He was heading for the runways. Not the best place to hide, but if by some chance he could get across them he might be able to escape into the countryside. He tried to run faster, but he knew that Stone was gaining. He turned and fired another shot.
The bullet plowed into the tarmac in front of Stone, not slowing him a bit. By turning to fire, Williams had lost a second or two of his advantage. Stone increased his effort.
The lights of the terminal spilled out onto the tarmac now. Soon they would be getting into the landing area. Stone didn't want that. Planes could get in his way.
He made a flying leap and grabbed at
Williams's
legs. He got them and held on. The men fell in a tangle.
Williams's
breath went out of him as he hit, but he kept struggling. The fall hadn't helped Stone, either. Williams struck at him with the pistol, opening up the cut that
Feliz
had made earlier. Stone felt a jolt of pain.
Williams fought his way to a sitting position, Stone still clinging to his legs. "This is it, Stone," Williams grunted. "You've caused me enough trouble. Now it's your turn."
He aimed his pistol at Stone's head.
"Don't do it!" Rosales called out.
Williams looked up. The cop was in a crouch with a two-handed grip on his pistol, which was aimed right at
Williams's
heart.
"Drop the gun, Williams."
Williams watched Rosales. "What if I don't?"
"Then I shoot."
"I can kill Stone first. You drop your gun."
"Lots of people have tried to kill me," Stone informed the D.E.A. man. "They haven't had a lot of luck at it."
He released
Williams's
legs abruptly and rolled quickly to the side.
Williams snapped off a quick shot at Stone, missed, then swiveled to face Rosales.
Rosales shot Williams three times.
Williams fell backward, his head bouncing off the runway. Dead.
Stone got up and brushed himself off. "Thanks, Bill." Rosales had walked over and stood looking down at Williams.
"I didn't want to have to kill him."
Stone touched the body with his toe. "He didn't give you much choice."
"No, he didn't." Rosales put away his pistol. "It's too bad that there have to be cops like him, scum who sell their souls. They make the rest of us look bad."
"No one judges people like you by people like him," Stone said.
Rosales shook his head. "Sometimes they do. You watch the papers. The big headlines will not tell about the destruction of the drug lab. They will tell about the informer within the D.E.A."
"Don't count on it. Carol called the papers with the drug lab story. The D.E.A. gets all the credit. Jack
Wofford
is the agent who broke things and did most of the work, even though he died in the fighting. That's too good a story to let something like this take precedence."
"I hope you're right. It would be nice to think that the good guys do win one now and then."
They left Williams lying there for security to clean up and went back into the airport.
K
athi
Wofford
was standing up, surrounded by Stone's team. They all looked at Stone and Rosales when they came back through the doors.
"It's over," Stone told them. "This time, it's really over."
"And we've closed one more loophole," Rosales reminded them. "Not only did you shut down one of the biggest drug operations in the state of Florida, you've now cut off a pipeline of information that was flowing right out of D.E.A. headquarters."
"Hey," Hog told him, "looks like you finally did your part, too, copper."
Rosales smiled. "Thanks. Anytime you need a little bit of help, just let me know."
I
n a war, someone always dies.
Sometimes, most of the time, it's the wrong someone.
As the plane left the runway, Stone knew that his old friend had died in a good cause.
Kathi
Wofford
, watching the takeoff with Rosales, knew it too.
But that didn't make Jack
Wofford's
death any easier to bear, or their grief any less.
They had to think about the other side. The drug lab that had been destroyed, the drug gangs that had been decimated.
A good soldier had been taken prisoner, and he had died in action, but his death had not been in vain, no. His sacrifice had gotten Stone involved, and Stone's team had ripped through the Florida drug underground.
They had left devastation behind them.
And they had left those papers with Rosales.
The papers had spelled doom for Carl Williams, and they would do the same for others. Many Colombian sources had been named, along with ships and pilots of planes. Rosales would put the information to good use and slow down the drug trade even more.
As the plane soared northward through the night, Stone thought of the thousands of other prisoners his team—and Jack
Wofford
—had just freed; prisoners who did not even know of their bondage.
The potential addicts who would now never be hooked, who would now never know the bondage of drugs and the prison without bars that their addiction could create.
If even one of those prisoners had been freed, though he or she would never know it, then Mark Stone's mission had been a success.