by Jim Riley
I got the implication and didn’t take it personal. Why use a flyswatter when a howitzer was on the way? “Roger all that, but I want some clear-cut rules of engagement. I’m about to put my men in harm’s way.”
“Hold on.”
Fuck.
“Okay, go ahead.” It was Coop, but I didn’t think he was talking to me.
Then. “Moffat?”
I recognized the voice. At least, I thought I did. “Yeah. Is this Colonel Rodriguez?”
“Yes, it is. Good to have you on board, Moffat. I hear you found our package.”
“Roger that, sir. I understand my mission to be to surveil the target and await an incoming team. Is that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“What are my rules of engagement, sir?” I halfway expected him to tell me there weren’t any. I was even prepared for it.
“Don’t engage unless you have to.”
“And if I have to?”
“You know the answer to that. This line is not secured so I’m not going to get specific, but you know what that package is. That truck does not leave that house. No one in that house leaves that house.”
“Are my men and I covered if this goes bad?” He knew exactly what I was asking. We didn’t know for one hundred percent sure there was a nuclear device at this location. Hell, it could be a truckload of smoke alarms for all I knew. If someone tried to leave and I gave the order for my team to blow them all to shit, there’d be hell to pay legally and criminally if it did turn out to be a mistake. I wanted some assurances.
“As long as it doesn’t turn out to be a day care center and you kill a dozen toddlers, you’re covered. Even then I could probably fix it. Do what you’ve got to do. That truck, nor anyone at that house, leaves. Do you understand?”
“No one leaves. Roger that and understood. Thank you, Colonel.”
“Thank you, Moffat.”
I checked the bars on the phone’s screen after I ended the call. I wanted to make sure I still had enough juice to keep talking to Coop now that things were warming up. I saw it still had four out of four bars. Good. I folded it and put it in my pocket. I took a deep breath and was collecting my thoughts to brief my men when a chill ran down my back. I took another breath. My biggest problem was not fear but how much I was going to tell them. They weren’t cleared to know exactly what it was we were doing. It was only their job to do it.
Chapter Seventeen
I started with wanting to know the situation at the house. “Two, this is Leader. Give me a sitrep.”
“The white male went back inside. I’ve lost sight of him, but he watched the plane until it was gone before he went back in.”
“Okay. And you’re positive on the weapon, right?”
“Roger that.” He sounded a little slighted by me second-guessing him.
“Okay. Sierra One, sitrep.”
“No change. Light coming through the front door window. No movement.”
“Roger all that, Sierra.” I hesitated because what I was about to tell him was fairly weighty. “Sierra, we have situation Dog One. Repeat, situation Dog One. Acknowledge.”
There was no emotion or wavering in his response, even though I had just told him to kill anyone that came out of that house and tried to leave. “Roger, situation Dog One.” It had been a prearranged signal I would give him if the situation became a worst-case scenario, and we had talked about it outside the van. Danny had to be one of most in-control people I’d ever met. Nothing seemed to faze him.
“Listen up.” I had them pull in tight into a circle. I was still briefing them over the radio so everyone could hear the same information, but I wanted to be able to see them. At least the ones near me. “Best we can tell, there is a terrorist cell at this location. It’s unknown how many are inside or if there are any more outside or in the surrounding area. Be on the alert.” I stopped and let that information sink in. If I got too far ahead of them, they may miss something while their minds tried to wrap themselves around the unbelievable events that were unfolding for them. It’s one thing to think something like what was happening might happen. When it in fact does, sometimes the human mind doesn’t want to accept it at first. I could see a few heads nodding, and when I saw that they were all looking at me I continued. This was going to be the really hard part for them to grasp. “There is a special team on its way here by chopper to make the assault. We are to secure this location pending their arrival. If something happens before they get here, we are tasked to handle it. Specifically, no one leaves that house. Let me repeat that. No one leaves that house.” No one said anything, but I saw a couple of them raise their heads up slightly. I knew I needed to be more specific. “There will be no arrests here tonight, gentleman. This is a search-and-destroy mission. If anyone comes out of that house and tries to leave, we will kill them and storm the house. When you go in, you immediately kill anyone you come in contact with.”
No one keyed a mic, but I heard some gasps and faint sounds like, “What?”
“There is a bomb in that truck. We have no idea how it’s to be detonated, and if it may be remote-detonated. We are not going to be asking them nicely to not set it off. If anything goes sideways, we will take that house and secure everyone in it so that bomb does not detonate. Killing them or not is not even a consideration. That bomb can’t go off.”
“What kind of bomb is it?” It was Jim Straight over the radio.
“A very big one.”
“Like the one at Oklahoma City?”
I hesitated and weighed my options. “Yeah, but bigger.” It was only a half-lie.
I had already planned out in my head how I wanted to deploy my men should it come to this. I left Jim and Troy in place, sent Brett and Benny Singleton to the tree line on the southwest or 2/3 corner, Travis Meach and Dale Bentwood went further north past Brett to cover the 1/2 corner, and JB and JW went up to the place I’d broken cover at the tree line when I checked the trucks. That put them covering the 4/1 corner. The house was surrounded, with both Danny and JB’s team covering the trucks, which was the most important thing. If they did detonate the bomb here, the nuclear fallout would be confined to the western side of the Continental Divide, which was sparsely populated compared to the other side. The worst situation was that bomb going mobile.
The plan was that if we did have to move on the house, the teams east of the center line would converge and the teams west of the center line would do the same thing. We’d make simultaneous entries front and back, as best we could, anyway, and do the best we could on the inside to secure the place. They’d all taken the plan without comment, but I could only imagine what was going on their minds.
The teams had gotten into position fairly quickly and the situation in the house had calmed down. By my watch, the assault team was still twenty-five minutes out. Twenty-five minutes more and I could turn this cluster over to someone else. That was twenty-four minutes too late.
“I’ve got movement. White male coming out the front door. No weapon visible.” Silence. “He’s opening the door to the U-Haul.” It was Danny.
My heart stopped. “All teams, stand by to move on the sniper’s shot.”
There wasn’t one. “Sierra, report.” Nothing. “Sierra.”
“He’s not leaving, he’s just started the truck. His boots were untied and his shirt hanging out. He just got up. Looks like he’s warming it up.”
It ended up being the right decision, but I was still pretty upset with Danny. He had orders to kill anyone that tried to get in that truck. “He doesn’t get back in that truck. Understood?”
“Roger that.”
He didn’t seem to be upset that he’d not obeyed the order exactly or that I’d snapped at him on the radio. But I knew that if that guy came back out and walked toward that truck, he was toast.
I decided I needed to be both closer to the action and that truck. In fact, if I could get next to that truck with my suppressed weapon, maybe I could take out anyone getting close without the
whole thing going noisy. I pulled my phone out and talked to Coop while I made my way to where JB and JW were. I’d cross there again, even if the light did come on.
“Yeah.”
“ETA on the chopper?”
“Twenty-two minutes.”
“They’re warming up the truck. I think your plane spooked them.”
“Fuck. They don’t leave, Dell.”
“I know. I’m on it.” I shoved the phone back in my pocket.
I was just getting to JB and JW when Danny keyed his mic. “Movement at the front door. Different white male. Carrying a Mini 14. He’s not walking to the truck, though. He’s heading for side 4. Head’s up.”
The man I was looking at was no more a Muslim extremist than I was. He was five-foot-nine tall, about one-hundred-sixty-five pounds soaking wet, and had long, stringy blond hair and a scraggly blond beard. He did have a rifle, though, and Danny was probably right; it looked like a Ruger Mini-14.
The floodlight came on when he rounded the corner. I carefully took my NVGs off and looked at him through my binoculars. He had the face of many of the twenty-five-year-old kids I’d seen throughout my career. This just was not making sense. Then Danny spoke again.
“Movement. Another white male coming out the front door. No weapon.” I waited for the shot if he went for the truck and had already brought my MP5 up to kill the kid. He was looking into the light and we were in the shadows. I could have stood and done a dance and he wouldn’t have seen us. “Moving past the truck. Headed for the 4.”
I clicked my push-to-talk, or PTT, drum switch-clipped to my vest twice in acknowledgment. I didn’t want to talk right then, even in a whisper.
“You nervous?” It was the second guy that had walked up, talking to the kid. I noticed that his boots were still untied and his shirt still hanging out. What a slob. These guys weren’t terrorists. They were shitbags. Hell, they may have stolen a truckload of smoke alarms or something, but these guys couldn’t have gotten their hands on a nuclear bomb in a thousand years. Shit. We were all ready to take them out and there was a team about twenty minutes out that was about to land on these guys like a bad smell. Shit, shit, shit.
My mind was racing a thousand miles an hour when the kid asked Shirttail—that’s what I’d decided to call him--the million-dollar question. “How big of a cloud does one of them things make?” Son of a bitch.
“Don’t know. Biggun, I’d reckon.”
Shirttail pulled out a pack of Red Man chewing tobacco and held it out to the kid. “Y’awntsum?”
“Thanks. Fucking Jews and Jew-lovers are gonna do a meltdown tomorrow, boy,” the kid said laughingly as he stuffed a big chew into his check.
I realized my jaw was hanging open. I had to call Coop.
I made my way back into the woods a short way and pulled out my phone.
“Yeah. Talk to me.”
“These fuckers are White Supremacist.”
“What?”
“I heard two of them talking. They’re from the South and they’ve got to be White Supremacist. They’ve just gotta be, Coop. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Just because their truck plates are from Arkansas doesn’t make them from the South, Dell. You’re jumping to conclusions.”
“I heard them talking.”
“What’d they say?”
“One guy offered the other some chewing tobacco.”
“There’s people from all over that chew, Dell.”
“He asked him if ‘y’awntsum.’ That’s southern speak for ‘do you want some.’”
“What?”
“Haven’t you ever listened to Jeff Foxworthy? Look, I recognized the southern accent. They’re white, redneck, southern, White Supremacists.”
“Well I don’t care if they’re valley girls, I guess. Just don’t let them get away.”
“I heard them talking about the Jews melting tomorrow.”
“Okay. Hang in there. Your relief is … nineteen minutes away now.”
JP called me on the radio. “You need to get up here. They’re going to be leaving in a few minutes.”
I made my way back up to JB and JW. JB was still whispering into his microphone, and the truck’s engine noise was covering what little noise he was making. “The older guy just told the kid they were leaving in five minutes, then went back around the corner.”
Danny confirmed Shirttail had gone back inside.
I thought it would have been a slightly bit harder decision to make as to when I needed to get aggressive with my plan. It wasn’t. “East teams move to Phase Line Yellow. West Teams move to Phase Line Yellow.” I heard several acknowledgements. Within two minutes, everyone was in place.
I decided to leave JW behind as an outside perimeter and sent him back downhill just a ways so he could cover anyone trying to escape the area. Everyone else would go in.
Brett was leading what I’d designated at Team Two. Their responsibility was going to be going into the downstairs exit door, or the 3/1/4. It led into a living room, and there was bedroom directly across the room from the entry door. The stairs going up were also across the room and all the other bedrooms were down a hall to the right. My team, Team One, was going to secure the truck and take the upstairs. We had no idea how many people were inside the house, what kind of weapons they had, and if there was any way they had of detonating the bomb remotely. That was a whole lot of unknowns.
Brett had his team staged at the tree line ninety degrees out from the 2/3 corner, which was designated as Phase Line Yellow. That meant they could stay there without problem. They would have about a forty-foot move to the house, then another forty feet or so to the door. That was Phase Line Green and was considered the point of no return. My plan was to move my team first and take out the kid while he was available. No use letting him get back around to where I couldn’t see him. This way, I’d take him from behind and that would be one down. I moved my team as close to the edge of the tree line as I could without breaking cover. The floodlight had turned out to be a godsend and covered our movement as long as we moved slow and quiet.
“Sierra, give me a sitrep.”
“All clear except the kid on side 4.”
“Team One Leader to all teams. We are moving. Team Two, stand by for my go.”
“Team Two, Roger.”
I moved out in the number one position. I was going to take the kid. I had waited until his back was turned and we moved forward. It was about thirty-plus feet from him when I would have become visible to him. All of my team were on the side 4 of the house and not visible to anyone unless they were looking out the garage-side window. There were no lights on in there, so I disregarded the issue. The team was in line behind me moving quietly, but four men walking on anything makes some noise. One of us stepped on a small limb. The kid turned around slowly, as though he heard something, but didn’t seem too concerned. When he saw us, his mouth gaped open and his eyes went wide. My first round caught him dead-center-chest at nipple height. The second round hit four inches above that at the top of the breast bone, and the third round hit him just below the left eye. Actually, it probably would have been the least likely to have killed him of the three rounds, but it didn’t matter since one of them had obviously hit his spine. He went down like a brick. I had never broken my stride and kept moving straight to the side 4 wall. When we were halfway down the wall, I stopped and glared down at the mid-twentyish, blond-haired, blue-eyed kid. I’m sure the men behind me thought I was having trouble with the fact that I’d just killed him, but that wasn’t what had me stopped in my tracks. It was the tattoo on his neck. The way he’d fallen caused his jacket to pull down slightly and expose most of his neck on the left side. There was a tattoo of a dragon facing down. The dragon’s tail twisted up the neck and ended up not quite to the jaw bone. My entire murder case began spilling over into my thoughts. I was looking down at the person that had murdered Gittleson. I felt a nudge from behind, and it brought me back to the moment.
“Yeah.” I moved forward to the corner. “Team One is at Phase Line Green at the 4/1 corner. We have one bad guy down. Team Two, move to Phase Line Green.”
“Roger, you’re at Phase Line Green, and we’re moving.”
It probably only took Brett and his team less than thirty seconds to move that distance, but it sure seemed like longer. Finally, he told me Team Two was staged at the door.
“Roger, Team One is moving to the door.” My plan was that Jim Straight, who was in the rear-guard position, was going to stop at the U-Haul. His job was to situate himself however he needed to in order to make sure no one got to that truck. When we got to the door, I’d tell Brett, and we’d make entry simultaneously with Team Two. We weren’t going to throw flashbangs right off, but instead keep it quiet as long as possible. Brett was the only other person on the team with a suppressed weapon. He was also shooting an MP5, and we were both using subsonic ammo. If he and I could continue to take the shots, it may gain us some stealthy advantage. It was a good plan if it had worked. Jim had already dropped off and was posted at the front of the truck and aiming in the direction of the door. I was about two steps from the door when it opened. Since it opened inward, like all exterior doors, I saw it open but hadn’t seen anyone yet. It was too late to retreat, so I raised my weapon. Danny took the shot. I heard the bullet rip past my head and heard the “whack” when it hit the skull. I pushed my PTT and said, “Compromise, compromise, go, go, go.” We actually had to step on poor Shirttail to make entry. Since the whole operation had gone noisy, I guess Brett decided to flashbang his entry. At least, I hoped it was Brett’s bang. The front door opened into a foyer, which opened into the Great Room. It was fairly easy to clear, with only a couple pieces of furniture that someone could have hidden behind. It was probably faster than any of us had ever cleared a room, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have looked too thorough for someone watching the action. But this situation was a little different.
We moved pretty quickly through the upstairs since it was so open, but before we made it all the way through, I heard Brett’s second bang. Immediately thereafter, I heard gunfire. Gunfire like I’d never heard before. It had to be a .50 caliber machine gun. I’d never heard one before, but that had to be one. I wanted badly to get down there, but we still had one more room, a bedroom, and bath to clear. There was a sudden lull in the gunfire, and I heard screaming. The shooting continued, and Team One moved on. I made sure we focused on clearing our rooms. I knew everyone else was thinking about getting downstairs to help their teammates.