Joe Dillard: Reasonable Fear Part 21

"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.

Five of them.

I started crawling.

Chapter Thirty-Eight.

Two of the men moved around the front of the house and stepped up onto the porch. One of them knelt at the door while the other hung back a few feet. By this time, I'd crawled to within a hundred feet if them, beneath a holly bush Caroline had planted a couple of days after my mother died. I couldn't make out what they were doing. I couldn't even see them without looking through the infrared scope.

I expected them to try the unlocked door and walk through, but a few seconds later, they ran off of the porch and there was a loud explosion. They'd blown the door open, probably with a small C-4 charge. A half-second later, I heard another explosion that came from around back. They'd coordinated their attack. I'd barricaded the door in back, but there was no way a few pine two-by-fours would stand up to plastic explosive. I cursed myself for underestimating them.

I could have shot the two in the front, but I waited, hoping they'd go inside. They crept back onto the porch, and through the scope, I saw one of them toss something through opening where the door had been. There was another explosion, a flash-bang grenade, and they rushed in. Less than a second after they cleared the doorway the first Claymore exploded and I knew they were dead. Two down.

I panned the thermal scope to a man who'd been squatting next to a spruce tree near the driveway. He moved backward several yards to a pin oak for better cover. I put the crosshairs on the side of his head and squeezed the trigger. He crumpled and lay motionless.

Three down. Two left.

They were most likely inside, coming up the steps from Jack's room toward the kitchen. The Claymores I'd set didn't cover that part of the house. I could wait to see if they stumbled into one and blew themselves up, or I could go in and try to kill them myself. I flipped the selector switch on the M16 to full-automatic and ran for the front door.

As I cleared the doorway, the smell of C-4, blood and intestinal fluid filled my nostrils. I stepped on one of the men who'd been hit by the mine and nearly fell. I flipped the flashlight on for a just a couple of seconds and pointed it at the men who'd rushed the front of the house. They were b.l.o.o.d.y corpses. The front entrance had been decimated, but there were no fires. I squatted next to the stairs that led up to Lilly's room less than five feet from the stairs that led down to Jack's and shouldered the M16, listening for a creak, anything. A few seconds later, I heard a faint sound. They were coming up the stairs. I peered through the scope. One of them appeared in a half-crouch.

I opened up on him and tracked the weapon to my right and down, firing a dozen shots through the sheetrock wall in less than a second. I heard a several thumps, but I didn't move. I stayed there for almost a minute, listening, the barrel of the M16 still pointed at the doorway. The rain outside had stopped. The wind had died down. The house was completely still. The last two men were dead on the staircase. They had to be.

I stood and eased my way to the opening, keeping the weapon trained in front of me. I flipped on the flashlight. The two men were lying on top of each other on the landing below. One of them groaned, and I started cautiously down the steps. I pressed on the carotid of the man who was on top but felt nothing. I grabbed his collar and rolled him to the side. The man beneath was breathing laboriously. I knelt next to him. His eyes were open, and he looked at me.

"Ayudame," he whispered. "Ayduame."

"I don't' know what you're saying."

"Mother of G.o.d, help me." The English was so heavily accented I could barely understand.

I took the knife out of its sheath and cut the black fatigue s.h.i.+rt he was wearing down the front. There were three small entry wounds from the M16 rounds: one just above his collar bone on the left side at the base of his neck, another a couple of inches from his left nipple near his armpit, and a third in his abdomen, about three inches beneath his sternum. All three wounds were bleeding, but the wound above his collar bone was lethal. Dark blood was spurting from it with every beat of his heart.

I set the M16 down next to me, sliced a piece of fabric from his s.h.i.+rt, balled it up in my hand, and started applying pressure to the wound in his neck. His eyes hadn't left my face.

"Are you the lawyer?" he said.

"You're dying," I said as his eyelids fluttered. "Make your peace."

The corners of his lips turned up slightly.

"So are you," he said.

I saw a flash of white light as something crashed into the back of head, and then there was nothing.

Chapter Thirty-Nine.

Five men had walked through the field to the house. Four had gone on the attack while one stayed back. The Claymores took two of them and I'd killed two more on the stairwell. I'd put a bullet in the head of the man outside, and when I killed him, I thought he was probably El Maligno, the boss, supervising his little raid from afar.

I was wrong.

I looked around, straining to see in the darkness. There was a sharp pain at the base of my skull where I'd been struck by something, probably a rifle or pistol b.u.t.t, and my head felt like it was being squeezed in a vice. I was sitting up, but I couldn't move. A beam of a light came on and s.h.i.+ned directly into my face.

"Ah, so you're finally awake," a voice said from behind the beam. It was a deep baritone, accented, although not as thickly as the man on the stairs. "I was afraid I might have hit you too hard, maybe put you into a coma. That would have been too bad."

It was then that I realized why I couldn't move. I'd been taped to a chair, just like Zack and Hector, with a board running up the middle of my back.

"This is a nice place," the voice said. "Look at all the damage you've done. You should be ashamed."

My first instinct was to ask him who he was, but I knew. Footsteps approached and the light came closer. He stopped less than a foot in front of me and knelt. He held the flashlight beneath his chin, pointing upward. It was a macabre image, a long, thin jaw, flat nose and black eyes. His lips curled into a smile.

"This is the last face you'll ever see."

I saw the scar. It was him. It was El Maligno.

"Where is your wife? Your son and daughter? You can't save them. I've been given my instructions. I've been paid. They can't hide forever, you know. As a matter of fact, I feel certain they'll come to your funeral, and when they do, I'll be waiting. Senor Lips...o...b..wanted you to watch them die, but that doesn't seem possible now."

He stood up and backed away. A few seconds later, he said, "Smile," and there was a flash.

"He wants photos," El Maligno said.

I struggled against the tape, but it was useless. It was like I'd been laced into a full-body straight jacket.

"I'm wondering about you," he said. "I've killed so many. It's interesting to see how people react when they know they're going to die, that all hope is lost. Some beg, some pray. Most of them soil themselves. Some try to be brave, but in the end, they cry. How about you? Will you cry?"

"I'll hunt you down in h.e.l.l."

"Ah, defiance! Excellent! Would you like to know what I'm going to do to you? I'm going to cut your throat, but I'm going to do it slowly. Shallow incisions. I'll probably have to make three, maybe four of them before I get to the jugular. I'll be taking photographs along the way for Mister Lips...o...b..s enjoyment. When I cut the jugular, I'm going to stand here and watch you bleed out. And then I'm going to cut your tongue out and take it to Senor Lips...o...b..as a souvenir."

I heard the click of a folding knife and suddenly, my mind began to take me to another place. I was barely conscious of the maniac approaching me. I felt at peace, almost serene. I saw Caroline in a white dress, standing on a beach next to a calm, clear ocean inlet. Her back was to me, and a soft, warm breeze was lifting her hair ever so slightly. She turned to me, smiling, and waved.

"I'm coming," I said.

Something cold and sharp pressed against my neck.

There was a flash of bright light and the room seemed to explode. Caroline dissolved as the flashlight El Maligno was carrying dropped to the floor.

I became aware of someone to my right. Another flashlight beam illuminated a body on the floor at my feet. Then someone was kneeling. A hand reached out and pressed fingers into the flesh of El Maligno's neck. I recognized the shape of a cowboy hat.

"He's dead," a voice said.