At two-thirty in the morning Ryan, Chavez, and Caruso sat in a rubber boat halfway between the Kempinski Hotel & Residences anioud the “palm frond” upon which Rehan’s safe house sat, and they watched the dark compound through their night optics. They were happy to determine that, other than the small permanent security force — a man at the front guardhouse and a couple of foot sentries on patrol — the grounds outside the main house seemed to be uninhabited. There would be cameras and motion detectors and perhaps even acoustic monitoring equipment, but Chavez, Caruso, and Ryan were prepared for this, so tonight they would execute the most dangerous portion of their operation.
They were much less concerned about equipment that could give them away and much more concerned about men who could shoot them.
They had rented the boat and the scuba gear from a PADI dive shop not far from their bungalow. All three men had significant scuba experience, though Domingo reminded them all that John Clark had more dives under his belt in one six-month period as a SEAL than Chavez, Ryan, and Caruso had in their combined lives. Still, the water was calm, and they were not planning on going very deep or staying under very long.
The small rubber boat was not optimal for the operation; neither was the scuba equipment they wore. But this was the equipment available to them, so when Ryan complained that their gear could be better, Chavez just reminded him that they would all have to “adapt and overcome.”
If they had needed to make a true covert underwater entry on the compound itself, they would have preferred to use rebreathing equipment, regulators that did not emit bubbles but instead reprocessed the exhaled gas with fresh oxygen. Rebreathers were crucial for covert scuba work, but even though the basic open-circuit gear they had rented from the recreational dive shop would give off bubbles galore when they swam underwater, they did not plan on arriving close enough to the compound to attract attention before coming out of the water.
They dropped anchor and slipped into the water silently. Ryan handed weighted and watertight boxes over the side to the other two men before he climbed out of the rubber boat and attached his swim fins to his feet. Soon all three men, each with a box in his hand, swam down to a depth of ten feet and checked their dive computers, found the direction to their target, and lined their bodies up on the lubber line of their compasses. They headed out with Chavez in the lead.
Ryan brought up the rear. His pounding heart created an odd techno-style cadence when coupled with the hissing noise of his breathing through his regulator’s valve. The warm black water cocooned him as he progressed, giving him the sense of being totally alone. Only the slight rhythmic pressures of his cousin Dominic’s swim fins kicking ten feet or so ahead of him reminded him that his colleagues were with him, and he was comforted by this knowledge.
Finally, after he was underwater for ten minutes, Jack’s forehead bumped gently into Dominic’s tank. Dom and Ding had stopped; they were on a sandy terrace on the incline that led out of the water up to the narrow strip of beach by Al Khisab Road. The depth on the terrace was just eight feet, and here Chavez used a faint red flashlight to show the other two where they should deposit their scuba gear. The men took off their equipment, strapped it together, and lashed it to a large rock, and then they each took one more long breath on their regulators. This done, the three men walked out of the water, dressed head to toe in black neoprene and carrying the watertight boxes with them.
Ten minutes after leaving the ocean behind, Dom, Ding, and Jack had moved onto a darkened property four lots down from Rehan’s estate. This home was neither walled nor patrolleder l, so they took a chance there were no motion detectors installed, either. Behind a large pool house, the Americans began setting up the equipment they’d pulled from the watertight cases. It took a good fifteen minutes of preparations, each man working on his own project, but shortly after three a.m. Chavez gave a silent thumbs-up and Ryan sat down with his back to the pool house wall. He placed a set of video glasses over his eyes, and he lifted a shoebox-sized remote control module out of a box.
From now until the deployment of the surveillance equipment was complete, Jack Ryan Jr. was in charge of this mission.
With a well-practiced flick of a switch on the controller in his hands, Ryan’s glasses projected the image transmitted from the infrared camera hanging from a rotating turret on the bottom of a miniature radio-controlled helicopter that sat on a foldout plastic landing pad a few feet away. The over-under propellers of the tiny aircraft were only fourteen inches in diameter, and the device looked not much different from a high-end toy.
But this was no toy, as evidenced by the sound it made when Jack engaged the engine. Its motor generated only thirty percent of the noise of a regular RC helo of this size, and the device also carried a payload from an operator-releasable locking mechanism on its belly.
The German company that manufactured the microhelo sold it as a remote viewing and transporting device for the nuclear and biological waste industries, giving an operator standoff capability to view unsafe areas and deliver remote cameras and testing equipment. As The Campus had moved from an assassination team to more of an intelligence-gathering shop in the past year, they had been on the lookout for new technologies that could serve as force multipliers in their endeavors. They had only five field operators, after all, so they did what they could to leverage their efforts with high-tech solutions.
Jack had a total of five payloads to deploy tonight with his microhelo, so he did not waste a moment before lifting his aircraft into the night sky.
When Ryan had his tiny craft hovering fifty feet above its landing pad, his deft fingers moved to a toggle switch on the right side of his controller. Using this, he tilted down the camera on the turret below the nose, and with ninety degrees of tilt he was looking down on himself and his two colleagues tucked tightly into the darkest portion of yard behind the pool house. He then called out softly to Dom, “Set waypoint alpha.”
Caruso sat next to him with a laptop computer opened and displaying the transmission from the tiny chopper’s camera. With a click of a button, Dom created a waypoint in the memory of the microhelo so that when called back to “alpha,” the craft’s GPS and autopilot would fly it directly back to a position over its base.
After tapping the requisite keys of his computer, Dom said, “Alpha set.”
Jack then climbed the aircraft to a height of two hundred feet. Once this altitude was attained, he flew over the three properties between his location and Rehan’s estate, flying with a slightly downward tilt to the turret cam so that he could monitor the sky in front of him as well.
When he had positioned his helo and its payload directly over the flat portion of the roof of the estate, he called out to Dom, “Set bravo.”
A moment later, the reply: “Waypoint bravo set.”
Jack’s target was the large air-conditioning vent on the roof of the building, but he did not descend immediately. Instead he used the td his turret cam, switched to thermal infrared, and began looking for Rehan’s guard force. He had no great worry about the device being seen in the darkness above the roof, but he was instead concerned about noise. Because although the microhelo’s engine was indeed quiet, it was definitely not silent, especially when operating over a darkened property on a dead-end street in the middle of the night. Ryan needed to make absolutely certain there were no guards on the roof or patrolling alongside the gardens at the northeastern part of the building.
There were some other limitations to the technology, as well, which Jack had to keep in mind, for the device’s light weight made it susceptible to sea breezes coming in from the gulf. Even with the stability-control internal gyroscope, Jack had to take care that a breeze that pulled him off course did not disorient him and send him into a wall or a palm tree. He could combat this by trying to gain altitude or calling for Dom to send the helo back up to waypoint bravo, but he knew he would not have much time to make that decision once he got down closer to the ground.
He scanned slowly; with his video glasses all he saw through his own eyes was what was picked up by the tiny camera two hundred feet over the ground and one hundred fifty yards away. Both he and Dom were involved in what they were doing, so it was Chavez’s job to serve as team security. He had no laptop to monitor, no goggles obstructing his vision. Instead he knelt by the pool house, using the infrared scope on his suppressed HK MP7 submachine gun, scanning for threats.
Through his goggles Jack made out the heat register of the man at the front gate, and a second man, standing outside the guardhouse chatting with him. Scanning back to the building he found a third signature, a sentry strolling lazily all the way over by the tennis court/helicopter pad. Ryan determined all three to be well out of earshot of his microhelo.
