The Investigator, page 31
Ten feet away, Kaiser reached back, caught the stock of the shotgun and swiveled it forward, the muzzle falling across their faces, and as they gawked, uncertain, he said, quietly, “I’m with the Department of Homeland Security. If you fight me, I’ll kill you both. I can’t miss from here. This thing is loaded with number-three buckshot.”
One of the guards said, “Bro…”
Kaiser snarled, “Fuck that bro shit. I did eight tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, and I’m more than ready to blow you guys up. I want you to take those rifles and prop them against the wall behind you.”
One of the men said, “You’re in a world of hurt.”
Kaiser nodded: “Maybe. But you’ll never know, because if I wind up in a world of hurt, you’re gonna be in a world of dead. Prop the rifles against the wall…”
They propped the rifles against the wall and Kaiser said, “Now go inside. Go inside. Line up, and go inside. If you think you can take me with those pistols, I can tell you, that’s been tried, and I’m still here. Go inside now. Be good. No, no, don’t put your hands over your heads, walk inside normal-like.”
They did that, and one of them said, “We’ll hunt you down like a rabid dog.”
“Good luck with that,” Kaiser said. He’d closed up behind him, the shotgun’s muzzle three feet from the second man’s shoulder blades. He said, “You, second guy. If your friend makes a play here, you’ll have a hole in your back the size of a basketball. Then I’ll kill him.”
Then they were inside. The interior was lit by a single window; the overhead lights were turned off. Kaiser said, “Stretch out on the floor. On your backs. On the floor.”
The men obeyed, kneeling, then stretching out. Kaiser took in the jail’s interior. There were three cells with yellow-painted bars, two side by side on the long back wall, another on a shorter side wall to the left. A bathroom with an open door and a window the size of a paperback book. There was nothing sophisticated about the cells, they were simply barred cages meant to hold drunks until they got sober, or other miscreants until they could be shuffled off to the jail in Van Horn.
“What’s going on?” The cells held three men and two women, and Kaiser said, “I’m with the Department of Homeland Security.”
One of the women blurted, “Thank God…”
“Not yet,” Kaiser said. “I’m here all alone. Who’s got the keys to the cells?”
Neither of the men on the floor spoke, and then one of the jailed men said, “The guy with the beard.”
The guy with the beard turned his head to see who’d spoken and Kaiser prodded him with the shotgun muzzle and said, “Give them up.”
“Fuck you, man—”
The guy got three words out and Kaiser kicked him in the ribs, hard, with an impact like a punt in pro football, and one of the council members said, “Oh my God,” and the man on the floor bounced sideways and groaned and Kaiser said, “If I have to kick you to death to get the keys, I will. So now you’ve got some broken ribs. Next thing I kick will be your hip and I’ll break your fuckin’ hip bone off. Gimme the keys.”
The bearded man groaned again, hurting when he tried to roll up on his side, but he dug in his jeans pocket and produced three keys.
One of the prisoners, a woman, asked, “What are you doing?”
Kaiser: “They’re about to put you on trial for treason. The penalty for treason is death.”
“What!”
“Ask the guys on the floor.” He handed the keys through the cell bars to one of the women and said, “Try the locks.”
One of the councilmen asked the bearded man, “Were you going to shoot us?”
The bearded man, now curled into a fetal position, said, “Fuckin’ traitor.”
Kaiser looked at the city council prisoners and nodded. “Tell me your names so I can talk to you.”
They were all wearing jeans, including the women, and all had dark hair and eyes. A tall man in a white dress shirt said, “I’m Harry Lopez, I’m the mayor.” He pointed at the two women: “Janice Moreno in the pink blouse, Veronica Ruiz in the white, the bald guy is Doug Hall, the other guy is Antonio Alonso.”
* * *
Moreno had gotten her cell open, and Ruiz stepped out behind her. Ruiz pointed to the beardless guard and said, “This one put his hands on me. Can I kick him in the head?”
The guard said, “Don’t do that…”
Kaiser smiled at her and said, “No, that’s not a good idea. You could break a toe, and you’ve got to walk to my car.”
Moreno freed the three men and Kaiser pressed the muzzle of his shotgun into the stomach of the uninjured man and said to a councilman, “Get his pistol.”
When they had both pistols, the councilmen took four .223 magazines and four nine-millimeter magazines from the men’s belt pouches.
Kaiser said, “We need to get their walkie-talkies.”
“Cell phones,” one of the women said.
“Cell phones don’t work anymore. They blew up the cell phone tower.”
Lopez, the mayor, prodded the beardless guard’s leg with his boot and said, “Goddamn it, did you have to go and do that? Took us two years to get that thing built.”
“That’s just the start,” the man said.
Kaiser said to Alonso, a short, stocky guy with a tough face, “I’m gonna point this pistol”—he pulled his carry gun— “at this asshole’s head, and I want you to go through his pockets. We want everything in them, wallet, knife if he has one, hidden gun, check his socks, his ankle… If he shows any sign of resistance, shout it out and jump back and I’ll kill him.”
The odor of urine suddenly suffused the jail, and Alonso said, “He peed himself.”
“He has good reason to,” Kaiser said, prodding the beardless man with his boot. “My trigger is delicate as a butterfly wing.”
When both men had been searched—they were both carrying walkie-talkies and knives, but no additional guns—Kaiser kicked the uninjured man and said, “Crawl over to that cell. Go on.”
The man crawled to the cell, and then Kaiser kicked the injured man again and ordered him to crawl to the adjacent cell. He looked around at the council members and asked, “You think they’ve got more keys? Like, you know, hidden somewhere on them?”
One of the men said, “I don’t believe so. Somebody might have keys, but I don’t think these guys do.”
Kaiser told Moreno to lock the cells and to test them to make sure they were locked. When they were, he went to the door. He could see three women walking down the hill on the main street, one block over, apparently on the way to the noon meeting.
“I will tell you everything I know in a minute,” Kaiser told the council people. “Right now, I want you to walk uphill, one at a time, to the first street. There’s a Ford Explorer parked there, the doors are unlocked. We’re gonna have to get six people in it, but that’s the only transportation we got… You women are going to have to sit on somebody’s lap…”
“Where are we going?”
“Tell you when we’re on the way,” Kaiser said. He tipped his head toward the cells. “I don’t want these guys to know.”
The bearded man said, “You guys are dead.”
* * *
The five council members walked out, one at a time, the men picking up the AR-15s as they went. Up the hill, they piled into the Explorer. Kaiser went last, carrying the two pistols taken from the guards. He climbed into the Explorer and put it in gear.
“We think they won’t be here more than a day or maybe two,” Kaiser said. “I’m not sure, but it’s possible that they’ll be trying to get out of here tonight, after the caravan gets here. I don’t know what they’re planning to do about that. Anyway, I’m taking you up to the Mescalero Cave. I’ve got food and water and blankets for the night, we’ve got guns. That cave is a fort.”
“We could hide out in a house in town,” Moreno suggested. “They can’t search them all.”
“Lot of reasons not to do that,” Kaiser said. “We can talk about it up at the cave. The fact is, they could search all of them. There are a lot of militia people here and I think they’d enjoy doing that.”
The path leading to the cave was three and a half miles up the highway. Kaiser got on the gas pedal and, a mile out, burned past two pickups coming from the other direction.
“They turn around? They coming after us?” he asked. He couldn’t see anything in the rearview mirror except the women sitting on the councilmen’s laps.
The councilwomen looked out the back window. “No.”
* * *
The cave was a five-minute walk uphill from the campground, a cup-shaped hole in the soft red rock of the mountain, fifty feet across and fifty feet deep. Boulders and ragged chunks of rock from the mountain, some as big as buses, littered the ground in front of the cave, providing cover.
Kaiser loaded the council people with the food, water, and bedding he’d collected, and sent them up the hill. Running down the path to the road, he checked both ways and saw nothing. When he’d given the council people enough time to make it to the cave, he followed them up the hill, pausing to lock the doors on the Explorer.
“Now,” he said, when they were gathered in a circle of boulders, “Who here hunts? Who knows how to shoot a rifle or a pistol?”
The five council people looked at one another, then all five raised their hands.
“Outstanding,” Kaiser said.
* * *
The first militia truck pulled into the campground a half-hour later. A man got out, ran to the Explorer, peered inside, then ran back to the truck. Five minutes after that, there were eleven trucks in the campground area.
Kaiser looked down at them, then turned to the five council people and said, “You know what I said. I’ll do the talking. I want you all in your holes, behind your rocks. I’ll yell if I need you to open up. Main thing is, stay under cover. Nothing can get at you where you are.”
“Will you shoot somebody?”
“If I have to. I’d rather not,” Kaiser said. “If I do, stay in your spots.”
The trucks could be negotiating chips, Kaiser thought. Pickup owners often loved their vehicles like pets, and trucks with a couple of dozen bullet holes are not only expensive to fix, they tend to attract the eye.
He watched as the men below got themselves organized, split into three groups, and began climbing toward the cave, one well to the left, one to the right, one up the center. Kaiser put his two riflemen on the wings and said, “Everybody take it easy.”
Veronica Ruiz, in the white blouse, had brought the two walkie-talkies from the Explorer, and now said, “They are talking on channel twenty-two.”
“Great. Listen in. The minute you hear anything interesting, let me know. Keep your fingers away from the transmit button. We don’t want them to know we might be listening.”
Down below, the men were scrambling from one rock to the next; not very good technique, Kaiser thought. He could shoot one of them in the open, and if anyone tried to help him, he’d get another. A thought to be put on reserve.
“We could pick off a few of them right now,” the stocky councilman said.
“Let’s wait,” Kaiser said. “But I like the way you think.”
* * *
The approaching squads stopped behind cover forty or fifty yards down the hill, and a man in the center squad shouted, “Come out of there.”
Kaiser shouted back, “No. We got food, water, lots of ammo, and a hell of a lot better cover than you’ve got. We could kill all of you before you got to us.”
“We don’t want anyone to get hurt,” the man shouted.
“Come on up here and talk. We won’t shoot you. You can see how we’re set up here, what you’re up against.”
The man, who’d stuck his head up for the shouted exchange, ducked back down, and Ruiz said, “They are talking on the radio.”
They listened as somebody talked to a woman: probably Hawkes, Kaiser thought. The woman asked, “What can they do to us?”
Man’s voice: “There are only six or seven of them, I think, but they’re higher than we are, and they got real good cover. They’d shoot the shit out of us. No way to get at them from above, they’re set back in that cave. If we had grenades, maybe.”
“Don’t have grenades… You think the guy was telling the truth when he said he wouldn’t shoot you if you went up to talk?”
“Who knows?” the man said. “Probably… If he shot me, there’d still be nineteen more of us, pissed off. I think he wants to show me how dug in they are. Intimidate us.”
“Okay. Listen, go talk to him. See what you can see. Tell him if he shoots anyone, we’ll crawl up that mountain and drop grenades on them.”
A moment of ratiocination, then the man said. “I’ll try it.”
* * *
The radio talk stopped, then the man who’d been doing the talking shouted, “I’m coming up. Don’t shoot me.”
“Come up.”
A man stood up, raised his hands over his head, and shouted, “I’m not armed.”
“Come on,” Kaiser shouted. He turned to the others and said, “Veronica and Janice, get behind those rocks over there… Lean in to them, so this guy can only see your backs, and he might think you have rifles. Veronica, turn the radios off—we don’t want them to know we can hear them talking. Antonio and Doug, I want you out where he can see you. Point your rifles at him when he comes up. Harold, stand halfway behind that rock, hold that pistol on him, let him see it…”
The man down below said something to somebody out of sight, then began climbing the hill until he was standing fifteen feet from Kaiser, who stepped out with his shotgun.
“You made a bad mistake,” the man said. “Don’t make it worse. Give up, and I’ll guarantee your safety.”
“What about the trial for treason?” Kaiser asked. “That’s usually considered a capital crime.”
The man shook his head. “We weren’t gonna kill them, though they deserve it. We were going to find them guilty and then cut them loose.”
“That’s nice of you, but we’re safe right here,” Kaiser said. “Let me tell you something. There are only eight of us, but we’ve got six ARs and two combat shotguns full of number-three buckshot. Three of us are with the Department of Homeland Security and we spent years with Delta fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’d have no problem killing all of you and we’re very good at killing people.”
“You oughta be with us,” the man said.
Kaiser: “You’re all… deluded. Talk of treason, you’re the traitors. Anyway I’m not going to argue. We’re not coming down. If you look around, you’ll see that you can’t come up. The best thing for all of us would be if you walk back down the hill, get your men, and go on your way.”
The man stared at Kaiser, more thinking, then said, “Here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m going to leave a bunch of guys down there—won’t tell you how many. Then the rest of us are going back into town. If you don’t fuck with us, we won’t fuck with you.”
“Deal,” Kaiser said. “You go on now.”
The man turned, walked back down the hill and out of sight.
* * *
Veronica stepped out from behind her rock and turned the radio up. They huddled around it and heard the man report back to the woman. The woman said, “Leave four men—the caravan is getting close and we may need the rest of you down here.”
“Got it.”
Then another man’s voice: “Don, I got about a fifteen-, maybe twenty-foot run to that big rock, the one on the left. They won’t expect it. If I can get to there, I can make it further up the hill. Maybe I can see down on them.”
The woman: “Don’t do that, Rick. We’ve got the problem contained, no point in taking a chance that you’ll get shot up.”
“Not much of a chance, if I could get up there…”
“Rick. I’m telling you…”
Then the man named Rick: “Those fuckers. He made me pee myself. I’m going up there.”
Kaiser said, “Goddamn it, it’s the jail guard.” He jogged to his right. “He’s going to try to…”
The beardless jail guard broke up the hill in a stoop, his AR in one hand, his other hand almost touching the hillside as he ran, running like he might have seen on a TV show.
Kaiser, tracking him with the shotgun, shot him in the legs and the man went down, screaming.
From down below, the negotiator shouted, “Stop. Stop. He wasn’t supposed to do that. He wasn’t supposed to do that.”
“Then come up and get him,” Kaiser shouted. “He’s hurt bad, he’s gonna need a medevac.”
“I’m coming up…”
The negotiator and another man hustled up the hill and the man on the ground sobbed, “I’m hit bad, man, I’m hit bad.”
Kaiser shouted, “Leave the gun. Take him and leave the gun. We’re going to pick it up. If anyone shoots at us, we’ll kill all three of these men.”
Janice Moreno said, “I’ll go. They’re less likely to shoot a woman. If you see anyone poke a head up, shoot him.”
Kaiser nodded: “Good. Go. Hurry.”
Moreno scrambled out from behind her rock, ran to the AR, picked it up, looked down the hill where the two militiamen were still only halfway down, then ran back to cover.
“Got it,” she said.
The wounded guard was put in a pickup and the pickup turned down the hill and disappeared.
“You think you killed him?” asked Lopez.
“I messed him up, but I was basically shooting at his ankles,” Kaiser said. “He’s gonna need a hospital, but I don’t think he’ll die. Does that… bother you? Me shooting him?”
Lopez: “Nope. I was more curious than anything. A good thing—they know we’re serious.”
The negotiator shouted up the hill: “We’re pulling out some of our men, but we’re leaving most of them. You stick a head up, we’ll kill you.”
