The Standoff Page 4

  Christmas season was upon him, whether he liked it or not, just as it was for everyone all over the world.

  On the long, but gratifying drive out of Chicago and Illinois down to Indianapolis, where he changed course onto Seventy-Four and headed southeast, Widow listened to the FM stations on the car's radio. They played nothing but Christmas music. He listened to original classics, and then country versions, and then pop Christmas songs. Most were the same songs, just repackaged or rebooted or whatever people called it these days.

  Some songs he had never heard before, while others he had heard done to death.

  When he got bored with all those versions, he clicked to a hip-hop station and listened to hip-hop versions of Christmas songs. He flipped through the various stations until one song sounded familiar. He wasn't much for music that was highly commercialized, but this one was catchy and familiar. He didn't know the title, but he was sure the artist was a rap group called Run DMC. He had heard them before, probably on a battle carrier somewhere in ancient history. He recognized the song because it was from one of his favorite Christmas movies, Die Hard .

  He left the station on and listened to the song from start to finish and found himself humming along with it as if he was back in high school.

  The song did exactly what it was designed to do. It reminded him of John McClane, an average cop just trying to reconcile with his family by flying out to Los Angeles to visit with them, but instead of good cheer and family reconnection, McClane is forced to run around a building all night fighting terrorists.

  Widow looked in the rearview and mouthed a line from the movie to himself. Then he smiled.

  Happy trails, Hans.

  The end of November, front part of December had been his favorite time of year, once, long ago when he was a kid. It wasn't anymore. It hadn't been for a long time, and with good reason. He was all alone, which normally he liked, but being alone in December often made him feel lonely.

  Once, December had been a time he spent with the only family that he knew, his mother. It was always just the two of them. Sometimes they would go spend the day at one of her deputy's homes. It was all a good time.

  Now, it was different for him. His mother had long been dead. Some asshole had betrayed and murdered her way back when she was a sheriff of a small Mississippi town. All that felt like ancient history now.

  Decades before that—even more, ancient history—after an argument over sharing who his father was, a teenaged Widow ran away from home. He never spoke to her again, not until the day she died—a fact that he would regret for the rest of his life. It remained one of his deepest regrets.

  After he ran away from home at eighteen, Widow joined the Navy, the NCIS, and then went on to become an undercover agent for Unit Ten, a secret unit with the NCIS that investigated the kinds of crimes that no one wanted. They operated in the shadows, investigating black Op crimes, mostly. They investigated crimes that were hidden behind top-secret levels of security clearance, the kind of things that there were no filings of.

  They were black on black.

  Widow was the first and only undercover agent to be embedded with the Navy SEALs, a group of men who became his family, but like all families, they had their secrets. He had the scars, the tattoos, the memories, and even the bullet wounds to prove it.

  Most of his Christmases had been spent with one of his two families. In childhood, it was with his mother. As an adult, they were spent at sea with his SEAL family.

  Those memories were behind him now.

  Now, Widow was a loner, a nomad, a drifter like his unknown father before him.

  The biggest calendar drawback of being a loner, a drifter, and an orphan all in one was this time of year. The holiday season was a downer, especially Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but also the whole month of December was a bit depressing. On Christmas Day, while everyone else spent their time with family and friends, and almost every business on Earth was closed, Widow was out there, alone.

  Early on, he formed a yearly ritual, a way of having his own Christmas.

  Every year, he sought out a twenty-four-hour roadside diner, the kind of place that doesn't close no matter what day of the year it is. It was the kind of place that would stay open during a nuclear fallout, over risk of losing one single dollar in revenue.

  Normally, these diners were the corporate kind, like a Waffle House or IHOP or Denny's.

  Widow liked to spend Christmas drinking coffee, eating eggs and bacon, and chatting with the waitress who was unfortunate enough to have to spend Christmas where she didn't want to be.

  Every year, Widow found himself alone in an empty diner with only the waitress and a cook and, sometimes, a busboy.

  Widow was there because he had no one left. She was there because she had drawn the short straw.

  The waitresses were always different, but the story was usually the same.

  She needed the job, needed the money, had to work, had to buy presents for her kids, had bills to pay. Hers was a story as old as capitalism.

  Sometimes, there were other customers, mostly truckers stuck out, or a local beat cop who had to work. But, in general, it was usually just him and her.

  Widow was there because he had no place to go. Truckers would be there because they had to eat. Cops were there because police departments don't close.

  The only living relative that Widow had left was his father, maybe, if the guy wasn't dead in a ditch somewhere, but Widow had never met him, didn't know him, and cared nothing about him.

  Widow's father had been an army vet turned drifter, not unlike himself. The guy had come into the town where Widow was born thirty-six years ago, met his mother and left them both behind. His time there was like signing a guest check-in book in a hotel. Signed, book closed and forgotten.

  Widow didn't hold any grudges, not against the father he’d never known. The guy never even knew he existed anyway. Maybe he was still alive. Maybe he was out there, spending his Christmases all alone too.

  There was no way to be sure. Widow didn't have a Facebook account. No Twitter. Widow didn't tweet.

  Widow changed the radio station in the Lexus and found the exact same Run DMC Die Hard Christmas song playing on another station, all over again. It started from the beginning. He cranked up the volume, turned up the heat on the heater and cruised on to the southeast.

  He felt the warm engine air blast out of the vents and smash across his face and neck and chest. It felt good.

  He continued down the same road, singing along as loud as he pleased inside the car. He imagined old John McClane running around a building on Christmas fighting bad guys and he wondered whose holiday was worse.

  The one thing that they had in common, he figured, was that McClane threw a terrorist off a building and Widow had just thrown a bad guy off a penthouse balcony.

  Ironic.

  Chapter 3

  U NDER THE GROUND, an acre into the woods and hills, in an uncharted cavern, carved out of basalt and rhyolite rocks by millions of years of underground water flow that no longer ran, Abel’s men checked and double-checked that their panel van was clean and gassed up and working properly. There’s nothing like planning an escape and having a mechanical issue ruin it all later. That kind of thing happened in life all the time, every day, but not in Abel’s company, it didn’t. Mistakes in a military Op were unacceptable.

  Under normal circumstances, it was a one-man job, but two of his guys were down there anyway, an over-precaution to an onlooker, but necessary when dealing with crude explosives.

  One man checked over the van, making sure it was mechanically sound. At least, he did the best he could. When dealing with machines, anything could go wrong at any point. There’s no such thing as preventing mechanical failure to a perfect one-hundred-percent guarantee. But there was no reason to share that fact with Abel or the others. They had all served together overseas long enough to understand that bad luck was the great enemy of preparation.

  The
second man didn’t bother with the van’s mechanics. He was charged with weapons detail. He checked the crew’s weapons and the supply inventory, as well as the explosives they were carrying.

  The back doors to the van were wide open. The guy checking the weapons had laid out five M4 assault rifles, all fully loaded, all ready to go.

  There were two combat shotguns, loaded with Magnum slugs, the kind that could blow the head off the shoulders of anything that ever had a head and shoulders, and at a good range if used by a skilled shooter and they were all skilled shooters—no question.

  The guy charged with weapons detail counted them up again, slowly like he was just learning to count for the first time. He did this not because he was slow, but because certain things in warfare required slow, methodical attention, like knowing the number of firearms in your company, and knowing that they were all working properly and armed with enough firepower to kill cops—if necessary.

  Finally, after a second double check, he spoke with chewing tobacco stuffed between his teeth and gums. He spat once and spoke.

  “Weapons’re locked, loaded and accounted for.”

  The mechanic, whose name was Dobson, stayed under the hood and said nothing.

  “Any problems with the engine?”

  “Not sure.”

  “We can’t have no issues. Not now.”

  “I know.”

  “So, what is it?”

  “It could be nothing. Just got a weird electrical read from the diagnostic machine.”

  “Isn’t that what the diagnosis does? It gives you readings?”

  “I didn’t like this one. It was weird.”

  “What’s weird about it?”

  “It was fast, like an electrical surge.”

  “A surge?”

  “It went a little haywire for a second. It started to lose power.”

  “Started to lose power? Or it did lose power?”

  “It only lasted for a second, but it was there.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Dobson shrugged and adjusted his eyeglasses.

  “Could mean nothing.”

  “What else could it mean?”

  Dobson paused a beat, took off his cap, and scratched his bald head as if he had wanted to do it for ages. His head reflected and glimmered from steel-framed lights mounted on the cavern’s ceiling.

  “It could be nothing.”

  “Or?”

  “Or it could mean that a sensor or a module isn’t firing correctly.”

  “How do we fix it?”

  “Maybe the system needs a reflash.”

  “Refrag?”

  “A reflash. Modern vehicles are all electronic. Even the cheapest ones run an electronic computerized system. There’s a bunch of systems working together, firing together. Might mean that one thing isn’t working properly, and it’s firing back at the other systems like a pinball.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Probably nothing.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “Yeah. I don’t see why not.”

  They both looked at each other. They had no time left. The ATF was coming, and they knew it. Everything had been planned and put in place. The wheels were already turning. The ship wasn’t stopping now. Therefore, the van had better do what it was built to do—drive and carry.

  The weapons handler, whose name was Flack, said, “Better keep this to ourselves.”

  “Of course. It’s nothing anyways.”

  Hopefully , Dobson thought.

  “Agreed. We can’t be throwing a wrench in this whole thing if it’s for nothing. Not now. The general won’t be happy about it.”

  “I think we’re on the same page. No use in reporting something that’s not a thing.”

  Dobson disconnected the diagnostic machine and then waited thirty seconds, counting them out loud. At the end of his count, he reconnected the diagnostic machine and checked the screen for readings again.

  “There. Nothing happened that time.”

  “See, it’s nothin’.”

  The two men looked at each other. Both were having the same two conflicting thoughts at the same time.

  The first was mistrust. That was automatic, like an instinct. Doubt was something every man experiences, whether or not he had served in the same military unit as his friend or not, which these two men had.

  The second thought was forced faith. It was to blindly trust that the other man would die with the secret—blind faith.

  Faith is a soldier’s unspoken requirement to do his job. Soldiers have to have faith in their orders, faith in their guys, and faith in the intel they’re given. “Never question” was a military requirement—never question orders, never question loyalty, always keep the faith.

  Abel’s men were no different from every other military operator. They were also required to have blind faith, more so than other units. They had all rolled out of their military lives, given up promising careers, abandoned the chance for family life, just to join his cause.

  They all had faith.

  They believed in what he stood for. They believed in his solutions, in his causes.

  Dobson unhooked the diagnostic machine and removed it and lowered the van’s hood. He dropped it and listened to the heavy metal sound of the American-made van’s hood dropping to the frame and the latches locking in place, securing the hood closed.

  Dobson rolled the diagnostic machine away and left it on the side of the little garage. He stepped back to the rear of the van, the back doors still opened.

  He stood next to Flack.

  “M4s look good.”

  “Everything’s good.”

  “What about the packages?”

  Dobson pointed to two double racks that took up most of one side of the back of the van. The racks were metal, painted black. They were drilled down into the bed and the wall of the van with two cage doors that closed and locked to prevent theft, as well as securing the contents so they wouldn’t bump around during transport.

  Flack stared at the racks and the contents.

  “They’re stable.”

  “Will they work?”

  “No one can say that with any certainty. You know that. Especially when they were packed by idiots that we tricked into thinking we’re some kind of religious cult.”

  “We’re the ones who taught them how to pack the explosives.”

  Dobson said nothing to that. He knew it was true. If the van didn’t break down en route, and the explosives didn’t blow them up in transport, there was still a chance that the bombs wouldn’t even go off because many of them weren’t packed by either Dobson or Flack. Nor were they overseen by either man. Packing, engineering, and encasing a bomb wasn’t easy, especially this many.

  If just one of them didn’t explode as planned, Abel would blame one or both of them for it, even if they weren’t hands-on responsible. That’s how military life went. The man down the chain of command got the blame, and so on—a pecking order.

  “They’ll explode. Probably.”

  “What about the C4s in the house?”

  “Those will go off; I’m sure.”

  “Why so sure? You think the C4 was packed better than our explosives?”

  “The C4’s military grade. And I saw to them each personally. Much easier when they’re already assembled.”

  “True. They’ll go off, then.”

  Dobson replaced his ball cap on his head.

  He asked, “Will these go off? You know, on their own? Like an accident?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You told us how to pack them.”

  “I know. But I can’t help it if one of you was asleep when I was giving instructions.”

  Dobson asked, “Think they’ll explode if we get into a high-speed chase with the cops?”

  “Think the van will hold up if we get into a high-speed chase with the cops?”

  They looked at each other and then back at the racks.

  “It’ll a
ll be fine. Gotta have faith, right?”

  “Right.”

  “They’ll all know soon enough.”

  Flack smiled and said, “Semper fi.”

  They looked at a heavy rack and the tight stacks of exactly forty-one pipe bombs. Each was carefully built and packed with crude explosive materials of gunpowder or match heads or some with chlorate mixtures. The packages surrounding the outer cases were packed with small nails and shards of broken glass, making for extra deadly shrapnel.

  They were all tightly packaged into priority shipping boxes from the US Postal Service. Each was sealed and stamped properly and addressed with a different name and address. All the addresses were in the US, including two in Hawaii and one in Alaska.

  There were forty-one packages with forty-one names and forty-one addresses. Each was carefully handwritten so it wouldn’t fall prey to being misread by the post office.

  Chapter 4

  A T THREE A.M. Widow cruised along on a quarter tank of gas and listened to Chuck Berry on guitar, on what might be considered a slow station by today’s radio standards, but was heaven to Widow’s ears.

  The guitar strings, the melodies, all of it buzzed in his brain like a honeybee. Chuck was a master. Thanks to him, Widow managed to get away from Christmas music, and he forgot all about John McClane’s problems.

  Widow liked all kinds of music. It depended on his mood, depended on the setting, and depended on the company he kept. Late night, open road, quiet, just him and the stars, then jazz was the right call, the right fit.

  If he had been cruising along with a woman by his side, then he would’ve made a different call—maybe. It depended on the woman.

  To ask Widow if he had a type, he might think on the question for a moment, but in the end, his answer would be: “My type of woman is the tough kind.”

  Widow left the heater on. It blasted and warmed his face. It warmed his arms with every exhalation of hot breath pulled off the engine.

  It had been a long time since he had driven a great distance by car, all alone. He enjoyed it as if it were a brand-new experience. Plus, there was the added bonus that this car had belonged to bad guys who were no longer breathing at all, which they deserved.