Stuart Woods - Heat

“He certainly seems very competent,” Jesse said.

“Yes, but suspicious to the point of paranoia. That’s a good trait, up to a point, but Kurt went past the point a long time ago, and he’s beginning to make a nuisance of himself. You saw the way he behaved over George Little’s death.”

“Well, yes; I did find that surprising. Flabbergasting might be a better word.”

“Yes, flabbergasting. Pat Casey was furious with him.” He looked up. “Jesse, is there anything you want?”

“How do you mean?”

“Anything. Anything that you don’t already have, I mean.”

“Not at the moment. I’m very content with my lot.”

“If there’s anything you ever want, you come to me,” Coldwater said. “Doesn’t matter how difficult it might be. You just come to me, and it’s yours.”

“Why, thank you, Pastor,” Jesse said. “I’m very grateful.”

“Well, you’d better get back to work,” he said. “Anything to report on Wood Products?”

“Well, no sir; I haven’t spent a great deal of time there since we talked about it.”

“Of course not; you let me know when you have something.”

They shook hands, and Jesse left. Driving back to the plant, he reflected on how he might get his hands on that safe. When the feds launched their raid, he had to get to that safe before anybody else.

Jesse waited until the end of the week before he called Kip. It was hard to wait, and he had grown very tense. He was having a hard time sleeping, and when he did his dreams were confusing and disturbing. He was always back in New York, walking down Fifth Avenue, window shopping, and what he saw had an awful effect on him. He would wake up, shaking and bathed in sweat, and not be able to remember what he had dreamed. His appetite diminished and he didn’t feel well. Herman Muller had commented on how pale he looked.

On Friday at lunchtime, when the office was empty, he called Washington. He no longer felt comfortable doing this on the mountain, so he did it from his desk, from where he could see anyone who came up the office stairs.

“This is Fuller.”

“Kip, it’s Jesse.”

“Hi.” He didn’t sound happy about the call.

“What’s going on? What was the reaction to the photographs?”

“Well, the shots weren’t what we hoped they’d be; all we could see was hallways and boxes; hard to tell what was in the boxes.”

“I did what you asked with the equipment you gave me.”

“I know, Jesse, and it’s not your fault.”

“Haven’t you heard from Charley Bottoms?”

“Yeah, but Barker—”

“Barker what?”

“Barker is getting paranoid about this, I think. He seems to believe that you and Charley are somehow colluding to make an ass of him.”

“What about the shots of the blueprints?”

“The shots are a little washed out. The camera was loaded with a special, low-light film, and you lit the plans too brightly when you photographed them.”

“All I used was a desk lamp.”

“It was too much; you’d have been better off just using ambient light.”

“Listen to me, Kip: our deal was that I would get evidence to indict Coldwater and his partners. I’ve done that; I’ve provided you with both testimony and documentary evidence, and Charley’s testimony confirms it. Now I’m at the end of my tether, and you’re going to have to move your ass if you want my testimony in court.”

Kip ignored this. “Let me ask you, since you know the territory, how many men are we going to need, and how should we come in?”

Jesse thought for a minute. “First of all, the best cops in the world are not going to be enough; you’re going to need soldiers, and I don’t mean the Idaho National Guard. I would get the attorney general to go to the president and request crack troops, trained in urban tactics, street fighting.”

“That’s not going to be easy,” Kip replied.

“You’re going to have to do a lot of things simultaneously; you’re going to have to put troop-carrying choppers on top of that mountain, establish a perimeter and hold it, to keep Coldwater and his people from getting into that underground system. Unless you can do that right off, a siege situation will develop and you’ll look like idiots.

“Simultaneously, you’re going to have to take Coldwater, Casey and Ruger; otherwise they’ll rally their followers, and you’ll have a pitched battle on your hands. Cut off the head of the snake, and the rest will be easier.

“Third, you’re going to have to seal off the town to prevent anyone from getting in. Coldwater now has alliances with other groups, like the one that Charley Bottoms is in, and they might well come to his aid. Also, you can’t let any of Coldwater’s people get out. The nasty part of this is that, even if you capture the mountain and arrest Coldwater and his principal aides, you’re going to have to round up the rest of the church congregation from wherever they are, and they may fight on an individual basis.”

“How many people are we talking about?”

“Judging from what I’ve seen at the church, I’d estimate somewhere between five hundred and a thousand men, and three or four times that many women and children. They seem to have a lot of kids.”

“Will the women fight?”

“My guess — and it’s only a guess — is that Coldwater doesn’t invest enough confidence in women to train them, and that you’ll have to deal mostly with men and boys. I’d count on being opposed by teenagers with assault rifles, if I were you.”

“What you’re saying, essentially, is that, no matter how we do this, it’s going to be a mess.”

“I think you have a choice between a mess and a godawful, mind-boggling tragedy that could shake this country to its roots, that could make the attorney general, the president and the military look like bumbling idiots who can’t be trusted to keep order. I think that if you screw this up you have the chance of having the biggest pitched battle in this country since the Civil War.”

Kip was silent for a long moment. “We’re going to need armor, aren’t we?” he asked finally.

“You’re going to need it, but how the hell will you get it here without alerting Coldwater? If you fill up the roads of northern Idaho with tanks and armored personnel carriers, it’ll be on radio and television a long time before they can get here, and Coldwater is going to be ready. Your best bet is choppers, a lot of them, and enough men to mop up the town on a house-to-house basis.”

“Is there an airport?”

“Yes. I’ve seen a sign pointing to it, but I’ve never been out there.”

“You better take a look at it and get back to me.”

“That’s a good idea; I’ll do it.”

“How many troops are we talking about?”

“What was it they called Field Marshal Montgomery in World War Two? Something like Martini Monty, because he wouldn’t attack unless he had a six-to-one advantage. I think you’ll need that, if you fail to cut off the head of the serpent first.”

“So we’re talking five, six thousand men with full field gear, assault weapons, flak jackets, the works.”

“I think you better bring in heavy weapons, too, in case Coldwater makes it to his fortress. You’ll want to be at least as well armed as he is.”

“Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of this country,” Kip said, sounding disconsolate. “At least, not since the Civil War, as you pointed out. American troops carrying out a full-scale assault on an American town? It’s insane.”

“Maybe so, but comparatively speaking, it’s even more insane to do nothing, not to mention negligent. Something else, Kip, and I hate to bring this up: you’d better be ready for casualties. This could be bloody, so you’d better have both the medics and the PR people on alert to handle the dead and wounded and to break it to the public.”