Wildfire (51 page)

"You find this amusing?" he asked the private investigator.

"No, I don't," Crane said evenly.

"Gut,
then I give you something better to do," Maas said, and in a movement almost too quick to see, he slammed the butt of the heavy double-action pistol against the side of Crane's head. The investigator sagged and then dropped to the floor with a loud thump.

"Bring him with us," Maas ordered as he began to roll his wheelchair into the living room.

"Bring him yourself," Chareaux snapped.

"You wish to have your chance with
Herr
Lightstone again?" Maas inquired calmly, making only the slightest gesture with the silenced pistol. The implication was absolutely clear. No matter how fast and skilled Alex Chareaux might be with a knife, a 10mm bullet would be just as lethal and much, much faster.

Having no choice but to bow to the balance of power that Riser had deliberately established in arming his two new employees, Alex Chareaux nodded in silent agreement. He began to drag the unconscious form of Walter Crane into the living room.

One of the 1900-grain slugs aimed at the approaching agents ricocheted off the bumper of the rented green jeep, and a sheared-off fragment struck Mike Takahara just above the right knee.

Grimacing from the pain, the tech agent used his pocket knife to cut away the pants leg. After verifying that the freely bleeding wound was shallow and therefore not life-threatening, Takahara quickly used the remnants of his pants leg to make a crude bandage.

Then, as Henry Lightstone and Larry Paxton maintained a forward covering fire up ahead, Takahara and Sam Tisbury managed to crawl forward to the red jeep. There they found Eric Tisbury lying on his back amid hundreds of fragments of safety glass, bleeding from the chest and mouth.

From his barricaded position against the side of the jeep, the tech agent could see at least four large buckshot holes in the youth's blood-soaked shirt.

Sam Tisbury reacted by grabbing his son and mumbling, "No! No!" over and over again, until Mike Takahara finally pulled him away to see if there was anything he could possibly do in the way of first aid.

As he did so, Eric Tisbury opened his eyes and whispered something.

"What?" Takahara said, and then tucked his head in close so that he could try to hear what Sam Tisbury's dying son was trying to say. But before the youth could finish, his eyes glazed over and his head rolled to one side.

Takahara started to say something to the father when they heard the four-bore again, the concussive blast echoing across the island as Riser blew the front door of the villa off its bronze hinges.

Staying as low to the ground as he could, Mike Takahara hobbled back to the bright green jeep, grabbed the pack-set radio out of the backpack, and switched it on.

"Foxtrot Whiskey Three to Foxtrot Whiskey Five, do you read me?"

"Foxtrot Whiskey Three, I read you!" Woeshack's distinctive voice crackled across the airwaves.

"Foxtrot Whiskey Five, where are you?"

"This is four." Dwight Stoner's deep voice came over the radio. "We're over Exuma Sound, heading straight toward the Hawk's Nest marina, about thirty miles out. What's going on?"

"We followed a pair of suspects to a villa about four miles northeast of Devil's Point. We have multiple shots fired, one suspect down, and at least one guy running around with what sounds like a cannon. Notify Halahan and get us some backup—whoever you can find, and make it fast."

"Ten-four," Stoner acknowledged. "Backup is on the way. Is anybody hurt?"

"Just me, I think, and it's minor."

"Well, keep your goddamned head down until we get there!"

Maintaining his low profile with the ground, Mike Takahara hobbled his way back to where Henry Lightstone and Larry Paxton were crouched down behind a pair of what looked like extremely small palm trees. A third tree lay shattered and toppled on the sandy ground a few feet away, the victim of another 1900-grain rifle slug.

"You okay?" Paxton asked, looking back and seeing the blood-soaked bandage on Takahara's muscular leg.

"Yeah, fine. Where the hell is he?" the tech agent asked, just as a pair of concussive explosions blew a shower of glass flying from the third story of the villa, and causing all three agents to duck down behind the minimally protective trees.

"I'd say he's up there," Larry Paxton said.

"Any idea what that thing is?" Takahara asked.

"Some combination of 20mm cannon and long-range blunderbuss, from the looks of things around here," Lightstone said. "You get hold of anybody?" He gestured with his head at the radio in the tech agent's hand.

"Woeshack and Stoner." Takahara quickly described their brief conversation.

"You know, I hate to admit it, but I think Stoner's right," Larry Paxton commented, glancing over at the shattered palm tree. "The smart thing to do would be to stay right where we are, keep our heads down, and wait for help."

"Sounds like one hell of a good plan to me." Lightstone nodded.

At that moment a familiar voice rang out.

"Herr
Lightstone! You are coming for me,
ja?"

Henry Lightstone blinked, and then looked over at Paxton in disbelief. "Maas?"

"I wait for you too, Henry!"

"And our buddy Chareaux," Paxton said, his dark eyes starting to narrow dangerously.

"McNulty died very badly,
Herr
Lightstone. Perhaps you and your friends can do better,
ja?

"Well, so much for good plans and intentions," Lightstone muttered as he slowly and cautiously began to move forward beyond the protection of the small palms.

Chapter Thirty-five

Henry Lightstone, Larry Paxton, and Mike Takahara moved forward in a rapid series of crossover maneuvers designed to give the person out in the open as much cover as possible, knowing, as they did so, that they were still leaving themselves horribly vulnerable to a lethal blast from whatever kind of weapon it was that had been making the cannonlike explosions.

As they approached the blown-open front door of the villa, they observed the bodies of what appeared to be four security guards sprawled next to a pair of gray-painted jeeps. A brief glance told the wildlife agents what they wanted to know: three of the casually uniformed men had bullet holes in their foreheads, and the fourth had his throat cut.

Lightstone waited until Paxton and Takahara were in position, signaled a two count with his left hand . . . and then dove in through the doors, rolling and ending up flat on the floor with the 10mm semiautomatic extended out in both hands. At the same instant, Takahara barricaded himself low against the right side of the door frame, and Paxton barricaded himself high on the left, both agents aiming their weapons in a crossing direction over Lightstone's prone body, and all three ready to shoot at the first sign of movement.

Nothing.

Stopping frequently to look and listen, the three agents slowly and cautiously worked their way up the wide staircase until they reached the third floor.

Still nothing.

"Where
are
those bastards?" Larry Paxton whispered as the three agents arranged themselves in a triangulated, back-to-back protective position, watching and waiting.

"I don't know," Lightstone replied in a soft voice, "but they've got to be around here somewhere."

Finally Henry Lightstone began to move carefully forward toward the far bedroom, as Paxton sifted over toward the living room, and Takahara slowly inched his way into the dining room.

"Oh, Christ, look at this," Takahara whispered, gesturing with his head to Paxton as he maintained a covering watch over Henry Lightstone, who was still moving toward the far bedroom.

"Man, oh, man," Larry Paxton said softly as he took a quick look into the dining room and saw the sprawled and shattered bodies of Harold Tisbury, Nicholas Von Hagberg, Wilbur Lee Edgarton, Jonathan Chilmark . . . and Sergio Paz-Rios, who lay on his back in the pool of blood that had formed around his slashed neck and head, his empty dark eyes staring up at the ceiling.

Then Larry Paxton froze as he saw Lightstone bring up a warning hand.

Moving as carefully and quietly as they could, the two wildlife agents came up beside Lightstone.

"I think I can see the edge of a wheelchair in that mirror," he whispered, motioning with his head to the far wall where an angled mirror gave the agents a very limited and cropped view of a small portion of the darkened bedroom.

"Maas?" Paxton asked.

"I think so." Lightstone whispered. "You ready?"

They both nodded.

Keeping a loose grip on the heavy double-action pistol and his finger through the trigger guard, Lightstone got down on his hands and knees and slowly moved over toward the open door. Then he looked back at his two partners.

"On three," he mouthed silently, and then held up a single finger.

One.

Two.

At that moment, the roar of a rapidly approaching single-engined plane; the sound of three jeep engines revving up, two close and one more distant; and a pair of thundering explosions outside the villa jarred the three agents.

"Foxtrot Whiskey Four," Stoner's deep voice crackled softly from the radio attached to Mike Takahara's belt. "They're getting away!"

As the single-engined Cessna with Special Agent/Pilot Thomas Woeshack at the controls roared directly over the villa in a series of desperately evasive maneuvers, Henry Lightstone dove inside the bedroom with the Model 1076 pistol outstretched in both hands—ready to send the 10mm hollow-pointed rounds into the body of the wheelchair-bound terrorist as fast as he could pull the trigger.

Then he remained stretched out on the carpet, staring uncomprehending at the slumped figure of Walter Crane, who—based upon the visual evidence—had been quickly secured to the wheelchair with multiple loops of duct tape before someone cut his throat too.

At eight-thirty that Sunday morning FBI agent Al Grynard responded groggily to the pounding on his door and was startled to see U.S. Attorney Theresa Fletcher standing there wide-eyed in the hallway.

"I'm sorry to wake you, but I've been hearing what I think are gunshots and—"

At that moment two more distant explosions from Riser's four-bore rifle echoed through the open window of Grynard's Cutlass Bay Club hotel room.

"Holy shit," Grynard muttered, and then: "Call Owens and Whittman while I get dressed."

Grynard grabbed his black nylon equipment bag and disappeared into the bathroom as Theresa Fletcher ran over to the bed and reached for the phone. She let the phone to Hal Owen's room ring six times before hanging up with an unladylike curse. She was just getting ready to dial Whittman's room when somebody knocked on the door.

After cautiously checking the peephole, she quickly opened the door to Hal Owens and Jim Whittman. Both agents were wearing dark green military camouflage clothing and black webbing gear. In addition, hostage recovery team commander Whittman was carrying an assault rifle, and trying to strap himself hurriedly into his black Kevlar vest. Moving forward quickly, the prosecutor grabbed at the back of the vest and helped him readjust the Velcro straps.

"Where's Grynard?" Owens demanded.

"Here," Al Grynard said, strapping on his pistol as he came out of the bathroom. "What's going on?"

"Sounds like we got some kind of firefight in progress, somewhere to the northwest of us," Owens said. "Which probably has something to do with a call for backup that the radio operator on one of our boats just picked up on a scrambled law enforcement channel. The location described is a red-tile-roofed villa about four miles northwest of us. Whoever was calling for help used the call sign Foxtrot Whiskey."

"Foxtrot Whiskey?" Grynard blinked, and then it hit him. "That's got to be Fish and Wildlife."

"Oh, Christ," Owens said, "let's get going. I've got one of our choppers en route to pick us up."

When the three FBI agents and deputy U.S. Attorney Theresa Fletcher got outside in the parking lot, the first thing Jim Whittman saw was the two men who had been in the bar the night before. Only now the two casually dressed men were hurrying to get into a rented car, and one of them clearly had a pack-set radio in his hand.

"Hey!" Whittman yelled, leveling the assault rifle and thumbing the selective-fire lever to "Auto," just as the second man whirled around fast in a low crouch with a stainless steel semiautomatic pistol extended in both hands.

"Federal Agent, drop—" Freddy Moore, the newly appointed FWS special operations deputy chief, started to yell, and then instinctively shifted the point-sight of his pistol away when he saw the FBI insignia on Whittman's vest. At the same moment, the tensed and focused hostage recovery team commander backed his finger off the trigger of the M-16 assault rifle.

David Halahan, the chief of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Special Ops Branch, was reaching for his own weapon when he spotted and immediately recognized FBI agent A1 Grynard.

"What the hell are you guys doing here?" Halahan demanded as the five federal law enforcement officers cautiously approached one another.

"If it involves Henry Lightstone, probably the same thing you are," Grynard said as the rotor noise of the rapidly approaching Blackhawk assault helicopter started to drown out their voices. "You want a lift?"

Chapter Thirty-six

Henry Lightstone was scrambling to his feet when Larry Paxton entered the bedroom.

"What the hell . . ." Paxton blinked, staring uncomprehendingly at the slumped and bloody figure of Walter Crane.

"Looks to me like Maas's sense of humor and Chareaux's knife," Lightstone said. "That goddamned kraut's been playing with us all this time, pretending he couldn't get out of that chair."

"Must have gotten himself a couple of them fake knee jobs, like Stoner did," Paxton commented.

"Yeah, probably . . . did you see which way they went?"

"No, but maybe . . ." Paxton started to say when Mike Takahara appeared in the bedroom doorway with the pack-set radio in his hand.