“There was this morning radio personality in New York City. Very popular in that market. About six in the morning he comes on, reads the news off the overnight wire, and gets the bright idea to try and call the Cuban. He gets through and puts the Cuban on the air live. We didn’t know it was happening until they were about halfway through. The DJ was asking the Cuban questions and drawing him out about his family and his troubles, and basically trying to talk the man down — but using pop psychology. There is nothing more dangerous than that. The Cuban was getting all wound up again and starting to lose his English, after I had worked all night to stabilize him. Then we started hearing phones going off upstairs. One after another, and by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late. This DJ’s listeners had figured out that they too could dial the firm’s exchange, plus four random numbers, and have a chance to talk directly to the hostage-taker themselves. I sent men down to the communications center with fire axes but it was too late, there were already a hundred telephones going off all around this guy, and every other caller telling him, Kill them.
“Then we start hearing gunshots. The Cuban is losing it, firing wildly, at the floor, up into the air. Then he comes back on our phone. He’s screaming about executions. He says he’s going to kill all the hostages one by one. My people begin to scramble and I get into the elevator at this point. I do not know why. The negotiator never participates in any arrests, but the situation was starting to slip away from me — me, you see — so in the confusion I grabbed a portable phone and went inside the elevator. We were jammed in there — myself, a technician, and six HRT members, all just two floors below him. The elevator had been rewired and was ready to go. I called up to the ninth floor, and our sonar equipment placed him not ten feet away from the elevator doors, some forty feet away from the hostages. More wild shooting then. I didn’t have any choice. I pushed the button for the seventh floor. I gave the order to fill the room with gas and sent my men in.”
Banish was staring straight ahead. He was watching the elevator door slide open, seeing it all happen again through the smoky plastic shield of a gas mask. The confusion, the yells, the pushed bodies. Gunshots, screams.
He heard the single shot. He saw the prone legs kicking, blood darkening the floor. “The Cuban took his own life. A single round to the temple, just as we broke in.”
People in business suits screaming, wailing, lying on the floor. “The firm’s employees were traumatized but each of them got out OK.”
Banish remembered running up to the side wall of the smoky room. He watched it all happening. He saw them there. “But the wife and daughter — he had stood them up against a wall away from the rest of the hostages, tied with a thin wire cord around each of their necks to keep them still. I had sent the gas in. They both lost consciousness just as we arrived. Their own weight dragged them down.”
He saw them sagging forward from the wall by their necks, throats sliced open ear to ear. Dangling hands twitching spasmodically, run red with blood. His own men trying frantically to cut them loose from the wall. Mother and daughter dying right there in front of him.
A dark woman in a sundress with a black eye and bruises on her arms. A twelve-year-old girl.
Roaring thunder approached his consciousness and then a helicopter buzzed over them, its spotlight running past, and Banish saw where he was again, the ground and the gully before him, and for a frozen instant everything glowed white. Then the helicopter passed and the shaken leaves drifted like regrets to the dirt around them. Banish cleared his throat.
“So we went out afterward. It was different, of course, all different. And when it was over I could not go home. I didn’t, until three days later. And I did not stop drinking from that day on. Gradually, and then rather spectacularly, I fell apart.”
Banish was quiet for a while.
“And the freed hostages. More than half of them quit their jobs within six months. That’s standard following a crisis like that; people yanked out of their daily routines, isolated, terrorized. One night can last you a lifetime. But one young woman, the first to leave the firm, refused to cooperate with her appointed psychiatrist. Eventually she disappeared altogether. It’s what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome. She came to identify her captor as her savior — rather than the police, with whom she had no contact — because her captor held the power of life and death over her and she had been spared. She got my name somehow and tracked me down at a hospital I was staying at. She had a gun and she tried to kill me. Fair trade, I’d say, except that she bungled the job. But that is what you get for playing with other people’s lives.”
He looked at Kearney then, across the cold mountain gully surrounded by the pleading woods. Banish said, “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
Kearney hesitated, then nodded.
“I am nobody’s hero. I don’t like some of the things I have to do. I have too much power, too much responsibility. Too many hands. That’s why these protesters — I could have pushed them all the way back to the Pacific if I’d wanted to. But I need them here. They will keep me from doing things I might otherwise do. Whatever their motives for being here, that is what they are: eyes, to watch me. Because I am not to be trusted. Because I am a gambler — that’s all I am. And a pretty good one. That’s my curse.”
Kearney was blinking at him. He started to say something, censored himself, then went ahead and said it anyway. “But it wasn’t your fault.”
Banish smiled weakly at the sentiment. Familiar words of counsel. They must have tasted warm on the tongue. But hearing them again did have the effect of sobering him.
“We talked to Ables tonight,” Banish said. “I’m reassigning you to the command tent, starting oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.”
Kearney’s white eyes cleared then. He nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Banish realized he was leaning forward. He sat back against the hard dirt wall again. There was an awkward moment of nodding silence on both sides, then a muffled pop. Banish turned his head to listen, uncertain. When nothing followed immediately, he crouched and turned fully to look up through the trees at the cabin. The searchlight was still. Then a crack out of the night like a cap being fired, and a hiccup burst of light — a shot from somewhere high in the trees above. Banish grabbed for his radio on the ground next to him. “Fagin,” he said.
Sniper’s Nest
Fagin scanned the compound with his NVD. Like looking into a fucking aquarium. He answered the voice in his ear.
“Wasn’t me,” he said. “Is that fucking HRT?”
Banish said, “Situation report.”
“Warning shot. Something moving out there, don’t know what the fuck it is.”
Banish’s voice came back. “Fagin, warnings only. Everyone else hangs back. I’ll get someone on the lights.”
Fagin clicked off. It was fucking Hostage Rescue. He slipped his ringer back in over the trigger and stayed alert. He could see nothing clearly because of the goddamn spotlight burning into his NVD — there was glare, although the light being still now made things easier. A second light came on low then and swept the woods. The stinging odor of the Vicks put a throb in his head. He heard the whup-whupping of the Huey returning. The whining of Ables’s family on the speakers down below. Another cold wind wheezing through the trees. He frowned hard. Happy fucking anniversary.