65 Below

by Basil Sands

  The phone on the commander’s desk rang. He picked it up, motioning to Wasner and Marcus to wait. “Commander Stark.”

  “Sir, this is Glenda in dispatch. The white suburban has been sighted in a driveway on Panorama Drive off Farmer’s Loop Road. FPD is awaiting your orders to send in SERT.”

  “Thanks, Glenda. I’ll get right back to you.” He hung up the phone and looked back up at the two men in front of him.

  “FPD found the suburban. It’s up on Panorama Drive, off Farmer’s Loop, just like your man Choi said.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” Wasner said. “That little fell must really want his freedom in the good old US of A.”

  “Let’s move, then,” Marcus said. “The team is still here and stoked up, so we can move on them now before they run.”

  “I want to use SERT,” Stark interjected. “This is a residence. We only know that the vehicle is out there—we don’t know if it was stolen and put back, or if they just dumped it in someone else’s driveway to throw us off. Your men will be backup in case it goes bad, but mine will have a little more restraint if it turns out we are at the wrong place.”

  Wasner spoke up. “Commander, my men are all experienced in hostage rescue and in civilian protection. These guys we’re up against are probably in it to the death. It doesn’t make sense to send cops up against them—your men may end up getting killed. Let them back us up, but let my men go in first. My men are much more prepared to die than I suspect yours are—not that it’s going to happen.”

  Stark thought about this for a moment, then nodded in agreement. “All right, but be careful. If there are any civilians present, their safety comes first.”

  The phone on his desk rang again. “Stark here.”

  “Chief, this is Wyatt. We’ve found out what the stuff in the vial is, or at least, what it does.” She repeated a summary of the lab findings.

  Stark’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, for God’s sake! How could someone make something like that?”

  Stark told the two warriors what Lonnie had told him.

  “Holy Nazi nightmare!” Wasner said. “No wonder they wanted to dig that stuff up. They could wipe out the world with that crap.”

  “Let’s move,” Marcus said.

  Wasner ran into the hall, calling for his men to assemble at the trucks. The SERT team came out of the building right behind them, ten troopers dressed in camouflage BDU’s and ten SEALs with over whites covering their combat clothing.

  They had a quick briefing in the parking lot, then the teams mounted their vehicles and headed out. They followed Airport Way to University Boulevard on the west side of Fairbanks. They sped north on that road. After a few miles, the name of the road changed to Ballaine Road, then after several more, the name changed again to Farmer’s Loop Road. The convoy of two of the SEAL F350’s, Marcus’s Jeep, the city hazmat containment van, and half a dozen trooper and police squad cars rolled fast, but without lights or sirens.

  Choi was left behind in the holding cell at the public safety building. This was for everyone’s benefit—they didn’t need him changing his mind once he was near his compatriots, and for his own safety, as those compatriots would no doubt kill him if they saw him with the Americans.

  By a quarter past two AM,the teams were on Panorama Drive. They stopped their vehicles out of sight of the blocky house on the treed lot. The police and military personnel stayed hidden behind a thick stand of spruce about twenty yards from the driveway. Steam billowed out of the open vehicle doors into the frigid night air as officers and warriors climbed out of their vehicles.

  The temperature had dropped even further. It was so cold that the moisture in their noses crystalized immediately when they inhaled the frozen air after leaving the warmth of the cars.

  “Man,” said one of the cops. “We’d better make this fast or someone’s going to end up with frostbite.”

  Marcus and Wasner crept forward to get a view of the house and its approaches. The house sat back almost two hundred feet from the road. Trees surrounded the yard, gradually thinning out until they ended about seventy-five feet from the front of the house and thirty to fifty feet on the sides and back. The white Suburban crouched quietly on the driveway in front of the garage door. Through night vision glasses, Marcus and Wasner made out several sets of tire tracks on the driveway.

  Wasner raised a pair of highly sensitive thermal imaging binoculars and scanned the house. Through the optics of the binoculars, pale green images of body heat floated ghostlike behind the walls of the structure. Two men were awake and moving downstairs in what appeared to be the kitchen. One more was upstairs in a seated position. It looked like he was on the toilet. A fourth was lying down in what was probably his bed.

  Wasner saw no other heat images in the house. The people inside were unaware of what was coming. Marcus and Wasner went back to the rest of the group and planned their approach.

  “The SEAL team will go inside. Forester, you and your team take the back door and go up. Mojo and I will take the front door and clear the main floor. Look out for a basement, too, just in case I missed something. Also, be advised—we need to verify who they are before we shoot. Do not shoot without verifying that these are our guys. I don’t want you to have killing some kid’s granddad on your conscience. If they raise a weapon, though, take them out fast.”

  A low murmur of “Aye, aye’s” and “Yes sir’s” sounded their understanding.

  “SERT, you guys set up snipers on all the windows and the vehicle—also watch that garage door. We don’t know if there’s some other vehicle they may use to try to escape. Have your medics and the haz-mat team ready. There will be casualties tonight—hopefully, only theirs.”

  “Got it, Chief,” came the response from the SERT commander, a trooper lieutenant named Rausch.

  Wasner continued. “Forester, you will be interpreting for us as needed with the Koreans. Trooper Wyatt will be back up for that. Be ready to do it like we did back at the cabin, but we have to work faster this time. It’s also possible there are some Albanians involved here, too. Mojo ran into a couple Eastern European tango-types just before he got us involved. If you need an interpreter, Mojo here also speaks that talk like a native, so we have that area covered well.” He stopped and looked around. “Any questions?”

  “Uh, Chief?” Miller asked.

  “Yeah, what is it, Miller?”

  “I gotta pee.”

  “What?” snapped the Chief.

  “I gotta pee so bad, I can taste it!”

  “Tie it off and get out of here!”

  Miller was joking. He had made quite a show earlier of peeing while Wasner and Johnson were checking out the house. He was surprised at the fact that his little friend had instantly felt the extreme cold on being exposed and tried to shrink itself back into his snowsuit before he could get started with the bladder-emptying operation. The negative-forty air temperature froze his urine solid by the time it contacted the ground. He made a two-inch-high pile of pee on the road.

  A quiet eruption of snickers rustled through the group as they moved into the trees around the house. They made their way through the knee-deep snow swiftly and quietly. Moments later, the group had gone around the house and were in position fifty feet from the back door.

  Marcus and Wasner and their team waited in the ditch beside the road. Once the back door team was in place, they would advance swiftly across the open ground of the front yard. Wasner’s radio hissed with the sound of Forrester’s voice.

  “Chief, we’re in position, and ready move on your command.”

  “All right, on my mark, advance to the doors. SERT, are you on target?”

  “SERT is on target and ready for your advance.”

  “SEAL team, move,” Wasner whispered into the mike.

  At that instance, five SEALs and Staff Sergeant Beckwith rose in the back, and five more with Wasner and Johnson rose in the front. They scuttled across the open yard. Eyes open. Alert for anyone looking out the windows
. Their steps left long, wide trails as they crossed the deep snow. They made no attempt to cover their tracks. This wasn’t a recon. This was an assault on a house full of armed men.

  Three seconds later, Forester’s voice came on the headsets. “Team two in position.”

  “Team one in position,” came the response.

  “On three.”

  The men tensed. They had all done this before. Little thought occurred once the process started. It was all reaction and training once they kicked in the doors.

  “One.”

  Their senses were fully alert.

  “Two.”

  Breath held.

  “Thr…”

  Motion sensor lights exploded to life at both the front and back porches simultaneously. The lights, reaction times dulled by the extreme cold, bathed the entire yard in bright, full-spectrum light.

  The men inside shouted alarms. The sound of motion scrambled.

  “…ee! Go! Go! Go!”

  The doors were kicked in. Flash-bang grenades split the night with deafening explosions. Glass shattered on the cabinet doors as the concussion boomed and shook the air in the room. The light of a thousand suns blinded anyone who looked toward the door.

  The SEALs rushed in, weapons up.

  One man in the kitchen recovered and whipped his arm up and around. A pistol extended toward the figures entering the back door. The man quaked as three times, dark red dots burst on his chest before his finger closed on the trigger. His body slammed into the counter top, head banging on an open cupboard door. A shelf inside tipped, sending a dozen ceramic coffee mugs crashing to the floor. The Korean soldier slumped in a quickly spreading pool of his own blood.

  “One down. Kitchen clear,” Forester spoke into the radio. His voice was calm and detached, clinical.

  Wasner’s team swiftly filtered into the front room and saw no one.

  “Living room clear,” Marcus said.

  Wasner ordered, “Boone, Harold, clear the garage!”

  “I’m going up,” Forester said. His team moved to the staircase at the end of the house. The stairs went up six feet to a landing, then turned 180 degrees and led toward the center of the house. A handrail ran along the open left side of the stairs.

  Noise and voices came from the garage.

  “He’s running!” Boone shouted into the mike. “Snipers! Man out of the garage!”

  “Try to keep him alive!” Marcus called.

  One of the North Korean commandos sprinted out the side door of the garage. He lunged for the Suburban. A loud pop cracked from the trees at the end of the driveway.

  “Suspect down!”

  “Two SEALs coming out the garage! Don’t shoot us!”

  The North Korean soldier writhed in the snow. Blood surged in streams from his right shoulder. A mass of bone jutted out of the skin. The man bellowed in pain as he twisted and flailed on the freezing ground.

  Boone and Harold were nearly on him. The man managed to find his pistol with his left hand and raised it to his temple. A bright explosion lit the darkness like a camera flash. Blood and brains sprayed over the surface of the snow. The man’s agonized twisting and shouting came to an abrupt stop. His limbs twitched spasmodically, then fell still. His face was still intact, but the bullet had hollowed his skull.

  “Damn! He killed himself, Cchief!”

  “All right, let the CSI guys take it from there. Come back in and finish clearing the house.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Inside, the men tried to use the heat-imaging capability of their night vision glasses. The heater in the house was too high. Random reflections and ghost images seeped up into their view. They couldn’t tell where the men were. They flipped the lenses up and out of the way. They had to do this one low-tech, old-school style.

  As they topped the staircase, two of the balaclava-masked SEALs poked their weapons over the ledge. They swept their muzzles side to side across the flat landing. They carefully peered down the wide-open hallway that ran the length of the upstairs area. Two more men passed the first pair and took opposite kneeling positions at the top of the stairs.

  Six identical doors lined the hallway, three to the left, two to the right and one at the end, directly facing the stairway. Presumably, three were bedrooms, one was a bathroom, and one was a linen closet. Which was which had to be determined the old-fashioned way. They would need to open each, one at a time.

  Forester and Beckwith passed the two pairs of SEALs in a fast, crouching walk.

  The first two men who had reached the top, Bell and Stingle, stayed where they were to guard the approach from below and keep an eye on the doors down each side of the hallway. The others started with the nearest door on the left.

  They tensed, took a deep breath, and paced their heart rate. Forester put his hand on the knob and slowly twisted. He shoved the door open and Beckwith burst in, Forester right behind him. It was a small bedroom with a window at the back, and an empty closet with a broken door that hung open on a twisted hinge. A bed and a small nightstand were the only objects in the still room. No people.

  “Room one clear,” Forester whispered into his microphone.

  The two men backed out. Philips and Miller swung open the next door, which turned out to be a linen closet with no place to hide a man.

  “Room two clear,” uttered one of the men.

  Forester and Beckwith passed them and took the door across the hall to the right. They got on either side. Philips and Miller covered them across the hall as Beckwith put his hand on the doorknob.

  A sound like wood and metal clacking together came from the end of the hall. Stingle shouted from the stairwell. “On the left! Freeze!”

  Something small, dark, and hard thumped heavily at the top of the staircase, bounced into the air, and halted on the carpet between the six SEALs.

  “Grenade!”

  Bell sprung forward and wrapped his body snugly around the baseball-sized mass of deadly steel. A muffled explosion thumped through the house. A bright flash of light shot out from under Bell’s body. Beckwith turned and fired two short bursts in the direction of the door. From the room, a man let out a scream, followed by a heavy thud.

  “Medic! Get the medic up here!”

  Stingle immediately turned Bell onto his back and started to pull off his body armor when he realized there was no need. Bell’s death-dulled eyes stared blankly into space. Blood ran in streams from the open armholes of his vest and out of his mouth and nose. The Mormon boy from Utah was going to get the hero’s funeral that would make his mother proud.

  Forester and Beckwith kicked in the nearest door while Philips and Miller rushed the end of the hall. The room on the right was another empty bedroom, and they quickly cleared it then rushed to the room from which the grenade had come. Philips and Miller had already entered and found the body of a dark-skinned Caucasian man lying facedown in a pool of blood on the floor next to a bed. He held a pistol in one hand. Another hand grenade, pin still in place, lay on the floor nearby. A metal box with an electronic keypad lay on the bed. It looked like a land mine. They cleared that room and went to the last one at the end of the hall.

  Forester put his hand on the doorknob. The others tensed up. A dozen holes suddenly appeared in the wooden door and nearby Sheetrock as a burst of gunfire rang out from inside the room. Splintered bits of wood from the door stung the men’s faces, and a shard of wood cut into Forester’s left arm through a gap in his armored vest just below the shoulder. Miller grunted and stumbled backwards as one of the rounds struck him full in the chest. It crunched into his armored vest, sending him backwards, and knocked the wind out of him. He landed flat on his butt.

  Lucky for him, the heavy wooden door had slowed the bullet enough that by the time it hit the vest, it was rendered non-lethal. His eyes rolled as he coughed and gasped for air, his lungs shocked by the impact. The medic left the dead body of Bell and sprinted across the hall to Miller, who would say later that it felt like he had
been hit with a small Buick.

  Beckwith fired a pair of three-round bursts through the Sheetrock wall into the room, then kicked the door open. He rushed in, followed by Forrester and Philips. A blond-haired, blue-eyed man stared back at them. He was mostly naked, except for a pair of colorful boxer shorts. A vial of the chemical was gripped in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  Blood soaked through the cloth of his boxer shorts near the hip and ran in thick, red rivulets down his right thigh. The man looked like he could have been taken out of a Nazi propaganda poster, except that now he had a crazed look in his eyes as he backed slowly toward the window.

  Beckwith faced him, weapon raised. “All right, buddy, put down your weapon and the vial. Put them down gently on the bed.”

  “You are too late!” Adem Jankovic’s Kosovar accent was evident. A mix of hatred and fear quivered in his voice. “You were too late to save my people in Kosovo, and you are too late to save your own people here.”

  Forester whispered into his mike. “Snipers? Can you see the dude in his underwear? Top floor, south corner, back of the house?”

  “Too late for what?” Beckwith asked calmly.

  “I see his shadow,” the sniper responded. “But no good shot. Try to back him up closer to the window.”

  Adem suddenly became calm, demonically calm. His eyes glimmered with evil intent. “You will see…you will see even now!” The blond Nazi poster boy raised the vial in his left hand.

  “Shoot him!” Forester grunted hoarsely.

  Beckwith squeezed the trigger on his MP-5, sending three 9mm rounds into Adem’s chest. The blond Kosovar shuddered, but stayed on his feet. He gripped the vial tightly. He opened his mouth to speak, but a hiss of air was all that escaped his gaping lips. Adem swayed, then stumbled back toward the window.

  His body convulsed in a spasm that jerked him aside. A round hole appeared in the window. The high-powered bullet zinged past him and splintered the wooden doorframe inches from Forester’s head.

  Adem blinked rapidly as razor shards of glass sprayed his back. Blood ran in a hundred tiny streams out of the wounds that peppered his flesh. He tilted dizzily. Beckwith and Forester lunged forward to grab the vial before he dropped it.