The reporter drew a revolver and cocked it at Roy, Jr.’s temple.
The click sounded dull in the snow. Chief Roy looked on wordlessly, feeling a hand at his waist. Someone relieved him of his side arm.
“Dad?” Roy, Jr., said, shying away from the short barrel of the gun.
Chief Roy could not grasp what was happening. He saw his son’s face and staring eyes, but nothing made sense yet.
Beyond, he saw Tom Duggan walking away through the snow, his black-clad figure fading into the night.
They knocked Roy, Jr., to his knees, then laid him facedown in the snow. Another one of them stepped up to the chief and put a nine-millimeter handgun to his stomach.
“You walk right back inside and don’t say nothing. Walk straight through to the side door and open it to us.”
Nothing was real. “I’ve got a civil emergency here...” said Chief Roy, but as soon as he heard his own words the spell was broken. He focused his attention on the snowy boot in his son’s back. Roy, Jr., was lying still and limp in the snow as though he were already dead. A gun muzzle was pressed to the back of the head Chief Roy once cupped in his hand. “Jesus Christ,” the chief said, his mind clearing. “I’ll do anything.”
“Do what I told you, and fast.”
Roy Darrow turned and started up the four steps to the double glass doors, disoriented, gripping the handrail, unable to hear anything. He entered his station and passed through it slowly. He could not summon any speed. One of his men tried to hand him a telephone receiver but he passed him by, part of his mind remembering how irritated he had been when Ann insisted on driving down to her sister’s in Cabot, “just to wait this thing out.” Now he didn’t care about his pride or the town or anything except his family and his son.
FBI Agent Coté was talking to him from the door of his office. “Got to clear some room here, Chief, this place is going to fill up with agents. Chief? Hey, Chief.”
Roy Darrow turned left at the radio room, unlocking the doors to the side parking lot, admitting the three men and a fourth. They followed him inside and then rushed past him, moving quickly throughout the station.
Special Agent Lon Coté returned to the desk inside the police chief’s office, rubbing his eyes and taking up the telephone again, still on hold. He was setting in motion the necessary mechanisms to use Title 18 violations — malicious destruction of federal property, hostage-taking — to upgrade the FBI’s official response from “advisory” to “operational,” thereby allowing them to take total command of the prison riot from the Bureau of Prisons.
A CNN cameraman walked past the office door and Coté shook his head at the lax security of the Gilchrist PD. All that would end... as soon as he could get somebody to pick up the damn phone. He looked out the room’s only window, to the flakes dancing under the streetlamps around the town common. Then he became aware of voices rising in the outer rooms.
He set down the phone and was halfway to the door when the cameraman reappeared. In the man’s free hand was a short-barreled Smith & Wesson.
Lon Coté felt the weight of the shoulder holster suddenly beneath his tan wool suit jacket. In his fourteen-year career he had never faced a loaded gun.
“Lay it on the floor,” said the cameraman.
Coté saw another man behind him rounding up police. Except for the paramilitary Micro Uzi machine pistol in his hands, everything about these guys said ex-cons.
Coté set his piece down flat on the carpet and stood with his hands open and out at his sides. “My name is Lon Coté, special agent with the FBI,” he said, plainly and without drama, surprised at the pride he felt in these words. “Now, what is this all about?”
Warden James stood outside the trailer, watching the black smoke rising out of the compound as wet snow-flakes melted on his venous cheeks. “Fortresses,” he said.
Chloe Gimms was behind him. “How’s that, Bart?”
The warden looked straight up at the flakes falling to him and for a dizzying moment experienced the sensation of flight. “This was the end of the line. The worst of the worst. Now what? How do we punish this? Where does it go from here?”
Chloe frowned. “Just hang in there, Bart.”
This was his last command. Thinking this bolstered Barton James. With the end in sight, anything is tolerable. Mrs. James had remained behind in Denver, too tired to follow him to one more prison town. Now he spent all his vacations traveling home. That was how upside-down things had been. She had wanted more time with him, now she was going to get it.
A roar behind him, machinery coming to life, almost like one of the campers starting up. But it was louder than that, Warden James felt the roar from the ground. Movement to his left. He turned, expecting police officers.
Three local men were walking toward them from the trees.
“The hell is this?” said Chloe Gimms, angered by the breach of security.
Headlights swirled behind the campers. Engine gears downshifted, and Chloe heard popping and felt thumps in the ground near her feet, then noises like rocks striking the camper hull and windows. With a crash and a wail of steel, the camper next to her was rammed from behind. She jumped out of the way as it was shoved over onto its side in a crashing whump of snow.
Now she saw the attacking bulldozer rearing back and raising its curved steel blade. The headlights swung around and with a snort of exhaust the bulldozer rolled at the second camper.
The Special Operations Response Team leader came rushing out of the camper door. He saw the first camper on its side and reached for his weapon — then jerked and took a small step backward as though shoved. Chloe never heard the gunshot. The SORT leader held his hands at his chest as though cradling a baby bird. The bird was bleeding.
The bulldozer rammed the second camper, its raised blade chewing and crumpling the roof, rocking the vehicle but failing to overturn it on the first try. The bulldozer rolled back, grinding snow, lowering its blade as a bull does its horns, then rushing forward again.
Yelling and movement came from inside the jostled second camper as members of the SORT team fled out the only door, stunned.
With the second blow the camper tipped over like the first, crushing the SORT team leader.
Gunshots cracked all around Chloe Gimms. SORT team members were still climbing out of the windows of the overturned second camper, only to be set upon by the men dressed as locals. Those already outside drew their weapons and looked for cover, but bullets smacked their chests and legs and knocked them around. They tried to return fire but they were shooting at ghosts. Snipers in the trees. The ground snow was turning red.
Chloe was lying on her side, not knowing how she got there. She turned to Warden James but he was being dragged away by two armed men. She was rolled over then by a man wearing a CNN ballcap, a gun jabbed into her face. He held a bloody SORT radio.
“Call in the guards from around the prison. Get them out here in two minutes.”
“What is this—”
He fired two shots into the snow behind her head and she barely heard her own scream. “Do it!” he yelled, in a faraway voice.
She called them in. She didn’t know if she was yelling or whispering into the radio. The man took her side arm from her and dragged her over to the rest.
Time blurred. Prison guards arriving from the perimeter were taken captive, made to sit in the snow like children, the local cops and reporters too. Guns, radios, and other equipment were all confiscated.
With the outside secured, some of the armed men headed for the prison entrance and the front gate, which opened magisterially. Gunfire was exchanged briefly, but then lights came on around the main entrance. Police cars, driven by more of these men, sped to the front gate with blue lights spinning.