Stand Your Ground (35 page)

“Private Atkinson?” Stark said.

“Good Lord,” Atkinson said. “John Howard Stark! You turn up in the oddest places, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah,” Stark said as he shook hands with his old acquaintance. “And I'm getting too old for it, too.”

“Nah,” Atkinson said. “Because that would mean
I'm
getting too old, and that's never gonna happen. Men like us, we just go on fighting as long as there are wrongs to be righted.”

Stark was too tired to argue.

Besides, Atkinson was right.

This wasn't over.

“The death toll, including the alleged terrorists, now stands at 1,247 and is expected to rise. The details of exactly what happened in Fuego, Texas, and at the nearby Baldwin Correctional Facility yesterday and early this morning are still very unclear and open to speculation. In a statement from the White House, a spokesman said the preliminary investigation indicates that overreaction by local law enforcement personnel to a peaceful protest may have sparked a riot as the protesters attempted to protect themselves.

“This stance would seem to be at odds with the broadcast from Fuego last night by Dr. Phillip Hamil, who perished later on in the disturbance. Dr. Hamil, a well-known academic and advisor to the administration, claimed in the broadcast to be the leader of a fundamentalist group calling itself the Sword of Islam. It appeared that several hostages were executed at Dr. Hamil's order during the broadcast. The spokesman for the President says that he believes Dr. Hamil was being coerced, that the man he knows would never be responsible for such an atrocity. The President was quoted as saying, ‘Islam is a religion of peace.'

“Also in relation to this ongoing story, representatives of the Department of Homeland Security had no comment when they were asked about reports that some sort of paramilitary force entered Fuego early this morning to quell the disturbance. Governor Maria Delgado of Texas also had no comment.

“In other news, members of the Muslim community in cities across the nation continue to protest the deaths of several of the inmates at the prison, who were killed during the violence there. They say that these were political executions and the prison staff should be held responsible for them, with appropriate criminal charges filed against them. However, only a few of the prison employees actually survived the incident, among them Warden George Baldwin, who is in serious but stable condition at a hospital in El Paso.

“The correctional facility, known locally as Hell's Gate, has now been placed under federal jurisdiction for the time being.”

 

 

“You get that Mexican bitch on the phone,” the President raged. “She can't get away with taking military action in defiance of my orders! I'll put the whole damned state under martial law! I'll remove her from office! I'll throw out all the Republicans down there and be done with it. Somebody should have cleaned out that rat's nest a long time ago. They've been holding up our progressive agenda for too long.”

The advisors stood around in the Oval Office in uncomfortable silence and let the President pace back and forth and rant. When he finally ran out of steam, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ventured to say, “If you do that, sir, you'll have a fight on your hands.”

The director of the Department of Homeland Security sneered and said, “I don't think we have to worry about a bunch of redneck yokels kicking up too much of a fuss.”

“I wouldn't be too sure about that,” the Attorney General said. “But in this case, Mr. President, we don't have any real evidence against Governor Delgado. We don't have grounds for any federal charges—”

“Screw grounds!” the President screamed. “I'm the President of the United States! The people have spoken! I have a mandate! I can do anything I want! My word is law!”

“But sir, the Constitution—”

The President raised both fists over his head, shook them furiously, and roared,
“Fuck the Constitution!”

 

 

Later—much later—after he had calmed down, he made a call on a special encrypted phone that not even the Secret Service knew about. When a familiar voice answered, he took a deep breath and asked, “What should I do? Is it time for the endgame?”

“Not yet,” the man on the other end of the call said. “The day is not here.” He paused. “But it's coming. Soon.”

 

 

Lee Blaisdell was made acting police chief of Fuego. He didn't really want the job, but somebody had to do it. Putting the town back in order was going to take a long time.

There were mass funerals for two weeks. It took that long to lay all the innocent victims to rest.

Nobody knew what happened to the bodies of the terrorists who had been killed. They were loaded onto trucks and taken away, presumably by the federal government. Good riddance, most people thought.

Jerry and Lara Patel were both buried in Fuego, however. The authorities weren't quite sure what their connection to the whole thing had been, so they were given the benefit of the doubt.

Lois Frazier had lost both her husband and son to the savages. Within a month, she sold her house and went to live with her sister in Houston.

Ernie Gibbs's parents hadn't been at church that fateful Sunday morning after all, because Mrs. Gibbs had turned her ankle in the garage when they were walking out to the car to leave for Sunday School. Together they mourned Chuck, the family's lost brother and son, and three weeks later, when Fuego High School reopened with a much diminished and much saddened student body, Ernie was among them. He knew Chuck would have wanted it that way.

Lt. David Flannery resigned from the Texas Rangers and dropped out of sight.

The last network Travis Jessup worked for aired a thirty-minute special about his life and career. It got even worse ratings than their usual programming.

Alexis Devereaux never shut up. She was on some cable news show or other every day for a solid month, telling anybody who would listen about how none of the tragic events in Fuego would have happened if not for the reckless policies George W. Bush had set in motion more than two decades earlier.

Hell's Gate was shut down, its remaining inmates transferred elsewhere. In the case of some of them, no one really seemed to know where they had gone.

Mitch Cambridge was hired as a correctional officer in another facility.

One of the other officers, Lucas Kincaid, was on the list of those killed in the incident.

 

 

“Cigar?” Atkinson asked Stark.

“Don't use 'em,” Stark said.

“Suit yourself.”

“I wouldn't say no to a cold beer, though, if you've got that.”

“Of course I do. Sit down and I'll be right back.”

Stark sat down in one of the rocking chairs on the front porch of Atkinson's rustic, isolated home. From here he could look out over the rugged, wooded slopes of the Palo Pinto Hills, and he thought it was a mighty pretty sight.

“Here you go,” Atkinson said. He handed Stark an ice-cold longneck dripping with condensation, sat down in the other rocker, and took a long swallow from the bottle he had brought for himself. “What do you think of the place I've got here, John Howard?”

“Pretty nice . . . if you want to hide out from the world.”

Atkinson snorted and said, “The way the world is today, wouldn't you want to hide out from it?”

“Some of the time,” Stark admitted. “We still have to live in it, though.”

“That's true.” Atkinson took another drink. “You hear anything from Kincaid?”

Stark smiled and shook his head.

“That boy's so far back in the woods we may never see him again . . . especially since Riley went with him. He said he'd check in from time to time, just to see if we needed him for anything.”

“We're going to need him,” Atkinson said, his voice growing solemn. “When the showdown comes, we're going to need him to prove what's really been going on.”

“You think people will believe it? Enough people?”

Atkinson sighed and said, “That's a damned good question. I wish I knew the answer. But one thing I
do
know—that showdown
is
coming.”

Stark heard wheels rumbling on the narrow gravel road that led to Atkinson's house. He sat up straighter and asked, “Are you expecting company?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

Stark and Atkinson stood up as a nondescript car drove into view. It stopped in front of the porch, and a man and a woman got out. Stark knew the man.

“Lieutenant Flannery,” he said with a nod of greeting.

“Just Dave now,” Flannery said. “I'm not a Ranger anymore.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

Stark looked at the woman and recognized her as well, even though they had never met. As she came up the steps, she held her hand out to him and said, “Mr. Stark, it's good to finally meet you.”

“You, too, Governor,” Stark told Maria Delgado. He glanced at Atkinson, who was grinning. “I reckon Tom asked me to come out here today so we could have this little get-together?”

“That's right. We have something to discuss. Something important.”

“What would that be?”

Maria Delgado took a deep breath and said, “The future of Texas. The future of our country.”

“Got more chairs here,” Atkinson said as he waved a hand at them. “We might as well sit down and enjoy this pretty day while we talk.”

So that was what they did. They sat there on a beautiful autumn afternoon in Texas and talked about the days that were coming.

The bad days that were coming.

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018

Copyright © 2014 J. A. Johnstone

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone's outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone's superb storytelling.

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

ISBN: 978-0-7860-3356-0

 

First electronic edition: August 2014

ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3357-7

ISBN-10: 0-7860-3357-6