Plesse watched as the younger man’s face turned pale, then red with anger. “You’re shitting me! Does she know what’s at stake here?
Well, what do I do now? Okay . . . okay, fine.”
He hung up a few seconds later and received an inquiring look.
“The deputy director managed to wake up the most uncooperative judge in Virginia,” the SAC explained. “We won’t be getting a warrant, at least not fast enough to do us any good.”
“Fuck.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself.”
There was a long, uncomfortable pause before Plesse unconsciously echoed the other man’s words. “So what do we do now?”
Harrison didn’t say anything in response. After thirty seconds of internal debate, he sighed heavily and reached for the headset.
When Larsen arrived thirteen minutes after the commander’s call, he did it so quietly that Naomi almost jumped out of her skin. She was watching the house intently for any sign of life, with Maginnes lying prone at her side, when a low whistle sounded a few feet to her rear. She spun around, and then realized that Maginnes hadn’t reacted at all.
“I heard you coming a mile away, Chris.”
“Sorry, boss.”
Naomi watched in amazement as a figure rose up from the ground before her.
“Still two minutes under time, though.”
Maginnes smiled reluctantly. “Pop a few chem lights, will you? By the way, this is Naomi Kharmai. She’s joining us from the Agency.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Naomi nodded in return and watched as Larsen reached into his pack and retrieved several small plastic tubes. He bent each one until the glass vials broke inside and the chemicals mixed. When he shook them and tossed them onto the ground, an area perhaps 5 feet in diameter was illuminated by a soft blue glow.
Larsen was maybe a few years older than she, with a narrow face and blond hair trimmed close to the scalp. His features were blurred by green-and-brown camo, but she noticed that his dark brown eyes were carefully appraising her. She watched as he called his team members to make sure the chem lights weren’t visible from their position. Then he pulled a topographic map out of his pack.
The HRT commander grabbed a few rocks and placed them on each corner of the large sheet of paper. “Let’s see what you got.”
Larsen’s finger hovered over the myriad of light brown contour lines. “I have one team here,” he said, pointing to an area of heavy vegetation on the north side of the house. “I’m going in with them, if it comes to that. I gave the second team to Aguilar. He’s across the road to the west. That was a problem . . . I wanted someone on the front door, but there’s no cover and they have to cross about 200 feet of open space before entry.”
“We’ll work around it,” Maginnes said. “What about the open-air option?”
Larsen pulled a grease pencil out of a loop on his flak vest and used it to mark several locations on the map. “Grierson stacked most of the snipers next to my second team of assaulters, because that’s where most of the windows are facing. We’ve been sitting out here for hours, Al. I went over the sectors of fire and moved everyone accordingly. Then we checked it again and came up golden. My people know where they can and can’t shoot. Oh, and one other thing: Jones is a couple hundred yards up the way with his .50. If, by some miracle, the subject manages to get to his vehicle, Jonesy can easily punch one through the block at that distance.”
Maginnes gave an approving nod. “Good. Who’s up on explosives?”
Larsen hesitated. “Canfield has the most practical experience, but Hudson spent a month training with Delta, so he’s—”
“When was that?”
“Uh . . . January.”
“Make it Canfield,” Maginnes said. “Hudson’s still a little green, but he can sit in on it. I want them to give your people a quick briefing on booby traps. Take these plans back with you, and have them look for trouble areas.” A brief pause. “I want to take it slow, Chris.
We know he’s not on the ground floor, so that gives us time to maneuver. We’ll use that time to get it right. I want everyone to walk away from this.”
Larsen bobbed his head in acknowledgment and turned his attention toward Naomi. “We haven’t gotten any specifics on this guy yet.
What can you tell us?”
“He was a Special Forces engineer. He applied to EOD in 1993, then became an instructor in ’94. They had to get a three-star general to sign the waiver; no one in the army has ever made that transition faster. He did the sniper school at Benning, and then the SERE
course at Camp Mackall. You know about Senator Levy and the Kennedy-Warren . . .” Both men nodded. Larsen smirked a little as if to show that he wasn’t impressed by Vanderveen’s record, but she sensed it was mostly for show. After a brief hesitation, Naomi decided that they deserved to have all the facts. “One other thing . . . He killed five of his fellow soldiers in 1997 while on deployment in Syria.
After that, he basically disappeared from the face of the earth, at least until now. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Larsen’s arrogant grin faded. He was about to respond when Maginnes held up his hand and cupped the other around his ear. He listened for a moment, then said, “Roger that, TOC. Give us a couple minutes, over.”
He dropped his hand and looked up at them with pinched features. “Search warrant didn’t come through.”
Naomi dropped her head, and Larsen muttered an expletive. No one said anything for almost a full minute.
Finally: “How bad do you need to get in there?”
She looked up at Maginnes. “Pretty bad.”
“How bad?”
“Bad enough.”
He nodded his head slowly, then seemed to come to a decision.
“Chris . . .”
“Yeah?”
“You got your throwaway?”
Larsen slapped the pack that rested at his feet. “Always.”
The commander said, “Is it clean?”
Larsen looked offended. “Of course it’s clean.”
Al Maginnes nodded his head again, then turned his dark eyes onto Naomi’s. When he spoke, his words were slow and precise.
“What happened was, we decided to get a little bit closer, okay?”
“I can buy that,” she said, and felt a little tingle between her shoulder blades.
“Chris, when you looked in the window, you saw a handgun lying on the floor.”
“Right.”
“Right.” Maginnes scratched his head and considered. “Okay, so he’s hardly going to have a registered pistol. An unlicensed firearm gives us cause to enter the premises.” He looked up at her. “Are you okay with that?”
“Sounds kind of iffy, but . . . Yeah, I’m okay with it.”
He looked at Larsen. “How about you?”
The younger man shrugged, tilted his head. “Sure.”
“Then it’s settled.” Maginnes cupped his mike to block out the sound of the wind. “TOC, this is Magpie . . . Uh, there appears to be a handgun in the house. Does the subject own a registered firearm?
Over.”
Harrison caught his meaning and came back immediately: “HQ
advises that the subject has not registered any firearms in the state of Virginia.”
“We’re going to check it out, over.”
Coming back, with a little excitement over the static: “Roger that, Magpie.”
Larsen was back with his men ten minutes later. Maginnes and Kharmai hunched together and watched the house through the trees.
“I could kill for some hot coffee right about now,” he said.
She thought about that for a minute. “Figuratively or literally?”
“Literally.”
“Wow, they weren’t kidding when they said you guys were hard-asses.” She yawned, leaned back and scratched her butt, then caught him smiling. “What?”