Чак Хоган - The Standoff

Banish said, “This is for everyone: we’re hitting the lights.”

Fagin pulled off his NVD and slammed the helmet down against the wood planking of the perch. “Fuck!” he said. He was thinking about how long it had taken that fucking door to close.

When the stadium lights clanked on and bleached the cabin, there was nothing left to see.

Banish entered from the light morning rain and wiped the bottoms of his shoes on two muddied towels set down inside the flap door. Kearney was there already, seated at the switchboard and wearing a telephone receiver headset, manning the outside lines. He did not look up. Banish turned to Coyle, who was ready for him.

“The road should be finished later today,” she reported. “Nothing yet on the CB. Do you want to try and raise him?”

“No,” Banish said. “We have to get him on that phone.”

“Excuse me.” It was Kearney’s voice. He was swung toward them, the single earphone pulled off his ear. “A woman on the telephone just said, “Stand by for Alpha Four’?”

Banish looked at him a moment, then told Coyle to order everybody out of the tent.

Coyle made the announcement, moving with the rest of them up and out of their chairs, setting down coffee cups and pencils, leaving work unfinished on desks and filing out past him through the door. Kearney looked around and followed suit without question, removing the headset and leaving it on the console and walking out with the rest.

Banish moved to Coyle’s desk. He punched the button on her telephone and took up the receiver, standing and waiting patiently through the silence. Alpha Four was the transmission code name for the Director of the FBI.

“Jack,” the Director said, his rich, senatorial voice coming on the line without a click. “What’s the good word?”

“We finally made contact with the individual last night.”

“I know,” said the Director. “I read the transcript in this morning’s Post . It’s not going very textbook, Jack, is it.”

“No, sir,” Banish said.

He envisioned the Director nodding on the other end. “A funny world sometimes, Jack. What the general public will latch on to. What the media will pursue. But you know there’s great interest in a case when you’re at a breakfast meeting and the President asks you how it’s going in Montana.” A pause then, but not dramatic; the Director was a deliberate man. “I know things are escalating out there, Jack. Administration tells me you’re up over a million dollars a day. People are watching this very closely.”

Banish said, “Yes, sir.”

“I’ve already had the Governor of Montana on the phone this morning. He’s going to declare a state of emergency. He was also ready to call out the National Guard, but I scotched that. I was able to convince him how serious a mistake that would be. Just to give you some idea of what’s going on out here, Jack. People are beginning to lose their heads over this. I’d say it’s the death of the girl, chiefly.”

Banish nodded. “Yes, sir.” He saw then what was coming.

“Jack, Sam Raleigh’s just gotten off that Port Authority situation in L.A. You may know, he was with the first negotiating team in Waco, the one that had so much success in getting the children out before Tactical took over. I know that he was your number two in New York before SOARs was established, and Carlson says he still speaks very highly of you.”

Banish nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The Director said, “I have a decision to make here, Jack. I was wondering if you could make it any easier for me.”

Four days after his reassignment, here it was finally. The arrow pointing home. A few quiet words to the Director, as smooth as an easy handshake, and he would fade back into the woodwork again, perhaps walk off the mountain that very afternoon, without fear of penalty and without disgrace. The Director was making it very easy for him. He could return to Skull Valley and continue the regimen he had set for himself there, and ride out his last few years to retirement and a full government pension.

But the situation. Recently, and in spite of himself, ever since hearing from Ables the day before, he had been thinking more and more about the children inside the cabin. Not so much as hostages, but as children. Three girls and an infant boy. He wanted them safe. Perhaps more than he should have. He wanted them well. It was a new sensation for him, seeing a hostage as anything other than a marker to be bargained for and won, although it was a common enough affliction and something he had witnessed numerous times before. Like a fever, it would strike even the most disciplined of men in the heat of a negotiation, becoming a hindrance only when manifested in the form of desperate acts committed out of frustration or anger misdirected at fellow agents. Either case warranted immediate dismissal. But other than that, this syndrome, Banish’s affliction, now seemed to him entirely reasonable. You don’t ask a man to carry around plutonium for a week, then have him hand it off to the next man and walk away and wait for the poison. Banish looked around at the vacated command tent. He felt strongly the drag of the small community he had created there. Its purpose had become his purpose. Leaving was no longer a viable option. He must not merely remain on the mountain; he must succeed.

“Sir,” he said, “I don’t think I could respect myself if—”

“Jack, I’m behind you. I’ve always been behind you. I think you know that. But my concerns are necessarily broader. I have faith in your talents, Jack, I do, but this operation has become much too significant for us to risk it being bungled. I need reassurance. Besides, Carlson says that as he understands it, you resisted the assignment from the beginning.”

Banish was recalling the day almost three years ago when he was told to walk away from his wife and daughter and never return. This assignment was his second chance at redemption, both personally and professionally, and perhaps his last.

“Sir,” Banish said, straightening when there was no one to see him there, “I’d like to stay on.”

The rain was falling harder and the wind was picking up, and Fagin stood waiting in it, his plastic poncho blown flat and wrinkled against his broad back. Two of Fagin’s men stood under nylon rain jackets near him, while a few yards away six members of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team were huddled together in their traditional black ninja uniforms. Banish was late to the meeting as usual.

Fagin turned. Two of the eight HRT agents stared at him coldly. Fagin shook his head a little but did not expend much effort. Stupid fucking mind games. Junior league interagency sandbox shit.

HRT was the FBI’s elite paramilitary force, trained to capture terrorists, hostage-takers, and violent criminals in life-threatening situations. Their team was made up of fifty volunteer agents split into three revolving units, with one unit on alert at all times and available for emergency assignment within a few hours anywhere in the country. They were assault specialists and top-flight snipers whose training regimen included what Fagin referred to as the Bayer drill, the ability to snipe an aspirin tablet at two hundred yards. In terms of prestige, equipment, and their five-million-dollar annual budget, HRT made the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group look like Double-A ball, and Fagin was man enough to admit this professional envy, but only to himself.

He found resentment a much more pleasurable emotion. HRT agents were largely range-taught, not war-trained like himself. Honing their talents by picking off over-the-counter pain medicine at Quantico’s Hogan’s Alley test range, a five-acre simulated town of pop-up targets, seemed to Fagin like not much more than a parlor trick. Fagin had seen them misused by their commanders, trotted out before the cameras during high-profile but nonessential situations, and media-hyped to no end. That budget game that Congress played. It made men in the USG sing and dance like women in the USO.