John Gilstrap - Threat warning

The surface on which she lay was hard, but not especially cold, and from time to time, when she heard a door open or close, the sound seemed to echo, leading her to believe that she was in a big room, or maybe just one with a tall ceiling. If the thought weren’t so absurd, she might have guessed that she was inside a church.

Wherever they’d deposited her, they’d made sure that her head was unsupported, and that her body was under constant strain. If they were going to kill her, she wished they’d just hurry up and get it over with. She supposed those are the thoughts of every torture victim.

The door opened again, seemingly far away, and this time it remained open for a long time-long enough for the cold air from outside to roll to her, triggering a chill. When the door finally closed, the room returned to silence again.

Then there were footsteps.

They sounded heavy, so she assumed them to belong to a man. Clearly, they were approaching her, each tick of sound just slightly louder than the one that preceded it. He said nothing as he approached, and his gait seemed abnormally slow, as if he were intentionally trying to intimidate her. It was working.

When the footsteps finally stopped, they seemed very close. When he remained silent, Christyne wondered if it was a test of wills to see who would speak first. “Who’s there?” she asked.

“You killed one of my soldiers,” the man said.

Christyne said nothing. She’d heard this tone only a few times in her life, and it was always tied to impending violence. She sensed that nothing she said could take the edge off his anger.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” he asked.

“Where is Ryan? Where is my son?”

The man let out a roar, an animal sound of pure anger or perhaps anguish. It shook the room, and continued to echo for a full second when he had finished. “Is that really all you have to offer?” he shouted. “Is that really all you have to say after you murder one of my best men? You want to know what became of the man who murdered him?”

“He didn’t murder him!” Christyne cried. Something inside her seemed to have broken, and her own anguish poured out in her words. “Your soldier was attacking me. Ryan protected me. He didn’t intend to kill that young man. Ryan couldn’t hurt a soul. Please don’t hurt him.”

Silence returned, and then the footsteps started approaching her again. They were smaller steps this time, and as he got very near to her, she thought perhaps that she could see a shadow fall across her eyes.

“So it was he who killed him,” the man said. “Thank you for verifying that.”

“No,” she said quickly. “That’s not what I meant.” Her heart and her brain both raced to find a way to undo the damage. How could she have been so stupid? “I didn’t mean that he was the one who killed him.”

“But that’s what you said.”

“I know. I-” Words were gone now, replaced with blind fear and guilt and shame. She heard herself sobbing, trying to beg for mercy, but all that came out was noise.

“That’s all right,” the man said. His tone took a softer edge to it. “It wouldn’t have mattered in the end. Dead is dead, and someone has to pay.”

“Not Ryan,” Christyne begged. “No, please, please not Ryan. He’s just a boy.”

“Not anymore,” the man said. He place something heavy and wet on the floor near her. It made a dull thump as it hit.

“What?” Christyne begged. “Oh, my God, what is that?” Jesus, was that blood she smelled?

“We’d have killed him anyway,” the voice said.

She gasped. This isn’t possible. Please, God, don’t let this be possible.

“I thought you might like to have a chat with him.” “What? What did you do? Oh, my God, what did you do?”

“I brought your son’s head to visit you. I thought you two had some things to discuss.”

Christyne Nasbe screamed until her throat was raw.

Jonathan and his team killed the next three hours poring over commercial-grade satellite maps of the Army of God compound. The photos were fuzzy at best, but by overlaying them with tax maps and a few ancient permits to tap into public water supplies, they were able to get enough of a rough layout to know that a random assault was out of the question with just the three of them. If they had the three of them times ten, it would still be out of the question without good intelligence on where the Nasbes were being held.

As Sam Shockley had indicated, the compound was huge, and a continuous fence showed clearly through the blur of the substandard imagery. There appeared to be several dozen buildings arranged in a pattern that suggested streets or pathways between them. According to utility company records, the compound had no electrical service on site; but Venice had been able to leverage Yellow Pages leads to tap into the sales records of local vendors who delivered gasoline, diesel, and propane to the compound. The amounts and frequency told Jonathan that the propane was likely used for cooking and the gasoline for fueling vehicles. They would have consumed fifty or maybe a hundred times those quantities if they were powering an electrical plant.

“Looks to me like we got some kind of cult working here,” Boxers said, reviewing the data. “They don’t appreciate the last hundred fifty years of progress.”

“They’re also dispatching death squads around the country,” Jonathan said. “What is it about the Stone Age that terrorists admire so much?”

Gail looked very concerned by it all. “You make light, Jon, but if the people in there are as armed as we’ve been told, we’re going to need help.” Her eyes bored into him. “You’re going to hate to hear this, but we’re going to have to call in the FBI for this. At a minimum, the West Virginia State Police.”

Boxers watched his boss expectantly, not agreeing, but not arguing, either.

“That’s the worst thing we can do,” Jonathan said. He kept his tone dismissive and authoritative. “We’d expose Security Solutions, we’d go to jail, and all the evidence they gathered would be thrown out because it was tainted by the fact that we violated laws to obtain it. Everybody loses.”

“I don’t accept that,” Gail said. “There has to be a way around. There has to be something other than a suicide mission.”

“Whoa, Sheriff,” Boxers said. He alternately used her former title as a term of endearment or as a weapon. This time it sounded like the latter. “We don’t do suicide missions.”

“Are you looking at the same data as I am?” she said, pointing at the map.

“I am,” he said. He looked at Jonathan, who looked away to let the Big Guy do a little verbal roaming. “Here’s the thing. Once Digger and me start something, we finish it.”

“All I’m saying-”

“Let him finish, Gail,” Jonathan said sharply.

She looked wounded. Maybe betrayed. Jonathan had never spoken to her like that before.

“All you’re saying is surrender before we engage,” Boxers said. “You’re looking at failure as the only option. That’s not the way Digger and I do things. We plan the mission and the extraction as best as we can, and we execute. We’ve never failed. Not once. One of the reasons for that is that we don’t accept that any other outcome is possible.”

Gail was stunned. She made a puffing sound that might have been a derisive laugh, and said, “So, you engage in self-delusion.”

Boxers started to say something, and then deferred to his boss with a simple glance.

“We engage realities,” Jonathan said. “We don’t have the luxury of reinforcements, and we don’t have the responsibility for arrests. All we have to do is take the good guys from the bad guys. Nothing else matters.”