by Marcus Wynne
“Observation deck. About ten minutes away. You want anything from Starbucks?”
“We don’t have time for Starbucks,” she said. “Hurry up.”
“On the way,” Hunter said.
2
“Has Langley got this yet?” Basalisa said as Hunter walked into the crowded conference room.”
“They’ve got it, boss,” a young male agent said. “I got receipt, and their terrain analysis folks are linking with NSA and DOD right now.”
Basalisa waved Hunter over. “Look at this.”
On a broad screen 24 inch color monitor, a video image played. A camera panned slowly over the inside of a barn building. Against one wall were barrels, blue polyethylene. Beside them was an idle fork lift. Sacks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, barrels of fuel oil. Center piece of the image was a yellow Ryder truck. Just briefly, the camera strayed across the open door and out over a long expanse of cornfield. In the distance was a cluster of silos, and a tall tower that looked like a radio or cell station. Shadows cut sharply across the field. Then the screen went blank.
“Where did this come from?” Hunter said.
“Another electronic transmission to the media. My hackers are working to try and trace the packets back, but this guy knows what he’s doing. The originating packet was broken up and distributed to servers all over the world, run through encryption, scrambled all the hell up…pretty damn tough to pin it down. So he knows the internet…but we’re hoping he don’t know about some of our other tricks,” Basalisa said.
Hunter studied her intent face, the lines drawn fierce, and the barely concealed exultation in her voice. She was on to something.
“You see,” she said, in response to his unspoken question. “That last shot…the field? Looks like just a cornfield, like millions of others in the world. We know it’s in the States, probably in the Midwest, probably right here in Illinois. And if it was just cornfield, we wouldn’t have much chance of finding which cornfield in any reasonable amount of time…though we could, eventually. But just maybe we got lucky…just maybe. The silos and the tower? That gives us a unique signature from the sky, and the fall of the shadows, that gives us a time and direction…”
“Terrain analysis,” Hunter said.
“Right,” Basalisa said. She didn’t seem at all surprised that Hunter knew about it. “Langley’s people. They can take that configuration, the time, all that, then run it through all the imagery that NSA, DOD, Space Command and the Agency have…and they’ll find those silos with the tower and back azimuth from that to the barn.”
“Is HRT ready?” Hunter said.
“Blackhawks are turning right now, there’s a full assault team standing beside them. I want you with them.”
“Roger that,” Hunter said. “They got some battle rattle I can borrow?”
“Ole Bjornstadt is on point again,” Basalisa said. “He asked for you. He’s got what you need.”
“On the way,” Hunter said. “We’ll patch through direct to your cell.”
“Get them, Hunter,” Basalisa said. “Roll these ones up. Bring me one. Alive.”
3
It took Langley just about as long as it took Hunter to get out to the airfield, throw on a borrowed plate carrier and load his borrowed M-4 to determine the location of the barn.
“Nearest big town is Decatur,” Ole said. “There’s a National Guard helicopter unit there, Blackhawks, so we’re going right into the airport. We’ve got the Resident Agent standing by with a four wheely….we’re going to drive a recon team right out there and put them in the weeds…get eyes on. The rest of us will hang back till we get the big picture. We’ll only be maybe five, ten minutes flight time from the farmhouse. Once we got eyes on, we can fast rope down right on them, or put down and foot mobile across. I’m trying to round up enough vehicles, but I don’t have the resources to put any good vehicles together to get the whole team on site in time…”
“Bus?” Hunter said. “Maybe the local Sheriff has a prisoner transport, something like that…”
Ole looked at Hunter, then nodded sharply. “Great idea. I’ll get the RAC on it.”
4
Luke Winn slithered forward on his belly, stopped, took a deep breath, then lowered his face to the stock of his rifle and peered through the Kahles telescopic sight. The open door of the barn leapt into his circular field of vision. He slowly scanned thoroughly, near, far, to the full field of observation. There was no activity that he could see, but he could definitely see the yellow Ryder truck, and in the shadows the shape of what were most likely the blue barrels he’d seen in the video imagery.
“No movement on target,” Luke whispered into his throat mike. “Positive ID on yellow Ryder truck, probable ID on blue barrels, again, no movement on site.”
5
“There’s been no movement on the site for 45 minutes,” Ole said. “We’ve got portable thermal imagers out there, and we’re not getting anything clear in the house. There is one source in the barn. But scatter and diffusion from the ground heat and the roof is giving us some grief. I’ve talked with the boss. The problem with a stealth assault is that there’s so much open ground between the fields and the barn. If we go vehicle, there’s over a half a mile of exposed road before we hit the barn from the main road. Our shooters have a Barrett that will go right through that barn and into the heat source if need to…I’m calling a straight up air assault, ride right in on top of these fuckers and fast rope in the door. Enter hard fast and affirmative.”
Ole looked around. “Any questions?”
His crew was silent. One of the young guns murmured, “Fucking A right, Ole. Put us in the door.”
Ole nodded, then looked at Hunter. “You still up to speed on a fast rope, Agent James?”
“I won’t be on the rope,” Hunter said. “I’m too gimped up. I don’t want to take the risk..”
“You don’t need to say a word, Agent James,” Ole said. “We’ll be putting one down ASAP once we’re clear. You’ll be on it.”
Hunter nodded, and fought down his own ill placed sense of shame and embarrassment at not being one of the first through the door. His days were over for that, he knew it, and so did these young guys, but that didn’t make it feel any better.
“Our EOD guys are on the second wave,” Ole said. “I got some experts with handles from the Air Force downstate, they can handle it if we need to mess around with the explosives. We’ve trained for this, we know what to do. Let’s go do it.”
6
Barry Panera was 33 years old, and had been an FBI agent since he was 25, and a HRT member since he was 32, and today was his one year birthday with the team. In honor of the occasion, they put him first in the door on the lead.
“You’re our Gumby!” Ole said. “That’s what young guys are for. I got first dibs on that piece of shit Seiko watch of yours when you buy it. I’d take your pistol, but my Karl Sokol beats up your Hilton Yam any day. More expensive don’t mean better, but hey, maybe we’ll sell it for beers to drink at your wake.”
The laughter was loud and raucous, and Barry shook his head and kept his mouth shut, as befitted the FNG. He was scared, and everybody knew it, and he knew it, but he still got ready and put it away, and that was what his team mates all watched for, that was one of the boxes to check on the checklist all of them carried in their head, the checklist that came under the question: Will I trust this man with my life?
The loud macho poseurs, they were the first to fall; and the rest of the others, inadequate in some way that they hadn’t learned to compensate for in a positive fashion, they fell too, if not in the grueling selection course that HRT ran, but then in the operational probation period, where in addition to the rigorous mandated tests and standards they had to maintain, had to run the gauntlet of the unofficial hazing and personal testing by the seasoned, hardened shooters of the most elite law enforcement team of door kickers in the world.
The rope master double checked the ropes and thei
r attachment, the ropes carefully coiled and prepped; then he gave the thumbs up to the crew chief, who murmured into his mouthpiece. The pilot turned and looked over his shoulder and nodded at Ole and Hunter, then worked his stick and the Blackhawk lifted into the air like a pregnant dragonfly.
They kept the doors open and the city of Decatur fell away beneath them, within moments turning to a long flat expanse of farm fields rich with soy beans and corn, dotted by the occasional silo or cluster of farm buildings. Hunter turned his face to the rush of air coming in through the open door, and closed his eyes for a moment as the hot summer air whipped through his thinning hair. The sensation brought back memories, long old memories: an air assault, his first, in training at Fort Bragg, when he was a young M-60 gunner and looking out and seeing an entire airborne battalion task force in the hair, long before the Blackhawks, old Hueys, these, the Cobra gun ships darting in and out of the formation, the Loaches flitting off to one side; then a time in Korea, working in the DMZ, watching a hail of green tracers fall onto a UN medevac helicopter and him guiding red tracers from his platoon onto the NKs; riding along as an observer with the Army’s Delta Force during an aircraft recovery operation, on the bench seats of a modified OH-58…
He’d had some good times in rotary aircraft, that’s for sure. His whole youth had been highlighted in helicopters. He hoped today would not be his last.
That thought came out of nowhere, but he spent some time with it. That was something one of the Agency counselors had told him, after Raven had been killed: “You want to let your feelings come up. Just be the master of them, so they won’t be the master of you. Notice it, own it, play with it, stay with it.” So he did.
Ole had skimmed over the details, but their briefing had covered it -- going into an environment packed with explosives and flammable materials was a dangerous tasking, but in essence not much different than a police unit taking down a meth lab loaded with flammable materials. There had been a brief discussion as to whether or not to bring in a DOE team that specialized in recovery of “items” that had explosive potential in and around explosive and/or radioactive material, but the HRT hung onto their mandate. This was a contingency they trained for, and though they had not yet had the tasking, they were probably as well trained as any team in the country for the job. The attached assets from the Air Force were some of the best trained in the world, and the senior NCO had recent experience with vehicle IEDs from Iraq, so they were good to go.
Hunter double checked his M-4; pulled back the charging handle to expose the brass of a chambered round, let it go forward, hit the forward assist twice, checked the safety. His pistol was good to go, that was his own. It was borrowed weapons he didn’t trust. He felt the mood in the chopper go from nervous laughter to focus and resolve. These were good operators, world class shooters, and today, he was glad that it was them he was going into harm’s way with.
Harm’s way. That was something most people would never understand. This was what they did, this was how they defined themselves, by their willingness to go in harm’s way again and again, most often where no one would ever know, and deal out violence or the threat of violence. It was a crazy world, and it seemed especially so when you were sitting somewhere safe and secure, sipping an expensive cup of coffee and flipping through a paperback novel.
Hunter wouldn’t trade his place with anyone in the world for anything on earth.
“Two minutes!” the crew chief shouted.
The rope master took his place and the men shifted into position. Hunter took a deep breath. Ole looked at him and nodded.
“We’ll see you on the ground,” the big Norwegian said.
The Blackhawks roared towards the barn suddenly visible, growing before the eye with each heartbeat, and then the big birds flared up, and the ropes went out.
“On the rope!” the ropemaster shouted.
Barry Panera led the way on the right hand side of the aircraft; on the opposite side Ole leaped on and then the rest of the assault team in the lead aircraft went out and down in five meter intervals and almost before they knew it, they were down and on the ground, spread out in a staggered assault line, no stack here, it was run to the fight…
Hunter watched them advance on the open barn door, and then a two man element make entry. The short bursts of voices over the command net rang in his ears through the head set he had rigged to his tactical radio.
“Clearing main floor…”
“Vehicle clear…”
“Covering loft ladder….”
“Climbing…”
“Loft clear…”
“Entering house…”
“Kitchen clear…”
“Living room clear…”
Ole’s voice was hard on the net. “EOD up…open the rear door, we have a heat source…”
7
Master Technical Sergeant Gene Tackleberry ran a hand held scanner around the perimeter of the door. The device was essentially a small x-ray device that let him see if there were any specific wiring or latches set to go off if the rear door to the truck was opened.
Nothing.
Next he ran a portable sniffer to detect explosive residue. He clucked softly to himself as he watched the digital read out.
“Well, well,” he said. “We got your basic ammonium nitrate, we gots some C-4, military issue, and some miscellaneous goodies…”
“Can you enter?” Ole said. “We’ve got a heat source in there. Body.”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Tackleberry said. He reached up and tugged at the handle and yanked the door up. “Bang!”
The shooters jumped.
“Cocksucker,” Ole said, live over the mike.
The door swung up and opened wide. Inside, tied to a kitchen chair with rope and duct tape, an elderly woman in a faded gingham print dress glared at them over the wide band of tape holding her mouth closed. Her dress was spotted and wet in front.
“Hey hotshot!” Ole said. “How the fuck did you know there wasn’t any wiring in there?”
“Magic of technology, Special Agent. That and years of experience. And the wisdom of the wise old sage,” Tackleberry said dryly.
“In other words, you didn’t.”
Tackleberry laughed and shook his head. “Oh, ye of little faith. Better see to the civilian, shouldn’t you?”
Ole waved two shooters forward, and they entered alongside Tackleberry, who glanced over the chair, and then nodded his assent to the two young guns. Panera pulled out a Strider AR and thumbed open the massive blade, then sliced through the tape binding the old woman to the chair. While she rubbed her hands and thin wrists, he peeled up an edge of the tape across her mouth.
“This will only hurt for a minute, ma’am,” he said. Then he yanked the tape off in one fast pull.
“Ow!” Margaret Simmons shouted. “Christ Jesus, be careful!”
8
“Make sure and get all this,” Hunter said to a junior agent manning a portable digital recorder with a wireless connection to a router in the helicopter. The video footage was running live back to the operations center where Basalisa Coronas hunched over a terminal watching.
“Got it, Agent James,” the agent said.
“So tell it to me slowly, Margaret,” Hunter said. “We need to know…”
“I don’t know what happened! I don’t understand what got into him…do you know? Gene Polchek is no terrorist, he fought in the war in Korea and Viet Nam, his son was a soldier…”
“Where did Gene go?” Hunter said. “After he tied you up and put you in the truck? Didn’t he know you could have died in there? With the heat, and the fumes…”
“Why would he do that?” she said, suddenly tearful. “I was always good to him. I don’t understand…he was so sad, but he meant business, I knew not to mess with him, he had a knife…I won’t believe he left me there to die. I won’t. He’s a God fearing man and he wouldn’t do that to me, I’ve sat with him in church, for goodness sake we’ve broken bread together
…”
“Did he say where he was going? What did he say, Margaret…it’s really important…”
She became still. The tears dried up as though by magic. “He did leave me to die, didn’t he? He never meant to come back. He left me in there with all those bombs. All that…stuff.”
She looked at Hunter and drew herself up. Suddenly she seemed much larger than she stood. “He left me there to die.”
“It appears that way, Margaret,” Hunter said.
“That son of a bitch,” she hissed. “I’d never believe that if I didn’t experience it myself.”
“Did he say he was coming back?”
“No,” she said. “He said that everything was changed, now. That I shouldn’t have come here. I just meant to check on him, see how he was, he’s been so down lately…No. He didn’t say he was coming back. He just said I wouldn’t have to worry. I wouldn’t be in there for long. He was just telling me that, wasn’t he? So I wouldn’t cause him a problem? He was lying, wasn’t he?”
Her eyes were narrowed and mean, but there was still a hint of hurt there. “Wasn’t he?”
9
“Was he?” Basalisa Coronas said. Her face was drawn with sharp lines in the digital image on the laptop out in the Blackhawk. “What’s your take?”
Hunter shrugged, looked at Ole, then back at the screen.
“It makes no sense,” he said. “He didn’t kill her, that would be logical. He leaves her in the vehicle, but there’s no anti-tampering devices on the truck, no timer, no dead man switch. There is a wiring circuit set up that could be attached to a detonator/initiator switch system in the cab of the truck…”