Чак Хоган - The Standoff

Banish was walking away. He was vaguely aware of Fagin’s saying something behind him, swearing. Then, farther away, Banish heard sobbing. He stopped and looked between two trucks and saw Lobach sitting on the wet ground with his head in his hands. Banish looked away fast and kept walking. If there was anything to say, he might have said it. But there was nothing he could say and nothing he could do. Marshal Lobach had made a mistake and another man was dead, and it was something he would taste for the rest of his life. Banish made a mental note to have him dismissed off the mountain.

[PARASIEGE, p. 11]

SAC Perkins and Deputy Marshal Fagin remained there watching him walk away. Deputy Marshal Fagin said in a loud manner: “What the fuck was that? The fuck is wrong with this guy?”

Following which, after some consideration, SA Coyle came forward with her observations. She addressed SAC Perkins and detailed the peculiar circumstances regarding SA Banish’s transfer. Specifically: that SA Banish drew his service weapon on SAs Coyle and Taylor, that SA Banish showed extraordinary reluctance in accepting reassignment, and that SA Banish had been in contact with AD Richardsen while in transit to request that the transfer order be rescinded.

It was admittedly uncustomary and perhaps of questionable judgment to air such behavioral transgressions in an open forum, but the pertinence of these inappropriate reactions seemed to outweigh discretion.

SAC Perkins then asked for and received this agent’s name:

SAC PERKINS: You remember the World Financial Center situation about three years ago?

SA COYLE: I was still in training at Quantico, sir. A guest lecturer from the Bureau came and addressed the pitfalls of that specific situation. As I recall, all hostage negotiation operations and procedures were subsequently reviewed as a result.

DEPUTY MARSHAL FAGIN: That was this guy?

SAC PERKINS: One of the hostages he saved tracked him down one year later and tried to kill him.

DEPUTY MARSHAL FAGIN: Is this some fucking joke? What the fuck are you handing me here? I’ve got forty fucking men on this mountain.

SAC PERKINS: I informed the SOARs chief that this situation warranted a strategic planning and crisis management specialist. I suppose skills bank matched cop to killer on tangibles alone.

SAC Perkins’s slight enthusiasm for a fellow agent was initially confusing. Of the three (unofficial) ways an agent is understood to earn the respect of his colleagues — by shooting a suspect in the line of duty, by being wounded in the line, or by shunning administrative advancement to remain in the field — it appeared that SA Banish had, over the Course of his career, fulfilled all three.

Banish set his suitcase down on the bed. Four new walls. The trailer looked like half a cheap motel room, the half without the television set. He turned and saw himself reflected in a wall mirror and went and took the mirror down.

The words had come too easily at the marshals tent. Salesman’s patter. He feared lapsing back into the old play book routine. He feared the old confidence.

This was no hostage situation. It wasn’t even a barricade case. It was a standoff, the worst parts of both.

He shouldn’t think too much. He should act, be moving forward. He took a deep breath and reviewed the old maxims: Discipline is paramount to success; Anticipation is ninety percent of command.

He zipped open his suitcase and turned it over, dumping clothes and toiletries out onto the thickly patterned blanket draped over the low bed.

A knock rattled the aluminum door. It was Coyle, handing him a heavy white legal-sized carton, Ables’s file. Banish set it on the floor and returned to the mess on his bed, then realized that Coyle was lingering in the doorway behind. “The situation is stabilized—” she began to say as Banish swung the door shut with his foot. He sifted through his clothes on the bed and found nothing appropriate. As with everything else, he would have to start from scratch.

In a supply truck outside, Banish found a discarded John Deere ball cap and traded his FBI slicker for a camouflage hunting jacket. He slipped his ID inside his breast pocket and stepped out and shut the truck door. Droplets tapped on his shoulders and cap brim, the drizzle becoming full rain.

Men with jobs to do crossed the clearing briskly, ignoring Banish. Among those standing idly, Banish located the local Chief of Police by uniform. He was loose-faced and fat under an open blue slicker. His thumbs hung in his gun belt. Banish approached and got his attention.

“Evening,” Banish said.

“Evening,” said the chief.

Banish went into his breast pocket. He pulled out his ID.

The chief looked it over, rain popping off the plastic shield. “More FBI?” he said, frowning.

“New case agent,” said Banish. “Just wanted to introduce myself to the ranking police official.”

He puffed up then. “Moody,” he said. “Chief of Police.”

Banish took his ID back and dropped his hands into his pockets. “I’ll need to address your men. Have them assembled outside the command tent at nineteen hundred hours.”

The chief nodded. He was being included now. “We’ll be there,” he said, his soft chin rising.

Banish walked away.

The dirt road was winding and stubborn and refused to muddy. A creek ran down along the right, pitted by rain, and the wet mountain air smelled like trees chopped open. Banish thought of ravaged Skull Valley.

He stepped aside to make way for a cruiser transporting three local policemen up to the clearing. They gave a noncommittal salute, the way cops wave to each other. Banish nodded, then stopped and turned and watched them go.

Around a steep bend at the bottom of the road lay a small bridge fashioned of iron beams and sided with pilfered highway railings. Beyond it, a grassy one-lane road ran perpendicular. Four armed marshals stood paired off on the bridge under green ponchos. They were chatting. Yellow police ribbon was woven three times across the bridge front like a lazy spider’s web.

More than a dozen protesters stood milling about peacefully on the other side. A passing car slowed to watch and honked its horn in support. Banish took it all in.

A white male in his forties with an overgrown mustache and grass-kneed jeans, holding a simple poster board sign: GO HOME.

A white female in her thirties holding her young daughter by the hand, standing with a neatly lettered wooden sign propped up against her legs: THIS is FREEDOM? LEAVE GLENN ABLES ALONE!

A white male in his fifties wearing fatigues, a wool cap, and a lumberjack beard, holding a cardboard sign at his waist and intoning its message: “Rebellion Against Tyranny. Obedience to Yahweh.”

Others held candles that flickered in the rain. One man read aloud from a Bible while holding erect a six-foot wooden cross. Banish took note of four individuals huddled off to one side.

He surveyed the shallow creek bed and the cars driving unchecked past the scene, then again the thin tape barrier stretched across the front of the bridge.

No one stopped him on the way back up the road either. Halfway to the clearing, a teenaged male with a shaved white head emerged from the high trees on the right. The youth glanced casually both ways up and down the road, then began toward Banish. He was coat less wearing a short-sleeved black shirt and black boots and fatigue pants. Hard black tattoos were etched on the white skin of his trim arms, most prominently an ornate swastika and a laughing skull.

“Hey,” he said, nodding, neither smiling nor frowning.