Free Stand Your Ground by William W. Johnstone Page A

Raymond?”
    â€œA man came in looking for you a while ago, Chief,” Raymond Brady replied. “He wanted you to call him.”
    â€œYou get his name and number?”
    â€œYes, sir. He said his name was Stark.”
    Cobb frowned slightly and asked, “John Howard Stark?”
    â€œHe didn’t say the rest of his name, just Stark. Let me look at the card where he wrote down his number . . . Yes, sir, he wrote John Howard Stark. You were right.”
    Cobb had felt a little tingle of... something . . . when he realized John Howard Stark was in Fuego. Not fear, certainly, and not even apprehension. More of an awareness that trouble had a habit of following John Howard Stark around.
    â€œDid he say what he wanted to talk to me about?”
    â€œHe said that there were strangers in town and Fuego was gonna be on TV.”
    That didn’t really make sense to Cobb, but he supposed Stark could explain. He said, “Go ahead and give me the number, Raymond.”
    The dispatcher did so. Cobb had a remarkable memory and knew he wouldn’t have any trouble recalling it. Then Raymond asked, “Should I have called you on the radio about this, Chief? I didn’t want to disturb you while you weren’t on duty.”
    â€œNo, it’s all right,” Cobb told the young man. “I’m sure that whatever this is about, it won’t amount to anything.”
    He said good-bye and broke the connection, then dialed the number Raymond had given him.
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    A single two-lane blacktop road ran from Fuego to the Baldwin Correctional Facility. That isolation and difficulty of access made it even more secure.
    Some modern prisons looked like industrial and manufacturing facilities—although with a lot more barbed wire—but Hell’s Gate was everything grim and gray that a prison should be. The main building was an imposing three-story heap of concrete, steel, and bulletproof glass. A narrower two-story wing jutted out from its north side. Windowless, it was a secure, bunker-like structure where the worst of the worst were housed.
    Those prisoners had been shifted around, however, some confined in solitary, others deemed lesser risks mixed in with the general population. The ultramax wing was now home to the hundred and fifty Islamic terrorists who had been brought here.
    George Baldwin explained that to Stark as they stood in the warden’s office and Baldwin pointed to a map of the prison mounted on the wall.
    â€œThere’s an old-fashioned sally port between the rest of the prison and the ultramax wing,” Baldwin said. “That wing has its own backup generator for lights, water, and ventilation if something happens to the power in the rest of the prison. There’s also a supply of food in case of emergency. Just MREs, but enough to keep the prisoners from starving for a while. We can isolate that whole wing if necessary.”
    â€œI can see why the Justice Department picked Hell’s Gate to house those terrorists, if they were bound and determined to transfer them from military prisons,” Stark said.
    Baldwin grunted and said, “If you ask me, the best thing to do with those bastards would be to stick ’em in front of firing squads. It wouldn’t take long to solve the problem.”
    â€œI don’t know if that would solve anything. It would just make the fanatics in the Middle East regard them as martyrs even more than they already do.”
    â€œYeah, well, that’s the problem, John Howard,” Baldwin said. “The fanatics aren’t in the Middle East anymore. They’re here, right in our own backyards.”
    Stark couldn’t argue with that, not after what he had seen in Fuego this morning. Two men didn’t make a mob of protesters, but that’s what the signs pointed to. Baldwin agreed with him, too.
    â€œHow about the National Guard, or even the regular Army?” Stark asked. “Can you call