do?”
“I brought your son’s head to visit you. I thought you two had some things to discuss.”
Christyne Nasbe screamed until her throat was raw.
Jonathan and his team killed the next three hours poring over commercial-grade satellite maps of the Army of God compound. The photos were fuzzy at best, but by overlaying them with tax maps and a few ancient permits to tap into public water supplies, they were able to get enough of a rough layout to know that a random assault was out of the question with just the three of them. If they had the three of them times ten, it would still be out of the question without good intelligence on where the Nasbes were being held.
As Sam Shockley had indicated, the compound was huge, and a continuous fence showed clearly through the blur of the substandard imagery. There appeared to be several dozen buildings arranged in a pattern that suggested streets or pathways between them. According to utility company records, the compound had no electrical service on site; but Venice had been able to leverage Yellow Pages leads to tap into the sales records of local vendors who delivered gasoline, diesel, and propane to the compound. The amounts and frequency told Jonathan that the propane was likely used for cooking and the gasoline for fueling vehicles. They would have consumed fifty or maybe a hundred times those quantities if they were powering an electrical plant.
“Looks to me like we got some kind of cult working here,” Boxers said, reviewing the data. “They don’t appreciate the last hundred fifty years of progress.”
“They’re also dispatching death squads around the country,” Jonathan said. “What is it about the Stone Age that terrorists admire so much?”
Gail looked very concerned by it all. “You make light, Jon, but if the people in there are as armed as we’ve been told, we’re going to need help.” Her eyes bored into him. “You’re going to hate to hear this, but we’re going to have to call in the FBI for this. At a minimum, the West Virginia State Police.”
Boxers watched his boss expectantly, not agreeing, but not arguing, either.
“That’s the worst thing we can do,” Jonathan said. He kept his tone dismissive and authoritative. “We’d expose Security Solutions, we’d go to jail, and all the evidence they gathered would be thrown out because it was tainted by the fact that we violated laws to obtain it. Everybody loses.”
“I don’t accept that,” Gail said. “There has to be a way around. There has to be something other than a suicide mission.”
“Whoa, Sheriff,” Boxers said. He alternately used her former title as a term of endearment or as a weapon. This time it sounded like the latter. “We don’t do suicide missions.”
“Are you looking at the same data as I am?” she said, pointing at the map.
“I am,” he said. He looked at Jonathan, who looked away to let the Big Guy do a little verbal roaming. “Here’s the thing. Once Digger and me start something, we finish it.”
“All I’m saying-”
“Let him finish, Gail,” Jonathan said sharply.
She looked wounded. Maybe betrayed. Jonathan had never spoken to her like that before.
“All you’re saying is surrender before we engage,” Boxers said. “You’re looking at failure as the only option. That’s not the way Digger and I do things. We plan the mission and the extraction as best as we can, and we execute. We’ve never failed. Not once. One of the reasons for that is that we don’t accept that any other outcome is possible.”
Gail was stunned. She made a puffing sound that might have been a derisive laugh, and said, “So, you engage in self-delusion.”
Boxers started to say something, and then deferred to his boss with a simple glance.
“We engage realities,” Jonathan said. “We don’t have the luxury of reinforcements, and we don’t have the responsibility for arrests. All we have to do is take the good guys from the bad guys. Nothing else matters.”
“Even if it means dying.”
Jonathan chose his next words carefully. Gail had been a shooter on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, and she’d seen her share of firefights both as a sworn officer and as a member of Security Solutions, but she’d never been part of an 0300 mission with Boxers and him, and for the first time, he wondered if she might have become more a liability than an asset.
“Dying doesn’t happen to us if we stack the odds enough in our favor, and we get our heads in the right place.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Don’t do that,” Jonathan said. “Please don’t do that. We’re a couple of hours away from going hot on this op, and I will not tolerate doubt.”
“You won’t tolerate it?” At what point in her life had she started seeking permission from Jonathan Grave?
“That’s what I said. Gail, you’re damn good at what you do. I’ve seen you perform in the shit, and I admire the hell out of you, but those times were all reactive. Someone took a shot at you, and you fired back. Tonight might not work that way. The reason why Box and I are still alive is because we don’t hesitate to do what needs to be done in support of the mission, and the mission is always one hundred percent about getting the PC home whole and healthy.”
He allowed the weight of his words to settle, knowing that she would recognize PC as the acronym for precious cargo, the universal term for hostages needing rescue.
“The quickest way to die is to hesitate,” he went on. “Microseconds matter. If the bad guy tickles his trigger before you do, his bullet leaves the muzzle first. After that, nobody has an edge. I need you to tell me that you can shoot first, or I’ve got to leave you behind.”
Gail didn’t know what to say. In her world-you know, where the grass is green and the water wet-what Jonathan described was murder. For him, the elements of the law didn’t matter because he saw a world that was divided into good and evil, and he could compartmentalize the illegality into irrelevance.
Back when she first met him in the hills of Pennsylvania, just hours before the ground would be littered with blood and bodies, and the world would seem to be on fire, Jonathan had told her with an utterly straight face that he was on the side of the angels. She’d taken such a corny line as prima facie evidence that he was mentally disturbed. Then she witnessed his skills as a warrior, and his warmth and mercy as a human being, and she realized that he was merely stating the truth. That was the moment when she first thought she might be in love with him.
“I won’t let you down,” she said. She didn’t have a clue how she would pull it off, but if it came to a choice between shooting a bad guy in cold blood or letting Jonathan die, the bad guy wouldn’t have a chance.
“Has your assistant sent you the satellite images we pulled down?” Rollins asked over the satellite link.
On the screen, Jonathan could see Venice’s jaw lock. She was nobody’s assistant, and he halfway expected her to tear into the colonel. He admired that she restrained herself. “It’s coming up now,” she said. “While we wait, can I get you some coffee, or maybe take your shirts to the laundry?”
The team at the CP roared with laughter while Rollins remained silent. Jonathan assumed that he didn’t get the joke.
Overall, the image on their computer screen was more or less identical to the one they’d been studying, but with ridiculously greater detail. The trees had been digitally removed by top-secret software, revealing a level of nuance that was at least two generations of sophistication beyond anything Jonathan had seen previously. He said, “Wow,” and then was surprised that he’d spoken aloud.
“Wow is right,” Rollins said. “See what happens when you leave the Community? I want you to know that we just spent about fifty million taxpayer dollars to get you these pictures. If I wanted to, I could zoom in and count freckles. In a shoot-out, we can mark individual GIs and opfor and track them in real time. We can take any one of them-or more than one of them-and convert the image to ground-level view and beam it to whoever we want. If we’ve got a shooter in a window waiting for a target, he can watch the computer image of the guy approaching in his left eye while he aims through the scope with his right. He’ll have range and windage data dialed into his scope and be able to meet the bad guy with a bullet as soon as he steps into the target window. This shit’s amazing technology.”
Amazing didn’t touch it, Jonathan thought. This was the stuff of science fiction. Rollins’s willingness to share it openly with Jonathan’s team-and risk a significant prison sentence to do it-told Jonathan that he’d been too distrustful of his former colleague.
The satellite imagery mostly confirmed what they’d already put together, although the compound had roughly
