“Yes. Something that will save American lives.” The caller gave Church the location of a Hamas cell operating in Washington, D.C., that was being funded by the Seven Kings. “This group plans to strike tomorrow during the afternoon rush hour. Many people will die, including key members of Congress. You can stop this.”
“That’s it?” Church demanded. “You speak of a group dedicated to global chaos and the downfall of our country and all you give me is a single terrorist cell? How do I know I can trust you?”
“You’ll find the cell.”
And then the caller disconnected.
Chapter Five
After-Action Report
Washington, D.C.
June 23, 1:44 P.M. EST
We followed up with recon and verified the cell’s existence. Fourteen hostiles and enough weapons and explosives to start a war. Or tear the capital apart.
I led the hit.
D.C. had been in the crosshairs since long before 9/11, so there are fifty kinds of counterterrorism protocols built into the infrastructure and dozens of agencies are tasked with gathering intel. It’s all supposed to be shared. Politicians aren’t supposed to lie, either.
Our people used MindReader to hack everyone else’s database and dump everything into one massive pattern-recognition search. By collating information from a dozen different agencies we learned that much more was known about this matter than any one group believed and the reason everyone who needed to know didn’t know was because red tape and departmental pissing contests reduce the flow of interagency intel to a dribble. Guys with prostates the size of soccer balls can piss a heavier stream.
It fell to the Department of Military Sciences to put the pieces together and put boots on the ground. Thanks to MindReader.
When Mr. Church formed the DMS he built it around a computer system that was several generations ahead of anything else known to exist. MindReader was designed to look for trends and the software was very carefully crafted to take into account some factors that might otherwise be missed, and although computers can’t generalize or make intuitive leaps, this one came pretty damn close. Its other unique feature was that it could intrude into virtually any other computer system without tripping alarms. When MindReader backed out, it rewrote the target computer’s software so that there was no record that it had ever been hacked. It was a highly dangerous system, and Church guarded it like a dragon.
So less than five hours after the mysterious call—from someone whom everybody except Church was already calling Deep Throat—disconnected we had snipers on rooftops, choppers in the air, a satellite retasked to do thermal scans, and Echo Team ready to kick in the doors.
The cell was located in a small frame house on Ninth Street in the Penn Quarter section of D.C. Lots of foot traffic, lots of tourists. We parked the van around back and halfway up the block. We were not wearing our usual combat rig—unmarked black BDUs, helmets, and ballistic shields. Too many civilians and no way to know who was a spotter for the bad guys.
I wore a Hawaiian shirt over jeans. We all wore vests, though, but these were the latest generation of spider silk bulletproof vests with carbon nanotubes filled with nanoparticles that become rigid enough to protect the wearer as soon as a kinetic energy threshold was surpassed. Stuff that’s not on the open market yet, but Church has a friend in the industry and he always buys us the best toys.
I strolled down the street with Khalid Shaheed, one of my newest shooters. Khalid looks like a schoolteacher and came to the DMS by way of Delta Force. A good guy to have at your back.
We pretended to argue about whether Brooks Robinson should be considered the greatest Orioles player of all time rather than Cal Ripken. I used a prearranged cue word to escalate the argument into a shouting match just as we passed the front of the target house. Shouts escalated into shoves and soon the front door opened and a man wearing a blue sports coat stepped out onto the porch.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Stop that … . Get out of here!”
He had a Palestinian accent, and Khalid turned to him and in brusque Palestinian Arabic told him to mind his own business. Actually, Khalid told him to have anal sex with a three-legged dog. Nice. The man began screaming at Khalid and soon they were nose to nose. The door was still open and I could see other faces appear at the windows and in the doorway.
My sunglasses had a mike pickup built into the frame. I whispered, “Go.”
Instantly the rest of Echo Team hit the house. Big Bob Faraday, a former ATF field man who was built like Schwarzenegger’s big brother, kicked the back door completely off its hinges. Top Sims, my second in command, swarmed past him with Joey Goldschein at his heels. Joey was our newest member, a good kid, six months back from Afghanistan. They bellowed at the top of their lungs as they moved through the empty kitchen and into a side hall.
“Federal agents! Lay down your weapons!”
The adjoining dining room was filled with men, most of them crowded around a big oak dining table that was covered with bricks of C4 and all the wiring needed to blow the whole house into the next dimension.
You’d think that people would be disinclined to initiate a firefight when there’s forty pounds of high explosives lying right there on the table. You’d be wrong. Lot of crazy people out there.
Suddenly it was the O.K. Corral.
Out front, the man arguing with Khalid turned sharply at the noise from inside the house. He never saw Khalid pull open his loose Orioles shirt and pull his piece. Maybe the man heard the shot that killed him, but I doubt it.
Khalid and I both had the whole team yelling in our ears about explosives and armed resistance. Deep Throat’s intel had been solid.
Khalid and I opened fire together, hammering the front windows and the doorway. The men were so tightly clustered that there was no way for us to miss.
Then the dead were falling and the others were backpedaling into the house. We jumped up onto the porch and I covered Khalid while he reloaded. Then I had to duck behind the brick wall between window and door as a hail of heavy-caliber bullets ripped through the frame. There were screams and blaring horns from the street behind us, and I knew that backup teams were closing on the house. The Hamas team was in a box that we were nailing shut. It was up to them whether the box was a container or a coffin.
Khalid and I both yelled in Palestinian Arabic for them to lay down their arms. The only answer was a renewed barrage of automatic gunfire.
“Flash out!” I barked into my mike, and then pulled a flash bang out from under my shirt and lobbed it through the doorway. Khalid and I covered our ears and squeezed our eyes shut. The blast was huge.
“Go! Go!” I snapped, and Khalid spun out of his protective crouch and rushed inside. I was right behind him. He fanned left; I took the right. There were five hostiles in the living room, but all of them were down, rolling around on the floor, screaming but unable to hear their own voices. Flash bangs blow out the eardrums and temporarily blind the unwary. We kicked weapons out of their hands and kept moving. The firefight in the dining room was still hot and heavy. I saw Top Sims in a shooter’s squat behind a breakfront that bullets had reduced to little more than splinters and shattered crockery. Big Bob and Joey were firing from the hallway entrance.
I tapped Khalid and he nodded and took up a shooting position from the living room doorway while I peeled off and headed for the stairs. From the sound of it there was a second firefight up there. The team’s other big man, Bunny—a moose of a kid from Orange County—had been on-point for the second-floor entry, and he had former MP DeeDee Whitman on his wing.