Stand Your Ground (23 page)

“Ms. Nichols is right,” Stark said. “Our only chance to survive is to hold them off until help gets here. This place gives us the best chance of doing that.”

“You heard the man,” Baldwin said.

“Yes, sir,” came the response over the intercom. A motor came to life, and the sally port's massive outer door began to slide back.

Baldwin motioned for everybody else to go through first. He and Stark hung back to be the last ones into the maximum security wing. As they entered haltingly due to Baldwin's injury, the warden said, “Do you really think help is on the way, John Howard? The way the country is now?”

“I'd like to think so, George,” Stark said. “But to tell you the truth . . . I just don't know.”

As Lucas Kincaid hurried through the prison, he heard an occasional muffled explosion, as well as the rattle of small-arms fire.

The thick walls couldn't keep all the sounds of the battle going on outside from reaching into the building.

That unholy racket gnawed at Kincaid's guts. He knew that good men were fighting and dying out there, sacrificing their lives to slow the terrorists' advance into the prison compound.

Unfortunately, there weren't enough guards to stop the attack. Kincaid knew that sooner or later the terrorists were going to penetrate into the prison, and more than likely it wouldn't take them long to crush any opposition.

Before that happened, he and the others who were trapped in here had to be ready to defend the maximum security wing. Their only chance to survive was to hold out until help arrived from outside—if it did.

Unfortunately, Kincaid had seen with his own eyes how the top brass, for the most part, whether military or law enforcement, liked to dither around and consider every angle—most important, how this problem was going to affect their own careers—before taking any action.

It was just that sort of politically correct navel-gazing that had prompted him to disobey orders at the village of Warraz al-Sidar. He'd had to go off-book in order to save lives.

That deadly firefight had uncovered something that landed him in hot water with some really bad guys. Powerful guys with friends in high places.
Very
high places. That was why he had been lying low ever since.

Hell's Gate had three distinct areas as far as the inmates were concerned: minimum security, general population, and maximum security. The minimum security cell block served as a buffer between the administrative area, where the library was located, and Gen Pop. As Kincaid came running up to the guard station at the entrance to minimum security, he found several officers he knew waiting there with guns drawn.

“Kincaid!” one of them exclaimed. “What the hell is going on out there?”

“The prison's under attack,” Kincaid said. “Round up as many weapons as you can and get the inmates over to the max security wing. That's where we're going to mount a defense.”

“Wait just a damned minute,
librarian
,” one of the other guards said. “You're telling us to release the inmates
and
give them access to guns?”

“That sounds pretty crazy, Kincaid,” said the first guard who had spoken.

“Look, there's no time to argue about it. There's a whole army of terrorists out there, if you want to take it up with them. But I'd rather save as many lives as we can.”

Several of the guards looked like they were starting to agree with him. The others still appeared stubborn.

“Where's Warden Baldwin?” one of them asked.

“He was wounded by an assassin who got into the prison posing as a member of the news crew that was here today,” Kincaid replied, trying not to give in to the impatience he felt. “He put me in charge. I want a couple of you to come with me to the armory and help me gather more weapons.”

“I think you've gone nuts,” the most obnoxious of the other men said. “I'm not gonna get in trouble on your say-so.”

“Fine,” Kincaid snapped. “Whatever happens—whoever dies—it's on your head, then.” He looked at the other men. “I still need two volunteers.”

A couple of them stepped forward.

“We'll come with you,” one said.

“Then let's go.”

As Kincaid continued toward the armory, he thought that the guy who'd been complaining actually was right: his plan was crazy. A lot of the inmates, even the ones in minimum security, couldn't be trusted. They might try to seize the opportunity to arm themselves and take over the prison.

But if the terrorists found them locked in their cells, they would massacre the inmates, slaughtering them a cell at a time by firing through the bars with automatic weapons, simply because the prisoners were Americans.

Was that worse than the chaos that might be unleashed by letting the prisoners out of their cells? Kincaid thought it was.

And whether he liked the responsibility or not, he was the one making that call.

When he and the two men accompanying him reached the armory, he swiped his pass to unlock the outer door, then keyed the day's combination into the keypad on the inner door. He hoped he remembered it correctly.

“Take as many rifles and as much ammunition as you can carry,” Kincaid told his companions as the doors slid open. “Head straight to the maximum security wing.”

He loaded himself down with rifles, pistols, and a couple of boxes of ammunition, then trotted toward the cell block where the general population was kept. There were a lot more hardened felons here, men who wouldn't think twice about shooting a correctional officer, no matter what the situation.

This hand was going to have to be played a little differently, Kincaid thought.

The alarm that had started going off as soon as it was obvious that trouble was imminent was still clamoring shrilly throughout the prison. Kincaid had gotten to the point that he wasn't paying much attention to it anymore.

The guards at the entrance to the main cell block certainly were, though. As Kincaid approached he found himself being targeted by eight men with riot guns leveled at him.

Kincaid slowed. Bristling with armament as he was, he wouldn't be surprised if the guards opened fire on him.

“Stand down!” he called to them. “You men know me. I'm Officer Lucas Kincaid.”

One of the guards lowered his shotgun slightly, but the others didn't relax.

“Kincaid, what is all this crap? Alarms going off, explosions outside, we can't raise the command center—is somebody trying to stage a breakout?”

“You could say that,” Kincaid replied. “The best anybody can figure right now is that a bunch of terrorists are trying to free the new inmates in maximum security.”

That news drew an outburst of curses from several of the guards. One of them declared, “I've been saying all along that if the government wanted to put those crazy bastards here, they should have brought in the Army to guard them! It's like the politicians just dangled them out there and dared their friends to come after them!”

It seemed to Kincaid that somebody had made a comment like that more than once recently, and the more he thought about it, the more he believed there might be something to the theory. The idea that somebody at the Justice Department might have helped set this up should have been ludicrous, but ever since the Democrats had started running the show totally in Washington, anything was possible.

Twenty years earlier, for example, nobody would have believed that the Attorney General of the United States would set up an operation to sell guns to the Mexican drug cartels that would be used to murder American law enforcement officers—and get away with it, to boot, receiving a pass from the media, who called it just another phony scandal, and inattention from a majority of the voting population.

Kincaid thought about John Howard Stark, who was somewhere else in the prison right now. Some of the guns used by Stark's cartel foes in his battles against them might as well have had that former Attorney General's fingerprints on them.

And nobody but a few people—too few to do any good, obviously—even gave a damn.

But as disturbing as that was, it wasn't the issue right now. Kincaid said, “I don't care how it happened, we've got to deal with it. Leave the weapons you have here, go to the armory and get more, and then head for the maximum security wing. That's where we're making our stand.”

“What about the inmates?”

“I'm going to unlock their cells and let them go,” Kincaid said.

The guards gaped at him in disbelief.

“You can't do that!” one officer exclaimed. “If that bunch gets their hands on guns—”

“They'll have a chance to put up a fight,” Kincaid interrupted. His voice was hard and flat. He didn't like what he was about to do, but he didn't have any choice. “They're our first line of defense.”

Looks of horror appeared on the faces of a couple of the guards as they realized what Kincaid was talking about. The others still just looked confused.

“When the inmates realize their doors and the cell block doors are unlocked, they'll come pouring out through here,” Kincaid went on. “They'll head for the main entrance. If I'm right, they'll run into the terrorists on the way.”

“What if they get past the terrorists? You're talking about turning loose a bunch of murderers, rapists, and God knows that!”

“If any of them get past the terrorists, it won't be very many. They'll be outnumbered and outgunned.”

Another man said, “That's a death sentence you're giving them, Kincaid. That's cold.”

“I know. But the minimum security inmates are on their way to the max wing, and there are guards and other innocent people there, too. I'm trying to save as many of them as I can.”

He was like a general in the old war movies, he told himself, ordering a company to hold the line while the rest of the regiment pulled back. He was sacrificing good men—and to be honest, quite a few bad ones—to save as many others as he could. There was a certain brutal nobility to it.

Not for the ones who were going to wind up dead, though.

Kincaid pushed that thought out of his brain and snapped, “Get moving. If you've got a problem, take it up with the warden when you get to the max security wing. He's waiting there.”

The other officers still hesitated. One of them asked, “How are we going to let the inmates out?”

Kincaid had considered that, too. He said, “I'll wait until you guys have had a chance to get well on your way, then I'll use the manual override to unlock all the cell doors at once.”

“Those bastards'll explode out of there once they realize what's happened,” one of the guards warned. “You'll have to get out of here quick to keep them from catching you.”

“That's exactly what I intend to do. And if I don't make it . . .” Kincaid shrugged. “When you get to the warden, tell him what I did. He probably won't like it, but it's the only chance any of us have.”

The grim realization that he was right put an end to any arguments from the other men. They set their riot guns and pistols aside so that the escaping inmates could claim them and use them against the terrorists. Kincaid planned to leave the weapons he had brought along, too.

“For a guy who works in the library, you've got balls, Kincaid,” one of the men said as they prepared to depart.

“I've done a few things in my time besides shelving books,” Kincaid said with a faint smile.

Once the men had trotted up the corridor and then turned into another corridor that would eventually lead them to the maximum security wing, Kincaid stepped over to the control panel in the guard station. He looked at the video feeds that covered the cell doors. Inmates stood at most of the barred openings. They had heard the alarms, the shooting, the explosions. They knew something was going on. Speculation was probably flying around like crazy in there.

Chances were that none of those men were prepared for the truth of what they would soon be facing, Kincaid thought. He knew a lot of them. Nearly every man in there had committed some sort of violent felony. Many were repeat offenders who had spent more of their lives behind bars than they had been out. Some were lifers, reptilian, sociopathic killers who up until now really had been wastes of perfectly good air.

But maybe for the first time, they were about to serve a purpose that had some decency to it, whether they were aware of it or not.

The other guards had had time to get clear. Kincaid took a deep breath and pushed the manual override button that unlocked every cell in the block. The shouts that went up as the inmates heard the clunking of the mechanisms and realized they were free blended together into an animalistic howl.

Kincaid unlocked the main doors into the cell block and started to step out of the guard station, then thought better of it and paused long enough to grab one of the pistols left behind by the other officers. Carrying the weapon, he broke into a run along the corridor.

Even through thick steel walls and bulletproof glass, he heard the frenzied clamor growing louder behind him as the inmates passed through the series of doors leading into the cell block.

He turned the corner into the other corridor, heading left and skidding a little because he was hurrying so much.

As he did, a startled shout sounded behind him. Kincaid's head jerked around as he looked back over his shoulder.

He was surprised to see that some of the terrorists had already made it this far into the prison. Half a dozen men were at the far end of the corridor, maybe fifty yards away. They hurried toward him, and as they did, the ones in the lead lifted the automatic weapons they carried and opened fire.

There were no doors or alcoves in the concrete walls, no cross corridors for another thirty yards, no place to take cover. Kincaid knew that.

All he could do was dive desperately to the floor as a hail of bullets sizzled through the air above his head where he had been an instant earlier.