Джек Марс - House Divided

“You know him?”

Ed shrugged. “I was on loan to him from Delta one time. The operation got about as FUBAR as possible. He nearly got a bunch of us killed. I’ll tell you about it one day.”

Luke nodded. “He was playing coy this morning. Said his intelligence people told him the attack was a decoy, a cover-up for something bigger. When the President pressed him on how he knew that, or what the next attack might be, he said he – ”

Ed finished the sentence for him. “He wasn’t at liberty to discuss that.”

“Exactly,” Luke said.

“So what’s our role in this?” Ed said.

“There’s a guy up in Baltimore. Trudy and Swann think he’s dirty, and that he’s about to skip town. I’d like to grab him today before he disappears. See what he has to say. We’ll never get an arrest warrant, at least not on short notice, so…”

Ed smiled. “You want me to go up there and bag him?”

Luke shrugged. “I’d say a team of six should do it. Ride with a couple of your best people to make sure it gets done. But also bring a couple of your newbies. I’d like to watch them in action, see what we’re looking at.”

“What’s the situation on the ground?” Ed said.

“It’s a house. Swann has the details. There are two women in there, and two children. Three adult males. All we want is the subject, who is in his sixties. I’d say tumultuous entry, move fast, bag him and bring him out. Try not to break anything.”

“In other words,” Ed said, “don’t kill anyone.”

Luke nodded. “That’s right.”

“You’re a very gentle man,” Ed said.

Luke smiled. “I try to be.”

“Okay. Consider it done.”

8:40 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

Westgate

Baltimore, Maryland

“Do you have a look at this place?” Ed said into his microphone.

Mark Swann’s deep, throaty voice came over his speaker. “You mean real time?”

Ed shook his head. “No, I mean back in 1978. Yes, real time, Swann.”

“Of course not. I can’t see anything. I don’t have a drone in the air on a day like today, and even if I could put one up, the cloud canopy is too low. All I can see is coming from your body cameras.”

“So you can’t see what’s going on in the backyard.”

“Not at the moment, no. But you have that aerial map, right? And the floor plan?”

Ed sighed. “Yes.” They were going in blind.

“Then you should be good.”

Ed was sitting in the back of a white van, parked thirty yards up the street from the house where Mustafa Boudiaf lived. The van had an orange, yellow, and green SMECO logo on it, with a lightning bolt through the middle. SMECO was the shortened version of Southern Maryland Electrical Cooperative, an electric company that didn’t even serve this area.

Three people were in the van with him, members of his team. They were dressed the same as him – in black long-sleeve fleece shirts, heavy tactical vests, and cargo pants lined with lightweight Dragon Skin armor. Pulled over the tactical vests were yellow reflective vests with the SMECO logo – just like electrical workers out to fix a power outage on a snowy day would wear. On their heads were white combat helmets with hinged facemasks, currently in the up position. A person not sure of what they were looking at might imagine those helmets were hardhats.

Ed glanced out the rear window. It was a relatively affluent neighborhood. The house was tan stucco, nondescript, two stories tall, set back on the other side of a wide lawn from the road. A bay window faced the street, next to a red front door. On the right side was a driveway with a black Lincoln Town Car in front, and maybe some kind of Toyota in back. On the left side was a narrow alley between properties. A long hedge lined the front sidewalk.

Everything – the hedge, the two trees on the front lawn – was brown and bare. The snow was blowing pretty hard.

Ed was calm. He looked at his people.

Two of them were young, early to mid-twenties. That would be Rodriguez and Stamos. Ed had taught Rodriguez at Quantico – she was one of his best students. She was the fittest person there, could knock out more pull-ups than Ed himself. She could run a five-minute mile, then follow it up with a hundred pushups and another five-minute mile. And she was serious – dead serious. Maybe a little too much. She wanted very badly to prove herself.

Right now, her eyes were like saucers. She looked like she needed to go to the bathroom.

“Rodriguez, you’re with me, girl. Ain’t nothing to this. We’re just utility workers, knocking on doors during a power outage. We’ve got a clipboard. The door opens, whoever answers, we take them down. You secure them, I move on. Got it?”

She nodded. “Got it.”

“Stamos, Anderson, you guys move up that alleyway and connect with Marshall and King on the back porch. Stamos, you and King are swinging hammer. You get the word, I want to see you hit that thing with all you got. Two hits max, I want that door open. One is better.”

Stamos nodded. He looked less nervous than Rodriguez, but still pretty green. “I got it.”

“Of course you do. This ain’t your first rodeo, man. So stop acting like it. You got nothing to prove to me. Just do your job the way I know you can.”

“Okay.”

Ed looked at Anderson, then shook his head and smiled. Anderson was thirty-two, and had come to SRT out of Delta Force. He needed a shave. His eyes were hard, but his body language was relaxed. He was probably bored. They had hired him, more than anything, out of Luke’s nostalgia for Delta. Ed doubted he would last. There were wars going on out there in the world, and mercenary work was where the money was.

“You know what to do, man.”

Anderson nodded. “Yeah.”

He addressed the whole group. “Look. There are women and children in there. Job One is to bring the subject out, but Job One-A is to do it with no loss of life. Non-lethal force is the motto for today. That said, don’t anybody let yourself die in there. If they want a fight, you give them one. Understood?”

Everyone understood.

Ed spoke into his mic. “Marshall, King, where are you?”

A voice came through his speakers. “We’re in the neighbor’s yard, just on the other side of the wooden fence. Waiting for go.” Marshall was former FBI. King had come from a SWAT team in Newark, New Jersey.

“You guys heard all that? You on my page?”

“We got you, Ed. Nobody dies today. Not them, but especially not us.”

Ed nodded. “Good.” He took one deep breath. He tried to let whatever tension was in his body release into the universe.

“All right. In and out in ninety seconds, kids. Let’s hit it.”

“Here they go.”

A dozen video screens were mounted on the wall in Swann’s office. Six of them were currently active, each showing the view from the body camera on each of the SRT agents about to hit Mustafa Boudiaf’s house.

“Office” was a generous term for Swann’s strange kingdom. There were four desks, each with at least three video monitors on top. Three tall computer server racks were bolted to the wall across from the video screens. Wires snaked all over the floor. Everywhere – on the desks, on the floor – were pieces of electronic equipment, with LED lights blinking in red and green and white.

There was one long window; the shelf below it seemed to have a force of magnetism that drew empty Coca-Cola and Red Bull cans to itself.

Swann sat in a chair in front of the video screens, Luke and Trudy standing perfectly still behind him. The screens showed a bizarre jumble of imagery, each screen marked with the last name of the person whose point of view was showing.