Now, recall three facts per paragraph, just like they taught me:
Florida, Nevada, and Arizona have been the slowest markets to recover, 12 percent gain in thirty-six months, the national thirty-year fixed mortgage rate is . . . Shit.
He couldn’t remember the rate.
The bus jerked to a stop, and Dempsey popped to his feet. After thanking the driver, he located his green Ford Expedition in spot A35, unlocked the doors with the key fob, and deposited his roller suitcase on the passenger seat beside him. He fired up the ignition, placed the transmission in drive, and departed the rental lot. He turned right on Hershberger Road, leaving the regional airport behind. Steering with his left hand, he unzipped his bag with his right, gaining access to a black metal gun box. He slid his thumb across the biometric reader, and after two beeps the bolt slid back. At the first stop sign, he opened the box and retrieved the compact Sig 239 inside. He installed a clip and released the slide, advancing the first round into the chamber. Then he slipped the weapon into a thin waistband holster and jammed the holster between his seat and the center console, where it would remain until he could put it on without wrecking his rental car. The two extra magazines went into the left pocket of his suit coat.
As he drove northeast on Route 11, he pulled out one of the two burner phones from his inside jacket pocket. He dialed the 577 area-code phone number from memory. After two rings a woman’s voice answered.
“Hello?”
“Hey, sweetheart. It’s me.”
“Hey, me,” said a warm and loving voice, a voice he’d never heard before. “You got in okay? How was your flight?”
“Great,” he said. For an instant, he imagined Kate on the other end of the line, but he shook the pointless, distracting fantasy out of his head. “How are the kids?”
“Playing like maniacs inside. I’m about to put them in the tub. They have school tomorrow, ya’ know.”
“I know,” he said.
“What time is your dinner meeting?”
“Not until later this evening. Eight thirty. I’m just out for a drive to kill some time. Looking around in case they really do transfer us here.”
“Bleah,” the woman said with a chuckle.
“I know, I know,” Dempsey said, trying to make his rehearsed lines sound spontaneous. “I love you, baby,” he said. “I’ll call you after dinner.”
“Okay. Love you, too.” And the stranger was gone.
The entire conversation had been code. Now his Ember support team back in the hangar knew that he was on time, on target. By mentioning the kids were playing like maniacs inside, his female collaborator confirmed that satellite and overflight drone imagery had located the “package”—an annoyingly sterile term for the terrified woman possibly being held hostage by a domestic terrorist cell. By saying the kids had school in the morning, she conveyed that Jarvis was giving the green light for Dempsey to drive by the target facility. His responses informed her that after the drive-by, he would proceed with the plan to pick up the IT guru, Wang, at 2030 for a surveillance stakeout after sundown.
When he was a SEAL, after being briefed on the mission objectives, all he had to worry about was INFIL/EXFIL contingencies and hosing down bad guys. Now, he was overwhelmed with information. He had sat through hours of briefings on the package—Sarah Reed, daughter of Henry Reed, US senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia. He knew intimate information about the twenty-three-year-old Georgetown graduate, details he felt uncomfortable knowing. Like the fact that Sarah had been molested as a child by a trusted family friend, and that this psychological trauma had precipitated a period of heavy drug use and rampant promiscuity during her high school years. Like the fact that her younger brother was gay, but—for the sake of Senator Reed’s political career—still locked in the closet. And like the rumor that Sarah’s mother was having an affair with one of the partners from Henry Reed’s old law firm.
Dempsey understood that digging through the Reed family skeleton closet was relevant to characterizing the package, but having so much personal information swirling around in his head was terribly distracting. He felt sorry for Sarah Reed; he couldn’t imagine the angst the girl must carry around in her heart every day. So when Jarvis theorized a possible link between Sarah and the Islamic terror cell suspected of kidnapping her, Dempsey had balked. On what grounds did Jarvis draw this conclusion? On the grounds that Sarah had traveled to the Middle East during the summer between her junior and senior years of college? Or was it because she had dated the son of a Saudi diplomat for a short period of time during her sophomore year? Dempsey thought the connection was a stretch at best. He didn’t understand how Jarvis could be so bold as to connect this girl to a terror cell without any hard evidence. Because Sarah Reed had been molested, that made her an Islamic radical? Yeah, right. If working for Ember meant he had to become cold, calculating, and paranoid when investigating fellow Americans, then maybe he’d made a mistake signing on.
He turned the SUV onto Read Mountain Road and took a left on Cloverdale Avenue, following the route he’d memorized. The road banked sharply to the right and became Second Avenue after the turn. Dempsey followed Second Avenue to a circular gravel drive leading to a modest house with two cars parked in front. Behind the house loomed a large warehouse—its corrugated steel roof dappled red with rust. He braked to a stop but left the transmission in drive while he made a show of pulling out a sheet of paper and calling up Google Maps on his mobile phone. Scratching his head, he pretended to reference the map program while cataloging the details of his surroundings. After a total stop time of thirty seconds, he drove away in the direction from which he’d come, retracing his route in reverse. Half a mile down Read Mountain Road, he pulled into a church parking lot. He got out of the Expedition and made a show of looking up and down the street, while pressing “Redial” on his burner phone.
“Hello?” said the woman’s voice.
“Man, I really hope they don’t transfer us here. This place is Hicksville, baby,” he said with a good-natured laugh. “I’m in the parking lot of a big church in a neighborhood that doesn’t have two decent houses on the whole block.”
I surveyed the target, and there were two vehicles present.
“Is the church nice?”
“Yeah, nice enough, but I can’t speak for the congregation.”
The target could be breached by our team, but not without risk.
“Can I talk to the kids?” he asked.
Are we a go?
“They’re in the tub. Can you call again in a little while?”
Undecided. We’ll let you know at the next check-in.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna check in to my hotel. I’ll call you when I’m all settled.”
Roger. Will proceed to pick up Wang.
“Love you.”
“Love you.”
All is well.
Dempsey climbed back into the Expedition and drove out of the church parking lot toward Route 11. After picking up Wang at the Sheraton, they would return so the tech genius could conduct electronic surveillance. The idea that Dempsey would cross-train in Wang’s job seemed preposterous. It had taken him half a day to operate the new-generation GPS that had been issued to the teams last year. Hacking into computers and turning people’s mobile phones into listening devices was hopelessly beyond his IT capabilities. He would watch, he would try to learn, but most likely he would fall asleep.
Thirty minutes later, he was back at the target with Wang. SIGINT collection proceeded exactly as Dempsey imagined, with Wang losing himself in ones and zeroes while Dempsey did everything in his power not to doze off. Using two laptops and an oversize PDA device, Wang somehow recorded voice information from inside the target house and the warehouse at the same time. They listened to the static-filled conversations together—Wang nodding enthusiastically under his noise-canceling headphones while Dempsey grimaced, unable to understand anything but a random word here and there. By combining Wang’s pirat
ed voice data with the thermal imagery from the overflight drone, Ian Baldwin and his data nerds back at the TOC were able to confirm that Sarah Reed was inside the warehouse with two Arabic-speaking males. Baldwin also determined that two other people—a man and a woman—occupied the house in front. If not for Wang and his IT kung fu, Dempsey decided, the SIGINT stop would have yielded zero actionable intel.
With the package confirmed at the target, Dempsey made another round trip to the hotel to pick up the rest of the team. Another thirty minutes burned, and once again he found himself driving north on Route 11 toward Cloverdale in the dark—only this time the Expedition was fully loaded with operators and gear. He wasn’t worried about the man sitting beside him in the front passenger seat. As a former Delta operator, Smith had Tier One skills and experience. In a shitstorm of bullets, blood, and confusion, Dempsey knew he could count on Smith the same way he had Spaz, Rousch, or Thiel. Wang was also not a concern, because his job was to stay behind in the SUV and monitor comms from the driver’s seat. If things went bad, Wang would assume the role of evac driver. Dempsey looked in the rearview mirror at Wang, who was fixated on Grimes’s chest while she stared out the window. The SUV bounced over a divot in the road, and he saw Wang grin like a high school kid peeking into the girls’ locker room.
Well, maybe I should revise my assessment. As long as a chick with a great pair of tits doesn’t walk by during the op, Wang should be okay.
In the cramped third row sat Mendez, looking like every Marine Dempsey had ever known—all business. Face taut, unblinking eyes staring into space, the Marine was running over his responsibilities and preparing for the rescue op. If they got the green light, Mendez would be ready—psychologically, at least. Tactically speaking, Dempsey would have to wait and see. A Marine with MARSOC training should be able to handle a weapon as well as any white-side SEAL.
He hoped.
And that left Grimes.
He studied her in the rearview mirror. Her face was stone, but the rapid rise and fall of her chest told him she was nervous. Best-case scenario, she would only be a limited liability. Worst-case scenario, her presence would put the entire mission in jeopardy, along with the lives of her teammates and the hostage. During their Farm training, Grimes had been a complete pain in the ass. She seemed to lack all sense of tactical posturing and repeatedly put herself into compromising or vulnerable positions. She hesitated when she should have moved, and moved when she should have held. She overthought every scenario, and questioned all his decisions during the exercises. Worst of all, she felt compelled to play Monday-morning quarterback in the debriefs, pointing out how every screwup could have been avoided if Dempsey had simply listened to her. Admittedly, most of her strategic insights had proven to be right, but it was her holier-than-thou attitude that pissed him off. She was the queen, and they were foot soldiers—unenlightened brutes who would do well to listen to her wisdom. Frankly, he was shocked she wasn’t running her mouth right now, driving everyone crazy.
He drove past Read Mountain Road—the turn that would have taken them back to the target—and continued on another quarter mile to Updike Lane. He turned left on Updike and followed it until he reached Mickey Lane, where he pulled the SUV into the empty parking lot of a brick building with a sign that read ROANOKE CONSTRUCTION INC. He piloted the SUV to the back of the lot and parked under a large oak tree to block the glare of a nearby street lamp.
“Let’s see what we can see,” Smith said with a grin.
Dempsey looked over his shoulder at Wang. “Get me an imagery update from Mom.”
Wang opened his laptop and clicked through several windows. “As of fifteen minutes ago, the overflight drone still had the package in the warehouse. She’s unrestrained and moving around. She’s with two men. From body movements, Baldwin believes one of the men is carrying a rifle.”
“Comms update?”
“There’s a TV on in the room. Everyone is speaking English. The package is doing very little talking. The chatter is primarily between the two men. No tactically relevant conversations to report.”
“What about the house in front?”
“A man and a woman are camped out in the kitchen, and have been on every pass, suggesting this is a sentry position against a forward entry. They also appear to have rifles.”
Dempsey closed his eyes and tried to picture what Wang was describing. He imagined two Middle Eastern men in the warehouse, one pacing back and forth with a rifle slung across his back, the other armed with a handgun tucked in his waistband. The sentries in the front, he pictured armed with automatic weapons—AK-47s or AR-15s, most likely—staged within arm’s reach.
“Traps?” Smith asked.
“Well.” Wang scratched at his sparse goatee in a way that reminded Dempsey of Spaz. “They’ve been in and out of the back door on the east corner of the warehouse several times, so that’s an unlikely site for a booby trap. The front door has also had tons of traffic. The woman in the house left to get food a few hours ago, which she shared with both groups—the package ate, by the way, for what that’s worth—and they’ve been out to the cars a couple of times since. I think those doors are your best bet for entry.”
“Any other vehicles?” Smith asked.
“Nope,” Wang said.
“Anything else you want to add?” Dempsey asked.
“There’s a TV on, like I said. The noise helps you guys, right?”
“Right,” Dempsey said.
“I’ve run through everything I can see. Mom has new information still in analysis. Chip and Dale opened the mike on a tablet computer through an Internet connection, but they lost it when the device was turned off. Dale said the sound quality sucked, so Ian is trying to clean it up now.”
“Any fires we need to worry about?” Smith asked.
“I had SIGINT running on a one-mile radius, but there’s a neighborhood with several hundred homes, and that’s a lot of traffic to parse. Mom doesn’t have the manpower she had in the JIRG. Still, nothing we’ve heard suggests that these assholes have another site standing by to help out. Only one phone call in the last hour, on a burner to another burner—that was from the dude in the main house. According to Baldwin, it sounded like a pickup request, but not for at least a couple of days, which seemed to piss everyone off. I’m confident they don’t have any help nearby you need to worry about.”
Smith nodded and looked at Dempsey. “JD?”
Dempsey scowled. He was getting used to his name but wasn’t ready for a nickname yet. “All right, let’s brief it, then I’ll make the call for the green light.”
“Agreed,” said Smith.
Dempsey turned in his seat so he had everyone’s eye. “We’re going to run Plan Two from the tactical brief: Smith and Grimes go in through the front to neutralize the sentries and stop them from making an outbound call for a QRF. Mendez and I go in the east door to the warehouse, put the shitheads in the bag, and bring the girl out with us. Each team tries to take one crow,” he said and looked over at Smith, who nodded in approval. They had been drilling into him for a couple of weeks the importance of leaving with information. Taking two prisoners off the X would be a great source. “But if that slows us down, or endangers anyone on the team or the package, then we just smoke ’em all and harvest whatever intel we can from the girl.”
He paused and noticed Grimes staring at him. Unblinking. Silently judging.
He quickly shifted his gaze to Wang. “INFIL will be on foot to the north corner where we’ll kit up and then split into pairs. Mendez and I will wait until Smith and Grimes get into position. That gives you plenty of time to reposition the Expedition. When you hear the GO, drive the SUV in front of the target vehicles. No one leaves unless they’re with us. On EXFIL, we’ll come to you. Got it?”
Wang nodded.
Dempsey paused long enough for comments but got none. “Our biggest external threat is local police response, but out here response time should exceed fifteen minutes. However, in the
unlikely event some Barney Fife is patrolling a nearby neighborhood, the response time drops to under five minutes. So I want our total mission time well south of that number. From kicking in doors to on the road should be under three minutes. Questions?”
He scanned their faces. Grimes raised an eyebrow at him, and Dempsey hated that it made her look pretty. Her lips parted, and he could see the wheels spinning in her head, but for once she held her tongue. His pulse quickened at the thought of a gunfight with this slapped-together team. The only comfort he had was the knowledge that this crew had drilled over a hundred hours together during the last two weeks.
“Okay,” he said, and pulled out a second burner phone. He dialed the preset number and listened while it rang.
“Hey, baby. How are you doing? You must be tired,” said his make-believe wife.
Is the team ready?
“Actually, I feel great for some damn reason,” he laughed. “I should be tired, but I’m not. Wanted to see how you’re doing before it got too late.”
We’re on station, ready to prep. Do we have a green light?
“Well, I’m great, but the kids are still awake for some reason. I’m waiting for them to fall asleep, and then maybe I could call you back? It should only be a few more minutes. Maybe you should get ready for bed, and then I’ll call before you fall asleep.”
Not yet. The team is still analyzing data. Move into position, and we’ll call you back with the go.
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll get ready for bed, watch the news, and wait for your call.”
I’ll move the team into position and stand by for instructions.
Dempsey hung up. “Position and hold,” he said to the group. “But it looks like we should be a go.”
He climbed out of the driver’s seat, and Wang immediately jumped in to take his place. Wang’s grin and nervous gusto confirmed his inexperience with field ops, though for an IT nerd, the kid had done well on the tactical driving module last week. Dempsey wondered how Wang would do when terrorists started shooting real bullets at him. He slapped Wang on the shoulder. “Don’t leave without us.”
Tier One (Tier One Series Book 1) Page 21