Deadline (Sandra Brown)

enlisted help from the local authorities, who also had outstanding warrants for members of the group. The team was assembled and the operation planned.
    But it became immediately obvious to each member of the team that Wingert’s band had meant what they’d said about choosing death over capture. The Rangers of Righteousness wanted to secure their place in history. There would be no laying down of arms, no hands raised in peaceful surrender.
    The lawmen were pinned down behind trees or vehicles, and all were vulnerable. Even a flicker of motion drew gunfire, and members of the Rangers had proven themselves to be excellent shots.
    The resident agent in charge, Emerson, radioed the operations post, requesting that a helicopter be sent to provide them air cover, but that idea was nixed because of the inclement weather.
    Special Ops teams from local, state, and federal agencies were mobilized, but they would be driving to Golden Branch, and the roads weren’t ideal even in good weather. The team were told to stand by and to fire only in self-defense, while men in safe, warm offices debated changing the rules of engagement to include using deadly force.
    “They’re playing pattycake because one of them is a woman,” Emerson groused to Headly. “And God forbid we violate these killers’ civil rights. Nobody admires or respects us, you know.”
    Headly, the rookie of the team, wisely held his own counsel.
    “We’re feds, and even before Watergate, government had become a dirty word. The whole damn country is going to hell in a handbasket, and we’re out here freezing our balls off, waiting for some bureaucrat to tell us it’s okay to blast these murdering thugs to hell and back.”
    Emerson had a military background and a decidedly hawkish viewpoint, but nobody, especially not he, wanted a bloodbath that morning.
    Nobody got what they wanted.
    While the reinforcements were still en route, the Rangers amped up their firepower. An ATF agent took a bullet in the thigh, and, from the way it was bleeding, it was feared his femoral artery had suffered damage, the extent of which was unknown, but on any scale it was a life-threatening wound.
    Emerson reported this with a spate of obscenities about their being picked off one by effing one unless…
    He was given the authorization to engage. With their assault rifles and one submachine gun—in the hands of the wounded ATF agent—they went on the offensive. The barrage lasted for seven minutes.
    Return fire from the house decreased, then became sporadic. Emerson ordered a cease-fire. They waited.
    Suddenly, bleeding from several wounds including a head wound, a man charged through the front door, screaming invectives and spraying rounds from his own submachine gun. It was a suicidal move, and he knew it. His reason for doing it would soon become apparent.
    When the agents ceased firing, and their ears stopped ringing, they realized that the house had fallen eerily silent except for a loose shutter that clapped against an exterior wall whenever the wind caught it.
    After a tense sixty seconds, Emerson said, “I’m going in.” He levered himself up into a crouch as he replaced his spent clip magazine with a fresh one.
    Headly did the same. “I’m with you.”
    Other team members stayed in place. After checking to see that their guns were loaded with fresh magazines, Emerson crept from behind his cover and began running toward the house. Headly, with his heart tightly lodged in his throat, followed.
    They ran past the body sprawled on the wet earth, took the steps up to the sagging porch, then stood on either side of the gaping doorway, weapons raised. They waited, listening. Hearing nothing, Emerson hitched his head and Headly barged in.
    Bodies. Blood on every surface, the stench of it strong. Nothing was moving.
    “Clear,” he shouted and stepped over a body on his way into an adjacent room, a bedroom with only a ratty mattress on the floor. In the center of it, the ticking was still wet with a nasty stain.
    In less than sixty seconds from the time Headly had breached the door, they confirmed that five people were dead. Four bodies were found inside the house. The fifth was the man who’d died in the yard. They were visually identified as known members of the Rangers of Righteousness.
    Conspicuously missing from the body count were Carl Wingert and his lover, Flora Stimel, the only woman of the group. There was no sign of the two of them except for a trail of