On both sides of the paved walkway and the small landing in front of the door there were chest-high hedges; the shadows sank below them and disappeared. Eight men in black, wearing black uniforms, helmets, body armor, soft-soled boots, gloves, balaclava masks, ski goggles and MP-5 submachine guns were crouched in perfect silence, stacked tightly in two files on either side of the door, ready to charge into the house.
The split-level wood-framed house had presented a bit of a problem. The lower elevation backyard was fenced in chain link, and the high back porch was a rickety-looking wooden affair, and totally exposed. One adjoining neighbor had a pair of alert Labrador Retrievers in the back yard, and maintaining the element of surprise on an approach from that direction was doubtful. Under each ground floor window there was a thick hedge which would impede entry, so the front door was the choice by default.
Into the front hall and living room, turn left, twenty feet straight ahead, master bedroom. Flash-bangs through the bedroom window first for a diversion, and in seconds it’s over, one way or the other, with a deafened and stunned man in his bed pinned down under a half-dozen blinding gun lights. That was the plan, rehearsed until it was second nature.
The leader beside the front door whispered, and his voice was picked up by the microphone built into the elastic band he wore around his head beneath his helmet. Beside him the door breacher swiftly applied his small charges. No mere battering ram would do in this outfit; this was not some local Podunk PD SWAT team busting a crack house. This was an FBI Enhanced SWAT team, making a violent felony arrest on a federal warrant.
“Romeo, Fox One ready,” went the whispered call.
“Romeo, Fox Two ready,” came back from one of the wraiths under the bedroom window.
“Fox One, this is Charlie. All quiet, no movement inside,” said a man in the electrical contractor’s van, watching his screens and listening to his headphones.
“Okay Fox One, this is Romeo. Show time Fox Two, give us a countdown.” This was the go-ahead from the on-scene supervisor.
“Copy Romeo. We are going in five, four, three, two…”
****
From his small window perch up on top of a heavy table in his attached garage workshop, Ben Mitchell had a clear view of the front of his house between slightly opened curtains. As expected, they had come, and as hoped they had been channeled into his front walkway. He had set a timer to turn off the television and lamp in his den at 11:35 PM, and another to turn off his bathroom light at 11:45. When they had approached he was already in his guard position, sitting on a chair placed atop his cleared-off workbench, where he could see out of the small garage window across the front of his house and out to the street.
Ben was wearing an old BDU uniform he had dyed black in his washing machine. Underneath he wore civilian clothes, a gray suit for Washington camouflage. Over his uniform he wore an old military kevlar vest covered in pouches and pockets, and an old Kevlar helmet on his head. He had spray painted all of this black, to closely match what he guessed an FBI assault team would be wearing. He wore clear parachuting goggles to protect his eyes and obscure his face, and green Nomex aviator’s gloves on his hands.
The pouches and pockets attached to the vest were packed with escape tools and getaway gear. In the end he just couldn’t bring himself to formulate a plan which didn’t include a provision for his escape, no matter how short or long term it might prove to be. One of the pouches on his chest had been modified into a holster, and in it he carried his government model Colt .45 pistol. If he could escape, he would.
Beginning at eleven PM the same dark Crown Victoria drove slowly up and then back down his street at even fifteen-minute intervals. Ben wondered why the supervisors didn’t just go with the video imagery that they were undoubtedly getting from all angles. Perhaps the older supervisors just couldn’t bring themselves to trust the technology, and had to personally lay their eyeballs on the house to reassure themselves. He wished he had a radio scanner, he could only imagine the web of radio traffic swirling around his house.
At 2:30 AM a dark van with all of its lights out rolled up and slowed in front of Mrs. Mendoza’s house, almost beyond his sight. A half-dozen or more dark figures poured out of it and scurried low across her yard and into his. They moved to his front door where they sank down to hide out of sight below his bushes. Two of the men continued across his yard to a position below his bedroom window, no more than twenty feet from Ben’s garage lookout post. They were just visible in the glow from the streetlight on the distant corner of the block.
That old intense rush came back over him, flowing through him stronger than any drug, that never forgotten thrill of waiting motionless in ambush, to be rewarded by the appearance of the unsuspecting enemy in the kill zone…
They wouldn’t wait now. Their snipers and rear security team would already be in position, ready. Ben knew what was coming next, and he was ready too.
In each hand he held a small green electricity-generating “clacker” the size of a computer mouse. Each trailed a long thin wire tail. They had originally come packaged with claymore mines. The mines were long gone but the clackers remained.
Ben had chosen to use the old military hand generators as much out of nostalgia as for any other reason. Some of the most intense memories of his life had revolved around those spring-hinged claymore clackers, sending squads of NVA soldiers to their doom in a steel hailstorm. If tonight was going to be his last combat action, he wanted to feel something comforting and familiar in his hands. He had tested them on small light bulbs and they had worked perfectly, and this had saved him the trouble of putting together a battery-powered switch.
****
The FBI SWAT team members crouched on each side of the low front porch and looked away, ready for their small breaching charges to blow the door inward. A pair of SWAT team members waiting outside the master bedroom was going to initiate the assault by “breaking and raking” his window with a long handled sledge hammer, and then immediately tossing in two Def-Tek flash-bang grenades with two second delay fuses. The front door breaching charges would be fired the instant that they heard the window shatter, and they would be on top of their man in less than five seconds. They knew just how long it would take, because they had already run through the maneuver a dozen times today in full assault gear on their base at Quantico. They trained and trained, but arresting a violent felon never became routine, and now their adrenaline was surging as it always did.
Each crouching man held his MP-5 with its sound suppressor and barrel-mounted gun light in front of him, their stocks tucked into their shoulders. Their gloved right index fingers all rested just outside their trigger guards, their right thumbs rested lightly on the safety selector switches above their pistol grips.
A thirty round magazine fully loaded with ten millimeter bullets was in the well of each of their MP-5s, a second magazine was snapped alongside it for a faster first reload, and more magazines were ready in the pouches on their tactical vests. In each left ear a tiny radio speaker kept them synchronized to the plan as Romeo Two counted down from five to one. In a matter of seconds the entry team could fire hundreds of devastating ten millimeter slugs into any person presenting a threat to them, but they fully expected that a pair of flash-bang grenades and eight retina-searing gun lights would make shooting their quarry unnecessary.
****
Ben Mitchell stood peering out between the curtains of the garage window, his hands holding the twin claymore mine clackers firmly, waiting for the assault team to move first, waiting for them to initiate the violence. He saw one of the men below his bedroom window stand tall, leaning over his hedges with a sledge hammer held back over his head as his partner stood up behind him.
The long hammer came down through his window, exploding it, and then was raked in a swift circle clearing the screen and the glass shards away as the second man tossed in two small cylinders, flash-bang grenades. At the moment the glass shattered there was a flash of light
and a boom from his front porch, and then more booms from his bedroom and the stacked assault team rose up and went flooding through the front door.
Ben paused a moment to let them all get inside, then he squeezed both spring-hinged clackers hard and electrical charges shot down the thin green wires to the blasting caps at the other ends.
The electric blasting caps were embedded into golf-ball-sized chunks of white C-4 military high explosive, saved from the Wilson Bridge demolition charges. Mitchell had plenty of blasting caps. They were smaller than cigarettes, made of aluminum with a pair of thin red and white wires trailing from one end. And it had been no particular problem to cook up crude high explosives, not with his garage workshop full of solvents and other chemicals that he routinely used in his business, along with a few items from his medicine cabinet, his bathroom and from under his kitchen sink. The technical problem was in reliably initiating a clean high-order detonation of his kitchen explosives using only blasting caps, which was why he had saved a little C-4 for just this type of contingency. The caps would detonate the C-4, and the C-4 would detonate his kitchen demo mines, no problem.
The FBI Enhanced SWAT team poured into his foyer, lighting up his living room with the amazingly bright Sure-Flash lights mounted under their gun barrels, as the boom of the flash-bang grenades reverberated from his bedroom down the hall. Fifteen feet away from them, against the opposite foyer wall, was a kitchen chair with a towel draped over it. Hidden under the towel was a square plastic Tupperware casserole dish the size of a large textbook, which was duct-taped on its edge to the back of the chair. The casserole dish, with its lid snapped tightly on, had a small green wire leading into a tiny hole in its back. Just in front of the casserole dish on the seat of the chair was standing a cardboard box full of a common household cleaning item, and in front of that box was a one gallon plastic milk jug that was not filled with milk.
The entire SWAT entry team was within fifteen feet of the towel-draped kitchen chair when the electrical impulses reached their blasting caps and Ben’s living room exploded outward in a massive fireball. That end of the house was an immediate splintered inferno; it went from zero to Armageddon in one second, and nobody came out.
Behind Ben’s house, just beyond his backyard fence, his other improvised mine had detonated in the gulley where he had guessed that the assault team’s rear security element would be lying in wait. As soon as he squeezed his two hand generators Ben dropped them and jumped off his table and crossed his workshop to another table. Here a row of high capacity military smoke grenades the size of spray paint cans were waiting, with their pins pre-straightened and partially pulled out. The small window on the back side of his garage was already open; he pulled the pins and threw out four smokes in rapid succession. Ben drew his cocked and locked .45 while he paused to let the smoke bloom, and then he pushed his side garage door open and dove through it, rolling sideways into his yard lest the snipers find him. The flames from the other end of his house were already hot on his back. He scrambled to his feet and ran through the billowing clouds of fire-lit purple and yellow smoke, reached his waist high chain link fence and vaulted over it, and then rolled down into the drainage gully running behind his property.
****
FBI SWAT team member Weston Thatcher was lying prone at the top of the ravine, peering over the berm watching the back of the suspect’s house and listening to the assault team’s countdown in his earphone. The door-breaching charges detonated exactly as he expected, then there was a massive explosion just off to his right side. The concussion of the blast rendered him senseless momentarily, but much of its force was absorbed by the other three rear-security team members to his right. Two of them had been kneeling or hunching upright for a better view instead of lying flat, and so they had been blown over Thatcher, who also was hurled some distance. He of course remembered none of this, but when he could see again through one eye he saw a helmeted figure in black moving through radiant yellow smoke just past where he lay. The man paused and looked directly at him, holding a pistol in his hand.
Thatcher tried to say, “Who are you,” through his smashed teeth and bloody lips but no sound came out, anyway he could not have heard a reply with both of his ear drums ruptured. Anyone fleeing the house in this direction would be a Bad Guy, and it was Thatcher’s sole mission tonight to stop anyone from fleeing. The man crawling past him was dressed like a team member, but not quite. The man was dressed in black, with a black helmet, but this man wore no black face mask. This man was black; this man’s face was black, black, black. The suspect was black, and nobody on his team was black. Black. Black face, black. Thatcher slipped in and out of sensibility as bands of pain tightened their grip around him. Anyone coming in this direction was a Bad Guy. Anyone coming in this direction had to be stopped, and even in Thatcher’s semi-delirious state his mission tasking rose to the front of his mind. Anybody who was black was the Bad Guy tonight. The Bad Guy.
****
Ben Mitchell looked briefly at the broken bodies of the SWAT troopers, covering them with his pistol. One was still alive, moaning, his face was a bloody wreck, his left arm was bent impossibly, a compound fracture. He scrambled past them and got to his feet and began to run up the slope toward the protection of the bushes and woods and the fence line which led away to safety.
****
Special Agent Thatcher, lying on his back, felt for his MP-5 but he could not reach it, and that’s when he discovered that his left arm didn’t work at all. His MP-5 was trapped under him still connected by its sling, so he reverted to training without thinking and drew the .45 caliber pistol from the black tactical holster which was still strapped to his right leg. He raised it one-handed across his stomach, flicked the safety down and then depressed the gun light’s pressure switch with his thumb.
The light mounted to the rail under the pistol’s slide threw a harsh yellow cone out into the swirling smoke and its brilliant center found the running man’s back, wavered and fell and found him again. He couldn’t hold up the heavy pistol any longer as the beam wavered from side to side across the man’s back. Thatcher squeezed the trigger twice, and then he passed out.
20
The President couldn’t sleep and had refused the offered pill. He was wearing his blue robe with the gold Presidential seal, pacing back and forth in a study off of his bedroom, rereading the proposal written by a mid-level BATF official named Walter Malvone, with his half-glasses low on his nose. His on-duty Secret Service liaison entered through the partially open door to the corridor and spoke to him in hushed tones, handing him a telephone. It was more bad news: the Director of the FBI was on the phone from the Hoover building, where he was pulling another all-nighter.
“Mr. President, we’ve got a situation underway in Reston Virginia. Actually it’s a total disaster, I’m sorry, it’s…” Director Sheridan was choking with emotion.
“Give it to me straight, Wayne.”
“We have an FBI SWAT team out there in Reston; they were serving a warrant on the prime suspect in the Wilson Bridge sabotage. They were ambushed… They were blown up and burned, the house is burning… It’s a total mess, and it’ll be on TV any minute. It’s going to be bad sir, real bad.”
“Jesus… How many casualties?”
“We don’t know yet, most of the team I think. It looks like nobody got out of the house… The on-scene commander is working it; I’m watching some of our own video. We’ve got some bad burns and a lot of missing at this point. I’m hearing eight missing and three dead, and it doesn’t look good for the missing. They were in the house…”
“Okay Wayne, thanks. Keep me informed.” Lost deep in thought, President Gilmore handed the phone back to the Secret Service agent. Gilmore was still holding the heavily underlined, highlighted and margin-noted Malvone paper. He gestured to the liaison; he was as always fully alert, pulling his normally quiet midnight duty. “Get me my CSO. I need Harvey Crandall here as soon as possible.”
“Yes sir, right away sir.” The Secret Service agent backed up, spun on his heel, and left the study.
****
The phone call Wally Malvone had long been anticipating came at 4:30 AM on Thursday morning, eleven days after the events at the stadium. He was tersely instructed to be at a certain entrance to the Old Executive Office Building, on the other side of the White House from the Treasury Building, promptly at 8 AM.
Malvone’s driver dropped him off on 17th Street. He passed through numerous security points where his various ID cards and badges were closely examined, and his briefcase was inspected. Upon entering the building he was scanned with a metal detecting wand, and handed a receipt in exchange for his SIG 220 pistol. He was given an escort of both a uniformed Secret Service officer, and someone in a suit with a laminated badge clipped to his jacket pocket, who did not bother to identify himself. They led him deep into the building to an executive elevator, and finally down a hall past another security checkpoint where his briefcase and cell phone and PDA were taken, and he was once again scanned closely with a wand and patted down thoroughly.
His minders directed him to a small windowless conference room where he was left alone and told to wait. They closed the door behind him without any other instructions. He sat at the unadorned narrow mahogany table, enjoying himself immensely, while endeavoring to maintain a poker face in the event that he was under observation. The walls were bare white. The unusually thick door through which he had entered was also painted white on the inside, and now that it was closed it blended with the walls so as to be scarcely noticeable. Sitting absolutely still he could hear nothing, not the faintest rumble or vibration from the building, not even the sound of an air duct. He was obviously in some sort of a quiet room, well protected from eavesdropping devices or methods.
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