The men began to boo.
Ghadab raised his hand. Khalid flipped off the television.
“They have not learned humility,” Ghadab told the others. “Clearly they require another dose of education.”
He turned to Khalid. “Find out all you can about this one. We’ll see how he likes the feeling of his skin peeled off from the inside.”
Takedown
Flash forward
The planes were Russian — and Russia wasn’t on their side, not today, not any day.
Johansen grabbed the handset to talk with the team in the field. Chelsea, Johnny, and the others needed to get to safety — now.
How ironic: they’d gotten past the most ferocious murderers on the planet and now were endangered by bozos who couldn’t find their target city without a map from the CIA.
32
Real time
Johnny Givens fell out of the helicopter, his balance thrown off by fatigue and a sudden shift in the wind that rocked the chopper backward. He pushed right when he should have gone left, then caught himself, jerking back like a wide receiver running a square-in. Grit kicked up by the helicopter’s blades sprayed across his path as Johnny ran toward the rendezvous point some fifty yards ahead.
Something flared ahead.
“Incoming!” yelled the team leader over the team radio.
Johnny pushed harder, increasing his speed. More flares.
OK, hit the dirt.
He slid to the ground, then pulled the small multi-control unit from the thigh pocket on his right pants leg. The flexible organic LEDs unfurled, revealing a screen. Johnny pressed his right thumb on it, bringing the device to life.
“Bird 1, view,” said Johnny, talking to a Smart Metal UAV overhead.
A view of the battlefield snapped onto the screen.
“Identify fire.”
A grid appeared over the image. A red circle flashed on one of the squares to the right.
“Share data,” commanded Johnny. “Destiny, take out the enemy unit in Grid 1-D.”
Destiny — a rebuilt Global Hawk Block 30 outfitted with GBU-53/B small diameter bombs — took the target from the smaller drone. Within seconds, a single small-diameter bomb fell from the aircraft.
“Stand by for explosion,” Johnny warned the rest of the team.
A second later, a mushroom of smoke bloomed at the eastern end of the target area. The gunfire stopped.
“We’re clear!” yelled Johnny, scrambling to his feet.
Chelsea Goodman had a stitch in her ribs and had twisted her ankle slightly when she got out of the helicopter, but there was no turning back now, no quitting.
You volunteered. Suck it up!
Her dad’s voice.
She reached the rendezvous point and tapped Fred Rosen, the CIA paramilitary officer in charge, then moved next to the tail gunner.
“You’re late,” said Rosen over the radio. “Thought we’d have to do this without you, little girl.”
She couldn’t think of a comeback.
They lined up on the house. Johnny was supposed to stay back with the second group, controlling the drones and communicating with the support units. But three members of the first group had been taken out by the earlier gunfire, and so he handed the control unit over to Chelsea and took a position behind the second breacher.
This was the most dangerous part of the assault. They’d lost any possibility of strategic surprise — the shooting surely woke up the house’s inhabitants — and while one could argue that they had tactical surprise in their favor, since they were determining when to make their entrance, in truth, any advantage was razor thin.
Johnny readied his gun. Smashing your way into a house produced an enormous adrenaline flow, but in some ways that energy was the enemy. You had to stay within yourself, act exactly as you’d been trained to act.
“Three — two—”
Boom!
“Go!” shouted Rosen as the charge on the door blew off the lock.
In the next second, the breacher shouldered the door out of his way, bursting inside as a pair of flash-bang grenades paralyzed the jihadist in the front hall.
The second man through shot the jihadist in the head.
Johnny ran past, following the lead man to the staircase. They knew from the Nightbird UAV that there were two more terrorists upstairs, and their “jackpot”—a hostage with information they needed.
Bullets spit down the stairs.
“Shit!” screamed the lead man, flattening himself against the wall.
Johnny took a small, spherical mech from his pocket and flung it up the stairs. It bounced off the wall and came to rest on the landing. Tapping his control unit, Johnny connected to the “ball,” viewing the image synthesized from its embedded IR and optical cameras.
“Three guys at the end of the hallway,” said Johnny.
“Which one’s Jackpot?” asked Rosen.
“Can’t tell.”
“Taser them all. Can’t risk killing Jackpot.”
“They all have guns,” said Johnny. “Something’s not right here.”
“Taser them all.”
Johnny reached to his back and undid the Velcro straps holding the Taser shotgun to his tac vest. Looking something like a Remington 870 with a drum magazine and a 1950s Buck Rogers Day-Glo yellow back end, the Taser fired a small web of electric charges. Get hit anywhere on your body and the charge put you down within microseconds. It could work through clothes as well, though not as dependably.
Which was why he aimed for the face.
Johnny got off a shot before he was hit. He fired twice more, then rolled back, dazed — a round had hit his vest near his shoulder. Though the ceramic plate stopped the bullet and absorbed a good deal of the impact, the blow nonetheless sent a shock through his body. It was as if someone had flipped an on-off switch, temporarily paralyzing his systems. He gasped for air as if he’d lost his breath.
The other members of the team scrambled past him. The three men at the end of the hallway were all down, disabled by the Taser rounds Johnny and the leader had fired.
“Get the hypos in them, cuff ’em,” shouted the leader. “Let’s go! Let’s go.”
By the time Johnny got to his feet, the men were trussed and being dragged into one of the rooms. Johnny got up and tapped the man who was guarding the stairs.
“I got this,” Johnny said, releasing him to help the others in the room.
Gunfire stoked up outside.
“We need that resistance cleared so the chopper can come in!” said someone over the team radio.
Chelsea swept her hand over the screen, commanding a refresh. For some reason the infrared camera on the Nightbird UAV had stopped working.
“Chopper is inbound!” boomed the voice of the team leader over the radio. “We need that resistance suppressed!”
That was her job — command Destiny to bomb the positions. But without the help of the other UAV, she had to manually calculate the targets: Destiny was a dumb bird, incapable of selecting targets on its own.
She couldn’t see the enemy, but she knew the gunfire was coming from positions some five hundred yards away, behind trees and possibly a stone wall. So what she had to do was time two attacks — one as the helicopter came in, then a second as it took off.
She looked at the grid on the screen and mentally calculated their position against the enemy’s.