by Jim Riley
But even before I could get my finger off the trigger, I had dropped the first guy on the left and swung the weapon to the right. The steady stream of .28 caliber rounds thumped along the back wall, and both men dropped within a second of each other, having never even raised their rifles.
Assault plans almost never go as laid out on paper, as I’ve already said. They’re really not even expected to. You try to build in contingencies and alternate movements, but in the end, you rely on trained operators to get the job done while they make changes on the fly. Against all odds, and unlike any other plan I had ever been a part of, this one was now going as though both sides were working off a script. In fact, I was starting to get a little nervous because it was going so well.
The elevator I was in was on the north side of the building, closer to the west end than the east. The two dead tangos lay in the floor of that hallway about halfway between the elevator and the east hallway where they had come from. The opposing side of the building was similar in design with an elevator, but with live tangos instead of dead ones. Well, at least for now. According to the HUD, Tango Team Two was hovering near the southwest corner. I started moving down the north hallway toward the other end. It would take me past the office with the bomb, but it was the best way for me to approach the next target. That way, I would be between them and the bomb.
I had only gone a few steps when Tango Team Two began to move. The dots only moved a short distance, then began to spread apart. One of two men stayed in the south hallway and the other continued on around the corner and toward the north hallway and me. Shit. I looked back at the two dead men on the floor. It was a fairly long distance from one end of the hallway to the other, but I had no illusions that this guy coming wasn’t going to notice those two lumps on the floor. I ran to the first body and grabbed him by the collar. The hallway where he and his partner came from was too far away, as was the elevator. Across the hall and down a few feet from where he lay was a Pepsi machine. I dragged the first guy over there and stacked him in the corner, ran back and grabbed the other one, and dragged him over there as well. I could hear Sarge telling me to hurry, and I had just gotten him behind the vending machine when the man cleared the far corner. I had to stand on the leg of guy number one to keep from being seen.
I slipped the pen camera out past the Pepsi machine and could see my new target. I couldn’t make him out clearly, but he seemed to be looking down the hallway. Maybe it was my paranoia, or maybe it just made sense that he was looking for the other team. If he kept coming my way I’d be happy to show him the other team, and he could be stacked up behind the Pepsi machine with them.
Instead, he stopped at a door about a third of the way down the hall and went in. The room with the bomb. I noticed that he didn’t have to use a key, and I hoped that when it came time for me to enter that door, it would be unlocked as well.
Even with the disruption of Tango Team Two splitting up, I needed to keep moving in order to accomplish my mission before the next status check. I didn’t know what exactly would happen when teams started failing to answer, but it certainly wasn’t going to help me keep my element of surprise going. Having the two men split up could turn out to be a good thing if the guy who left stayed away long enough. I could do two singles instead of a double, which were inherently more risky.
I moved out and this time took the east hallway, the same direction the other team had come from. It seemed like the better option now that my targets had split up. For all practical purposes, the hallways on each side ran around the building and connected with each other, which left a ring of offices on the exterior walls and an island of offices in the middle. I moved quickly down the east hallway to the end and stopped at the corner. It was going to be a long shot down the length of the south hallway and I needed to know how my target was situated. I slipped the camera past the corner. Although he was standing with his weapon ready, he didn’t seem to be concerned about his surroundings, which was good. I suppose he felt pretty secure that no one was slipping up on him. He never noticed as I eased out just far enough around the corner, took time to steady my aim, and shot him once in the head. He responded by dying nice and quietly.
Just as the partner was dying and I was trying to catch my breath, Sarge notified me that the other half of Tango Team Two looked like he was about to leave room where the bomb was being held. A second later he confirmed it. Now the question remained of which way he’d go. If he came back down the west hallway, it was no problem. I could move further down, and he’d come around the corner and walk right into me. If he went the other way I had to boogie back down the length of the east hallway to the north hallway and get to him before he got to his two dead buddies, since I was pretty sure seeing them would raise a red flag with him. Naturally, he went looking for his buddies. He was about as close to them as I was. Shit. Here we go again. Lucky for me, he was walking at a leisurely pace, and by this time I was all but full-out running. I got to him a matter of seconds before he would have gotten to them. Sarge was giving me a blow-by-blow, and I popped the corner without taking time to look. I had switched my weapon back to full auto and came around the corner looking for my target and ready to engage. A nice three-round burst to the torso, and just like his partner, he died quietly. He was no more than ten feet from the Pepsi machine when I got him. I was breathing hard.
“Good job, Dog One.”
I could hear Sarge reporting two more tangos down, and that I was on my way to secure the package. I didn’t say anything. I was focusing on cleansing breaths and calming down. That had been close.
For a moment, I allowed myself to start getting optimistic about living through this incident. Fortunately, I caught myself before it got out of hand. This thing was a long way from over, and just because I had had some good luck so far didn’t mean it would continue, or that Murphy wouldn’t get upset and take a dump on me.
I moved on toward the office with the bomb and was two doors down from it when I stopped and asked Sarge for a sitrep.
“Two more on your floor in the office thirty feet down from you. Moving around the office from time to time. They don’t seem to be aware that anything is going on, at least from what we can tell. Currently, one is stationary in the southeast corner and the other is walking west along the middle of the room. No other movement on your floor. Nothing else of note in the rest of the building.”
I took that to mean that I shouldn’t worry about anything else but my mission. I had no problem with that.
“Dog One, stand by.”
I stopped. I hate it when I’m suddenly told to stand by. It normally means something bad in one way or the other or a change in plans. This time it wasn’t really a change in plans and it wasn’t necessarily bad. But then it wasn’t good either. The radio was dead as though I had been cut off, then Sarge came back on. “Dog One. The small round canister in your pouch on the upper left, with the yellow trigger.”
“Yeah. The one that looks like a small flashbang?”
“Roger. It’s nerve agent. Enough to do the floor, but that’s about it. If you are not going to be able to get to the bomb, you are to deploy the device.”
That was it. There was no I’m sorry or kiss my ass. Just commit suicide. Take one for the team, or in this case, for the good of hostages and the rest of St. Louis. I really didn’t have a problem with it, but it still seemed like he could have sold it to me in a nicer package.
“Roger that. How fast does it work?”
“Within seconds. If it looks like you can’t get to the bomb and there’s a chance they will, you’ll need to deploy it and hold them until it works.” There was a pause, then, “Sorry.”
That was all I needed to hear, I guess, and it made me feel better. “Roger your last. Hooah.”
I reached up and touched the small canister and repeated the process three times. It wasn’t superstition. I was creating some muscle memory in case I needed to get to it under stress. It takes one thousand repetitious movemen
ts to train your mind and body to do something without thinking about it. Three times would only be enough to slightly help me if I needed to grab the thing under stress. It was like the difference between knowing the subject matter and quickly cramming for a test. It was better than nothing.
I eased down to the room I was going to be entering. Sarge told me that one of the dots was still in the southeast corner and the other was stationary in the northwest corner. I pulled up the layout on my HUD and saw that just inside the office door and to the right was a bathroom, similar to the layout of many hotel rooms I had been in. The rest of the room was open, at least on the layout. I was sure there was furniture in there, possibly some even tall enough to hide behind. With the one guy located in the northwest corner, which was past the small bathroom, I knew I wouldn’t be able to engage him until I was well into the room.
Based on where the other man was, which was in full view of the door I was about to enter, that only gave me a full second or two after I had engaged the first man to get to the second guy. Plenty long enough for him to grab a weapon and maybe get off a shot at me. The best tactical option would have been to deploy a diversionary device, commonly known to SWAT operators as a flashbang. A flashbang, contrary to what many television talking heads say, is not a grenade. Grenades fragment, while flashbangs simply emit a deafening, but non-lethal noise of about a hundred-and-seventy-five decibels and a blinding light of about two-and-a-half-million candela. They’re designed to inflict sensory overload on the brain of the victim, which shuts down or logjams the nervous system for about three to seven seconds, depending on the person. It doesn’t do any permanent damage but gives an operator a nice window of time to do what he needs to do without much resistance.
In this case, it would have given me enough time to enter the room and shoot them. Unfortunately, that was not going to be an option for me, since the explosion would undoubtedly be heard on the next several floors and probably bring someone running.
I decided to wait a couple of minutes to see if the guy in the southeast corner would accommodate me by moving out of sight of the door. That way, I could slip into the room. I would still have to do a double, but at least they would be close together. I told Sarge my plan, and he didn’t disagree. Actually, he didn’t say whether he did or not. It wasn’t his call, since I was the one on the ground. Something like this was an operator’s call, unless there were other circumstances that would override it. That special circumstance came about forty-five seconds later when my idiot target still hadn’t moved, but the status checks started. Sarge advised me about this and said they were now jamming the signal but I needed to go.
I reached up and touched the nerve gas canister one more time and then grabbed the doorknob. As I had hoped, it was unlocked, and I slowly turned it with my left hand. I held the M28 with my right hand and kept the butt firmly pulled into my shoulder. Sarge had removed the floor plan from my HUD. The HUD was becoming such a part of my world, I hadn’t even noticed, and my mind was completely focused on my mission. I was already visualizing the man in the back corner when I pushed the door open. I didn’t slam it open because I was hoping he was looking away from me, which would allow me to make some distance toward the corner before my presence in the room was announced.
When I had cleared the opening door, I saw him. He was on his knees on a prayer rug, arms outstretched, eyes closed, and chanting something quietly to himself as he bowed down. It was the sheik in the robe I had seen when this all began. In my peripheral vision, I saw the black plastic case open on a desk. It was the only thing on the desk. The man still had not noticed my presence, and it was somewhat unsettling. I had been prepared to be in a firefight from the second the door opened, and here I stood in the entryway with my weapon pointed at the man praying, and he didn’t even realize I was there. Now I had to decide what I wanted to do. Being a cop, the thought passed through my mind to try to take the two guys into custody, but I quickly let that thought pass. If anything went wrong, the results would be catastrophic. I wasn’t prepared to take that chance.
I moved to the corner and decided to take the man I could see first. I didn’t know where the man around the corner and to my right was facing but judged that he couldn’t see his partner on the floor because of the desk in the middle of the room. The man I couldn’t see was talking on the radio trying to reach the first-floor tangos but getting no response. With luck, I could quietly put one behind the ear of the man on the rug, then pop the corner and take number two.
It all became a moot point when the man finished praying and, for reasons only he will ever know, he opened his eyes and looked straight at me. The three-second reaction rule applies to me as well, and I didn’t react as fast as I would have liked. He was reaching for an AK 47 on the ground beside him, when he yelled something in Arabic. I didn’t know what it was, but I’m sure it was something like, “Oh, shit, there’s a spaceman in our room.” Whatever it was, it was his last thought. The bullet caught him square in the ear, and he melted to the floor.
I popped the corner. I could see the pistol coming up toward me in slow motion. This was the closest anyone had gotten so far to being able to get a shot off at me. I didn’t have time to process that it was a handgun round and wasn’t going to penetrate the space-age ballistic suit I was wearing. All I could think of was not letting him get a shot off.
Not knowing what I was going to find when I popped the corner, I had reached up with my thumb and flipped the selector switch to full auto. I knew as soon as I pulled the trigger it was not going to be pretty, but I aimed low and walked the weapon up vertically. The bullets began hitting him at about the pubic hair, and I raked it all the way up to his brow. The last shot took off the top of his head. He hadn’t gotten a shot off.
“Two tangos down.” I reported it much more calmly than I felt.
“Roger, two tangos down.” I could hear the relief in Sarge’s voice, although all he said was, “Good job, Dog One.”
I walked over to each man and nudged them with my boot. I’m not sure why I did that since both were missing parts of their heads and were undoubtedly dead. Maybe it just made me feel better. Still uneasy, I secured their weapons, then closed and locked the door.
Considering I was looking at a device powerful enough to take out a couple of square miles of real estate and anyone standing on it, it certainly looked pretty simple. The Russians hadn’t wasted a lot of money on aesthetics. There were several switches with red covers, a meter with a red needle pointed about halfway up, some sort of battery-strength indicator, an outdated-looking keypad, an LED screen, and a barrel key in a key slot. All of the writing, what little there was, was in Russian, but the display was plain enough. It read 1:22:23. I assumed that was how much time remained until it went off.
I was looking down at the device when I heard a new voice in my ears.
“Sergeant Moffat.”
“Yes,” I replied to the new person in my life. It was a little surreal having someone suddenly whispering in my ear besides Sarge. He had almost become like a part of me.
“This is Technician Ogletree. I’m going to walk you through disarming the device. Do you understand?”
What was there to understand? Did he think I was retarded? “Yeah, I understand.”
I don’t know why Sarge couldn’t have walked me through it. All I had to do was flip one switch, turn the key in the only direction it would go, then remove it. The hardest part was deciding what to do with the key. Ogletree told me to hide it, because without that key, the device could not be rearmed.
After some thought, I swallowed it. I figured my gut was the safest place for it right then. When Sarge got back on the radio, he thought it was funny that I had swallowed the key and remarked that cops would eat anything as long as it was free.
I knew that HRT was in a full lather to come into the building. I also knew that the hostages still had men with rifles trained on them. Furthermore, I had some concerns that there were bad guys be
tween me and the rescue team. I wasn’t so worried about having to hold them off, but if they got me, they got the bomb. They may not be able to set it off, but they could still blow it up with a grenade or something and turn it into a radiation device, or dirty bomb, which would still do a lot of damage and probably ultimately kill all the hostages in the building at a minimum. I told Sarge about my concerns. He told me to stand by.
Minutes passed before Sarge got back with me. Even though the bad guys had lost comms, the remaining men hadn’t seemed to notice. At least there was nothing of concern being reported to me by the TOC.
Sarge told me that Command was deciding what they wanted to do. By and large, the military is project-oriented, and a few casualties along the way are acceptable. That’s normally okay in their line of work. Law enforcement missions, the FBI in this case, are usually looked at under a microscope in hindsight and critiqued to the last little detail by some lawyer looking to score a nice settlement from the government. I had no doubt that a debate was raging between Stinson and Colonel Rodriguez over whether to move with the full-blown HRT assault at this point, or try to do something else about the hostages, continuing to use me.
I was right, but it really had nothing to do with the hostages as much as it had to do with who got the glory. Stinson was being pushed from higher-ups to go with the HRT assault to rescue to the hostages, now that the bomb was secure, so the FBI would get its fair share of the glory. Rodriguez also wanted to do something about the hostages, but he wanted to use me since things seemed be going so well. I figured Stinson was probably more than willing to go along with the Colonel, but the FBI stance was pushing hard for an HRT assault. I was pretty disgusted about the whole pissing match when I found out what was really going on. A compromise was reached when the FBI allowed the mission to continue the way it was going, and Rodriguez promised to let HRT play before it was over.
“Dog One, this is TOC.”