Stand Your Ground (26 page)

Under the circumstances, though, a matter of inches was as good as a mile.

“Keep going, John Howard!” Kincaid called to Stark as they neared the entrance. “Get inside!”

He turned back and crouched as the pistol in his hand spat lead, too. Several of the terrorists were down, but more had appeared to swell the ranks of the attackers.

Stark hesitated, but only for a second. He was the biggest of the four Americans on the wrong side of the door, and the gap was barely big enough for him to get through it now. He had to turn sideways to fit his shoulders through it as he ducked into the sally port.

“Now you two, go!” Kincaid shouted to Riley and Cambridge. “I'll hold them off.”

Cambridge's pistol was empty—for the moment, anyway. Grimacing, he straightened, whirled toward the door, and gasped in pain as a bullet ripped a bloody furrow across the outside of his upper left arm. He was able to stay on his feet, though, and stumbled past the closing door.

“Go, go!” Kincaid yelled again at Riley.

“Not without you!” she told him as she fired the last shot in her magazine.

Snarling, Kincaid twisted toward her, grabbed her arm, and shoved her through the narrow gap. She reached back through, snagged his shirt collar, and tugged him toward her. Taken by surprise, Kincaid fell through the opening and tumbled to the floor, taking Riley with him.

A few last slugs from the terrorists screamed through the gap, then the door thudded shut. Bullets continued to strike it, but small-arms fire would never penetrate that barrier.

Kincaid was lying on top of Riley. He wasn't a huge guy, so she wasn't having any trouble breathing. In fact, under different circumstances this arrangement might be downright pleasurable, she thought.

To one side of the room, Cambridge cursed bitterly as Stark examined the wound on his arm. Riley barely heard him as she and Kincaid lay there catching their breath.

“Are you . . . all right?” Kincaid asked after a moment.

“Yeah. How about you?”

“Those guys are terrible shots—thank goodness.”

“They're not much on strategy, either,” Riley said. “They spot an enemy, they just chase after him, yelling and shooting.”

“Five hundred years ago, they would have done the same thing, only they'd be waving scimitars.”

“Yeah, the more things change . . .”

This was one of the craziest conversations she'd ever had, Riley thought. Lying on a hard floor with a ruggedly good-looking man, their faces only inches apart, weapons scattered around them, talking about bloodthirsty fanatics . . .

She glanced past Kincaid's shoulder, saw hate-twisted faces leering down at them through the reinforced, bulletproof glass of the door's window, and gasped.

“Damn!” she said.

Kincaid rolled smoothly off her, picked up the pistol he'd dropped, and came to his feet. He stood at the window, glaring defiantly through the window at the terrorists who had their faces pressed to the glass.

It was quite a contrast, Riley thought as she stood up and moved beside him.

Behind her, Stark told Cambridge, “You'll be all right. That graze probably hurts like blazes, but it's not bleeding too bad.”

“You're right about the hurting like blazes part,” Cambridge said. “We need to pull back and close the inner door.” When Riley and Kincaid ignored him, he went on, “Hey, you two. Come on. We're falling back.”

The terrorists were still raging impotently on the other side of the outer door. Their mouths twisted and spittle flew against the glass as they spewed their hatred.

She was looking at an ancient evil, Riley thought, an ugly thing that had come down through the ages like some atavistic horror and still threatened mankind.

It wasn't Islam, per se—she didn't hate Muslims and had absolutely no desire to see all of them wiped off the face of the earth. She believed that everybody was free to worship as they wanted—or not worship—as long as they didn't hurt anybody else. She knew that some Muslims even believed the same way.

But an ever-expanding core of fanatics existed who believed that the only way for them to worship their God was to eradicate everybody who didn't have exactly the same brand of faith that they did. That hatred wasn't limited just to the so-called infidels, either, which explained why different Islamic sects had been slaughtering each other for hundreds and hundreds of years.

It was like Baptists and Methodists going to war and trying to kill each other over the question of whether to sprinkle or dunk when it came to baptisms.

Crazy.

She put a hand on Kincaid's arm and said, “Come on, Lucas, we need to go. We can't do any good here.”

“Nothing's going to do these lunatics any good except a bullet in the brain,” Kincaid grated. “I just hope we get the chance to make some more of them all better.”

By late afternoon, the cordon was in place around the town of Fuego and Hell's Gate prison. Air Force jets continued to enforce the no-fly zone. Roadblocks had been set up on all roads leading into town, and heavily armed personnel from the Department of Homeland Security patrolled the open countryside in armored vehicles to make sure no one tried to sneak through that way. Real-time satellite feeds from the nation's defense network covered the area and were monitored continuously. The intel from those feeds was passed on to the DHS troops so they were able to intercept anyone who tried to get to Fuego. Most of those were reporters, but there were some civilians who had loved ones in the town and wanted to find out if they were still alive.

Everyone who was intercepted was detained. They would be taken to various black sites and interrogated, since anyone who attempted to defy the orders of the President was regarded as a terrorist—especially if it could be determined that they had ever expressed any conservative political views in social media or elsewhere, even in face-to-face conversations with friends.

Coverage of the crisis in West Texas had preempted almost all the programming on broadcast and cable networks. Well-groomed news anchors with nary a hair out of place reported solemnly that there was nothing to report. Equally well-groomed pundits speculated not only on what was happening but also on the causes, and eventually all of them reached the conclusion that it was all the fault of the Republicans, especially George W. Bush. He had set the stage for this catastrophe, they all agreed with self-satisfied nods.

The White House had no comment except to say that the investigation into the matter continued. Well-placed leaks, however, indicated the conclusion that the incident had begun as a totally justified protest by peaceful Islamic-rights advocates.

In the governor's mansion in Austin, Maria Delgado snatched up the cell phone on the desk in her study as it began to ring. Without making any small talk first, she asked, “What have you found out, Tom?”

“Unfortunately, not much yet,” Colonel Atkinson replied. “Sergeant Porter and I managed to penetrate the DHS perimeter without much trouble and we're on our way to Fuego now. We're close enough to see some smoke.” He paused. “It doesn't look good, Maria. In fact, it looks like a war zone, and I think it's gonna just be worse the closer we get.”

Delgado massaged her temples, but that did nothing to make her headache go away. She said, “You're on foot?”

“That's right. Between our camo and the stealth gear we're using, it's going to be hard for the sats to pick us up. I assume the government's monitoring the area using NSA and DOD satellites?”

“Washington doesn't tell me anything, you know that. But I'm sure you're right, Tom.”

She could practically see the grin on Atkinson's face as the colonel said, “It's a good thing Texas has its own encrypted communications satellite, then, isn't it? At least once Porter and I get to Fuego, you'll have a secure comm link in there.”

He was right about that, Delgado thought. The remaining liberals in the Texas House and Senate would pitch a hissy fit, as would the media, if they found out how she had used some of the state's surplus funds to put what was disguised as a privately owned industrial satellite into space. Texas was one of the few states left in the country where the economy hadn't been completely crushed by progressive Democratic policies and punitive regulations, so she had decided that she might as well put some of that revenue to good use.

The communications satellite was just one of the measures she had taken to prepare for the clash with Washington that she regarded as inevitable. Although she didn't like the secrecy this effort involved, it was necessary to keep all her plans from being short-circuited.

The liberals and the media were really
good
at those hissy fits. They had raised the outraged reaction to a high art form eagerly embraced by the segments of the country who wanted to keep their benefactors in power. Even in a holdout state like Texas, they could cause a lot of trouble.

“Whatever you find in Fuego, let me know, Tom,” Delgado told Atkinson. “I'm putting my trust in you. If we need to pull the trigger on the emergency measures we've talked about in the past—”

“Don't worry, Governor. You'll be my first and only call.”

Atkinson broke the connection.

Delgado set the secure phone down and sent a silent prayer heavenward for the maverick colonel and Sgt. Porter.

The sun had started to drop toward the western horizon as Lee Blaisdell looked around at his motley “army.” He and Lt. Flannery and the others had rounded up about forty more people—mostly men but a few women, too—from outlying farms and ranches in the area. That gave Lee and the Ranger a force of approximately fifty fighters to take on hundreds of terrorists.

But Sam Houston and the Texican army had been badly outnumbered at San Jacinto, too, Lee reminded himself. He recalled that much from Texas History class when he was in seventh grade. Those ol' boys had put Santa Anna's much larger army to rout and captured the Mexican dictator himself, winning Texas its freedom and ushering in almost a decade as an independent republic.

A lot of people thought Texas might have been better off staying a republic rather than joining the United States, and the way things had gone in recent years, Lee was beginning to think maybe that opinion had some validity.

You couldn't go back and change the past, though, and even if you could, it probably wouldn't be a good idea. Best just to deal with the here and now, no matter how bad it was.

They had the two jeeps and the weapons they had captured from the terrorists. The new recruits were in pickups for the most part, although there were a couple of old cars in the convoy that was forming up. People were armed with everything from double-barreled shotguns and antique but functioning revolvers to modern assault rifles and 9 mm pistols. One old fella even had a black powder cannon that he had built himself. They had lifted it into the back of a pickup and fastened it down, then loaded a supply of black powder and a crate full of three-inch cannonballs, too.

“All right,” Lee said as he addressed his assembled force. “Nobody's cell phone works, so we can assume the terrorists disabled all the towers somehow. But the radio at the police station ought to work, so we need to take that objective. The best way to do that is to distract the enemy with most of our force and lure some of them away. Then a smaller group of us can hit the station and get control of it without the rest of the terrorists knowing what we're doing. We need to let the outside authorities know what's happened in Fuego and find out when help is going to get here.”

“It's not gonna get here,” Spence Parker said. “If it was, it would've already been here. They've all abandoned us.”

Lee had a hunch the football player might be right, but he didn't want to admit that out loud. Not even to himself, really, because that would mean giving up hope.

“We don't know that,” he said. “And I sure as hell don't intend to roll over and surrender to the same bastards who wiped out half the town. I don't reckon any of you want to do that, either.”

He got a few shouts of agreement in response to that. When the group had settled down again, he went on, “Half a dozen of us are going to the police station: me, Lieutenent Flannery, Raymond, Gibby, Spence, and one of the lieutenant's men. The rest of you will circle around and approach the other end of town. I don't figure you'll have to look for the enemy. They'll come to you. Hit them as hard as you can for a few minutes and then get the hell out of there. While you're doing that, the rest of us will be taking over the police station.”

“How will you know when to attack the place?” one of the men asked.

“We'll hear the shooting,” Lee answered with a grim smile. “Any other questions?”

Silence and a lot of determined looks were all he got in return. He jerked his head in a curt nod, satisfied that they were doing all they could to free Fuego from the grip of the invaders.

“Let's move out,” he said simply.

As the others were climbing into their vehicles, Janey came over to Lee and said, “I wish you'd let me come with you.”

“You know that's not a good idea,” he told her. “I'd be worrying about you and watching out for you, and before you know it, one of those sumbitches'd shoot me.”

“But I could watch your back.”

“The fellas with me will do that. Listen, Janey, the one thing that'll give me the best chance of comin' through this alive is knowing that you're safe.” Lee took a deep breath. “That's why I told Martin to drop you off at the Simmons farm with the rest of the ladies before the fellas go on to town.”

Janey's eyes widened. Lee saw the familiar spark of anger and indignation in them.

“You . . . you damn sexist!” she sputtered. “You think women can't fight?”

“I know you can. I've seen you do it.”

“There are women in combat in the military now, you know.”

“I know,” Lee said. “I got no problem with that. But they ain't fightin' side by side with their husbands and boyfriends, either. They'd be tryin'to take care of their fellas, and their fellas'd be tryin' to take care of them, and it'd just be a bad situation all the way around. You know I'm right about this, Janey.”

“Blast it,” she muttered, and he knew that was her way of admitting that he was indeed right.

“C'mere,” he said.

He drew her into his arms and kissed her. Her head tilted up naturally so that his mouth found hers. Their kisses had always been passionate, but this one had an extra urgency because they didn't know when—or if—they would see each other again.

“You be careful,” she whispered when their lips drew apart.

“I intend to be,” Lee said. “Bubba's gonna need his daddy while he's growin' up.”

“Damn right he will.”

Lee grinned, patted her on the butt, and turned away while he could still force himself to let her go. Without looking back, he strode over to Gibby's pickup, where the passenger door was standing open. He stepped up into the cab, paused there standing in the door, and circled his arm over his head, signaling the others to fire up their vehicles.

It was time to start trying to take back their town.