The processional music commenced. An altar girl carrying the Easter candle walked up the center aisle past Elizabeth. Behind her followed two more altar girls with their candles mounted on long holders then an altar boy carrying the crucifix on a standard, a deacon carrying a Bible overhead, and finally Father Randy. Their eyes met as he passed.
A light came on in one cabin. Ben put the scope on that cabin. A figure silhouetted by the light appeared in the optic. Three hundred meters out and no wind, it would be an easy shot. The cabin door opened and a man stepped into the doorway; he yawned and stretched and presented a perfect shot opportunity, conveniently backlit. Ben adjusted the ballistic cam on the ART until the horizontal stadia lines framed the target’s torso and head; he centered the cross hairs on the target’s head. He had not put the scope on a human being in over thirty years. Killing another human being was something you lived with the rest of your life. He had lived with his killing back then, and he would live with his killing today. Ben took a deep breath, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger.
The man fell.
A good sniper always maintains surveillance on the downed target because his comrades will often check the body or remove weapons. That is a mistake. A mistake another man in the cabin was making. But he quickly pulled back out of sight, stuck a sidearm out the door, and fired two rounds into the air-the discharge echoed around the mountains like a pinball. Damn! Ben kept the scope on the spot where the second man’s head would appear when he peeked out the door, as Ben knew he would.
When he did, Ben squeezed the trigger again.
Two down, nine to go.
Jacko didn’t jump when heard the two gunshots. He smiled. Ben Brice had come to him, sooner than he had figured. Ben Brice was on this mountain, and he would die on this mountain. Jack Odell Smith would take the major’s revenge. His destiny was at hand.
He sat up in bed and lit a cigarette.
Proceed to Plan B. Ben fired the flare gun into the air with his left hand then quickly returned to his shooting position. A man appeared at the door of another cabin. The bullet hit him in the forehead.
Three down, eight to go.
John saw the flare and punched the detonator.
Sheriff J. D. Johnson always rose at the crack of dawn. Twenty years living on military time would do that. Today, he needed to get up early. He was going up into the mountains northeast of town, the mountains he loved to gaze upon as he drank his first cup of coffee of the day, as he was now, to find Colonel Brice and his son. Or to find what Colonel Brice had left behind. Just as he was about to turn away from the window, Red Ridge exploded like a Roman candle.
The mountain shook.
Ben was under the log now, protected from the falling rocks and tree limbs. After allowing a few seconds for the serious debris to fall, he returned to his shooting position and sighted in the camp through the haze of dirt and snow blown into the air by the explosion.
The explosion had the intended effect: chaos had captured the camp. Men in long johns fell out of the cabins; their heads jerked about as they tried to locate their attackers. They fired their weapons wildly and took cover behind the vehicles. Ben put two more down before they had made cover.
Five down, six to go.
He was sighting in another man, a big man ducked down behind the white SUV outside the main building, when the man popped back into sight with a shoulder-mounted missile aimed directly at Ben’s position. Captain Jack O. Smith was a skilled soldier: the suppressor prevented muzzle flash, so he didn’t know Ben’s actual position; he was simply aiming the rocket at the shooting position he would have taken if attacking the camp.
An adrenaline rush catapulted Ben up and running before the captain fired. He ran east for the count of five then dove under the nearest cover just as the ground rocked with an explosion behind him.
“Ben!”
Little Johnny Brice was crouched down and his ears were ringing from the first explosion. The second explosion had been right at Ben’s location. Ben had told him not to move from this position, no matter what happened. And Mom had told him to do exactly what Ben said and maybe they’d get Gracie back alive.
But neither of them had told him what to do if Ben got himself blown up!
John looked down at his right hand, the one holding the. 45-caliber pistol Ben had given him and trembling like a leaf in the breeze. He had fired the weapon a dozen times out back of Ben’s cabin; he had hit nothing he had aimed at. He hadn’t even come close. This wasn’t his kind of work.
Scared shitless in Idaho!
John R. Brice, alpha geek, Ph. D. in algorithms, 190 IQ, billionaire three times over, pushed his glasses up on his nose, took a deep breath, and ran toward Ben’s location.
If Ben Brice were defending the camp, he would do what any good soldier would do: he would outflank the enemy. The western route was too steep; an assault would come from the east. So as soon as the sky cleared of falling debris, Ben jumped up and ran toward the east, running the woods just like he had run the woods in Vietnam. The instincts would always be a part of him, the instincts that — made him duck behind a thick tree. His ears had picked up a sound, and his mind and body had reacted automatically. He shut out the sound of his own breathing and listened. He heard heavy footsteps crunching in the icy remains of the snow; the enemy was coming closer now. Ben reached down and grabbed a large flat stone, several pounds of rock. The footsteps were almost on him now, closer, closer, closernow!
Ben stepped out and slammed the rock into the unprotected face of a large man carrying an M-16. He was out before he hit the deck. Ben straddled the man. He could not take a chance on the man regaining consciousness and returning to the fight. He thought only of saving Gracie as he broke the man’s neck. He patted the man’s jacket down and found two fragmentation grenades. Ben put them in the pocket of his coat.
Six down, five to go.
John inhaled smoke then coughed it out. The trees were charred and smoldering along a line where the explosives had detonated. At Ben’s location, there was a small crater. Ben had survived the explosion. Or he had been blown to megabytes.
John ran on.
The suspect was crouched behind an old truck and loading a goddamned grenade launcher! On the ground beside him was an MP-5 fully automatic machine gun! And FBI Special Agent Pete O’Brien was betting that truck didn’t have an up-to-date vehicle registration on file with the Idaho DMV!
Pete was standing twenty meters behind the suspect. His adrenaline was pumping double-time; his rifle was aimed at the suspect’s back. Just as he was about the squeeze the trigger, the voices of his Academy instructors came screaming back to him:
“An FBI agent may not shoot a citizen in the back!”
“FBI rules of engagement require that the suspect be given the opportunity to surrender!”
“Suspects have constitutional rights!”
“You must shout, ‘FBI! Drop your weapon! Yes, that grenade launcher!’ ”
Of course, ordering this suspect to drop his weapon would give him an opportunity to shoot Pete first. But that’s what the “arresting agent” had done in every training exercise at the Academy; and every “suspect” had surrendered. But this wasn’t some bullshit hypothetical training exercise staged in Hogan’s Alley at the Academy with fake bad guys and fake bullets, where no one actually died when someone screwed up. This was the real fucking thing, a fucking shoot-out on a fucking mountain in fucking Idaho with a bunch of armed-to-the-fucking-teeth terrorists holding a little girl hostage and plotting to assassinate the President of the United States of America! At the Academy, they said 99 percent of all FBI agents would retire without ever having discharged their duty weapon at a suspect, much less ever having killed a suspect. Pete O’Brien sighed; he wasn’t going to be one of those agents.
