The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

He set down the phone and was halfway to the door when the cameraman reappeared. In the man’s free hand was a short-barreled Smith & Wesson.

Lon Coté felt the weight of the shoulder holster suddenly beneath his tan wool suit jacket. In his fourteen-year career he had never faced a loaded gun.

“Lay it on the floor,” said the cameraman.

Coté saw another man behind him rounding up police. Except for the paramilitary Micro Uzi machine pistol in his hands, everything about these guys said ex-cons .

Coté set his piece down flat on the carpet and stood with his hands open and out at his sides. “My name is Lon Coté, special agent with the FBI,” he said, plainly and without drama, surprised at the pride he felt in these words. “Now, what is this all about?”

Warden James stood outside the trailer, watching the black smoke rising out of the compound as wet snow-flakes melted on his venous cheeks. “Fortresses,” he said.

Chloe Gimms was behind him. “How’s that, Bart?”

The warden looked straight up at the flakes falling to him and for a dizzying moment experienced the sensation of flight. “This was the end of the line. The worst of the worst. Now what? How do we punish this? Where does it go from here?”

Chloe frowned. “Just hang in there, Bart.”

This was his last command. Thinking this bolstered Barton James. With the end in sight, anything is tolerable. Mrs. James had remained behind in Denver, too tired to follow him to one more prison town. Now he spent all his vacations traveling home. That was how upside-down things had been. She had wanted more time with him, now she was going to get it.

A roar behind him, machinery coming to life, almost like one of the campers starting up. But it was louder than that, Warden James felt the roar from the ground. Movement to his left. He turned, expecting police officers.

Three local men were walking toward them from the trees.

“The hell is this?” said Chloe Gimms, angered by the breach of security.

Headlights swirled behind the campers. Engine gears downshifted, and Chloe heard popping and felt thumps in the ground near her feet, then noises like rocks striking the camper hull and windows. With a crash and a wail of steel, the camper next to her was rammed from behind. She jumped out of the way as it was shoved over onto its side in a crashing whump of snow.

Now she saw the attacking bulldozer rearing back and raising its curved steel blade. The headlights swung around and with a snort of exhaust the bulldozer rolled at the second camper.

The Special Operations Response Team leader came rushing out of the camper door. He saw the first camper on its side and reached for his weapon — then jerked and took a small step backward as though shoved. Chloe never heard the gunshot. The SORT leader held his hands at his chest as though cradling a baby bird. The bird was bleeding.

The bulldozer rammed the second camper, its raised blade chewing and crumpling the roof, rocking the vehicle but failing to overturn it on the first try. The bulldozer rolled back, grinding snow, lowering its blade as a bull does its horns, then rushing forward again.

Yelling and movement came from inside the jostled second camper as members of the SORT team fled out the only door, stunned.

With the second blow the camper tipped over like the first, crushing the SORT team leader.

Gunshots cracked all around Chloe Gimms. SORT team members were still climbing out of the windows of the overturned second camper, only to be set upon by the men dressed as locals. Those already outside drew their weapons and looked for cover, but bullets smacked their chests and legs and knocked them around. They tried to return fire but they were shooting at ghosts. Snipers in the trees. The ground snow was turning red.

Chloe was lying on her side, not knowing how she got there. She turned to Warden James but he was being dragged away by two armed men. She was rolled over then by a man wearing a CNN ballcap, a gun jabbed into her face. He held a bloody SORT radio.

“Call in the guards from around the prison. Get them out here in two minutes.”

“What is this—”

He fired two shots into the snow behind her head and she barely heard her own scream. “Do it!” he yelled, in a faraway voice.

She called them in. She didn’t know if she was yelling or whispering into the radio. The man took her side arm from her and dragged her over to the rest.

Time blurred. Prison guards arriving from the perimeter were taken captive, made to sit in the snow like children, the local cops and reporters too. Guns, radios, and other equipment were all confiscated.

With the outside secured, some of the armed men headed for the prison entrance and the front gate, which opened magisterially. Gunfire was exchanged briefly, but then lights came on around the main entrance. Police cars, driven by more of these men, sped to the front gate with blue lights spinning.

Inmates exiting the penitentiary were picked up and chauffeured away. The rest of the guards were marched out of the prison, hands on their heads. A pickup truck pulled near the front entrance and a man standing in the bed raised a long, dark tube to his shoulder.

The missile obliterated the road sign heralding the entrance to ADX Gilchrist and federal property.

A cheer went up. Oddly, the prison structure itself, the gates and the watchtowers, were left intact.

Chloe Gimms saw it all then. The inmates were going to turn the tables on their captors and lock them up like prisoners of war. Chloe Gimms’s mind flashed on every story of human degradation she had overheard in her six years working federal pens. She was one of the few women there and she was going to be passed around like their last cigarette.

But that was not what happened. A truck used for transporting livestock was brought around and all the captives were loaded onto it like day laborers, including the wounded and the dead. Armed prisoners in con scrubs surrounded the truck and Chloe Gimms pushed toward the center, trying to disappear with the rest. The back of the truck was shut up and they began rolling away from the prison, past the fallen campers and abandoned TV trucks, turning the corner and following a bulldozer out along the access road. Chloe’s mind reeled. She looked around for familiar faces, but they were packed so tightly she could not move. Where were they being taken? The phrase “mass grave” popped into her head, and Chloe Gimms’s bladder emptied, warming the insides of her thighs. Hers was one of the last to go.

Special agent Lon Coté rode with the rest of the Gilchrist police force aboard a second truck, pulling in between the guard truck and the lead bulldozer. Ex-cons had led a surprise attack on the prison from the outside, and the liberated prisoners rode in pickups on either side of the two trucks now, howling and hoisting rifles in their hands.

The country road was dark but for the white snow. In the distance Coté could see machines working, large vehicles: backhoes, tractors, a fork-bladed snowplow. The organization mystified him. This was a coordinated effort, not a riot of opportunity.

The trucks slowed near the machines, rolling past cruisers and armed prisoners, AR-15s leaning casually on shoulders. No one on Coté’s truck uttered a sound. A huge combine lit up, slowly threshing its way off the road to allow them past. Suddenly Coté understood, and he was amazed.

The voices of the cons below grew angry. An argument, back and forth, in Spanish and English. The Spanish accent was Cuban. Gilchrist housed seven Mariel Cubans, the worst of the six thousand or so degenerates, criminals, and lunatics dispatched to the United States in Castro’s “Freedom Flotilla” of 1980.