Чак Хоган - The Standoff

Banish was staring straight ahead. He was watching the elevator door slide open, seeing it all happen again through the smoky plastic shield of a gas mask. The confusion, the yells, the pushed bodies. Gunshots, screams.

He heard the single shot. He saw the prone legs kicking, blood darkening the floor. “The Cuban took his own life. A single round to the temple, just as we broke in.”

People in business suits screaming, wailing, lying on the floor. “The firm’s employees were traumatized but each of them got out OK.”

Banish remembered running up to the side wall of the smoky room. He watched it all happening. He saw them there. “But the wife and daughter — he had stood them up against a wall away from the rest of the hostages, tied with a thin wire cord around each of their necks to keep them still. I had sent the gas in. They both lost consciousness just as we arrived. Their own weight dragged them down.”

He saw them sagging forward from the wall by their necks, throats sliced open ear to ear. Dangling hands twitching spasmodically, run red with blood. His own men trying frantically to cut them loose from the wall. Mother and daughter dying right there in front of him.

A dark woman in a sundress with a black eye and bruises on her arms. A twelve-year-old girl.

Roaring thunder approached his consciousness and then a helicopter buzzed over them, its spotlight running past, and Banish saw where he was again, the ground and the gully before him, and for a frozen instant everything glowed white. Then the helicopter passed and the shaken leaves drifted like regrets to the dirt around them. Banish cleared his throat.

“So we went out afterward. It was different, of course, all different. And when it was over I could not go home. I didn’t, until three days later. And I did not stop drinking from that day on. Gradually, and then rather spectacularly, I fell apart.”

Banish was quiet for a while.

“And the freed hostages. More than half of them quit their jobs within six months. That’s standard following a crisis like that; people yanked out of their daily routines, isolated, terrorized. One night can last you a lifetime. But one young woman, the first to leave the firm, refused to cooperate with her appointed psychiatrist. Eventually she disappeared altogether. It’s what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome. She came to identify her captor as her savior — rather than the police, with whom she had no contact — because her captor held the power of life and death over her and she had been spared. She got my name somehow and tracked me down at a hospital I was staying at. She had a gun and she tried to kill me. Fair trade, I’d say, except that she bungled the job. But that is what you get for playing with other people’s lives.”

He looked at Kearney then, across the cold mountain gully surrounded by the pleading woods. Banish said, “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

Kearney hesitated, then nodded.

“I am nobody’s hero. I don’t like some of the things I have to do. I have too much power, too much responsibility. Too many hands. That’s why these protesters — I could have pushed them all the way back to the Pacific if I’d wanted to. But I need them here. They will keep me from doing things I might otherwise do. Whatever their motives for being here, that is what they are: eyes, to watch me. Because I am not to be trusted. Because I am a gambler — that’s all I am. And a pretty good one. That’s my curse.”

Kearney was blinking at him. He started to say something, censored himself, then went ahead and said it anyway. “But it wasn’t your fault.”

Banish smiled weakly at the sentiment. Familiar words of counsel. They must have tasted warm on the tongue. But hearing them again did have the effect of sobering him.

“We talked to Ables tonight,” Banish said. “I’m reassigning you to the command tent, starting oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.”

Kearney’s white eyes cleared then. He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Banish realized he was leaning forward. He sat back against the hard dirt wall again. There was an awkward moment of nodding silence on both sides, then a muffled pop. Banish turned his head to listen, uncertain. When nothing followed immediately, he crouched and turned fully to look up through the trees at the cabin. The searchlight was still. Then a crack out of the night like a cap being fired, and a hiccup burst of light — a shot from somewhere high in the trees above. Banish grabbed for his radio on the ground next to him. “Fagin,” he said.

Fagin scanned the compound with his NVD. Like looking into a fucking aquarium. He answered the voice in his ear.

“Wasn’t me,” he said. “Is that fucking HRT?”

Banish said, “Situation report.”

“Warning shot. Something moving out there, don’t know what the fuck it is.”

Banish’s voice came back. “Fagin, warnings only. Everyone else hangs back. I’ll get someone on the lights.”

Fagin clicked off. It was fucking Hostage Rescue. He slipped his ringer back in over the trigger and stayed alert. He could see nothing clearly because of the goddamn spotlight burning into his NVD — there was glare, although the light being still now made things easier. A second light came on low then and swept the woods. The stinging odor of the Vicks put a throb in his head. He heard the whup-whupping of the Huey returning. The whining of Ables’s family on the speakers down below. Another cold wind wheezing through the trees. He frowned hard. Happy fucking anniversary.

Something moving again in the greenness. He blinked several times, scoping the area.

A figure outside, an adult, standing just beyond an open door at the right side of the cabin where the land began to drop off. Something in its hands, maybe a gun, but impossible to confirm. Fagin heard the helicopter coming faster, the treetops starting to bend. He cursed the glare of the spotlight. The side door was still wide open. He fired once more, another generous warning, this time low and wide to the figure’s right. Whoever it was, Fagin wanted the person back inside pronto.

Banish’s voice again in his ear, “Fagin.”

The Huey roared and whupped right overhead, cruising in on a low sweep. Fagin saw the figure looking up. He saw it raising the object in its hands as the Huey floated over the trees.

He saw a burst pattern of gunfire from the dark figure.

Fagin said, “What the fuck—”

The helicopter was bailing out. Fagin tapped on his radio. “Fucker’s shooting at the Huey.”

Banish’s voice came back. “Who?”

Fagin dropped two more rounds and watched two patches of green ground jump black near the figure’s legs.

The figure ducked and swung around toward Fagin, returning fire. The Huey was gone and Fagin could hear the shots accompanying the fire burst as the figure moved back toward the open door. “Stupid fuck,” he said. He took aim and paced the running figure with trailing shots.

Rounds strafed the leaves above Fagin’s head. He ducked and re aimed “Mother fucker,” he said, angry, squeezing the trigger, plugging away.

Banish said, “Fagin.”

Fagin picked surgically at the ground by the figure’s feet, chasing it back to the door. It let go one final volley and then ducked inside. Fagin came up on the last one, depositing a single black chip hole in the glowing green door.

The door was slow to close.

“Fagin.”

He pulled the Remington off his cheek and clicked back on. “What the fuck!” he said.

Banish said, “Sit-rep.”

Fagin was near breathless with anger, but Banish wanted control on the network, a concise situation report. “Hostile gunfire, unprovoked,” Fagin said. “One individual. I moved it back inside and left a round in the fucking door. That’s all.”