Special Forces: The Operator Read online

  Avi swore under his breath. The shooter had picked his target wisely. Which was a problem. Smart, organized criminals were often extremely hard to catch.

  The FBI agent continued, “People just started dropping in the crowd. Took a minute or so for anyone around them to realize that anyone had been shot. It took a while more for the crowd as a whole to realize there was an active shooter. The panic and stampede was delayed for up to three minutes after the first victim fell.”

  “One shooter took all of these shots?” Avi followed up. “How long was the shooter active?”

  “It appears that all the shots were taken in the course of a minute or two.”

  “How many shots confirmed?”

  “We count a total of nine known shots. Six kills.”

  Damn. Six for nine? That was a ridiculously high kill rate, even for a professional sniper. Only a few very small spots on the human body were known kill zones. Either that, or the shooter had used highly destructive rounds to increase the chance of making kills.

  Aloud, the FBI man said, “Preliminary assessment is that multiple shooters did this. But that’s purely a guess at this point.”

  Avi looked around grimly. “One highly trained sniper could aim and fire nine times in two minutes. But to make all these successful kill shots in that short a period of time? You’re talking a world-class sniper.”

  “Either that, or more than one shooter did this,” the FBI agent allowed. A couple of shooters would mean each shot could’ve been set up more slowly and carefully.”

  “I concur with you. This looks like the work of multiple shooters,” Avi declared grimly. “How many wounded?”

  The agent shrugged. “Not many. Three.”

  “Any information on the ammunition used?”

  The FBI agent nodded as if Avi was thinking along the exact same lines he was, and said, “Four of the shots were to people’s heads. Two shots were center of the chest kills. From one of those bodies, a crime scene investigator has recovered a high-velocity, copper-jacketed, hollow point round here at the scene. It was fragmented all through the victim’s upper torso.”

  Avi swore. That type of round was designed to inflict maximum damage on human flesh. A round like that would shatter on impact and tear the crap out of the person it hit. Even if a round didn’t strike a lethal area, the sheer damage and blood loss could turn a normally survivable shot into a deadly one.

  “Faces were torn right off a number of the victims. Positive identification’s going to be a bitch,” the FBI man volunteered.

  “Any pattern to the victims?” Avi asked without much hope of that angle panning out.

  “None. They seemed randomly selected through the crowd.”

  Avi shoved a hand through his hair. “Do you have any information at all on the shooters?”

  “Nada,” the FBI man replied sourly. “The Aussies have men searching every building in the area, and Olympic security is searching those dormitories.” He pointed at the three high-rises looming beyond the tall fence ringing the Olympic Village.

  “I can’t even give you a rough location of where the sniper’s nest—or nests—were located,” the guy continued. “In the chaos, victims got turned around and moved. Some were carried out of the crowd. The scene’s completely contaminated.”

  “Is there film footage of it?” Avi asked.

  “Probably. But we haven’t had time to round up video from CCTV or from cell phones of bystanders, let alone bring in any experts to analyze it.”

  “I know a couple photo analysts who are in town for the games. Here’s my card and phone number.” Avi shoved his business card at the FBI man. “Where can I contact you to share what my people find out?”

  The FBI man reached into his coat for a card. “Any help you can give us would be appreciated. This is a freaking mess.”

  No kidding.

  Avi headed for the nearest entrance to the Olympic Village, but a mob of athletes and coaches clogged the approach to the gate. The village was on hardcore lockdown and nobody was being let in or out.

  Everyone in the crowd was panicky, and those close to the gate were arguing and trying to talk the guards into letting them through. Avi understood their urgency to get off the street and get within the tight security perimeter of the village. Not that he was convinced they would be any safer inside the village than they were outside of it.

  Given the location of the Olympic dormitories overlooking the plaza, it was just as plausible that the gunman had been shooting from inside the village. And given the presence of a possible terror team inside the Iranian delegation, that made the possibility just that much more plausible.

  Even if this wasn’t the work of Mahmoud Akhtar and his cronies, it was entirely possible one or more of the actual shooters had found a way to infiltrate the Olympic Village and take up a perch in one of the dormitories towering over the plaza.

  He yanked out his cell phone and called his Israeli boss in the security center. “Any chance I can get cleared into the village in spite of the ongoing lockout? There’s a huge mob out here, and none of us are being allowed in.”

  “Sure. I’ll make the call. Which gate are you at?”

  “North 2.”

  “Done. Get back here ASAP, Bronson.”

  “Mind if I swing by the American operations center first and see what they’ve got on the shooting?”

  “That’s fine. Just update me when you learn anything.”

  “Will do, sir. But it could be a while to learn much.”

  It took him nearly ten minutes to cajole and finally push his way through the huge, tense crowd of athletes and coaches to reach the actual gate. As Avi emerged from the crowd, the guard started into a spiel about no one entering or exiting, and he cut across the guy’s rote recital.

  “I’m Avi Bronson. Security specialist for the games. I believe my boss called you guys a few minutes ago?”

  “Yes, of course. Bronson. We’re expecting you. If I could see your badge, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  The guard thoroughly inspected his credentials and waved him through, accompanied by a chorus of shouts and protests. He threw an apologetic glance over his shoulder at the frustrated athletes and coaches. Little did they know they might actually be safer where they were.

  He took off running for the US security headquarters, which was much closer than the Israeli building. Truth be told, the American facility was better equipped and had more staff than his own country’s operations center.

  Thankfully, the American guard on duty at the front door was an ex-Special Forces type who knew Avi personally. They’d worked together in Africa a few years back on a joint task force to take out pirates in the Gulf of Aden. As soon as Avi dropped Gunnar Torsten’s name, the guard let him inside the building right away.

  He burst into the chaotic American operations center, not surprised to see all hands on deck to figure out what the heck had just happened in that plaza.

  He spotted Rebel and her teammate, Gia Rykoff—also a photo intelligence analyst—huddled together in front of a large computer monitor.

  “Have you got anything?” he asked them tersely as he approached.

  “We just spotted what we think might be a muzzle flash from the top of this building overlooking the plaza,” Gia answered. “On top of this building.” She poked at the screen.

  While she backed up a clip of video from what looked like Sydney CCTV, he glanced down at Rebel. Her gaze slid away immediately, and her brow knitted into a frown. What was that expression in her eyes? Guilt? Grief? Simple discomfort?

  Gia jabbed a finger at the image she’d just frozen. “Watch right here.”

  The video started rolling forward again, and he spied a tiny flash of light from the top of an office building. That was 100 percent a muzzle flash. He hadn’t been a special operator fo
r almost twenty years for nothing. He knew a freaking weapon firing when he saw one.

  Immediately, he yanked out his phone and called the FBI agent on scene. “We’ve got video of a muzzle flash on the bank building at the northwest corner of the plaza. It might be one of the shooters’ nests.”

  “Got it. Thanks. I’ll let you know what we find.” Before the agent fully disconnected the call, Avi heard him shouting for agents to get up to the roof of the bank building.

  He stood silent behind Rebel and Gia as the women went back through footage from various surveillance cameras of the concert, using the time stamp of that possible muzzle flash as their guidepost. They didn’t spot any more muzzle flashes.

  But he wasn’t surprised. The video imagery attenuated to full white screen over and over as pyrotechnic explosions from the rock concert’s stage overloaded the video cameras. And the noise—it was a mishmash of instrumentals, singing, screaming crowd members, and those damned stage explosions. No way would they pick out the sound of the shots firing.

  And then Rebel and Gia started the grisly task of watching the video to spot victims starting to drop in the crowd. The women worked at guessing the direction shots had come from based on how bodies initially spun and fell, and where the red mist leftover from the lethal headshots lingered in the air.

  It took about a half hour all told, but at the end of that time, their best guess was that three shooters had ringed the plaza, shooting down into the space from above. He swore luridly. It would have been like shooting fish in a barrel.

  Had there not been so many headshot kills, he would’ve guessed the shooters hadn’t even bothered to aim their weapons. A standing room only crowd had been packed into the square to see a world-famous rock band perform. Every shot was bound to hit someone.

  “How many shots total are we looking at?” Avi finally asked.

  “We’ve counted one more shot than the initial FBI report. That makes a total of ten hits,” Rebel answered, her voice haggard. “The forensics guys on the scene will have to hunt down that last stray round that embedded itself in a walls or the pavement to verify our count. It is possible that one bullet did a through-and-through and caught two victims, of course. But we definitely have ten victims.”

  “And how long did the shooting go on?”

  “About ninety seconds as best we can tell,” she replied.

  He relayed the information to the FBI agent, who relayed back that absolutely nothing had been found on top of the bank roof. If a shooter had been up there, he’d left no tracks, no fingerprints, no brass casings, nothing to indicate he’d ever been there.

  Avi said to Rebel and Gia, “Can you start looking at video footage from closed-circuit TV of the streets around the plaza immediately after the shooting?”

  “What are we looking for?” Rebel asked. Her voice was emotionless. Too emotionless. She was suppressing her emotional reaction to the incident way hard. He got it, of course. Right now, they all had a job to do, and hers was to find any information that might help law enforcement catch the bastard or bastards who’d done this. Thank goodness she had the mental discipline to do her awful job so well.

  He replied as evenly as he could muster, “I need you to look for anyone carrying a bag or case large enough to conceal a sniper weapon.”

  “You think the shooters ran away from the scene along with their victims?” she asked.

  “How else did they egress the area without anyone seeing a thing?” he responded tightly. “No weapons have been found in the surrounding buildings. No tracks, no brass shell casings. Nothing to indicate that a shooter set up a nest of any kind. Whoever did this cleaned up after themselves carefully and took all their gear with them when they left the scene.”

  She nodded, and for an instant, made eye contact with him. A world of pain swam in her gaze. Grief for the victims of the shooting, chagrin at not having been able to stop it and something else. Something personal and painful that he was afraid to put a name to.

  She hesitated as if she wanted to say something to him, but then remained silent.

  “What?” he bit out. “If you have something to say, say it. Six people are lying dead in that plaza. I’ll listen to any ideas you’ve got that might help catch the shooter or shooters, no matter how far-fetched they might be.”

  She sighed heavily and squeezed her eyes shut tightly for a moment. Pain. That was definite pain etched on her face.

  “I’ve got something to show you,” she said heavily.

  “What’s that?”

  “I should have shown it to you before. But...” A pause, then she spoke all in a rush. “But I didn’t want to talk with you. I let my own selfish desires get in the way of doing my job. It’s my fault those people are dead. All my fault—”

  He cut her off, alarmed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Come with me.”

  He followed her to a workstation across the room. She sat down, typed at the keyboard and pulled up on her large, high-definition monitor a still photograph. He leaned down to study it more closely.

  The image looked like a training facility for snipers. It was set in arid, beige dirt, featureless except for three shooting towers and a bunch of shredded target dummies on the ground. That, and a pile of camo netting tangled to one side of the shooting range.

  “We got this image this afternoon from an American surveillance satellite,” she said grimly. “Look familiar? Tall shooting positions around a large, open area, with targets below?”

  He swore luridly. Was she suggesting that tonight’s shooters had trained in that mock-up on her screen?

  “Where is this training facility?” he asked harshly. Although, he suspected he already knew the answer.

  “Iran. Same place Mahmoud Akhtar trained his new team.”

  Avi swore even more violently.

  She spoke quickly. “Gia and I worked up a list of possible locations around Sydney that this mock-up duplicated. We couldn’t get the list below about thirty venues and we—I—didn’t want to tell you about it until I could narrow down what this mock-up was meant to be of.”

  He glanced down at the screen and back at her. “It is a pretty general mock-up. All you can really tell from it is that a shooter expected to shoot at a downward angle at targets from a high perch.”

  “Yes. But if I’d told you earlier. Maybe the IOC would have put out more security at all the big open areas with crowds.”

  “You couldn’t have known the target would be a crowd. From that mock-up, the target could just as easily be a single individual that the Iranians planned to assassinate.”

  “Don’t let me off the hook,” she ground out. “I should’ve told you and I didn’t.”

  “Fine,” he replied harshly. “Next time, don’t hold out on me. But I’m telling you, tonight’s attack would not have been prevented even if every security delegation at the games knew about it. That’s too general a mock-up to have given us a hard target to defend.”

  Her gaze lifted to his reluctantly. “For real?”

  “For real,” he said gently. Then he straightened, assumed a military commander’s tone and said briskly, “Get your head out of your ass, McQueen, and get back in the game. I need you combing footage of the crowd fleeing the scene for some glimpse of the shooters. It’s all we’ve got.”

  “Yes, sir,” she blurted reflexively.

  She spun and headed over to Gia’s side smartly.

  He hated using that tone of voice with her, but she’d needed a figurative slap to snap her out of the self-recriminations and get her back to work. There would be time later to apologize to her for being a jerk.

  And maybe, just maybe, she would understand. Unlike any other woman he’d ever had a real relationship with, she was the first and only actual military member. He muttered a silent prayer to whatever deity might be listening that
she would understand.

  He followed her back to the workstation.

  Without sitting down, she looked up at him reluctantly. The expression lurking at the back of her gaze was wounded. Dammit. He’d been too tough on her. Too late to go back on it, now, though. He would have to find a way to make it up to her later.

  In the meantime, he asked more pleasantly, “Can you work up a briefing on the image you showed me, in particular, highlighting its similarities to tonight’s shooting?”

  “I could, but then I wouldn’t be able to look for anyone carrying a rifle away from the plaza.”

  She made a good point. He replied, “You’re right. Hold off on the briefing for now. It’s more critical to ID shooters and figure out where they went after they shot all those people.”

  “I will. But when we’re done reviewing the footage, I’ll get on that briefing for you.” A pause. Then she asked in a small voice, “Are you okay?”

  His gaze snapped to hers. “Hell, no, I’m not okay.”

  “I meant personally.”

  “So did I,” he snapped.

  She blinked and looked startled for just an instant, and then the professional facade was back. “I have to get back to reviewing the footage of the crowd.”

  He stepped back, out of her way. But as she brushed past him, he couldn’t help sucking in a sharp breath. Her gaze lifted to his ruefully. Yeah. She felt it, too. No matter what misunderstandings lay between them, there was still crackling chemistry, as well.

  “Later,” he murmured.

  She made a noncommittal noise and continued on past him.

  He wandered over to where Israeli analysts were watching video footage from inside the Olympic Village, doing much the same as Rebel and Gia were doing on the footage from the city. They were looking for athletes or coaches moving suspiciously in the crowd. People carrying bags or cases large enough to conceal a rifle.

  And it went without saying that everybody was searching for the black tracksuits with green, white and red trim of the Iranian delegation.