The Standoff Read online

  Adonis was certain that if they dug enough, they would find an internet connection and communication between the two militant groups, and they did. Then they got more than they bargained for when they tapped the Army to provide records of Abel. Their requests were met with resistance, at first. That was until she explained the bomb-making materials and militia group connections that the ATF and the FBI already had.

  The Army cooperated, reluctantly, but with enough to paint quite a terrifying picture of the guy.

  Whoever Abel used to be had long been buried. He was a ghost. It turned out that he had the kind of past with titles like Black Ops and acronyms like USSFs, United States Special Forces.

  Before sending Dorsch in, they set up an external surveillance team not far from the compound. They used drones and watched them for five days. They studied them. They heard gunfire every morning from eight a.m. till noon; target practice they surmised, or shooting classes, taught by Abel’s right-hand guys.

  They got plenty of video of it happening from two surveillance drones.

  The property was twenty-five acres on either side of their compound and covered with huge, thick trees and snow.

  If it weren’t for one small break, a break that Adonis couldn’t use in court, she would’ve been told to move on.

  One of her drones captured the license plate of a black panel van parked in the back lot of the compound, with a bunch of other vehicles, which was weird because the driveway headed in the other direction. No matter, it was the plate that they could identify as one caught on camera near the nursery and the stolen fertilizer.

  It wasn’t enough to get the proper authorization from a judge on a raid of the compound, but it was enough to convince her boss to authorize an undercover operation.

  In her early life, Adonis had gotten a lot of flak because when asked what Toni was short for, she would say that her first name wasn’t short for Antonio or Antonia or Antoinette. It was short for Anthony, a boy’s name, given to her by her dead father. He was African, but not in the African-American way. He was actually from Africa. He was born in the former French colony of Morocco. So was her mother. They were both originally Moroccan. They spoke French and English. They grew up around post-colonial francophone traditions. They kept Toni in the same traditions, even after they moved to the American South. Adonis was born and partially raised in Atlanta.

  One tradition, shared by both the French and Moroccan people, once upon a time, was a strong patriarchal hierarchy—prehistoric, olden and outdated, now, but it had been there.

  Because of this patriarchy, Adonis was given her grandfather’s name, Anthony William Adonis. Whether it was popular at the time to do so or not, it was what it was.

  As an adult Toni Adonis kept the Toni part, but never ever revealed to anyone that her first name was Anthony or that her middle name was William. If her team had ever found out, they would call her Willie for sure. No getting around it. It would’ve been with love, but it would’ve been annoying and embarrassing and a wrecking ball that would undermine her in her new leadership position.

  She would take the male names with her to the grave.

  Chapter 9

  A DONIS’S PARENTS WERE both dead now, cancer for one and a car crash, involving a drunk bus driver, the bus he was driving, and a head-on collision at a stoplight, for the other.

  Her father would’ve been upset with her for choosing to be an ATF agent—such a male-dominated profession as law enforcement was the last thing he would’ve wanted for her—but her mother would’ve been proud.

  Adonis knew that, but neither parent lived to see it.

  She was the first in her family to go to college, to get a degree, and to advance in a career field like law enforcement.

  The truth was that she was the only child in her family. She had no connection to her extended family back in the old world. Somewhere, she had an email address and the name of her mother’s sister, but she had never had contact with her. Why start now?

  She remembered she emailed once, after her mother died, but never investigated to see if anyone ever received her note or emailed her back. It’s possible that her mother’s sister read the email and responded, but it went to her spam folder.

  Adonis just never searched for it.

  She loved working for the ATF. Mostly they tracked and busted illegal firearms sales and illegal stockpiles of military grade weapons. Arms dealing and gun smuggling was a big trade in North America, a trade that didn’t get much media attention, if any. These days it was Homeland Security or ICE or that got all the media attention. There was still a lot of coverage of the war on drugs as well. The DEA benefitted from those stories. And the FBI always got top-billed in the media, while her agency was the forgotten child.

  On top of having a male name in a mostly male field, Adonis was black, a fact that some of her colleagues couldn’t help but notice and resented when she started, thinking that she had been included as a token black. Many of the higher-ups gave her grief about it. So, did the men on the ground, in training, in the field, but once she continued to show up every day, putting her all into the job, she earned respect and was given it. The negative comments stopped, and, over time, she fell into their brotherhood like any man, white or not.

  Adonis’s rise through the ranks seemed pretty fast to her male counterparts, but to her, it had not been fast at all. To her, it was because she doubled her efforts over her male counterparts. She worked twice as hard as them. She was always the first to show up and the last to leave. Some affectionately called her the Pitbull because she possessed toughness and determination and stubbornness, and she had a small frame.

  She had put in the work and now she was in command of her first major operation.

  They called the operation: Cherokee Hill, after a nearby location with miles of rolling hills to the east with the same name. Carbine was a border town in South Carolina, twenty miles south of the North Carolina state line. Despite the opportunity for a command, despite her pit-bull nature, despite wanting to prove that a black woman was just as good as or better than any man in the ATF, Adonis would come to dread ever hearing the name Cherokee Hill.

  Chapter 10

  T OWARD THE BACK of the Athenian compound, and under the snow and the hills and the dirt, Joseph Abel sat in the front passenger seat of a black panel van.

  Dobson sat in the driver’s seat, and the rest of the crew huddled in the back between assault rifles stored up along the wall on one side of the cabin and the forty-one packaged, addressed, and stamped pipe bombs secured to another.

  They moved ahead slowly along the driving trail paved on the floor of the cave. The project had taken only a month and a half because they’d used the free labor Abel had acquired from his followers.

  Luckily, there hadn’t been many obstructions to clear out in order to make the tunnel flat enough for the van to drive in and out of. The natural tunnel led away from the compound for more than a half mile and came up about a football field from a dirt road that wasn’t much wider than the track they had created.

  Dobson drove with ease, taking it slowly, being careful, being cautious.

  They left the radio off and the windows down. They listened to the sound of explosions from above. Abel closed his eyes and listened as if he was enjoying a live musical orchestra. The cacophony of explosions sounded loud and echoing, literal music to his ears.

  The explosions didn’t do much damage to the cave, not until the final one that blew the main building to pieces. That one came at the end of a string of explosions.

  At the sound of the first explosion, Abel spoke.

  “Stop here,” he ordered Dobson.

  Dobson nodded and slowed the van to a complete stop. He kept his foot on the brake and waited.

  Abel reached into his winter coat and pulled out a small burner cell phone. He dialed a number with the press of a single button. It was a preprogrammed number, set to fast dial.

  He didn’t put the phone up to h
is ear like he was making a call. He just waited and looked out the window over the trees.

  There was only one simple ring, and then the burner phone went dead.

  The other phone he was calling was installed as a trigger to several layers of C4 explosives plastered at structural points on the main building, the church, the barn, and the other buildings.

  The second after the other line received the call, the C4 exploded.

  Abel and his guys sat and listened to the discordant sounds of explosions and screams that followed. The explosions they heard with no effort. They heard the screams on the wind.

  The final explosion came as the loudest. It echoed over the trees and across the sky. The last one rocked the cavern behind them. Rocks tore off the ceiling and fell to the ground as if a giant was stomping on the ground above.

  By the touch of a button, Abel killed anyone who was left inside the main building, the church, the barn, all the remaining buildings.

  Abel smiled a cold, ominous smile. The polished whites of his teeth matched his coat.

  He smiled because he had convinced the Athenians to martyr themselves, but none of them knew about the C4 explosives. They didn’t know of the forty-one pipe bombs or what they were for. They only knew the lies they were told and they believed them as truth.

  Abel figured the ones left behind were certainly dead now. It was doubtful anyone would survive the explosives, and if they did so what? No one had all the pieces to what he was up to other than himself and his core guys.

  He delighted in it all. He delighted in the deception, in his plans, and in the carnage, he caused.

  Abel tossed the burner phone out the window and over the van’s hood. It landed on the cavern floor in front of the van.

  “Run over it. Okay. Let’s go.”

  Dobson nodded and took his foot off the brake and pressed down on the gas. The van rolled on and forward and over the burner phone, crushing it to pieces.

  Abel stared out the window, listened to the cracking and shattering of the burner phone, and smiled.

  Chapter 11

  T RICKING THE ATF into a trap, killing his followers, and covering his tracks was all part of the plan. However, one thing that Abel lived by was to expect the unexpected. Plans go to hell when the first action is taken, always. It is a good measure to anticipate that things will go wrong or at least different than expected.

  About five miles down the winding backroad from the compound and the fires—backroads that were supposed to be clear—Abel and his men came to their first unexpected obstacle.

  “General,” Dobson said.

  Abel looked forward and stared out the windshield ahead.

  “I see him.”

  Up ahead of them about a hundred yards away from the van’s grille, through overhung trees, at the intersection of the snowy, dirt road they were on and the one they needed to turn on, a lone highway patrolman was parked in the middle of the intersection.

  The light bar on his car flashed blue light through the gloom.

  “What do we do?”

  “Keep going.”

  “What if he wants me to stop?”

  “He will want us to stop. So, stop.”

  Dobson nodded and drove slowly to the end of the dirt road.

  The highway patrolman stood a few feet out in front of his cruiser’s grille. The car’s engine idled. The driver door hung open like he had just thrown the car into park and stepped out. Which is what he did. He was cruising along, patrolling the sector that he was assigned to patrol, which were just a confusing section of backroads near the Athenian compound’s property line. That’s when he thought he heard explosions, forcing him to pull over and step out. That was only moments ago.

  The highway patrolman wore a bulletproof vest outside his uniform, but under a heavy police coat. The vest was plain and obvious. It was a bulky thing that made him look like he wore a deflated tire around his torso.

  The patrolman had one hand resting on the butt of a holstered Glock.

  He watched, a little confused by the oncoming black van and the headlights coming toward him. Behind the van, far above the trees, he saw black smoke coming from the direction of what he thought had been a series of explosions. He couldn’t confirm this because, so far, he couldn’t get anyone on the radio to update him. He heard a bunch of inaudible chatter back and forth between cops and ATF agents. He heard nothing concrete, nothing definitive, not even anything that made coherent sense, not yet. There was too much excitement. He wanted to leave and drive over that way, find out what the hell was going on, but the incoming van might be worth stopping to check them out.

  Still, he was a good cop. He didn’t ask questions when the time wasn’t right for questions. And by the sounds of the chatter, this wasn’t the time to be asking questions. Dispatch had enough going on with the operation to the south.

  He was sure that he had heard something that sounded like explosions. It all had to be connected. He figured that the Athenians engaged in a firefight with the ATF. Maybe he heard grenades or explosives. A lot of times, these cult-militias are armed to the teeth with all kinds of military hardware. There was no telling what the Athenians had in their arsenal. He had never heard of a militia group using grenade or rocket launchers on law enforcement before, but it wouldn’t shock him if that’s what they were doing.

  The patrolman watched as a black van pulled up out of the gloom from the direction of the compound grounds.

  But there were no roads into the compound from there. Why were they there?

  The van’s tires rolled slowly through white mist and darkness. It pulled up slowly and stopped at a four-way stop sign, about ten yards from the toe of his boot.

  The patrolman raised both hands and stepped out into the middle of the road. He signaled for the van to stop. As it slowed, he lowered his gun hand and dropped it back onto the butt of his Glock. He walked straight and then curved to approach the driver. As he gained ground, he noticed that there were multiple people inside the van. He wasn’t sure how many because of how far away the van was, but he counted more than three. He saw through the front windshield two figures seated in the front seats, one in the driver seat and another in the passenger seat.

  He approached all the way and stopped and tapped on the window with his other gloved hand. Dobson rolled the window down manually and leaned out with a big smile on his face.

  “Hello, Officer. What’s going on?”

  The patrolman stayed back a couple of feet and peered into the van’s cabin. First, he looked at Dobson. The guy had unremarkable features. Then he looked over at Abel who wore all white. The guy smiled at him almost sinisterly. Then he craned his head and tried to look in the back of the van, but could make out nothing but shadowy figures—several of them. It was pitch black in the rear of the van.

  He unclipped a flashlight off his belt and clicked it on. He pulled it up and shined it at Dobson and then at Abel and then behind them. He saw a little more than nothing, but not much else. The hole between the front seats and the rear of the van was narrow. He saw a black guy sitting behind Abel. The guy wore all black, like he was in the military or something.

  The patrolman asked, “Did you boys hear that explosion?”

  Dobson looked at Abel as if he was looking at a commanding officer.

  Abel said, “We heard something back that way. It sounded like a bunch of transformers exploded. That’s happened out here before. There's a lot of forgotten power company equipment out here. It’s all worn and old. They really need to fix that stuff. But you know how it goes. The power company doesn’t give a crap about us country folk.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Abel smiled.

  The patrolman said, “At any rate, I don’t think it was a transformer.”

  “Oh. What was it then?” Dobson asked.

  The patrolman shifted on his foot, tilted away from them like he was making himself a harder target to hit in case one of them drew a gun on him.

 
It didn’t work.

  Right then, about as fast as a gunslinger from the Old West, Abel whipped to the left, over the center console and reached his hand across the steering wheel and out the window.

  A Glock 17 was in his hand, tight in his grip.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  Once. Twice. Three times.

  Three bullets scattered in short patterns across the patrolman’s face and neck. Red mist exploded and puffed and lingered in the air after the patrolman’s body plummeted backward.

  His body hit the snow with a loud THUD!

  Dobson knew the attack was coming. He had no doubt. He wasn’t misled or betrayed by Abel’s attack. He expected it because they had already trained for it.

  He reached to cover his ears the moment the highway patrolman denied that the explosion had been a transformer, which was smart on his end because the shots would’ve rocked his eardrums. It probably would’ve busted them.

  After the patrolman’s body was on the ground, Abel retreated and holstered his weapon, not as fast as he drew it, but with the same grace. The gun went right into his holster like it was well oiled, which it was.

  Dobson asked, “What you want us to do with him?”

  “Leave him.”

  “What about the lights? Someone will see them eventually.”

  “Let them. They’ll know it was us whether they find him dead like this or hidden in his trunk a month from now. Makes no difference.”

  One of the other guys slid the van’s side door open, and the rest of them piled out to take a look. Only one of them stepped away from the van and approached the patrolman. He stopped just over the body and stared down at the three holes in the guy’s face and neck. They were the size of nickels and bleeding out like waterspouts.

  He spun around.