Taking Fire

by Cindy Gerard

  Meir’s life wasn’t the only one on the line in this op. They were all gearing up to stop bullets if they had to, to save the boy.

  Another rolling rush of emotions swamped him. The boy who was his son. Every time the reality of it hit him, he felt a rush.

  He clenched his jaw so tightly his teeth ached. He could not, he would not, let his son die.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  Coop shifted his gaze to the rearview mirror, and Brown turned around in his seat.

  “Meir is my son.”

  “We’d figured that out,” Brown said softly. “We’re going to get him back, Boom. No doubts.”

  His eyes burned with emotion, and he swallowed it back, too overcome to speak.

  * * *

  Except for the constant grinding of the Bunn making yet another pot of coffee, the conference room in the basement of Royal Brit was church-quiet. All eyes were on Stephanie, who stood at the front of the conference table, entering key strokes on her Toughbook while a tense Nate Black watched over her shoulder.

  The tension in the room was familiar to Talia. Her years with Mossad had been filled with similar briefings. Everyone wanted success. Everyone wanted to come back alive. And everyone knew the odds were stacked against them.

  Not this time, she repeated over and over in her mind. This time, her son’s life was on the line. He was an innocent. He didn’t deserve to be part of Hamas’s bloody games.

  And neither did the people at the table with her.

  When this was over, she would find a way to repay them. She only hoped they would all be alive for her to thank.

  “Okay!” Stephanie said, sounding excited. “We’ve got eyes in the sky on the Ultramar warehouse. Thank you, technology gods!”

  Everyone expelled a breath of relief, and Coop let go of a “Hoo-ah!”

  Five minutes ago, Stephanie and Black had returned from carrying the dismantled ultralight surveillance drone up to the roof, reassembling it, and hand-launching it. Since the launch, Stephanie had been remotely guiding the drone using software loaded on her Toughbook.

  “You can call Green and Jones in now,” Stephanie told Black, who immediately picked up his phone and dialed. “I’ve got the coordinates for Ultramar locked in, and the Puma will circle the building at around five hundred feet until I change the command or until it runs out of battery power, whichever is first. If anyone leaves or arrives at that warehouse, I’ll know within seconds.”

  The Israeli military and Mossad had been the first to employ drones to locate targets as far back as the 1970s, so Talia was very familiar with the technology. The Puma was an excellent choice. It had a two- to three-hour loiter time and was equipped with on-board sensors, a thermal-imaging camera, and nearly silent electric motors so it wouldn’t be heard from the ground.

  “What’s the resolution on that?” she asked, wanting to know just how good the thermal-imaging camera was.

  “We swapped out the basic sensor package for top-of-the-line,” Stephanie told her, “so we should even be able to see if they have a mouse problem. We’ll know pretty soon.”

  “Okay,” Black said after hanging up. “It’ll take Green and Jones what? Around twenty minutes to get here?”

  Coop nodded. “This time of night, traffic’s light. Twenty minutes should do it.”

  “While we’re waiting for them, bring the drone in closer, Steph. See if you can pick up some heat signatures inside the building.”

  This was the part they’d all been waiting for. The test to see if the drone and the thermal-imaging equipment could lock onto the heat signatures each human body created and tell them how many people were inside the Ultramar warehouse and where they were. More specifically, where Meir was.

  The room grew silent as Stephanie shifted the images the drone sent from the Toughbook screen to the wall screen so they could all see them.

  All eyes strained to see the details in the photos that arrived, one after another after another. For several long frames and multiple shots, they saw nothing but dark, nothing but gray. Nothing that indicated there was a single sign of life in the building. Finally, when the drone reached the east side of the warehouse, there they were. Fuzzy red horizontal blobs.

  “Got ’em,” Brown said. “Way to go, Steph.”

  A few heat signatures indicated people at ground level. Others were at a higher level and others even higher than that.

  Stephanie said, “Inside this warehouse, there’s a four-story building that houses administrative offices and more. As you can see by the various heights, our terrorists are spread out from the first to the fourth floors, sleeping.”

  Suddenly, the images were blank again.

  “Give it a few minutes,” Stephanie said. “The drone moved out of range. It’ll circle back, and we’ll have another look.”

  Talia made herself breathe as she waited for the drone to fly back into thermal-image range. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she’d seen a smaller image among the other red lumps, another larger one close beside it.

  “Here we go again,” Stephanie said. “Sharp eyes, everyone, so we can pin this down.”

  Talia watched closely, then made a quick diagram with pencil and paper. “I think I’ve got them.”

  When the drone went out of range again, they all compared notes.

  “So we’re in agreement?” Black asked after they’d conferred. “Meir and . . .” He trailed off and glanced at Talia. “What was his name, the one Meir told you looked out for him?”

  “Rami,” she supplied quickly.

  “Right. Meir and Rami appear to be sleeping side-by-side in a room in the middle of the fourth floor. Then we’ve got eight other signatures which we’re tagging as tangos. Two on the ground floor guarding the entrance door, two on the second floor, two on the third, and two outside the room we’ve designated as Meir’s and this Rami guy inside with him.”

  Everyone nodded.

  The conference-room door opened, and Green and Jones walked in.

  “Gentlemen,” Black said. “Good timing. Let me bring you up to speed.”

  33

  “But he’s my son.” Talia tried to stay calm. She knew this battle wouldn’t be won by out-of-check emotions. But her heart pounded, heat enveloped her, and if she hadn’t clasped her hands together beneath the table, they’d be shaking with rage.

  “With all due respect, Talia, you haven’t worked with us before,” Black pointed out. “You know the value of team synergy. Especially in this situation, where we haven’t had the chance to fine-tune the plan. One move out of sync with our usual rhythm could jeopardize everything. And frankly, you’re too emotionally involved.”

  “I’m the only one he’ll recognize,” she protested. “He’ll be frightened. I need to be there when we find him.”

  “You’re going to be there, but in a backup role. Use your head, not your heart, and you’ll realize we’ll all be much safer—Meir included—if you fill the support role where I need you. Taggart will be there with you.”

  She looked over at Taggart, who nodded. She knew he wasn’t happy about being assigned to a support role, too. And Black was right. He was handling this exactly the way she would if she were team leader.

  “Fine,” she said reluctantly, and let it go.

  They were moving out at three thirty a.m., a little less than an hour from now. Her heart leaped at the thought. If all went as planned, she would have Meir safely back with her very, very soon. She had to believe that.

  “Steph.” Black’s voice brought Talia’s attention back to the front of the room. “Pull up the blueprint.”

  A digitized blueprint of the Ultramar warehouse filled the large projector screen.

  “Talia, you were the one who finally located the blueprints online. Do the honors, would you?”

  She nodded stiffly a
nd rose. The moment she started talking, she felt herself shift into operative mode. Comfortable, filled with purpose, and in control. “The warehouse is around the size of a football field. One hundred yards long, half as wide. Inside the warehouse, they’ve constructed another building.”

  Stephanie handed her a laser pointer, and she used it to indicate the location of the building inside the warehouse.

  “For the sake of clarity, we’ll refer to this interior building as the Bunker. As you saw on the drone shots, it’s four stories tall, is situated inside the east corner of the warehouse, and was designed not only to house administrative offices but also as a stronghold in the event there was ever a security threat.

  “It has showers,” she continued, pointing them out, “a stockpile of food, beds, a kitchen, and so on. The bad news is, the Bunker is built like a fortress. After the Arab Spring, they upgraded the security so that if something like that happened in Oman, key players from the warehouse could hide in the Bunker until they could be extracted or until the battle died down.”

  “So,” Black added, assessing the somber faces around the table, “think of the Bunker as a safe room on steroids. If we don’t take advantage of the element of surprise, they may have the capability to seal themselves up tight and hold off our siege.”

  Or—and Talia had tried desperately not to think it, but there was no getting past it—they could martyr themselves in the name of Allah and blow the place sky-high, taking everyone inside the warehouse with them.

  * * *

  Bobby sat in the back of the van, scanning the faces of the team as they headed for Ultramar. They were as ready as they could be. Still, his thoughts were in turmoil. They’d all trained countless hours on taking down bad guys, executing dozens of rescues over the years. From his experience, he knew that they probably had only a fifty-fifty chance of getting Meir back. Those odds hadn’t been discussed in the briefing.

  Dead and injured hostages were normally referred to as “breakage,” but this hostage wasn’t breakage. This was his son.

  He glanced at Talia, who sat next to him. Silent. Tense. Resolute. Like him, she wore tactical-level body armor and gear identical to that of the rest of the team. While she’d have preferred her Glock, Nate had issued her a sound-suppressed 1911A1 pistol like the rest of the team. She wore it in a drop holster on her right hip; the sling of the M4 hung over her shoulder. He couldn’t decide if the armor made her look like a badass warrior or small and vulnerable. She was still pissed about not leading the assault, and he wasn’t happy about it, either. But Nate had made the right decision about not having them enter the Bunker with the rest of the team. They were too physically beat-up, too psychologically spent, and far too emotionally invested. A bad call on either of their parts, and they could get not only themselves but other team members killed. And Meir could become a casualty.

  He wished, however, that they had better numbers, because the guys could use the extra firepower up front. Rhonda was now controlling the drone from headquarters stateside, because they needed Stephanie as their wheel man and lookout—much to her husband Joe’s dismay.

  One of his conditions for Stephanie coming along was that she was not to be involved in direct combat. That she wouldn’t be subjected to line-of-fire casualties unless paper cuts and carpal tunnel were considered combat wounds.

  But Stephanie had won this battle by default. They needed her behind the wheel and in constant radio contact with Rhonda, who continued to relay updates on the drone images. As of their departure from Royal Brit, none of the heat images had moved. Which was exactly what they wanted, for the tangos to be sound asleep, so it would all be over before they knew what hit them.

  Nate’s final words before they loaded up had been straight and to the point. “The timeline is this: Breach the warehouse, disable the alarms, kill the lights. Hit the Bunker hard and fast, take out the guards floor by floor, secure Meir. In and out in less than two minutes. Head for the airport. Mission accomplished.”

  Sounded great in theory. Now it was about to be tested.

  He ran Nate’s assault plan through his mind, visualizing how it would go down. Nate would be the site commander at the warehouse, overseeing and calling the shots.

  Once the entire team was inside, Green and Jones would come at the Bunker from the front. Black and Brown would be the second line of defense into the Bunker. Cooper and Santos would enter through the back. Carlyle would stand close by at the casualty collection and extraction point, at the west front corner of the Bunker. Bobby and Talia would provide backup at the warehouse door, watching for anyone trying to escape.

  Stephanie would stand by in the van, ready to drive them the hell out of there when it was over.

  Easy-peasy. Except for a few minor details.

  Although they would know where the tangos and Meir were, they didn’t know how the bad guys were armed or if any changes had been made to the building that might affect the assault. The assumption was that the blueprints were up to date, but it never paid to assume. It was the best they had, however, so they were going with it.

  “ETA sixty seconds,” Stephanie said. “Final radio check commencing now.” They all wore their radios on a pouch on the back of their armor. The voice-activated throat mike pressed against their necks, and the earpiece fit under their sound-deadening hearing protection.

  Steph called out each individual’s name, waited for a return “check,” and pronounced them good.

  “Rhonda, what are you seeing from the drone? We good?” Steph asked.

  “You’re clear. Nothing moving but the wind. Break a leg, boys and girls. Kick some serious ass.”

  Stephanie pulled the van up to the gate securing the warehouse fence. Santos peeled out of the van, broke the padlock with bolt cutters, and opened the gate wide. Stephanie rolled the van slowly through, and Santos jumped back in on the fly.

  She pulled up short of the warehouse, out of range of exterior security cameras. “You’re on, Rhonda.”

  “Roger that.”

  Then they waited, tense and watchful, knowing Rhonda was manipulating her computer back home, keying in codes, hacking into the exterior security camera system.

  Less than a minute later, Rhonda’s voice came over their headsets. “Done deal, people,” she said. “If anyone’s awake and monitoring, they’re now looking at a looped video of an empty parking lot. So unless they’ve got X-ray vision, they’re not going to spot you out there.”

  Stephanie slowly pulled ahead toward the main warehouse door. Bobby fingered his rifle, double-checked that his helmet was strapped on tight, along with the thermal-imaging glasses clipped to the front of it. After the others were inside and shut down the power to the warehouse, he’d slip the glasses down so he could see to do his job.

  A calm came over him as he closed his eyes

  and touch-searched his gear, making sure he could put his hands on any part of it without looking, knowing the rest of the team was doing the same thing.

  Stephanie stopped the van next to the main warehouse door.

  Jones and Green grabbed the breaching charges they might need to blow the Bunker doors, then climbed out of the van. They’d be the first through the door. Everyone but Stephanie followed and stacked up next to the warehouse wall. Talia hung tight behind Bobby, the two of them providing rear security. Santos used his bolt cutters again on the locked warehouse door. Once he broke the lock, he checked for alarm sensors or wires.

  “Aren’t you done yet?” Coop asked, impatience and nerves getting the best of him.

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Santos said. “Do-or-die time.”

  They knew that when Santos opened that warehouse door, there was no going back. They had to run almost eighty yards to reach the Bunker, take out the two ground-floor guards, then set and blow the breaching charges to get inside.

  At the same time, Carlyle
would go open the electrical panel and blow the power to the entire complex, then slip back into position. About ten thousand things could go wrong, and there was only one way that this would go right. Everything had to work exactly as planned.

  Bobby reached back and squeezed Talia’s hand. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  This was it.

  On Santos’s “Go,”’ he followed the team inside.

  They’d just cleared the exterior door when alarm bells went off, screaming through the cavernous warehouse like banshees.

  34

  Rami woke up with a start. Beside him, the boy, Meir, whimpered in his sleep.

  He blinked, shaking off his confusion, and realized something was wrong. A noise. Something loud and shrill and horrible.

  The door to their room flew open.

  “Get up!” Amir stood on the other side, a rifle in his hand, fierce anger on his face.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Someone has broken into the warehouse. They can only be after the boy. Take him, and hide with him in the closet. If anyone comes after him but Hakeem or me, shoot them.”

  He shoved the rifle into Rami’s hands.

  Just then, the alarm went silent. Soon after, the sound of automatic-rifle fire reverberated through the building.

  “Do you understand what you are to do?” Amir demanded.

  Rami nodded. “Kill them.”

  “Yes.” Amir glared at Meir. “Then you kill the boy.”

  * * *

  “What the hell, Santos?” Black yelled into the mike, as they all ducked for cover behind tall wooden shipping crates, large pieces of machinery, and whatever else they could find.

  “You tell me!” Santos yelled back. “They must have added a secondary alarm system that wasn’t on the blueprints.”

  And now they were squatting like sitting ducks on a lake surrounded by hunters, the screeching alarms rubbing their already raw nerves like sandpaper.