Taking Fire (18 page)

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 and 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.

“Carlyle, kill those fucking lights,” Nate ordered. “We'll lay down cover.”
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

The axiom rolled through Bobby's mind. This was what happened in rushed operations thrown together in bad conditions and without proper recon and surveillance. So much for a sneak attack.

Time for plan B, the
oh, shit
plan. All men on deck, a full-out assault on the Bunker as soon as Carlyle killed those lights and that damn alarm.

Muzzle flashes erupted from the Bunker—the bad guys clearly knew they had company—and Black's team lit up the warehouse with live rounds and tracer fire in response.

Suddenly, the warehouse went dark. The alarms stopped screaming. Score one for the good guys.

“Carlyle?” Nate barked over the radio.

“I'm good,” Carlyle barked back, sounding out of breath.

Without surprise on their side, things got much more dangerous. And they couldn't use overwhelming firepower to shoot their way into the Bunker, or Meir could become a victim of friendly fire.

Another problem: they hadn't anticipated that the warehouse would be so full of crap. They had to maneuver around stacks of crates and machinery to get to the Bunker. While offering some protection, the obstacles cost them speed. And speed was their best weapon right now.

As one, the team ran the maze toward the Bunker, bullets whizzing all around them. Bobby flipped down his night-vision goggles, firing as he ran. Running beside him, Talia did the same. He stopped and hunkered down behind a crate about fifteen yards from the Bunker's front entrance, then looked around and counted. All six infrared lights that the team had secured to their helmets to identify one another in the dark were present and accounted for.

He ducked for cover when another round of gunfire strafed the warehouse and the flash of tracers lit things up like the Vegas Strip.

“Green's down!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Bobby saw Carlyle grab Green by the handle on the back of his body armor and drag him behind a stack of crates.

“He's just stunned, Steph,” Carlyle said after several long, tense seconds.

“I'm fine,” Green grumbled.

“You damn well better be.” Steph sounded worried but strong.

“On one, two, three,” Black said, and everyone but Green stood and laid fire in the direction of the ground-floor guard who'd been giving them grief.

“Tango down,” Jones said.

“Ditto that,” said Santos.

Two down, seven to go.

Then a machine gun started firing from a first-floor window.

Jesus. These guys were loaded for bear.

Bobby dropped to one knee and shone the laser sight on his rifle about a foot over the muzzle flash from the big gun. He fired a three-round burst, and the machine gun went silent.

“Tango down,” he said into his mike, then glanced at Talia. “You okay?”

“No,” she said. “They must know we're here after Meir. What if . . . what if they decide to ki—”

“They're not going to kill him,” he promised her, praying he wasn't lying, then shut off his mike so the others couldn't hear their conversation. “These bastards think they're invincible. They plan to be the last men standing. And they're going to keep Meir as their prize until the last shot is fired. They want you alive. They want you to see that they're in control. And to do that, they'll want you to see that they have your son.
Our
son,” he added firmly. “And I'm not going to let that happen.”

Santos fired a 40mm flashbang grenade through the window the machine-gunner had been using, and Bobby clicked his mike back on, getting back into the game as a loud crack reverberated through his ­earpiece—more tango fire, distinguishable from the team's fire because the tangos weren't using sound suppressors. Then the muffled
whosh, whosh, whosh
of a sound-suppressed M4.

“Tango down,” Jones said.

“Hoo-ah!” Brown whooped. “Give 'em hell, boys!”

The next several seconds were a clinic of a precision team working together as though their thoughts were connected. Cooper and Santos peeled off toward the back Bunker door, taking one of the breaching charges with them. Jones and Green, with the remaining breaching charge, belly-crawled to the front door while everyone else laid cover fire.

“Breaching in three, two, one.” Santos's voice came over the mike, followed by the huge roar of an explosion.

“Ditto that,” Jones said, as he and Green scrambled out of harm's way. Jones hit the firing clacker, and three seconds later, the Bunker's front door blew down with a jaw-rattling
boom
and fell inward in a cloud of smoke.

They were in!

As Santos and Cooper started clearing the first floor from back to front, Jones and Green charged in and started clearing from front to back, meeting them in the middle.

On Green's heels, Black and Carlyle rushed in, discarding their original plan on the fly. “Heading to the second floor,” Black said, and got a “Roger that” from both Jones and Santos. Although this all happened in a matter of moments, Bobby felt as though time had stopped. Nothing moved fast enough to suit him.

“I can't sit here and do nothing,” he said over his mike. “I'm heading for the fourth floor.”

Beside him, Talia rose.

“No!” he said. “You stay put. We need someone to cover, in case anyone gets past us.”

“I'm with Bobby.” Mike Brown appeared out of nowhere.

Her face pale but calm, Talia nodded, then took a position behind a huge turbine. “Bring him to me.”

Bobby gave her a clipped nod, and with Brown on his heels, he charged through the blown Bunker door.

The room billowed with smoke and the smell of plastic explosives. The fire sprinklers had gone off, and cold water drizzled down his back.

“We're inside, heading up the stairwell for the top floor,” he reported.

“Roger that,” from Black.

Based on the blueprints, there were stairwells leading up both the front and the back of the building. In theory, they should have cleared one floor at a time. But the drone photos indicated that Meir was on the top floor, so that was where he headed.

His earpiece echoed with the sound of more flashbangs, then a burst of M4 fire and a gargled scream that quickly went silent.

“Tango down. Second floor clear,” Jones said.

Brown followed as Bobby ran up the stairwell taking two steps at a time, his adrenaline hitting an all-time high. They had entered the textbook “fatal funnel.” No place to hide, and all a bad guy had to do was fire a burst into the well and be guaranteed to hit one of them.

His breath rasped, and his heart pounded. More out of concern for what they would find than from exertion.

A flash of light from muzzle fire had him dropping to his knees in defense. Behind him, Brown fired three distinct
snicks
.

“Tango down.”

The two of them jumped over the body and raced up the stairwell, past the third floor and onto the fourth landing without running into more resistance. Taggart stood next to Brown by the stair door, a flashbang in his hand.

As soon as Mike opened the door, Bobby tossed it inside. The two of them charged into the hall when it went off. Bobby's only thought was of getting to Meir before the bad guys had a chance to recover and decide to kill him.

In the strobe of the flashbang, he saw a man raise an AK-47.

He fired three rounds into the man's chest and followed that with two in the head. “Tango down,” he reported grimly.

If his tally was right, Hamas was down seven. That left two standing in the way of getting Meir.

The odds were now better than good. But it only took one lunatic to fire a killing shot, so he kept moving. He and Brown quickly cleared the rest of the floor.

And found nothing.

No one.

Where the hell was Meir?

Bobby keyed in his mike. “Fourth floor clear. Anybody have eyes on the boy?”

“Negative,” came a unison reply.

What the hell?

Nate jumped in. “Start a search in detail.”

They'd have to look under every bed and table, in every closet and bathroom. Anyplace anyone could be hiding.

Rhonda's voice broke over the radio. “All teams, we're going to have company soon. I've been monitoring radio chatter, and the Omani police received a report of shots fired in the warehouse district. That would be us.”

Shit. The last thing they wanted was to have to explain an unsanctioned U.S.-backed op on Omani soil, especially when he, personally, had already sent four dead Hamas in a crushed rental Golf to their morgue.

“I'll try to divert them,” Rhonda added. “I'm thinking another bomb threat on the opposite side of the city will trump a suspected-shots-fired call.”

Whatever it took. If Rhonda could buy them even five minutes, it could be the difference between pulling this off or not.