The American rk-1

by Andrew Britton

  Harrison placed the headset on top of his radio and swiveled to the center console. They all crowded around the low table, shoulders touching in the cramped space of the van. “These are the house plans. We got lucky and scooped them up from the owner, who built the place himself in ’88 before he decided to rent it out. This is key, right here…”

  The area he was pointing at showed two levels on what should have been a one-story ranch. “A basement?” Naomi asked. “In Virginia?”

  “Not only that,” Harrison said. “But the owner says it’s a finished basement, complete with furnishings. Vanderveen is aware of our technology, which is something we need to keep in mind. He knows that the infrared can catch him through the windows, so he’s safer underground. In other words, he might very well be down there, and-”

  “The thermals wouldn’t have picked it up,” Naomi finished.

  Another grin from Harrison. “That’s right. So we’re still up in arms over how to make the approach. We’ll hold off on making a decision and see what trickles in from Norfolk. Until then, we’re waiting on the deputy director and a search warrant.”

  Plesse asked, “Can you access the basement without going through the house?”

  Harrison shook his head and the grin faded. “No, there’s only one door leading down from the interior. No basement-level windows either.”

  “I couldn’t see the house from the trees,” Naomi pointed out. “I’d like to take a closer look.”

  The SAC opened his mouth, but Maginnes was the first to speak. “I’ll run her out there, Brett. I need to talk to Larsen anyway.”

  The younger man nodded his consent, and Naomi followed the HRT commander as he snatched up his M4 and opened the rear doors to the van. Plesse didn’t move from his seat.

  Outside, she shivered and said, “God, it’s freezing out here.”

  Maginnes, still wearing only the T-shirt on top, didn’t seem fazed by the icy wind. “We can probably scrounge something up for you before we head out there. There aren’t any vehicles on the perimeter, so we’re gonna be outside for a while.”

  He pulled open the rear doors of one of the Suburbans and dug through a pile of equipment. After a few seconds, he stood up with a pack in his hand and a triumphant look on his face. “This belongs to the smallest guy on my team, which means his stuff is probably only eight sizes too large for you.”

  “Where can I change?”

  He was already looking around. “Other side of that tree, I guess.” He was pointing to a large oak about 20 feet away.

  “There’s nowhere warm?”

  “Nowhere that isn’t occupied. That’s fine, if you don’t mind twenty guys watching you strip.”

  “I think I’ll pass,” she said with a laugh.

  Ten minutes later they were moving slowly down Chamberlayne after passing the two VSP squad cars positioned at the end of the road. Naomi had changed out of her pantsuit into a pair of dark blue Columbia utility pants and a black half-zip pullover, under which she was wearing several long-sleeved shirts. Her feet looked slightly ridiculous in black combat boots two sizes too large. She’d had to put on three pairs of socks to make them fit; her feet were sweating a little bit in the warmth of the vehicle, but it was better than getting out of the truck and freezing to death twenty minutes later.

  “I don’t want to take the truck any closer than we have to,” Maginnes said. The Suburban’s lights were doused, and he was navigating through a pair of night vision goggles clipped to a harness on his head. “We’re going to have to hoof it the rest of the way.”

  They moved slowly through the darkened fields. Maginnes would stop every 15 feet or so, and then, without explanation, suddenly move off again. He called in his position periodically so they wouldn’t get shot by his own men on their approach. It wasn’t until nearly twenty minutes after leaving the comfort of the Suburban that they arrived on the edge of the perimeter.

  Maginnes knelt in the dirt and adjusted his lip mike. Naomi slumped down next to him, already exhausted. “TOC, this is Magpie, radio check, over.”

  “Magpie, TOC,” came Harrison’s voice over the earpiece. “Read you Lima Charlie, out.”

  He called in several other radio checks. The last one was to his assault team leader, Chris Larsen. “Alpha One, Magpie. Give me a quick sit rep, over.”

  “Mags, this is Alpha. All weapons and personnel are accounted for. Sierra team is running through their own list. Still haven’t spotted anything from our position, over.”

  “I’m…” Maginnes glanced around quickly, “about 300 yards south of the nest, in the dip next to the third stand out from the road. Do you have eyes on, over?”

  “Negative, Magpie, over.”

  “Hold on a second, over.” Maginnes peeled off the AN/PVS-7 goggles and handed them back to Naomi, who was basically operating blind. The moon and stars overhead were obscured by leaden clouds heavy with snow, but when she slipped on the harness and turned the knob, the world around her suddenly reappeared in strange, unnatural colors. The house, which she hadn’t seen on the approach, now popped into view, pale against the darker green of the open air. From the stand of trees opposite the barn, she saw white lines streaking out of the woods toward the walls of the house.

  “Oh my God,” she breathed.

  “You see them?”

  She steadied the goggles against her face with her left hand and pointed with her right. “Over there.”

  Maginnes stopped fiddling with his radio. He turned on the Aimpoint sight attached to his M4 and pointed the weapon toward the woodline. “Got me, Alpha One?”

  “That’s a Roger.”

  “How soon can you get here?”

  A brief pause, and then his earpiece crackled. “Ten minutes, fifteen to be on the safe side.”

  “Take your time, Chris. Magpie, out.”

  The SAC was sipping coffee and talking with Plesse when Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 suddenly filled the air. He picked up his cell phone and frowned at the number before flipping it open. “Harrison.”

  Plesse watched as the younger man’s face turned pale, then red with anger. “You’re shitting me! Does she know what’s at stake here? Well, what do I do now? Okay… okay, fine.”

  He hung up a few seconds later and received an inquiring look. “The deputy director managed to wake up the most uncooperative judge in Virginia,” the SAC explained. “We won’t be getting a warrant, at least not fast enough to do us any good.”

  “Fuck.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause before Plesse unconsciously echoed the other man’s words. “So what do we do now?”

  Harrison didn’t say anything in response. After thirty seconds of internal debate, he sighed heavily and reached for the headset.

  When Larsen arrived thirteen minutes after the commander’s call, he did it so quietly that Naomi almost jumped out of her skin. She was watching the house intently for any sign of life, with Maginnes lying prone at her side, when a low whistle sounded a few feet to her rear. She spun around, and then realized that Maginnes hadn’t reacted at all.

  “I heard you coming a mile away, Chris.”

  “Sorry, boss.”

  Naomi watched in amazement as a figure rose up from the ground before her.

  “Still two minutes under time, though.”

  Maginnes smiled reluctantly. “Pop a few chem lights, will you? By the way, this is Naomi Kharmai. She’s joining us from the Agency.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  Naomi nodded in return and watched as Larsen reached into his pack and retrieved several small plastic tubes. He bent each one until the glass vials broke inside and the chemicals mixed. When he shook them and tossed them onto the ground, an area perhaps 5 feet in diameter was illuminated by a soft blue glow.

  Larsen was maybe a few years older than she, with a narrow face and blond hair trimmed close to the scalp. His features were blurred by green-and-bro
wn camo, but she noticed that his dark brown eyes were carefully appraising her. She watched as he called his team members to make sure the chem lights weren’t visible from their position. Then he pulled a topographic map out of his pack.

  The HRT commander grabbed a few rocks and placed them on each corner of the large sheet of paper. “Let’s see what you got.”

  Larsen’s finger hovered over the myriad of light brown contour lines. “I have one team here,” he said, pointing to an area of heavy vegetation on the north side of the house. “I’m going in with them, if it comes to that. I gave the second team to Aguilar. He’s across the road to the west. That was a problem… I wanted someone on the front door, but there’s no cover and they have to cross about 200 feet of open space before entry.”

  “We’ll work around it,” Maginnes said. “What about the open-air option?”

  Larsen pulled a grease pencil out of a loop on his flak vest and used it to mark several locations on the map. “Grierson stacked most of the snipers next to my second team of assaulters, because that’s where most of the windows are facing. We’ve been sitting out here for hours, Al. I went over the sectors of fire and moved everyone accordingly. Then we checked it again and came up golden. My people know where they can and can’t shoot. Oh, and one other thing: Jones is a couple hundred yards up the way with his. 50. If, by some miracle, the subject manages to get to his vehicle, Jonesy can easily punch one through the block at that distance.”

  Maginnes gave an approving nod. “Good. Who’s up on explosives?”

  Larsen hesitated. “Canfield has the most practical experience, but Hudson spent a month training with Delta, so he’s-”

  “When was that?”

  “Uh… January.”

  “Make it Canfield,” Maginnes said. “Hudson’s still a little green, but he can sit in on it. I want them to give your people a quick briefing on booby traps. Take these plans back with you, and have them look for trouble areas.” A brief pause. “I want to take it slow, Chris. We know he’s not on the ground floor, so that gives us time to maneuver. We’ll use that time to get it right. I want everyone to walk away from this.”

  Larsen bobbed his head in acknowledgment and turned his attention toward Naomi. “We haven’t gotten any specifics on this guy yet. What can you tell us?”

  “He was a Special Forces engineer. He applied to EOD in 1993, then became an instructor in ’94. They had to get a three-star general to sign the waiver; no one in the army has ever made that transition faster. He did the sniper school at Benning, and then the SERE course at Camp Mackall. You know about Senator Levy and the Kennedy-Warren…” Both men nodded. Larsen smirked a little as if to show that he wasn’t impressed by Vanderveen’s record, but she sensed it was mostly for show. After a brief hesitation, Naomi decided that they deserved to have all the facts. “One other thing… He killed five of his fellow soldiers in 1997 while on deployment in Syria. After that, he basically disappeared from the face of the earth, at least until now. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  Larsen’s arrogant grin faded. He was about to respond when Maginnes held up his hand and cupped the other around his ear. He listened for a moment, then said, “Roger that, TOC. Give us a couple minutes, over.”

  He dropped his hand and looked up at them with pinched features. “Search warrant didn’t come through.”

  Naomi dropped her head, and Larsen muttered an expletive. No one said anything for almost a full minute.

  Finally: “How bad do you need to get in there?”

  She looked up at Maginnes. “Pretty bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad enough.”

  He nodded his head slowly, then seemed to come to a decision. “Chris…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You got your throwaway?”

  Larsen slapped the pack that rested at his feet. “Always.”

  The commander said, “Is it clean?”

  Larsen looked offended. “Of course it’s clean.”

  Al Maginnes nodded his head again, then turned his dark eyes onto Naomi’s. When he spoke, his words were slow and precise. “What happened was, we decided to get a little bit closer, okay?”

  “I can buy that,” she said, and felt a little tingle between her shoulder blades.

  “Chris, when you looked in the window, you saw a handgun lying on the floor.”

  “Right.”

  “Right.” Maginnes scratched his head and considered. “Okay, so he’s hardly going to have a registered pistol. An unlicensed firearm gives us cause to enter the premises.” He looked up at her. “Are you okay with that?”

  “Sounds kind of iffy, but… Yeah, I’m okay with it.”

  He looked at Larsen. “How about you?”

  The younger man shrugged, tilted his head. “Sure.”

  “Then it’s settled.” Maginnes cupped his mike to block out the sound of the wind. “TOC, this is Magpie… Uh, there appears to be a handgun in the house. Does the subject own a registered firearm? Over.”

  Harrison caught his meaning and came back immediately: “HQ advises that the subject has not registered any firearms in the state of Virginia.”

  “We’re going to check it out, over.”

  Coming back, with a little excitement over the static: “Roger that, Magpie.”

  Larsen was back with his men ten minutes later. Maginnes and Kharmai hunched together and watched the house through the trees.

  “I could kill for some hot coffee right about now,” he said.

  She thought about that for a minute. “Figuratively or literally?”

  “Literally.”

  “Wow, they weren’t kidding when they said you guys were hard-asses.” She yawned, leaned back and scratched her butt, then caught him smiling. “What?”

  He shook his head. “I never saw a woman do that before.”

  “Then you haven’t been paying attention,” she said in a whisper. “We do it all the time.” Then, a second later: “Besides, there’s too much testosterone flowing around here. I was kind of feeling left out.”

  Another twenty minutes passed. A little snow started to fall, and although it was freezing cold and windy as hell, Naomi couldn’t help but start to drift off a little. It was 5:05 in the morning when Maginnes furrowed his brow and cupped his ear.

  “Roger that, Alpha One. Standby, over.” He reached over to shake her, and she started, then looked up. “We’re ready to go.”

  She was still shaking off the sleep. “Umm… okay. How? I mean, how are they going in?”

  “If he’s in there, I can’t give him time to barricade himself,” he said in a low murmur. “We’re gonna go with Primacord on the door frame.”

  She said, unnecessarily, “They need to be careful.”

  “They will be.” Maginnes had the individual teams call in, then got back on with Larsen. “Okay, Chris. Let’s go.”

  “Roger that, Mags. Breachers are moving in, out.”

  Several minutes passed. Naomi couldn’t see anything other than their own quiet breath condensing in the frigid air, and she said so.

  The commander handed her the night vision goggles. “Try these. Don’t watch the door when they shoot the charge.”

  Pulling on the goggles, she immediately saw dark figures advancing through the light snow. One stayed back with his weapon up, facing the front of the house, as the other moved up and started priming the door.

  “Where are they?”

  “Already at the door,” she said.

  Maginnes murmured into his mike. “Sierra One, what do you got? Over.”

  “No movement in the windows.”

  “Sierra Three, Magpie. Anything?”

  “Negative. I’m drawing a blank, over.”

  Then, a moment later: “This is Alpha One. Door is primed.”

  “Take those off, Kharmai.” When the goggles were up on her forehead, he cupped his hand and said, “Blow it.”

  There was a brief flash of light through the snow
, followed immediately by a sharp crack. After a few tension-filled seconds, Larsen came on and said, “No secondary explosions, Magpie. Clear to advance, over.”

  “Head on in, Chris. Take it slow.”

  “Roger that.”

  Maginnes waited as long as he could bear it, then reached over to pull the goggles off her head. “Ouch.”

  He saw that he had caught a few strands of her hair. “Sorry.” When he focused on the house, he didn’t catch any movement in the windows.

  Naomi was getting impatient. “What do you see?”

  He shook his head in frustration. “Nothing.”

  Chris Larsen was the third man in the house after Canfield and Hudson. He was immediately followed by a team of five assaulters, who quickly followed his hand signals and moved to their predetermined positions.

  “Magpie, Alpha One. Moving to secure ground floor, over.”

  “Roger, Alpha One.” Larsen watched as his men cleared the first two rooms to the right, then followed them silently into the living room. The kitchen was past the open space, and he moved forward smoothly with the Heckler and Koch MP5 up tight against his shoulder, his eyes scouring the walls at knee- and ankle level, searching for anything that might indicate a trip wire. Then he was moving slowly against the textured wallpaper, taking a deep breath before poking his gun and his head around the corner… nothing.

  He lowered the weapon and turned to see one of his men standing in front of a closed door. Larsen was the only one to spot the towel stuffed underneath. The operator said, “I think we got something here…”

  Larsen had just enough time to say, “No-” before the door disintegrated. Kevin Hudson, who had been the one to pull it open, was thrown back and up by the blast. He passed through 8 inches of drywall before his head collided with the ceiling, snapping it forward and breaking his neck instantly.

  Larsen turned to run, but then found, to his astonishment, that his feet were not touching the ground, and actually seemed to be going in opposite directions, as were the rest of his appendages…

  Naomi saw a blinding flash, then heard a muffled wumph as the house was ripped apart. Maginnes was on top of her in an instant, shielding her body as fragments of brick, wood, and glass rained down around them.