by Jim Riley
“By the way,” Oberg added, “once you get off that plywood landing you’re on, you have to walk on the girders. Otherwise, you’ll go through the ceiling.”
“Roger that,” I responded, getting into my operator’s mindset. “You’re just filled with the good news, aren’t you?”
He chuckled at that. I guess he could sense some change in me as well and was responding to it. If he was loosening up, it must mean things were getting better.
I told Oberg I would call him back when I got to my next waypoint. He had explained to me that I was looking for a cable tray on the back wall. He said it would look like a ladder attached to the wall with wires running in it. I made my way slowly but still almost missed the girder a couple of times. “It ain’t nothing,” I kept telling myself. Just walk on a four-inch, lightweight beam in the dark with terrorists waiting down there to kill you. It ain’t nothing, I told myself again.
I finally made it to the back wall. Considering it was only eighty feet or so, it had still taken me nearly five minutes to get it done. Oberg must have been getting worried because he picked up my call before it finished ringing the first time. I could hear the concern in his voice.
“You worried about me.” I had a slight smile on my face when I said it, even though no one could have seen it.
“No. We just don’t have a lot of time.”
The smile left my face. “You want to tell me my mission?”
“Not yet. This is an unsecured line.” He didn’t wait for a response or comment from me but went on with the instructions. “You’re going to need to climb down that cable tray to the first floor, where you’ll come to another hinged door.”
I looked down the hole. Okay, how do I explain to him my concerns here? I have a fourteen-by-fourteen inch square shaft that’s partially taken up with a cable tray and wires, going down two floors, and it’s twenty times darker than the place I’m standing in now. He could sense my hesitation.
“Moffat, we’re in a world of hurt. You’re our only hope, and if you fail, there won’t be enough left of any of us to pick up with a spoon.”
“Okay. Is this hole the same size all the way down?” I was hoping he was going to say no, it gets bigger and has landings to rest on.
“Yep. And you’ll have to go head first, so you can get the trap door open when you make it down.”
“How’s the door secured?”
”Sliding bolt on the opposite side like the one you came in from, but you should be able to reach into a cut-out that the wires feed through and get to the bolt.”
“Should be able to?”
He didn’t respond, and I didn’t push it.
I’m not claustrophobic. In fact, I take pride in being able to stay in small, cramped spaces for extended periods of time. Longer than most people can stand it. But this was scary. I knew I had the rungs on the cable tray to support myself against, so I didn’t go crashing head first down the shaft, and I could use my feet to help hold back the load, but two floors, or twenty-six feet, was a long way. And when I got to the bottom, if the door wouldn’t open, there was no turning back. I’d be head down in a hole. My grave, I thought, more appropriately. “Adapt, improvise, overcome, and most importantly, cowboy the fuck up and stop whining,” I told myself and dove off into the hole.
I covered the space between the third-floor attic, where I started, and the second-floor attic smoothly, and actually, fairly quickly. In fact, I was beginning to feel pretty casual about the whole thing. Little did I know that for every one wire that originated on the third floor and went down the cable tray, there were five more on the floor below. Add that to the ones already in the cable tray, and I was barely able to fit in the shaft. The next descent took me three times as long as the previous one had, not because of the limited space, but because none of the rungs on the cable tray were available to grab any longer since they had all the wires spread out on them. Where before I could use my feet to help me slowly descend, now I had to just grab wires and hold back my descent. And the wires twisted and wrapped around each other like drunken boa constrictors having an orgy.
I was spent by the time I reached the door Oberg had directed me to. It was just as he had described, just like everything else had been so far. He may be kind of uptight, but he sure was good at his job.
I fiddled around and finally managed to get my fingers on the bolt slide, and I moved it back and forth until the bolt cleared the hasp. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite quick enough, and the metal door swung down on its hinges without any restraint. It banged against the wall, and I about pissed my pants again. I didn’t move for about two minutes, praying the whole time no one heard the noise, not sure how at least someone couldn’t have heard it. I fully expected Oberg to have heard it from the CP and to ask me about it when I called him. I eased my worn-out body down from the shaft and managed to get to the floor without any further major noise or injuries to my frame. It had been a full day, and I knew I wasn’t through yet. I sat on the floor of the darkened mechanical room. It felt good to have the freedom to move my body any way I wanted to, and I stretched all my limbs out in sequence. Ironically, now that I had reached a place where I could turn the light on, I was becoming a little fond of the dark.
After resting for a few minutes and replacing the door over the cable tray shaft to its rightful position, I took my cell phone out. I turned it on and noticed it was down to one bar on the battery strength and two bars on the signal strength. I hoped my call would make it out. Oberg picked it up on the first ring.
“Glad you made it.”
“Had nowhere else to be.”
Enough chit-chat. He got down to business. “You in the equipment room?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I was afraid you might have made a wrong turn.”
It was a joke. Oberg had made a funny. We were bonding, I guess. It was over as quickly as it had come, and he continued on. “Find something to put along the bottom of the door, so you can turn the light on.”
I used the light from the phone again and found an old pair of workman’s coveralls hanging from a nail. I put them at the bottom and reached up to turn on the light. I had been unexposed to light for so long, it blinded me. In fact, it was downright painful. When I finally got my bearings, I let him know.
“Okay. Walk to the back wall of the room and look to your right.”
While I was walking, he continued with his instructions.
“You’ll see a white, twelve-inch PVC pipe sticking up out of the cement with a cap on it.”
I walked over to the pipe and looked down. “You guys are coming in through here?” I asked, jokingly.
“What?”
“It was a joke. I asked you if the assault team was coming in through that pipe.”
“You are the team,” he replied. It was no joke.
How many times can a man’s emotions go up and down in a ten-second time frame? The answer for me at that moment was way too many. First, I was stunned, then I was excited, then I was scared, then I was excited again, then I was confused.
I hadn’t said a word, but he undoubtedly picked up on it, judging by his next comment. “It’s all right. You can do it.” I doubted very seriously that he meant it, but what was he supposed to say? “You’re our only hope, so we’re in the shit and giving up?”
He knew I was trying to process the information he had given me and knew the only question I would be able to come up with would be something like, “What are you talking about?” He saved me from my thoughts and gave me an order. “Unscrew the cap on the pipe.”
“Huh?”
“Unscrew the cap on the pipe.”
I tried to unscrew the cap on the twelve-inch PVC pipe with my hands, but it was too tight. I told him to hold on while I got a tool to use. The time away from the phone was useful. My thoughts were racing with questions, and I was having a hard time getting my mind around what he had just told me. I needed a second to get a grip. I’m an aggressive, gung-ho,
Type-A personality, but I’m also a realist when it comes to tactics. The odds of me going up against all the guys in the building were not good. Hell, almost nonexistent.
I found an extremely large pair of channel lock pliers. I didn’t even know they made them that big. I hooked them on to a couple of ears sticking out on the cap and removed it. When I finished, I picked the phone back up.
Oberg had used the down time as well, and he undoubtedly came to the conclusion that I probably needed at least some form of explanation. “I’ll explain it all to you here pretty quick. For now, let’s just move forward one step at a time. Is the cap off?”
I grunted, and he must have taken that as an acknowledgement, so he went on.
“We’re going to blow a line to you. It’s a string coming out of a small cone. So you’ll need to stand back.”
I stepped back and let him know I was out of the way. I waited for about thirty seconds and nothing happened. I was about to tell him his string didn’t show up when I heard a swooshing noise, and a small yellow tube came flying out of the pipe. It bounced off the ceiling and landed on a workbench across the room.
“Is it there?”
“Got it.”
“Great.” There were several seconds of silence, then Oberg said, “Okay, now pull the string.”
I began pulling on the string. After I’d pulled in about fifteen feet of string, it began to get slimy. I told him about it, and he said, “Shit.”
“What?” I thought he meant there was a problem.
“It’s shit. That’s the sewer line. My guys are about ninety feet away in a manhole.”
Great, I thought. After pulling ninety-two feet of the very fine nylon string, I reached a point where someone had tied it to another nylon string. Only this one was larger, about the size of the stuff you buy at the hardware store. I told Oberg what I had, and he told me to start pulling the next string. I considered making a joke about magicians pulling endless scarves from their sleeves but decided not to. The next nylon string was just as slimy, and I was beginning to get bored with my job when I reached the end of the nylon string. It was attached to a rope, about a quarter inch in diameter.
“Got it,” I told him. I assumed he would know that I meant I had reached the end of the string and now had a rope.
“Okay. Now you’re going to pull up your gear. Pull steady, but if it hangs up, stop pulling, and I’ll have them pull it back a little to dislodge it.”
“Roger that.”
Since the rope was larger, it had more area to gather slime, or more literally, shit. With the weight of the package coming up the pipe, and the slime on the rope, I had to start using two rags I found on the workbench to pull on the rope so I could keep a grip. Finally, I saw the package coming up the pipe. I pulled it out and saw that it had a rope tied to the bottom as well. That was how they would have pulled it back if it had gotten stuck. I found out that it was also tied to the next two packages. By the time I had all of them out of the pipe, I was sweating, and my arms were a little fatigued.
“Open up the first pack and take out the helmet and LBV.” After wiping off the outside as best I could, I unzipped the first rubber tube pouch. It only had a few items in it, and I began unloading it. Two of items were the load bearing vest and helmet Oberg had told me about. I pulled the vest out and immediately noticed a few things that were different from the LBVs that my team normally used. For one thing, this one was a lot lighter. In fact, I wondered if it was just a vest or if it had any ballistic value to it.
The Blackhawk vests I had purchased for the team combined Kevlar ballistics panels and plates with a nylon exterior, and utility pockets to hold things like extra magazines, door chocks, etc. They also weighed about thirty-five pounds. This vest, similarly, had pouches, but it seemed more streamlined, and the pouches seemed much more tool or item specific. It only weighed about eight pounds, I guessed. One of the pouches already contained something. I assumed it must be comm gear, only because of a wire coming out of it that connected to the helmet and not because of its shape. It was flat like a slice of bread, about the same size or a little smaller.
I looked into the rubber pouch and saw the last item. It was balled up, but I quickly unfolded it into a black jumpsuit. I held it up to me and saw that it was about the right size. I could hear Oberg speaking over the phone and picked it up.
“How’s your phone doing?”
I looked at it. It still showed the last lonely bar. I knew that the battery had to be getting low and told him that.
“Let’s get your comms going first, in case we lose the phone.”
As instructed, I slipped into the jumpsuit first. Surprisingly, it fit just right. Being small is sometimes as difficult as being too big when it comes to finding clothes that fit. I rubbed the material between my finger and thumb. It felt like a combination of polyester and Gore-Tex. It fit snugly but seemed to stretch just a little bit as well. After I got it on, I slipped on the LBV and helmet. The LBV fit a little loosely, but I quickly fixed that with the adjustable Velcro flaps. It felt good.
Next, I put on the helmet. It was a regular-shaped helmet but much lighter and thinner. It came down to about my hairline in the back, covered my ears, hit my forehead just above the eyebrows, and had a full face mask. I hadn’t really known what to expect under the helmet, and to be honest, it wasn’t that impressive.
That was, until it suddenly came alive.
Without warning, the clear shield that was built on to the front became a Head’s Up Display. As my eyes scanned the information in the HUD, I mainly saw data. Some of it I recognized for what it probably was, some of it I didn’t. Then Oberg spoke into my ear. It came from speakers built into the helmet, but it sounded more like he was whispering in my ear from over my shoulder. I answered him back, assuming there was a built-in microphone in the helmet, as well. I was right.
“How you like it?”
“Bitchin’.”
“Yeah. That’s what I thought, too.”
The comment seemed out of place, like this was the first time he had ever seen this stuff too, but I let it go.
“Okay, let’s get on with it. We don’t have all day.” That was Oberg, always business.
I unloaded the other rubber pouches and found my boots. Adidas GSG9s. Nice, but I noticed they were well-used and commented on it.
“Not like this was a planned mission. Be glad you got them. Besides, all the squeaks have been worked out of them.”
I put them on. They felt a little weird, having already been form-fitted to somebody else’s size eight feet. Probably some other HRT member who I’m sure wasn’t too happy about giving up his boots. But they fit well enough.
I started loading equipment into the pouches. As I’d first assumed, the pouches were specifically designed to hold certain items. Most of the items were easy to match to their corresponding pouches, and I inserted them without help. A couple of the others didn’t seem to fit anything specific, so I just found a place for them. One was a canister similar to a flashbang, but smaller, and with a different trigger mechanism. I also noticed I had a fragmentation grenade. Serious shit.
Oberg was talking in my ear as I went on sorting and storing the gear. He commented about the pile of rope at my feet, and I realized he could see what I was looking at.
“Yeah. That screen on your helmet is transmitting a picture back to the TOC.”
TOC was shorthand for Tactical Operations Center, a remote sub-command post. The TOC was designed to get the operations people away from the command post. If command and operations and, when necessary, negotiators, all have to use the same facility, things can just get too hectic. Not only that, but command usually can’t keep their noses out of operation’s business, micro-managing everything.
“Cool,” I said, thinking about the HUD.
“Yep.” His standard reply. This guy sure used words sparingly. “Pick up your weapon.”
I couldn’t wait. If there is anything an operator loves,
it’s weapons. With all the Star Wars-like toys I now had on my body, I was expecting something like a ray gun. The subgun, at least that’s what I assumed it was by looking at it, was shaped very similarly to the Heckler & Koch G36C. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. The first thing I noticed was that there was no bolt to pull back. The gun was balanced, but still seemed a little awkward. I rocked it back and forth in my hands and found that the barrel, which was extra thick and probably a suppressor, was very heavy, as was the stock. The middle seemed light, but it didn’t have a magazine in it. I reached down and got one of the magazines from the rubber pouch. It was heavier than a normal full magazine, and I looked into it to see what kind of rounds the gun shot.
At this point, nothing was surprising me, but I was at a loss to figure out what kind of ammunition I was looking at. So I asked.
“Did they forget to seat the bullet in a cartridge before they loaded it into the mag?” The ammunition I was looking at was just a long, thin bullet, slightly larger than a .22 in diameter, but about an inch long overall. On the back end, it was only slightly boat-tailed and had some kind of jacket on it. The bullet itself was a not the normal copper color I was used to but was a very light blue. Almost pretty, I thought. I could only see the top bullet but judging by the size of it versus the weight of the magazine, I figured there had to be around a hundred of them in there. I hadn’t gotten an answer and asked again about the funny ammo.
“That’ll be explained to you in a little bit. Let’s just get you up and running so I can brief you.”
Once again, the answer was a little off, and I wondered why Oberg seemed to be trying to hurry me through this part like he was trying to get rid of me.
I seated the magazine and asked, “Now what?”
Once again, my helmet activated on its own. This time wasn’t as dramatic but it was significant. I was looking at a small, circular outline with crosshairs in it on the HUD. I moved the gun and the crosshairs moved until they got to the edge of the HUD, then stopped. I had moved my aim too far to the right. I brought the weapon back, pointed in the direction I was looking, and once again, the crosshairs tracked the weapon. I also noticed that some of the data I hadn’t recognized in the HUD now made sense. There was an icon that must have concerned the weapon. Below it was the number “100”, with a small icon next to it that looked like a bullet. I assumed that was my current ammo count. Next to the weapon icon, which sort of resembled a subgun, was a green light. I assumed that meant the system was up and ready.