They unhooked the bungees, then lowered themselves to the ground and tightly re-rolled the fiber before covering it with pine needles and branches. If things went sour and they had to get out fast, they would use a set of mini-bolt cutters they were now burying by the fence line. At that point, leaving any physical sign would be moot, and their priorities would shift: escaping without discovery of their identity would become paramount.
Packed up and ready to part, they gave each other a gloved thumbs-up, then set off in opposite directions: DeSantos headed for Target A, Uzi for Target B.
Uzi’s deliberate movements made him feel as if he were watching a baseball game in slow motion. But that’s what this op demanded. They had to keep from triggering the motion sensors. While light-absorbing clothing was an advantage, defeating motion detection was an inexact science; a passing animal, or merely brushing against a branch, could set it off.
So Uzi moved with caution, staying in the path of tree trunks — natural obstructions to the sensors. He slowed his movement in those areas where surveillance measures and other sensing devices were most likely to be placed. Ten minutes later, he came upon a clearing that contained a structure a bit larger than a modular trailer. His projected method of entry had also been determined by aerial surveillance. Though the doors were padlocked, they contained external hinges. Uzi circled to the back of the structure, shrugged off his rucksack, and removed a screwdriver. Using the back end of his knife, and limiting his movements, he used short, firm strikes that he shielded with his body. The screwdriver handle was coated in rubber, absorbing much of the noise.
After half a dozen blows, Uzi had the oxidized brass hinge pins in his pocket. He entered the building, flipped on his quarter-size red-beamed LED flashlight, and began taking inventory.
Across the compound, DeSantos was approaching his target, a twenty-foot-tall, flat-roofed structure that appeared to be a modestly sized storage facility of about a thousand square feet. DeSantos opened his backpack and removed a coiled length of thick rope, fitted with a grappling hook at one end. With a looping, underhanded toss, he sent it to the top of the building.
As feared — and expected — the quick movement of his arm was more than enough to stimulate the motion sensor. A tree-mounted spotlight snapped on.
Uzi divided the building’s interior into grids and methodically carried out his search. Thus far, he had found a cache of weapons with filed-off serial numbers, ammunition, and boxes of spare computer parts. He wished he could take photos — or better yet — that he could make arrests based on what he found. But he was there illegally, trespassing at best and breaking and entering at worst.
After finishing his survey, he returned to Grid 3 and stuck the flashlight in his mouth. He was looking for ammunition with Russian markings — a potential link to Bishop’s murder.
Uzi finished rummaging through the cartons, taking care to replace everything the way he’d found it. If he had the time, he would’ve used his phone to take photos of the interior after breaching the shack. That way, he could replace everything the way it had been with reasonable precision, then reformat the memory card to delete the pictures. But he had to be quick and be gone. No time to be perfect — and he could not afford to make any blatant errors, either. He had to hope that no one would notice a book or box slightly ajar.
Frustrated at not finding what he came for, he turned to make one last sweep of the area. As he pivoted, he noticed a removable floor panel that shifted under his weight. He knelt down and studied the seams of the metal plate, then removed the knife from his thigh holster. Using the sharp tip, he pried up the edge enough to get his fingers underneath.
When he lifted the panel, he saw four steel steps leading down to… What? A basement? A crawl space? After descending the stairs and lowering the hinged plate back into place, he took his flashlight and shone it around his immediate vicinity. Not a basement. Not a crawl space.
“Holy shit.” Before he could take another step to explore, the storage building began rattling, followed by a rumbling deep in his gut.
DeSantos stood with his face and body pressed up against the side of the building, the dark stealth clothing protecting him from detection. If a guard was watching his security monitor, he’d see the light snap on — but, theoretically, would not see a black-clad male figure trespassing on their property. DeSantos had been told that in such a situation, if he remained absolutely still, he would probably appear to blend into his surroundings. He had told his DARPA buddy that he didn’t like the “probably” part of his comment, but knew that with so many variables and limited field testing of the new technology, he would have to hope for the best.
As he waited for the lights to turn off, he realized he was wasting valuable minutes. One thing they couldn’t determine from satellite reconnaissance was the length of time the motion sensors were set to burn. And with each second he remained pinned to the side of this building, the less time he would have to look around inside it. If he could just move his left hand a few feet, he’d be able to click his squelch key and signal Rodman to make his approach.
As he debated what to do, he felt the thumping of the rotors followed by the roar and whir of the Black Hawk’s engines. The chopper blades’ pounding of the air was intense, vibrating deep in his throat and hammering away at the inside of his chest like a heart stimulated by a massive adrenaline infusion — which wasn’t far from the truth.
As if his airborne team had read his mind, Rodman was beginning a zigzag descent over the compound, stirring up all sorts of shit in wind buckets and dramatically lighting up the night sky with black and gray smoke spewing from the chopper’s tail. DeSantos had hoped to be inside the structure by this point, as the strong wind generated by the Black Hawk would set off the motion sensors all over the compound. Instead, he counted to five, allowing all the members of ARM’s security detail to get a good long glimpse at the noisy chopper putting on its show over their land. Then he grabbed the rope, and with catlike quickness, pulled himself up.
Rodman wiggled the control stick, giving the appearance of substantial instability in the chopper’s flight path, then lowered the bird with lurching movements toward the ground. The performance was spectacularly frightening, particularly if you were a group of paranoid militia members who spent every waking moment obsessing about this very event. In some ways, it was a dream come true for them — a chance to grab their high-tech rifles and semiautomatic submachine guns to defend their property from an onslaught of invading black-helicopter Feds.
In another sense, it was their ultimate nightmare — for the very same reasons. They had powerful weapons and a common conspiracy-laden mind-set that kept them banded together, aligned against an overwhelmingly virulent enemy — ingredients for a potentially explosive environment. Rodman knew this. Trained or not, it was the inability of these men to properly analyze a situation under duress that made this situation so volatile.
Yet the same factors that infused this mission with risk were precisely the things that each of the OPSIG operatives craved. Whether on foreign or domestic soil, adrenaline was a drug for them.
As the chopper neared the ground, Rodman positioned the cockpit as close as he dared to the main gate without risking danger to his craft from the surrounding trees. He landed parallel to the fence line, clearly outside their property, taking care not to antagonize more than necessary. He sat there calmly in his seat, throwing switches that needed to be thrown, and some that didn’t. Drawing out the moment and soaking up as much time as he could until he received the squelched signals from his land-based team indicating they had achieved mission success.