— That would be the standard procedure, he knew. Find a house nearby, move the occupants out, and put in a stakeout team to monitor the suspect’s comings and goings, phone conversations, and associates. Once enough evidence of possible wrongdoing had been collected, the FBI would obtain a search warrant from a sympathetic judge and move in. For a by-the-book guy like Flynn, that would be the best and safest way to proceed. But it would also gobble up hours and days he wasn’t sure they could afford.
Flynn surprised him. “No, Pete. We go in as soon as possible.” He pointed upstairs and growled, “When I briefed the Director and the Attorney General this morning, both were adamant that we take any action necessary to break this thing open.”
From his tone, Thorn suspected the senior FBI agent was leaving a lot unsaid. If anything, the country’s political and media elites were even more spooked by the terror campaign than the general public, and the political pressures to act were enormous.
Flynn turned to Helen. “The Attorney General herself is seeking a search warrant authorising an HRT raid. Once we have the warrant in hand, I’m assigning the mission to you and your section. You know the general area pretty well and you’re damned good the best I’ve got, in fact. John Lang concurs.”
“Okay.” Helen nodded flatly, taking the compliment in stride without any false modesty. She glanced at Koenig, getting down to business without wasting any more time. “What do we know about the house right now, Tommy?”
“Not as much as I’d like.” He slid a faxed copy of a real estate brochure across to her. “The place is fairly large about twenty-five hundred square feet. Four bedrooms. Two and a half baths. One story aboveground and a good-sized basement below. A one-car garage attached to the house.”
“Brick exterior construction?” she asked.
Koenig nodded. “Hardwood floors upstairs. Concrete covered by carpet in the basement.”
Helen looked up from the brochure. “I need more than this. Can we get a set of blueprints from the builder or the county records?”
“We’re working on it,” Koenig confirmed.
“Good. Now, what about numbers inside the house? Any data on that?” she asked.
“Nothing solid. We risked one drive-by earlier this afternoon and spotted two vehicles in the driveway one minivan, one Toyota Camry. There was another car, a Taurus, parked along the street out front. The Camry is registered to this Nielsen. The other vehicles trace back to different names and addresses. Based on that, we’re guessing a minimum of two suspects and a maximum of six.”
“I see.” Helen sat back in her chair, her eyes distant as she considered her options for several seconds. Finally, she turned back to Flynn. “Okay, Mike, what are my rules of engagement for this operation?”
Thorn knew that was the key question. The rules of engagement, or ROE, would determine the Hostage Rescue Team’s tactics. The looser the rules were, the more options Helen would have in laying out her assault plan. If she could assume the people inside were hostile, she and her agents could bring significantly more firepower to bear in the early stages, and they could use their weapons a lot more freely.
Flynn looked troubled. “There’s a snag. Without clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, I can’t get the AG or the Director to sign off on unlimited ROE. They’re too afraid we might nail some innocent civilians by mistake. So we have to tread lightly at first. I’m afraid you can’t go in with guns blazing on this one.”
Helen nodded slowly, hiding her concerns behind an impassive mask.
Thorn knew his own face was less controlled. He didn’t like the sound of this not at all. Taking out terrorists was a lot different from conducting a sweep against a suspected crack house. Success always depended on the maximum application of controlled violence in the minimum amount of time. Without that, the risks to the assault force to the woman he loved went up dramatically.
Despite his relief that the FBI was moving at last, he couldn’t help worrying about Helen’s safety. Concrete evidence or not, he firmly believed that house in Arlington held some of the terrorists they were hunting. If he was right, Helen and her comrades could be walking right into a buzz saw.
“I’d like to move in after midnight,” she said calmly. “We’ll have a better chance of catching these people asleep, or at least at a low ebb, then.”
Flynn nodded his understanding and approval. “I can buy that much time from the Director.”
“Good.” Helen paused briefly, thinking again, and then went on. “That should also allow us to covertly evacuate the nearest neighbors. I don’t like increasing the chances that we’ll be spotted, but I think it’s imperative. If there are terrorists inside, we have to accept that they have heavy weapons and that they’ll use them if they get the chance. I don’t want civilians caught in the cross fire if we can help it.”
“Agreed. Anything else for now?”
When Helen shook her head, Flynn checked his watch and stood up.
“Okay, then let’s start moving things into place. The clock is running fast on this one.”
Determined not to be left wholly on the sidelines, Thorn leaned forward. “I have one request, Mike. With your permission, I want to ride along as an observer.”
The senior FBI agent stared hard at him for a moment before replying. Then Flynn glanced at Helen, obviously making sure she had no objections. Finally, he nodded abruptly. “Okay, Pete. I guess you’ve earned the right to be in on the kill. We’ll find you a place in the command van.”
Thorn sat back, partially satisfied. He couldn’t do anything to reduce the risks she’d be running, but he knew he’d feel better if he were at least close by.
Much as he longed to lead the planned raid himself, he couldn’t think of anyone better qualified for the assignment than Helen. She had more tactical ability, fighting skill, and sheer guts than anyone else in the FBI or even in the Delta Force for that matter.
Amazing. Six months ago, he would never have imagined himself thinking that of a woman any woman. And now he couldn’t imagine being left without her.
Somewhere off in the distance, a church bell chimed once and fell silent.
Despite her Nomex-coveralls and body armor, Helen Gray shivered. It was well below freezing outside and the need to stay motionless only intensified the cold. She lay burrowed in a hedge bordering the street and sidewalk across from the suspected terrorist hideout. Her post offered her a good view of the front of the house.
She studied it carefully, looking for the slightest evidence of anything wrong anything that might indicate they had been spotted. Even with her night vision goggles down, she couldn’t see anything out of place. From the outside at least, the house appeared a perfectly ordinary suburban dwelling, identical to thousands of others throughout northern Virginia all the way from its sloping shingle roof to its redbrick walls and the white trim around its curtained windows. There were no lights showing behind those curtains.
Well, Helen thought coolly, it was time to find out exactly what was hidden inside that quiet house.
She keyed her mike and whispered, “All Sierra units, this is Sierra One. Everybody set?”
Voices ghosted through her earphones as her teams checked in, one right after the other. Sierra Three and Four, Paul Frazer and Tim Brett, were around the back, poised to enter through the rear door on her signal. Five and Six, Frank Jackson and Gary Ricks, were crouched behind the rear of the Ford minivan parked in the driveway. They would take the front door. Sierra Two, Felipe DeGarza, lay prone beside her as a reserve. Her own two-man sniper teams, Byrne and Voss, and Horowitz and Emery, occupied positions in the surrounding homes.
She would have preferred to lead the assault teams herself, but with the situation still so murky, Flynn wanted her in a position to exercise tighter tactical control over her sections if things didn’t go according to plan. Leading from the rear wasn’t her style, but orders were orders.
The head of the FBI task force wasn’t taking many chances. As a safeguard against an attempted breakout by the suspects, he had deployed a cordon of local police and other special agents in a wide net around the neighborhood. He even had a Blackhawk helicopter standing by on the local elementary school’s playground prepped for immediate flight if a pursuit became necessary. From the absence of any media nearby, she guessed that Flynn had also stomped hard on the Attorney General’s notorious tendency to curry favorable publicity.
Helen took a deep breath. Her next signal would open the ball. “Hotel One, this is Sierra One. We’re ready. Initiate shutdown sequence,” she said softly.
“Roger, Sierra,” she heard Flynn say.
Helen clicked her mike again. “All Sierra units, stand by. Wait for my mark.”
