The Enemy Within (51 page)

Flynn surprised him. “No, Pete. We go in as soon as possible.” He pointed upstairs and growled, “When I briefed the Director and the Attorney General this morning, both were adamant that we take any action necessary to break this thing open.”

From his tone, Thorn suspected the senior
FBI
agent was leaving a lot unsaid. If anything, the country’s political and media elites were even more spooked by the terror campaign than the general public, and the political pressures to act were enormous.

Flynn turned to Helen. “The Attorney General herself is seeking a search warrant authorising an
HRT
raid. Once we have the warrant in hand, I’m assigning the mission to you and your section. You know the general area pretty well and you’re damned good the best I’ve got, in fact. John Lang concurs.”

“Okay.” Helen nodded flatly, taking the compliment in stride without any false modesty. She glanced at Koenig, getting down to business without wasting any more time. “What do we know about the house right now, Tommy?”

“Not as much as I’d like.” He slid a faxed copy of a real estate brochure across to her. “The place is fairly large about twenty-five hundred square feet. Four bedrooms. Two and a half baths. One story aboveground and a good-sized basement below. A one-car garage attached to the house.”

“Brick exterior construction?” she asked.

Koenig nodded. “Hardwood floors upstairs. Concrete covered by carpet in the basement.”

Helen looked up from the brochure. “I need more than this. Can we get a set of blueprints from the builder or the county records?”

“We’re working on it,” Koenig confirmed.

“Good. Now, what about numbers inside the house? Any data on that?” she asked.

“Nothing solid. We risked one drive-by earlier this afternoon and spotted two vehicles in the driveway one minivan, one Toyota Camry. There was another car, a Taurus, parked along the street out front. The Camry is registered to this Nielsen. The other vehicles trace back to different names and addresses. Based on that, we’re guessing a minimum of two suspects and a maximum of six.”

“I see.” Helen sat back in her chair, her eyes distant as she considered her options for several seconds. Finally, she turned back to Flynn. “Okay, Mike, what are my rules of engagement for this operation?”

Thorn knew that was the key question. The rules of engagement, or
ROE
, would determine the Hostage Rescue Team’s tactics. The looser the rules were, the more options Helen would have in laying out her assault plan. If she could assume the people inside were hostile, she and her agents could bring significantly more firepower to bear in the early stages, and they could use their weapons a lot more freely.

Flynn looked troubled. “There’s a snag. Without clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, I can’t get the AG or the Director to sign off on unlimited
ROE
. They’re too afraid we might nail some innocent civilians by mistake. So we have to tread lightly at first. I’m afraid you can’t go in with guns blazing on this one.”

Helen nodded slowly, hiding her concerns behind an impassive mask.

Thorn knew his own face was less controlled. He didn’t like the sound of this not at all. Taking out terrorists was a lot different from conducting a sweep against a suspected crack house. Success always depended on the maximum application of controlled violence in the minimum amount of time. Without that, the risks to the assault force to the woman he loved went up dramatically.

Despite his relief that the
FBI
was moving at last, he couldn’t help worrying about Helen’s safety. Concrete evidence or not, he firmly believed that house in Arlington held some of the terrorists they were hunting. If he was right, Helen and her comrades could be walking right into a buzz saw.

“I’d like to move in after midnight,” she said calmly. “We’ll have a better chance of catching these people asleep, or at least at a low ebb, then.”

Flynn nodded his understanding and approval. “I can buy that much time from the Director.”

“Good.” Helen paused briefly, thinking again, and then went on. “That should also allow us to covertly evacuate the nearest neighbors. I don’t like increasing the chances that we’ll be spotted, but I think it’s imperative. If there are terrorists inside, we have to accept that they have heavy weapons and that they’ll use them if they get the chance. I don’t want civilians caught in the cross fire if we can help it.”

“Agreed. Anything else for now?”

When Helen shook her head, Flynn checked his watch and stood up.

“Okay, then let’s start moving things into place. The clock is running fast on this one.”

Determined not to be left wholly on the sidelines, Thorn leaned forward. “I have one request, Mike. With your permission, I want to ride along as an observer.”

The senior
FBI
agent stared hard at him for a moment before replying. Then Flynn glanced at Helen, obviously making sure she had no objections. Finally, he nodded abruptly. “Okay, Pete. I guess you’ve earned the right to be in on the kill. We’ll find you a place in the command van.”

Thorn sat back, partially satisfied. He couldn’t do anything to reduce the risks she’d be running, but he knew he’d feel better if he were at least close by.

Much as he longed to lead the planned raid himself, he couldn’t think of anyone better qualified for the assignment than Helen. She had more tactical ability, fighting skill, and sheer guts than anyone else in the
FBI
or even in the Delta Force for that matter.

Amazing. Six months ago, he would never have imagined himself thinking that of a woman any woman. And now he couldn’t imagine being left without her.

DECEMBER
5

Arlington, Virginia

Somewhere off in the distance, a church bell chimed once and fell silent.

Despite her Nomex-coveralls and body armor, Helen Gray shivered. It was well below freezing outside and the need to stay motionless only intensified the cold. She lay burrowed in a hedge bordering the street and sidewalk across from the suspected terrorist hideout. Her post offered her a good view of the front of the house.

She studied it carefully, looking for the slightest evidence of anything wrong anything that might indicate they had been spotted. Even with her night vision goggles down, she couldn’t see anything out of place. From the outside at least, the house appeared a perfectly ordinary suburban dwelling, identical to thousands of others throughout northern Virginia all the way from its sloping shingle roof to its redbrick walls and the white trim around its curtained windows. There were no lights showing behind those curtains.

Well, Helen thought coolly, it was time to find out exactly what was hidden inside that quiet house.

She keyed her mike and whispered, “All Sierra units, this is Sierra One. Everybody set?”

Voices ghosted through her earphones as her teams checked in, one right after the other. Sierra Three and Four, Paul Frazer and Tim Brett, were around the back, poised to enter through the rear door on her signal. Five and Six, Frank Jackson and Gary Ricks, were crouched behind the rear of the Ford minivan parked in the driveway. They would take the front door. Sierra Two, Felipe DeGarza, lay prone beside her as a reserve. Her own two-man sniper teams, Byrne and Voss, and Horowitz and Emery, occupied positions in the surrounding homes.

She would have preferred to lead the assault teams herself, but with the situation still so murky, Flynn wanted her in a position to exercise tighter tactical control over her sections if things didn’t go according to plan. Leading from the rear wasn’t her style, but orders were orders.

The head of the
FBI
task force wasn’t taking many chances. As a safeguard against an attempted breakout by the suspects, he had deployed a cordon of local police and other special agents in a wide net around the neighborhood. He even had a Blackhawk helicopter standing by on the local elementary school’s playground prepped for immediate flight if a pursuit became necessary. From the absence of any media nearby, she guessed that Flynn had also stomped hard on the Attorney General’s notorious tendency to curry favorable publicity.

Helen took a deep breath. Her next signal would open the ball. “Hotel One, this is Sierra One. We’re ready. Initiate shutdown sequence,” she said softly.

“Roger, Sierra,” she heard Flynn say.

Helen clicked her mike again. “All Sierra units, stand by. Wait for my mark.”

She waited without moving for the next reports to be repeated over the command circuit. It was crucial to take the suspected terrorists out while they were deaf, dumb, and blind. CompuNet already had instructions to block incoming and outgoing E-mail from the target address. Now it was time to take more direct measures.

“Landlines down.”

The telephone company had cut its service to the immediate calling area.

“Cell down.”

All cellular phone communications were down.

“L ights down.”

The streetlamps on this block blinked out as technicians switched off all electric power to the vicinity. Now!

“Go! Go! Go!” Helen ordered, sighting down the barrel of her submachine gun at the front of the house.

Jackson and Ricks were already on their feet and heading for the front door. They carried a door-breaker, a heavy battering ram with twin handles, slung between them. The restrictive rules of engagement prohibited the use of the HRT’s two favored methods for opening locked doors breaching charges or shotgun blasts direct to the hinges.

One. Two. Three. Helen found herself mentally counting the seconds it took her lead team to reach the front steps and get into position. They were there!

Jackson and Ricks rocked back on their heels and then slammed the battering ram into the front door. The smashing, tearing thud seemed loud enough to wake the dead let alone the suspects they were trying to surprise. The door sagged under the impact but stayed stubbornly shut.

Again! Another heave and more nerve-shattering noise. This time the front door gave way and fell open.

“We’re in!” Helen heard Ricks’ triumphant report as he dropped his side of the door-breaker and darted in with his weapon ready.

WH`4MMM. The doorway disappeared in a dazzling orange and red explosion that lit the whole area. Caught full on by the blast, Ricks was blown in half. Jackson, two steps behind, flew backward off the front porch and landed on the lawn screaming in agony. He flopped around on the dead grass like a gutted fish.

“Jesus Christ!” Helen snarled. A booby trap. Those bastards inside had rigged their front door with a booby trap as a precaution against unwelcome nighttime visitors. Part of her mind was silently screaming in shock and in time with lackson. Another part, colder and more analytical, realised that knocking down the door had triggered the explosive probably a sheet charge mounted in the side jamb. Simple. Classic. And totally unexpected.

She tore her eyes away from the boiling cloud of smoke and still-falling debris at the front door. Ricks and Jackson were out of action, but she had other forces in motion. She keyed her mike. “Three, are you in yet?”

Frazer answered immediately. “Negative! Negative! They’ve reinforced the back door! It’s backed by steel!”

“Can you rig a breaching charge?” Helen demanded. The tactical situation was going from bad to worse at a rapid, breathtaking pace.

It got worse.

Gunfire crackled suddenly from somewhere in the back of the house.

“Shit! Shit!” Frazer shouted over the radio. “We’re taking fire! Christ!” The noise doubled ih volume as he and Brett started shooting back. “We’re pinned down, One! Can’t go forward! Sure as hell can’t go back!”

Helen gritted her teeth. She called the leader of the sniper team posted to cover the rear of the house. “Byrne! Take that bastard out!”

“Trying, Sierra One,” the sniper replied calmly. She heard him pause and caught the muffled crack of his high-powered Remington rifle. “Gonna be tough. Hostile has a flash-suppressed weapon. I’m having a hard time drawing a bead on him.”

Lying beside her in the hedge, DeGarza suddenly stiffened. “I’ve got movement in the right front window, boss.”

“Great.” Helen peered through her goggles, zeroing in on the window he had indicated. Was that a curtain stirring?

More gunfire erupted this time from the front of the house. The Ford Taurus parked on the street rocked crazily back and forth, hammered by the stream of rounds that tore through its doors and shattered every window. Sparks flew off metal in wild, corkscrewing patterns. Whoever was inside the house was making sure there were no attackers hiding behind the vehicle.

Helen saw brick dust and splintered wood puff up around the house’s front windows as her snipers opened up in an attempt to silence the still-unseen gunman. The curtains jerked wildly shredded by each bullet but the hostile fire continued without pause. She shook her head decisively. This was too slow. “Emery!” she ordered. “Smoke ‘em out!”

In response, a grenade launcher thumped once from behind her, hurling a tear-gas grenade toward one of the house’s windows. But instead of sailing on through into the rooms beyond, the grenade bounced back outside onto the lawn and lay hissing, spewing its grey cloud of tear gas harmlessly into the open air.

Helen swore sharply to herself. The defenders must have strung netting behind the curtains. She grimaced. Booby traps, reinforced steel doors, and now grenade netting. She and her section were attacking a fortress.

Alerted by the attempted grenade attack, the gunman inside shifted his fire away from the mangled Taurus to the homes across the street.

Helen and DeGarza burrowed deeper into the hedge as rounds whipcracked past their heads. The chattering roar of automatic-weapons fire rose higher. Someone else inside the house had opened up, systematically shooting into every piece of cover that could shelter an attacker.

“Jesus,” the stocky
HRT
trooper whispered into her ear. “Who are these guys?”

She shook her head impatiently. Their enemies were damned good. That was all that was important now.