Stand Your Ground (5 page)

Sunday morning promised a beautiful autumn day when the sun rose in a deep blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. The temperature was around fifty degrees, just low enough to be pleasantly cool. A light wind blew out of the south, indicating that the day would warm up nicely later.

The café near the motel was the only place open for breakfast, and it was doing a fairly good business when Stark came in. Empty stools were plentiful at the counter, though, so he took one of them. The café wasn't really that busy because most people didn't go out for breakfast before heading to church, and Fuego was a churchgoing town, at least compared to most places these days. Christians had been so belittled for so long that many of them elsewhere had drifted away from attending services.

“Coffee, hon?” the redheaded waitress asked Stark as she came along the counter toward him. She already had the carafe from the coffeemaker in one hand and a cup and saucer in the other.

“Yes, ma'am,” Stark said with a smile.

She filled the cup, pushed a bowl with little plastic containers of half-and-half and packets of various sweeteners within his reach, and asked, “What'll you have?”

“Stack of pancakes with bacon and hash browns,” Stark replied.

She grinned at him, nodded, and said, “Can't beat the classics, can you?”

“No, ma'am, you sure can't.”

An elderly man in overalls, a flannel shirt, and a gimme cap sat two stools over. He gave Stark a friendly nod and asked, “You go to the game the other night?”

“I happened to be there,” Stark said. He knew how important high school football was to the folks in towns like Fuego. They'd be talking about the McElhaney game all week . . . until the next game.

“Mighty excitin',” the old man said. “Ain't had much of a team so far this year, but that game might've been enough to turn it around.” He sighed. “If our startin' quarterback hadn't broke his leg, that is. Gonna have to go with a underclassman now.”

“Have you heard how the boy's doing?” Stark asked, mildly curious.

“He's still in the hospital. Ought to be able to go home in another day or two, his daddy said. Bert Frazier—that's Andy's daddy—stopped by here for coffee a while ago on his way to work. He's a guard out at the prison, you know. Good fella. Used to be a cop. He'd been by the hospital to see his boy.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear the youngster's doing as well as can be expected.”

“Yeah, he'll be all right. Done for the year, though, as far as playin' football. That'll hurt his chances of gettin' a good scholarship. Tough break.” The old man grunted. “No pun intended.”

Stark smiled and drank some of his coffee.

The waitress brought his food a minute later, and he dug in with enjoyment. The talkative old-timer let him eat a while, then asked, “You ain't from around here, are you, mister?”

“No, just visiting,” Stark said.

“Thought so. I know just about everybody in town. Ain't hard for me to pick out a stranger . . . and the town's full of 'em this mornin', let me tell you.”

“It is?” Stark said with a slight frown.

“Yep. Seen some of 'em down at the grocery store parkin' lot and here and there around town. Funny-lookin' fellas, too. Thought at first they was Mexicans, comin' in for some sort o' construction project, but I ain't so sure about that. Looked to me like they might be some other kind o' foreigner.”

That was odd, Stark mused. His first thought at hearing the old man's words had been a worry that cartel soldiers might be moving into the town for some reason. The whole area had had so much trouble with drug smugglers, with the problem continuing to grow worse over the past decade because of budget cuts and what passed for immigration reform to Democratic politicians, and Stark's personal history included so many violent clashes with the cartel that it was natural his thoughts would turn in that direction.

But then the old-timer had said that he thought the men he'd seen weren't Hispanic. What did that leave?

Middle Eastern, Stark thought as his frown deepened.

Alarm bells went off in the back of his head.

He finished his food, then asked the waitress, “Where's the police department?”

She looked surprised as she asked, “Something wrong with the food?”

“What? Oh, no.” Stark laughed and shook his head. “The food was great. Perfect. Wonderful bacon. No, I need to talk to somebody about something that doesn't have anything to do with the food.”

She blew out a mock sigh of relief and said, “That's good to hear. The police department's a couple of blocks up Main, on the other side of the street.”

Stark nodded and said, “Yeah, I think remember seeing it when I was walking around town yesterday.”

“You probably won't find anybody there but the dispatcher, though,” the waitress told him. “And there'll only be one officer on patrol on a Sunday morning like this.”

“Well, it probably doesn't amount to anything,” Stark said. “I just want to check on something.”

“All right, hon. Hope it works out for you.”

Stark paid his check, nodded, said so long to the old-timer he'd been talking to, and left the café. He walked back over to the motel, and as he did, he saw a couple of men striding quickly from one of the units to another.

With their dark hair and skin, they could have been taken for Hispanic, all right, he thought. But like the old man in the café, he didn't think they were.

Instead of going to his room, Stark got into his pickup and started it. He backed out of the space and pulled from the parking lot onto Main Street. It took him less than a minute to reach the Fuego Police Department, which was housed in a tan brick building with some shrubs growing along the front. The entrance was down at the end of the building, facing a parking lot to the side.

When Stark went inside, he found a burly young man sitting behind a counter at a console that included a radio and a computer. He wore the same sort of uniform that Stark had seen on Chief Charles Cobb the day before. The dispatcher swiveled his chair around to face Stark and asked, “Help you, mister?”

Now that Stark had a better look at the young man, he realized the dispatcher had Down syndrome. He said, “The chief doesn't happen to be here, does he?”

“Nope. Just me. Officer Raymond Brady. Who're you? I don't know you, do I?”

Stark smiled and said, “No, I don't live here in Fuego. I'm just visiting. My name's Stark.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Stark. What can I do for you?”

“You're the dispatcher?”

“That's right. Do you have a crime to report, or an accident, something like that?”

Stark shook his head. “No, what I'd really like to do is talk to the chief.”

“Give me your cell phone number. I'll see if I can get in touch with him and tell him to give you a call.”

That seemed reasonable to Stark. He couldn't very well claim this was an emergency and insist that Officer Brady call the chief on the radio right this minute. For all Stark knew, there was absolutely nothing threatening going on in Fuego this morning. It was just a hunch on his part that something might be wrong.

But given the fact that 150 Islamic terrorists had been locked up in Hell's Gate a few days earlier, and now there was a sudden influx into town of men who might be Middle Eastern . . .

Well, it didn't take a genius to see that
something
might be up.

Stark took a business card from a plastic holder on the counter, turned it over, wrote down his name and cell phone number on the back, and handed it to Raymond Brady.

“The chief can get hold of me at this number anytime.”

“Maybe you should tell me what this is about, so I can pass it along to the chief,” Raymond suggested.

Stark hesitated, but only for a second. Raymond seemed competent and sharp as a tack.

“I'm a little worried because there seems to be a lot of strangers in town.”

“
You're
a stranger in town,” Raymond pointed out. “You said so yourself.”

“That's true, but I think the ones I'm talking about might be looking to cause some trouble.” Stark thought about the fact that Alexis Devereaux and Phillip Hamil were both in town, too, and went on, “I think there's going to be some sort of protest demonstration about those new prisoners out at Hell's Gate.”

“The terrorists, you mean.”

“Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if there were TV crews here later.”

“Fuego's gonna be on TV?” Raymond asked.

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“That would be something.”

“But maybe not something good,” Stark said. “Anyway, that's what I want to talk to the chief about. I was going to suggest that he be on the alert for some sort of disturbance.”

“Chief Cobb's always on the alert for trouble,” Raymond said with a note of pride and admiration in his voice. “And I'm his number one lookout.”

“I'm sure you are. If you'll give him my number . . .”

“I will,” the young man promised.

Stark smiled again, nodded, and said, “Thanks.” He went back out to his pickup, hoping that it wouldn't be long before the chief got in touch with him.

As he started to pull out of the parking lot, he hesitated again, then turned left instead of right, back toward the motel. There was nothing he needed from there right now, and even though he wasn't supposed to show up at the prison until 11:30, he decided to drive out there now. He suspected that the demonstration, if there was one, would take place here in town, but it might move out to the prison later.

Stark had already planned to warn his old friend that trouble might be on the way. Now he was more sure than ever that George needed to know something was up.

Fuego was small enough that it had just one of numerous things. The town's lone apartment complex sat on the western edge of town. Kincaid had rented an efficiency there when he arrived some eight months earlier, paid for with money some of his friends had gotten to him.

Men who lived and worked in the shadows knew that there might come a day when they would need to disappear with little or no warning. Untraceable funds were stashed all over the world for just such emergencies. They had access to all sorts of well-documented false identities as well.

Officially, Lucas Kincaid was not one of those shadow warriors, but he had worked with many of them—Special Forces operators, SEALS, Company men. When the incident at Warraz al-Sidar occurred, Kincaid had known that his military career was over. He had gone too far off-book. If he turned himself in, he would be court-martialed, and he knew that getting off with just a dishonorable discharge would be an incredible stroke of luck.

It was more likely he would have wound up in some deep, dark hole nobody even knew about, spending the rest of his life in the most secret of top-secret, black-site prisons.

So he had reached out—into the shadows—and wound up with a new name, a new life, a new job.

“Lucas Kincaid” had the background to get him hired at the Baldwin Correctional Facility. It hadn't occurred to him that he might wind up in charge of the prison library, but Kincaid had surprised himself by finding that he liked it. He had always been a big reader, and he had organizational skills.

The best part about it was that nobody ever got killed over an overdue book. At least they hadn't so far.

And nobody at the prison or in Fuego had a clue who he really was. Things might stay that way indefinitely if he was just smart enough not to call attention to himself.

On Sunday morning he slept late. When he got up he worked out for an hour. The fight a couple of nights earlier had told him that he needed to get back into better shape. Then he fixed himself an egg-white omelet, washed it down with a couple cups of coffee, and felt pretty darned good. He didn't feel like sitting around all day and watching TV, that was for sure.

There was always work to do at the prison. The library was closed on Sunday, but he could go in and update the circulation statistics. Of course, he could get one of his assistants to do that—but not Simon Winslow, who wasn't allowed on computers even if they weren't connected to the Internet. One of the other guys could handle the job, though.

But in that case, what would he do today, Kincaid asked himself, and with that thought in his head he got dressed, piled into his Jeep, and headed for Hell's Gate.

Not for the first time—not hardly for the first time—he felt uneasy because he wasn't armed. He could have gotten a CHL using his new identity, but that was one more digital trail. He could have carried illegally, or at least had a knife in his pocket.

But he would have had to leave any weapons in the Jeep when he got to the prison, in order to get through the metal detectors, and it didn't seem worth the trouble. He had a tire iron that was easy to grab if he needed to, and it wasn't illegal anywhere.

The Jeep had satellite radio. That was necessary out here in far West Texas, where regular radio signals could be few and far between. It was tuned to a news station, and as Kincaid drove toward the prison he heard a breaking story about how the body of a United States senator had been discovered in a motel in Virginia, not far from Washington, D.C. The police were being stingy with the details, of course, but a source close to the case had leaked the fact that the woman had died of a broken neck and her death was considered a homicide.

That was a damned shame, thought Kincaid. He didn't know the senator, didn't agree with her politics at all—she'd made a habit of saying inflammatory things about the military, about the Second Amendment, about economic redistribution—but still Kincaid hated to hear about anybody being murdered. Life was a precious thing and shouldn't be squandered.

Well, most of the time that was true, anyway, he told himself. Anybody who had killed as many people as he had ought to qualify such statements.

The only things the cops were admitting at the moment were that they had no suspects and no clue as to the motive behind the senator's death. When the report was over, Kincaid pushed the tuning button on the Jeep's steering wheel, found a metal station playing a Hammerfall song, and cranked up the volume as he drove toward the cliffs, shining red in the morning light.

Charles Cobb's hand hovered over the butt of the revolver holstered on his hip. As he waited for the other man to make his move, Cobb kept his breathing steady. A man needed calm nerves at a time like this.

The other man—visible only to Cobb since he was imaginary—slapped leather. Smoothly, Cobb pulled the double-action Colt .45 and squeezed off all five rounds in its cylinder in less than three seconds. The shots came so close together they sounded like one long roar instead of individual blasts.

As the echoes rolled away across the flats, Cobb studied the target he had set up. The shots had a nice grouping, all within the chest of the man-shaped silhouette. Cobb didn't think his draw had been quite as fast as the others he had made earlier that morning, but it was still pretty fast.

He reloaded the Colt and returned it to the gunfighter's leather he wore. Other than the holster and gun belt, he wore his regulation uniform because he was taking the afternoon shift. Most of his officers were football fans, so they could see the NFL games that way. Cobb enjoyed watching football, but he didn't really keep up with it. Baseball was his game, yet another way in which he was sort of a throwback.

Nobody expected a black man to be interested in Old West gunfighters, but ever since seeing Western movies starring Fred Williamson and Jim Brown when he was a kid, deep down Charlie Cobb had wanted to be fast on the draw. Police work gave him a familiarity with handguns, so eventually he had taken the step of getting a Colt .45 replica and starting to practice with it. He wasn't married, so he had his work and his hobby, and he devoted long hours to both of them.

He was pretty good with the Colt by now, he thought. Probably nowhere near as fast as the true pistoleers like Wild Bill Hickok, Smoke Jensen, Ben Thompson, John Wesley Hardin, and Frank Morgan, but still pretty slick on the draw. Of course in this modern era, five rounds in a revolver didn't amount to much—he kept the sixth chamber empty, just like the old-timers—but Cobb still took pride in his ability.

He had driven out to his favorite spot to practice, several miles north of town, the same way he did most Sunday mornings. There were no houses anywhere around, so the shots wouldn't disturb anybody. And nobody could see what he was doing and make fun of him, either.

He packed up his targets and headed back toward Fuego. He had driven about a mile when his cell phone rang. There was no service in the area where he practiced, but Raymond could reach him there on the radio if something important came up.

It was the station calling now, Cobb saw as he picked up the phone from the seat beside him. He thumbed the button to answer it and asked, “What is it, Raymond?”

“A man came in looking for you a while ago, Chief,” Raymond Brady replied. “He wanted you to call him.”

“You get his name and number?”

“Yes, sir. He said his name was Stark.”

Cobb frowned slightly and asked, “John Howard Stark?”

“He didn't say the rest of his name, just Stark. Let me look at the card where he wrote down his number . . . Yes, sir, he wrote John Howard Stark. You were right.”

Cobb had felt a little tingle of... something . . . when he realized John Howard Stark was in Fuego. Not fear, certainly, and not even apprehension. More of an awareness that trouble had a habit of following John Howard Stark around.

“Did he say what he wanted to talk to me about?”

“He said that there were strangers in town and Fuego was gonna be on TV.”

That didn't really make sense to Cobb, but he supposed Stark could explain. He said, “Go ahead and give me the number, Raymond.”

The dispatcher did so. Cobb had a remarkable memory and knew he wouldn't have any trouble recalling it. Then Raymond asked, “Should I have called you on the radio about this, Chief? I didn't want to disturb you while you weren't on duty.”

“No, it's all right,” Cobb told the young man. “I'm sure that whatever this is about, it won't amount to anything.”

He said good-bye and broke the connection, then dialed the number Raymond had given him.

 

 

A single two-lane blacktop road ran from Fuego to the Baldwin Correctional Facility. That isolation and difficulty of access made it even more secure.

Some modern prisons looked like industrial and manufacturing facilities—although with a lot more barbed wire—but Hell's Gate was everything grim and gray that a prison should be. The main building was an imposing three-story heap of concrete, steel, and bulletproof glass. A narrower two-story wing jutted out from its north side. Windowless, it was a secure, bunker-like structure where the worst of the worst were housed.

Those prisoners had been shifted around, however, some confined in solitary, others deemed lesser risks mixed in with the general population. The ultramax wing was now home to the hundred and fifty Islamic terrorists who had been brought here.

George Baldwin explained that to Stark as they stood in the warden's office and Baldwin pointed to a map of the prison mounted on the wall.

“There's an old-fashioned sally port between the rest of the prison and the ultramax wing,” Baldwin said. “That wing has its own backup generator for lights, water, and ventilation if something happens to the power in the rest of the prison. There's also a supply of food in case of emergency. Just MREs, but enough to keep the prisoners from starving for a while. We can isolate that whole wing if necessary.”

“I can see why the Justice Department picked Hell's Gate to house those terrorists, if they were bound and determined to transfer them from military prisons,” Stark said.

Baldwin grunted and said, “If you ask me, the best thing to do with those bastards would be to stick 'em in front of firing squads. It wouldn't take long to solve the problem.”

“I don't know if that would solve anything. It would just make the fanatics in the Middle East regard them as martyrs even more than they already do.”

“Yeah, well, that's the problem, John Howard,” Baldwin said. “The fanatics aren't in the Middle East anymore. They're here, right in our own backyards.”

Stark couldn't argue with that, not after what he had seen in Fuego this morning. Two men didn't make a mob of protesters, but that's what the signs pointed to. Baldwin agreed with him, too.

“How about the National Guard, or even the regular Army?” Stark asked. “Can you call them in to help keep order if you need to?”

Baldwin grimaced and shook his head.

“I'm only allowed to request assistance from civilian authorities. No military. The Federal Protective Service was disbanded after that nerve gas fiasco, or at least it was supposed to be, but from what I hear it was just absorbed back into the Department of Homeland Security. It's still the same bunch of jackbooted thugs.”

Stark nodded. Like everybody else in the country, he had heard about how the former president had tried to bypass the Second Amendment and use his own personal Gestapo to seize all the guns in the little town of Home, Texas, about 150 miles from here. As if that weren't bad enough, the president had then ordered his men to use a new chemical weapon developed at a secret government lab on American citizens. It had cost the president his job, and he was now living in exile overseas, where he had come from to start with, rather than do time in prison where he belonged.

A lot of people had hoped that near-disaster would permanently alter the direction of the country, but after a short time when it appeared that might happen, the media had gone back to propping up their sacred “progressive” cause and smearing anyone who dared to oppose it, and things had returned pretty much to the sorry state that resembled “normal” in the United States these days.

“Sounds like it could be a mess, all right,” Stark agreed with his old friend. “I suppose we'll have to wait and see what happens, though.”

Baldwin sighed and said, “Yeah. In the meantime, you want to have a look around?”

“Sounds good to me,” Stark said.