He paused. "My insurance agent once told me that everyone has a freight train and a railroad crossing in his or her life and you never see it coming until its too late."
"Nice, uplifting insurance agent you have," said Lockwood, trying to lighten things up. But he knew exactly what the gray-haired FBI man meant. You never knew where the bullet that hit you came from. One of these days he could stop a rowdy summertime DUI and find himself looking down the barrel of some punk's Saturday-night special and wind up in the uniform he was wearing right now, except flat on his back in a satin-lined wooden box. Outside the front of the building a big Sandri Sunoco fuel truck rumbled by on its rounds. The wind was rising and the snow was falling even more heavily. It was going to be a nasty night in Winter Falls.
Saxby gave a twisted little smile. "I just want this whole thing to be over and the ex-president to be on his way, and then, Chief Lockwood, maybe you and I can find a place to have a cold beer and a big steak and tell each other old war stories."
"Amen to that," agreed Lockwood.
33
Malcolm Teeter, who liked his friends to call him Stryker, his favorite character from the video game Mortal Kombat, sat alone at the wheel of the Sunoco oil tanker parked behind the Winter Falls Shopping Center on Crooked Pond Road. The detonator for the nine-thousand-gallon, twenty-eight-ton ANFO bomb that filled the red, white and blue tank was on the dashboard in front of him. Made up of a radio-controlled servo from a toy motorboat purchased at a RadioShack in Portland, the detonator was connected to four six-volt batteries and a PerkinElmer slapper blasting cap like the kind used in antitank rockets.
The new dude had showed them how to order things like that online. He'd even managed to get them all what appeared to be perfect replicas of New Hampshire National Guard uniforms so they'd fit in during the Winter Falls operation.
He called himself Barfield, and he was nice enough but he was too quiet. And, anyway, Malcolm wasn't stupid, was he? In no more than a week, even though nobody said anything, you could tell who was boss now and it sure as hell wasn't Wilmot goddamn DeJean anymore. He had the rank, sure, and walked around the compound with that "I am the principal of this school" look on his face, but it was Barfield who showed them all the new tricks-like getting rid of all that hot-dog stuff, about shooting pistols on the side, like how to mix in and not give people clues like showing your tats or wearing shit-kicker boots, like the difference about looking and actually seeing, and most of all about patience.
Malcolm didn't like driving in the smallest load, but just like this Barfield guy said, it was the most important because it was the first. It would draw away the heat from the real ground zero-the school-and bring it up here, to the north of the town. According to Barfield, there was going to be a lot of heat in town, and driving down Main Street you could almost feel it.
Going by the park in front of the cop shop and fire hall, you could pick them off everywhere. Like, what kind of idiot wears a topcoat and carries an attache case and just stands on the corner in the middle of a snowstorm? Secret Service or a Fed, that's who. Nobody noticed Malcolm, of course, which was the whole point. Sunoco was just about the biggest heating oil distributor in the state and there were Sunoco stations all over the place. Who saw a fuel truck in the middle of winter? They were supposed to be driving around at all hours of the day and night.
But still, he didn't like the waiting around. Of the six trucks his was the only one that wasn't going to be close to the rink. It was fine that he was key man or whatever Barfield called him, but it didn't do much for his-what was it?-his self-esteem. He felt a bit like the odd man out.
Teeter looked out the half-frosted windshield. The parking lot in front of the big P amp;C supermarket. Almost closing time. Teeter picked up the simple little radio control that would detonate the bomb parked next to the side wall of the shopping center. He might be the odd man out, but he knew the stats.
He grinned. He could see the estimates and the comparisons in the newspapers. The Oklahoma City bomb had been three thousand pounds; this one was fifty thousand pounds. The Oklahoma City bombing created a thirty-foot-deep crater and took out half an office building, causing damage for blocks around. This one would vaporize the entire supermarket and half a dozen other stores in the shopping center.
He would get a cell phone call from Barfield. That was the signal to climb out of the truck with the detonator, press the switch and then run like hell. He'd have five minutes to get himself out of range and to the rendezvous on Pine Street. He checked his watch again. Twenty minutes. He turned up the Tina Turner cut on his iPod. Now there was an old bitch who could sing.
General Angus Scott Matoon sat in his E Ring office in the Pentagon and fretted. It was eight o'clock in the evening and so far there was no news from Winter Falls. That could mean nothing or anything, but if Crusader was to succeed he needed to take the men of Prairie operational, and soon. He had enough men in place to take over the small but vital command-and-control units of the nation's telecommunications satellites, but to gather the reins of that power into a single fist would take time. Crusader was a tightrope; America had to be briefly thrown into chaos before Vice President Sinclair came to the rescue. As well as being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Chief of Staff of the Army, Matoon also had personal command of the little-known and even less-documented USNORTHCOM, the United States North American Command-a million-member strong homeland defense force controlling the land, sea and air in and around the continental United States, Canada and Mexico, and essentially occupying both the United States and those two sovereign nations under an iron-fisted martial law that came from the Oval Office and the commander in chief. It had been quietly established just after 9/11 and further augmented during the economic crises of 2008 to 2010, with the fear of a banking collapse and the threat of a new civil war.
As soon as word came down that Crusader was in motion, Matoon's main job was to take over the euphemistically named Consequence Management Response Force, a massive, military-manned national police force from USNORTHCOM's headquarters at Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. None of this could be accomplished until he had control of the satellite systems and Rex Deus became the de facto leadership of the nation. He looked at his watch. He couldn't wait any longer. He picked up the red telephone in front of him on the big oak desk that had once belonged to General Robert E. Lee and punched in a number.
"We have a prairie fire."
Everything went off like clockwork. The chopper landed square in the center of the big canvas target that had been pegged out on the snow-covered grass of the little park in front of the Municipal Building on Croppley Street. The smiling president, bounding down the short steps, shook hands with Mayor Dotty Blanchette, and together, before they froze to death, they got into the middle Escalade in the nine-car procession and headed for the Abbey School.
The Abbey School rink, named for the president's late father, was located on the foundations of what had once been the main animal pen for the Abbey's cheese-producing sheep and that had later been converted into what had been pretentiously referred to as the Big End- the main cricket field for the school. Cricket had gone over like a lead balloon and the large area to the east of the main school building had been converted into a baseball diamond. With New Hampshire regularly having as much as five months of winter, hosing down the baseball field in late October or early November and turning it into a skating rink seemed like a natural thing to do, and with the prez's prowess at hammering his opponents blindsided into the boards and making power plays, covering the rink and putting in seating followed equally naturally.