by Tom Clancy
Dom said, “Jesus, man. I don’t know about this.” Dom was thinking how The Campus would do this, and he was sure they would go with a much lower-profile operation.
Jeffcoat snapped back. “No offense, Special Agent, but this call wasn’t to consult with you. It was to give you a heads-up.”
“Right. I’m heading that way, and can provide eyes from a distance. What’s the room number?”
Jeffcoat said, “Five-fourteen. Just come to the CP if you want updates, do not go to the hotel. When we get set up we will be on East Delaware, a block south of the Drake. I’m serious, don’t crowd our scene, Caruso. SWAT and local PD will handle the Drake and do any trigger-pulling, and JTTF and FBI will manage the operation covertly on scene from standoff range via the mobile command. I’m only notifying you because I was ordered by D.C. to keep you informed. We don’t need too many cooks in the kitchen.”
“Right. Good luck.”
—
Dom and Adara climbed into their rental and headed north on Michigan Avenue. Dom carried a Glock 26 subcompact nine-millimeter pistol in a shoulder holster under his blue sport coat, and a second G26 in his backpack for Adara’s use in an emergency. Without comment she pulled it out, along with an extra mag, and slipped the equipment into her purse. She then pulled her hair back into a ponytail with a rubber band.
They were both dressed conservatively, but they knew how to conceal their weapons, no matter what their attire.
“What’s our play?” Adara asked.
“We’ll go to where the command center is and see who’s running the show. Offer any help we can give.”
She asked, “Does it seem like a good idea to you for SWAT to hit them in their hotel room? There’s a ballroom at the Drake, it will be in full swing, and a lobby bar, plus people in their rooms. IED shrapnel or AK rounds are going to go through walls like butter.”
Dom said, “I’m with you, I’d rather they sat back and put eyes on them, took al-Matari and Hembrick down while they were somewhere else, but this isn’t our call to make.”
Adara said, “Would we be more help if we got inside the hotel, just in case? I mean, sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”
Dom looked at her a moment while he drove. “It’s my show, Adara. You are subordinate to me on this.”
“I know that.” She went quiet.
Dom thought about what he’d said, and how it sounded. The last thing Dom wanted or needed right now was a fight with his girlfriend. After driving in silence for a minute, Dom said, “We’ll just feel it out when we get there. If we think we can help on the inside, then we’ll find a way into that hotel.”
“Okay,” she said, and then added, “I’ll do whatever you think is right.”
—
Five FBI agents working with the Chicago Division of the JTTF arrived in the lobby of the Drake in ones and twos, sat on benches, walked through the bar and mall on the lower level. They all were in text message comms with each other, as well as with CPD and JTTF officials, who were scrambling to get their big mobile command trailers staffed and moving and patrol cars into the neighborhood to create a cordon around the century-old hotel.
The lobby teams had filtered in covertly in an attempt to identify known al-Matari cell members who might have been going to or coming from the elevators. A lower-level access to the room-floor elevators, one story below the main lobby, was put out of commission by FBI agents dressed as maintenance staff. This led to a brief shouting match with the actual hotel maintenance staff in the lower concourse before uniformed CPD officers intervened and pulled hotel maintenance into an employee-only hallway to explain they’d just threatened to kick the asses of a group of covert FBI agents.
At the same time the altercation was going on downstairs, in the lobby a forty-something couple, both special agents, stepped up to the counter and asked to speak with the hotel manager. They took him into a back room with a flash of their credentials, and told him they needed every unoccupied room on the fifth floor right then. The manager stepped to a terminal with a shaking hand, and with difficulty managed to generate keys for three deluxe king rooms on the fifth floor.
Over the next five minutes, three teams of armed FBI special agents went to the three rooms, posing as guests. All the other guests on the floor were contacted, one by one, by hotel staff inquiring as to their satisfaction with their stay. This identified which rooms were occupied by civilians, and which guests were still out on the town this evening.
There was one exception to the telephone survey—room 514. A decision had also been made not to call David Hembrick’s room to avoid the chance the call might make Hembrick and al-Matari suspicious.
Dom and Adara parked in a garage on East Walton, just a block west of the Drake. From the street it looked just like a regular Saturday night in front of the big old hotel, but when the couple turned right on Michigan, then made their way down to East Delaware, it was a different story. A half-dozen obvious government sedans and SUVs covered the road, and motorcycle cops blocked the turn off Michigan onto the one-way street.
As they walked closer to the dozen or so FBI and CPD men standing by one of the SUVs, Adara said, “Remember how I said I thought the biggest target would be the JTTF itself?”
“Yeah.”
“Well . . . what better way to target them than to draw them all here to one place?”
Dom thought it over. “That makes a hell of a lot of sense. Jeffcoat said a mobile command vehicle is standing off somewhere, but it will arrive on scene at the same time as the hit on the Drake. This street is going to be a zoo in a minute.”
Adara looked around and said, “I guess the cops have it under control,” but her voice didn’t sound so sure.
—
There were eleven public or employee ground-floor entrances to the Drake hotel and the small shopping mall attached to it, and this made controlling access to the building a nightmare for police concerned that lookouts at ground level might tip off Hembrick and al-Matari and cause them to barricade themselves, set off an explosive, or try to flee. But as soon as the three groups of agents were in their rooms on the fifth floor, all looking out through peepholes into the hallway, three armored trucks pulled up around the building. One on Lake Shore, and two on East Walton Place. Eighteen men in all, SWAT officers from the Chicago Police Department, leapt from their vehicles and moved on the building. A second unit was parked four blocks to the west as a quick-reaction force to help the first in the case of disaster, and every one of the men on the second team was pissed that he wasn’t on the team called on for the hit itself.
One truckload of SWAT leapt out of the back of their vehicle at the south-side main entrance, raced through doors held open by plainclothes cops and Feds, and entered the building. Here the six officers took the stairs up to the main lobby. They shot past shocked hotel guests who watched them with mouths agape, and then they moved to the employee access door, again held open by a special agent who’d been hanging out in the lobby looking for known ISIS personalities. The olive-drab-clad SWAT members moved into a stairwell and began ascending in a tactical train toward the fifth floor.
The second team entered from Lake Shore, ran the full length of the street-level high-end shopping mall, and took the main elevators one flight below the lobby. One floor above, an FBI agent heard the transmission that they were on their way up, so he blocked anyone in the lobby attempting to use the elevators. From now on, the four elevators off the lobby would be only for people trying to escape their hotel rooms above.
The third group entered from the front as well, and they entered the public-access stairwell.
Now a dozen police officers, many wearing uniforms, moved into the lobby. They did not evacuate the hotel completely, and many in the ballroom just a half flight of stairs up from the lobby had no idea anything was amiss.
Two minutes lat
er all eighteen SWAT officers were up on the fifth floor. Three groups of four quietly evacuated the rooms where guests had answered their phones to respond to the survey. The officers did not take the time to check the rooms where no one had answered.
When this was done, a half-dozen officers stacked up a few yards from the door to room 514, and six more men approached slowly, their M4 rifles pointed at the door. The last six took up positions by the stairs but trained their weapons on the entire floor.
The six FBI agents who had checked into the rooms on the floor opened their doors, drew their weapons, and stayed well behind the action, but ready to help, if needed.
A breacher and a security man moved up to the door. The security man kept his weapon up while the breacher gently attached a small water-tamped charge next to the door latch, then stood back with the shock-tube detonator in his hand.
The team leader, back in the stack along the wall, whispered into his mic. “Bravo One has positive control. Breaching in three, two, one.”
The door to room 514 blasted inward, and the team flooded into the room.
As they did so, the door to room 515, directly across the hall, opened inward, and just as the fourth man in the stack recognized the movement on his right and turned toward it, twenty-year-old Maria Gonzalez, the lone female of the Chicago cell, took one step out into the hall.
Without a word she detonated her suicide vest in the center of the team of SWAT officers.
The door to room 501 opened as well, and Ahmed, another member of the Chicago cell, slung a C-4 bomb the size of a briefcase toward the SWAT officers standing by the stairwell on the south side of the hall. The case landed in the middle of the group, but not before they shot Ahmed to death, riddling his body with bullets.
Even though the would-be bomber was shot, the device exploded in front of the stairwell, killing everyone there and blasting out windows throughout the several floors on the southern side of the building, spraying glass down onto East Walton Place.
Two floors down, three Chicago cell members and two from Santa Clara left their third-floor room armed with grenades and AK-103 rifles. They wore body armor and suicide vests, and together they took the one flight down the main lobby stairs. As soon as they opened the door they saw the police, and while three men fired their AKs, three others hurled grenade after grenade into the lobby.
61
Two massive black mobile command trailers, each with a full array of technical and communications gear, rolled to a stop out of view from the Drake on East Delaware. Instantly the street was reclosed for the block and the entire command post was surrounded by CPD police cars.
Inside and around the vehicles were over forty members of the JTTF, all senior members of the FBI, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Naval Intelligence, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Secret Service, the Illinois State Police, the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division, as well as the antiterrorism division of CPD.
Assistant Special Agent in Charge Thomas Russell was not only the local head of the FBI office, but also the director of the JTTF in Chicago. He stepped out of a black Chevy Suburban parked in a fire zone and darted into the trailer labeled on the sides as Mobile Command Unit One the moment the steps had been placed by the side door.
They’d all heard the explosions a block away and five stories above, and now the radios were alive with reports of officers down on the fifth floor. Transmissions squawked into transmissions, the flow of information to the command center deteriorated, but within seconds of the first bit of bad news, the sounds of fully automatic weapons fire crackled up the street.
Again the radios screamed. “We’re taking fire in the lobby! Man down! Active shooter!”
“What the fuck is going on in there?” Russell demanded.
A CPD communications and dispatch specialist said, “I’m getting reports of multiple explosions and a gun battle on the fifth floor. Tangos in multiple rooms. And multiple shooters are in the lobby, with S-vests and assault rifles. All our elements from the fifth floor have evacuated, but there are dead and wounded.”
“How many civilians in that hotel?”
“Hotel management said five hundred seventy-three rooms at an eighty percent occupancy. Figure an average of two per room, that’s nine hundred sixteen people, but no way to know how many are in there right now, and how many in the bars, restaurants, and conference rooms.”
“Good Christ.” It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He and his entire outfit had just performed a full-scale drill on a terrorist attack of Soldier Field six weeks earlier, and the operation had gone off without a hitch, so Russell had been confident in his and the local police department’s ability to see this arrest through.
But somehow it had turned to utter chaos in the Drake.
A communications specialist down at the end of the trailer shouted over the din of the operations center. Director Russell? I’ve got a call from room 514, they are asking for you by name!”
Thinking the only possibility was that a SWAT commander on the floor was calling, he answered immediately.
“Russell?”
“Good evening, Special Agent in Charge Thomas Russell.” The caller had a Middle Eastern accent tinged with British vowels.
“Who is this?”
“I am offended you do not recognize my voice. I am certain your drones found ways to listen to my phone calls when I was in Syria. Isn’t that how your military found out about my camp there last year?”
Russell grabbed the arm of his second-in-command, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. The man had been passing on his way through the command center, and the director yanked so hard he spun him on his heel.
Russell put his finger over the mouthpiece of his phone and whispered, “Al-Matari.”
The lieutenant colonel raced to alert communications techs to record the call.
Russell asked, “What’s the status of the police officers up there?”
“Up here we have six alive. All under our control. I have more mujahideen on other floors, rounding up civilians. Pull all your forces out of the building and then we will talk again. Unless I hear you have done this in three minutes, I will personally shoot one hostage a minute until you comply.”
“What do you want?”
“For you to follow my instructions. Then . . . we negotiate.” The line went dead.
Russell turned to his second-in-command. “Get all our people out of there now, and have them bring out the civilians they can grab. They have three minutes. We’ll bring in FBI HRT, regroup, and do what we can to defuse this. Stage as many CPD SWAT as you can outside, in case they have to go back in if the shooting starts up again.”
—
It took Dom Caruso several minutes to find Special Agent Jeffcoat inside the tape on East Delaware, just fifty feet from one of the two mobile command centers. The SA was on his phone, a Benelli shotgun hanging across his chest over his soft body armor.
As soon as he hung up, he looked up to see Caruso. “Not now.”
“What the hell is going on in there?”
“It was a trap. We have a hostage situation, but we did get a call from inside, so at least they are talking to us. We’re backing off, to try to get some people released.”
Dom didn’t like that at all. “No. You’ve got to hit them right now!”
“You’re nuts. They have a half-dozen SWAT officers alive up there on the fifth floor, plus God knows how many civilians. We don’t know how many terrorists there are in the building or what weapons they have. We have to get our shit together and wait for HRT.”
Dom couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “All the way from D.C.?”
“They can be here in three hours. In the meantime, we negotiate.”
“Look,” Dom implored. “Al-Matari is
n’t doing what you think he’s doing. This is a common tactic jihadist terrorists use all over the world. It’s called ‘negotiation for fortification.’ These talks are a stall tactic. They are in there right now rigging bombs, making mantraps, prepping for the next stage of their statement. They are waiting for you to get every camera in the country pointed at Chicago, and then they will do what they really set out to do.”
Assistant Special Agent in Charge Russell saw the argument from the back of Mobile Command Post One and pushed through the crowd of JTTF responders. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
Dom said, “Special Agent Caruso, out of D.C.”
“Right. You’re the guy Murray wanted read in on the situation. Is there something you know that you aren’t sharing with me?”
Dom said, “You are treating this like a hostage situation. You are trying to calm things down and talk. That’s the opposite of what you need to do right now. The quicker you get shooters back in there, the fewer innocent lives you’ll lose.”
Russell responded by questioning Dom’s authority. “I know you’re the President’s nephew, but that doesn’t give you command of my scene.”
“I’m just trying to help. Look. This mobile command is too close to the Drake. For all you know he has a dirty bomb in there and—”
“Does Washington have intelligence that says he has a dirty bomb, because if you guys do, then I sure as shit wasn’t notified.”
“No, sir, but—”
Russell said, “I don’t have time to justify every action I make to an SA out of another division. Stand here with your mouth shut or get on the other side of that tapeline.”
Dom did leave the command post. He found Adara in a growing crowd on Michigan Avenue.
Clearly, she’d seen the entire altercation. “Did that go as badly as it looked from over here?”
Dom’s face was rock-hard and serious. “I think this hostage-taking thing is a ruse. Their demands, whatever they are, are just stalling tactics. They want as many eyes as possible on them so that when they slaughter all the hostages, they’ll get more publicity.”
