46

 

The Molly M was tied across the end of a fifty-foot-long wooden dock like the top of a capital letter T, the mid-day breeze sending ripples against her white hull.  The dock extended from the navigable center of the tidal creek, across the shallows and marsh grass up onto dry land.  The creek could have been any one of the hundreds of minor tributaries branching off of the James, the York, the Rappahannock or the Potomac Rivers.  In fact, the Molly M was tied to a dock on a nameless creek just two bends and a short reach away from the Chesapeake Bay itself, near the mouth of a lesser river called the Piankatank, located halfway between Norfolk and Maryland.

Two-hundred feet inland on the highest point of ground nearby, all of six feet above the high tide line, stood an impressive modern two story stilt house which would not have looked out of place along the beach front in Nag’s Head or on Nantucket.  The only hint that the house might possibly be occupied on this Wednesday was the presence of the old crab boat tied up at the end of the dock.  There were no people outside or cars visible around the property.

Inside the house it was lunch time, and the conspirators sat around the comfortable living room eating sandwiches while watching the George Hammet confession video.  The camcorder used to produce the tape sat on the tan-colored carpet, wired directly to the television with dubbing cables.  They watched and rewatched Hammet’s humiliating breakdown with no sense of triumph, no smugness or gloating, but with critical eyes, striving to draw out the elusive fact or the unmade connection.

The room was the largest in the house, with picture windows on two sides looking out over an expanse of dunes, marshland, meandering creeks and sparkling coves.  Its furnishings matched the casual elegance of the exterior of the house; relaxed luxury in beiges and blues and light natural woods.  Brad and Ranya shared a richly upholstered love seat, but the atmosphere in the room was deadly serious and they avoided making any public display of their affections.  

Phil Carson and Barney Wheeler sat on opposite ends of a matching sofa facing the sixty-inch television, which occupied most of a wall-dominating sandalwood entertainment center.  They were a pair of unremarkable gray-haired men somewhere past fifty, casually dressed in jeans and t-shirts, in keeping with the vacation setting of the waterfront home.  Wheeler had a neatly trimmed beard and wore wire rimmed glasses, while Carson needed a shave and smoked incessantly.  Road maps and nautical charts covered most of the glass-topped coffee table between the sofa and the TV. 

Former STU Team detainee Victor Sorrento was in the kitchen, watching the replay of the video from the other side of the breakfast bar.  He was now being called Tony.  Carson was the only one of the group who knew his true name and the details of how he had come to join their group.  He had not come up the bay on the Molly M.  He had been dropped off at the house by the older couple who were now out on a shopping trip in their pickup truck, buying items the group would need to conduct their mission.  Where “Tony” had gone before and after Hammet’s ordeal and interrogation was not discussed; the conspirators maintained a wide zone of personal confidentiality.

Their host at the waterfront house was easily the best dressed among them, wearing a light blue dress shirt, khaki slacks and tasseled loafers.  “Chuck” was also the tallest of the men in the room, standing several inches over six feet. Like Carson and Wheeler, he was also late middle-aged, but seemingly in good shape, with a tan outdoorsy face and neatly groomed black hair sprinkled with gray.  His cobalt-blue BMW 745 was parked out of sight beneath the house; the first floor was set ten feet above the sand in recognition of the fact that the sea level would occasionally exceed the height of the dune. 

Chuck had already been at the house when the others arrived on the Molly M in the early morning; it was unclear if he was the owner of the place or merely had access to it.  Brad guessed he was a realtor or a rental agent, and the house was a seasonal luxury rental.  It was a two story contemporary beach style house, built on a secluded multi-acre property with its own private driveway and dock.  Brad guessed the place would rent for several thousand dollars a week during the summer, but that it might be conveniently empty and available mid-week in late September.

This fit a well-established pattern which he was familiar with from his extensive reading about espionage, terrorism, and clandestine operations.  He knew that realtors and other property managers were extremely valuable support assets to all types of underground organizations, because they could inconspicuously arrange short and long term safe houses and caches, and often without leaving a paper trail.  This type of support activity was more widely understood these days, mainly as it related to Muslim-operated hotels and motels providing covert havens for members of Islamic terror cells.

 The role which real estate agents could play was still less well known, but Brad had guessed at the arrangement as soon as he had seen the fully furnished yet isolated house, with only generic seascape art pieces on the walls, and no personal family touches.  The bare exterior of the refrigerator, devoid of souvenir magnets and photos, was a dead giveaway.

Chuck was the only one of the conspirators that Brad just couldn’t figure out.  Admittedly, he had only met him a few hours ago, and it was not the type of social environment which lent itself to sharing life stories.  First-names-only was an unstated rule of the house, and it was assumed that all of the names were false.  Chuck just seemed to enjoy too comfortable and affluent of a life, right down to his gold Rolex watch, to be consorting with an armed resistance cell.  He also seemed nervous; he was in and out of the tan-colored leather recliner, frequently looking out the windows between the closed inner curtains.

But Phil Carson obviously trusted him enough to use the house, and Carson was the group’s single unifying linchpin, so that was that.  Brad guessed that some old Army relationship was at work, perhaps some ancient debt from the long ago jungle war was being repaid.  It seemed unlikely that Carson and Chuck moved in the same social circles these days, but then Phil Carson was a consistently surprising man.

Not present at the meeting was the Molly M’s skipper, who was sleeping aboard his crab boat down at the dock.  At ninety-plus years old, no one begrudged Captain Sam his rest after navigating his boat up the bay half the night.  Anyway, whatever role old Sam might play in the operation would be limited to driving the boat, and the less he knew about the details the better.

The video lasted twenty minutes, split between Carson and Wheeler asking questions off camera, and Hammet’s replies.  Hammet was seen from the shoulders up, wearing a white t-shirt with a plain white sheet tacked up behind him.  The lighting was terrible, the picture repeatedly flared and moved in and out of focus, but his words were completely understandable.  The video ended abruptly and the screen went solid blue. 

Carson asked, “Robin, can you transfer the camcorder video to a regular VHS one, but without our questions on it?  I want a version with just George’s answers, and none of our voices.”

“No problem.  Are blank tapes already on the shopping list?  You don’t want to record over old tapes from here.  I’m pretty sure they can recover the old stuff from under any new video, and you don’t want that.”

Chuck offered, “Look under the television, there might be some blank tapes down there.”

Ranya knelt on the plush carpet and began pulling open drawers.  Among the DVDs and old movie cassettes she found a single blank VHS tape still in its wrapper.  The men all gazed at her snug denim-clad figure admiringly, but privately. 

“Once I make a new master, it’ll be easy to make lots of copies.  There’s another VCR in the bedroom we’re in.  I can bring it out here and hook them together.  The more copies we make, the better.  Put more blank tapes on the shopping list; Archie and Edith can pick them up anywhere on their next trip.”

“Why don’t you just call them up?” asked Chuck.  “They can pick them up now.” 

“We’re not using any phones here, remember?” said Carson.  “No land lines, no cell phones, no two-way radios, all right?”

“Yeah, I remember.  No problem.” 

From the kitchen Tony asked, “Do you really think the television networks will ever play the video?  I don’t think they’ll touch it with a ten foot pole.  George doesn’t look too good, his face is all puffy, and now he’s, ahh, ‘missing.’  How are the networks ever going to play something like that?  Especially now, with ‘heroic federal agents’ getting sniped at by ‘right wing terrorists’ every day?”

Brad offered, “What about TOP News?  They might go for it.  They might report some of what George said, or at least follow up on some of his information, and let the audience decide.”

“You’re dreaming, Bob,” said Barney Wheeler, using Brad’s current name of convenience.  “That tape is radioactive.  They won’t run it; they won’t even look at it.  Not even TOP News.”

“What about the internet?” asked Ranya, settling down next to Brad on the love seat again.  “It’ll probably edit down to about ten minutes when I‘m finished.  We can release it on the net and just let it go from there.”

Carson let this discussion of the tape, the media, the internet and the “sheeple’s” probable reaction to it continue for another minute.  “Okay, be that as it may, that’s all off in the future.  Hammet is still ‘missing’ at this point, so let’s put the new tape aside for now and get back to Malvone.  Robin can take care of making the new tapes.  All I care about Hammet at this point is what he had to say about Malvone.  The tape by itself just isn’t enough proof, and it was obviously made under some kind of duress.”

Standing by a window, Chuck asked, “Where is this guy, this George Hammet?”

“He’s not available,” replied Carson.

“Not available?  Why not?”

“He’s just not.  That’s all there is to it.”  Carson didn’t feel the need to educate Chuck on the fact that ‘irregulars’ like themselves couldn’t afford to drag prisoners around, especially not with the ever present risk of highway checkpoints.  Instead, he just stared hard at him for a moment from the sofa while he took a deep drag on his cigarette and then exhaled a plume of gray-blue smoke.  “What we need to do now is decide on our exact goals for this operation, and then plan and proceed toward that goal.”

Wheeler said, “Well, just wasting Malvone won’t be enough.  We need to snatch him, and pick up all the documents we can at the same time.  We can rule out grabbing him at their new base in Waldorf; that place will be crawling with jackboots any time he’s there.  Obviously, forget about Washington: it’s wall to wall with those digital face-scanning cameras, and there’s a checkpoint on every other block.  So we’re back to his house on the river.”

Carson said, “I’ve already gotten some good intel on that place.”  He seemed to have friends almost everywhere available to assist them with a boat, a fast station wagon, a belt-fed machine gun or a local recon report.

“We can’t even think about bringing the guns up there by road.  With that bridge in Washington still out, the Route 301 bridge over the Potomac at Dahlgren is an absolute zoo.  The toll plaza on the Maryland side is just one gigantic checkpoint, like the border crossing at Tijuana.  The local roads leading into Malvone’s place are a maze, and to cap it off he’s got a private driveway with a security gate and a camera.  There’s no fast way out of his neighborhood, and after you get out you’re still trapped on the Maryland side of the Potomac, between DC and that Route 301 bridge. 

“So that takes us back to the river, all the way in.  Here’s how I see it: we’ll use two boats, and a vehicle on the Virginia side.  The first boat goes ahead as a scout, and it’s clean as a whistle.  No guns, no nothing.  The guns and the tactical gear will all be hidden on the Molly M, following a few miles behind.  If there’re any security checks on the river, the scout boat radios back, and we transfer all the weapons ashore to the vehicle.  Then the vehicle uses back roads to bypass the river security, and further up river we transfer the guns back to the Molly.”

“I assume you’re talking about Archie and Edith when you say the vehicle,” said Tony.  “But what if they get stopped by a FIST highway checkpoint?”

“They won’t.  All the way up, they’ll be going four times faster than the boats, so they’ll constantly be driving ahead and backtracking.  They’ll be using small secondary roads almost all the time, and they’ll know if there are any checkpoints.  So far, what we’ve seen of the FIST checkpoints is they’re on the interstates and major routes, not the smaller local roads.”

Brad nodded.  “So the weapons will always be on the river, or on the Virginia land side, right up until we’re in the target area in Maryland.”

“Exactly.  That’s the idea,” said Carson, stubbing out his cigarette.  “We’ll play three-card-Monte with the guns, right up until we’re in the objective area.  Then for the exfil, we’ll leapfrog south in reverse, on the boats or the vehicle on the Virginia side.”

Tony asked, “What about having another car on the Maryland side, just in case?”

Carson shrugged.  “We just don’t have the manpower.  We’re cutting it right to the bone as it is.  I’m working on getting a couple of switch cars left here and there; we’ll see how that goes.  Obviously there’s a risk, a big risk, we all know that.  But what the hell, after what we’ve done already, there’s a risk even if we just stay at home hiding.  Personally, I think it’s worth it to snatch Malvone, and get a chance to lay out the whole Stadium Massacre, just blow it wide open.  How they did it, why they did it, all the details right from their own mouths.  Two separate videos, even if they’re made under duress, that’ll be powerful stuff.  In the long run, that’s probably our best protection.  And even if it’s not, it’s still worth it, at least to me.”

Barney Wheeler had gotten up and was standing near the window overlooking the winding creek below the house.  Thin cream-colored sheer inner curtains let the light through, but prevented anyone who might be observing from afar from seeing them inside.  The sun was almost directly overhead, and the windows were in deep shadow beneath the wood shingle roof which extended over the encircling balcony of the house.  He asked, “How sure was Hammet about the Friday night poker game?  He said he was only at Malvone’s house once, right?”

Carson replied, “Look, I know it’s slim, but it’s the best we have to go on.  Once we get right in the area we’ll put eyeballs on his place, and we’ll be ready to change the plan.  Maybe we’ll have to take him in the early hours after he goes to sleep…but he’ll probably have all kinds of security systems activated once he goes to bed.  I still like the idea of busting into a drunken poker game, and catching all of the STU leaders in one room.”

“Do it like you did the rescue, come in with the bright lights and blind them!” said Brad.

Ranya added, “Better yet, come in screaming ‘FBI!  Search warrant!’  I think that’ll freeze ‘em up, at least for a few seconds.  After all the arsons and murders they’ve done, in the back of their sick minds they’ve got to be a little worried.  I mean, the ‘Special Training Unit’ is operating way, way over the line, even for the feds.”

“What line?” asked Tony, from the kitchen.  “I don’t see any line any more.  Where do you see a line?  I just see a homeland security police state.   FBI, DEA, ATF, and now the ‘Special Training Unit.’  One jackbooted Gestapo thug is as bad as another.  Face it: they shredded the Constitution with those so-called Patriot Acts.  They crossed the line a long time ago, and they never came back.  First it was for drugs, the it was just so they could go after Muslim terrorists, remember?  Now it’s for everybody.”

“Maybe so,” said Wheeler, “but don’t forget about inter-agency rivalry.  Even in a police state, you can bet the FBI still hates the ATF.  Probably even more, now that the ATF moved to Justice, and the ATF’s Special Training Unit is operating way out in the lead.  Robin’s right, yelling ‘FBI’ is smart; that’ll get their attention and buy us some seconds, and seconds is all we’ll need.”

“Okay, let’s assume we get to that point,” said Carson.  “We’ve got a room full of STU leaders face down on the floor.  We only want Malvone.  According to Hammet, only those two knew about the stadium.”

“I say shoot ’em,” said Tony.  “Take Malvone and shoot the rest, they’re all dirty.  We’ve got suppressed weapons.  Shoot ’em and burn the place down, just like they did the Edmonds, just like they were going to do to Bob and me.”  He was using Brad’s nom de guerre, the only name he knew him by.  Even though they had been imprisoned out of sight of one another in the same room at the air field, they had not been able to talk until meeting in the halfway house.  “They’re big boys.  They’re already murderers, and what goes around, comes around.  Shoot ‘em!  Don’t leave anybody to come after us later, and send all the other jackbooted thugs a message at the same time.  We pay your salaries Goddamn it, so don’t screw with us!”

The room went quiet at Tony’s embittered outburst.  After a few moments Chuck, the realtor, said quietly, “Look…I just…I can’t be part of cold-blooded murder.”

Carson lit another cigarette.  “Chuck,” he said softly, “it’s these STU Team guys who’re cold-blooded killers.  They kidnap, they torture, they burn people alive.  Save your pity.  Those guys aren’t soldiers, they weren’t drafted, they’re all volunteers.  And this is real life: this isn’t Roy Rogers, you can’t just shoot the guns out of the bad guys’ hands.  These guys are going to have real guns that shoot real bullets, you can count on it.  And Chuck, I know you remember what that’s like.”

Wheeler added, “He’s right, save your pity for the innocent.  This is a war now.  We’ve all seen the news.  Agents are getting shot every day, and so are our people.  They were going to kill Leo Swarovski right in his bed.  They were going to kill Bob and Tony and frame them as assassins.  They burned Edmonds’s family and called him a terrorist—they even blamed his own family’s death on him!  That’s how these guys play...they play dirty.  Real dirty. 

“So maybe now we’re in a dirty war, but it’s still a war!  Even if it’s a civil war.  They started it; now we’re just playing by their own dirty rules.  These ‘Special Training Unit’ guys are like Nazis; they’re just killers, no matter who signs their paychecks.  So the way I see it, it’s not murder to kill them, it’s justice being done.  And anyway, we won’t be able to handle more than one prisoner on the exfil.  That’s Malvone, and the rest of them don’t know anything about the stadium, so they can’t help us.

“But even so,” Wheeler continued, lightening his tone, “maybe it’ll be better to keep the others alive.  With Hammet and Garfield and Malvone all missing, and Malvone’s house burning down, there’s bound to be a major investigation.  There’s got to be some serious media coverage. They can’t keep this quiet; they can’t cover this up.  It’ll be too big.  Then, after that, if we put both of their confession videos on the internet, videos with all the details that only the real stadium snipers could know, it’s got to blow up into a network story. 

“Once that happens, the other STU leaders will talk to save their asses.  They’ll want to shift all the blame for the Stadium Massacre onto Malvone and Hammet to clear themselves.  And if we grab Malvone’s computers, if we get his computer discs, his notebooks, his palm pilots, everything we can find, well, we might get lucky and find more documentary proof there too.”

“Okay, all right,” said Chuck, reluctantly agreeing.  “I can deal with it, whatever happens.  Just leave me out of the planning, don’t tell me any more.  I mean, I don’t need to know what you’re going to do.  Phil, how about if I just leave now, and come back after you all take off tomorrow?  You’re leaving tomorrow, right?”

Carson said, “Actually, Chuck, what I had in mind was you driving the scout boat.  You’ve still got your boat, don’t you?”

“What?”  Chuck was taken aback by the question, and its implications.  “Yeah, I still have it, but I never thought, I mean I never planned, on doing…”

“It’s just a short cruise up the bay.  Up and back, no guns, no nothing.  You’ll be a couple miles ahead of the Molly, that’s all.  A piece of cake.  Okay?”

The well-dressed realtor felt five pairs of hard eyes on him.  “I—I guess so.  All right.  Sure, I can do it.  I’ve been all the way up the Potomac on my boat before; it’s not so unusual.  I’ll create a client and find some waterfront property that I’m checking out.”

Phil Carson said, “That’s the spirit, Chuck.”                                                             

 

****

 

The President had a late lunch in the White House with his CSO Wednesday afternoon.  He was grim faced as he stabbed at his crab salad.  “Harvey, I just heard from Sheridan.  Two more agents were killed today.  One of them was shot down at Quantico, right in the middle of the Goddamned Marine base!”

“Jesus!  Right on Quantico?  Did they catch the shooter?”

“Are you kidding?  They don’t even know where the bullet came from!  And do you want to hear the real topper?  The guy who was shot was the FBI’s chief sniping instructor!  How’s that for ironic?”

“Damn!  How many does that make so far?” asked Harvey Crandall.

“Counting Reston, or just since the Fed List came out?”

Reston?  That was different, that was a raid.  How many since after the list?”

“Twelve new ones, but there’s no way to tell if they were already targeted, or if they were only killed because of the list,” said the President.  “Harvey, it’s getting bad, really bad.  The more we go after these militia types, the more the gun nuts are going crazy!  And now with this list…”

“But they’ve stopped the list, haven’t they?  I mean, people can’t get it on the internet anymore, can they?”

“That’s what they tell me.  They say the NSA’s got a handle on it.  But the genie’s already out of the bottle!  We have to assume that every lunatic with a rifle’s got a copy of the list already, or that they can find it somewhere.”

“Any luck tracing it?”

“Not yet,” replied the President.  “New England they think, maybe.  But at least we’ve managed to keep the Fed List story out of the media.  We’ve had almost one-hundred percent compliance with our, uh, ‘request’ not to report it.  That’s been just about the only bright spot in this whole fiasco: those media controls, or, uh, I should say ‘guidelines’, they seem to be working.  Thank God for the Patriot Act!  The media, the networks, they all understand how important it is to not endanger federal agents by spreading this story around…and of course, they don’t want to get their FCC licenses yanked.”

“But the story’s already on the internet; didn’t the Sledge Report run it?”

“He did, but he pulled it after the AG talked to him.  Anyway, as long as it’s just on the internet it doesn’t matter; it can’t get any real traction.  The serious media won’t touch it.”

“What about talk radio?”

“So far, so good.  The shootings are all still being covered as local stories.  That’s what I’m being told.”

Crandall said, “But we’ve got to plan for the story to break sooner or later.  Patriot Act or not, the whole Fed List story’s bound to get out.”  He speared another chilled jumbo shrimp from his sterling silver bowl, dunked it into the special White House cocktail sauce and gobbled it down in one bite.  “Did you ever think it would get this far?”

“What?  No way.  Honestly, I never even considered the possibility that it could…spin out of control like this.  But hey, they started it!  They started it right at that Goddamned football game!  It all started there, so everything since the Stadium Massacre is on them!  Everything!”

“But who are they?  Who’s ‘them’?  The people behind the Stadium Massacre, or all of the maniacs that are taking pot shots at our agents now?”

“The gun nuts, the militias, the right wingers, the Constitution fanatics, all of them!” exclaimed President Gilmore.

The CSO shook his head wearily.  “That’s a lot of people.  That’s millions of people.”

“Well, they started it!  I didn’t ask for this crap!  They started it, Goddamn it!”  President Gilmore threw down his silver salad fork; it clattered off of his china plate and bounced onto the parquet floor.  An unsmiling Navy Petty Officer in a starched white uniform swooped in, picked it up and replaced it with a new fork in one fluid movement.

The President waited until the sailor was back at his station by the galley service pass-through, and then he leaned forward and lowered his voice, regaining his composure.  “Look, Harvey, I’ve got a lot of confidence in Sheridan.  He’s good at his job.  But let’s face it, the FBI just can’t…  I mean, it just isn’t set up, institutionally I mean, to handle this kind of situation.  They can’t move fast enough, they don’t have the right mindset.  You know, they just can’t do the kind of…dirty work that’s needed to stamp this fire out.  You follow me?”

“I think so.”

“The only ones I’ve seen who know how to fight this new kind of war are in that ATF group.  What’s that guy’s name?  Malone?”

“Malvone.  Walter Malvone.”

“That’s the man!  Burning out that militia nest in Virginia, that was terrific.  Pulling those assault rifles and bazookas out of the ashes, that was some great television.  That was fantastic.  I mean, let’s face it, this is just as much a media and PR war as anything else, so we need to see lots more TV like that.  We need to send a strong message to the whole country!  We need to shift the whole debate…”  The President sipped his tall iced tea and continued.

Harvey, the way I see it, it’s not enough just to crack down on these gun nuts.  We need to do it on television.  We need to discredit them; we need to disgrace them even while we’re wiping them out.  We need to make the rest of the country hate their stinking guts, so they’ll call that GUN-STOP number and inform on their own fathers and brothers if that’s what it takes.  I swear to God, I think this Malvone is the only one who really understands just what kind of a media war we’re in.”

“Yes sir, I agree, but there’s an element of risk as well.”

Harvey, harsh times call for harsh measures.  We’ll never get a handle on this thing fighting by the Marquis de Queensbury rules: we have to fight fire with fire.  I’ve gone over his paper again.  I want you to pass the word to Malvone that he’s got the green light directly from me.  Give him a free hand in Maryland and North Carolina as well as Virginia, as of today.  Give him whatever he needs: budget, personnel, anything.  I mean, it’s a tiny group; the whole thing can’t cost more than one F-22, right?  Those gold-plated pieces of shit crash every other week, and we’re still buying them, right?  So keep it black, keep it off budget, keep it deniable, but get Malvone whatever he needs.”

“Yes sir, it’s already set up for complete deniability at every level.  No matter how far anybody digs, it can’t reach here.”

“Good, good.  That’s essential, obviously.  So tell Malvone to put it into high gear and start kicking some more ass like he did down in Virginia.  Tell him I think he’s doing a great job, and tell him I want to see more of it on TV, right away.  Tell him I want ‘gun collector’ to be a dirty word, a national obscenity.”

 

****

                                                            

Wally Malvone and the STU leaders spent the day exploring their new base in the Waldorf industrial park, and moving in their gear.  Dinner was pizzas and cokes, eaten on their newly-delivered mahogany conference table, in a half-furnished office which smelled of newly-installed carpeting.  Most of the office furniture had been delivered earlier in a Ryder truck, courtesy of their unseen financier, ‘Mr. Emerson.’  They were wearing casual clothes for the task of moving team equipment, computers, files and furniture into their new base, all except for Malvone who was in a dress shirt and suit pants, since he had just come from ATF Headquarters. 

“So, what’s the deal on Hammet?” asked Bob Bullard.

“Nothing yet, no word,” replied Malvone.  “He’s probably dead, that’s my guess.  Somehow Fallon and Sorrento must’ve gotten the drop on them and took off in his Jeep.  It’s the only thing that makes any sense.  But as far as I’m concerned, he never worked for us at all.  He’s Norfolk’s problem.  And when they get around to reporting him missing, it’ll just go down as another federal agent murder.  He’s on the Fed List.”

Jaeger said, “Well, that’s one good thing about that damned list anyway.  But what if he went to the Inspector General?  What if he’s ratting us out to the Office of Professional Integrity?  That could get damned serious, even with your connections in the Senate.” 

“That’s possible, I suppose, but not likely,” said Malvone.  “All five of them gone?  I’m guessing Garfield and Hammet were killed right after they made him call Swarovski.”

Shanks asked, “With Hammet out of the picture, are we still on track to form up a new team?”

“What?  Oh, we sure are.  We’ve gotten the go-ahead to move as fast as we can, both on the team expansion, and on our operations.  We’ll have to juggle them both; it’s not going to be easy to break new guys into our system, even SRT guys, and maintain our operational tempo at the same time.”

“Well at least we’ve got plenty of room here,” said Silvari.  “We could put five more teams into the space we’ve got, easy.”

“Yeah, that’s a fact.  Crowding won’t be an issue around here for a long, long time,” said Malvone, smiling.  “Bob, next week you’re going to start recruiting new guys.  Do you have an itinerary yet?”

“I’m working on it, boss.  I’m going to hit all the Field Divisions and talk to the Special Response Teams, give them a recruiting pitch.  And we’ve already got the list of SRT and FBI SWAT and HRT guys we generated in-house who want to come over.  I think we can put together another two teams in a month.  Personnel-wise, it’s no problem.  Getting the bodies won’t be the hard part; it’s going to be integrating them into the STU while we’re still conducting ops at the same time.”

“We’re the SPD now, Bob, the SPD.”

“I keep forgetting.  The ‘Special Projects Division.’  I like that…  And being at division level is going to really help.”

“The name doesn’t matter,” replied Malvone.  “We’ll get anything we need, no matter what we’re called.  We’ve got the big green light all the way from the top, the very top…but forget you heard that.”

“Heard what?” laughed Bullard.

Shanks said, “You should have seen us at Office Depot!  We just about cleaned them out.”

“Come on you guys, we’ve got to keep a low profile.  People remember things like that.  I know we’re in a hurry, but don’t make any big scenes in town.”

“Wally,” said Silvari, “we’ve got guys staying in motels all over the place because of that Fed List, and they want to know if their expense claims are going to be a problem.  They’re going to be running up some big tabs.”

“No, no problem.  Maximum per-diem all the way, no hassles, for as long as it takes.  How many of our guys are on the Fed List?”

“About half.  The out-of-state guys aren’t listed; it’s all by home of record.  What about you Wally?  Did you make the list?”

“Nah, I lucked out.  My home of record is still at my condo in Miami.”

“You can’t beat that Florida state income tax,” said Silvari.

“You got that right.”

“So Wally, are we still on for Friday night?”

“Sure, why not?”

 

****

                                                             

Four shadows slid along the balcony in the darkness.  Two stopped on the right side of the door, and two continued across to the hinge side.  One of them stage-whispered “3-2-1-Go!”  The door was jerked open and held all the way to the left side.  A small cylinder was tossed into the room, and after a two second pause the man who threw it yelled “boom” with his eyes closed.  Then he dashed through the open door, followed closely behind by the others.

Four brilliant flashlights turned the room into a carnival funhouse of colliding lights and shadows as loud voices simultaneously yelled, “FBI!  Search warrant! Freeze!  Down on the floor!”  They were inside the room and in a position of control and dominance in under three seconds; they formed a rough line along the near wall, two on each side of the door.  Carson was all the way to the left with his .45 caliber Tommy gun; Victor Sorrento was just to the left of the door with Hammet’s 10mm MP-5.  Ranya was just to the right side of the door with a suppressed 9mm MAC-10, and Brad was all the way to the right side of the room with another MAC.  Each weapon was shouldered, sweeping back and forth in a tight arc covering a quarter of the room.

Carson found the light switch and turned on a table lamp in the living room of the halfway house.  “Not bad, at least nobody fell down this time.  Seriously, that was a lot better.  Nobody walked into anybody’s field of fire, but Tony and Robin, you still need to move further away from the door before you stop.  Get cover, or keep moving, but don’t stand there next to the door!  Remember, the open door’s the big bullet magnet.  You already know that…what am I telling you for again?  Okay, turn off your gun lights now—we don’t have any spare lithium batteries.” 

Their Sure-Flash gun lights were older models, a gift from Jasper Mosby, who didn’t ask Phil Carson what he needed them for.  The four gun lights (with their etched numbers ground off) and one Def-Tek “distraction device” were the only items of actual SWAT gear Carson’s little team had.  Mosby had put them in a taped-up brown bag, and left them in the cleaning supply locker in the men’s room of a Denny’s restaurant in Hampton, where Archie had picked them up. 

Carson continued with his instruction.  “Remember, in Malvone’s club room, there’s a bar running along the right side wall.  It’s a natural hiding place for anybody who’s behind it when we come in, so Bob, make sure you get all the way over there and clear it right away.  Then you can use it for cover yourself.  Or for concealment, anyway. 

“The enclosed staircase along the back wall is good cover for any bad guys coming down from the kitchen, so as soon as everybody in the club room is neutralized, Robin, you just push right across and take your position at the bottom to secure it.  Keep talking to us; let everybody know what you’re doing.  Everybody be aware that after we’re all on line, Robin is crossing the room to control the stairwell, so let’s not have any accidents.  Don’t sweep her with your guns.  I know this room isn’t set up the same as Malvone’s club room, just keep the sketches in mind and it’ll work out fine.

“If they comply and get right on the floor, we’ll flex-cuff them one at a time.  If not…well, just do what comes naturally.  But don’t shoot Malvone, or at least don’t kill him!  We need him to be able to talk; that’s the whole point of the exercise.  Then, once everybody in the room is secured, and that should only take a minute, we’ll do a fast search of the house.  We’ll clear the whole place room by room in pairs, putting on all the lights as we go, and then we’ll search it on the way back out.  We’re especially interested in his office; it’s next to his bedroom on the same side of the hall.  We’ll take his computer, his laptop, zip drives, CDs, cell phones, iPads, notebooks, videos, cassettes, whatever we can find.  Just shove it all in the bags, and we’ll sort it out later.”

Brad and Victor wore green vinyl white-water rafting bags with backpack straps over their other gear, ready to haul out the computers and other documents.  All four of them had on matching black nylon warm-up suits, with their submachine guns hanging across their chests from strap slings around their necks.  Each weapon held a pair of empty thirty round magazines for this practice session; one in the weapon’s magazine well and one duct-taped in tandem for a quicker reload. 

Three of them wore black fanny packs turned around to the front holding their extra submachine gun magazines, although they all realized perfectly well that if they needed more than the sixty rounds apiece in their first two magazines they would be “in a world of hurt,” as Carson put it.  Carson himself wore an old brown canvas rig on his chest, which carried six extra magazines in vertical pouches. 

Even with all the submachine gun ammo, they all carried pistols as backups in generic black ballistic nylon holsters; the cheap holsters were picked up during Archie and Edith’s afternoon shopping trip. 

Unlike the Special Training Unit, and all of the other hundreds of American SWAT teams, they had not each been individually outfitted with thousands of dollars worth of “high speed” ergonomic ballistic nylon and Kevlar, which securely carried every weapon, ammo magazine and item of tactical gear in precisely the optimum location. 

Instead, they had been outfitted by Archie and Edith, on short notice, from an eclectic variety of discount chain outlets and sporting goods stores.  Instead of bulletproof Kevlar vests, they wore water ski vests for floatation during their waterborne infiltration.  The thick ski vests were spray-painted flat black, and bulked up their profiles to make them resemble actual SWAT cops. 

On their heads they wore skate boarding helmets, similar to ice hockey helmets, which were roughly the same shape as the compact kevlar helmets worn by many SWAT teams.  Like the ski vests they wouldn’t stop a bullet, but spray-painted black, they made the amateur assault team very closely resemble the real deal.

Their “flex-cuffs” were actually the largest size nylon wire-ties Archie had been able to purchase at an electrical supply company.  Wire ties were the original plastic handcuffs, and they still worked just as well as the ones especially made for police. 

To protect their eyes, they wore clear goggles picked up at a welding supply store.  These were attached around the backs of their helmets with thick elastic straps, and also added to their overall SWAT team “look.”  On their hands they wore thin black driving gloves.

Anyone seeing them behind their bright gun lights, helmeted and dressed all in black, would assume that they were an actual law enforcement raiding party.  Pros like the STU Team would then not aim for the chest or head, assuming they were clad in bullet-proof kevlar.  This would increase their safety, by diminishing their target area.  At least, that had been Phil Carson’s reasoning, and no one had disagreed.

“Look at us,” laughed Ranya, looking like a chubby Michelin-man ninja warrior.  “How long do you think it’ll take them to figure out we’re not the FBI?”

Brad replied, “It doesn’t matter.  They’ll be blind and disoriented from the flash-bang grenade, then all they’ll hear is ‘FBI!’ and all they’ll see is our gun lights.  They’ll never really see us at all; it’ll work the same as it worked at the air field.”

Carson said, “That’s how it should work, but remember, that was only two guys, and they were dragging Edmonds across the floor when we came in.  This time it’ll probably be at least five bad guys.  Just remember, Malvone’s the big bald-headed older one with the thick mustache, so don’t shoot him if you can avoid it.  It’s not going to be easy this time…with Hammet and Garfield missing, you can bet they’ll all be jumpy, and armed to the teeth.”

“Well, if I even see a gun, I’m shooting,” said Tony, matter-of-factly.

“I wouldn’t expect anything else,” said Carson.  “But if they go right to the floor, we’ll hold our fire and flex-cuff them, got it?”

“Got it,” said Tony.

Carson said, “These STU guys use flash-bangs and gun lights all the time; so maybe, just maybe they’ve trained against this kind of raid.  I doubt it, but it’s possible.”

“Shooting civilians in bed is their style,” replied Tony.  “I don’t see them training to go up against this kind of attack.”

“Neither do I.  But you can bet our gun lights will turn into bullet magnets pretty damn fast, if we don’t get control in the first few seconds.  So don’t fool around.  If they don’t get on the floor, if you can’t see their hands…well, don’t take any chances. Two to the chest and one to the head, just in case they’re wearing vests underneath their shirts.  But try not to kill Malvone!  Bob’s seen him before, so he’ll make the positive ID.  Once they’re all cuffed or dead, we’ll search the place.

“Okay, let’s go back out on the balcony and run through it again.  Move away from the door fast, don’t sweep each other, and cover your sectors.  And Robin, open it slower this time, the real one might be a lot heavier, or it might get hung up.”

Ranya said, “You’re assuming the door’s going to be unlocked, like at the air field.  What if it’s not?”

“Then we’ll improvise.  We’ll get them to open it up.  We’ll figure it out when we get there.  There’s a hundred ways to skin a cat, we’ll figure something out.  Okay, let’s go outside and do it again.  After we get it perfect, we’ll test fire our weapons.”