Back Blast (48 page)

C
ourt and Zack both felt like two kids who had been left alone overnight in a candy store. By the time they turned on all the lights in the massive underground storage facility to see what they had available to them, the two ex–CIA employees felt like they could fight a small insurgency.

The underground warehouse was the size of a supermarket. On shelves, in lockers, and in numbered squares on the floor for reference and restocking, thousands of items sat ready for the taking. Small arms and ammunition, knives, motorcycles, rubber boats, parachute rigs, night vision devices, and communications gear. Climbing equipment and helicopter fast ropes, camouflage uniforms, and snow skis. Explosives, crossbows, medical supplies, GPS units, and even horse saddles.

They selected kit for their job ahead, although there were a lot of questions about just what they would be getting themselves into. Two guys hitting a building with an opposition force of eight to ten was bad enough, but Court and Zack knew precious little about the capabilities of their enemy, and absolutely nothing about the building itself.

They went with general-purpose gear: pistols and carbines, a sniper rifle with a suppressor for Zack, and an ultra quiet small-caliber suppressed handgun for Court. They stocked up on ammo and magazines, body armor, radio headsets, medical equipment, ropes, knives, and other accessories useful for men in their profession.

They also equipped themselves with grenades and explosive breaching charges.

Zack whistled after he and Court looked at everything they had selected to take with them on their op. “What do you say you and me say screw it to Hanley and instead go invade some Caribbean nation? I think we could
orchestrate a coup in Dominica, maybe even Grenada. Make our own laws and live like kings.”

Court ignored him, because something had caught his eye: a door that read Experimental Locker.

He went inside, flipped on a light, and began looking around. Zack followed him in. They walked between several shelves packed with a large collection of more esoteric equipment. Microdrones, robot cameras, even a heartbeat detector for tactical teams that looked useful to Court until he tried to lift it, then decided he’d rather check back in a few years when the eggheads got it miniaturized into something he wouldn’t have to schlep around like a medicine ball.

They read the tags and printed material attached to several other different pieces of equipment. Hightower said, “I don’t think you and I are smart enough to figure all this shit out.”

But Court knelt down over a black watertight case and pulled a laminated instruction booklet out of an attached plastic pouch.

Hightower walked over to the unit and bent down to see what had Court so engaged. He read the label on the case, then he read it again. Then he shook his head. “
Hell
no.”

“Hell
yes
,” replied Court.

“Why?”

“Why
not
?”

“You’re a hero, dude. But you’re not a superhero. That right there is a one-way ride to hell.”

“I can make it work.”

“You’re gonna die.”

“Gotta die of something.”

“Shit, man, die of something
else
.”

Despite continued protests from Zack, Court lifted the twenty-five-pound case and lugged it out with the rest of the gear they would take back with them.

Zack followed him out. “Seriously, Six, what the hell are you thinking about doing? It’s eight dudes in a house. We go in, hit it, and quit it.”

Court said, “I’m planning ahead. I’m going after Denny.”

“Fuck that. Denny’s untouchable. Hanley would never sanction it.”

“Then it’s a good thing I don’t work for the CIA. I’d probably get written up or something.”

—

J
ust after nine thirty a.m., a small blue and white helicopter flew low over the trees at the west end of Harvey Point, and then it slowed to a hover over a grassy field just south of the SAD storage facility. Zack and Court stood next to all their cases and packs of gear and watched the helicopter land.

The aircraft powered down and Chris Travers climbed out of the right seat, then walked directly over to the two men.

There was no greeting. He just said, “I hope you dumbasses don’t think you are taking all that shit on board this helo.”

Zack said, “We weighed it. Two hundred forty-five pounds of kit. That’s a Robinson R44 you’re flying there. You can carry this, us, and more.”

Travers did not press the issue; even though Hightower was nearly fifteen years Travers’s senior, he was still an intimidating character.

The three men loaded the aircraft, then they climbed in themselves. Travers took off into a sunny morning and flew the men to the north.

As they flew, Zack and Court discussed their options. Using Travers’s tablet computer with a cell connection, Court pulled up all the imagery on the Arlington safe house he could find. Looking it over, he saw it was a large but nondescript building in a middle-class neighborhood with a fence around the yard. The one interesting feature was that it backed up to an industrial area, with a large parking lot just behind the property.

“It’s going to be defended,” Court said.

Zack agreed. “We can hit it at night, use NODs.”

Court moved the map around the area. Just north of the location was a small park, with trees, two baseball diamonds, tennis courts, and a soccer field. And just beyond that was a large mall.

“Maybe instead of attacking into an enemy position, we can draw them out into the open.”

“How so?”

“We bait them with the one thing they are after.”

“Where are you going to find seventy-two virgins?”

“I mean me.”

Zack understood immediately. He joked, “Just one virgin, then. I like it.”

—

C
atherine King had only been back in the States a few minutes when she learned about the death of Andy Shoal. She rushed from Dulles to the crime scene, stood there on the sidewalk just like she’d stood on the sidewalk with Andy many times in the past week, surrounded by cops and flashing lights, searching for answers as to what had just happened.

She didn’t know why Andy had been killed by Denny Carmichael, and now she wondered why he had yet to come after her.

No, not for a second did she think the man known to the American press as Jeff Duncan had anything at all to do with this. The media had already convicted him, of course, and their reporting had gone beyond ridiculous, with experts on all the twenty-four-hour news stations opining about every possible motivation and tactic. Video games were being blamed; antigovernment anarchists were implicated; a four-year-old local high-profile missing persons case had been brought up by reporters at a press conference to a bemused FBI spokesperson who didn’t have a clue how to respond.

Every American with the common name Jeff Duncan was being sought, not by the police or the feds, because they all rightly assumed that it was a pseudonym, but by local reporters. A man in Illinois with the right name, the right general age, and the right general description had been frustrated by a reporter’s demands he account for his whereabouts, and he threw a punch at the man. Now Jeffrey Duncan of Peoria was behind bars and a hundred reporters from around the globe stood outside the jail in the rain, thinking the D.C. assassin might just possibly be this loudmouthed tire store clerk with a right hook that couldn’t even drop a spit-shined J-school grad.

And Catherine felt a sense of responsibility for it all. It had been her reporting that started everyone looking in the wrong place, had taken eyes off Carmichael and his Agency.

And she wondered if, once the shock wore off, she would feel responsible for what had happened to Andy, as well.

For the twentieth time since she’d been off her flight from Tel Aviv she
tried to call Six. As with all the other times, there was no answer. She wondered if he was still alive, or if all this commotion in the country about him was continuing on long after he was no longer around to take the blame for all these things he did not do.

Catherine headed back to her office, knowing good and well that the second she arrived she would be surrounded by her investigative team and the executive editor, and they would want to know everything about Tel Aviv and how it all related to Andy Shoal’s murder. Most would agree that the man who kidnapped her at Union Station three days ago was an assassin, and that Catherine’s Stockholm syndrome had just blinded her to this fact.

And she wouldn’t argue with them; she didn’t have the energy.

—

T
he Fashion Centre at Pentagon City was a large multistory mall with a luxury hotel and several restaurants. The average shopper would not realize it, but the mall also had dozens upon dozens of security cameras.

And all of these cameras were part of the network of image feeds that ran through the software at the Violator tactical operations center.

At six p.m., video monitors at the TOC came alive with images and facial recognition hits. While the men and women working in the TOC struggled frantically to pin down the location on a map of the building, they saw shot after shot of Court Gentry’s face, totally exposed without a hat or sunglasses. He entered the north entrance of the mall at the ground floor, walked south through the food court, stood in line for a minute to buy a cup of coffee at a kiosk in the center of the large crowded space, and then took his drink to the escalator.

By now the TOC had him fixed and they had live feeds from the Fashion Centre camera network, so they were able to track him in real time. While one analyst contacted the JSOC operatives, who were twenty minutes away in the center of D.C., a second analyst ordered all CIA contract officers in the area into the location.

A third analyst, under orders to do so, contacted the head of the National Clandestine Service. Due to the death of Jordan Mayes, and Suzanne Brewer’s hospitalization with a broken leg, Denny Carmichael had taken over operational control of the Violator TOC. Denny had the live
video feed patched through to his Alexandria safe house, and he immediately disconnected the call.

—

C
ourt Gentry took the escalator up to the second floor of the mall, and then he walked directly to a rear entrance of the adjoining Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City. He wove through the back of the hotel until he came to the front lobby, and here he stepped up to the elevator bank.

He took the elevator to the fifth floor, where he walked down the hall to a corner suite and entered with a key card.

—

A
ll eight operational Saudi assets arrived at the Ritz-Carlton just ten minutes later, which was only possible because the hotel was less than a half mile from their safe house. The men wore suits and ties, they came through the two entrances in groups of four, and they looked calm and casual, like businessmen returning from a day at a conference, as they split into four groups in the lobby.

Two men took the main stairs, two men took an elevator to a floor above Gentry’s hotel room, two men entered the Employees Only door and made their way to the service stairs, and two more men waited in the hall.

They all had suppressed Glock 17 pistols and combat knives, and they were all trained killers. At first their earbuds connected them to the director of their service, who had given them the kill order and the room number, but then he had to disconnect for a meeting, so now they just communicated softly to one another.

The team leader, a man named Cha, remained in the lobby with an asset named Jawad. He had the three ascending teams give a final “go check” and then he unleashed them on room 545.

—

H
ani and Kimal moved up the stairs, climbing quickly with their weapons behind their backs. Up on the fourth floor of the stairwell they heard movement, so they raised their weapons, then spun around from the landing just below. There, a hunched-over middle-aged janitor with gray-blond
hair mopped the floor, softly rapping along to the Kid Rock song in his headphones. He faced the opposite direction, so the two assets hid their pistols inside their coats and kept going up.

They stepped around the housekeeping cart and passed the hunched-over man without a glance as he continued his rap, and they ignored the words, concentrating on listening for sounds higher up, nearer to their target area.

Until then they both heard the man behind them speak in a loud, low voice. “I
know
you didn’t just track across my clean floor.”

The assets stood on the stairs above the janitor now. They spun back, looked down, and found themselves facing a large handgun with a larger silencer. Behind the weapon, where the janitor had been, now stood a surprisingly large man holding a mop in one hand and the pistol in the other.

—

Z
ack Hightower stood up fully now, adding six inches to his height. He said, “Nighty-night, bitches,” and his Heckler & Koch pistol barked twice in the stairwell. He stepped back on the landing and moved his mop out of the way, and two bodies slid down into the space he had just occupied. Both men were on their backs, their eyes open, holes in their foreheads.

He shot both men once more in the head, just to make sure.

Hightower held a small microphone in his left hand, hidden behind the mop handle. He quickly brought it to his mouth as his slipped the pistol back in the housekeeping cart. “Two down. South stairwell clear.”

—

F
our Saudi operators closed on room 545 at the end of the hall, their suppressed pistols trained on the door. They all wanted to know where their two partners from the stairs were, but they were operating in radio silence now, so they could only listen in while Cha downstairs called over and over for Kimal and Hani to check in.

One of the assets kept his eye on the stairwell, far behind him, worried something must have gone very wrong, but the other three stayed focused on the mission. They moved all the way to the door, and one man raised his foot to kick it in.

—