by DL Barbur
“Yeah,” he said.
“Cop ever since. Well, at least until November. I was a detective the last few years. Never on SWAT.”
He nodded, satisfied. I hadn’t exaggerated but hadn’t downplayed my experience either.
“I spent 15 years in the Army. Last eight were in the Fort Bragg Stockade Rifle and Pistol Club.”
That was his way of letting me know he’d been a member of Delta Force, the Army’s most elite band of special operations soldiers. Their original headquarters had been at the Fort Bragg Stockade. It was interesting he hadn’t done a full twenty, the number of years you needed to retire. I wondered if he’d gotten hurt, or if he’d run afoul of the same people as me and Bolle.
We stopped at a heavy metal door. He typed in a combination and grunted as he pulled it open. The room inside smelled like gun oil. There were long guns in racks. Pistols hung on the walls, and there were lots of black nylon cases and backpacks with labels on them.
He grabbed two backpacks.
“Look, my primary objective is to just get eyes on the target and start passing intel. But I think we need to be ready with a hasty assault plan in case they act like they’re going to kill the hostage or move her somewhere before we get resources there.”
I nodded. That was standard doctrine. If we had to rescue Gina, we would want to do it at a time of our choosing, with plenty of resources, and a very carefully thought out plan. But if it looked like the bad guys were going to kill Gina, or move her, we’d have to make things happen on her own.
He unzipped one compartment of the backpack, pulled out an AR-15 that had been chopped down to the size of an overgrown pistol.
“.300 Blackout. Aimpoint red dot sight. 10” barrel with a brace instead of a full stock. I’m not thrilled with them, but they are easy to hide.”
I nodded.
He put the gun back, showed me the other compartments. “Some extra mags, flashbangs, and a rudimentary chest rack. There’s only a plate in the front, so don’t get shot in the back.”
“Front towards enemy,” I said and reached for the bag. It was surprisingly heavy.
He swung his own bag on his shoulders. Then picked up a small satchel.
“Demo kit,” he said.
I followed him back through the corridors. I was going to have to take some time getting to know this place so I wouldn’t get lost trying to find the bathroom. Outside I could hear the clatter of rotor blades. We walked by the conference room and Alex grabbed my arm.
“I feel really useless here,” she said.
“Hang tight,” I said. “We’ll find something for you to do.”
“Well, hopefully it isn’t stitching you up. I never liked Gina, but…”
“But she was your dad’s wife,” I finished for her. “We’ll get her.”
“Ok,” she said. “Be careful.”
With that she kissed me. Then drew away.
I made myself walk away, out to the parking lot, where Dalton, Casey and Henry were loading backpacks and bags. Even though the Little Bird was modified with a long narrow storage compartment under the fuselage, it was going to be a tight fit.
Dalton motioned me into the front right seat and I climbed in. Dalton, Casey, and Henry crammed into the back seat like peas in a pod. There was no way I would have fit back there with a person on each side. There was a set of headphones dangling from a hook beside me. I put them on, grateful for a break from the noise.
Jack’s voice crackled over the intercom.
“We set back there?”
Dalton made sure both doors were secured and gave a thumbs up. The Little Bird labored to get off the ground. Instead of springing straight up in the air, we took a sort of running start, with the skids just a few inches over the pavement as we flew forward for fifty yards or so before we gained altitude.
“We’re heavy,” Jack said.
Great, I thought. I hated helicopters.
He put us in a gentle, right-hand turn to get the nose of helo pointed north. Down below, I could see Alex standing in the parking lot, looking up at us.
CHAPTER TEN
Jack climbed to a thousand feet. I was sitting in what was technically the co-pilot’s seat and could see all the instruments. I sat with my arms folded across my chest, hands well away from the stick and collective, and my feet pressed against the base of my seat, away from the foot pedals. The only thing that scared me more than being a passenger in a helicopter was the idea of accidentally bumping the controls.
“You want an overflight of your target area before I set you down?” Jack asked over the intercom. It was clear he was talking to Dalton. I was fine with that. Hostage rescue was a Delta specialty. In the Ranger Regiment I’d had plenty of training in urban warfare, close quarters battle and shooting, but that was twenty-five years ago now. Also for every hour of training I’d received, a Delta guy would get ten. For every round of ammo I’d fired, a Delta guy would probably fire a hundred. I was fine with playing second fiddle on this operation. Hopefully, if something needed to be investigated Dalton would have the good sense to let me take the lead.
“Let’s do a single overflight, in a straight line,” Dalton said. “Don’t circle. We need to look like we’re going from point A to point B.”
We flew over the river, into Washington state, and Jack banked right to take us west. He was taking the turns slow and easy. Normally the Little Bird handled like a Ferrari but I could feel it straining to change course. We were probably technically overloaded by a couple hundred pounds. We flew for a minute or two and I tried to orient myself. Even though it was right across the river, I hadn’t spent much time in Vancouver. I’d crossed the river a handful of times to pick up a suspect and that was about it.
“That place is huge,” Casey said over the intercom. She was on the left side of the aircraft and had a good view of the apartment complex as we buzzed by. I leaned forward in my seat to see around Jack. She was right. The complex was probably a square mile or so, with dozens of buildings, and a half dozen streets that snaked around the complex.
“A couple hundred units,” Henry said. He was alternating between looking out the window and looking at the tablet in his lap. “The cell signals triangulate right about the center of the property. I can narrow it down to a couple hundred feet, but that’s it.”
“Ok. We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Dalton said. “Let’s go pick up our vehicle.”
We flew a couple miles further east, then landed in a field just south of a fire station. Two guys were standing in the fire station parking lot next to a minivan and a little subcompact car. I hoped the minivan was for us. Dalton motioned me towards the vehicles as he helped unload the Little Bird’s cargo compartment.
After shouldering my backpack, I ran forward. Both guys looked like they were in their late teens or early twenties and were bug-eyed at the sight of the helicopter. I walked up to the one holding a set of keys in one hand, and a clipboard in the other.
“Uhhh… Are you here to pick up a van?” he asked.
“Yep,” I said. I took the clipboard from him, scrawled something illegible in what looked like the right places, then held out my hand for the key. He put it in my hand slowly, never taking his eyes of the helo as he did it.
“What are you guys doing?” his slack-jawed buddy asked.
“We’re with Fish and Wildlife,” I said. “Goose survey.”
“Oh,” he said, then did a quick scan of the cloudless blue sky. There wasn’t a goose to be seen.
“We can’t find any in the sky, so we’re going to look on the ground.”
He blinked owlishly, then the two looked at each other and headed for the subcompact. I got in the van, fired up the engine, and adjusted the mirrors to my liking. Everybody else piled in and we were off.
“So, I was thinking,” Casey said. “Dent, you and Dalton look like cops. Why don’t you drop me and Henry off? We can act like we’re checking out apartments and text you if we find anything
interesting.”
My first impulse was to tell Casey to keep her ass in the car, and not get within range of target house, but I just as quickly dismissed it. Her plan was sound. Casey and Henry both looked like archetypal Portland hipsters.
Beside me in the passenger seat, Dalton was nodding.
“Sounds good. We’ll be close.”
We dropped them off on the north side of the complex. They strolled down the street, and Casey linked her arm in Henry’s, which he seemed to enjoy tremendously. Hopefully, there would be enough blood still flowing to his brain that he could keep working his gadget and home in on the cell phones.
“Let’s find someplace close, but inconspicuous,” Dalton said.
“I need food, and coffee,” I said.
Dalton checked his phone. “Go north. There’s a burger place.”
I nodded, pulled out into traffic.
“When did you last sleep?” Dalton asked.
“I napped on the helo. Other than that, going on two days.”
He nodded. There was no judgment. It was just a piece of information. Just like you needed to know if the engine of your truck had enough oil, you needed to know the sleep state of your men.
I parked at the Burgerville a couple of blocks north and ran inside rather than using the drive-through. I didn’t want to get stuck behind a soccer mom ordering a meal for her family of five if things went to shit with Casey and Henry. I was back in the van in a matter of minutes. I parked us in a far corner of a shopping center parking lot and tore into the food like a ravenous wolf.
My phone sat on the dash between us. When it buzzed I wiped my fingers on a napkin and reached for it.
Found the place. Did a circle and Henry’s detector tracked the cell. Also car with “White Pride” stickers out front. Blasting music from inside. Pretty sure it is Skrewdriver.
I looked at Dalton. He shrugged. The phone buzzed again.
Skrewdriver = White Power band.
We both nodded.
“Tell them…” Dalton started, but the phone buzzed again.
Apartment next to them is empty! We are inside. I bumped the lock.
Dalton’s eyebrows went up. The phone buzzed again.
Hope that’s ok???
“Ask them the apartment number,” Dalton said.
I started typing out the message, messed up, corrected it, then messed up again. Beside me, Dalton sighed.
“Here,” I said, handing him the phone.
His fingers flew across the keypad.
You can park here, Casey sent, accompanied by a picture taken from inside the apartment of an empty visitor parking spot. When I see you pull up, I’ll go knock on their front door, tell them I just moved in, ask for a roll of toilet paper. You come in the back while they are distracted.
“Maybe we should just let them handle this,” Dalton said. “We could go catch a movie or something.”
“I don’t think Henry can shoot very well,” I said as I put the van in drive.
It worked out just like we planned it. We pulled into the empty spot and Henry motioned us in. Dalton and I each wore a backpack and carried another duffel bag full of surveillance equipment. It would have looked suspicious as hell, except nobody was out and about to see us. It was still the peak of rush hour, so folks commuting from Oregon wouldn’t be there yet. Most folks here probably went inside and stared at one screen or another when they came home anyway.
The inside of the apartment was dark and smelled like carpet cleaner. It was small and narrow, with a living room and kitchen downstairs, and a staircase leading up to what I assumed would be the bedrooms. We were at the end of the building, the target apartment was next to us, and there were two more apartments on the other side.
Through the wall I could hear pounding bass and what sounded like screaming vocals. I instantly started developing a headache.
Casey came back in the door, carrying a roll of toilet paper.
“One guy opened the door just enough to talk to me, so I couldn’t see in the house. Early twenties, shaved head, bad teeth, lots of crummy tats. He talked to my boobs the whole time.” She kept her voice low, although odds of somebody hearing over the music were pretty low.
Dalton pointed up and started towards the stairs. We all followed him and congregated in the hallway in the center of the apartment, the farthest point from the front and back windows.
“Ok,” he whispered as he reached in his backpack. “Henry, you and Casey get started on phones and cameras. Dent, we’re going to cut some big strips of carpet off the floor and duct tape them over the windows.”
He handed me a roll of duct tape from his bag and headed for the back bedroom. I went to the front bedroom, flipped open my Benchmade folding knife, and with a few minutes’ work had a strip of carpet cut loose. I affixed it with plenty of tape and put my knife away. To anybody standing in the street, it would just look like a curtain, if they even noticed it at all.
I went in the back bedroom. Casey was setting up the cell phone monitoring equipment. She had two devices called Stingrays hooked up to a laptop. The Stingrays were clunky-looking gray boxes that looked like something a high school kid would build from a kit for a science fair, but they let Casey basically own any cell phone within half a mile.
“I’ve got two associated phones extremely close. Probably next door.”
By “associated phones” Casey meant she’d managed to delve into the call histories of the two phones and determine that they’d called each other. She would download the histories of each phone which would give us more numbers, then set the Stingray to search for all the phones in those histories. When one of those phones came in range, it would attempt to download the history from those phones. The amount of information could grow exponentially with each new phone. The laptop would sift the data and build what was called an association matrix. We could analyze it in dozens of ways, to determine who called whom when, and how frequently.
Given enough time, we could also retrieve text messages, pictures, and anything else stored on the phone. We were engaging all sorts of warrantless electronic searches. If this ever went to court, we would have some big problems.
“You want me to turn on their audio?” Casey asked.
Dalton nodded as he walked over to the common wall shared between this apartment and the one next door. He held what looked like an over-sized electronic stud finder. I recognized the device as Range-R, a cutesy name for a handheld doppler radar unit that could see through walls and tell us if a human-sized object was moving around on the other side. I did some quick math in my head as I watched Henry unpack several pin-hole fiber optic cameras. We probably were toting close to a quarter of a million dollars worth of electronic surveillance gear with us. Whatever Bolle’s other faults, the man knew how to secure a budget.
As Dalton pressed the device up against the wall, Casey patched an audio feed into the earpiece in my ear. She’d remotely commanded one of the cell phones next door to turn on its microphone and we were using it to eavesdrop on the room.
This was one of the many reasons I didn’t like cell phones.
At first, I got a double dose of the pounding music, then I heard what I thought was gunfire. I must have jumped because Casey waved at me.
“Video game,” she said.
I nodded.
She worked at the controls of the laptop for a second and the music level dropped in volume. I could hear male voices utter the occasional expletive, and hear the clicking of controls.
“I got you fucker!” one of them said, his voice rendered tinny and metallic by all the audio processing and filtering Casey was using.
Dalton checked the display of the Range-R. Nothing moving. He pointed at the wall to Henry, who stood on tiptoe and used a silent drill with a slender bit to drill through the wall near where it joined the ceiling. The drill had a depth gauge that stopped just before the bit poked through the drywall on the other side. He pulled out the flexible bit, leaving a long pl
astic tube behind. He fed one of the fiber optic cameras through the tube, and by feel pushed it through the last few millimeters of drywall on the other side. The camera went live.
The two apartments were mirror images of each other. We were looking through the common wall at an empty bedroom. The fisheye lens of the camera showed up some sleeping bags, some crumpled up clothes and nothing else. We repeated the process with the front bedroom. It too was empty.
Dalton gathered us together.
“Ok, we need to get cameras downstairs, but we need a quick plan in case this goes to shit. All of our options suck right now, but if we think they are going to harm the hostage, we need to act. Bolle is on his way, but he’s at least half an hour out.”
There were nods all around.
“We’ve got two ways in the front door and the back door. Both are absolutely terrible approaches. They’ll see us coming. I want to work on a better plan, but if we go right now we’ll take the back door.”
I nodded. The back door had big windows on either side, but then again, so did the front. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be expecting anybody at the back door.
Dalton pulled a flashbang grenade off the front of his vest. Unlike a military fragmentation grenade, which sent out a cloud of lethal fragments, the flash bang relied on concussion and a blinding flash of light to disorient and stun opponents.
“Casey, do you think you can throw one of these?” he asked.
She nodded.
“The command to go will be the word ‘execute’ three times. Got it? Execute. Execute. Execute.”
She nodded again.
“Pull the pin, release the lever, throw it right by the front door.”
“Ok,” Casey said and took the grenade from him.
“Dent and I are going to stand by the back door, while Henry places the cameras,” he said.
Through-wall cameras were great. The intelligence they could provide was invaluable. But there was a small chance that somebody would see the tiny little hole appear in the wall. Placing them took a deft touch to avoid sticking them out too far, and there was always a chance a paint chip would drop off the wall when the camera penetrated.
