Understand you have a 10-52 that’s going to be coming up that lane toward the barn?”
“Ten-four,” said Marty. “Last I heard, two of ‘em. Go up on Orange for a minute.”
That was a signal to change to a scrambled, restricted access frequency, so that TAC 6 and the helicopter could discuss something that wasn’t for just everybody. They were being careful, and I liked that.
Sally was holding up her fingers. “Shit. That’s at least eight of ‘em,” she said. “Eight.”
“Yeah. With the two, that would have been ten.”
We all looked at one another in the faint orange glow of the heater.
“That’s just too many,” I said, “for one fuckin’ car. Where the hell’s Hector’s van with the Nebraska plates, then? “A van made more sense, although it would have been pretty crowded with ten people in one. The van plus the car, on the other hand, would just about fit.
Sally held up her walkie-talkie, “It’s Lamar for you on Ops.”
I switched my frequency to channel 1, and said, “Three.”
“Okay, now everybody listen up.” Lamar must have called a radio conference. “Here’s the deal. Two ten-fifty- twos go up. They take their crews and one officer each. They stop in the yard, right in the middle. Nobody, I repeat, nobody goes outside the circle of the yard light.” There was a brief transmission break as he organized his thoughts. “Okay, everybody listenin’? They will bring their wounded man into the light, and the EMTs from the first ambulance will go to them with a stretcher. Both officers in the ambulances go to the stretcher with them. Nobody else. Repeat, nobody else.”
Another transmission break, followed by, “While they do that, 1-388 will come out to the other ambulance. 1 -388 can walk on her own. She will get into that ambulance. Both ambulances leave at the same time. Nobody else moves into the area. It goes smooth and quick. If you’re ten-four on that, sound off in order, starting with Three.”
“Three’s ten-four,” I said. That was followed by acknowledgments from eight or nine team-leading officers, and both ambulances; Battenberg 51 and Maitland 52.
“Okay,” said Lamar. “We go in ten minutes.”
It sounded like a plan, all right.
As Lamar finished, my cell phone went off again. This time it was Marty.
“Carl, look. The HRT is going to be here really soon. The plan is, as soon as the ambulances clear the area on their way out, the HRT goes in, and then we go in. Get ready to move, because when HRT reach the barn in good shape, you guys will leave with us. We take you out, down to the road, and then move back up. The HRT will advance on the suspects. They want you out of there as soon as you can get out.”
“What about the people at the silo?”
“They’ll neutralize them.”
I wondered just how to neutralize somebody two-thirds of the way up a silo. I hoped he was right when he said they could do that. “Okay. Sounds like a plan.”
“We call you one more time, just before we come to get you.”
“Got it.”
“Should be within fifteen minutes or so. If the HRT gets here while the ambulances are still up at the barn area, we wait until they clear.”
“Right.”
“The word is, if anybody tries anything with the ambulance, we take ‘em out.”
“Good.”
“Okay. See you soon.”
CHAPTER 18
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2001 16:33
“Skripkin’s bullshitting,” said Volont.
“No shit,” I said. “Which part? “We were sitting in the taping room, getting ready to replay the Skripkin interview for the second time. We’d been joined by FBI agents Gwen Thurgood and Milton Hawse, who had broken off from the searches in Battenberg after Volont had called them from the Conception County Jail.
“Let’s start with when he says ‘to kill Jews.’ That’s bullshit. If somebody wants to kill the Jews who get meat from some delis, all you have to do is break into a deli and put the stuff on the food right on-site. Hell, it’d be a whole lot easier just to toss a bomb in the front door. Nope. Won’t fly. He’s lying.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. So now tell me why,” said Hester. “Why lie about what they’ve already done?”
Volont had a satisfied look. “Okay, lady agent,” he said. “To keep us from figuring out what they’re going to do.”
It was quiet. Volont leaned forward just slightly. “What we have here is the warm-up. The game hasn’t started yet. Now, assume you want to poison a food supply. On a big, big scale. Kill thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people.”
“We don’t really have any evidence for that,” said Hawse.
“Now, just hang on here,” said Volont. “Like I said, assume that and just listen for a minute. But, no, we don’t. No direct evidence, anyway. However, we do have an involvement with Al Qaeda through our Mr. Odeh. That’s not theoretical. We do know that much. Keep with me for a minute,” he said, forestalling another comment from Hawse. “You can’t just try a method and then try it again and again until you get it right. Won’t work. The first big attempt, the one where you tip your hand, really has to work right from the start. Otherwise, you set off alarms all over the country, and you don’t get a second shot. Not these days.” Volont glanced around the room. We were all listening.
“Right…” said Hawse.
“Okay, then. You start small. You do a little test. An experiment. Very small scale. Where? You go to a sparsely populated area with virtually no cops.” He made a sweeping gesture around the room. “Well, shit, here we are. Like they say, the heartland will never be a police state, because there just about aren’t any police.”
He was right about that, at least.
“Then, you pick the most closely supervised, cleanest, most sanitary operation you can find. A kosher meat plant fills that bill. For one thing, this one just so happens to be located in the middle of a rural area, okay? For another, it hires nonresident labor. This whole area is just about made in heaven for these bastards to waltz in and do their thing without anybody picking up on their being here.”
“An experiment?” asked George.
“Sure. If you get it to work in a kosher plant, you can get it to work anywhere. Even the FDA guys say that the kosher plants are the best in the business. Sanitary. Clean. Safe. Closely supervised. It’s a family business, for Christ sake, not a big corporation. The guys who own and run that place get involved in the whole business.”
“Your point?” asked Hawse.
“It’s coming. But there’s one more thing,” added Volont. “With this one, you get the added benefit that your experiment, if successful, also kills Jews. That works two ways.”
“How?” asked Gwen.
“Like this. First, we have Mustafa Abdullah Odeh. An involvement by him is almost a guarantee that I’m on the right track here, all by itself. We’ve got the ricin in the meat that sure as hell didn’t get there by accident. We’ve got a Colombian connection, Rudy, who hired out to work with Mustafa and whichever particular group he’s fronting for right now. So what we’ve got is a carefully planned, controlled experiment. Look, the Jews are a secondary target here. Frosting. It’s really sensitive because the victims are Jewish, but don’t let that distract you from understanding the real intent, here. Don’t forget these people are connected to the 9/11 bunch. Their primary objective is to kill Americans. They want to destroy American icons, like the World Trade Center. And they want to terrify as many Americans as possible. Hell,” he said, “I’d bet even money that if Juan Miguel Alvarez, aka Hassan Ahmed Hassan, does have a hatred of the Jews. It’s an acquired taste. It’s like Osama bin Laden, you remember? He hardly said diddly shit about Jews until we started goin’ after his ass in Afghanistan. Then, all of a sudden, he’s a crusader against Jews in general, and Israel in particular. Smoke screen, just like the one Skripkin’s trying to blow up our ass.”
