by Larry Bond
She flashed a quick, lopsided smile at him and then whirled toward the exit, her mind already busy grappling with the tactics necessary to implement her first set of orders.
Above Temple Emet
Moving slowly, Helen Gray wriggled closer to the western edge of Temple Emet’s flat roof. Her right hand swept back and forth across the rooftop in front of her, feeling for unseen obstacles or soft spots that might creak under her weight. This close to the terrorists barricaded somewhere inside the synagogue, the slightest noise might result in disaster.
A faint rustle of clothing from behind told her that Special Agent Paul Frazer, her number two, was right on her heels. For a tall man he slithered on his belly with surprising grace, silence, and speed.
It was nearly pitch-black. Dawn was still three hours away, the harvest moon had finally gone below the horizon, and the star-filled sky provided very little ambient light. She had decided against using night vision gear for this part of the jaunt. The goggles amplified all available light, turning even the darkest night into something resembling blue-green daylight, but you paid a price for that in reduced depth perception and peripheral vision. For now she planned to rely on her own, unfiltered senses.
She poked her head carefully out over the edge and peered down into a dimly lit courtyard. Temple Emet was built in a horseshoe shape around a parking lot and a landscaped quarter acre used for dancing and as a playground for children using the school. The tabernacle, a half-built wooden hut, stood abandoned in the center of the open area. Ears of corn and smashed pumpkins lay scattered across the grass and pavement. Her eyes rested briefly on the dark, broken shape sprawled awkwardly near the tabernacle. They hadn’t yet been able to retrieve the body of the man the terrorists had gunned down at the very start of this mess.
She shook her head sadly and looked away, continuing her scan. The dead would have to wait. She was more concerned with finding the living.
Helen craned her head further out over the edge of the roof, studying the main entrance to the synagogue. Shallow steps led up to a pair of massive doors right in the middle of the main building. This was by far the largest and the oldest structure in the complex. The others were clearly add-ons built as the temple’s congregation grew and prospered. And an Arlington SWAT contingent attached to her command had already carefully combed through those outbuildings and confirmed that they were empty.
She had two of her four snipers posted inside one of those outbuildings, ready to provide covering fire for her six-man recon party if the terrorists spotted them first. The section’s other pair of sharpshooters was deployed inside the treeline about a hundred yards away from the synagogue’s eastern face. Most of the doors and windows in the complex opened onto the inner courtyard, but there were two enormous stained glass windows on the eastern wall. The windows themselves were famous works of art—each separate pane contained a representation of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
A soft voice crackled through the earphones built into her helmet. “One, this is Romeo Three. In position. Ready to deploy.”
Helen stared into the darkness, searching the rooftop thirty or so yards from her own position for Romeo Three and Four, Special Agents Brett and DeGarza, the second of her two-man recon teams. Nothing. She gave up, flipped the night vision goggles down over her eyes, and switched on the battery that powered them.
Two equipment-laden figures leaped into focus. One perched on the roof edge with his back to the courtyard, ready to rappel down the side of the building. The second HRT trooper sat facing him, braced to pay out a length of climbing rope for his partner.
She keyed her mike. “Three, this is One. I see you. Go ahead.” She loosened the strap on her submachine gun and brought it around in front of her. Frazer crawled into place beside her and unlimbered his own weapon.
Romeo Three, Tim Brett, stepped back into the open air, dropped a couple of feet, and then swung back lightly against the temple wall. Then he repeated the process, slowly and gently making his way down the side of the building toward a window facing into the courtyard. He was using one hand to control his descent while the other held a sidearm ready.
Helen held her breath until Brett stopped moving, dangling only a foot or so from the window, just out of the line of sight of anybody looking outside. She watched closely as he holstered his automatic and reached inside one of the equipment pouches on his assault vest. Then he leaned over, slapped the piece of electronic listening gear now in his hand onto the top part of the window and rolled away.
His whisper ghosted through her headset. “Probe active. Live on channel three.”
Helen switched the setting on her radio, shifting to the broadcast from the bug Brett had just put in place. Nothing. Just the soft hiss of static and dead air. There was no one inside the room behind the window. She swallowed her disappointment. On paper, the senior rabbi’s office had seemed a logical spot for the terrorists to hole up in. According to the blueprints Tanner’s men had liberated from the county records, the room had just that one narrow window and only one easily guarded door leading out to a secretary’s office. Well, she thought coldly, they would just have to try again, somewhere else.
At her quiet command, Brett began climbing, hauling himself up hand over hand easily, despite the weight of equipment and weapons he carried.
“Romeo One, this is Romeo Five. I think I’ve got something.” Special Agent Frank Jackson’s normal stoic calm was gone.
Helen glanced behind her in surprise. She’d deployed Jackson and his partner, Gary Ricks, along the synagogue’s eastern wall, more to cover all the bases than from a real belief they might hear anything in that area. She could just make out Ricks hunched over near the edge of the roof. So Jackson must be suspended somewhere beside one of the two huge stained-glass windows that opened up into the temple’s worship hall. “Go ahead, Romeo Five.”
“I have audio on channel six.”
“Switching now.” Helen changed the setting on her radio again.
She tensed as a number of different voices suddenly boomed hollowly through her headphones. Some were higher-pitched—children’s voices, several of them crying softly while others tried to console them. Others were deeper, but still identifiably belonged to women—mothers trying desperately to hush their weeping sons and daughters. There were other voices too—louder, harsher, and angrier. They belonged to men riding on the knife edge of sudden violence and bloody murder. The terrorists.
One guttural drawl in particular caught her horrified attention. “Tell those brats to shut up, or I swear to God, I’ll blow them and this whole damned Jew rat’s nest to kingdom come!”
Another masculine voice sounded in her headset, but this one was younger, calmer, and more educated. “I will do my best. But I tell you again this exercise is futile. Surely you must know that the police are all around this temple by now? What do you hope to gain by holding these children and their mothers prisoner? Let them go and I will stay behind. Surely I am hostage enough for you?”
Helen nodded to herself. That must be Temple Emet’s assistant rabbi. A brave man. She only hoped his courage didn’t get him killed before she and her troops could rescue him.
The guttural voice spoke again, even angrier now. “One more word out of you, Jew-boy, and I’ll splash your goddamned brains across that organ there, you hear?”
Helen breathed out. She had heard enough. The terrorists and their hostages were in the synagogue’s choir loft. It was time to leave before they realized just how close the HRT had gotten to them. She switched back to her section command frequency. “All Romeo units, this is Romeo One. We’ve pinged ’em. Pull back to RP Alpha. Verify.”
One after another the men in her recon team checked in and confirmed that they were moving back to the rally point to await further orders.
SEPTEMBER 28
FBI command post, near the Temple
Helen stood at one of the large windows in the principal’s office they had commande
ered as a command post, staring out across the open ground that separated the high school from Temple Emet. The sun was going down, spilling gold and red light across the synagogue complex. Pushed by the setting sun, the shadows were lengthening. It would be dark in less than an hour. But the full moon would rise a short time later, again making it too dangerous for them to move in until the very early hours of the next morning.
“Special Agent Gray?”
Helen turned away from the window. One of Larry McDowell’s assistants stood there—a young man, fresh-faced, and probably almost straight out of the Academy.
“Agent McDowell would like you to join them across the hall for a planning conference.”
“I’ll be right there.” Helen watched the young man scurry off and then followed him. She was almost amused. So the all-knowing agent in charge had finally decided to acknowledge her existence. That must mean he was starting to feel the pressure from above and was looking for possible scapegoats.
Lang, Tanner, and McDowell were all gathered in the teachers’ lounge he had turned into his own private command center. One other man was there beside them, and she recognized him as the head of the FBI negotiating team.
McDowell preferred deliberating outside the organized chaos of the primary operations center, and she couldn’t blame him for that. The lounge was a small, quieter place. The four senior men stood grouped around a coffee-stained worktable, intently studying blueprints of the temple complex. Along the wall behind them, a small cadre of junior FBI agents in their trademark gray suits manned a bank of tactical radios and secure phones.
Lang looked up at her approach. “You feeling okay, Helen?” he asked.
“Fine.” She’d made sure her troops slept through the morning and early afternoon and she’d managed to grab a quick catnap herself. Sleep discipline was emphasized by HRT training. Of course, if this siege dragged on much longer, Lang would have to bring in another section to spell them. She shied away from that thought. Hearing those bastards inside the synagogue only made her more eager to be in at the finish. “What’s up, John?”
“Nothing good.”
“Still no word from inside?”
Lang shook his head grimly. So far, despite every effort, they’d failed to establish two-way communication with the hostage-takers. There were no phones in the temple choir loft and the terrorists were apparently too afraid of police sharpshooters to risk venturing out of their improvised fortress to find one downstairs. Even an offer the FBI negotiators had made by loudspeaker to hand-carry a portable phone inside had so far gone unanswered and unheeded.
And an early hope that the unknown terrorists might be driven out of the choir loft by thirst had been quickly dashed by the discovery that it had a small adjoining washroom. Right now the FBI’s only source of information on the bad guys was strictly one-way—eavesdropping via the listening device her team had planted early this morning and now supplemented by laser microphones aimed at the synagogue’s large stained-glass windows.
“Now that we’re all here, let’s recap this thing and see if we can come to a consensus. Okay?” McDowell said brusquely.
Typical, Helen thought wearily. He locks me out of the room and then he acts as though I’ve been goofing off when he finally condescends enough to invite me in on the planning. But she kept her irritation off her face. Showing anger would serve no purpose and might only encourage him to needle her further.
“First, Captain Tanner’s men have finally located the vehicle we believe the terrorists used as their transport. Correct, Captain?”
Harlan Tanner nodded slowly, his own face impassive despite McDowell’s barely concealed dig. “That’s right.” He didn’t bother referring to his notes. “We’ve identified a 1985 Chevy Suburban parked down the street from Temple Emet as having been stolen from outside a Richmond home earlier yesterday. Every other car, truck, and van in the neighborhood belongs to someone with a legitimate reason for being in the area.”
“Did your people find anything in the Suburban that might give us a handle on what we’re facing in there?” Helen asked, butting in before McDowell could push on.
“Yeah.” Tanner looked straight at her. “Forensics is still going over it with a fine-tooth comb, but they’ve already found traces of a lot of bad shit.”
“How bad?”
“Carrying cases and cleaning kits for assault rifles—probably AKs.” He paused significantly. “They also found the chemical signature for some high-grade plastic explosive—maybe four or five kilos’ worth.”
“Christ.” Helen was appalled. That much explosive power, properly emplaced, could easily turn Temple Emet into a smoking pile of rubble. She turned to the head of the negotiating team—an agent named Avery, she suddenly remembered. “You’ve been listening in on these goons. How many are we dealing with exactly?”
“Three, Agent Gray. We’ve identified three separate voices belonging to the terrorists,” McDowell cut in sharply, clearly irked that she’d been taking control of his meeting.
Avery nodded. “That’s right. The accents are a little blurred because of the distance between our mikes and the choir loft, but my linguists believe two at least are originally from the Tidewater section of Virginia. The third man is definitely an American English speaker, but his precise origins are indeterminate. Their politics are pretty clear, though. We’ve picked up a lot of radical, neo-Nazi jargons and sloganeering. They also keep referring to someone they call ‘a brother-in-arms.’ A German national apparently named Karl.”
“And their mental state?” Lang asked.
Avery hesitated briefly, apparently reluctant to theorize without more hard evidence, but then he plunged on. “Very bad. And deteriorating. This was not a planned confrontation. Instead, it’s clear that these terrorists only intended to blow up the synagogue itself right before a major Jewish holiday. They stumbled on to the children’s decorating party by accident. Right now they’re pretty well locked into a classic paranoid state—compounded by isolation, sleep deprivation, growing hunger, and alcohol abuse.”
He saw their appalled glances and amplified that last comment. “We’ve heard fairly clear signs that at least one of them is already very drunk and may still be drinking.”
“Damn it.” Tanner spoke for them all. Alcohol would slow the hostage-takers’ reflexes and reaction time, but it would also impair their judgment, perhaps making them more likely to start killing their captives.
McDowell took center stage again. “Right. You’ve heard the bad news. As I see it, the situation we face is inherently unstable. These creeps won’t communicate with us. And now they’re starting to lose it. So we’re getting nowhere fast out here and the media vultures are out in full force, circling thicker and thicker.” He paused. “I’ve been in constant touch with the Director. He’s personally stressed that the Bureau cannot afford another Waco. We can’t let this thing drag on indefinitely, and we can’t have this siege end in another pile of dead women and kids.”
Great, Helen thought to herself, talk about mixed messages. Risk an attack to end the standoff, but don’t take any risks with the lives of the hostages. And that was impossible.
“I’m soliciting opinions here, folks,” McDowell said. “Do we wait longer? Or do we strike now?” He turned to Lang. “John?”
“I say we go,” the HRT commander said flatly. “Time is clearly not on our side.”
“Avery?”
The negotiator took a deep breath and then sighed. “I concur. We should go.”
McDowell stood silently for a few minutes, pondering his options and not liking any of them. Finally, he looked up. “Okay, I’ll phone the Director and pass on our recommendation.” He turned to Helen. “If he approves direct action, when can you and your section be ready to move?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Early tomorrow morning. When it’s dark.” She glanced at Lang for confirmation. “We can move sooner if they start to unravel faster, but it would be a lot more dangerous.”<
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He nodded his agreement.
McDowell frowned. “All right, Agent Gray. Assemble your section, make your plans, and then brief us.”
“Of course.”
But then he stopped her on her way out the door. “Don’t screw this up, Helen. We’ve all got a lot riding on this one.”
She smiled sweetly at him and pulled his hand away from her arm. “Not as much as those poor kids inside Temple Emet, Larry. Maybe you forgot about them.”
She didn’t wait to see what effect her parting shot had on him. She had work to do.
SEPTEMBER 29
The moon was down.
Helen Gray checked the fastenings on her Kevlar armor and assault vest one last time and then slung her submachine gun from her shoulder. She glanced at Rabbi David Kornbluth, Temple Emet’s spiritual leader. “You understand about the stained glass, Rabbi? If there were any other way …” She left the rest carefully unsaid.
The rabbi, an elderly man, turned his shrewd gaze on her and shrugged. “I would prefer that these barbarians had never invaded my synagogue, Miss Gray. But they have. And now you must root them out.” He gently took her hand. “May God go with you.”
Helen ducked her head, already knowing how much depended on her. “Thank you. I will.” She strode away quickly, desperately hoping she could fulfill the promise she had just made.
Oh, her plan was sound. Very sound. But she knew only too well how swiftly the most carefully crafted plans could disintegrate in practice.
She trotted down the steps of the high school and out toward the pair of parked school buses that sheltered her assault force from both media scrutiny and detection by those inside the temple. Her four snipers were already in position on the eastern edge of the synagogue roof.
