John shook his head sadly. “No, I was ‘just here,’ as you put it. But it was my town that stopped the Posse, and I saw more than enough of the depravity of men when turned desperate.”
“That is what I am fighting to prevent here,” Dale replied sharply.
“So perhaps using nukes in the cities and machine-gunning kids and women here is part of the reconstruction program now?”
“John, it was a combat situation, and you, veteran of Iraq, should understand that. They reported taking heavy ground fire and had only seconds to react. Air to ground, mistakes happen, including fratricide at times. You know that.”
“Train your people better,” John finally said coldly. “I could see they were kids, women, old folks—so could your pilots.”
“Precisely why we need people like you, John, to see to things like that.”
“And because you wanted to talk with me, you ordered your pilots to harass the crap out of my pilot and damn near kill us when we finally tried to land.”
“John, I felt it essential to talk to you at once regarding the whole affair. My pilot got a little carried away, that’s all.”
“And once we landed in Asheville, you’d confiscate our plane?”
“Of course not,” Dale replied smoothly as he reached back behind his desk for the bottle of scotch and offered John a drink.
“I’ll pass for now. My stomach is still a bit queasy from that ride.”
Dale poured himself another shot and put the bottle back into the cabinet. “I’ll look into it and get back to you. These kids that fly can get wired up, and we both know that. Most likely, he figured your man could handle that final pass after the chase he had been led on, nothing more.”
“Tell him to stand well clear next time.”
“Or what will you do?”
“It’s already been a long day, Dale. I didn’t expect the ride I went on this morning. I think it’s time I went home.”
“Sure, John.” Dale extended his hand. “No hard feelings.”
“For what happened to me, no. But what happened to those civilians, yes—damn hard feelings. I’d like it thoroughly investigated. And believe me, Dale, this is from long experience here. Whether they did raid that convoy or not is no longer the issue. They will seek payback, and you just triggered a war along your northern border.”
“Well, if they come at you, call me at once.”
John just nodded.
“And, General, when can I announce your acceptance of a commission and get plans rolling for you to head up to Bluemont?” He asked the question as if the conversation of the previous twenty minutes had never taken place. “Arranging a transport flight just doesn’t happen overnight.”
“Let’s talk about that some other time,” John replied.
“Why not now?”
He fixed Dale with a hard stare. “Because frankly, I just don’t feel like discussing it at the moment after what I saw this morning.”
Without waiting for a reply, John headed out the door, stopped at the desk to pick up his Ruger, and found Ed sitting in his patrol car, still fuming mad.
“Ed, I don’t want to hear a word, not a word for right now. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
CHAPTER TEN
He sat in the town hall for most of the day, refusing to discuss anything of what happened in Asheville or during their earlier flight. Billy, however, had eagerly shared what he had seen, and the entire town knew. Reactions were mixed. Some were furious over the harassment of their flight, but many shrugged off the fate that had come down on the reivers.
John requested a town council meeting for noon, and behind closed doors, he reviewed what happened both in the air over the reivers’ camp and in his subsequent meeting with Dale.
“I have a confession to make now,” he finally announced. “While being held by the reivers, I struck an informal truce. No killing raids. Neither of us can fully control everyone when it comes to stealing some pigs and chickens and running stills up in the mountains, but their leader—his name is Forrest Burnett, ex-military, wounded vet who fought in Afghanistan—struck me as an honorable man. We shook hands to just back things off between us.”
“I know Forrest,” Ed interjected. “Lived up in Burnsville. A good kid. One of my cousins married into the Burnett family, so I had some dealings with them. Heard he volunteered for the army right after 9/11. Got shot up real bad in Iraq, or maybe it was… Afghanistan… anyhow, one of those places. Came back a bit messed up. I mean, his wounds—an arm and an eye—would mess up anyone, actually. Folks said it was that posttrauma thing. Couple of brushes with the law after he got back, but cops up there understood where he was coming from and tried to keep it light on him. So he’s running the reivers?”
“It’s what he claims,” John said.
“A question, John,” Reverend Black interjected. “When you got back, why didn’t you just tell us?”
“My mistake. I realize now I should have been up front. Given that the Stepp family lost several in skirmishes with them, I knew that saying I had negotiated something of a truce wouldn’t fly well with folks living over in the North Fork. Some might have seen it as me trading off for my own freedom. I was planning to go up there personally, talk to the families one-on-one, and smooth things over before going public. Things just got ahead of me.”
“Hell, John,” Maury interjected, “when you’re a prisoner like that, anything is pretty well fair game as a promise to get you out as long as you don’t compromise the military code. We know that.”
“Forrest had promised that they were going to decamp and head north, which obviously he did not do. As we know, the Stepps did launch a vengeance raid over the weekend and walked straight into an ambush, and the reivers let them off with one man slightly wounded. Even the Stepps admitted the whole crew could have been wiped out but were let off. Maybe I screwed up by not going up there sooner. I’m sorry.” John shrugged and looked out the window, no one speaking for a moment.
“So you figured on letting things settle down with these reivers,” Reverend Black interjected to break the embarrassed tension, “and then go public, is that it? We stay on our side of the mountain, they stay on their side?”
John looked back over his shoulder and breathed a sigh of relief with the nods of agreement. More than once in the previous two years, he had held information back at times until he felt the timing was right. This had been a tough one, though. The reivers were viewed as outlaws in the old, literal sense of the word—that they were outside the law and thus fair game.
Ed, who had until this morning been the most passionate about confronting the reivers or any other raiders without remorse or mercy, had now changed his tune completely upon learning that a kin through marriage, a vet, was running the outfit. He spoke for several minutes of old friends he knew on the north side of the mountain—that they were decent, hardworking folks and perhaps the last year had been a tragic misunderstanding that could have been solved by talk rather than raid and counterraid.
“So what are you suggesting we do?” Reverend Black asked, looking to John and then Ed.
“I’m waiting for that right now,” John replied. “I set up a signal with Forrest if either of us needed to parley. That was the three American flags I asked Ed to raise this morning down at the old auto dealership, and I’m waiting for a response. I hope to God he is okay and he does respond and not believe that we had anything to do with that attack. If he’s dead and one of his hotheads takes over, and there were more than a few of them, we are in for a bad summer of raids. Even if he is alive and decides to fight rather than talk, it is going to be a bitter summer along the mountain slope. We’re going to have to mobilize up a fair portion of our trained personnel for full-time border guard duty who should be working in the fields and rebuilding things instead. But the position I know they observed us from, Craggy Gap, there is now a squad of troops from Asheville up there now. So I don’t know if he got the signal or not—or the one I dropped from the plane.”