Gallows Pole Read online

  Gallows Pole

  J. D. Rhoades

  (2011)

  Rating: ★★★★☆

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  Someone is killing entire families, forcing fathers to hang their wives and children before taking their own lives. How does the killer do it? And what is the meaning of the small iron horse the killer leaves at every murder scene? FBI agent Melissa Saxon and her handpicked team are racing against time to solve the mystery before more families die.

  Former anti-terrorist operative Colonel Mark Bishop and the survivors of his command think they know. One of their own, a stone killer who calls himself the Hangman, has come out to play, and he's trying to draw out not only Bishop, but his former comrades—the elite team known as Iron Horse.

  Only the Horsemen can stop one of their own. But the team is disbanded, the survivors scattered. Bishop himself is tormented by guilt for the things he had to do to keep one of his men from suffering an agonizing death. Their adversary is not only a skilled assassin, but a master at creating fear. Behind the scenes, shadowy and powerful figures pursue their own plans for Bishop and the Hangman.

  Mark Bishop, Melissa Saxon, and the last of the Iron Horsemen will have to use all their courage and every resource, including an array of high-tech weapons, to stop the Hangman. What they have to do will put everything they ever believed in to the ultimate test and push Bishop to the edge of sanity.

  "J.D. Rhoades delivers the goods and then some in the wonderfully suspenseful Gallows Pole."

  -- Gary Phillips, author of The Underbelly

  "J.D. Rhoades kicks ass!"

  --J.A. Konrath

  "Rhoades is a knock-em-dead writer. Always a fan. Get this."

  --Anthony Neil Smith

  GALLOWS POLE

  by

  J.D. RHOADES

  Copyright 2011 by J.D. Rhoades

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and persons depicted are from the author’s imagination. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to absent friends.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Al-Suwaidi District, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, November 2007

  Bishop sat in the driver’s seat of the black SUV, looking through the windshield across the darkened street. He squinted as if trying to see through the night, through the walls of the buildings, to the place where six of his men crouched in the alleyway. He realized his fists were clenched and slowly relaxed them. He took a deep, slow breath, feeling the pounding of the blood in his ears. He took another, trying to slow his heart rate by force of will.

  This was always the hardest part for him, the moment just before the hammer fell. The plan was a good one. The intelligence they had was solid, or as solid as could be expected in this place. The men he commanded were the best in the world, and he’d trained each one personally to his own exacting standards. Still, years of experience had taught him that you could do everything right and it could all go to shit in an instant. If that happened, men—his men—would die. All of the ways that could happen tried to crowd their noisy way into his mind. He shoved them out. He knew that when he gave the go signal and things began to happen, all the anxiety would vanish. He could deal with real problems. It was the ones he imagined that were making his mouth dry and his palms wet with sweat.

  He looked over to where Lanier sat, hunched over a laptop computer, the dim light of the screen the only illumination in the car. Tiny cameras on the helmets of the entry team showed the scene in the alley. Bishop reached over and tapped Lanier on the shoulder. The captain turned the screen so he could see better.

  The low-light image was blurred and jittery. There was a name in white letters on one corner of the screen: BARKSDALE. As the two men watched, barely breathing, Barksdale stepped back, bringing the rest of the team into view.

  They were dressed in black tactical gear, head to foot, their faces masked. They carried an idiosyncratic variety of small arms, each man having arrived at his choice through long experience and customized his weapon to his individual taste.

  One of the men unslung the satchel from his back and pulled out a strange-looking device. It was a plastic console that looked like an oversized version of a handheld video game. One side was flat; on the other, two large plastic handles rose from the console on either side of a small TV screen. The man pressed a switch and the screen glowed. He placed the flat part of the device against the wall and began slowly moving it sideways along the rough block.

  The scanner was Israeli-made, equipped with a sophisticated Ultra Wide Band radar that probed the space beyond the wall. The screen stayed blank. The man wielding the device turned to the camera and shook his head. He held up a hand, fingers curled to make a zero. No one on the other side.

  Bishop felt a sense of foreboding, a subtle itch in the back of his mind. There were supposed to be five people in the shabby little house: the target and four bodyguards. It seemed like too much good fortune that none of them would be in the room they’d planned as their entry point. Good fortune made him nervous. Still, he couldn’t abort because things were going better than expected.

  Another man approached the wall, holding a pair of steel stakes, pointed at one end. Each was about three feet long, with a cross section in the shape of a shallow “U.” Engineers used them for temporary fence posts and to mark off areas for building. Calhoun, the demo man, had other uses for them. He’d filled the ‘U” of one of the stakes with C4 plastic explosive.

  Calhoun placed the explosive-filled side against the wall and braced it in place with the other. He stepped back and spoke for the first time. His voice, a harsh country twang, came over the headsets each man wore.

  “Fire in the hole,” he said. The picture became a nausea-inducing blur of motion as Barksdale took cover along with the rest of the team.

  The improvised shaped charge went off with a sharp bang. Bishop heard it close up in his earphones and a split second later, the echo from across the street. When the picture became coherent again, Bishop was looking at a four-by-eight-foot hole in the wall. He spoke into his headset.

  “Take ‘em.”

  They never took the easy way in. Doors were often booby trapped, windows guarded. Armed men lurked around bends and down hallways. Bishop and his team went through walls, burrowed up through the floor or down from the ceiling. Bishop called it “re-making the battle space.” Sims, his second-in-command, called it “the most fun you could have with your clothes on.”

  The picture became a blur again as Barksdale went through the hole. Bishop looked away and spoke into his headset microphone. “Two,” he said to the black van behind him. “Get ready to move fast when they bring the target out.”

  “Roger that, sir,” Sims said from the other vehicle. “Can’t get out of this shit-hole fast enough to suit me.”

  “Seconded,” Bishop said. In contrast to the glittering office towers and shopping malls downtown, the al-Suwaidi district of southern Riyadh was a warren of potholed streets, decaying buildings, and open sewers. Extremists thrived here, fueling and feeding on the burning resentment of the city’s poor. Extremists like their target.

  Muhammad Al-Rahman had hatched a plot to detonate a so-called “dirty bomb” in the KingdomCenter, the country’s tallest building, at a time when a good portion of the country’s extensive royal family was attending a meeting. The initial blast would kill a large number of the royals inside, but it was the radiation from the medical and industrial nuclear waste packed around the bomb that would spread the most fear. The team was there to stop them, and, while they were at it, do what they did best, which was to spread a little fear of their own. Al-Rahman was about to disappear from the face of the Earth.

  At least that was the plan.

  Bishop heard the voices of the entry team as each man hit his assigned room. “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.” Then, “Place is empty, sir.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Barksdale said. He straightened up from his crouch and swept the area around him with his camera. The screen showed an empty room. Lanier changed views. Each picture showed the same thing. There was no furniture, no appliances, no sign that anyone had ever lived there.

  Lanier looked up from the laptop, “Looks like our source lied to us.”

  Bishop felt his whole body go freezing cold as the nagging feeling of wrongness suddenly became a terrible certainty.

  “Barksdale,” Bishop snapped into his microphone. “Get out. Now.”

  “Roger that,” the leader replied. He’d begun to come to the same realization and his own voice was tight with fear. “Let’s move…”

  Bishop saw the huge orange and yellow fireball bloom inside the house an instant before the pressure wave blew it apart from inside. No, his mind screamed. No. No. No. No. Even as his brain refused to accept what he was seeing, his hands and feet moved instinctively, slamming his vehicle into gear and lurching forward. “Sims!” he yelled into his headset. “Get…”

  If Bishop’s vehicle had not been moving, the explosion from the IED planted in the road next to him would have killed him and Lanier instantly. As it was, the blast and fragments shredded the rear of the vehicle and slewed it around sideways in the road. Bishop was out of the vehicle before it came to rest, just as the hidden gunmen in the alleyways on their side of the road opened up. Any glass and sheet metal left intact after the IED detonated was immediately peppered with bullets. Bishop fired back and rolled away just as bullets kicked up dust and gravel from t
he street where he’d just been. He heard Lanier cursing and the chatter of his weapon. There was the roar of an engine and Sims’ van pulled up next to Bishop. He saw Sims’ weapon extended out the window, firing. The rounds that slammed against the side of the van sounded like hail on a tin roof.

  “Come on!” Sims yelled from inside the van.

  “Where’s Lanier?” Bishop yelled back.

  As if in answer, Lanier came running around from the back of the van. He carried a canvas bag in one hand, his assault rifle in the other. As he skidded to a stop beside Bishop, he twisted and threw the bag at the mouth of the nearest alley. There was a scream of fear, abruptly swallowed in the roar of the satchel charge going off. Bishop was on his feet before the echoes died away, his face contorted in a vicious snarl. A killing frenzy was on him, fury and anguish melting together into a boiling sea of pure hate. He would tear his enemies apart with his bare hands if he could reach them. He started for the mouth of the alley, the stopped, got himself under control. He wasn’t going to do his men any good by going berserk.

  “Come on,” he said. He and Lanier ran around the van to where the door of the cargo compartment gaped open. They looked towards the burning house. A man in black was running towards them, zig-zagging like a running back. They could see the muzzle flashes of weapons firing at him from across the street. One found its mark and knocked him to the ground on his face. Bastards, Bishop raged inwardly. Then, without thinking, he was up and moving, firing from the shoulder. Sims and Lanier immediately began laying down suppressing fire.

  Bishop reached the man on the ground as he was slowly getting to his hands and knees. He still had the knapsack on his back. The bullets had smashed into it, destroying the scanner inside, but he was alive and unhurt.

  “Felix,” Bishop said. “Where’s Calhoun?”

  “They…took him,” Felix gasped. “I saw… two gomers dragging him off.”

  “And the others?” he said.

  Felix shook his head. There was no way anyone inside the building could have survived.

  “Sir!” Sims yelled. “We need to GO!”’

  They ran for the door, tumbling into the van as it began moving. Lanier was still firing out the window as they roared off into the darkness. They weren’t followed.

  They stopped a few miles away, along the main highway.

  Felix spoke first. “We were set up.”

  Bishop nodded. The rage had left him as suddenly as a torch going out, and he suddenly felt an eerie sense of clarity. “There’s only one person who could have done it.”

  “Yep,” Lanier said. “He’s the one who sent us there.”

  “He’s one dead motherfucker,” Sims added.

  “Roger that,” Lanier said.

  They looked at Bishop. He felt their eyes on him, felt their trust, their absolute certainty that he would tell them what to do. There were days when that trust felt like a weight on his shoulders, days when he wondered what he’d tell them. Not tonight. Tonight the path he needed to lead them on was as clear and bright as a blade of Damascus steel, and as unforgiving.

  They’d been betrayed. Men had died. That was a debt that demanded only one type of payment.

  “If he was in on this,” Bishop said, “he’ll also probably know where they took Calhoun,” he said. “And we don’t leave our people behind.”

  “Going after him would be suicide,” Felix said.

  “Yep,” Sims agreed. “You got a problem with that?”

  Felix’s smile was more like a baring of teeth. “Have I ever?” he said.

  “Our friend may not want to talk about who he’s working for,” Lanier said.

  “We’ll have to persuade him,” Bishop said. Lanier looked like he was about to ask a question, but at Bishop’s grim and terrible expression, the question stuck in his throat.

  “Major Sims,” Bishop said. “When we get done with what we’re about to do, you may need to assume command.”

  Sims looked uncertain. “Sir?”

  “And then you may need to put me under arrest.”

  They looked at him, too dumbfounded to speak.

  “Saddle up,” Bishop said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dearborn , Michigan, Present day

  He awoke to the sound of a slow, rhythmic creaking. Gradually, as if through a slowly lifting fog, he realized he was on his knees, by the coffee table. The edge of the heavy wooden table was clutched tightly between his fingers, so tightly that the knuckles ached. He shook his head to clear it and looked up, eyes still unclear and bleary, at the source of the sound, only a few feet away.

  They hung there, four bodies, in a neat line, arranged tallest to shortest. They were suspended from one of the exposed beams of the living room ceiling, the beams his wife had made such a fuss over. It was one of the reasons they’d chosen this house, even though the price was more than he’d thought they could afford. She loved the exposed beams.

  His wife. His vision snapped into crystal clarity as he recognized her face. She looked down at him, eyes bulging, tongue protruding obscenely. Her legs still twitched and spasmed slightly, but there was no life left in the eyes he’d once loved. Shaking his head again in dumb incomprehension, he looked down the line at the faces of his children.

  He screamed. It was a horrific sound, a howl of pain and anguish like a gutted animal, a sound to chill the spines of the demons in Hell. He heard the rustling of someone moving behind him and started to turn, started to rise.

  “Stop,” a voice whispered.

  It was as if the tendons in his legs had been cut. He sank back to his knees, gasping. The person behind him moved again, walked around before the kneeling man. He wore a hood over his face, an inky black cowl that covered his features.

  “Why?” he said, his voice now a whispery croak. “Why do you do this?”

  “I didn’t,” the man in the hood said. He sounded amused. “You did.”

  The man on his knees shook his head no, but the words brought a flood of images back to him. The images were shattered, disjointed, kaleidoscopic: Hands throwing the ropes over the beams, struggles, cries, pleas for him to stop, please stop…

  Hands.

  His hands.

  “No,” he said as the shock hit him. Tears ran freely down his face. “Please, no.”

  The man in the hood laughed. A rope appeared in his hands. He formed a loop with it and began to tie the now-familiar knots. “That’s what she said.”

  When the noose was ready, he went to it willingly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bishop awoke just after dawn. He could see a spot of sunlight on the wall, coming through the tiny window of his cell. He sat up, stretched, then rolled out of bed and onto the floor, where he did fifty quick pushups. He rolled over and did a hundred abdominal crunches. Then fifty more pushups. He was sweating lightly when he heard the high buzz of the motor outside. He stood, shook the knots out of his shoulders, then quickly stripped the rough iron bed of its single sheet and blanket, folding both neatly and placing them by the door. When the sound of the motor stopped, he straightened up. He stood at parade rest, eyes straight ahead. He could hear the metallic sound of the locks on the outer fence, then the gate. A short pause, and then the clunk of the lock in the heavy iron door of the cell. The door swung open, flooding half of the tiny room with light. The prisoner didn’t move.

  “Well,” a voice said, “C’mon out.”

  Bishop walked out, stooping slightly to clear the low doorway. He stopped and stood at attention just outside, blinking slightly in the sunlight. His posture was ramrod straight. His skin was pale from lack of sunlight, but his face was lined and weathered as if he’d spent years in the sun before he went in. His hair was dark, shot through with streaks of steel-gray, and cut short.

  He stood inside a square of chain-link fence, thirty feet on each side. The cell behind him was a ten-by-ten-foot cinderblock building with a small barred window. The building and fence were far back from any main road on the rolling expanse of a six-hundred-acre farm. A four-wheeled ATV was parked outside of the fence.