“There’s five cars and trucks parked up here on the driveway, and on the grass. At least there were an hour ago. One’s a camper, a pickup truck with a big camper on top, the kind that goes up over the cab. I can’t tell if it’s being used or not. There’s a couple of regular cars, and two SUVs. One’s a black Suburban, tinted windows, the whole nine yards. The garage door was closed when I was up at that end, but I didn’t spend much time up there. I was watching the river side most of the time, that’s where the people were.”
“What about guards?” asked Carson.
“I’m getting there,” said Tony. “It looks like they’re taking turns, about fifteen minutes or a half hour each. Sort of random, and not all the time. When they’re out walking around checking things, they’re wearing night vision goggles and carrying MP-5’s, the kind with the collapsing stock and the built-in silencer. One guy walked around and around the house. Another guy just sat in a chair up on the balcony, and had a cigarette. So it’s hard to say exactly what kind of guard situation we’ll see when we get there.”
“That’s okay,” said Carson, “We’ll scope it out when we’re on site. Was everybody downstairs, or were there people upstairs too?”
“Just that one guy on the balcony, smoking a cigarette. I didn’t see anybody stay upstairs, not inside the house, but I guess they could have. They all walked from their cars to the backyard on this sidewalk path here, along the west side of the house. I could’ve hit them with rocks.”
Wheeler snickered. “Malvone doesn’t want his goons tromping around in his living room; he makes them go around back like delivery men.”
“Probably doesn’t trust them in his house,” said Brad.
“Any dogs?” asked Carson
“Shit no! I wouldn’t have been watching them from so close if they had a dog, that’s for sure.”
“Do they leave the back door unlocked? Which way does it open?” asked Carson.
“It opens inward, I could tell that much. I didn’t really get a good look at the door when it was opened; the angle was wrong from where I was watching. I think they’re locking it from inside. After it got dark, when they wanted to go inside, the guards knocked on the door, and then waited a little bit and went inside. So I’m guessing they’re unlocking it from inside. There’s probably a peep hole in the door, or a closed circuit TV, to see who’s outside.”
“Well, we can work on that. That opens up some possibilities. Did the guards have radios?”
“Walkie-talkies, or maybe cell phones. I couldn’t tell. Nothing fancy, no headsets or anything like that. Very casual.”
“So it’s dark around the rest of the house? No motion triggered lights, nothing like that?”
“Nope. The sentries were wearing NVGs, and they just walked around in the open.”
Wheeler made a half smile and said, “They think they own the night when they wear night goggles. Tactical common sense goes straight out the window.”
“I’d say that’s right. They didn’t see me. I always stayed behind good cover. You can tell that when they put on NVGs they think they’re invisible. They walk around in the open like they’re strolling in a park. They don’t use cover, nothing.”
“I think it’s true, they’re all attack and no defense,” Wheeler added. “These morons still think they’re the only ones around with night goggles. We can definitely use that to our advantage.”
“Okay, let’s break out the guns and suit up,” said Carson. “Great report, Tony. It looks good; it looks like a go, all the way.”
“So let’s go kick some ass,” said Tony.
“Let’s get Malvone,” said Carson. “And bring him back here alive.”
“Let’s get it done,” said Brad.
****
“Now that’s what I call an effective negotiating strategy,” said Tim “Hollywood” Jaeger. He was sitting with them at the poker table, but the game was on hold while they watched a news replay on the big screen TV in the corner of Malvone’s party room.
“Yeah, that’s what I call rapid conflict resolution,” joked Michael Shanks. They were all watching a cable news channel replay of a police action which had occurred earlier in the day. A television news helicopter had captured the video Friday morning in northern Illinois, where a brick farmhouse was the epicenter of a SWAT standoff.
An informant had called 1-855-GUN-STOP and reported that a certain farmer had a hidden cache of illegal assault and sniper rifles. Farmer Brown was, evidently, not interested in discussing the matter with law enforcement officials, and had taken his telephone off the hook and barricaded himself inside his one story red brick home.
The airborne video camera, obviously filming from extreme range judging by the jerkiness and lack of focus, zoomed back and panned along the dirt road leading into the farmhouse. A pair of armored cars with three oversized tires on each side rolled up the road, then spread apart and halted 100 yards from the farmer’s front door. Each combat vehicle had a long slender gun barrel protruding from a small turret on their front slopes.
If there were any more warnings issued, they were not audible on the tape. The videotaped replay had apparently been edited down to eliminate many long boring minutes of inaction. After what seemed like only moments since they arrived on the scene (actually an hour had passed), white smoke and shiny gold-colored dots were seen pouring from the fronts of the two armored cars. At the same time, glass, brick fragments and dust exploded across the front of the house. The silent firing continued on the television for ten solid seconds, and ceased abruptly. The unseen news announcer repeated the official police department version of events. The barricaded farmer had fired on the armored vehicles, “forcing” them to fire back in “self-defense.”
After another editing break to eliminate more tedious real-time waiting, white and then black smoke began pouring from the front windows of the farmhouse, followed by bright orange flames shooting from all sides of the house. The flames curled upward and wrapped around the roof and, within a minute, the entire house was fully engulfed.
“Man, we should have done that at Waco on Day One,” said Bob Bullard. “No more wasting weeks and weeks coddling these fanatics. ‘Come out in five minutes, or meet your maker.’ That’s all we should ever have to say.”
“Yeah, no more screwing around with these lunatics,” said Shanks. “Make it simple. Come out with your hands up, or face the consequences. Obey the law, or die. And if you decide to break the law, hey, that’s your problem.”
“It works for me,” said Wally Malvone, relighting his cigar with a Zippo lighter.
Joe Silvari looked between them and responded, “If it’s all so simple, if it’s all so easy, how come we’re hiding out down here at ‘Fort Malvone’? How many federal agents have been killed since all this crap started? Twenty? Thirty?”
“Three in the STU Team alone,” said Jaeger, suddenly subdued.
“Hammet doesn’t count,” said Bullard. “He wasn’t STU. And Clay Garfield was only contract, not an operator. Garfield screwed up, or he wouldn’t be MIA right now.”
“MIA?” asked Silvari. “He’s probably at the bottom of a river if you ask me. With a liquor bottle beside him.”
“Like Hammet,” said Shanks. “Pretty good work, whoever put him in the river. ‘Missed the turn, dead drunk’...or so they say. You gotta admire that kind of professionalism, that kind of attention to detail. He had a .16 blood alcohol when he croaked. If they Vince Fostered him, they did a damn convincing job.”
“What do you think?” asked Jaeger. “Fallon and Sorrento did it, and got away in Edmonds’s Mercedes?”
“Maybe,” said Bullard. “I’d say that’s probably a good guess. Hammet and Garfield screwed the pooch, one way or the other. They got cocky, they got sloppy, and they made a mistake. And so they paid the price. Don’t ever underestimate these guys we’re up against.”
“Well, I’m not forgetting those two, Fallon and Sorrento,” said Malvone, between puffs on his ciga
r. “Or Swarovski and Edmonds, for that matter. We’ll get back around to those guys. They haven’t seen the last of us; we’re not letting them slide off the hook.”
“It’s easy for you to be smug, Wally,” said Silvari. “You’re not on the damned Fed List. When I go home, I have to sneak in and out of my house, looking over my shoulder, checking out every car parked up and down the street.”
“Man, you’re not kidding,” said Jaeger. “The worst part is walking up on my back porch, wondering if somebody’s scoping it out from five-hundred yards away. I don’t even use the front door.”
Malvone was well into a fresh bottle of Tanqueray gin, and he wasn’t buying into their pity party. “Oh, stop your complaining. Everybody on the list is drawing max per-diem, straight into your pockets.” Half of the STU Team was on the Fed List, and half of them, with addresses outside of the three listed states, were not.
Some of the listed operators were staying with friends, relatives or unlisted team members. Shanks was staying in his camper. But no matter where they were staying, they were collecting over $150 a day in emergency per-diem funds. All of them were masters in the art of collecting bogus hotel receipts from compliant night managers to turn in with their claims. Like many federal agents, they routinely worked 100 plus hours a week during crisis periods, with no hourly overtime pay beyond the twenty-five percent comp pay they always made. This type of per-diem scam was considered a well-deserved perquisite of their profession.
“I’d trade the per-diem money for just being able to go in and out of my house without feeling crosshairs on my neck,” said Jaeger. “You’re just lucky you’re not on the list, Wally, that’s all I’m saying.” Malvone’s home of record was in tax-free Florida, where he had a condo.
Silvari said, “Wally, even if you’re not on the list, you’ve got to do something about your security. Why don’t you get some dogs? Rottweilers, or Dobermans maybe?”
“What do I need guard dogs for when I’ve got you guys?” joked Malvone. “Seriously, I can’t deal with dogs; they’re almost as bad as kids. I’m on the road all the time, and I just don’t want the hassle. Feeding them, taking them to vets, taking them to kennels, picking up their shit…no thanks! And I’d need to fence in the whole place, and that’d ruin the view across the creek.”
“Wally, you still need some decent security,” continued Silvari. “Get some cameras, motion detectors, infrared sensors… I can set you up next week. Really, you need to get serious about it.”
Malvone shook his head no. “Joe, we have deer out the ass down here. Tanaccaway Park is lousy with them; they swim back and forth to Fort Jeff all the time. They even swim across the Potomac; you can’t believe how those deer can swim! If I used motion detectors or infrared around the property, they’d be false alarming on deer all the time. Seriously, my best security is just having this place in my mother’s maiden name.”
Momma Malvone, nee Eloise Bertleman, age 79, was safely sequestered in an old folk’s center in Saint Petersburg Florida. The Tanaccaway Creek home where she had been born and raised had been kept in her maiden name for tax purposes. Wally, her only child, had evicted her, bag and baggage, when she turned seventy and he wanted to move back home—alone.
Silvari wouldn’t drop it. “That’s good for right now, but you could be on the next list to come out. You don’t know what’s going to happen, nobody does. Somebody could tail you, and follow you here.”
“Okay Joe, maybe you’re right. More cameras might be a good idea. Right now I’ve just got the one camera aiming up my driveway from the porch to the gate. And I’ve got one monitor up in my bedroom, and you’ve seen the other one in the kitchen. So maybe I should put another monitor down here? I always thought it was good enough just to wait for a car to stop at the gate, look at it on the TV, and buzz it in. And I’ve got alarm switches on all the windows and doors, those little magnetic things. You can see the one on top of the back door there. Yeah, why not? Go ahead and bring some more cameras down next week. Let one of your geeks install them. But hey, in the meantime, whose turn is it to go out and look around?”
“Are we still doing that?” asked Silvari. He had only gone out once all night.
Jaeger said, “I was just out; it’s not my turn.”
“I’ll go again,” said Shanks. “I need some fresh air anyway.” He pushed back from the table and drained his highball glass. Hanging on a peg board by the door were their jackets, a set of night vision goggles, and a black MP-5SD with an integral sound suppressor and a long magazine in it. He slipped on his brown leather coat, and slightly pushed aside the curtain covering the window near the door to take a quick look outside. Shanks slung the MP-5 over his shoulder, and pulled the NVGs down off their peg. Then he turned the door’s spring-loaded dead bolt, and went outside. The bolt clicked as it locked behind him.
****
It was only a mile and a half from the Molly M’s anchorage to Malvone’s house. Even with five of them in the gray inflatable, the 35-horsepower motor could have easily pushed the boat up onto a plane, and they could have covered the distance across the flat water in two or three minutes. But they were operating as stealthily as possible, so they let the engine push them quietly through the water at just an idle speed, a shadow lost against the unlit shoreline of Tanaccaway Park.
After his solo reconnaissance, Tony was the most familiar with Tanaccaway Creek, so he steered, sitting on the port side tube back by the thick wooden transom. He wore Hammet’s night vision goggles, which fit snugly over his face, held in place with a webbing of straps around his head. For him, the world existed in bright shades of green. Phil Carson was Tony’s partner on the mission, the other half of his two-man team, and he sat on the floorboards just in front of him. Brad and Ranya sat close together on the plywood deck on the starboard side, their backs to the rubber tube. Barney Wheeler sat inside the angled bow of the boat.
Their weapons were out of sight on the deck behind each of them, covered beneath dark bath towels from the halfway house. Even without visible firearms it would have been evident to the most casual Coast Guard or law enforcement observer that these five were up to no good: they were out at midnight on the dark river in an inflatable showing no lights. They wore matching black suits, black daypacks, black fanny packs turned to their fronts, and holstered pistols on their sides. They had loaded the Zodiac while still shielded from observation by the hull of the Molly M. After leaving her protective flank, they had had to transit for a half mile along the shoreline of the Potomac itself, close up along the tree-covered bank of Tanaccaway Park.
They reached the open mouth of the creek and Tony continued straight across it to the north side, Malvone’s side. This was a dangerous period. They were totally exposed, and they were all fearfully waiting for a searchlight to capture them in its beam as the Zodiac slid across the dark water. Their boat was no more bulletproof than the air inside its tubes.
In a few minutes, Tony reached the shoreline of Fort Jefferson, the upper lip of the mouth of the creek, and turned right. Once hard against the bank and heading into Tanaccaway Creek, they were relatively safe from the risk of discovery. The half-moon was almost down behind them, and provided them with some illumination ahead. Wearing night vision goggles, it was as bright as day for Tony.
The outboard motor made a low purring sound, and several times the aluminum skeg at the bottom of the shaft touched bottom. Tony, who was familiar with the depths from his kayak exploration, was staying as close to the shore as he could without going aground, or ruining the propeller. His destination was a chemlite marker, which he had positioned earlier. He had put the chemlite into a rusty soup can, and wedged the can into the crotch of a small tree with its open end facing southwest. Now the chemlite, invisible from the shore, was a brightly glowing beacon drawing him to the place where they would leave the boat and continue on foot.
His target was a maple tree on the shoreline, two-hundred yards west of Malvone’s property. The bank was
eroding away here, and the maple was leaning outward at a crazy angle. Its displaced roots churning up the earth, forming a little gulley and tearing a portion of the steep eight-foot-high bank into a manageable slope. Tony killed the engine and tipped it up. Barney slid over the front of the boat and dragged them along in the shallows by the bow line, until they were beneath the chemlite marker. They all slipped over the sides of the boat, and dragged it by its rope handles up on the pebble beach. The Zodiac would be invisible from Malvone’s backyard, in the unlikely event that anyone leaned far out over the bank and looked this way, while wearing night vision goggles. Wheeler tied its bow line securely to an exposed root branch. There on the rocky shore, beside the inflatable, they put on their packs and helmets and hung their weapon slings over their necks.
The last of the moonlight lit the bank enough for them to follow Tony as he climbed the little ravine by the maple tree up to the top. The large estate to the west of Malvone’s narrow property had several acres of woods as a barrier between them. Wearing George Hammet’s night vision goggles, Tony easily led them through the woods to a thicket just inside the tree line, in a position directly across from Malvone’s house. He had previously selected this spot, where they could see across the back of the house and observe the door to the basement party room. Carson and Tony sank down to a crouch and whispered into each other’s ears, and then they waited.
This spot was as far as Barney Wheeler was going. He had a carbine version of the AR-15, which had a small night scope mounted on top. The scope had been taken off of Hammet’s MP-5; it was the same scope Hammet had used to target Joe Bardiwell exactly two weeks earlier in Suffolk. Both the AR-15 and the MP-5 had the same standard type of optical sight mounting rail built on top of their receivers, facilitating the swap. The “third generation” night vision scope was only the size of a soda can. It made the night as bright and almost as clear as day, but only in monochrome green. Wheeler was going to stay behind at this point, with a clear field of fire to his left up the path toward the front of the house, across the back of the house over to the club room door, and to his right across the entire backyard to the river bank. Like the others, he had a small walkie-talkie radio taped to the left strap of his daypack, with a hands-free earplug and mike.
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 74