Third Degree

Chapter 21

Danny was so stunned by the revelation of Laurel’s pregnancy that he could hardly think. He and Sheriff Ellis sat shoulder to shoulder in the helicopter, headsets on, with the rotors already whirling at full rotational speed.

“I don’t think we can wait until Carl gets a clear shot,” the sheriff said, his worried face illuminated by the cockpit lights. “I know you want to, but I can’t risk Shields barricading his family in that panic room. He could cut their throats and laugh at us while he was doing it.”

“He hasn’t done that yet,” Danny pointed out.

“No, but he’s coming apart in there. I didn’t like the sound of his voice. I’ve got that Jim Jones, Kool-Aid feeling.”

Danny wanted to argue, but his mind kept jumping back to the fact that Laurel had lied to him about sleeping with her husband. This morning she’d told him flat out that she hadn’t. But she had.

“Shields doesn’t believe her about that pregnancy either,” Ellis added. “I think that pushed him over the edge.” He elbowed Danny. “You think Shields is the father of that baby?”

Jim Jones, Danny thought, twenty seconds behind the conversation. Kool-Aid. “I don’t know. Might be the guy who wrote the letter.”

“Shields is a doctor, so he must know what he’s talking about. He says he couldn’t have got her pregnant. Aw…in five minutes it won’t matter anyway.”

Danny closed his eyes, trying to work his way to the heart of what had really been going on in his life.

“Fuck this,” Ellis said, abandoning his deacon’s rectitude. “Take us up, Danny!”

Danny pulled pitch and the Bell leaped into the night sky. In seconds he was looking down at the glowing yellow windows of the Shields home in miniature, an aerial shot of the perfect suburban home. A Steven Spielberg movie.

“This is Black Leader,” Ellis said. “TRU will carry out explosive entry on my command. Acknowledge by turns.”

Danny gripped the controls with too much force, trying in vain to bleed off his anxiety.

“Black One, in position.”

“Two, in position.”

Ellis pointed down toward the front yard. “I want you to flare out there and hit your light, pull him to a window. He might come alone, and I’ll blow the doors then.”

Danny shook his head as though to clear it. “You can’t send Ray in there, Sheriff. You’ve got to let Carl take the shot.”

“There’s no more time! And Carl’s still on the back side of the house.”

“Move him!”

“It’s too late! We’re going in. Shields has left us no choice.”

“Six, in position.”

Danny descended to 150 feet and flew left turns as he waited for the acknowledgments to come in. From this altitude, the beating of the rotor blades would sound to someone in the house like a giant robot pounding on the roof. Maybe that baby is Warren’s, he thought. But the sheriff was right; Shields was a doctor and he’d sounded certain about his inability to father a child. Danny flashed back to the morning’s school conference, when Laurel had started to tell him something, then pulled back at the last moment, when the next parent showed up at the door-

“This is Black Six,” crackled the headset. “I’ve got movement on the front thermal cam. It’s real faint, but it looks like a large figure moving from the pantry toward the central hall. The foyer area.”

“What’s he doing?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a green blob, Sheriff. Like a ghost.”

“Keep me posted. Carl, stay ready. If Shields moves back into the great room, we may blow those back windows yet.”

“Understood. I’m glassing the windows, and my spotter’s on his thermal. I’m ready to fire.”

Danny looked down at the house, praying for the X-ray vision promised in the comic books of his youth. Where was Laurel? What was Warren doing? Would he really execute her? Yes, answered a voice in his head. Not to kill her, but to murder the child she’s carrying. It’s his only chance at revenge against an invisible enemy. He’ll shoot her in the stomach….

Danny thought about the cell phone in his pocket. He should already have used it to try to find out what was happening inside. But with Warren moving around the house, what good were texted answers? Every passing second could change the reality in there. Maybe it’s time to call her, he thought. But would that give the TRU the edge they needed, or get Laurel killed before they could even blow the doors?

For once in his life, Danny had no idea what to do.

Grant sat huddled in the pantry with the lights off, just as his father had told him to do. He had one job: pull the big breaker switch if he heard shooting. He knew all about the breaker switch, because his dad had told him about it when they lost power during Hurricane Katrina. It wasn’t hard or anything. He’d seen twenty different cartoon characters pull the same kind of switch to make the lights go out.

Grant was confused about what was happening with his parents, but he was glad to have a job to do, and he didn’t want to disappoint his father again. No matter how crazy it might seem that his dad was acting, Grant knew there was a reason for it, because his dad always did the right thing. His mom had told him that. Plenty of times. And now wasn’t the time to start doubting it. He was only a kid, after all.

As he stared up at the big switch lever, his back pressed into a corner, someone slid open the pantry window. Grant jumped because he was startled, but after that he stayed absolutely still. He’d been hunting enough times to know what to do when you didn’t want to be seen. No movement. No sound. Not even a breath.

It didn’t surprise him that the alarm system didn’t chime. The same silence had greeted him when he sneaked back through the window upstairs. He figured the cops had turned off the system somehow.

A dark head came through the window, and with it the smell of cigarettes. Then the head vanished, and a leg with a boot on the end of it came through. Four fingers curled under the window frame. Then the head returned, followed by shoulders and the rest of a body. Grant tensed, preparing to spring to his feet and tear out of the pantry, but his father’s instructions held him back. He could not abandon his post.

He heard a grunt, followed by creaks and stretchy sounds like those his grandmother’s knees made when she got up from her easy chair. The intruder stood tall in the darkness. He was wearing a uniform, Grant realized, just like the one Deputy Sandra had been wearing. Grant thanked God there was a shelf above his head, or the guy would probably have seen him already.

When the man took a step forward, Grant’s eyes bulged. This man had coached the baseball team Grant played against in the city championship last year. His son was a pitcher on the team, a boy who cussed all the time and tried to pick fights after he lost. The referees had threatened to throw the coach out of the game for yelling cuss words.

Trace…that’s what the kids called him. Coach Trace. Like the Natchez Trace.

Grant watched Coach Trace move quietly to the pantry door, then open it slowly. When light from the kitchen fell across him, Grant saw a gun in his hand. Then Coach Trace vanished.

A fist closed around Grant’s heart.

He gritted his teeth and tried to figure out what to do. His dad had told him to stay put, that he wouldn’t be safe roaming around the house. He’d also said that switching off the lights was an important job. A critical job. And Grant was supposed to wait until he heard shooting to do it. Coach Trace clearly meant to shoot somebody-maybe even his dad-but was that when Grant was supposed to switch off the lights? He didn’t think so. Because that would be too late. He pulled off his shoes, walked barefoot to the door, and followed Coach Trace into the kitchen.

Danny was hovering a hundred feet over the front yard when when a panicked voice filled their headsets.

“Sheriff, this is Gene on the front thermal! I think somebody may have gone into the house!”

“What?”

“I had a figure in the shrubs near the pantry window. I thought it was Dave, but then it suddenly faded to half intensity. Now it’s gone. I think maybe the guy went into the house.”

“Damn it!” Ellis cursed. “This is Black Leader, have any of you entered the house?”

No one replied.

“Acknowledge proper position by turns!” Ellis demanded. “Come on, damn it!”

“Black One, in position.”

“Two, in position.”

“Three, in position.”

The transmissions came in like a military roll call, all the way to fifteen without pause. Sheriff Ellis breathed a sigh of relief after the last. “Must have been a mistake. For a minute I thought we had a rogue on our hands.”

“Let’s get this show on the road,” Ray Breen said.

Ellis motioned for Danny to start descending.

Laurel stood motionless in the foyer, recalling her attempted escape from the safe room, when Warren had threatened to kill both her and himself. That was the turning point, she thought. My last chance to get out. But it had been no chance at all, really. Because Warren would have carried through with his threat. She was certain of it now. It would have saved the children, she thought with a stab of guilt. But who could have made that choice? Surely she’d had reason to hope for some other outcome at that point.

She stared at the door that concealed the entrance to the safe room, recalling stories she’d read about gas station clerks ordered by robbers to go into a restroom and lie on the floor. I won’t go in, she told herself. I’ll fight here rather than die passively in there. Maybe Grant will help me.

She turned toward the front door. Police waited on the other side of it, but Warren had bolted all the doors and hidden the keys. She stepped backward and looked down the hall toward the kitchen, which was dark now. Warren was escorting Beth up the hallway. The scene looked completely normal, father and daughter walking toward the stairs to go up and read a bedtime story-except for the pistol hanging from Daddy’s hand.

Something’s different, she thought, her pulse quickening.

She looked at her husband’s face, haggard and swollen, only the eyes vital, alive with a zealot’s conviction. He’s going to kill us, she realized. This is the end.

Panic of unimaginable power surged through her, infusing her with the strength to try anything. Her hands quivered with energy, as though they knew that any moment they might be employed to choke the life out of a stronger enemy.

My cell phone, she thought suddenly. Should I call Danny and tell them to come in shooting? Warren won’t let me do that. But I could just open the line-

Something moved behind Warren, blanking Laurel’s mind of everything but what was in front of her. Was it only a shadow? No…it had substance-

There! A darker outline in the darkness of the kitchen-

She forced her eyes to focus on Warren’s, trying to protect the newcomer. In the dark blur behind her husband, the shadow floated swiftly up the hallway, thin and fluid and somehow more dangerous than Warren’s gun. She felt an instant of guilt for not warning Warren, but then Grant’s voice shattered the silence-

“Coach Trace! Coach Trace!”

The shadow whirled toward the piercing scream, and Warren spun also. His gun went up as he turned, and Laurel saw then that the shadow had made a fatal mistake, one that Grant must have known it would. By spinning toward the sound, the stranger had turned his back on Warren, and by the time he tried to correct his error, Warren had already fired. Grown-up stuff indeed…

Warren’s bullet struck the shadow somewhere vital, because she heard the heavy thud of dead weight dropping onto wood, a sack of feed hitting a barn floor. Then Grant charged out of the dark and snatched a pistol from the fallen man’s hand.

“You got him, Dad! You got him!”

Grant leaped into his father’s arms and hugged him tight.

“What the fuck was that?” Sheriff Ellis shouted into his headset mike.

“Gunshot,” said Danny, terrified that Warren had just executed Laurel. “Sounded like a pistol, but what was that the boy screamed?”

“We gotta go now!” Ray Breen yelled. “Give the order, Sheriff!”

“Negative!” Ellis shouted. “Somebody yelled Trace. Trace, was that you? What are we hearing down there? Did anybody fire?”

The communications officer didn’t respond.

Danny tilted the chopper to get a better view of the house. Rain still peppered the windshield, making it hard to see clearly.

“Trace!” Ellis yelled. “Get me Dr. Shields on my radio!”

“We can’t wait!” Ray shouted. “We gotta go!”

“Shut up, Ray! Keep this channel clear!”

The radio hummed and crackled, and then a woman’s voice filled Danny’s headset. “Sheriff, we’ve got a problem.”

“Who’s this?”

“Sandra Souther. I’m in the command trailer.”

“Where’s Trace?”

“Um…I think he’s in the house.”

Ellis blanched. “What?”

“Dr. Shields just called the phone in here. Nobody was answering, so I came in and picked up. Dr. Shields said Trace just tried to shoot him in the back, and he had to kill him.”

Sheriff Ellis looked at Danny with dawning horror.

“You’d better put a rope around Ray Breen,” Danny said. “Fast.”

“Ray, this is Billy Ray,” the sheriff said in a voice Danny had never heard from him before. “I know you heard that, brother. You’re to stand down and let me handle this, copy? Get a grip on yourself for sixty seconds and let me handle it.”

“Fuck that,” Ray muttered. “I lead the TRU. We’re going in.”

“Ray!” Ellis balled his right hand into a fist and spoke harshly. “If you enter that house without authorization, you’re out of a job.”

“I don’t give a shit! Black Team, prepare to go on my command. Five seconds-”

“I’ll arrest you for murder, Ray. As God is my witness, you’ll go to death row in Parchman. And you’ve put too many men there to want to see it from the inside.”

Danny listened in dread for Breen’s go order, but it didn’t come.

“Sandra, this is Sheriff Ellis. Can you hook me up to Dr. Shields?”

“Maybe. Hang on.”

“Why in God’s name would Trace do that?” Ellis murmured, seemingly lost.

“He had a personal grudge against Shields,” Danny said. “I don’t know what it was. I just found out myself. I should have told you.” Danny touched the sheriff’s arm. “You can’t let Ray into that house. Now or later, you can’t do it.”

“He’s the TRU leader,” Ellis said. “Those boys down there trained under him, and I’m not changing horses in midstream.”

Danny looked hopelessly down at the house glowing in the dark.

“He’ll kill Shields, no matter what you tell him.”

“Shields put us all here. That’s the bottom line. If it ends ugly, it’s on his head. Trace Breen didn’t start this nightmare. Warren Shields did it all by himself.”

No, I helped, Danny thought. With a little hands-on assistance from the man’s wife-

“I’ve got Dr. Shields for you, Sheriff,” Sandra said. “Go ahead.”

“Dr. Shields, this is Sheriff Ellis. Can you hear me?”

“It’s faint, but I hear you.”

“Did you just shoot one of my deputies?”

“Yes, sir. Trace Breen snuck in here and tried to shoot me in the back. If my son hadn’t warned me, I’d be dead now.”

“You’re a goddamn liar!” screamed Ray.

“Keep this channel clear!” Ellis ordered. “Doctor, no matter how justified you may feel, you just shot a duly appointed officer of the law. You have only one option. You must surrender. I’m giving you three minutes to walk out of your house with your hands held high in the air. You must walk out alone, unarmed, without any member of your family. Do you understand?”

Shields didn’t reply.

“Dr. Shields? Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“The clock starts now. I beg you to come out peacefully.”

Shields said nothing else.

“Hang up, Sandra,” Ellis said.

“He already broke the connection.”

Ellis looked at his watch. “Whoever’s on those thermal cams, tell me if it looks like they’re going into the panic room.”

“The kids may be in there already,” said a voice. “But I think the adults are in the kitchen.”

Ray Breen said, “I never seen no chickenshit like this in my life, Billy Ray. The son of a bitch killed one of our people, and you-”

“Shut up and listen!” Ellis hollered like a quarterback silencing his linemen in a fourth-quarter huddle. “We’re not waiting three minutes! We’re going in one minute. Copy?”

Danny wasn’t sure he had heard right until Ray Breen said, “I got you now. We’re ready.”

“Black Six,” Ellis said, “if Shields gets within thirty feet of that panic room, we’re going in. Keep me posted.”

Christ, Danny thought. Shields could be in there thinking about giving up, and he’ll still be thinking about it when Ray Breen blows his head off. Sheriff Ellis’s strategy was sound; giving an unbalanced man a real deadline could easily push him into executing his hostages. But Danny couldn’t shake the feeling that they hadn’t done all they could to talk Shields out of the house. Or was that simply his guilt talking? Was there any hope that Shields would surrender? The doctor believed he’d just defended himself against an intruder trying to murder him. He was deep into a siege mentality. He was also terminally ill. Did it even matter to Warren when or where he died?

“Take us up another hundred feet,” Sheriff Ellis ordered.

Danny started ascending. Where’s Laurel now? he wondered. What will she do when they blow the doors? Drop to the floor or stand there like a doe in the headlights while bullets spray through the house? Is there any chance she’ll try to protect her husband? Danny didn’t think so, but even the slightest prospect of this terrified him, because he was certain that Ray meant to kill Shields no matter what.

“Thirty-five seconds,” Ellis said, his eyes on his wristwatch. “Stay ready, Ray. Everybody key off your watches. Thirty seconds…”

A silver sheet of rain hit the windshield, and Danny fell through a black hole, straight into Afghanistan. Forty-two marines were trapped on a mountaintop in the worst storm the company’s Tajik adviser could remember. Taliban guerrillas commanded by mujahideen who’d fought the Russians twenty years earlier were scaling the rock walls like ants to finish off the Americans. It was only a sideshow to the battle raging at Tora Bora, but to the marines marooned on the mountain, it was the end of the world. An army Black Hawk had already been shot down as it hovered to fire a Hell-fire missile into a cave mouth. An Air Force A-10 had held off the guerrillas for a while, but now even the Warthog had been grounded. When night fell, there would be no stopping the Taliban. They were already too close to the marines for artillery to knock them off the mountain, and the Spectre gunships in the theater were committed to Tora Bora. At any moment, Danny expected the marines to call in artillery on their own position, as Joe Adams had famously done on Hill 385 in Korea. Anything was better than being captured by Afghan tribesmen.

Then a Delta Force officer volunteered to drop onto the mountain and set up a protective perimeter, if a helicopter pilot would try to airlift the trapped marines to safety. To do so would mean almost certain death. Danny didn’t want to die. He had no illusions about war. He was forty-three years old, and he hadn’t reached that age by volunteering for suicide missions. Yet he’d felt a voice rising up his throat, trying to volunteer him. Why? Was he trying to live up to the legacy of his father, the red-faced crop duster who’d fought in the Big One? He certainly had no faith in his immortality under fire. But at bottom, he realized, it was simpler than all that. If someone didn’t take a bird up there, those marines would die. Forty-two husbands, fathers, and sons. Fate had placed their lives in Danny’s hands. Of the two other pilots there that day, one had a son he’d never seen, and the other always had his eye on the main chance, which meant flying milk runs for rock stars, not dying in Afghanistan. So without thinking very much, Danny had raised his hand and said, “I’ll go.” The most meaningful reward he ever got in the military was the look in the Delta operator’s eyes after he volunteered. The look said, You are a crazy fuck, and you’re probably going to die, but, brother, you are One of Us.

Danny landed on the mountaintop three times before they got him. He wrung performance out of that chopper that the engineers who’d designed it would never have believed. His Pave Low took more AK rounds than by any physical law it should have survived, and the blasting sand and water stripped off half the paint and all the decals by the end of the second run. But eventually the ship gave up the ghost. It took an RPG round to kill it. Danny’s door-gunner screamed a warning, and Danny jinked at the last second, but the hissing rocket clipped his tail rotor and the controls went gooey on him. He didn’t even remember the crash, only an absolute certainty that the end had come, and that it had come in a chopper, as he had always known it would. He thought of his father as he fell, with his beloved Pave Low windmilling in the air like Pete Townshend’s guitar arm. There was a bright flash in his head, then the face of a girl he’d loved in high school, and then…nothing.

Only later did he learn that his crew were killed on impact. Danny was ejected, seat and all, through a hole the mountain ripped in the cockpit during the ship’s final spin. A piece of shrapnel tore through his left leg, and some Afghans fired a burst of AK rounds at him, connecting once in the same leg. And then a miracle occurred. Inspired by Danny’s desperate barnstorming, the pilot of one of the AC-130 gunships over Tora Bora threw away his regulation book, diverted to the besieged mountain, and rained hell and death down on the Afghans for ninety minutes straight. The Delta Force operators tied Danny to a stretcher they found in the wreckage of his chopper and carried him down the mountain, fighting a rearguard action all the way. The last six marines came with them. A hundred meters from the bottom, elements of the First Marine Division rushed up like a camouflaged tide and swept them back down to safety.

They gave Danny and his dead crew a Mackay Trophy for that action, but the ceremony was hollow for him. He never again saw any of the marines he’d saved that day. He did receive a couple of letters, one from a wife in Kansas, thanking him for saving her husband. The jarhead had added a postscript himself at the bottom: Semper fi, buddy. You’re always welcome here. They put in a snapshot of their kid, too, a freckled girl standing in short rows of corn. Danny had only read the letter once, but he kept it in his top dresser drawer, to remind him that sometimes you just had to say “Fuck it” and do the right thing, no matter what it cost. If you did, you never knew what someone else might do to help you. Or what good might come of it.

“Ten seconds!” Sheriff Ellis cried, his voice pitched high from the stress. “Take us down, Danny!”

Danny loved Laurel; he hadn’t the slightest doubt about that. And he hated his wife, for using his son as a hostage. He had an obligation to Michael that nothing could remove, but didn’t he also have an obligation to Laurel? What if she was carrying his child? God forgive him, a healthy child who could speak and listen? Laurel had given him everything she had to offer and asked nothing in return. She’d simply trusted that he’d do the right thing by her. And that he had not done-

“Five seconds,” said Sheriff Ellis. “This is Black Leader, we’re going to hover low and hit the spotlight. Everybody-”

Danny twisted back the throttle and slammed down the collective, and the helicopter dropped like King Kong off the Empire State Building.

“Shiiiiiiiitttt!” Ellis screamed, his face bone white with terror. “What’s happening?”

“We lost the engine!” Danny shouted, intentionally throwing the ship out of trim. “Brace yourself!”

Anything less than a crash might have left Ellis capable of issuing orders on the way down, so Danny had pulled an emergency autorotation, virtually killing the engine and causing a controlled crash in which only the energy stored in the still-whirling rotor blades could spare them from death. Red emergency lights lit up the instrument panel, and the whoop-whoop of the low rpm warning filled the cabin. He waited until the last possible instant to flare, then yanked up on the collective, certain that the primal terror scrambling the sheriff’s brain would prevent him from giving the go order. The Bell bounced hard on the front lawn, its rotor tips spinning bare inches from the brick front of the house.

“What just happened?” Ray Breen shouted. “Are you guys okay?”

“Holy Christ!” yelled Ellis, clutching his chest in terror.

Danny unhooked his harness and scrambled out of the chopper onto wet grass. When the sheriff saw this, he assumed the ship was about to explode and tried to do the same, but Danny leaned back inside and yelled, “Give me ten minutes! Ten minutes alone with him! Stay on those mikes!”

Comprehension dawned in Ellis’s eyes, followed by a blaze of anger, but Danny broke away and sprinted around the chopper to the front door of the house. He slammed into it with all his weight and started banging on it like a fugitive at a church door.

“Open up! It’s Danny! Warren, it’s me! It’s Danny!”

Over his shoulder he saw two alien figures in black body armor break cover and charge him. They’d closed to within twenty feet when the door fell away and someone yanked him inside.