Dead or Alive (22 page)

The trip took twenty minutes. Clark spent most of it running scenarios in his head and watching the dusty, ochre-colored roads of Tripoli skim past the end of the tailgate. Finally the truck grumbled to a stop in an alley whose front and rear entrances were shaded by a pair of date palms. Lieutenant Masudi appeared at the rear and dropped the tailgate. Richards climbed out and led Clark and Stanley down the alley, while Chavez and the others gathered the gear and followed. Richards took them up two flights of stone stairs mounted on the stone wall’s exterior, then through a door into a half-finished apartment. Stacks of drywall lay against the wall along with five-gallon tubs of Sheetrock mud. Of the four walls, only two were finished, these painted a shade of sea-foam green that belonged in an episode of
Miami Vice.
The room smelled of fresh paint. A large picture window framed by date palms overlooked at a distance of two hundred meters what Clark assumed was the Swedish embassy, a Spanish-style two-story villa surrounded by eight-foot-high white stucco walls topped with black wrought-iron spikes. The building’s ground floor sported plenty of windows, but all of them were barred and shuttered.

Six thousand square feet at least,
Clark thought sourly.
A lot of territory. Plus maybe a basement.

He had half expected to find a colonel or general or two from the People’s Militia waiting for them, but there was no one. Evidently, Masudi was to be their only contact with the Libyan government, which suited Clark fine, as long as the man had the requisite horsepower to provide what they requested.

The street below looked like a damned military parade. Of the two visible streets adjacent to the embassy, Clark counted no fewer than six Army vehicles, two jeeps and four trucks, each surrounded by a group of soldiers, smoking and milling about, bolt-action rifles casually dangling from their shoulders. If he hadn’t already known it, the soldiers’ weapons would have told Clark everything he needed to know about Qaddafi’s attitude toward the crisis. Having been pushed out of the loop in his own country, the colonel had taken his elite troops off the perimeter and replaced them with the shabbiest grunts he could field.

Like a spoiled little boy taking his marbles and going home.

While Chavez and the others started unpacking the gear and sorting it in the unfinished breakfast nook, Clark and Stanley surveyed the embassy compound through binoculars. Richards and Lieutenant Masudi stood off to one side. After two minutes of silence, Stanley said without lowering his binoculars, “Tough one.”

“Yep,” Clark answered. “You see any movement?”

“No. Those are plantation shutters. Good and solid.”

“Fixed surveillance camera on each corner, just below the eaves, and two along the front façade.”

“Best assume the same for the rear façade,” Stanley replied. “The question is, did the security folks have time to mash the button?”

Most embassies had an emergency checklist that any security detail worth a damn would know by heart. At the top of the list, titled “In Case of Armed Intrusion and Embassy Takeover” or something similar, would be an instruction to fatally disable the facility’s external surveillance system. Blind bad guys are easier to take down. Whether or not the Swedes had done this there was no way of telling, so Rainbow would assume the cameras were not only functional but also being monitored. The good news was the cameras were fixed, which made it much easier to pick out blind spots and coverage gaps.

Clark said, “Richards, when’s sunset?”

“Three hours, give or take. Weather report is for clear skies.”

Shit,
Clark thought. Operating in a desert climate could be a pain in the ass. Tripoli had a bit of pollution, but nothing like a Western metropolis, so the ambient light from the moon and stars would make movement tricky. A lot would depend on how many bad guys were inside and where they were positioned. If they had enough bodies, they’d almost certainly have surveillance posted, but that wasn’t anything Johnston and Loiselle couldn’t handle. Still, any approach on the compound would have to be planned carefully.

“Johnston ...” Clark called.

“Yeah, boss.”

“Go for a stroll. Pick your perches, then come back and sketch it out for coverage and fields of fire. Richards, tell our escort to pass the word: Let our men work and don’t get in their way.”

“Okay.” Richards took Masudi by the elbow, moved him a few feet away, then started talking. After half a minute, Masudi nodded and left.

“We have blueprints?” Stanley asked Richards.

The embassy man checked his watch. “Should be here within the hour.”

“From Stockholm?”

Richards gave a negative shake of his head. “Here. Interior ministry.”

“Christ.”

There was no use having them transmitted in piecemeal JPEGs, either. No guarantee they’d be any better than what they already had—unless the Libyans were willing to take the shots to a professional printer and have the pieces stitched together. Clark wasn’t going to hold his breath for that.

“Hey, Ding?”

“Here, boss.”

Clark handed him the binoculars. “Take a look.” Along with Dieter Weber, Chavez would be leading one of the two assault teams.

Chavez scanned the building for sixty seconds, then handed back the binoculars. “Basement?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“Bad guys usually like to hunker down, so I’d say they’re concentrated on the first floor, or in the basement if there is one, though that’s iffy—unless they’re really dumb.”

No exits belowground,
Clark thought.

“If we can halfway nail down where the hostages are and whether they’re lumped together or split up . . . But if I had to make a snap call, I’d say enter on the second floor, south and east walls, clear that level, and then head down. Standard small-unit tactics, really. Take the high points on the map and the bad guys are at an automatic disadvantage.”

“Go on,” Clark said.

“The first-floor windows are out. We could handle the bars, but not quickly, and it would make a lot of noise. But those balconies . . . the railing looks pretty solid. Should be easy to get up there. A lot’s going to depend on the layout. If it’s more open, not too broken up, I say start high. Otherwise, we rattle their cages with some flashbangs, breach the walls in a couple places with Gatecrashers, then swarm ’em.”

Clark looked to Stanley, who nodded his approval. “The boy is learning,” he said with a grin.

“Fuck you very much,” Chavez replied with his own smile.

Clark checked his watch again. Time.

The bad guys hadn’t made contact, and that worried him. There were only a couple reasons to explain the silence: Either they were waiting to make sure they had the world’s attention before announcing their demands, or they were waiting to make sure they had the world’s attention before they started tossing bodies out the front door.

S
URPRISING NO ONE, the blueprints did not arrive within the hour but closer to two, and so it was not quite ninety minutes before sunset when Clark, Stanley, and Chavez unrolled the plans of the compound and got their first look at what lay ahead of them.

“Bloody hell,” Stanley growled.

The blueprints weren’t the original architect’s set but rather a taped-together photocopy of a photocopy. Many of the notations were blurred beyond recognition.

“Ah, Jesus ...” Richards said, looking over their shoulders.

“I’m sorry, they said—”

“Not your fault,” Clark replied evenly. “More games. We’ll make it work.” This was another thing Rainbow did very well: adapt and improvise. Bad blueprints were just another form of insufficient intel, and Rainbow had dealt with its fair share of that. Worse still, the good colonel’s intelligence service had refused to give the Swedes blueprints to their own damned building, so they were out of luck there, too.

The good news was the embassy building did not have a basement, and the floor plan looked relatively open. No chopped-up hallways and cookie-cutter spaces, which made room clearing tedious and time-consuming. And there was a wraparound balcony on the second floor overlooking a large open space that abutted a wall of smaller rooms along the west wall.

“Forty by fifty feet,” Chavez observed. “Whaddya think? Main work area?”

Clark nodded. “And those along the west wall have gotta be executive offices.”

Opposite them, down a short hall that turned right at the base of the stairs, was what looked like a kitchen/dining area, a bathroom, and four more rooms, unlabeled on the plans. Maybe storage, Clark thought, judging by their size. One’s probably the security office. At the end of the hall was a door leading to the outside.

“There’s no electrical or water on these plans,” Chavez said.

“If you’re thinking sewer to get in,” Richards replied, “forget it. This is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Tripoli. The sewer system is for shit—”

“Very funny.”

“The pipes are no bigger around than a volleyball, and they collapse if you look sideways at them. Just this week I’ve had to detour twice on the way to work to avoid sinkholes.”

“Okay,” Clark said, bringing things back on track. “Richards, you talk to Masudi and make sure we can get the power cut when we give the go.” They’d decided to leave the utilities on, lest they agitate the bad guys this close to Chavez and his teams going in.

“Right.”

“Ding, weapons check?”

“Done and done.”

As always, the assault teams would be armed with Heckler & Koch MP5SD3s. Noise-suppressed and chambered in 9 millimeters with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire.

Along with the standard load-out of fragmentation grenades and flashbangs each man would also be armed with an MK23 .45-caliber ACP with a modified KAC noise suppressor and a tritium laser aiming module—LAM—with four selector modes: visible laser only, visible laser/flashlight, infrared laser only, and infrared laser/illuminator. Favored by Navy Special Warfare teams and the British Special Boat Service, the MK23 was a marvel of durability, having been torture-tested by both the SEALs and the SBS for extreme temperature, saltwater submersion, dry-firing, impact, and a weapon’s worst enemy, dirt. Like a good Timex watch, the MK23 had taken a licking and kept on ticking—or in this case, kept on firing.

Johnston and Loiselle had bright and shiny new toys to play with, Rainbow having recently switched from the M24 sniper rifle to the Knights Armament M110 Sniper System, equipped with Leupold scope for daylight conditions and the tried-and-true AN/PVS-14 night sight. Unlike the bolt-action M24, the M110 was semiautomatic. For the assault teams, it meant Johnston and Loiselle, shooting cover fire, could put more rounds on target in a whole lot less time.

At Clark’s direction, each sniper had earlier done a walk-about of the area, circumnavigating the blocks surrounding the embassy compound, picking out perches and sketching out his fields of fire. Of the spots Chavez and Weber had chosen as their entry points, Johnston and Loiselle would be able to provide absolute cover—until the teams entered the building proper, that was. Once inside, the assault teams would be on their own.

 

 

 

F
ifty minutes after sunset the team sat hunkered down in their makeshift command post, lights out, waiting. Through the binoculars Clark could see the faint glow of light seeping through the embassy’s plantation shutters. The exterior lights had popped on, too, four twenty-foot-high poles, one at each corner of the compound and each topped with a sodium-vapor lamp pointed in toward the building.

An hour earlier the muezzin’s call to
salaat
had echoed over Tripoli, but now the streets were deserted and quiet, save the distant barking of dogs, the occasional car horn, and the faint voices of the People’s Militia guards still on perimeter duty around the embassy. The temperature had dropped only a few degrees, hovering somewhere in the upper eighties. Between now and sunrise, as the heat dissipated into the cloudless desert air, the temperature would plummet another thirty degrees or more, but Clark was confident that by sunrise the embassy would be secure and Rainbow would be packing up. He hoped with no friendly casualties and a few live bad guys to hand over to ... whomever. Who would oversee the post-mission mop-up and subsequent investigation was probably still being debated.

Somewhere in the dark a cell phone trilled softly, and a few moments later Richards appeared at Clark’s shoulder and whispered, “Swedes on the ground at the airport.”

The Swedish Security Service, the Säkerhetspolisen, fielded the county’s antiterrorist division, while the Rikskriminalpolisen, or Criminal Investigation Department, was its version of the FBI. Once Rainbow had secured the embassy, it would be turned over to them.

“Good, thanks. Guess that answers the question. Tell them to stand by. As soon as we’re finished they can come in. Nothing about our timeline, though. Don’t want that getting out.”