The five council people looked at one another, then all five raised their hands.
“Outstanding,” Kaiser said.
The first militia truckpulled into the campground a half-hour later. A man got out, ran to the Explorer, peered inside, then ran back to the truck. Five minutes after that, there were eleven trucks in the campground area.
Kaiser looked down at them, then turned to the five council people and said, “You know what I said. I’ll do the talking. I want you all in your holes, behind your rocks. I’ll yell if I need you to open up. Main thing is, stay under cover. Nothing can get at you where you are.”
“Will you shoot somebody?”
“If I have to. I’d rather not,” Kaiser said. “If I do, stay in your spots.”
The trucks could be negotiating chips, Kaiser thought. Pickup owners often loved their vehicles like pets, and trucks with a couple of dozen bullet holes are not only expensive to fix, they tend to attract the eye.
He watched as the men below got themselves organized, split into three groups, and began climbing toward the cave, one well to the left, one to the right, one up the center. Kaiser put his two riflemen on the wings and said, “Everybody take it easy.”
Veronica Ruiz, in the white blouse, had brought the two walkie-talkies from the Explorer, and now said, “They are talking on channel twenty-two.”
“Great. Listen in. The minute you hear anything interesting, let me know. Keep your fingers away from the transmit button. We don’t want them to know we might be listening.”
Down below, the men were scrambling from one rock to the next; not very good technique, Kaiser thought. He could shoot one of them in the open, and if anyone tried to help him, he’d get another. A thought to be put on reserve.
“We could pick off a few of them right now,” the stocky councilman said.
“Let’s wait,” Kaiser said. “But I like the way you think.”
The approaching squadsstopped behind cover forty or fifty yards down the hill, and a man in the center squad shouted, “Come out of there.”
Kaiser shouted back, “No. We got food, water, lots of ammo, and a hell of a lot better cover than you’ve got. We could kill all of you before you got to us.”
“We don’t want anyone to get hurt,” the man shouted.
“Come on up here and talk. We won’t shoot you. You can see how we’re set up here, what you’re up against.”
The man, who’d stuck his head up for the shouted exchange, ducked back down, and Ruiz said, “They are talking on the radio.”
They listened as somebody talked to a woman: probably Hawkes, Kaiser thought. The woman asked, “What can they do to us?”
Man’s voice: “There are only six or seven of them, I think, but they’re higher than we are, and they got real good cover. They’d shoot the shit out of us. No way to get at them from above, they’re set back in that cave. If we had grenades, maybe.”
“Don’t have grenades... You think the guy was telling the truth when he said he wouldn’t shoot you if you went up to talk?”
“Who knows?” the man said. “Probably... If he shot me, there’d still be nineteen more of us, pissed off. I think he wants to show me how dug in they are. Intimidate us.”
“Okay. Listen, go talk to him. See what you can see. Tell him if he shoots anyone, we’ll crawl up that mountain and drop grenades on them.”
A moment of ratiocination, then the man said. “I’ll try it.”
The radio talk stopped, then the man who’d been doing the talking shouted, “I’m coming up. Don’t shoot me.”
“Come up.”
A man stood up, raised his hands over his head, and shouted, “I’m not armed.”
“Come on,” Kaiser shouted. He turned to the others and said, “Veronica and Janice, get behind those rocks over there... Lean in to them, so this guy can only see your backs, and he might think you have rifles. Veronica, turn the radios off—we don’t want them to know we can hear them talking. Antonio and Doug, I want you out where he can see you. Point your rifles at him when he comesup. Harold, stand halfway behind that rock, hold that pistol on him, let him see it...”
The man down below said something to somebody out of sight, then began climbing the hill until he was standing fifteen feet from Kaiser, who stepped out with his shotgun.
“You made a bad mistake,” the man said. “Don’t make it worse. Give up, and I’ll guarantee your safety.”
