Threat warning

by John Gilstrap

  “All I’m saying-”

  “Let him finish, Gail,” Jonathan said sharply.

  She looked wounded. Maybe betrayed. Jonathan had never spoken to her like that before.

  “All you’re saying is surrender before we engage,” Boxers said. “You’re looking at failure as the only option. That’s not the way Digger and I do things. We plan the mission and the extraction as best as we can, and we execute. We’ve never failed. Not once. One of the reasons for that is that we don’t accept that any other outcome is possible.”

  Gail was stunned. She made a puffing sound that might have been a derisive laugh, and said, “So, you engage in self-delusion.”

  Boxers started to say something, and then deferred to his boss with a simple glance.

  “We engage realities,” Jonathan said. “We don’t have the luxury of reinforcements, and we don’t have the responsibility for arrests. All we have to do is take the good guys from the bad guys. Nothing else matters.”

  “Even if it means dying.”

  Jonathan chose his next words carefully. Gail had been a shooter on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, and she’d seen her share of firefights both as a sworn officer and as a member of Security Solutions, but she’d never been part of an 0300 mission with Boxers and him, and for the first time, he wondered if she might have become more a liability than an asset.

  “Dying doesn’t happen to us if we stack the odds enough in our favor, and we get our heads in the right place.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t do that,” Jonathan said. “Please don’t do that. We’re a couple of hours away from going hot on this op, and I will not tolerate doubt.”

  “You won’t tolerate it?” At what point in her life had she started seeking permission from Jonathan Grave?

  “That’s what I said. Gail, you’re damn good at what you do. I’ve seen you perform in the shit, and I admire the hell out of you, but those times were all reactive. Someone took a shot at you, and you fired back. Tonight might not work that way. The reason why Box and I are still alive is because we don’t hesitate to do what needs to be done in support of the mission, and the mission is always one hundred percent about getting the PC home whole and healthy.”

  He allowed the weight of his words to settle, knowing that she would recognize PC as the acronym for precious cargo, the universal term for hostages needing rescue.

  “The quickest way to die is to hesitate,” he went on. “Microseconds matter. If the bad guy tickles his trigger before you do, his bullet leaves the muzzle first. After that, nobody has an edge. I need you to tell me that you can shoot first, or I’ve got to leave you behind.”

  Gail didn’t know what to say. In her world-you know, where the grass is green and the water wet-what Jonathan described was murder. For him, the elements of the law didn’t matter because he saw a world that was divided into good and evil, and he could compartmentalize the illegality into irrelevance.

  Back when she first met him in the hills of Pennsylvania, just hours before the ground would be littered with blood and bodies, and the world would seem to be on fire, Jonathan had told her with an utterly straight face that he was on the side of the angels. She’d taken such a corny line as prima facie evidence that he was mentally disturbed. Then she witnessed his skills as a warrior, and his warmth and mercy as a human being, and she realized that he was merely stating the truth. That was the moment when she first thought she might be in love with him.

  “I won’t let you down,” she said. She didn’t have a clue how she would pull it off, but if it came to a choice between shooting a bad guy in cold blood or letting Jonathan die, the bad guy wouldn’t have a chance.

  “Has your assistant sent you the satellite images we pulled down?” Rollins asked over the satellite link.

  On the screen, Jonathan could see Venice’s jaw lock. She was nobody’s assistant, and he halfway expected her to tear into the colonel. He admired that she restrained herself. “It’s coming up now,” she said. “While we wait, can I get you some coffee, or maybe take your shirts to the laundry?”

  The team at the CP roared with laughter while Rollins remained silent. Jonathan assumed that he didn’t get the joke.

  Overall, the image on their computer screen was more or less identical to the one they’d been studying, but with ridiculously greater detail. The trees had been digitally removed by top-secret software, revealing a level of nuance that was at least two generations of sophistication beyond anything Jonathan had seen previously. He said, “Wow,” and then was surprised that he’d spoken aloud.

  “Wow is right,” Rollins said. “See what happens when you leave the Community? I want you to know that we just spent about fifty million taxpayer dollars to get you these pictures. If I wanted to, I could zoom in and count freckles. In a shoot-out, we can mark individual GIs and opfor and track them in real time. We can take any one of them-or more than one of them-and convert the image to ground-level view and beam it to whoever we want. If we’ve got a shooter in a window waiting for a target, he can watch the computer image of the guy approaching in his left eye while he aims through the scope with his right. He’ll have range and windage data dialed into his scope and be able to meet the bad guy with a bullet as soon as he steps into the target window. This shit’s amazing technology.”

  Amazing didn’t touch it, Jonathan thought. This was the stuff of science fiction. Rollins’s willingness to share it openly with Jonathan’s team-and risk a significant prison sentence to do it-told Jonathan that he’d been too distrustful of his former colleague.

  The satellite imagery mostly confirmed what they’d already put together, although the compound had roughly twice the number of buildings that Jonathan had estimated.

  “Before we get to the audio,” Rollins said, “I want to point out a few major features that you’re looking at.” An orange dot appeared in the middle of the screen. “Do you see my cursor?”

  Jonathan said, “Yep.”

  The cursor moved, and so did the picture. It paused on a spot, flashed once, and then the image grew rapidly, as if they were falling toward the ground, to reveal the head and shoulders of a man standing near a fence. The image flashed again, and the virtual camera swung down to a ground-level view of a man in his twenties dressed in black with an M16 assault rifle slung across his chest. From there, the camera pivoted to reveal individual features on the man’s face. You couldn’t count the pores in his skin, but you could certainly pick him out of a lineup.

  “These are satellite images?” Venice asked. Her tone spoke of pure admiration.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rollins said. “And please don’t ask me for details. You folks are the first people without compartmentalized clearances ever to see this.”

  Jonathan understood the significance. These guards were well-equipped. “They’ve got the right toys,” he said. “Do we know if they know how to use them?”

  “You need to assume they do,” Rollins replied. “There appears to be a shooting range there at the facility. I figure why have a range but to teach people how to shoot? I can show it to you if you’d like.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “Later.”

  “How many of these guards are there?” Boxers asked.

  “I count six, but you’re free to do your own analysis. I can only send you a static picture, but it’s fully functional. You can zoom in or out as you wish. But first, I want you to really study this guy. Each of the sentries wears the same kit as far as I can tell, and to me it looks like they’re not wearing any body armor. Or if they are, it’s light and under their coats.”

  Jonathan nodded and pointed to the screen. “I don’t see any reloads, either.”

  “Look closer,” Rollins said. “They’ve got their mags taped together, ’Nam-style.”

  Jonathan saw it. Back in the day, soldiers taped ammo mags more or less end-to-end to make for quick reloading during a firefight. The theory was that they would merely flip the empty mag and reinser
t the other end to keep the volume of fire intense. In practice, it created more problems than it solved. First of all, the ammo in the bottom mag was always exposed to the elements. In a jungle environment, that meant mud and spiders and assorted junk that would foul the action of the already-cantankerous M16, and in cold weather like this it meant potential accumulations of ice. Plus, in a combat environment, when adrenaline is flowing like a river, flipping a mag is no easy trick with nervous hands.

  It did look kinda cool, however, when the guys in the movies did it, and wherever guys are involved, the coolness factor is a very important consideration.

  Jonathan noted all of it. The two mags still gave them sixty rounds apiece-a little over three seconds per mag on full-auto, plenty of bullets to create a very bad day-but most inexperienced warriors wasted the first sixty rounds on either the sky or the ground just a few yards in front of their feet. The real takeaway from this photo was the lack of body armor. Jonathan’s team would not make a similar mistake. It would be heavy and limit mobility, but he’d already had enough holes blown into him, thank you very much. After the last incident in Pennsylvania, he’d made a promise to himself to keep all of his blood confined to its assigned vessels from now on.

  He said, “Okay, Colonel, while you’ve got the controls, give us a tour of this compound.” He figured it was what Rollins was dying to do anyway.

  The virtual camera resumed its bird’s-eye view again and the ground fell away. From above, they viewed twenty-three well-constructed buildings of various sizes. Frame built and brick veneered, this was a community designed to last. The largest of the buildings-Jonathan guesstimated it to measure thirty by fifty feet-sat in the middle of the occupied acreage and was served by a straight access road that appeared to lead directly from the main gate. Jonathan’s money said that the central structure was the church or common meeting hall. Most of the other buildings could well have been houses, maybe fifteen hundred square feet each, and they were arranged in a sharply defined grid pattern, reminding Jonathan of the residential areas of suburbia everywhere.

  “Any idea of how many people in total live here?” Jonathan asked.

  “Hard to say,” Rollins replied. “A couple dozen, certainly; maybe a couple hundred. Watching the place in real time, we see lots of movement, but there’s no way to tell without more detailed analysis whether we’re seeing different folks or the same dozen or so over and over. There are a couple of features of this place that I think you need to concentrate on.”

  The image shifted to reveal a wood-frame building that could only be a school, built in the classic old style, complete with a tiny steeple out front.

  “If I took you to a ground-level view on this one, you’d actually see the word ‘School’ over the door,” Rollins explained. “I show you this because of what it implies regarding children on-site. I want to make it extraordinarily clear to you, Digger, that dead children are not part of the package. I will not authorize that.”

  Jonathan exchanged glances with Boxers. “Last time I checked, you’re not authorizing any of this. We’re not in the habit of killing children.”

  Rollins cleared his throat. “I heard about an op in Colombia a while back that left a lot of blood on the ground. Rumor has it in the community that you might have had something to do with that.”

  “Move on,” Jonathan said. There had in fact been such an op, but the children hadn’t been killed by the good guys. Either way, he didn’t owe an explanation to Roleplay Rollins.

  The colonel got the hint. The picture moved again, this time swinging in for a close-up of the main building.

  “I figure that to be the church and meeting hall,” Jonathan said.

  “Agreed,” Rollins confirmed. “But it’s got an interesting feature. Here, look at this.”

  The image flashed, and then there were looking at an infrared scan of the same building. In IR imagery, warmth is white and cold is dark. Here, the main building looked like a negative image of itself.

  “Look how cold that building is.”

  “Maybe it’s unoccupied,” Gail offered.

  “Maybe, but that wouldn’t explain it being this cold.”

  Jonathan had seen images like this before, and he didn’t like where his imagination was taking him. “You think it’s armored, don’t you?”

  “That’s exactly what I think,” Rollins confirmed.

  Gail scowled. “I don’t get it,” she and Venice said together.

  Jonathan explained, “No matter how cold the weather, on a nice day like this, the radiant heat of the sun raises the surface temperature of buildings-brick in particular. Put a layer of steel behind it, though, or build it out of reinforced concrete, and it stays relatively cool. This heat signature at this time of day tells me that the brick facade is covering up some heavy-duty shielding.”

  “Which means they’re expecting an assault,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan closed the loop: “And none of that is good news for us.”

  Over the link, Venice said, “So you’re telling me that you’re raiding a fortress?”

  Jonathan looked to Boxers, then shrugged. “Well, it’s not going to be a walk in the park, but I think calling it a fortress might be overstating it. Think of that assembly hall as the castle keep-the place to administer the Kool-Aid if all else fails. Colonel, have you analyzed the other buildings?”

  “In a cursory sort of way, yes. This appears to be the only one reinforced like this. I like your analogy to the castle keep. I think that’s probably pretty accurate.”

  “So we need to try to engage them outside of that,” Boxers said. “If they retreat to the keep, then we’ll have an interesting day.”

  “Suppose that’s where they keeping the Nasbes?” Gail asked. “Isn’t that the most sensible place?”

  Jonathan said, “Not necessarily. They clearly think they’re out of reach or else they wouldn’t be so aggressive with their communications to the world. If they don’t feel endangered, then there’s no reason to be on high alert.”

  “Didn’t all of that change when Ryan escaped?” Gail asked.

  Jonathan sighed. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe not,” Rollins said. “We’ve got a cell phone intercept. I need to set the scene a little bit for you. Tell you where the voices are coming from.” Papers rustled on the other end of the phone. “Okay, you’re going to hear two voices, both of them picked up from encrypted telephone conversations. I leaned on a friend at the NSA to program a computer to monitor every telephone conversation coming out of Maddox County, West Virginia, looking for certain key words that we thought were important.”

  Gail’s mind reeled. If the New York Times ever got wind of this, the jail time would be the least of their worries.

  Jonathan placed his hand on hers and brought his lips close to her ear. “Remember the end game,” he whispered.

  Rollins continued, “The first voice you hear-the one that wants to just kill the captives and dispose of the bodies outright-comes from a cell phone that traces to a location outside the compound. I can send you a map if you want, but I don’t think the location itself is in play. Because we’re dealing with cell phones, we can only get within so many yards of the signal, but our friends at Fort Meade narrowed it down to a residential street that happens to be where Sheriff Kendig Neen resides. We printed the signal against a known recording, and we came up with a four-nines reliability quotient.”

  “Four-nines” meant ninety-nine point nine-nine percent likelihood that the voice belonged to the person they suspected.

  “The other voice-and there are only two in this recording-traces back to a location where there happens to be only one structure within a half-mile radius. Watch your screen.”

  The picture moved rapidly and then the camera settled onto a familiar sight.

  “That’s the home of Michael Copley,” Jonathan said.

  “So you’ve been busy,” Rollins said. “You’re exactly right. I’ll run the recording now. It’s
truncated at the beginning because it takes a few seconds for the computer software to kick in. Okay, here we go.”

  Jonathan listened to more movement, and then the quality of the sound changed to the characteristic scratchiness of a telephone recording. As promised, this one picked up in the middle of an ongoing discussion.

  “… we decided this. You keep walking out to the edge like this, and it’s going to fall away. If you’re going to kill them, do it and be done with it.” The voice had a buttery baritone quality that would have been appropriate for a radio broadcaster. “The rest is just unnecessary. It’s getting disgusting. It’s one thing to execute, but it’s another to torture and maim. Did you see what you did to the kid’s arm?”

  “This is not your call to make,” the second voice-the one belonging to Michael Copley-said. “They killed one of my soldiers. They need to pay.”

  “I don’t disagree, Brother Michael. Say the word and I’ll take care of it myself. But you need to do it quietly. This Internet broadcasting stuff is just going to bring trouble to all of us.”

  “The world needs to know that we cannot be fought,” Copley said.

  “The world doesn’t even know who the hell we are,” Neen protested. “And the less they know, the better off we’re going to be.”

  “They killed Brother Stephen. Killed him.”

  Neen sighed audibly. “And we will punish in kind. We can do it publicly within the community, but I’m begging you not to turn this into a show on the Internet. I begged you last time, and now I’m begging you again. It’s too much of a risk. It will anger people, and they will be all that more determined to identify us and bring us down.”

  Copley laughed. “Given what we have done, and what we are about to do, I believe that horse has long left the barn.”

  “Think of the data trail, then. Why take the additional risk when we don’t need to?”

  “Because the world needs to know.”

  “No, they don’t!” Neen railed. “Brother Michael, we have our cause, and our cause is just. We’re wreaking terror, and the blame is being cast on the Muslim heathens. All that we’ve worked for and all that we’ve built is finally coming to fruition. With all respect, sir, this grandstanding is putting that at risk. Forgive me for saying so, but that’s irresponsible.”