Donald Harstad: A Long December

A moment later, Sally’s voice was back. She spoke very fast. “Three, he’s spotted you, get down!”

Since I was kneeling already, I just dropped down on all fours and then kicked my feet back. I was as down as I could ever get. I was aware of Hector flopping to the ground, too. He had good ears.

I kept looking toward my right, at the house, and heard a loud voice from my far left say “Police! Put your weapon down! Police!”

I saw the man with the gun, then. He was crouched down and had just stepped about two feet out of the shadow of the house. I heard a crashing sound, and saw an orange muzzle blast leap out of his shape, first horizontally and then vertical so fast it described a bright orange arc, and then it was gone as he fell backward, back into shadow.

“Holy shit!” said Hector.

“The unidentified subject is down, Three,” said Sally. He sure was. I could very faintly make out his lower legs and feet. There was no movement.

I risked a 10-4.

“They advise stay put, Three. They think there’s another suspect in the residence.”

“No problem,” I said, and meant it.

Now that I was stretched full length on the ground I was getting colder. A lot colder. Snow was beginning to fall on the exposed back of my neck, and I was reluctant to reach back and turn up the collar. Lord, that was cold. I stayed put, though. I hadn’t seen a flash or heard a report, but I was certain that somewhere there was a very good sniper who had taken out the “unknown subject” with one shot. I could stand by as long as they wanted. I was in absolutely no hurry to get up and move at this point.

“Three, there’s movement again,” said Sally, just as I saw shadows near the kitchen area. The shadows continued to the porch, and the door opened.

Exposed to the yard light, two men stood crowded together in the doorway. One was Jacob Heinman in a shirt and overalls. The other was dressed in a heavy parka, and had a ski mask pulled down over his face. He also had a weapon, which looked an awful lot like an old shotgun. He was holding Jacob in front of him.

“I have this hostage!” he yelled. I recognized the voice. It was Odeh. “I am armed.” He held the shotgun out at arm’s length, just to prove it. As he did, I heard a crack, and his gun just kept on going, out of his hand, off to his right and onto the ground. It looked for all the world as if he’d thrown it. That sniper was a really great shot.

He hollered something I didn’t get, and pulled Jacob Heinman back into the house with him. Instantly, I could see HRT people going up the little cement steps and into the door right behind him. I saw lots of movement, a flash, and then two HRT members came hustling out with Jacob and Norris Heinman. They hurried them off to my left and disappeared behind the barn. Immediately, there was a loud noise that apparently was a combination of a shot being fired and the yard light blowing up, and the barnyard was plunged into darkness.

It got vewy, vewy quiet, as Elmer Fudd would have said. I could imagine the HRT members going from room to room in complete darkness, using their night-vision goggles. Spooky, but very effective.

After about five very long minutes, I heard a helicopter approach. It sounded like “mine,” but since I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t tell. I heard it make three passes over us, and then fade as it began to circle quite a way out from the house.

A moment later, lights started coming on in the house, and two cars and an ambulance appeared in the driveway.

“It’s all clear, Three,” said Sally. “One suspect in custody, two hostages secured.”

“Ten-four!” I said. “Can we get up now?”

“Yep,” said a male voice, very near. “Name’s Howell,” said the black-clad figure that stood up on the other side of the fence that separated the hogs from the house. As he stood, a hog squealed in surprise.

I stood, too, but Hector stayed down. “Christ, man,” I said. “How long you been there?”

“Too damned long. He came over the fence and scraped his boots in the fresh snow. “Glad it’s not summer. Frozen hog shit is bad enough.”

Hector got to his feet, and the three of us walked together over to the cars, which were rapidly being covered with snow.

The Heinman brothers were being escorted back out of the barn.

“You’re still alive,” said Jacob when he saw me.

“Glad you two are, too,” I said, noticing a large swelling on his forehead.

“Too old to go easy,” he said.

The ambulance crew hustled past us and into the house.

“Better have ‘em check you out, too, Jacob,” I said.

He indicated one of the HRT members. “He’s already told me to do that.”

“Shit, I cannot believe this, man. I saw you running, and I thought, ‘what is going on with him,’ and then you said to come on with you, and I thought it was a good thing to do, and I didn’t know where we were going to…and they took that dude out, man. They snuffed his ass like that. And then when this dude comes up behind us from nowhere, man, and scares the living shit out of me…” Hector was talking very fast, coming down from an adrenaline high. He wore an enormous grin. “This was just so fucking cool!”

“Glad you liked it,” I said.

Volont came over to us. “You do tend to get into deep shit, don’t you? “he asked.

“I do what I can,” I said.

“Just FYI,” he said, coming a little closer, “our prisoner is Odeh. For sure.”

“Excellent.”

“Somebody shot him in the thigh,” he said with a broad smile. “You?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Too bad you missed his nuts,” he said. “The dead one over by the house is the one they call Chato. Odeh’s told us that already.”

“That was just stupid, Odeh holding the gun out that way,” I told him. “I thought you said he was a trained terrorist.”

“Oh, he is. He is. But he’s not one of those who’s at the tip of the spear, not by a long shot.” Volont glanced around. “It helps if you think of him as a middle manager. Sort of their version of Hawse,” he said with relish.

It turned out that the Heinman boys had towed their car into a garage in Battenberg about a week before. It had a broken timing chain, and they’d just raised the back end up and towed it behind their tractor. It was taking a long time to fix because it was a 1975 Dodge Dart, and the parts were getting a little scarce. Odeh and Chato had clobbered Jacob Heinman because they thought he was lying about the missing car. It seems they thought that Hester’s car, which was a Plymouth, belonged to the Heinmans for two bad reasons. First, it had the same pentagonal logo as the key that hung on the nail in the brothers’ kitchen. Despite what Jacob and Norris said, they didn’t believe Hester’s Plymouth was a cop car because Hester has one of the undercover radios that fit in the glove box. You can’t see it from the outside, and it uses the same antenna as the commercial radio. My car, on the other hand, has a pedestal mount for the cop radio, in plain sight through the window.

Thanks to my having the young trooper check out the “media van” that had followed us toward the Heinman brothers’ farm, Judy Mercer of KNUG was on the scene and she and her cameraman got almost all of the action at the farm on tape. She’d apparently thought my reference to being very tired was for the benefit of the other media team, and it had been her headlights I’d seen behind us. Inadvertent though it was, it was nonetheless her scoop. I was glad, because they’d caught me thundering out the door and heading toward the pigpen. I refer to that sequence every time somebody implies that I’m slow.

Odeh, I was told, talked pretty readily. I can’t prove that, because I never got to talk to him again, myself. What George told me, though, was that Odeh and Chato had been in the van, the one that Hector told us about. They had four others with them. They’d parked it, and walked in after one of the people who’d surprised us in the barn had called them on a cell phone and warned them that we were there.