Clint would have believed the phrase his heart sank was nothing but a poetic expression until his actually did it. Unaware that he had left the cover provided by the southwestern corner of the main building, he stared, slack-jawed, at the concrete showering down from C Wing. How many of the sleeping women in that cellblock had been killed in the blast, incinerated or torn to pieces in their cocoons? He barely heard something buzz past his left ear, and didn’t feel the tug as another bullet, this one thrown by Mick Napolitano from behind the second bulldozer, tore open one of his pants pockets and spilled loose change down his leg.
Willy Burke seized him by the shoulders and yanked him back so hard Clint nearly fell over. “You crazy, Doc? You want to get yourself killed?”
“The women,” Clint said. “There were women up there.” He swiped at his eyes, which were smarting from the acrid gas and welling with tears. “That son of a bitch Geary put a rocket launcher or something up on that knoll where the little graveyard is!”
“Nothing we can do about it now.” Willy bent over and gripped his knees. “You got one of the bastards, anyway, and that’s a start. We need to be inside. Let’s get to the back door, pull Billy in with us.”
He was right. The front of the building was now a free-fire zone.
“Willy, are you all right?”
Willy Burke straightened up and offered a strained smile. His face was pale, his forehead dotted with sweat. “Well, shoot a pickle. Might be having a little heart episode. Doctor told me to give up the pipe after my last checkup. Shoulda listened.”
Oh no, thought Clint. Oh . . . fucking . . . no.
Willy read the thought on Clint’s face—there was nothing wrong with his eyes—and clapped him on the shoulder. “I ain’t done yet, Doc. Let’s go.”
3
From his position outside the visitors’ room, now most surely gutted by the dynamite blast (along with whoever had been inside), Frank saw Jack Albertson go down with his gas mask torn askew. There was nothing but blood where his face had been. His own mother wouldn’t recognize him, Frank thought.
He lifted his walkie-talkie. “Report! Everybody report!”
Only eight or so did, mostly those who had been using the bulldozers for cover. Of course not all of the men had walkies, but there should have been at least a few more responses. Frank’s most optimistic guess was that he had lost four men, including Jack, who had to be as dead as dirt. In his heart, he guessed it might be five or six, and the wounded would need hospitalization. Maybe the kid, Blass, whom they had left at the roadblock with Miller, could drive them back to St. Theresa’s in one of the buses, although God knew who might still be on duty at St. Terry’s. If anyone. How had it come to this? They had the bulldozers, for God’s sake. The dozers were supposed to end it fast!
Johnny Lee Kronsky grabbed his shoulder. “We need to get on in there, buddy. Finish them off. With this.” His backpack was still unzipped. He pushed aside the towel he’d wrapped the dynamite in and showed Frank the Griner brothers’ bump of C4. Kronsky had shaped it into something that looked like a child’s toy football. Embedded in it was an Android.
“That’s my phone,” Kronsky said. “I’m donating it to the cause. It was a piece of shit, anyway.”
Frank asked, “Where do we go in?” The teargas was blowing away, but he felt as if his mind was full of it, obscuring all thought. The daylight was strengthening, the sun rising red.
“Right up the gut would be best,” Kronsky said, and pointed at the half-crushed Fleetwood RV. It was tilted against the building, but there was room to squeeze through and reach the main doors, which had been smashed inward and twisted off their hinges. “Struthers and those bulldozer guys’ll give us cover. We go in, and we keep moving until we get to the bitch that caused all this.”
Frank was no longer sure who had caused all this, or who was in charge, but he nodded. There seemed to be nothing else to do.
“Gotta set the timer,” Kronsky said, and powered up the phone embedded in the C4. There was a wire plugged into the cell’s headphone port. The other end was attached to a battery pack stuck in the explosive. Looking at it made Frank remember Elaine preparing Sunday dinners, pulling the roast out of the oven and sticking in a meat thermometer.
Kronsky whapped him on the shoulder, and not gently. “How much time, do you think? And think about it careful, because when the count gets down to single numbers, I’m gonna throw it, no matter where we are.”
“I guess . . .” Frank shook his head, trying to clear it. He had never been in the prison, and had expected Don Peters would give them all the layout they needed. He just hadn’t realized how useless Peters was. Now that it was too late, that seemed like a glaring oversight. How many other things had he overlooked? “Four minutes?”
Sounding like a crabby high school teacher faced with a thick-headed pupil, Kronsky said, “Are you asking me or telling me?”
They heard spatters of gunfire, but the attack seemed to have fallen into a lull. The next thing might be his men deciding to fall back. That could not be allowed.
Nana, Frank thought, and said: “Four minutes. I’m sure.”
Frank thought, In four minutes I’ll either be dead, or this will be on the way to being over.
Of course it was possible the woman herself would be killed in the final assault, but that was a chance he would have to take. That made him think of his caged strays, their lives held hostage to forces they did not understand.
Kronsky opened an app, tapped the screen, and 4:00 appeared. He tapped again and the numbers began to count down. Frank watched, fascinated, as 3:59 became 3:58 became 3:57.
“You ready, Geary?” Kronsky asked. In his manic grin, a gold tooth glimmered.
(“What are you doing?” the sonofabitch agitator had called to Kronsky that day in the Ulysses Energy’s Graystone #7 mine. “Quit lagging.” The sonofabitch agitator had been at least twenty yards down the hall. In the deep black of the underground, Kronsky hadn’t been able to see the dumb bastard’s face, let alone his Woody Guthrie tee-shirt, just his headlamp. Power in a union, the sonofabitch agitator liked to say. More power in a dollar, and the man from Ulysses Energy had given Johnny Lee Kronsky a few crisp ones to take care of their problem. “Fuck you, your union, and the horse you rode in on,” Kronsky had told the sonofabitch agitator, before throwing the dynamite and running like hell.)
“I think we ought to—” Frank began, and that was when Lowell Griner fired the bazooka for the first time. There was a whooshing sound almost directly overhead. Frank had a blurred glimpse of something flying. Some projectile.