CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Torture Report — that’s what Boxers called it, ever one to make people feel at ease — revealed only one additional bit of data, and it was a doozey. Sometime in the next two days — Pyotr thought it would be tomorrow night — the stores of explosives in the chapel would be transferred to trucks and transported to the United States.
“Okay, now I’m interested,” Boxers said.
Jonathan stopped him with a raised hand. “That’s not our mission,’ he said.
“It is now,” Boxers countered.
“The rescue comes first,” Jonathan said. “Not that we can’t kill two birds with one detonator.”
Boxers smiled. “Nice line. But unless and until we know where the family is being kept,” Boxers said, “or where they will be kept if they haven’t yet arrived, any planning we do is just conjecture.”
“What’s our worst case, then?” Jonathan asked. “Assuming that they’re in the most remote part of the facility, how do we get in and out?”
“I actually have some construction details,” Venice said.
All heads turned.
“Hey, if you’re going to zone for public use, you have to tell people how the hotel rooms are constructed.”
“Do you want to join the FBI?” Irene asked. She phrased the question as a joke, but Jonathan knew there was a serious offer in there.
“You can’t afford her,” he said. And he believed that to be true. In fact, he was willing to bet that what he paid Venice trumped what Irene made as director of the FBI. With change. A lot of change.
“The jail actually started life in 1792 as a single row of stone cells,” Venice said. She highlighted the western wall of the compound — the part that looked on the photo to be part of the outer wall and contained the chapel with the explosives. The southern end of the section became the northern edge of the archway that served as the main entrance. “Back then, not only was there no glass in the windows, the doors themselves — then made only of iron bars — opened directly to the outside. Can you imagine what manner of wildlife must have crawled in there?”
The question was meant to be provocative, but Jonathan wasn’t in the mood. Apparently, no one in the room was in the mood.
“Okay,” Venice said. She clicked, and the picture of the cell returned to the screen. “Those floors are constructed of six-by-six oak timbers. It was an attempt at insulation, but after all these years, they must be dense as concrete.”
“But nowhere as brittle,” Boxers observed. Many in the room didn’t realize it, but that was a vote against explosives. Whereas stone and old concrete will shatter with a relatively small hit of HE — high explosives — heavy timbers will absorb a lot of the shock. It was a crapshoot whether they’d break or merely heave up and bend.
“What about the roof?” Jonathan asked.
“Originally, it was timber, too,” Venice said, “but sometime in the 1920s, it was covered with slate. It’s not entirely clear from the info I’ve been able to read whether the slate was ultimately replaced with something else.”
Jonathan calculated whether the roof would make a good entry point, and decided that it posed too many challenges. “What are our ground options?” Jonathan asked.
“I’ve got a better question,” Big Guy said. “Who’s our team?”
“I’m going,” the First Lady said.
“Oh, no you’re not,” Jonathan said. “You’re the res-cuee, remember? And you’re already safe. There aren’t a lot of rules in my business, but one of them is that once a PC is safe, you don’t throw them back into danger.”
“PC means ‘precious cargo,’ ” Venice explained to David and Becky.
Yelena smirked and cocked her head. “How sweet. You think I’m precious?”
Jonathan let it go.
“That’s my son and grandson, Mr. Grave. You can’t expect me to just—”
“I can expect you to let me do my job, which means you staying out of my way.”
“Would you rather I take a commercial flight to Ottawa and then just drive to the front door?”
Jonathan stared. She was serious.
Yelena continued, “It’s not as if I would be completely useless. You know, I have—” She checked herself and threw an uncomfortable glance at the director of the FBI. “Admitting to nothing, it’s entirely possible that I have some experience setting explosives.”
“Holy shit!” Boxers proclaimed with a giant laugh.
“Then I’m going for sure,” David said.
“The hell you are.” That came as a unanimous chorus from everyone else in the room, and the words seemed to press him back in his chair.
“Think of me as an embed.”
“You’re not writing about this, remember?”
David held up his forefinger. “Not true,” he said. “I promised not to reveal details. No real names. I never said anything about the story itself.” He looked directly at Jonathan. “A deal’s a deal. You can’t change the terms now.”
“Watch me,” Boxers growled.
Jonathan felt the weight of the others’ anticipation as he considered his option. In his world, on an operation this small, an embed was another word for liability. This kid wasn’t a war correspondent. To bring him along could actually endanger others.
On the other hand, he had already endured a lot, and seemed to be handling it well. “If you come, you’re not coming to observe and write,” he said. “You’re coming to engage. Have you ever fired a weapon?”
David smiled. “Glock nineteen and twenty-three, Remington eleven hundred, Bushmaster M4 and 308, and, in one day of overkill, a Browning A-bolt composite stalker in three hundred Win Mag.” He seemed to have been waiting for the question.
And his answer sucked all of the air out of the room.
“What kind of scope did you use on the Win Mag?” Boxers asked.
Without dropping a beat: “A Leupold Vari-X three.”
“Did you hit what you were shooting at?”
“Dead center,” David said. “At six hundred yards.”
The room gaped in unison.
“My dad belongs to a gun club out in Loudoun County,” he explained. “I went there a lot as a kid.”
“Targets?” Boxers asked.
David rolled his eyes. “Generally, they don’t let you shoot at people.”
“So the targets never shot back at you.” Boxers stated that as his point.
“In a perfect world, he can hit what he’s shooting at,” Jonathan said, summing it up. It also served as his decision that the kid could come. They needed the manpower.
When Becky sensed that it was her turn, she cleared her throat and gave a shy smile. “I took a gun safety course in Girl Scout camp,” she said. “But I’m willing to go if I can be of any help. At the very least, I can carry stuff while my partner, Rambo, shoots up the place with his three hundred win-thing.”
“There’s a sentence every warrior wants to hear,” Boxers said.
“Stop,” Jonathan said. “We’ll stipulate that everyone wants to or is willing to go. Now we need a plan.”
“First we need to know where the PCs are going to be held,” Boxers said.
“That’s a level-three concern,” Jonathan said. “First, we have to get in country with the appropriate tools.” He knew it was stupid, but he resisted talking about weapons and explosives in front of the others. As if they didn’t know what “appropriate tools” meant. “Next we have to figure out how to get into Canada and then onto the island. The actual extraction and evacuation don’t happen unless we can get past those two points. Irene, I don’t suppose you have any contacts in CBP, do you?” Customs and Border Protection.
“No one high enough on the food chain,” she said.
“It’d take too long to get false passports for everyone,” Jonathan thought aloud, “so driving is out.”