cops ever caught you in the house, you get down the basement, light a candle, turn on the gas, and seal the tunnel. Regular old manhole cover with some plastic tape or foam. Then you crawl out the culvert…skin your knees up some…I keep thinking, he didn't answer the cell phone the last time Virgil called.'
'Sonofabitch,' Gomez said. They climbed down from the loft, and Gomez got on his radio. A half dozen agents came running.
'THE LINE GOES right into that clump of trees,' Stryker said, pointing up the hill. 'There's like three clumps coming down the hill, and then the last clump on the bottom, it goes right into that clump.'
'They might already be out,' Virgil said.
Gomez told his guys, 'Armor up. Fast. Let's go, let's go…'
Eight of them crossed the field in a long skirmish line, while the two functioning north squad trucks ferried six more agents in an end run to block off the field to the south. The last hundred yards they did on hands and knees, moving two at a time, the DEA agents performing like well-trained infantry. Gomez was working the radio, had the north squad in position, and they tightened the noose on the end of the seam.
And when they got there, they found a depression that had once been a farm dump, two rusted car bodies from the forties and fifties, corroded farm machinery, a half-buried cylindrical washing machine.
One of the agents put his finger to his lips, and pointed urgently. There, on the side of the slope nearest the farmhouse, a piece of corrugated steel, like the kind used in silos, was too conveniently arranged on the slope. The agent eased up to it, listened, peered under the sheet, then put his finger to his lips again, and backed off.
'That's it,' he whispered to Gomez. Gomez waved back the troops. They moved back in a loose circle, and Gomez walked away with his radio. Fifty yards out, he stopped, clicked on the radio, and briefed the waiting agents, listening on their headsets.
It'd be a hell of a crawl, Virgil thought, looking down to the farmhouse. The smallest culvert that would take your hips and shoulders, pushing with your toes, bad air…Anything more than a two-foot culvert would take a hell of a lot of digging. The seam wasn't that big…
THEY WAITED an hour, then started working it in shifts. From the time they'd first jumped Franks, until the house went up, was little more than an hour. They'd figured out the seam a half hour later. Two hours after that, four of the DEA troops and Stryker were watching the sheet of steel, and Gomez was back at the house, watching two agents carefully probing into the basement.
Then Gomez took a radio call: 'They can hear them coming.'
He and Virgil jogged up the hill, two more agents running along behind. When they got close, an agent near the culvert exit stood up and made a hands-down gesture: 'Quiet.'
The agents on duty had backed into a semicircle, on their stomachs, behind rocks, behind humps in the field, all zeroed in on the sheet steel. The lead agent at the site pointed them toward a red outcrop. They went that way, squatted down, peering through a clump of weeds, and Gomez drew his pistol. 'Easy,' Virgil breathed.
Stryker eased up next to them and said, whispering, 'We could hear them talking. Must be really tight in there.'
They waited twenty minutes; the lead agent said once, on the radio, to Gomez, 'Patience, patience, they're right there,' and Gomez repeated it to Virgil and Stryker.
Twenty minutes, and then the sheet of metal twitched, and then a man's head and shoulders pushed from beneath it. He pulled out a long weapon, looked like another M-16. He knelt for a moment, catching his breath, then turned and snaked up the bank that he'd just emerged from, looking down toward the farmstead. He watched for a second, then slipped back down the slope and pushed the sheet up, said something, and then Feur came out of the ground, sat up, gasping for air, looked around.
The two talked for a few seconds, then Feur pointed up the hill, and they both stood, crouching, weapons hung low in their hands, and then the lead agent shouted, 'Freeze. DEA. Put your hands over your head.'
Both men froze, then Feur shouted, 'Virgil?'
Virgil yelled, 'You're good, George, just drop the weapons.'
Feur spotted the direction of his voice, yanked the M-16 up. Stryker cut him down, and the rest of the DEA guns tore the two men to pieces. Beside him, Gomez had gotten to his knees, and emptied his pistol at the two.
'Jesus,' Virgil said. 'Oh, Jesus, stop, man…'
THEY WALKED DOWN. Feur and the man he'd called John-Virgil supposed-were six feet outside the end of the culvert, lying on their backs. They'd been hit forty or fifty times. Their weapons were converted M-15s.
Feur didn't look peaceful; he looked like a dead weasel. John didn't look like anything. His face was gone.
One of the armored agents said to Gomez, 'They resisted. It was straight up. We did it straight up.'
Gomez nodded: 'Straight up,' he said. 'The motherfuckers.'
20
A DUCK-BILLED WRECKING machine plucked splintered lumber out of the wreckage of the farmhouse, like a steel velociraptor; the sun was rolling down below the horizon, the sky as orange as a bluebird's belly.
Virgil sat in the open door of the barn's hayloft, feet dangling, eating a bologna sandwich provided by the taxpayers, two other agents chewing along with him, talking about the fight, when Gomez walked up on the ground and called, 'Let's go to town. TV is waiting.'
'Fuck you,' Virgil called back.
'I knew you'd say that. I talked to Davenport, and he says he wants to see your happy face on all channels, thanking the governor for this opportunity to take crime fighting into the sticks.'
'Fuck Davenport,' Virgil said.
'Get your ass down here. I'm too tired to fool around.' Gomez walked away, stopped to talk to Stryker. Virgil stood up, dusted off the seat of his pants, picked up a half-drunk bottle of Pepsi, and stepped toward the ladder.
One of the agents, the Latino-looking New Yorker who'd given Virgil a hard time about his T-shirt, said, 'Virgil. We owe you. Puttin' those guys in the truck and taking them out of the yard. We pay. You ever need help on anything… you call us. No bullshit.'
The other agent nodded, said through a mouthful of Wonder Bread and bologna, 'Anything.'
GOMEZ AND STRYKER rode to Bluestem with Virgil, in the shot-up Ford, trailed by two more agents in one of the north-crew trucks. They'd both been back and forth since the killing of Feur. The two badly wounded DEA agents were still alive. One would probably make it, the other probably not; two more, whom Virgil didn't know, were less seriously wounded, and almost everybody was scratched and pitted by rocks, dust, and pieces of metal.
Pirelli was screwed up, but not terminally. A slug had busted up his shoulder joint, and putting that back together would be tough. His broken arm was another problem, and would take a while to heal.
'AND JUDD,' Stryker said. 'Where is that asshole?'
A DEA arrest team had gone after Judd as the raid on the farm was taking place, but hadn't been able to find him. His car was at his office, the door was unlocked, but there was no sign of Judd.
'This bothers me,' Virgil said. 'Why would he be gone?'
'Tipped?' Gomez asked.
'By who? One of your guys? When Pirelli called me, Jim and I were together, and we were together every inch of the way. Neither one of us called anyone.'
Stryker nodded; Gomez said, 'Maybe…I don't know.'
GOMEZ ASKED, 'You got a better shirt than that?'
'And another jacket,' Virgil said. 'We can stop at the motel.'
'Keep the jacket; I don't want you guys washed up,' Gomez said. 'I want you looking messed up, but the T- shirt is too much. Looks crazy, given all the dead people.'
'I got a black AC/DC shirt that should be perfect,' Virgil said.
'Virgil.'
