The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

Rebecca found Terry alone with the parlor television. He was a whiz with the remote control, as though staying on top of the media coverage somehow involved him in the crisis itself.

“They set part of the prison dispensary on fire,” he told her. “That’s smart. Burning your own house. And CNN finally got somebody on the scene.”

“The truck passed us.”

“Some bozo kid, it’s awful.” Terry chuckled. “His big break and he’s blowing it.”

“Did Kells come back? Hodgkins?”

Terry shook his head. “Nope.”

The heavy snow came halfway to Rebecca’s knees, thick stuff, coming down hard and sticking fast. It fell as quickly as Mia could clear it off the car windows. Fern was running her snowblower, shooting a plume of white onto the front lawn, but the machine kept choking and quitting. Robert sat behind the wheel, gunning the engine while Coe, wearing his fool’s cap, helped Bert rock the car back and forth.

A snowmobile, sleek and black with yellow detail, cut slowly across the neighboring field, stopping in Fern’s driveway. The engine idled and the driver removed his dark-visored helmet. It was a seventy-year-old man in a nylon racing suit. Fern left her snowblower to exchange a few words, then the old man replaced his helmet and turned back in the direction of Gilchrist Common.

Fern returned to them even more disappointed than before.

“Dickie Veal, he runs the public works. The outlying roads are all jammed up. Cars stuck in the smaller lanes near the edge of town. And there’s some ice, people sliding off the shoulder. Everything would be clear, my driveway too, if Dickie’s main plow hadn’t gone missing two nights ago.”

Robert looked at Mia, trying to make her understand that they were fighting a losing battle.

“Hey,” said Coe. “Hey, listen.” His many-tasseled hat was in his hands now, his head cocked toward the northern mountains. The absence of the snowblower brought out the snow-silence. “Check it out.”

Rebecca heard a few car horns in the distance, faint and pitiable like quarreling children.

“No more gunshots,” he said.

Back indoors, Terry sat in a club chair pulled into the center of the parlor, hands clasped before the TV as though watching a close basketball game. He muted the volume when the porch doors opened, and confirmed the absence of gunfire. “It’s over,” he said.

On screen, they were repeating footage of the distant prison fire. Fern said, “Did they say anything on the news?”

“Amateur night,” Terry said, shaking his head disparagingly. “The CNN feed went to static almost as soon as they got it up. Nobody has anyone at the scene now.”

Fern looked to her lamps. “Maybe we’re going to lose power.”

Rebecca said, “Wait a minute. Every remote feed was lost?”

“Power surge,” dismissed Terry. “All those camera trucks out there in the middle of nowhere without enough juice. Or, maybe the FBI went in there with guns blazing, like Waco. Took out the cameras first in order to stage a surprise attack.”

As the others began to relax, it was now Rebecca’s turn to look concerned. Terry turned the sound back up as she shed her parka, keeping her reservations to herself while standing in the parlor with the rest, waiting for the television to tell them what to do.

Repressive security conditions inside ADX Gilchrist precluded the warning signs that traditionally anticipate prison disturbances, such as increases in disciplinary hearings, hints to well-liked guards that they should take vacation time or sick leave, or a high volume of outgoing personal items. There were no well-liked guards at ADX Gilchrist; there was no mail.

Despite the acute embarrassment of a full-blown riot raging in a so-called “unriotable” penitentiary — and the fact that correctional officers were rarely murdered during an uprising — Warden Barton James and his people relied on the usual reactive models. A prison riot has a reliable life cycle, from the inmates’ violent euphoria of the first hours to the rejection of their initial, unreasonable demands — freedom, full pardons — to infighting among racial lines and the bloom of “preexisting intergroup tensions,” and finally, to renegotiation and eventual collapse. The outcome of the riot was never in question; the only variable was its eventual cost, of human life, of damage to the physical plant, and of the loss of public faith in their federal prison system. Although in theory any prison riot can be ended at any moment by force, tactical assaults are prohibitively costly by all three criteria and ordered only as a strategy of last resort. The Bureau of Prisons’s response was to allow the riot to run its course.

And that is exactly what the watchmen of ADX Gilchrist were doing: waiting, hoping to minimize cost. They never anticipated being evicted from their facility, and now they found themselves holed up on the access road well back from the front gate, inside two campers commandeered from a nearby construction site. ADX Gilchrist’s onsite tactical unit, the Special Operations Response Team, was drinking cold coffee in the second camper. Off-duty guards manned the prison grounds outside the perimeter fence, and the government barricade — the twin campers, parked lengthwise across the road — was secured by local police and fire department officers. Communication with Bureau of Prisons headquarters at the Department of Justice was by cellular telephone only.

The only convenient sanitary facility was a single, wretched Porta-John from the same construction site. More popular was the snow-filled woods, which was fine for the men but not for FBI Special Agent Chloe Gimms now sharing on-scene command with a shaken Warden James. A thin woman with electric gray hair, she had survived forty-two years without peeing in the woods and was not about to break that streak now. She paced inside the small camper, ignoring the urge, tapping her thighs with red-mittened hands.

Warden James listened to the sporadic gunfire and the prison alarms. He sat in a small chair with his fists pressed to his eyebrows, wondering if he was supposed to be able to feel his pulse in his forehead. Chloe Gimms asked him about cutting power.

“No,” he said. “The crash gates would all come down. We’d be trapping guards inside with the inmates, with no way to get them out.”

“So even if we retook the Command Center, we couldn’t wall off the units. Personnel would still be trapped inside.”

Warden James looked up. “Correct.”

“That’s it, then. Nothing else we can do until more support arrives.”

The warden stood and looked out one of the small camper windows. The outline of the facility was visible through the snow at the end of the long lane of trees lining Prison Road, black smoke from the dispensary fire rising behind. He tried reaching out to his charges, tried to understand them. “They’ll have a lot of anxiety. After years in isolation, of being spoon-fed—”

“It’s a free-for-all,” said Chloe Gimms. “Old scores are being settled. A kill-off.”

“No,” said Warden James, shaking his head. “They’ll be looking for someone to take my place. A guiding force. A leader.”

“That’s the nice thing about psychopaths. They’re too crazy to group up. Nobody could hold these cons together.”

The warden turned. “Luther Trait could. For a while anyway. The riot started in his unit.”

“Trait? You think this is him?”

“It couldn’t be anyone else.” He stepped away from the window, distressed. Correctional officers were rarely murdered during an uprising. Something wasn’t right. “Where is your partner?”

“Police station in town. We needed a landline to talk to Washington — regulations.” She crossed her arms, tucking in her mittened hands and looking out the window the warden vacated. Local police walked the barricade between the campers and the TV trucks. “Those cops better keep the media away,” she said.