Free Knight's Late Train by Gordon A. Kessler Page B

great room with high-vaulted ceiling and rough-hewn beams was well lit. Five men in the white, snow-camo fatigues stood in easy view. A black man sat in a wooden chair in the middle of the big room. I took a set of binoculars from my backpack and got a better look. Focused on the sitting man, I soon recognized the bludgeoned and bloody face of John Sites’.
    I’d known John all of my life. He was in his seventies, but still an imposing yet polite figure at six-five and 200, muscular pounds. After Vietnam, it was John who got my father his railroad job with the ATSF Railway, now BNSF. They’d been best friends ever since. Although he’d left railroad employment long ago in favor of the government Federal Railroad Inspector job, he’d stayed in contact with Doc — and through my father, with me.
    Bringing the binoculars down and shaking my head, I remembered John babysitting me when I was five. Specks and John Sites were my past — they were my father’s life, and I found my whole being anchored strongly with these good men.
    Scanning the rest of what I could see of the house and yard, I found no one else. I prayed the children and Mary had somehow managed to escape. But were they outside someplace, unprotected in the snow? Now that the cold storm front had passed, the temperature was back up into the teens, but was dropping with the sun and would bottom out at near zero tonight. I inspected my surroundings and saw nothing, not even a trace that someone had passed into the woods.
    After devising a quick plan, I pulled off my parka and dug into my backpack and ruck sack in preparation for an impromptu mission. In three minutes, I’d buckled my weapons belt over a light jacket, and I was ready to deliver Hell to these Colorado National Guardsmen wannabes.
    A bout to shove off on a sprint to the back door, I stopped. in the lodge, John Sites leapt up from his chair and ran for the next room. One of the men who’d stood over him raised a Mac 10, lined up in the doorway and let the bullets fly. Within a couple of seconds, he turned away and walked back to the others as if his task was done.
    If I’d begun my attack a minute sooner, John Sites might have still been alive.
    With my kids nowhere to be seen and my mind bent on revenge, I decided to take a direct route to the big lodge. I wanted my adversaries to see that they were being attacked by only one man so that they wouldn’t panic and kill their hostages — if that’s what Mary and the kids had become. I wanted these assholes to underestimate their attacking force. Then, I’d give them one hell of a surprise.
    *   *  *
    With the M-4 on full auto, I squeeze the trigger and the first shot takes down one of the men paroling the perimeter. But a second round doesn’t chamber. I jack in another bullet and fire again at a second adversary. This time I miss my target altogether, and again the bolt doesn’t reload the next round. I manually cock and fire again and repeat the process as I advance.
    I am shooting, but the only place bullets are landing is around me.
    The M-4 carbine is a gas-operated gun that utilizes the high pressure created from a fired bullet to chamber another round. “Shit!” I said, realizing the carbine in my hands must be loaded with blank cartridges that create little back pressure. Only the first bullet was real so that upon a quick inspection, I wouldn’t notice the blank cartridges below it. Still, in front of several armed men, I chide myself for not noticing the magazine was a little light, loaded with the less weighty blank cartridges instead of full metal jackets.
    Damn it ! What the hell—Rillie?
    I soon discover I was fortunate, however. The guards from the front join the ot hers and the six men approach cautiously, obviously having orders to capture me, as they close in without returning my blank shots.
    “We got Knight,” one of the men who’d come around from the front of the lodge says into a microphone on his weapons belt