Чак Хоган - The Standoff

Banish finally showed, head ducked to the rain, shoes sinking into the muddy ground. He eyed the two segregated groups of BOLOs. Fagin made no move to cojoin. He was expecting a nice clean whitewash here.

“Who fired that first shot?” Banish said above the downpour.

One of the HRT agents spoke up, name of Renke. Plump-faced but solidly built, big hands. “We spotted a suspect exiting the side of the residence armed with a rifle of some kind, crouching in a furtive manner.”

Banish said, “Adult figure?”

“Affirmative. I had the suspect in my Weaver scope.”

Banish stopped him there, turned. “Fagin?”

“I saw someone come out, but couldn’t make the object as a weapon until they started firing up at the NG helicopter. I was at six o’clock, head-on. The glare off the searchlight fucked my NVD.”

Renke stepped in, saying, “SA Banish, Marshals Service has no command or say-so over HRT.”

Banish’s response was quick. “That’s my determination, SA Renke. As your senior SOARs agent on this mountain, HRT answers to me, answers loud and answers clear. Deputy Fagin has been with this operation from the beginning, and if I so determine in the interests of convenience and/or mere whim that you men are to be placed at his disposal, then so shall it be.” Banish got in Renke’s face then. “Or do you feel the need to seek a second opinion from Quantico?”

Renke turned his eyes straight ahead. “No, sir.”

“Good,” said Banish, backing off. “Let me review for you men the rules of engagement on this mountain. Do not fire unless expressly fired upon. And even then: with extreme and diligent caution. Do not get drawn into an exchange. Every man will be held accountable for his actions here. If you had been with us over the past few days, you might have known that just last evening we received our first communication from the suspect. That alone renders your initial warning shot ill-advised at best. There are young children in the residence and they are armed and possibly dangerous, and that is what makes this operation such a challenge. And I know how you men like a challenge. That is all.”

The HRT agents looked at each other and went away. Banish was showing some spark here. He came back to Fagin through the rain.

“Listen,” Fagin said. “I’ve been giving it some thought. Last night. That side door didn’t close right away.”

Banish immediately shook his head. “Don’t tell me that,” he said. “I don’t want to hear that. I just got off the phone with the Director and the subject of a gunfight did not come up.”

“Well, I’m telling you. Now you know.”

“What are you saying?” Banish said. “You hit somebody?”

“I was taking heat. I popped back high and hit the door once. That’s all.”

Banish looked away, then looked back. “You mentioned night-vision,” he said. “Judith Ables was killed in the initial skirmish. How did they get her body all the way over to the barn without your men seeing anything?”

“We assumed they did it in the hour or so after the cease-fire, before we were moved into position.”

“Right.” Banish nodded. “But this is their twelve-year-old daughter. This is a child. They’ve been living together in that same five-room shack for two years now. You think they could get rid of her corpse in less than an hour?”

Fagin thought about it, shrugged. “What I’m telling you is, we’ve had that cabin under twenty-four-hour surveillance since the original shootout. There is no way they could have carried a dead body over to that barn without me and my men knowing about it.”

Banish nodded again. He was rubbing the burn on his face and looking up at the wet mountain.

A cloudburst on the way up, and the woods darkened some more and thumped with heavy rain. Marshals Taber and Porter stood posted outside as Fagin and Banish entered the run-down barn shaking off their coats. It still smelled of human death, rain rapping on the collapsing roof, piddling through to the ground. Fagin scanned the barn and moved directly to the far-left corner. Banish remained somewhere behind him, near the center, looking around.

There was a stack of old fruit crates in the corner, the only area of the barn where a section of floor was well concealed. Fagin tugged on the top crate with a gloved hand and met resistance. He checked it and saw that the bottom slat was nailed tightly to the top slat of the crate below, and so on. He bent over and stretched to reach the bottom crate farthest to the rear. It slid out freely without moving the rest. Fagin turned it over. No bottom slats. He examined the dirt there and saw that it was looser and finer than in other places and reached out and brushed the top layer aside, then dug in deeper with his gloves. The soil below was also loose. He stepped in beside the crates and dug some more and hit something hard about ten inches down. His fingers found a latch. He pulled on it and there was a rush of foul air and the entire section of dirt came up and out.

Fagin straightened up pissed off. “Fucking tunnel,” he said, too loudly, and Banish came over beside him and Fagin lowered his voice. “Sneaky fuckers,” he said.

Banish said angrily, “Jesus Christ.”

“Fuckers,” Fagin spat. “Motherfuckers. We go in there now with night-vision, take them by surprise—”

“No,” Banish said. “Even if it isn’t booby-trapped, they’d hear you halfway through and be waiting.” He looked around. “Put two men in here, grab whatever crawls out. Why wasn’t all this broken down in the first place?”

“My fuck-up,” Fagin said. “Overlooked. Fuck. ”

Banish looked around the barn, nodding. “He’s been waiting for this,” he said, then stepped away. He had said that a few times before.

Fagin checked the area around the tunnel hole. The opening was two feet square, the tunnel below much larger and the dirt walls brown and dark. He was thinking out loud, only half-talking to Banish. “They pulled the girl through here wrapped up in something else besides those sheets, then cleaned her up and took it back with them.” He kicked at the hard ground. “Dirt here’s tough. Must be the only tunnel. Took them all of two years just to push this fucking thing through.”

He dropped the wood board back down with the chunk of dirt on top and kicked the loose soil over it and slid the crate back into position. Then his voice rose, directed at Banish somewhere behind him. “I’ll have my people check the other buildings just in case. Can’t run too deep. Fucking tunnel rats,” he said, stepping back to shake his head. “Picked that up in Nam, huh? What do you say? Charlie could fucking dig. Honeycombs, they were, like those fucking ant farms you see into — storage rooms, kitchens, sleeping quarters. Had to be deep enough, though. I remember these cowboys in one of the units I was hooked up with, they’d take down a village rough, then pull aside all the remaining locals and bring in heavy equipment. They’d go riding in these big trucks, slow, all around the rice huts. That was how they celebrated. The weight of the trucks would cave in the shallow family tunnels, the local routes. You could hear the trapped VC screaming up through the dirt. Fucking ready-made graves, claustrophobic death traps.”

He was shaking his head, remembering the war-whooping farm boys wheeling around in circles. He turned in annoyance when Banish did not respond. Banish was standing across the barn, near where the Ables girl had been found. He was looking down. Fagin moved aside a rusted-out lawnmower and started across to him.

He saw that Banish was holding the corner of a cracked sheet of black tarp in his right hand. The tarp was caked with heavy, dark dirt. A good-sized body lay below.