Tom Clancy - Locked On

Ryan’s heart was pumping a mile a minute. He looked around the hotel room and wondered what the other men were feeling. Dom seemed somewhat amped up, but not much. Driscoll, Chavez, and Clark looked like they could be sitting at a Starbucks, sipping a cup of coffee and doing the crossword puzzle of the Sunday Times.

Chavez spent the next twenty minutes laying out everyone’s duties during the operation to come. He used his notebook with hand-scribbled maps. He and Caruso would enter the suite above Hosni Iheb Rokki’s third-floor suite, and they would attach three long ropes to an anchor point, most likely the kt l abiron pipes leading to the toilet in the master bath. Dom and Ding would attach themselves to two of the ropes, and lead the other one out the balcony and then swing it down to Sam, who would be waiting in the room next to Rokki’s.

Clark would enter the hotel after texting Gavin Biery in Maryland, giving him the order to disable the cameras. Then Clark would head quickly and calmly to the hallway outside Rokki’s door. When all elements were ready, Sam Driscoll, attached to a nylon harness, would swing over to the bathroom window of the suite. If the bathroom was unoccupied, he would attempt entry there; if someone was using the bathroom, he would make his way along the wall to the bedroom balcony and enter there. He would be armed with a suppressed Glock 23, but his mission would be to take Hosni Iheb Rokki alive by administering a self-contained propellant-powered injector of anesthesia that would knock him out cold.

When Sam was in position hanging over the courtyard, Chavez and Caruso would rappel from their balcony down to the balcony of Rokki’s living room, and they would use their suppressed MP7A1 short-barreled submachine guns to take down Hosni Rokki’s confederates. John Clark would hit at the same time from the front door. He also had a CO 2injector of anesthesia, along with a suppressed SIG Sauer pistol.

Ryan would serve as the wheel man down on the street, but he would also be tasked with watching out for any signs of police and, if any of the four tangos squirted out of the ambush, he might well be called on to go after them.

After Rokki’s goons were down and Rokki was unconscious, they would put him in a large rolling bag and take him out the front door of the hotel. Ryan would pick them all up and return to the safe house. With luck, they would be wheels up at Paris — Le Bourget ninety minutes after Clark gave the men the go to execute the op.

Finally, when he finished, Clark stood back up and asked, “Any questions? Comments? Concerns?”

Jack was confused by something. “If DCRI are watching the suite, they are going to see every bit of this.”

Chavez shook his head. “See? No, it’s a corner unit, and they have line of sight on the southwest-side window, and we are hitting from the balconies over the courtyard on the north. Sam, Dom, and Ding will be shielded from view, but if the French are using a laser mike to get audio, they will damn well hear some noise. We will communicate with hand signals while in the suite.”

Caruso shrugged, then spoke up: “A lot of moving parts on this one, Mr. C. Lots of stuff that can go wrong.”

Clark nodded, a severe expression on his face. “Tell me about it, kid. It’s the nature of the beast with this type of urban hit. Whacking the guys would be tough, but taking one of them alive makes the danger go up exponentially. Anything specific you don’t like?”

Dom shook his head. “No. I like the plan. Let’s do it.”

Clark nodded. “All right. Rokki and his men have called for one pot of coffee and one pot of tea to be delivered to their room at eight-thirty. We’ll hit them at eight forty-five. We leave in one hour.”

And with that, the meeting broke up so that each man could take a few minutes to organize his gear as per the op plan Chavez had just laid out. Sam and Ryan checked their.40-caliber Glock pistols and suppressors; Dom and Ding performed function checks on their submachine guns. They threaded their silencers on the barrels, nearly doubling the length of the weapons, but still they found them key e g compact, lightweight, and well balanced.

They also checked their other equipment. Rappelling ropes, encrypted mobile phones with voice-activated Bluetooth headsets. Flash-bang grenades, smoke grenades, small shaped charges to breach doors or make doors, whatever the case may be.

They didn’t plan on using smoke grenades or flash-bang grenades, and they had no plans to breach the walls of the Four Seasons. Chavez’s laundry list of items that Ryan had brought with him from the States was designed for the mission in mind, but he’d also added a few other odds and ends in case everything went “tits up.”

Clark went into the kitchen, pulled items from another bag that Ryan had brought from the States. After giving the team time with their gear, he called them over.

On the table his men saw he’d laid out what looked like five small spongy pieces of rubber.

“What are these?” Sam asked. He reached over and picked one of the “bags” up. It felt like a small wad of rubbery dried glue.

Clark lifted one himself. “We don’t have time for a long tutorial, so I’ll just demonstrate.” With that, he turned away from the room, fumbled with the item for several seconds, and then leaned over. Driscoll looked to his colleagues seated around him for an idea of what was going on. They all just watched.

Clark stood back up, turned toward his men, and Sam Driscoll gasped audibly. John’s face had completely changed features. His cheekbones were more pronounced, his nose seemed to have taken on a more angular profile, his square jaw had rounded out noticeably, and the deep creases around his mouth and eyes had filled in. After staring at him for several seconds, Sam could discern that the face did not look natural — it was somewhat alien, frankly — but if he were just passing him by in the street, he would neither notice anything amiss nor, and this was the important thing, be able to recognize John Clark.

“Jesus,” Driscoll said, and the other men voiced their amazement as well.

“There is one of these for each of you. As you can hear, it doesn’t alter your voice or your ability to speak at all. It just fills in shallow areas and restructures soft tissue on your face to make you unrecognizable. It is a tube; there are holes at both ends so your hair is not covered. Also, your ears are exposed, so we can use our Bluetooth headsets. Go ahead and try them on.”

By now the rest of the men were putting on their masks like boys playing with new toys. They all found it difficult to orient the eyeholes and pull the tubes over their heads. As they worked and struggled, Clark continued talking. “These things aren’t perfect. They are uncomfortable to wear and hard to put on, and as you can see, they make you look creepy, like you’ve either had way too much plastic surgery or you come from another planet. Primarily they are to foil facial-recognition software, to change our faces so we can’t be recognized after the fact, and to confound any eyewitnesses to our actions.” Clark looked around the room. He chuckled. “Jack, you still look like a million bucks. Ding? Amigo, I’m sorry to say this does nothing for you.”

The men looked at one another and laughed, a light moment in what was sure to be an incredibly tense day. They then shouldered up to each other in front of a wall mirror.

Dom said, “They sure do the trick, but I’m going to need a lot of practice getting this thing on. If I have to do it on the fly for some reason, it’s not going to be pretty.”

front ofh="1em">Clark said, “The same goes for all of us. We’ll keep these with us on the op just in case, but we’ll have regular ski masks we can use if we need to throw something on quick. If we run into trouble and need to get out of there surreptitiously, then we’ll go with these for the exfil. Also, it’s very important to use sunglasses, too. Most facial-recognition algorithms use the distance between the eyes as a key identity measurement. Shades mess up their ability to determine identity more than anything else. In fact, when you leave this house, I want you wearing shades. You can put the masks on later if you need them.”