April Smith - Judas Horse

McCord has overpowered the girl and is dragging her toward the Room of Unfinished Dreams as a huge explosion throws everyone in the house to the floor.

Someone says in a faraway voice like a tinny old recording, “The barn’s on fire!” Where is Stone? Where is Stone?

The floor is hot. I grope forward, trusting that McCord and Sara have made it to the sewing room, where SWAT will breech the windows and the twisted bamboo blinds at hostage-rescue speed.

Where is Stone?

Peering through the smoke I find the wretched shapes of two older, slower people feeling their way through the fractured debris of the front hall. Behind them is the closet and the tunnel of escape. Ahead, through gaping holes where the front door used to be, helixes of orange flame are exploding from the outbuildings. The white foal is zigzagging blindly through the yard in terror.

Megan is struggling to get out. She has to save the foal. Stone pins her arms and drags her backward. She kicks at him. They fall over the heap of junk from the closet, sprawling on top of each other. She fights free and crawls toward the open hole, turning her head to shout something at Stone. Her hair has begun to smolder. A curtain of heavy charcoal smoke falls between us. Scraps of incinerated paper fly on whirls of heat like fiery demons. Stone is up, hopscotching across the gently burning floorboards, bellowing at Megan, who is just out of reach. The faraway old-fashioned voice says, “The baby,” and she stumbles through the shattered opening into the fresh air, Dick Stone close behind.

My guess is there was never going to be negotiation. And this wasn’t another mistake like Waco. The mission was to massacre every living being on the farm. The tactical commanders took orders from Deputy Director Peter Abbott, who was willing to risk scrutiny to be certain the terrorists — and everything they knew — were eliminated.

Snipers are trained to cultivate patience. They are told, “You have one opportunity. Make it count.” A team of two elite shooters with tripod-mounted AR-10s had the front door sighted up the past five hours, their breath moderated like one wave after another in a tide that never breaks, still as the leaves, infinitely enduring. When Dick Stone reels into the luminous circles of their scopes scuttling with Megan in the shattered doorway, they take the shot, a calm, straightforward release of two high-powered bullets. At the same instant, Megan pops up in front of Stone and inadvertently becomes the target. The two bullets simultaneously penetrate her left cerebral hemisphere.

Just like that. The heavy guns, familiar as big brothers, kick hard into the curve of their shoulders, but the shooters are braced to absorb the shock, unlike Megan’s skull, which instantly fractures in radiating spiderweb patterns, likely the only sting she feels, as the brain has no pain receptors, along with awareness of some sort of impact that might have registered a second or two before she loses consciousness, the bright library of a lifetime gone.

Stone ducks back into the house, from which we stare at Megan’s body, lying prone in the blasted doorway, appearing to be smoking like the fallen timbers swollen with heat that are crumbling around us, a century of farm life hissing away in vapors. Dick Stone’s mouth howls in anguish like the silent cavernous winds of hell; a meaty arm hooks my neck and does not let go as we stagger away, conjoined like primordial brutes as a savage twister of coal black smoke drives us away from daylight.

We drive to a turnout where a chain hangs across a dirt road. When we emerged from the tunnel, we ran across a hundred yards of open wash beyond the perimeter, clouds of ink black smoke roiling behind us. We kept on going — a call on the satellite phone to an associate of Mr. Terminate — and then a grandma biker chick right out of Omaha, a wrinkled witch a hundred years old, met us and took us to a safe house in a trailer park, where we were given a stolen car. We drive for ninety minutes into the national park. Only when we passed a green sign for the parking lot for the Hard Edge Trail do I realize that our destination is the place where Steve Crawford died.

Stone gets out and unhooks the chain, gets back in and drives the sedan over it. Branches sweep the windshield as we ascend a rutted fire road. The Northwest fir is as impenetrable as the Virginia woodland surrounding Quantico; voracious organisms choking one another out for the sun.

At times the car is almost engulfed by closely growing colonnades of young Douglas fir, and I am gripped with a claustrophobic unease, as sickening as having crawled through that tunnel. Spring rains cut deep gullies in the moist terrain and now our heads hit the inside roof of the car as we launch out of our seats. Ten miles an hour seems way too fast.

“Watch out!”

“Got it,” Stone mutters, slowing to a stop before a huge tree felled across the road.

We stare at an impassable tangle of branches and fine sprays of dark green needles spewing out in all the wrong directions. Nothing looks more like a forbidding mistake than a huge horizontal tree lying across your path.

“We’re not that far,” Dick Stone says, arming himself with the Colt, a Commando submachine gun, three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a collapsible snow shovel.

We climb around the tree and follow the road on foot. During the drive, we gained altitude, and the mountain air is pure and chill.

“I’ve been in some odd situations, Dick, but this is one of the strangest. Ever zoom out of yourself? All the way out, so you’re looking down from somewhere else?” “Not sober.”

“What are we doing in the woods? I don’t even like the woods. There’re ticks and poison oak.” The road is wide enough to walk side by side, but sometimes one of us will walk ahead, over gullies cut by cascading rocks, sometimes along the lip of the road. We continue that way, flowing around each other, as Stone twirls the shovel lightly over one shoulder.

“Why are you and I always digging another man’s trenches?” I muse.

“Some of us are soldiers. Born that way.”

We are walking single file where the road washes out. At the bottom of a huge rounded boulder split by a tree, Stone takes a turn onto the well-kept Hard Edge Trail. A Forest Service sign points back to the parking lot at 5.7 miles.

We continue up, retracing Steve Crawford’s steps.

We crest a ravine and look down at the creek where the hiker found the remains. I recognize the rock formations from the postblast photos.

“Good God!” says Stone. “What are you two doing here?”

Toby Himes and Mr. Terminate are sitting on a fallen log. Toby, always appropriately dressed for whatever occasion, wears an impeccable hiker’s outfit — clean boots, wind-resistant pants, lightweight black quilted vest, orange hunter’s cap. Mr. Terminate, wearing a T-shirt with a faded message that has to do with sucking, is smoking a cigarette, the AK-47 cradled in his arms. His presence is so improbable that it instantly reframes reality.

Before, the forest was treacherous.

Now, it is incendiary.

“Figured you wouldn’t leave town without saying good-bye.”

“Course not,” says Stone, climbing down the slope. “I owe you, big.”

“No problem, it was a lot of laughs,” says Mr. Terminate. “I see you still got your shadow.” “Hi, John,” I say, just so he can ignore me one last time.

Stone bums a cigarette and puts one foot up on the log.

“Megan is dead.”

“Really? Oh shit ! Oh man !” Toby’s eyes grow round in surprise. “Deepest condolences, my friend. What happened?” “They mowed her down. About how many bullets would you say she took, Ana Grey?” “I don’t know, Dick.”