Part 21 (1/2)

”Is that it? A shotgun and a pistol? I don't know exactly what kind of firepower these guys will bring if they come, but it'll d.a.m.n sure be more than a shotgun and a pistol.”

”Maybe. Probably.”

”You're going to get yourself killed, Dillard.”

”You were a SEAL,” I said, ”a professional soldier. Which enemy is the most dangerous, the enemy you least wanted to fight?”

He thought for a minute before he started nodding his head.

”The man who's defending his own home.”

”And that's what you're looking at. This ground we're standing on, that house, those buildings, this is my home. My wife and I built a life here, we raised our children here, and now John Lips...o...b..has taken it from us. He's taken our lives, and I don't intend to let it stay that way. If he sends soldiers, sicarios, hit men, a.s.sa.s.sins whatever you want to call them if he sends them here, I'm going to kill them.”

”And when Lips...o...b..hires more? You going to kill them, too?”

I thought of the conversation I'd had with Erlene. She'd gotten the message. I had no doubt she had her own people working on doing the same thing to Lips...o...b..that he'd been doing to others.

”I don't think Lips...o...b..will hire any more,” I said.

”Why would you think that?”

”Just call it a hunch. I think Lips...o...b..s train is about to run off the tracks.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven.

After Mack and Leah left, I walked back through the woods to the van and curled up underneath a poncho. I slept restlessly for few hours, terrified by a nightmare, one in which Caroline, Lilly and Sarah were being gang-raped by men wearing black hoods. I'd been gagged and tied to a chair, my eyelids taped open, and was being forced to watch helplessly. Jack was in another chair across the room, his throat cut and his tongue pulled out through the wound. The sound of John Lips...o...b..s laughter boomed through the scene while the men sweated and grunted and brutalized the women in my life. I woke up just as the man who was raping Caroline raised a knife to her throat.

I changed back into the clothes I'd been wearing the day before, started the van, drove it around to my workshop, and unloaded the crate Bo had given me. I cut several two-by-fours that were lying in a pile into four-foot lengths and used a cordless drill to bore two holes into each end. As soon as I was finished, I drove the van back to the hiding place and for the third time walked through the woods to the house. I opened the front door with my key and stepped inside.

I don't think it had ever been so quiet inside the house. I walked through each room, looking around, trying to act like I didn't know I was being watched. I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a sandwich, sat down at the kitchen table, and ate it slowly.

I spent the better part of the next two hours convincing myself that setting an ambush with the intention of killing men wasn't wrong. I thought about Osama bin Laden and the terror he'd inflicted on an entire nation, a nation in which I'd been raised, a nation of laws. How did we react? We went hunting for blood, just as we should have. It took ten years, but we finally killed that miserable coward.

John Lips...o...b..was no different in my mind. He was a criminal and a terrorist, a murderer of defenseless young women as well as a coward who hired others to do his killing. The difference was that I knew his men were coming, and I knew where they were most likely to strike.

A thought popped into my head as I recalled the conversation I'd had with Bo Hallgren in his barn. I walked over to a drawer in the kitchen and took out a pen and a small notebook. I set the notebook on the table in front of me, opened it, and wrote down the words, ”reasonable fear.”

Was I in reasonable fear of seriously bodily harm?

d.a.m.ned right I was.

Would the law allow me to use deadly force?

If they came to my house, the answer was yes. A man's home is still his castle in the eyes of the law.

I finished nibbling on the sandwich and started gathering things: photographs, an old wedding alb.u.m, a cedar chest full of memories, and I carried it all to the outbuilding. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I knew with what I was planning there was a possibility that a fire might start. If it did and I couldn't put it out, I didn't want to some of the things Caroline and I cherished to burn.

On my last trip to the workshop it started sprinkling. A clap of thunder startled me and I looked to the southwest, the direction from which most of our weather came. A huge, black thunderhead was rolling across the mountains, moving steadily in my direction. I picked up Bo's crate and carried it to the corner of the house, just outside the garage, as the sky grew steadily darker. I went back to the workshop one last time, gathered up the two-by-fours, the drill, and some four-inch wood screws, and carried it all to the crate.

I walked inside the house again. Bernie Cole had made me a diagram, so I knew where the cameras were. I was so geared for a fight that I wanted to walk up directly in front of a camera and say, ”Here I am. Come and get me,” but I resisted the impulse. I could hear the wind whistling outside. I walked down the steps to the bas.e.m.e.nt and flipped the main circuit breaker.

The house went black.

I hurried back upstairs and out through the garage. I made two trips carrying the crate, the lumber and the screws and the drill into the house. I changed quickly back into the fatigues, boots, and web gear, smeared some camo paint on my face, and went to work.

There were five doors into the house: one in the kitchen that led to the deck, one in the den that led to the deck, one in Jack's old room downstairs that led to the patio, one in the kitchen that led to the garage, and the front door. I barricaded the two doors that came off the deck and the door to Jack's room by s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g three two-by-fours into the door frames on the inside. I left the other two doors the front door and the door from the garage to the kitchen unlocked.

I opened the crate and started pulling out the real toys Bo had given me: Claymore mines. Claymores are roughly the size of a thick, hardback book, and they only weigh about three-and-a-half pounds. The outer sh.e.l.l is green and made of plastic. They're convex in shape, about eight inches long, five inches high and a little less than two inches wide with the words ”Front Toward Enemy” stamped into the front panel. They're filled with seven hundred steel b.a.l.l.s, each about an eighth of an inch in diameter. The b.a.l.l.s are held together by an epoxy resin and propelled by a C-4 explosive charge.

I'd used Claymores when I was a Ranger. They're deadly, but the best thing about them is that they can be aimed in a particular direction. They don't send shrapnel flying three hundred and sixty degrees like other conventional land mines. They have a sight on the top so a soldier can aim them. They'll spread the steel b.a.l.l.s about sixty degrees at fifty yards away. I didn't need a sixty-degree spread, though. My prey was going to be in a much more confined area.

I placed one Claymore about fifteen feet from the front door and another about fifteen feet from the door that went from the garage to the kitchen. I camouflaged both of them by covering them with dark towels. There are several ways to detonate Claymores, but Bo had given me four laser triggers, the latest improvement in the technology, and I set the beams so that anyone who walked four feet inside the doors would be met by a hail of ball bearings traveling at four thousand feet per second. I set one in the den and one at the top of the stairs that led to Lilly's room places where an intruder who entered through a window was most likely to walk. As soon as I was finished, I pulled the M16, the ammo, the knife, the flashlight and a poncho out of the crate, pushed it into the garage, and went outside into the storm.

When I got to the place where I planned to spend the night watching, I took the cell phone out of my pocket and texted a message to Caroline: ”All is well. Talk in morning. I love you.” I turned the phone off, and sat back to wait.

I certainly didn't plan it when the house was being built, but building on the bluff above the lake gave me at least a bit of a tactical advantage. If someone wanted to sneak up and try to get inside, they couldn't do it from the lake side because of the sheer rock cliffs. That meant they would have to come through the woods or walk across an open field on the opposite side of the house. They could come directly down from the road, but I didn't think they'd be that lazy.

I'd been over it dozens of times in my mind in the past twenty-four hours. From which direction were they most likely to come? I didn't know how sophisticated their weapons or their equipment would be. Would they have night-vision devices like the scope I had? Would they have grenades or rockets? Were they planning on destroying the house and anyone in it? From what Pinzon had told me, I thought they most likely wanted to take me alive, if at all possible, so they could torture me or force me to watch my family die. They might even want to take me to Lips...o...b..so he could derive some pleasure at my expense.

The weather was both a blessing and a curse. It would help me move silently, but it would do the same for them. I'd walked up to the same rise where I was standing when Leah and Mack arrived that morning. It gave me a clear view of three sides of the house. I couldn't see what was going on in back, but I didn't believe they'd come from there. I spent the next four hours lying on my belly, peering through the thermal sight and listening. Five vehicles pa.s.sed on the road below me at different times during my wait, and each one set my heart racing.

The rain slacked off to a drizzle a little after midnight. I could hear the low rumblings of thunder as the storm glided off to the east. I lay there for another hour as doubt began to eat at me and I began to tell myself I was a fool. Around one, I heard the sound of another vehicle coming down the road, but this was different, louder.

I rose up and looked in that direction. There were three vehicles driving toward me. As they pa.s.sed the driveway they slowed ever so slightly, and something told me it was about to begin.

Three vehicles? I wondered how many people were in them. I thought briefly about the promise I'd made to Mack McCoy to call him. I turned the phone on and noticed my hands were trembling. I told myself to calm down and changed my mind. It was me against them. There would be no cavalry.

The vehicles had driven off into the darkness to the west, and I waited for them to return, telling myself to breathe deeply, to rely on the training I'd received so long ago, to remain steady in the confusion, the noise, the chaotic terror of men trying to kill each other. I thought about Caroline and Jack and Lilly and what I was willing to sacrifice for them and their safety. The answer, as it had always been, was everything. I listened for the sound of a vehicle, thinking they might turn off their lights, approach slowly, and park close by so they could get in and out fast. Nothing. Maybe the vehicles had been a group returning from a party or a bar, maybe a bunch of kids.

And then I saw the first sicario.

In the thermal sight, he was glowing like he was beneath a black light, approaching slowly from the northwest. They'd apparently driven a ways past my place and then walked back. He was carrying a rifle. I not only felt my heart pounding, I could hear it.

Th-thump. Th-thump.

A couple of seconds later, I saw another image, then another, then another, and then another.

Th-thump. Th-thump. Th-thump. Th-thump.

I waited several seconds, panning them as they walked across the field that ab.u.t.ted my property and into the yard on the west side of the house.