Khalid was, among other things, a makeup artist who could have gotten work on Broadway. When we arrived at the hotel room, among the equipment delivered for us was a professional stage makeup kit. Khalid used it to transform us all into Iranians. Luckily a lot of people in Iran look like their European forebears. Khalid had to tone down his own darker Egyptian complexion. Bunny and I both got our fair hair dyed black. Lydia was Latina but had the olive skin of her Madrid ancestors; with the right eye makeup and a modest chador with a headscarf, she would blend right in. John Smith was already dark-haired, so Khalid gave his pale face a little more color.
Top was never going to look like either an Iranian or an Arab, but that was okay. There were plenty of African Muslims in Iran, and Top could speak Somali and Persian with an African lilt. Except for Top, we all dressed in military police uniforms.
We let the transfer happen and gave it about three hours for all the hubbub to settle down. Top, dressed like a factory worker, came into the police station to report that someone had stolen the tires off of his car while he was out to dinner with his wife. Lydia was the wife. Top was not hysterical but still managed to be loud enough to draw attention, and no matter what he said, Lydia contradicted and corrected him. The officers found it all very amusing, though they dutifully took the report.
The rest of us watched all this on tiny monitors built into the faces of our wristwatches. Very Dick Tracy. One of the last toys Mr. Church got from his longtime friend Steve Jobs. Stuff was three years away from hitting the commercial market. They’ll be going out as iSee, and Apple will make another gazillion off it. Pretty handy for the military, especially when married to the high-definition digital camera built into the middle button of Top’s shirt.
We were parked in two cars, one in front, one in back. The streets were empty. It was nearing the time for Isha’a, the evening prayer, last of the five prayer times of the day.
Eight men in the police station’s front room. Top made sure to show us as he turned to appeal to one officer after another in his distress about his tires. MindReader provided us with a floor plan. One door in front, one in back. Ten cells. Thermal scans from a satellite confirmed the eight men up front and four more in the back, plus three thermal signatures in the holding area. The hikers each separated into different cells.
Twelve to five, and if we blew the snatch or let them raise the alarm, we were going to fill those empty cells. Even though none of us carried any ID, and although our fingerprints and DNA were in no databases anywhere, thanks to MindReader, it wouldn’t be a stretch for anyone to guess where we came from. We were potentially bigger political currency than the three college kids, even if one of them was a senator’s only son.
“Okay, Top,” I murmured as we got out of our cars. “Party time.”
The easiest way to do this would have been to kick the doors, toss in a couple of flash-bangs and kill everyone in a uniform. That would also be barbaric. We weren’t at war with Iran, and we certainly weren’t at war with a small regional police station. The officers in there were nowhere near the policy level. They were probably working schlubs like me and my guys; like my brother back in Baltimore PD.
So we went with Plan B.
The flash-bangs? Yeah, okay, we did that. But, hey, everyone likes party favors.
When I gave the word, Top and Lydia jammed their palms against their ears, squeezed their eyes shut and dropped to the floor. Khalid came through the station’s front door and lobbed a flash-bang in a softball underarm pitch that arced it over the intake counter and landed it right on the duty officer’s desk. I was right behind Khalid and I had a second’s glimpse of the officer staring in unbelieving horror at the grenade.
Then… BANG!
The flash-bang is designed to temporarily blind and deafen anyone in the blast radius. It feels exactly like getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer made of pure light. You don’t shrug it off. You scream, you go temporarily but intensely deaf and blind, and roll around on the floor. If you’re up close and personal it can burst your eardrums.
Everyone in the room was staggered.
I raised a Benelli M4 shotgun and opened up. I wasn’t firing buckshot-my gun was loaded with beanbag rounds. That sounds fun. It isn’t. The rounds are small fabric pillows loaded with #9 lead shot. They won’t penetrate the skin, but it feels like you’ve been punched by the Incredible Hulk. You do go down and you do it right now.
There was one officer who hadn’t gotten his eggs scrambled by the flash-bang and he had a pistol halfway out of the holster. I put a round center mass and knocked him into a row of filing cabinets. He rebounded from the cabinets and fell flat on his face making tiny croaking sounds. Khalid and Top flanked me, drawing and firing X26-A Tasers, which have a three-shot magazine with detachable battery packs. The twin sets of flechettes struck their targets and the battery packs sent fifty thousand volts into each man. The men dropped and the shooters released the battery packs to allow their guns to chamber the second rounds. The packs would continue to send maintenance charges through the flechettes until the batteries ran dry, say about twenty seconds. Four down, four to go.
Lydia pulled another shotgun from under her billowing black chador and hammered an officer into the wall with the beanbags. I pivoted and fired two shots at a screaming cop trying to crawl toward a desk with a phone on it, hitting him once and missing once because he went down that fast. Khalid and Top used the Tasers on the other two.
In the space between the flash-bang and my first shot, I heard an explosion in the cell area. Bunny blowing the back door off its hinges with a blaster-plaster. Then the sound of shotguns and Tasers.
And that fast it was over. Eight men up front, four in the back. All of them down, no fight left in anyone.
I turned. “Warbride, secure the door. Sergeant Rock, Dancing Duck-bag ’em and tag ’em.”
We were using combat call signs. Lydia was Warbride, Top was Sergeant Rock, Khalid was Dancing Duck. I was Cowboy.
Immediately Top and Khalid produced plastic flex-cuffs, which had been designed to hold pipes together but have become a staple of law enforcement worldwide.
One of the officers began to stir. Maybe the Taser flechettes hadn’t lodged deeply enough for him to take the full shock, or maybe he was one of those rare types who can bull their way through it, but he lunged at Lydia and tried to tackle her. Lydia is five eight and one forty. Solid for a woman but far smaller than the cop. However, she stepped into his rush and hit him three times-nose, solar plexus, and groin-in less than a second. The cop went down like he’d been poleaxed. Lydia spun him onto his stomach and cuffed him, then bent and whispered, “Next time, pendejo, don’t let your balls get your ass in trouble.”
Once he was down, my team cuffed the officers by the wrists and ankles and then connected those cuffs, leaving everyone hog-tied. Sponge balls with elastic cords were used to muffle voices. The cops would be able to spit them out once they got their wits about them, but I intended for Echo Team to be a memory by then. Lydia locked the door and pulled down the slatted metal security shutters. Then she started ripping out phone lines, smashing laptops, and crushing cell phones under her heel.
I ran past her, through the security office and into the holding area. Bunny was finishing the last of the hog-tying while John Smith searched the officers for keys. He found them and tossed the set to me as I ran past.