

  The lights in the house were different than when he left. The lights downstairs were on, but they were low.

  They cut the power , he thought. They forced Abel to use a backup generator.

  Widow thought the whole move was stupid. It was overkill. He supposed that’s how they operated. Everything they did was overkill.

  Widow pulled the cruiser up behind the sheriff’s truck and parked it. He took out the keys and pocketed them. He looked around one more time and saw no one. He opened the door and slipped out, opened the rear door, and looked at the Winchester and then at the M4. The Winchester was a good rifle. It had served him well, so far, and he had more ammo for it in his pockets. But sometimes, you find better ordinance in the field.

  He picked up the M4 and checked it. The bad side of the M4 was it only had one magazine.

  The Glock was a different story. It had been fired—twice. Cucci had lied about shooting the ATF agents. He must’ve helped kill at least one of them. The thought made Widow hope the guy did die in the trunk.

  The M4 did have one other component to consider. It had a sound suppressor on the end. That was the deciding factor; he scooped it up.

  Lightning cracked overhead and thunder rolled. He looked up. The snowfall beat down on his shoulders and face.

  He left the Glock and the Winchester and took the M4 and kept the borrowed Beretta. He closed the car doors and locked it behind him.

  He kept the M4 up, switch the firing selector from
SAFE to AUTO. He had four bad guys left and the M4 came standard with a thirty-round box magazine. There were twenty-nine rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber.

  Widow walked along the side of the sheriff’s truck, keeping his eye on the front door to the house.

  The wind gusted around him. The barn door flapped open in the distance, which startled him. He almost shot at it. Then he remembered the huge hole on the back of the barn. The wind must’ve been blustering through it.

  He ignored the barn doors and looked back at the house, expecting the sounds of the barn door flapping and banging on the wood to get Abel and his guys on their toes and outside.

  He didn’t know all of them or what branch of the military they were from, but he remembered reading enough about Abel’s Special Forces career to know they were good. He probably didn’t stand much of a chance one on four, which made him glad that none of them came outside to check it out.

  He continued streaming alongside the truck. He passed the tires and stopped at the door. He tried the handle. It was unlocked. He opened it. The door squeaked loudly on rusted hinges, but not loud enough to out blast the barn door’s banging. He opened the truck door and looked inside. He saw what he was looking for. It was the sheriff’s radio. It was an old-fashioned thing, bolted under the dash, like a CB radio.

  He hoped there would be one, so he could call for help from the sheriff’s department. Cops don’t operate on cell phones and telephone lines. A police radio would work. There hadn’t been one in Shep’s car. Not surprising because it was probably on his body, once. It wasn’t there when Widow saw him. Nothing was there. Someone was walking around in his uniform. Whoever had it had probably tossed the body radio.

  Widow set the M4 down across the bench and scooped up the radio receiver. He switched the knobs on and turned the volume all the way up, hoping it was already on the right police channel. And maybe it was. He didn’t know because the damn thing didn’t come on at all. He clicked the receiver back down on radio and lowered himself down to the footwell to get a better look at the radio. The wires out of the back were completely ripped out, haphazardly and recklessly like someone had done it with their feet from the driver’s seat, not caring what damage was done.

  Widow cursed under his breath and slid back out of the truck and took the M4. He shut the door and moved on to Walter’s truck.

  There was nothing of value for him inside the Tundra’s cabin. He already knew that. But there were the packages, stockpiled in the cargo bed. That part was of interest. If he had to guess, that part was the most interesting part, at least to Abel, which made it valuable. And one thing that Widow loved to do was destroy things that guys like Abel thought were valuable.

  The little pleasures in life , he thought.

  Widow set the M4 down, leaned it against the back tire and lowered the tailgate to the Tundra. He reached in and ripped up a heavy tarp they had strapped down over the packages. He unhooked a couple of the cables holding it all down.

  Underneath were the same forty-one packages he had seen them loading. He picked one up, read the name and the address of it.

  James Wallace. Nashville, Tennessee.

  He read the next one.

  Shaun Kimerson. Dallas, Texas.

  He read the next one.

  Steven Scott. Seattle, Washington.

  He read one more.

  John Omaha. Norfolk, Virginia.

  He looked up, scanned the yard and the front door to the house. He saw no one. Then, suddenly, there was movement in one of the front windows. It was the dining room, where he’d eaten a big breakfast with coffee only hours ago.

  The curtain moved and the blinds ripped back. He saw an unfamiliar face looking out the window. He ducked down behind the truck and stayed quiet a long moment.

  The barn door flapped again, hard, slamming into the side of the barn and then swinging all the way back and slamming back shut.

  He peeked up over the side of the truck, hoping whoever was looking out was only checking out the noise from the barn door and didn’t linger too much on the Tundra and the tailgate that was now down.

  Luckily, he got lucky. The unfamiliar face was gone. The blinds were back in place. And the curtain was pulled shut.

  Widow paused a beat, kept his eye on the window, and then glanced at the front door, just in case.

  No one came out.

  Widow stood back up and looked at the package in his hand. Each was heavy and bulky. They were all the same size, about the size of a kids’ shoebox.

  Each was the exact same weight, as best as he could guess. The only difference between them was that some had more stamps than others.

  He came out from behind the truck and stood over the tailgate. He set down the package he had in hand and tore it open. Under the manila wrapping was a plain black box, not a shoebox, but could’ve been one from the factory, before they put all the labels and pictures all over it.

  Widow tore through a second, protective layer of brown, industrial packing tape—easy enough to rip through.

  He stopped at the lid to the tape. He left one last tape in place. He froze and stared at a small coil of wires taped right under the lip of the box. It just barely stuck out.

  He almost missed it. He felt utterly stupid. The wire, the weight, the packages being so valuable to the Athenians, they were all rigged to explode. They were bombs. They planned to mail them all out, blowing people up, like the Unabomber—Ted Kaczynski.

  The names were targets.

  Widow stared at them, tried to figure the connection. Why these names?

  He had no idea who they were. But whoever they were, they were all going to die if they opened these package bombs as carelessly as he almost had.

  Widow put a hand in his coat pocket and took out the folding knife from Cucci’s boot. He whipped the blade out and flipped the package to the bottom. He felt around the corners, pinching each one, searching for a weak spot. He found one not rigged with the wires—he hoped.

  Usually, bomb makers will pack these kinds of devices, rig them to blow when opened or tampered with, but they’ll leave a single corner alone in case they need to reenter the device.

  Warily, he sliced into the box with the knife. He cut all the way down nearly to the edge. Then he cut two slits on both ends of the slice. He folded the knife closed and pocketed it.

  He pried at both edges of the slits at the same time and folded the corners back and down and out, making two equal flaps. Then he bent the hole open wide enough to look in.

  The first thing he found was packing. The box was packed full of shrapnel pieces. There was broken, jagged glass, broken nails, and screw ends.

  The shrapnel was meant to add to the devastation of the explosions. If there were other people in the room when someone opened the package bomb and the explosion didn’t kill them, then the shrapnel would.

  Carefully, he used the blade to sift thought the nails and glass. Then he found what he was looking for. He dug down until he found a homemade pipe bomb with crude metal pieces and wires sticking out of it.

  Devastating , he thought.

  He left the package right there and inspected the others from the same stack. He pulled one out at a time, reading each, reading the addresses and the names, hoping something would click in his head.

  Finally, he came to a name he recognized.

  It was a guy named William Buckley, which he remembered for two reasons. First, he’d met the guy once. It was an assignment where a SEAL team was sent into enemy territory to rescue some POWs in Afghanistan.

  Widow was a part of the team.

  The second reason he recognized the name was also because Buckley shared the name of a famous English convict, sent to Australia during a whole period when England sent more than a hundred fifty thousand of their worst inmates to the island nation. Only Buckley escaped prison and went to live among the Aborigine. He became a legend in his own right.

  That’s the only reason Widow remembered the
name because the William Buckley he knew wasn’t memorable. Not for him.

  The Buckley he knew had one more title to his name. He was General William Buckley in the US Army.

  There were forty-one package bombs with forty-one addresses across the US. And there were exactly forty-one still-living, retired generals from the US Army.

  Abel packed these pipe bombs as one last act of terrorism. At least that’s what he probably told his followers. Widow could imagine the lunatic selling them on fighting a fake, crazy revolution. Telling them all their sacrifice was worth it. Targeting retired military generals was unheard of. It would send a clear message to the government, to the military, to the world.

  All the while, Widow was sure that Abel was emptying their bank accounts, using the money of gullible, lost souls looking for new lives, searching for meaning.

  It was nothing more than petty revenge for what they’d done to him and, now, dozens of innocent people were dead. Widow imagined Abel was probably plotting an escape from the country with one last stop somewhere to hand over the packages to someone he trusted to mail them out. Then he would get on a plane or a boat and disappear with bank accounts full of stolen money.

  Chapter 49

  T HEY HEARD the thunderclaps, the lightning strikes, snowfall, and the wind outside the farmhouse. Inside, Abel smoked the last of his cigars, asking Abe questions about Christmas trees and farming and the times. When Abe mentioned the nearby farms closing due to the financial crash over a decade earlier, Abel took it upon himself to give Abe, and the terrified family, a lecture on government and corporate corruption.

  Brooks stayed near the front of the family room. He angled himself at the bottom of the stairs so he could cover the front hall, the mudroom, and the front door while staying aware of Abel and the main room. An M4 rested in his hands, across his chest, muzzle down. Flack leaned on an island counter right behind Abby in the kitchen, out of sight of the others.

  Occasionally, he grunted at her, making her uncomfortable.

  Tanis patrolled the house. He went from room to room, slowly and methodically like he was a potential buyer looking at every crown molding and every stick of furniture for reasons to criticize the house in order to negotiate a lower price.