Чак Хоган - The Standoff

He had one hand over his ear and was squinting. It was noise and flame from every side of the cabin, tremendous. The woods were crumbling and staggering around him. Clear enough, then, that the whole thing had been orchestrated. Ables wasn’t satisfied with just principles anymore. He wanted lives.

An awful roaring noise, rumbling the very ground, and Blood braced for whatever was coming next. A spotlight pierced the dark scene and then a helicopter rose fast over the trees beyond the cabin, turning and dipping down close for action. It was answering fire, glowing phosphorescent green and ripping the ground and the cabin walls, and Blood stayed where he was just long enough to see Fagin riding shotgun, leaning out of the helicopter door and braced against the skid and howling and tearing away. Then Blood ducked off and started fast down the ravaged slope.

Banish had his gun out now. He was listening hard. Nothing through the drone except gun chatter. Sounded like a firefight. Sounded close. Where was Nicole? He couldn’t let anything happen to her.

He was stumbling around. He was seeing things in the dark, traces of things, like ghosts drifting down and settling in the blackness in front of him, and he was giving them meaning. He saw Lucy Ames smiling into the sterile rec room of the Retreat. He felt her bullet burrowing deep into him and dropping him to the tile floor. He saw his house on Long Island ripped to pieces inside. He saw the wide, bright trading floor in the World Financial Center, heard the buzzing of hundreds of telephones, saw the blood on the floor. He saw a mother and daughter standing up against a wall, throats cut, necks sliced open. Their mouths were wide. Their tongues were swollen. Their eyes were staring and wet.

“Banish!”

Someone was yelling and near. Banish got a read on the voice and spun and fired. The gun kicked back wildly in his hand. He re aimed as well as he could and then stopped, turning his head, listening for more.

Bark chipped off the tree next to Blood and he froze. Banish wasn’t dead. He was somehow on his knees on the floor of the woods waving a gun, motioning wildly and mumbling aloud. His flashlight was lying on the ground behind him, illuminating a bright cone of bark trash. He looked this way and that way, but he did not register Blood.

Blood glanced quickly around. The gunfight was going on unseen away from them, occasional stray bullets whistling past, picking off leaves, thumping trunks. Blood bent down carefully. He found a broken piece of squaw wood and tossed it back over Banish’s head and Banish turned at the noise and fired twice. By the second shot Blood was upon him, pitching himself sidelong against Banish and knocking him flat against the ground. He kicked the gun free and managed to wrestle one of Banish’s arms behind his back. They were rolling around on the ground. Banish was still struggling.

“Banish!” Blood said. “Banish!”

Banish was fighting for Blood’s Browning. He had wild strength. Blood managed to force the butt of the shotgun against the back of Banish’s neck and then pin his elbows with his knees. Blood kept saying “Banish” over and over again, trying to get through to him, keeping his head pushed into the bark trash on the ground.

That seemed to work. Banish eventually stopped resisting, then relaxed completely. Blood let up on his neck and allowed him to turn over beneath him. There was a glancing dent on the right front of Banish’s helmet and a spray pattern of black powder burn over half his face. He had come closer to death than anyone Blood had ever seen. Banish blinked several times, opening and closing his mouth and trying to speak.

“Blood?” he said.

Blood said, “You’re all right.”

“I can’t see.”

“You’re alive, you’re all right.”

“I can’t see.”

“That’s just the flash. Come on.”

He helped him to his feet and took Banish’s arm over his shoulders. Bullets split through the trees. They started to move.

Fagin leaned way out of the Huey as it swept wide over the treetops to make another pass. They had the fuckers on the run now. Massive firepower down there, outlying trees being blown back from the cabin as though caught in a storm. It made Fagin howl all the more. He was pumping tracers into the mountaintop, phosphorous-tipped rounds glowing in loud, green streaks, threading their way through the dark night to the target, chewing up cabin wood. Fagin knew what the fuck it was he was feeling, the great spirit having fully arisen within him once again: the glory and majesty of the early days of Vietnam.

Motherfuckers!

His hold line snapped tight around his waist as the bird swooped in low to make another pass. The searchlight came around and found Mellis, unmistakable fucking bearded fucking Mellis, stomping along the side of the cabin and firing blindly over his head. He was galloping for the elevated porch in back. Fagin rolled right and choked the M-60, lighting up the cabin side, tracer fire eating its way into the ground at Mellis’s pounding boots, but then the Huey lurched and his kill fire missed its mark, and Mellis reached the rear of the cabin and disappeared under the overhang of the porch. Fagin swore wildly back at the farm-boy pilot. The UH-1 came around again and swung down low and Fagin, screaming now, gave the fucking porch everything he had.

Blood told him they were taking cover. A structure down land from the cabin, a barn. A few more steps and Banish smelled a musty odor, and then the shooting was not as loud. His head fought the buzzing drone.

He pulled the strobe off his belt and felt it into Blood’s hands and told him what to do with it. Blood traded him his flashlight and Banish heard him walk away and outside. There was a low whir as the strobe was switched on.

Banish saw a shadow. He waved the flashlight in front of him and several times, fleetingly in the far corners of his eyes, he saw hints of light. He perceived texture within the blackness. He saw the beam indirectly and, through it, the stripped-back wooden walls of the barn, debris and discard scattered around the dirt floor. His eyesight was beginning to fill back in. He was despondent.

Captain Greg Ohmer of the Montana National Guard topped out over the tree cover and throttled hard left to bring the UH-1 back around. There were some zings as the bird took a few sparking hits broadside, and Greg tightened up his grip on the stick, saying “Sweet Jesus Mother of Mary” over and over again in an unnaturally high voice and fighting to hold the shaking helicopter even and low.

Fifty weeks out of the year, Greg Ohmer was the owner and manager of a Burger King franchise in downtown Billings. He had a wife and a nine-year-old daughter and lived in a small house a few miles west of the city. His biggest worry going into this year’s two-week tour in the reserves was leaving his restaurant in the hands of his twenty-year-old assistant manager.

Greg Ohmer had not sat in the cockpit of a helicopter for more than three years — and even then only to renew his pilot’s license. Patrol missions were one thing, especially during the day, cruising above the mountain ridge and looking out over the blue-green mountains into the snow peaks of British Columbia; Greg had never stopped loving to fly. But these low-maneuver tactical raids under heavy unfriendly fire were something else entirely. He was WAGing it up there, wild-ass-guess flying, piloting via his PAVE nightfall system and recalling his training as he went, watching the altitudinal wind gusts and trying to keep his rotors and his tail fin clear of the treetops, and basically bringing the cranky UH-1 in as tight as possible without choking up the engine or one-eightying out.