Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (3 page)

Gail whimpered. Barney yelled something and then lunged at the uniformed man, hoping to grab him, to stop him assaulting Gail. The man responded by taking a pistol from a holster on his hip, cocking it and pointing it at Barney’s little girl, who was facedown on the tarmac crying her eyes out. Barney backed off and started sobbing, holding his hands over his face. He fell to his knees and bent forward so that his forehead almost touched the ground.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please …” Barney begged between the sobs, his voice cracking.

The uniformed man ignored him and, using the knife’s long blade, traced the undersides of Gail’s breasts, taunting Barney to do something stupid.

Gartner watched, immobilized by fear, as the point of the blade scratched a white line in Gail’s skin all the way down to her exposed belly button. The man then pulled the zipper down on his fly and extracted his erection. He yelled something at one of the men who rushed in and forced Gail down onto her knees in front of his curved member. He held the knife under her chin and she looked up at him, her face twisted with fear. She trembled as she opened her mouth.

That was when the shooting started.
Brraat … brraat-dat-dat-dat. Brraat …
It came from somewhere behind the terminal building where the Quonset huts were. There it was again –
brraat … brraat-dat-dat-dat
– individual bangs followed by automatic fire. There was a lull, and then the shooting seemed to be coming from everywhere. The uniformed man barked a few words at his people, his prick still in Gail’s mouth, his hand wound tightly around her ponytail.

Gartner watched Barney Sorwick, could see that he was about to make some kind of move, his eyes darting left and right, his hands and shoulders twitching. Suddenly, he broke free of the men holding him and lunged at the monster forcing himself on his wife. But the man moved at the last instant and all Sorwick managed to get was a finger hooked in the mouth opening of the ski mask the man was wearing. And then it was ripped away, revealing the uniformed man’s face.

The subordinates held their breath, along with Gartner, waiting for the reaction. It was a
mestizo
face, wide and flat with high cheekbones. Gartner placed him in his forties. As faces went it was brutal and cruel, the face of nightmares. Large blue tattooed tears dropped from the corner of an eye and grew larger as they ran down his cheek and neck. He sneered at Barney and made a gesture to the man with the Bowie knife, who then threw the heavy weapon at Barney. It flew through the air and hit Barney’s forehead with a
thunk
, the blade quivering above the left eye, four inches of the polished steel embedded in brain. As Barney fell backward on the asphalt and began to convulse, the tattooed man drew his holstered pistol and began shooting the children.

And that was all Gartner saw as a spray of lead smashed into his spine at the base of the neck and returned him to the night.

*

Bobbie Macey wasn’t covering a lot of distance. She hopped a few times and then stopped. The pain in her broken leg was different now. It had an edge to it. The nerve endings were waking up to a serious problem, and they were ringing alarm bells. She went down on her hands and knees and crawled, braved the critters and made reasonable ground. It was that or stay put and wait for Gartner to come looking for her. She realized that she could see her hands in the darkness now. Dawn was on the way. With around a hundred yards covered down on all fours, she stopped to rest and give her knees a break.

“Lord, don’t let me faint,” she said aloud after a sharp stab of pain caused her to catch her breath. Macey imagined herself lying here in the heat of the day, dehydrated, discovered by ants and scorpions long before Gartner got to her. The taxiway was still another three hundred yards ahead.

It was then that she heard the gunfire.
Brraat … brraat-dat-dat-dat …
She’d heard it before, as a Marine in Iraq. From a distance it crackled, sounding like bubble wrap being squeezed. “What’s happening?” she asked the night. Another pain spike shot up her leg, convincing her to lie down. Macey’s eyes rolled back in her head.

When she opened them again, the sky above her was blue, her mouth was full of dirt and the pain in her leg was unbearable. An awful noise filled her head. She turned it to the side and saw a black bird streak past not more than thirty yards away, followed by a second black shape.

“Buzzards,” she mumbled before again slipping into unconsciousness.

I was earning an honest day’s pay as a special agent in the Office of Special Investigations, doing my best to apprehend Senior Airman Angus Whelt, officially AWOL from Lackland Air Force Base roughly three hundred miles to the east. Whelt wasn’t inclined to make it easy for me and my current partner, Hector Gomez – not the Hector Gomez who plays shortstop for the Colorado Rockies but the carsick Texas Ranger Hector Gomez who was throwing up onto the floorboards in the passenger seat beside me, making the cabin reek of regurgitated spicy ground beef, corn chips and refried beans as we bashed along a dirt trail close to the US–Mexico border.

Whelt wasn’t making it easy for us because if we caught up with him he’d soon thereafter be doing a big slice of federal time. He was on the run because OSI had closed in on his narcotics operation. “Doctor” Whelt and his partner, Airman First Class William Sponson, also AWOL, were, according to various sources, the dealers of choice at Lackland until someone tipped them off about OSI closing in on their asses. So they fled. The Air Force grinds its heel on drug dealers and neither man was too keen about becoming something sticky on the bottom of the Air Force’s boot. We knew where Whelt was – playing hard to get on a dirt bike at our eleven o’clock. Sponson’s whereabouts were presently a mystery.

Ahead, an overhang in the bend jutted out suspiciously – a root ball maybe. I yanked the wheel hard over to clear it. Our rental – a Jeep Patriot from Thrifty – hit it anyway. Or maybe the damn root ball hit us. The impact jarred like an uppercut and pitched the vehicle on its side, up on two wheels. We teetered there like a stunt car, on the verge of rolling over while I wrestled with the wheel. Gomez was thrown sideways against the window. He left behind a smear of something on it: either bile or banana smoothie, I was too busy to make a positive ID either way. Fortunately, nudging the opposite berm jolted us back down onto the relative security of all four wheels.

“Je … sus!” Gomez said, bouncing around beside me, one hand braced hard against the ceiling.

Whelt was on what looked like a Honda motocross bike. He’d chosen to make his escape on it with good reason: the asshole rode like a Crusty Demon. His record said that he’d been some amateur national motocross champion before joining the service. Any moment I fully expected him to loop his bike in midair and flip us the middle finger.

He suddenly speared off the trail and took to the virgin bush, the bike’s rear wheel spewing a rooster tail of rock and sand as he rode a divergent course from ours, away from the trail. Shit, I’d known he was gonna do that eventually. I glanced across at my partner, the Ranger, fighting the heaves. He was a mess. And, yeah, re window smear: banana smoothie.

If we were going to catch Whelt, we had to follow the guy into the rough. Gomez looked over at me, read the play instantly and shook his head, his eyeballs large. Like we had a choice.

I turned into the low dirt wall that bordered the trail we were on. The jeep’s front wheels hit it with a sickening
graunch
and the hood reared up as the front wheels clawed at the sky. The rear wheels punched into the berm next and the vehicle reacted, bucking viciously fore and aft. When everything settled a little I stood on the gas pedal and steered for the crest, the tires scrabbling for traction while the front air dam smashed into rocks and low bushes.

My hope was that Whelt would make a mistake and put his bike down so that we could catch him, cuff him and take him in, but that hope was fast disappearing over the hill in front of us, standing up on the footpegs, the bike leaping and bounding over the terrain as it was designed to do. Behind Whelt meanwhile, the Patriot, designed for Walmart parking lots, didn’t at all appreciate the treatment we were giving it.

“Hey!” Gomez said, pointing.

He was indicating the US–Mexico barrier fence in a depression below us, an eighteen-foot-high, rust-colored steel mesh barricade that looked about as solid as a parked freight train, one that snaked across the land as far as I could see.

“What’s he … up to?” Gomez wondered aloud.

“
The Great … Escape.”

The pounding, crazy ride was making talking difficult.

“What’s . . . that?”

“
The Great
…
Escape
… with Steve McQueen. Movie.”

“So?”

“McQueen’s running from the N … Nazis. Steals a bike, makes a break for Switzerland …” I swerved to avoid a boulder and ran the jeep nose first into a ditch. A thick wave of dirt spewed up and over the hood and windshield. “Only the border’s … fenced – like we got here,” I continued.

“Lemme guess, he jumps the fence,” said Gomez. Whelt had stretched his lead, almost gone. “You think that’s what this guy’s gonna do?”

I doubted tunneling was on his mind.

Ahead, another hill. Whelt was already beyond the crest, only his dust visible.

Gomez shouted: “It’s a movie, so … he makes it, right?”

“No, he gets … hung up on the fence.”

I wasn’t ready to give up. And anyway, it was this or paperwork. I steered toward the crest, foot to the floorboards. We came over the rise, the jeep’s motor racing, tires spitting gravel, the dust thick inside the cabin.

“Whoa!” Gomez yelled, bracing for impact as we shot over the crest.

My left boot beat him to it, standing on the brake pedal. The jeep slid sideways one way and then the other as we ploughed down the hill, coming to rest while a rolling ball of our own dust overtook us. Below, in the crook between the hill we were on and the one beyond it, was a crowd of people and vehicles. A crowd of illegals – Mexicans. Significant numbers of Border Patrol Agents were marshaling them together. There were well over fifty people and a dozen off roaders down there, out in the middle of nowhere. The attraction that brought everyone to this particular point appeared to be a break in the fence, a five-by-ten-foot section of the steel mesh simply cut out by an oxyacetylene torch. On the other side of the fence, the Mexican side, were chewed-up tracks of numerous vehicles that, presumably, had brought the illegals to this point. A departing dust ball on the southern horizon confirmed it.

Several of the BPAs were looking up at us, presumably wondering who we were and what the hell we were doing. One of them was starting to move in our direction, hand on the butt of the pistol on his hip, coming to investigate. I scanned the area for Whelt and found him on the crest of the hill opposite. He’d stopped and was looking back at us. Okay, so the guy wasn’t upside down in midair but he was still flipping us the bird. No way were we gonna negotiate our way through this parking lot and catch him.

Gomez wiped his mouth clean with a wad of Kleenex. “Shit.”

“You were saying about real life?” I asked him.

My cell was buzzing in my pants pocket. Taking it out and looking at the screen, I saw I had half a dozen messages from a familiar Maryland number: Andrews AFB, home of the people keeping me in the style to which I ought to have left far behind by now at age 34 – the OSI. Gomez wandered down to talk with the BP Agent coming up the hill, his ID and badge held above his head, while I checked in. My supervisor and buddy, Lieutenant Colonel Arlen Wayne, picked up after a ring and a half.

“Vin …” Arlen said, the signal sketchy. “Where are y …”

“Where am I?”

“…”

“I can’t hear you,” I said. “I’ll call you back later.”

“… NO …”

There was a bar and a half of signal strength registering on the display. I walked around, trying to find another bar or two. “That better?”

“Yeah. Where … you?”

“On the border with Gomez letting Doctor Whelt slip through our fingers.”

I noticed a major dent in the Patriot. The panel just below the front fender had been stove in. I bent down to have a closer look and saw a pool of hot engine oil spreading on the gravel between the front tires, ants running from the steaming black tsunami. I hoped I’d checked the insurance box on the rental agreement and, if not, that Thrifty were a bunch of understanding folks.

“For … bout him,” Arlen said.

“Did you just say forget him?”

“They . . . his buddy, Spon …”

“They found Sponson?”

The rest was even more garbled though I gathered he wanted to know how far away from El Paso we were. “Thirty miles, give or take,” I told him.

Arlen sounded like he was in a dentist chair, a drawer full of cutlery in his mouth. But I caught the key message: Get to Horizon Airport at El Paso and monitor the El Paso Sheriff’s Office radio in the meantime. “We’ll hurry. Call you when we get there,” I confirmed.

Just before the line went dead I heard him say, “Vin … slaughter. Jesus, some real bad shit.”

Our other runaway, Whelt’s pal Airman First Class William Sponson, had turned up in less than ideal circumstances. Arlen didn’t often swear. It had to be some extra fucked-up ass-burger to move him into four-letter-word territory. Unlike me. A wisp of steam escaped through the jeep’s grille. Fuck, shit and urination. This pile of spot-welded horse flop was going nowhere in a hurry. “Do you remember checking the insurance box on the rental agreement?” I asked Gomez as he walked back up the hill toward me.

“Nope.”

The jeep made it to the Interstate and expired there on the side of the road, smelling of fried engine oil, the needle on the temperature gauge buried in the dead zone. I called a local towing company and a couple of Border Patrol Agents offered us a ride to El Paso. They told us they had round-ups every other day like the one we stumbled across.

“I’m sure you read the headlines,” said Agent Willow Schwinn behind the wheel, a chubby talkaholic. “Keepin’ illegals out is like trying to hold back the sea. On the bright side, ain’t no damn computer stealin’
this
girl’s job.”

“We might’a stopped those folks just now,” continued her equally chatty male buddy in the front passenger seat, whose name I didn’t catch, “but half a mile along the barrier fence could’a easily been another breach, a bigger one maybe, with trucks pulling up to take a hundred or more illegals. What you saw today might even have been a decoy, a diversion. Happens all the time. They used to pull the same shit with drugs till we wised up to it – send a small shipment through and set it up for a bust so that the real haul sneaked past while your back was turned filling out the paperwork. Sometimes we get lucky, like last month. Found thirty million dollars in cocaine inside bags of chicken manure – fertilizer. They thought the smell would fool the dogs. Didn’t.”

“That was a mother lode, not a decoy. The seizure would’a hurt ’em for sure.”

“Hurt who?” I asked.

“One of the cartels – Sinaloa, Juárez or Chihuahua, not a hundred percent sure. Drugs or illegals, the aim is the same: get the goods to a city with a big population. Do that and they’re gone.”

“We seen every trick in the book. Illegals pack ’emselves into everything from suitcases to containers,” Schwinn said. “Opened the hood on an SUV once and found a guy tucked in beside the carburetor.”

“I seen a woman squeezed herself into a filing cabinet,” countered Agent Passenger Seat.

“Under ‘B’ for ‘Busted’, right?” said Schwinn with a smirk. “One of these days I swear I’m gonna find one hiding in the bottom of my Slurpee.”

Ha ha ha …

The guy sitting next to me in the back looked Mexican and his name sure sounded Mexican. Maybe the folks riding in front could only spot the ones playing hide and seek. I glanced at Gomez.

He looked at me and shrugged, seemingly unaffected by the slurs, his face a mask. He asked, “Would you folks mind tuning your radio into the local police frequency?”

“Sure, no problem,” Agent Passenger Seat responded happily. He leaned forward, punched a button on the system and dialed in a freq. After a few seconds of air came continuous short bursts of frantic communications. It was all centered around a crime scene at Horizon Airport. Nothing specific, mind, but some real bad shit appeared to have gone down at the place, as Arlen had said. There were requests for multiple ambulances, forensics teams, mortuary services, the coroner’s office, investigators, patrol vehicles – essentially all available mobile units from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office were to pedal their asses to the facility, pronto.

“Shee-it,” said Agent Passenger Seat, sharing a look with Schwinn.

Fifteen minutes later we turned off the Interstate, heading north, and then east onto Pellicano, the road alive with El Paso Country Sheriff’s Office and El Paso Police Department vehicles, as well as ambulances. About a mile from the highway a police roadblock had been set up on a minor sandy side street off Pellicano. I couldn’t see any signs indicating the presence of an airport anywhere hereabouts. A chopper coming in to land and the roadblock itself, clotted as it was with various media vans and trucks that were being denied access, were the only indications that we were getting warmer on the airport location front.

On the other side of my window a knot of media photographers clicked away at us like we were stars arriving at a red carpet occasion.

“Says here that Horizon was built by a local fella by the name of Phil Barrett, now deceased,” said Gomez, reading from his iPhone as we waited in the queue of official vehicles. “His family still owns the place.”

“A private airstrip?” I asked.

“Nope, public.”

Could be that the facility was in the Barrett family’s backyard. I looked around. The terrain was about as dry and sun-stunned as any desert I’d ever seen and growing an airport out here had a lot more chance of surviving than grass or plants.

Gomez was on his cell. “Calling in,” he said, meaning Ranger HQ in Austin. “Get some clearances happening.”

Agent Schwinn showed the police officer her ID.

“Border Patrol, eh?” said the heavy-set guy, dark-blue sweat stains under his armpits and a face that looked like he’d just bathed it in cooking oil. “Names.”

Schwinn provided them and the officer jotted them into a logbook.

“You got business here?” he asked.

Gomez lowered his window, still on the phone to Austin. “Hector Gomez, Rangers, and Special Agent Vin Cooper, Air Force OSI. We’re looking for a deserter. Got word he turned up here.”

“IDs,” he said.

Gomez and I passed them over.

“Yeah, well, if he’s here the only thing he’ll be turning up is daisies.” Finished jotting down our details on his clipboard, the officer handed back our credentials.

“This is the Sheriff’s jurisdiction out here, ain’t it?” Gomez asked, now off the phone and giving me the thumbs up on those clearances.

“Yeah, but as you’re about to find out, things are a little messy around here at the moment.” Then to Schwinn he said, “Go straight ahead. A deputy will show you where to park. You need to check in with Commander Matheson from the Sheriff’s Office. There’s an Emergency Operations center parked behind the terminal building. You can’t miss it.” He pulled his face away from the window, leaving behind a few sweat drops on the sill, and tapped the roof with his hand.

Schwinn motored forward, taking it slow. A sign by the side of the road – finally – announced Horizon Airport and welcomed us to it, obviously not party to the circumstances of our visit. A little further along, the road, bordered on one side by a neat row of trees, widened into an impromptu parking lot of EPCSO black and whites, blue and whites from the local PD, plus assorted forensics vans and ambulances. A frustrated-looking deputy, head cocked to one side and hands on hips, pointed at a slice of sand for us to occupy.

“We’ll leave you guys to it,” said Schwinn, coming to a stop but leaving the motor running. “This one’s a little beyond our job description.”

We thanked the agents for the ride, got out and checked in with the deputy.

“Rangers in on this now too, eh?” he said, nodding at the polished silver “cinco peso” on Gomez’s chest, the famous five-pointed Texas star worn by the Rangers, punched from an original Mexican silver five-peso coin. “Not surprised. This is some bad shit.”

He told us to display our IDs and then provided directions to the operations center parked behind the departures building.

Out of the AC in Schwinn’s vehicle the sun beat down with a physical force that made my shoulders slump. Marshmallows could roast in the hot air hitting the back of my throat. I glanced at the runway, the far end of it disappearing in a puddle of shimmering mercury. After a couple of minutes, my underarms were already starting to look like dark ponds.

Behind the makeshift parking lot, a line of yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off access to the ramp beyond it, as well as to the paths leading to several homes and trailers on the desert sand. The place was crawling with law enforcement. Around these residences, heavily armed PD and Sheriff’s Office tactical response personnel, as well as K-9 deputies and their dogs, searched the low sand ridges and bushes. Other police and deputies walked a grid laid out on the sand, looking for what would fall under the general headline of Clues. A Texas Department of Public Safety chopper was arriving, landing down the far end of the runway in the mercury puddle. Other helicopters hovered stationary at around five hundred feet over the desert half a mile away. Media choppers, I guessed, keen for the story behind whatever the hell had happened at Horizon.

Gomez and I headed in the direction of the airport’s main buildings. Crime scene tape extended out onto the ramp. An old military aircraft was parked inside the tape, a kangaroo in its roundel – Royal Australian Air Force. A bright-red Learjet sat fifty feet beyond it, also inside the tape. Between the aircraft, several portable sunscreens had been placed over various groups of forensics people to provide them with a little relief from the sun’s assault. They were dressed in blue coveralls and wore facemasks and white plastic booties over their shoes,
CSI
written on the backs of the coveralls. Some were kneeling over four or five bundles of clothing dumped on the asphalt. Others were making notes, speaking into digital recorders or standing around chatting. I’d been in this game long enough to know it wasn’t piles of discarded laundry they were photographing.

I didn’t need to prompt Gomez. He saw what I saw and neither of us liked what we were seeing.

The police tape continued all the way to the terminal building. Along the way we passed at least another half dozen tactical response officers and CSI people from both the PD and the Sheriff’s Office, their heads down, deep in thought, heading back the way we’d come.

The tape went around the rear of the airport terminal, a small low-roofed shed clad with corrugated steel. Twenty yards behind it, a number of police and SO deputies were hanging around a Winnebago – the op’s emergency command center. Gomez and I walked up to the door, excused ourselves and squeezed in. A man and a woman, both in the gray uniforms of the EPCSO, had their backs to us, discussing a large overhead photo of Horizon Airport taken from a height of around fifteen hundred feet, propped on an easel in front of them. Drawn with felt pen at various places all over the picture were red circles, each given a number and a two-letter code. There were quite a few of these circles. Seeing four of them in a cluster drawn on the ramp, where the old air force trainer and the Learjet were parked, I knew each circle represented a fatality. I found a circle numbered 19, then saw another numbered 27.

“Jesus,” I muttered.

A burst of comms came through a police radio.

The female deputy turned around. Three stars adorned her collar. According to the silver tag on her shirt, her name was Foote. She was a short, barrel-shaped woman with full lips and puffy black rings around her eyes that told me she was either an insomniac or played contact sports. I decided either could have been the case. “I’m Chief Deputy Foote,” she said. “Can we help you gentlemen?” The subtext of the way she said it informed me that their help was unlikely to be forthcoming and that calling us “gentlemen” was not because she thought we were. The information I skimmed from various badges and the nametags on the man beside her told me he was Operations Bureau Commander Matheson, the number two in the room. Like his boss, the Chief Deputy, Matheson was also short. He kept himself in shape, though, and I guessed his age at about forty. A roll of thick blond curls crowned his pudgy red face. He reminded me of Richard Simmons. I wondered if he took aerobics classes.

“Ranger Gomez and Special Agent Cooper, OSI,” said Gomez, parrying Foote’s tone with practiced dull efficiency. “We’ve been informed through channels that Airman First Class William Sponson, AWOL from Lackland AFB, had been picked up at Horizon Airport. We’re here to check on that report.”

Gomez’s subtext:
I’m a Texas Ranger. Fuck with me at your peril.

“Don’t you Air Force people wear a uniform?” Matheson inquired, frowning at me.

Subtext:
I wonder what you’d look like in Spandex.

“Of course, we welcome Ranger support,” Foote added.

Subtext:
I’m not going to fuck with you. It’s just that me and this guy beside me are completely out of our depth, and I was hoping to keep the people who are aware of that to a manageable circle I can browbeat
.

“Washington sent me here, but I’m guessing if my deserter’s around, the only place he’s headed is the morgue,” I said. “And I’m further guessing along with twenty-six others.”

“Can you give us the specifics of what’s happened, ma’am, sir?” I asked when there was no response.

“We’re working on it,” said Matheson.

Subtext:
We’ve got no idea whatsoever.

But then the Chief Deputy sighed, glanced at Matheson and said, “Look, your summary’s on the money. But there are no witnesses and there are also no surveillance cameras so therefore no surveillance footage. If it sounds like we don’t know what happened here, that’s because, honestly, right at this point we don’t know.”

Subtext:
No more subtext, fellas.

“Almost all of the 27 DOAs have multiple gunshot wounds,” she continued. “Whoever did this even went into homes. We’ve got men, women and children murdered. And the information you have about your airman is correct. We found him – he’s dead. His identity is yet to be positively confirmed with your personnel department, but he was carrying his Air Force photo ID card.”

Maybe I was wrong about Foote. It had been known to happen. “So, everyone present at this facility was murdered sometime last night?” I asked.

“We’ve narrowed the attack to between four-thirty and six this morning,” Matheson answered.

“And we do have one survivor,” said Foote. “We believe it’s one of the Learjet pilots.”

“Is he talking?” asked Gomez.

The Chief Deputy shook her head. “We wish. He’s in a coma. They – whoever
they
were, and there had to be quite a few of them given the area covered by this attack – shot him in the back and left him for dead. His spinal cord’s smashed, but he’s alive. Barely.”

There was a knock on the partially closed door behind us. A woman in a blue CSI suit stepped in, the white booties still on her feet.

Matheson raised his chin at her. “Give us a minute, Liz.”

Subtext:
Let’s not give these out-of-towners anything we don’t have to.

“No, tell us what you’ve got,” Foote said to her, countering the commander, sticking to her earlier decision to play it straight.