Чак Хоган - The Standoff

“What have we done?” Blood asked him quietly.

Banish said, “We just shot their lights out.”

He paced. He ran a flat hand across his dry mouth. He had given up trying to work and took instead to walking back and forth and tapping his leg, with frequent side trips to the door flap. He had issued various busying assignments to the remaining overnight personnel to keep them away from the tent, and now that they were all gone, his window of opportunity was wide open and Kearney was nowhere to be found. Banish ran his left hand back through his thick hair and felt the hum rising again in his head. His great and immense thirst.

The old mastery. Things were moving now and he was in complete control. The drink itself meant nothing to him. A small reward. A squirt of grease to lube the few remaining creaks. It would leave him refocused and refreshed for the return to work the next morning. He nodded as he paced, routinely patting his right hand against his leg.

He checked the outer tent again, still empty. Time, time. It had been so long. The cool smoothness of the glass bottle. The snap and paper crinkle of the government seal. The twisting crack of the plastic cap — the genie escaping, the perfume released. The glug of it being poured. He was coming out of the desert. He felt himself finally rising out of the stasis that was Skull Valley. His tongue was a dry bucket in the stone well of his deep and immense thirst.

Footsteps in the outer tent. Quiet footsteps, and Banish started fast toward the door, then retreated instead to stand waiting casually before his desk. The flap was shrugged aside.

Dutiful Kearney. Banish crossed to him, fighting eagerness, fighting joy, but surely smiling and widely, ready to relieve Kearney of the burden of his plain brown package and feel the comforting shift of the liquid inside. Delicious fuel.

But Kearney had a soft look on his face, and when he raised his hands, they were empty. Banish blinked. He looked up at Kearney to see if he had realized his mistake, but Kearney was standing there, that hangdog look on his face, and Banish realized that there had been no mistake.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Kearney said, sheepish but resolute. “I couldn’t do it. It’s not right. Maybe you need help.”

Banish went after him. He put him in a choke grip, his forearm pressed against Kearney’s neck and pinning him back against a tent pole. It took Kearney by surprise, before he could even save a breath, and his mouth gaped empty.

“Goddamn Boy Scout,” Banish said. Kearney put his hands up to Banish’s quivering arm but did not fight back, except with his eyes. “I give you a direct order, I don’t care, you carry it out to the letter—” Kearney’s face turned pink, then red from the strain, lips blue, mouth twisting. Choking, deer-eyed.

“Get off my mountain!” Banish railed, releasing him finally and pulling back. Kearney slumped off to one side, stumbling away from Banish, reeling, his hand at his neck. The young cop stood there sucking air, face pained and twisted and red.

“GET OFF MY MOUNTAIN!”

Kearney pushed aside the canvas flap and stumbled out of the office. Banish turned fast. He went to his desk. He put one hand on the edge and held on, looking about feverishly, his head raging, buzzing.

He cursed Paradise Ridge. He cursed Montana. He flashed on his favorite liquor store in Manhattan, the fifths kept in dark bottles on shelves behind the counter like exotic medicines, neat rows of more than ten deep. He could drive off the mountain right now, he thought, in search of some. But how to explain it. They would be coming back to the command tent any minute.

The command tent. A cold ripple of salvation straightened him up. The beer. The drugged Pabst Blue Ribbon — he didn’t care — tall, chilled cans of blue and gold. If Coyle hadn’t gotten rid of them yet—

He went out roughly through the canvas fold and into the tent room to the small, humming refrigerator, ripping open the door and rooting through the clinking bottles of clear water and the scattered pieces of fruit. They were gone. The cans of beer were gone. He stood there a moment, frozen, cursing Coyle — then slammed shut the door, rattling the refrigerator, grabbing and shaking the appliance bodily, upsetting its contents, and then, defeated, he slumped over its top, gripping it finally for balance. He swore into his shirtsleeve. His great goddamn immense thirst. He closed his eyes and felt nothing but emptiness, recalling in the poisoned darkness of his mind the insects that had plagued him throughout his first blurred weeks at the Retreat, the bugs of hysteria — chewing on his skin, racing under the flesh of his arms, feasting on the soft pulp of his brain.

It was a chilly morning after. Perkins crossed the staging area briskly, wearing a navy-blue jacket and a bold necktie for television. Agents had been shipping in hourly from nearby field offices and the busy clearing bore their presence. Rumors abounded as to the previous night’s fiasco. While there was great concern over what the reaction to the impending announcement might be, Perkins himself was humming with contentment. He would be the Bureau point man that morning, the vessel through which the FBI’s version of the night’s events would be presented over the airwaves throughout the country and the world.

He passed the wide mouth of the new mountain road. The contractors had cut deep into the rising timber and torn up and flattened the ground soil in a straight, upward path, and they were now working unseen beyond the crest of Perkins’s sight line. He could hear them, though — great noisy machines — and see the dark exhaust smoke puffing. He watched as a treetop high above shook its top branches and then fell. The road was nearly completed. They were closing in on the mountaintop.

Perkins entered the command tent and went straight to the back office and inside, prepared for whichever Banish he would find. The office was cleaned up, papers stacked neatly on the desk, calm order restored. Banish was so intent on his work that he did not notice Perkins’s entrance. He looked disheveled, hair tugged-at and roughened, the black powder stain on his face already starting to gray. He was hunched over his work, eyeglasses low on his nose, writing not on white sheets of notepaper, Perkins noticed, but on a separate yellow, leather-bound, legal-sized pad. Perkins advanced and waited for acknowledgment. It was not forthcoming.

“Been here all night?” Perkins said.

Banish looked up fast in surprise and saw him standing there, then returned wordlessly to finish whatever he was working on. When he was done, he set aside the notebook and handed Perkins some typed pages. He coughed into a loose fist, clearing some of the phlegm from his throat and reaching for a glass of water.

“Briefing and Q and A outline,” he said, setting the glass back down. “That’s as far as we’ll go.”

Perkins flipped through the pages, nodding. “Right,” he said. “Everything else is set for later.”

Banish nodded, distracted. “What time is it?”

Perkins checked his watch. “I go on in twenty minutes.”

Perkins turned and headed back out of the tent and across the clearing to the waiting Jeeps, covering the pages as he went. It was good work. Perkins couldn’t fault the preparation, nor the expertise. It was Banish’s sense of procedure that worried him, the way he was handling the cabin, the staging area, and the press, all by remote control these were dishes he could keep up and spinning only so long. Any spectacular failure following this new escalation — millions of taxpayers’ dollars spent, thousands of man-hours committed — would surely touch Perkins as well. He could protect Banish only so far, but if in the end Banish was to topple like one of those unlucky trees, Perkins would make certain he himself was in a good position to yell timber and jump clear.