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(Pendleton, Oregon, 2 a.m. Thursday, October 2, 2013)
It was a scruffy, odd collection of men who hunched over the table at Denny’s. Mac looked at his troops: Stan Warren, looking every one of his 40-plus years. His dark suit was wilted and wrinkled, and Mac suspected he would toss that once-white shirt rather than wear it again. Eli Andrews hadn’t changed much—he’d looked scruffy when he started the day and he still looked like a homeless person in his army fatigue jacket, gray T-shirt, and pants that Mac could only call dungarees. Shorty sat between Eli and Timothy Brandt. He had his laptop set up and was arguing with Eli and Timothy about the map on his screen. He looked more put together than anyone else at the table, but then he’d joined up with them after teaching school. A short slim Filipino with expensively cut dark hair, Shorty looked as out of place inside the Pendleton Denny’s as his Lexus did outside.
“I don’t care what you two think the map should look like,” he protested. “This is what the map does look like.”
Timothy shook his head. He looked older than he had 10 hours ago. Mac could see his mother in him now. He suspected Tim looked like his grandfather had looked like when he’d joined up to fight in Vietnam. How the Rev. Brandt had hidden their family relationship, he didn’t know.
“Look,” Timothy said, dragging his finger across the screen of the Google Earth map. “It’s missing the schoolhouse, the barn, and a whole street worth of homes over here.”
Eli grunted. “And the barn and schoolhouse were both there when I left 20 years ago,” he contributed.
“It’s a satellite image,” Shorty protested. Mac hid a grin. They were insulting Shorty’s god. His faith was shaken.
In front of them lay the remains of breakfast. They’d put away an unholy amount of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and coffee. And a Mountain Dew, because nothing could force Mac to drink coffee. He’d drunk it in the Marines because it was the only caffeine available, but it was a hallmark of being a civilian again that no one was going to make him drink coffee again.
Mac wanted to stretch. But he’d already found out just how much it hurt his arm to do that. He resisted. From the look on the waitress’s face, he looked to be in as bad, if not worse, shape than the rest of them. But then, he was the only one who had actually been shot. And if you looked carefully, you could see the bullet holes in the sleeve of his black leather jacket. The jacket had to go, but not while he was wrapped up in bandages.
“OK,” Mac interjected. “We need a plan.”
They all looked at him expectantly. He sighed.
“That’s your job, dude,” Shorty said. “I’m tech support. Tim here is our inside source. Eli and Stan are muscle. You’re the brains.”
“God help us,” Stan Warren muttered. He smiled and nodded at the waitress when she offered him a refill. She hadn’t called the cops on them, so Mac figured they were good. He’d have to leave her a big tip. He wondered if he could expense this trip. Then he looked at Warren speculatively. Maybe Warren could expense the whole thing?
“OK. Then here’s what we’re going to do.” He laid out the plan that had been forming in his head as they’d dropped over the Cascades, down into the Colombia River Gorge, and into the Pendleton valley. They were still about two hours out. And he could feel the clock ticking.
He pulled a scrawled map out of his backpack. He'd made it from memory when he realized that he was going to have to go back to Jehovah's Valley. Apparently, his map was as good as Google’s.
He set it in the center of the table where everyone could see. "OK, to give you some perspective, the Valley and surrounding range that the church owns is roughly four-square miles. I'd guess the land that's developed for housing is about one square mile. Main road in goes through a locked gate. It's a choke point. Meaning, we're going to have to split up four ways. I'll go in through the scrub to the south, because I've never seen the land to the north of the Valley."
He paused, thinking how little time he'd had to do any kind of surveillance at all. Started to shrug and stopped when his arm reminded him that he'd been shot.
“Shorty, you’re going to be stationed up on the road running communications. If things go to shit, you get out of here and call in the FBI, sheriff, and whoever else you can think of. Start with Roberta Brooks, she knows the locals.” He traced a line along to the north of the valley. “Eli, you take the northern route. It’s what, about two miles to be able to circle around and come in from the east?”
Eli nodded.
“So, Agent Warren, you give us an hour to clear out anyone lurking around the perimeter and get into place, and then you and Timothy come in through the front gate. He tapped the map. You may have to walk in.”
Stan Warren frowned. “How many men do you think we’re up against?”
Mac thought about that. “Adam, plus seven originally? But two are in jail, and one’s in the hospital. I’d guess five.”
“Plus, however many of the Valley’s men will side with him,” Warren said thoughtfully.
“Timothy? What do you think?” Mac asked.
The young man’s eyes were shadowed, sunken. He’d eaten, but not enough, Mac suspected. “Depends on what they think is going on,” he said slowly. “If they think we’re attacking the Valley, they’ll all fight—probably a dozen men.”
“We need you to alert them that this isn’t an attack on the Valley,” Mac said, meeting his eyes squarely. “Can you do that?”
Timothy lifted his chin. “Isn’t it?”
Mac shook his head. “No. We aren’t going to hurt women and children. We aren’t going to attack anyone who doesn’t attack us. They’re non-combatants.” He didn’t have to look around. He knew he was the only berserker in the bunch. If he said he wasn’t going after anyone in the Valley, no one else would.
“Two questions,” Warren said. “What about John Welch?”
“John Welch goes down. If he surrenders to you, then you charge him with kidnapping. Same with Army of God men,” Mac said. It went without saying that anyone who attacked wouldn’t survive long enough to be arrested. Not at those odds: five Army of God, and 12 Valley men against the three of them? He didn't think they could count on Timothy. He could break either way. That didn't leave anyone on guard duty.
“Second question.”
“What about Janet?”
Mac grimaced. That was the million-dollar question. He looked at Timothy. “Where would they be holding her?”
Timothy shook his head. “Could be lots of places,” he said dubiously. “At Brother John’s, if she is truly there as his wife.” All of the men shook their heads vehemently at that one.
“OK, then,” Timothy said. “At the Preacher’s house? She is his daughter.”
Mac considered that. Thought about what little he knew about John Welch, and about Janet. “If Janet defied John and fought him, where would he lock her up?”
“The Penitent’s Cabin,” Timothy said promptly. “No other place to lock up someone.”
“No!” Eli said loudly. “They can’t do that to her!”
Shorty shushed him. “It’s OK, man,” he said. “We’re going to get her out of there. She’s tough. She’ll know Mac’s coming. It’s OK.”
Mac looked at his map. "Timothy? The Penitent's Cabin is straight in, right? At the end of the main road?"
Timothy nodded, traced the main road on Mac's map. "Yeah, you've got it right," he said, not looking at Shorty who huffed a bit. "Drive in, across the railroad, through the gate, and it's straight through to the Cabin. Probably a mile all told from the road."
Eli looked at Mac. “We gotta go.”
Mac flagged down the waitress. “He’s paying,” he said, gesturing to Warren.
Warren grunted and handed over a credit card.
As they walked out to the two cars, Warren stopped and looked around. The interstate snaked through the open prairie, the lights from 18-wheelers moving steadily. “Even the air feels different,” he said. “Drier.”
Mac nodded. “High desert,” he said. “We’re going to head into the Blue Mountains now. We’ll finally be back into the trees. But they’re different. Pines, mostly.”
Warren looked at him suspiciously. “How do you know all that? You’re a city kid.”
“Recon starts with knowing the land you’re going to be covering,” he replied. Then he grinned. “I looked it up.”
Warren studied him a moment. “So tell me truly, how are you feeling? Can you do this?”
Mac got in the passenger side of his own car. That should tell you how I’m feeling, he thought.
“It hurts like a mother,” he said as Warren started up the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “But it’s my arm, not my leg. And my left arm at that. I’m good.”
Stan Warren nodded. “We can switch places,” he said. “I’ll go overland, you go through the gate with the kid.”
Mac raised one eyebrow as he looked the agent over, taking in his suit and dress shoes. And he looked tired. It had been a long day for both of them. No telling when Warren had left D.C. to fly out to Seattle.
“Nah, I’m good,” Mac said, resting his head back and closing his eyes. “Wake me up when you see the sign for Union.”
A little over eight hours later they stopped about a half mile before the gate to the Valley. Mac got out of the car, and Timothy Brandt took his place next to the FBI agent.
Mac opened up the back, moved the spare tire, and pulled weapons out of the tire well.
“Jesus, Mac,” Warren said. “Third world countries have gone to war with less of an arsenal.”
“Don’t bother, he’s not going to listen,” Shorty advised. “He’s got a gun fetish.”
Mac ignored both of them. He stuffed the weapon he’d been carrying in his backpack into his pocket, along with extra ammo. He slid a knife into a sheath and strapped it to his leg. Another knife, another sheath, strapped around his waist. He grabbed a pair of handcuffs, more as a sop to Warren’s sensibilities than because he planned to use them. He figured if he came across anyone out there, he wasn’t going to haul them around with him.
He motioned for Eli to choose what he wanted. Knives, apparently. If he had a gun fetish, Eli was seriously into knives.
“Take a gun,” he said.
Eli shook his head. “Don’t like them,” he said. “Unless you got a shotgun.”
Mac felt insulted. He had high tech weaponry, the best the current market offered, and the man wanted a shotgun? But then again, for shear intimidation, a shotgun had its strong points. He pulled out a shotgun and handed it over.
Eli broke it down, loaded the shells, sighted it. He nodded. “You take care of your weapons,” he said with approval.
Shorty drove away to deliver Eli to his “insertion point,” as Eli called it.
“Remember,” Mac told his friend, “you hear shots, you call it in. You do not come to our rescue.”
“I got it,” Shorty said. “I’ve already played hero in this thing once. That’s enough.”
Mac laughed. He looked at Stan Warren and Timothy Brandt.
“An hour,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Warren said. “Get out of here.”
Mac walked away.
It was quiet, scarily so, he thought as he slipped through the barbed wire fence. Not a lot of light to see by, but at the same time the stars were bright, and stretched across the sky. The challenge was to stay focused. The land looked empty. Mounds of sagebrush and something they called rabbitbrush—he really had looked it all up after his first visit out here. Somehow, he’d known he’d be back. He moved slowly, watching the ground for gopher holes and rocks that could easily trip him up. But it wasn’t a difficult route to follow. The Valley was truly a valley. They irrigated it for crops and for their homes, but once you left its protection, it quickly turned into scrub. Easy enough to stick to the edge of the scrub.
He wasn’t sure what alerted him, but he stopped. Held still. And there, up ahead, was a human shape. The man had staked out a good vantage point to overlook the valley with his sniper rifle. But he was completely focused on what was happening below, not on Mac who was coming in from the road. That was the problem with being a sniper without a spotter. It required an intense focus on the expected target area, to the exclusion of everything else. A sniper was the best part of a team.
For a moment Mac missed his Marines' team intensely. One was dead. One was in D.C. working for a politician, and one was doing embassy duty in Saudi. He blinked the memories away, glided up to the sniper, and had a knife at his throat before the man realized he was there.
“Easy,” Mac said in a conversational tone.
The man tensed but said nothing. Mac took the rifle from him and tossed it out of reach.
“Tell me. Who are you waiting for?”
The man said nothing. Mac put a bit more pressure on the knife.
“I have handcuffs,” he said in the same matter-of-fact voice. “I can use them on you and leave you here for the cops. Or I can use the knife and leave you for the vultures.”
He paused, then added. “Do they have vultures out here? Crows. They do have crows.”
“You’re crazy,” the man said, sounding horrified.
“So I’ve been told,” Mac said agreeably. “I’ll only ask one more time... who are you waiting for?”
“Some reporter. Supposed to take him out so he can’t write us up in the paper I guess,” the man said with disgust. “I don’t get it. The boss’s boss has got his shorts in a bunch, and all I want to do is get to Boise and catch a flight out of this god-forsaken country. Instead I’m out here with a sniper rifle waiting for some pansy-assed reporter! And now you show up? Who the fu... hell are you?”
Mac snorted. “A pansy-assed reporter, evidently.”
The man went still. “Shit.”
“Didn’t think you Army of God types would use bad language.” Mac frisked him. He was carrying a backup .40 caliber Beretta semi-auto and a knife. He tossed those as well.
“Yeah, well, I learned more than just shooting while I was in the military,” he said.
Mac laughed.
“Who else is out here with you? Just give me a sit-rep will you? Don’t make me drag it out of you.”
“Three of us around the perimeter. One in the rafters of the barn. One inside Brother John’s house. One up by the main gate. Adam was headed to the church with Brother Stephen.”
“Going to put a shooter at the church?” Mac asked. “And that’s more men than you have.”
“A couple of eager beavers from the Valley,” he answered. “And for some reason, all of the rest of the Valley’s people have decided to have an all-night prayer meeting at the church. I don’t know what that’s all about.”
“And why one at Welch’s house?” He’d be damned if he’d call him brother.
“He’s missing. His son is guarding the gate, so Adam put one of us at his house. He’s injured. Figured a comfortable chair was better than a cold hillside like this.”
Mac considered the man briefly. “No communication devices? Nothing to keep you in the loop?”
“God-forsaken place doesn’t have cell-phone reception,” he said with disgust. “We don’t carry anything special, because cell-phones—you know? But this place...it freaks me out every time I’ve been here. No phones, no television. Computers only at the school. Who lives like this?”
Mac grinned. He’d had the same thoughts. And that made him realize the man had been through the same military training he had. When you’re taken prisoner, cooperate. Make them see you as a person, like themselves. As an individual. Harder to kill someone like yourself. Harder to torture. And that realization made him alert just enough to feel it when the man tensed and twisted to throw him off.
Mac drove the point of his knife into the man’s left trapezoid muscle, then grabbed that arm, wrenched it up and high behind his back. “Good try, but you telegraphed the move,” he growled, not wanting to admit how close he’d come to pulling it off.
The man took a deep breath to scream, and Mac twisted his arm up higher. The man grunted in pain.
“Should have screamed when I stabbed you,” Mac instructed. “Too late now. If I pull the knife out, by the way, you’re going to bleed like a stuck pig. Or so they say. I’ve never seen a stuck pig.”
Mac held him with one hand, awkwardly grabbed the handcuffs from his pocket with the other. Be easier to kill him, he thought. Might have to yet. Maybe the man had done the same calculation, because he didn’t fight Mac as he put the handcuffs on. He looked around to see if there was anything, even a sturdy sagebrush, to cuff him to. Nada. He reconsidered killing him.
What Would Janet Do? He was so going to fuck Agent Warren up for planting that phrase in his head.
He did find the man’s jacket, tore a strip off of it, and made a gag.
“Let me be clear. I’m going to leave you here. Stuck, cuffed, and gagged. Now you can try to make your way into the Valley and warn the others. But if I see you, I’ll shoot you. No second chance. If you sit here, someone will be out to collect you. If you’re smart, you’ll stay put. If not? Well, you win a Darwin Award, posthumous.”
The man sighed, settled to the ground. He nodded.
Mac took one last look at him, torn. But shooting a prisoner was beyond him. So he turned, gathered up the man’s weapons, and headed on to the west, hoping to find the second sniper before Eli did.
He was pretty sure Eli would just kill anyone he came across. Come to think of it, he was going to be without cuffs for a second guy. Oh well.