She pushed another button.

"We need some units to block the bridge approach, some to surround the bank." He took a deep breath. "We need three or four squad cars to block the road north and south of Frieberg. And Twenty-nine, Twenty-nine, you go to the bank and provide support for the fire truck."

That was good. That was very good. The north-south road through town was bordered by bluffs for two or three miles each way. No side roads. No turnoff except to a vacant summer dock area to the south. No way to go around a roadblock.

And 29 now had something useful to do.

Actually, it looked like it was just a matter of whether or not the cop cars could get here before the bank trucks were ready to pull out with all the money.

I watched Volont give Sally back her microphone. "Try for some ETAs for us, see when the cavalry is going to get here," I said. "And make sure Conception County has the other end of the bridge blocked."

Her answer told me she was still in top form. "Get me some coffee, would ya?"

I did.

What was happening now was that Gabriel's little army was actually being shown the opposition for the first time. We should begin to find out what they were made of real soon. I was betting on jelly, at least for the majority.

The growl of an engine, and the sound of the chopper blades as the Huey settled down on the bridge deck was a nice effect. We couldn't see them, of course. Neither could Gabriel and his people. But the noise was unmistakable.

None of us could see anything moving or changing at the bank, but at the boat, the headlights of the stretch van moved slowly up from the dock. Apparently, they saw the fire truck and the two TAC team agents from Alpha Chase blocking the road and the agents taking cover with their M-16s. The stretch van simply stopped. They didn't appear to have taken this development into consideration. Just what we intended, and just as I thought. Amateurs. Finally, I thought, things are beginning to move in a direction we've chosen.

Volont spoke into his secure radio. "This is Volont. If the van advances, you are authorized to use deadly force to prevent its leaving."

The van promptly backed up.

"What the hell…" was Hester's first reaction.

"I'll be a son of a bitch," said George.

Art comprehended last. "They can hear us!"

Not only hear, but understand. They'd cracked the scrambled code of the secure radios.

"Well, now we know what they really needed all the computers for," I said. Another fucking surprise. Did his own download from the code banks. Slick. "Where did the FBI get those secure radios?"

"GSA, I suppose," said George. "Where the government shops…"

"From the Army," said Volont. "Via the NSA development people. Damn."

Gabriel, as an Army Special Operations soldier, quite likely was familiar with those radios before the FBI even purchased them. Even I knew that much.

"We'd better let the troops know," said George.

"Wait a second. If he doesn't know we know…" Volont was up to his old tricks.

"No." George glared at him. "No games. He's smart, and he knows. We have to tell our own people."

Volont came up with the ultimate leader's cop-out. "Then you tell them."

George knew it. Hell, George was an MBA. George had had all the "corporate think and manipulate" classes you could name.

He reached in his jacket and pulled out his walkie. "CP to all units. The security on this frequency has been compromised. Repeat, this is no longer a secure frequency." He replaced his walkie-talkie, and looked out the window toward the boat. "There."

"Well," I said, "there goes my chance to say 'fuck' on a radio."

The phone rang. Sally put us on the speaker phone as soon as she realized it was Gabriel.

"Didn't think you'd have the balls, Agent Volont. I planned for the eventuality, but I really didn't think you had them."

"Life," gritted Volont, "is full of surprises."

I didn't think that was a particularly good choice of words, all things considered.

"Oh, it is," agreed Gabriel. "Indeed. Now, I'd recommend getting your people out of the way of my people, or we're going to be producing victims." He paused, and then chuckled. "By the boatload, as it were."

Volont's face was several shades lighter than normal, but he stood his ground. "Completely counterproductive. Victims mean bad publicity. Victims mean no money for you. Victims, and your goals are done. Gone. Because with victims, we take out your whole team, and the horses they rode in on."

Yeah. Me too.

"I think I'll tell the crew to hand out the life jackets. You have five minutes," and the line went dead.

"… 'tell the crew to hand out the jackets,'" said Hester. "He is on the boat."

Nice.

Volont spoke to James of boat security. "All right. Get all your rescue units up and running. All lifeboats, all rescue craft. We're going to need them in a very short time."

James stared, and then barked out a laugh. "All available 'rescue' equipment is on that boat, out there. Two thousand PFDs and one sixteen-person inflatable boat."

"What?! What's a PFD?"

"Personal flotation device. A little half-assed life jacket that looks like a piece of gym mat with straps. As for 'units,' it's fucking winter, mister. The three rescue launches are in storage, with the oil drained out of the motors. They can't run on ice, anyway. That's all we have."

"My God," said Volont.

"It's just a damn riverboat," said James. "In a river that's thirty feet deep. We meet all the Coast Guard requirements, and we don't put out from shore in the winter. What do you expect?"

"We can round up about a half-dozen iceboats," said Sally. "Maybe ten people each… but it'll take time…"

"Get on it! Jesus H. Christ, life jackets and a rubber boat!" Volont turned to George. "Get over to that Huey and see what sort of good they can do us in a rescue."

"You might as well let me give you all the bad news at once," said James. He did. If a passenger used a life jacket, in the water out there today, they would live about fifteen minutes. That was, if the current didn't carry them under the ice. If they were to be recovered after ten minutes, since the average gambler was about fifty-eight years old, they would likely still die of exposure. The nearest hospital was in Conception County, across the bridge. They had two ambulances. Frieberg had two ambulances. Our entire county could muster another six. By calling in everything available, and declaring an extreme emergency, we still wouldn't be able to get more than a dozen ambulances to Frieberg in the first hour.

With twelve ambulances, at eight to ten minutes per trip, into an ER that held six, into six hundred and fifty passengers in the water, meant that more than six hundred of them would be dead in fifteen minutes. But that was assuming they went into the water.

"How deep is it out there?" I wanted to know.

"Winter depth we've never really looked at…" said James. "It's low. Probably lower. That's for sure."

I picked up a phone book. "Anybody mind if I call the lock and dam? To get the depth?" Nobody did. I got the lock master, and he had the data in about a second. They could only give me the main channel data, and the general river stage at Frieberg. They said it was fourteen feet.

I motioned James over. "How much does the boat draw? Like, how deep does she sit in the water?"

He thought for a second. "I'd have to check to make sure, but I think it's seven or eight feet."

I grinned. "Really… Look at this." I showed him the figure fourteen, underlined. "That's the current river stage data from the lock and dam, with the measurement taken by the robot sensors under the bridge, here. So it's the depth of the water about five hundred feet from the Beauregard." I thanked the master.