The Standoff Read online

  Chapter 7

  A DONIS LOOKED at her Timex.

  It ticked away.

  Time was almost up.

  She stared up at the compound over her rifle’s ACOG scope, through the gloom, through the white-blackness of a late snowy night, and saw no movement. No lights flickered on. No eyes peeked out of windows. No curtains flapped like someone was hiding behind them—no sign of life.

  Suddenly, a bad feeling wafted over her like Spidey sense or women’s intuition or a good old-fashioned cop’s gut feeling. Something didn’t feel right. It wasn’t just that no one was coming out of the building; it was that no one was even turning on the lights to look out.

  A heavily armed convoy of a hundred ATF agents and police would scare anyone out of his or her home in the middle of the night. Never in her wildest dreams would she have imagined that no one would come out or respond at all. It was weird.

  She set down her rifle and got on her radio again.

  “Clip, come in.”

  Clip was short for Clemens, the team leader for the SRT. When it came to the guys who do the door-bashing and the entry and the tear gas launching and all that stuff, he was one of the more reasonable ones the ATF employed, in Adonis’s opinion.

  Clip came back over the radio with one simple response.

  “Go.”

  “Clip, something’s not right here.”

  There was silence over the radio as if Clip was accessing the compound to see if he could spot what she was warning him about.

  “It seems good to me. Time to move in.”

  “I don’t think we should.”

  “What’s on your mind? Be quick.”

  “Look at it. No one’s coming outside. No one’s looking through the windows at us. There’s not one single light on in the entire damn building. Isn’t that weird?”

  “It’s four-thirty in the morning.”

  “Yeah, but there are a hundred armed cops out here. No one’s moving around in there.”

  Silence.

  Adonis said, “If we were outside your house, wouldn’t you wake up at least?”

  “They don’t need to come out to see us. They got cameras at the corners of the buildings. They’re probably watching us right now.”

  Adonis looked up at the corners. She couldn’t see any cameras. She clicked the button on the radio to talk.

  “Maybe you’re right. I still think we should back off. Reevaluate.”

  Clip said, “I say we go anyway. Over.”

  “I don’t know.”

  More silence.

  “No, disrespect, Adonis, but it’s my call. Not yours. I handle the tactical side of this Op. I say we go. We’re not going to get another shot. We got them by surprise. We need to take it. You’re guy’s in there. And I don’t want another Waco. Let’s not give them the chance to arm themselves. We go now.”

  “I don’t want that either. That’s why I think we should hang back.”

  “No. We’re going.”

  The radio went dead.

  A moment later, on a general channel that fed into everyone’s radios, Clip’s voice came on.

  “Everyone, go on my mark.”

  Seconds passed.

  The snipers lined up their shots as best they could. The agents in the helicopters readied theirs weapons. Everyone trained their guns on windows and doors.

  The men on the ground got ready to move in.

  Just then, before Clip could give the order to move in, everyone but the guys in the helicopters paused and listened. They heard something in the distance, behind them back toward the entrance and the busted gate and the snow-shoveled drive.

  Adonis turned, pinned her back to the SUV tire well and watched above her as a single helicopter approached from the darkness. It wasn’t one of theirs. She waited till it was in better view.

  She heard the blades and saw the helicopter clearly. It was mostly white, with the tail painted blue.

  It was hard to miss with the night sky behind it.

  The helicopter was on a downward trajectory as if it was coming in for a sweep of the compound.

  Clip came over the radio before Adonis could.

  “Ramirez.”

  The voice of one of the pilots of one of the ATF helicopters came back on and responded.

  He said, “I’m on it.”

  The helicopter that Ramirez piloted perked up and circled over the back of the compound. It tilted and yawed and ascended toward the sky, and then it swooped up at high speed toward the oncoming unknown helicopter.

  The ATF helicopter intercepted the unknown helicopter back over the busted gate.

  The unknown helicopter stopped and hovered a hundred feet in the air seeming to be studying the events unfolding.

  After a full thirty seconds of silence, Ramirez spoke over the radio.

  “Clip.”

  “Go.”

  “It’s Channel Thirteen News.”

  Both Adonis and Clip said the same word at the exact same time, only Clip said it over the radio, over the main channel.

  “Shit.”

  Clip paused a beat, and then he ordered, “Go now!”

  Adonis froze, but the SRT agents rose up like football players right as the quarterback barked the go order at them. They took off, running toward the main building.

  From the air, the whole thing looked like an army of soldiers converging on a target city all at once, like a violent siege was about to occur.

  The agents made the run in seconds and stopped at both entrances and windows that were designated as their zones.

  At the steps to the front door and at the steps to the back, the agents all froze and dropped to crouched shooting positions, readied for whatever would happen next.

  Everyone stopped because the doors to the main building jerked open fast and violent. Dozens of groups of people stampeded out of the building like it was on fire.

  Clip barked an order over the radio.

  “Don’t shoot! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  The agents on the ground heard the order buzz over their earpieces.

  They stayed where they were. No one opened fire.

  Adonis was still back behind the SUV. She watched over the hood. She stared on in horror at what she saw.

  All the Athenians running out were children.

  They were in the front. Every one of them was dressed in stark white clothing from head to toe like they were about to take part in something special.

  The ATF and her team hadn’t known an exact number of children present in the Athenian compound, but they had estimates, mostly from Dorsch’s radio messages. The first thing an undercover agent does when they can get a message out to their team is to give intel—headcounts, weapon counts, the number of children, and any signs they see of criminal activities, and, especially, notes on whoever their target was. In this case, Dorsch had provided a guesstimate of the number of children and a detailed report of everything else he could share about what he knew of Abel up until his last radio check.

  The information he provided on Abel was nothing more than they already had in his profile. But the number of children she saw running from the compound’s main building was close to the number they estimated to live there.

  She stared on.

  After the children made their way out and ran past the agents on the ground and away from the buildings, she saw adults of all ages—men and women. They were all holding hands. The women were out in front. The men filled in the gaps. They ran tightly in a circular pattern. She saw some teenagers, not many, but some. They all started breaking off as if they were terrified of something.

  Why were they in circles like that? she thought.

  It was only a moment later that her question was answered.

  She watched as the hordes of children and teenagers and some adults ran at the agents.

  Agents raised their rifles and aimed. No one fired.

  She heard the agents on the ground ordering the running white-clothed m
asses to stop, to freeze, to stay where they were, but no one listened.

  Clip barked the same order from before, only louder.

  “HOLD YOUR FIRE!”

  The Athenians numbered about a hundred. They were coming out of the building fast and spilling out into the snow, into the yard, and into the gloom.

  The agents on the ground saw no visible weapons. So, no one fired, but they continued to bark orders and warnings at the cult.

  Adonis raised her rifle again and maxed out the magnification on her ACOG scope to see them.

  That feeling of uneasiness, of intuition she had seemed to get louder in her head like a silent warning system.

  Something’s not right , it whispered. It grew louder and louder.

  Not right.

  NOT right!

  NOT Right!

  NOT RIGHT!

  Suddenly, Adonis froze in horror. She knew what it was. She saw it. She saw them, the adults in the middle of the circles, eyes closed, running behind the children toward the ATF agents.

  Their lips moved fast. They whispered to themselves—fast as if they were speaking in tongues, like they were praying.

  She saw something else. She saw the detonators in their hands. She saw the vests on their bodies, under open coats.

  She saw the crude explosives.

  Adonis jumped back off the SUV’s hood and reached for her radio. She clicked the talk button and shouted into the receiver.

  “SUICIDE VESTS!”

  The warning came too late.

  The Athenians, the circles of people in white, stopped dead in front of the ATF agents at the front of the building.

  The Athenians in the rear stopped underneath one of the helicopters. It was low enough to the ground so that the shooter could provide cover fire for the agents on the ground.

  The Athenians threw their hands up to the sky, spread out wide as if they were praising the ATF agents as gods. All of them raised their hands that way except for the ones in suicide vests. The ones in the suicide vests squeezed the triggers on their detonators.

  Suddenly, in a violent, terrifying second that seemed to slow down time, the quiet calm, the gloom that surrounded the compound erupted into several huge, devastating fireballs as the suicide vests and their wearers exploded almost at the same time.

  The pressure waves ripped limb from limb, followed by fire, followed by heat, all in same second, all in the same collision of destruction.

  Smoke and fire and immense heat ripped through the air as if they followed behind missiles launching from the ground. The fire roared and burned and raged. The heat seared the skin of everyone who felt it. Multiple blast waves shocked and exploded and tore up from the bombers’ torsos and ripped into the air. The main building’s windows exploded and shattered. The glass shattered inward in a massive wave of millions of smaller pieces. The bars on the windows rattled on their hinges. The wood and the brick heated, catching fire almost instantaneously. The porch went up in a spheroid of flames.

  The compound was hit with a firestorm.

  The explosions rocked the main building and echoed through the others. Body parts tore through the air and the smoke like a macabre firework show.

  Adonis was thrown back off her feet from the multiple blasts.

  Her body slammed down into the snow so deep that she felt stuck, instantly.

  She stared up at the dark sky for what felt like a long, long moment, but was really just magnified by the slow-motion feeling of the whole moment. She couldn’t move. The wind had been knocked out of her.

  She could no longer see her agents or the explosions, but she could hear them. She could still see the smoke.

  The explosions paused for a long moment, and then they picked up again, almost as if a new set of explosions had begun. They continued to roar. The first wave wasn’t the only wave. She figured there was a second wave. The second wave was different. It was worse than the first, more powerful, louder.

  It seemed like everything was exploding. The whole thing seemed to be a coordinated effort, meant to be a horrifying trigger of exploding dominoes.

  After several minutes of explosions and fire and smoke, the explosions stopped. Adonis was left with only the sounds of the screams of agony of the agents and the few Athenians left alive.

  Adonis stared up to the sky and watched more black smoke fill the air and cover any sign of stars in the sky.

  Chapter 8

  E LEVEN DAYS before the explosion, the fire, and the near-hundred dead, in a brick and wood multi-building compound, painted all white, in the unusually snowy woods in Carbine, South Carolina, ATF Lead Agent Toni Adonis had taken the lead on a new investigation that began from a tip, originating from a mailman out of Augusta, Georgia. The tip led her and her team straight to the Athenians. Which she thought was about as generic a name to call a cult as possible. Why not just call themselves the Romans or the Spartans or just plainly call themselves the Jedi?

  The Athenians became a joke among agents involved in the tree of communications, from the agent who first took the call about the tip all the way up to Adonis’s boss.

  Not much was known about the Athenians on a federal level. When she first got the case, she had to start at the state level just to get info about them. But the state level had little on them. She had to move to the local level and inquire about them with the Carbine Police Department, who sent her to the Spartan County Sheriff’s office. No one had much.

  It wasn’t until she got the registered name of their leader and the CEO of Athenian, Inc., a registered company in the state of South Carolina, that she learned something interesting.

  Athenian, Inc. was basically both a registered business as well as a certified religious entity. But the leader of both things was a man named Joseph Abel.

  Abel had quite an interesting history. Once a one-star general in the US Army, Abel was now seen as a militant religious fanatic. He wasn’t on the FBI’s Most Wanted List or anything. His name wasn’t on any official terrorist watch lists that Adonis could find. But after a long morning and afternoon of piecing together the man’s documented history and current whereabouts, she put together a terrifying profile of a man who was dangerous, to say the least, and at worst could be a terrorist leader in the making.

  The Spartan County Sheriff’s office and the Carbine police had nothing negative to report about the Athenians. They kept to themselves and didn’t break any laws that the various police departments were aware of.

  Abel’s Athenians were a quiet, religious sect—common enough people, mostly simple-minded, ignorant—the kind of people you would expect to find in a religious cult. They were the kind of people who follow and do not question. Doubts never crossed their minds, but that wasn’t just because they were ignorant and naïve. It was also because of Abel.

  Abel was a kind of anti-government, anti-society, anarchist, David Koresh-type, but with ten times the charisma and ten times the know-how.

  Certainly, his military background gave him a commanding presence.

  The Augusta mailman informed his supervisor who told the postmaster, who told the postmaster general, who contacted the ATF and the FBI about a tightly packed box that snagged open from connecting with a loose rack in an off-freeway Postal Service depot.

  A forklift driver had been moving pallets. He accelerated a little too hard, a little too fast, and bumped into a pallet, which started a chain reaction of boxes falling over and knocking over the next box like dominoes, where the final shipping box was busted open. The whole thing was a total accident, an entire piece of bad luck for the senders and receivers of the shipment.

  The box contained nothing illegal. At first, they thought the accident had busted the contents because they found thousands of crushed, burned-out light bulbs and shards of glass. They thought they had accidentally broken open a shipment of bulbs or something else made of glass. Upon further inspection, they realized that the light bulbs were already crushed and broken.

  The box w
as marked: “For Recycling Purposes.”

  The part that was strange, other than wondering why any company would ship broken glass to be recycled, was that the box of crushed, burned-out light bulbs had a return address from a fake company owned by a notorious militia group called the Two Percent, which was already flagged by the FBI for radical behavior and anti-government activities, including promoting domestic terrorism and especially acts of violence using pipe bombs against large crowds.

  The Two Percent had blogs on the dark web, with lists of targets and instructions on making pipe bombs and many other things that kept the FBI monitoring them.

  A flag was triggered after the mailman saw the contents of broken glass and after the FBI was notified. The triggered flag alerted the FBI, who investigated further.

  The Two Percent owned no company or manufacturing business or recycling business. The only things they manufactured were propaganda and hate. The only thing they recycled was the steady stream of the same conspiracy theory claims.

  The FBI found four more pallets loaded with the same broken glass, the same recyclable markings, and the same “Ship To” address, with the same recipient.

  Coupling the broken glass with an armed robbery in South Carolina of a large plant nursery where the robbers stole dozens of bags of fertilizer, the FBI agents involved raised their eyebrows along with their suspicions.

  The broken glass could be what it claimed—possibly—but broken light bulbs are often used to pack pipe bombs. Not a red flag in and of itself, but that combined with the false recycling claim and the origin of the shipping and the stolen fertilizer out of South Carolina and the direct connection to the Two Percent militia group meant the FBI was inclined to notify the ATF.

  The ATF took the case. It turned out that they were already tracking numerous shipments of weapons and bullets and piping to a religious group in Carbine—the Athenians.

  It all seemed to connect on paper.

  The ATF began monitoring them. They assigned Adonis to lead the case. Within one day, she had a team in place and was planning to infiltrate them with an undercover agent. She had enough to warrant infiltration as well when it came to possible bomb-making materials in the hands of crazed anti-government cults; the ATF didn’t drag its feet. They had no time to waste.