Special Forces: The Operator Page 22

  “Thanks, Lynx. How are you feeling? Calm? Tense?” It was Lynx’s first actual field operation.

  “A little of both,” Lynx confessed.

  “Just do it like we do in training. The reflexes you’ve spent all these months building won’t let you down. Don’t overthink. Just do what you know how to do. And remember, we’ve all got your back.”

  The younger Medusa nodded and smiled at her. “And I’ve got your back.”

  They bumped fists, and Rebel shrugged into her flak vest, strapped on her utility belt, loaded spare magazines of ammunition in her thigh pockets and did a quick inventory of her video recording equipment designed for low-or no-light conditions and with image stabilization technology so she could film while running and still get a usable image.

  She strapped on her helmet, parked her NODs—night optical devices—on top of her helmet, and pulled the thin microphone boom attached to her helmet into place at the corner of her mouth.

  “Radio check,” she transmitted.

  Over the built-in earphones in her helmet, Torsten responded, “Five by five. Meet us out back. You’ll both be in the front SUV. We’re waiting on you and Lynx.”

  “On our way.” She picked up her urban assault rifle, highly customized for the Medusas to be light, maneuverable, and deliver a crap-ton of lead on target in no time at all. She felt herself settling into the focused calm she took into any mission.

  With a nod at Lynx, she led the way out the door.

  “What the hell’s going on?” a desk jockey across the room squawked when he saw the two women emerge from the conference room in full tactical gear.

  “Talk to Torsten,” Rebel bit out as she passed by the guy without stopping.

  “We’re not authorized to use deadly force!” the guy yelled after her.

  “Speak for yourself,” she called back as the operations center door shut behind her.

  She took off running down the hallway with Lynx on her heels. They burst outside and jumped into the first vehicle, which Avi was driving. The SUV pulled out even before her door was fully shut.

  They all felt the urgency of the moment. Time was against them. That bomb diversion at the Convention Centre meant Mahmoud had a limited window to do whatever he was planning to do, and that window was already in effect.

  The interior of the SUV was silent as everyone studied the images of the roof, the building schematics and the diagram of the mock-up the Iranians had trained in. Rebel was lucky. Because of her job training, she could memorize a visual image with barely more than a glance. Still, she studied the images carefully to make sure she hadn’t missed any crucial details.

  Torsten made a phone call from the backseat of the SUV to brief someone in the US military command structure. He’d undoubtedly been passed up the chain of command with his request to launch a full tactical assault on an Olympic venue and was now having to repeat himself.

  Rebel knew her boss well enough to hear that his request wasn’t going well. His voice remained even and reasonable, but she sensed an undertone of frustration.

  He ended the call with, “I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you this is going to happen. We have credible intel that one of the world’s most wanted terrorists is, as we speak, launching a major attack on the single largest Olympic sporting venue. We’re operating under the umbrella of the Israeli government, which has requested our assistance in this operation.”

  Even Rebel heard the shouting from the other end of Torsten’s phone. He weathered the storm admirably, though, ending with, “By all means. Call your counterparts in the Israeli Defense Forces.”

  He hung up and, from the driver’s seat, Avi glanced in the rearview mirror to grin at Torsten. “This is a Mossad operation. By the time your people run up through the IDF chain of command, cross over to Mossad, and run down that chain of command, this op will be long over.”

  “That’s the idea,” Torsten replied, grinning back.

  Rebel had to love operators who knew how to work the political apparatuses of their countries effectively. Special Forces soldiers had to be careful when and where they sidestepped the system, but now and then, they could get away with an end around like this.

  The drive to the Addison Field House took under ten minutes. The interior of the vehicle was silent as they approached the building, everyone mentally preparing in whatever way they did for a mission. Rebel heard several of her teammates practicing four-count breathing to calm themselves and clear their minds. She followed suit.

  The SUVs pulled up behind the Addison Field House. Rebel climbed out of the SUV and fell in behind her teammates. Here went nothing.

  Chapter 19

  They’d elected to enter the venue via a loading dock, well away from the crowds who would undoubtedly panic at the sight of a full tactical team racing past them.

  Rebel ran with her teammates along a service corridor underneath the facility to the stairwell they’d chosen for their approach to the roof.

  Once they entered the building, they all went silent, relying purely on hand signals to communicate as needed. They’d run so many scenarios together over the past year plus of training together that there was little need even for hand signals. They all knew who would do what and when.

  They jogged up a dozen long flights of stairs to reach the roof. Torsten paused and signaled for them to go hot. The safeties came off their weapons, and Rebel reached forward to place her hand on Tessa’s shoulder. When everyone had a hand on the person in front of them, Torsten crouched low and eased open the exit. It was entirely possible a sentry had been placed to watch this stairwell.

  Silence.

  Torsten eased outside, sliding left, scanning back and forth for hostiles. Gia went next, sliding right and checking that quadrant for movement. One by one, they slid outside until they stood in an arc about thirty feet across.

  Torsten eased forward and everyone else followed suit.

  There was a reasonable amount of ambient light up here, but Rebel still pulled down her NODs. They would automatically adjust to the current light level. The roof jumped out in lime light and black shadows. Human heat signatures would show up as bright white blobs.

  They took their time, creeping forward slowly and stealthily. Various maintenance structures, steel support beams crossing in front of them at an angle, sloping toward their right, and the first air conditioning unit were approached, moved around cautiously, cleared and put behind them.

  From the right end of the line, Gia held up a fist.

  Everyone froze.

  She indicated by hand signal that she had movement in her one o’clock position. The team pivoted slightly to the right to center up on the target and moved forward even more slowly now.

  Contrary to the gunslinging, shoot-out reputation of teams like theirs, the object in any mission was to slide in completely undetected, accomplish the objective and slide out completely undetected. Tonight had potential to be the exception to that rule, but the Medusas would still move in as if they planned for no one to know they’d ever been here.

  A large white blob suddenly lifted away from the roof and resolved into some sort of bird. A vulture maybe. Its wingspan was easily six feet.

  The team continued forward.

  It was a painstaking process, but they entered the area of the roof that matched the mock-up. It was eerie moving in and among the cluster of ventilation and air conditioning units for real. The crates from the warehouse, their diagrams, and the satellite imagery all came together in Rebel’s head and came to life around here.

  They made it all the way across the area covered by the mock-up without spotting anything out of the ordinary.

  Crap. Was she wrong? Had the mock-up itself been a giant misdirect? Was Mahmoud out there right now, attacking some other crowd of innocent civilians while the Medusas sat up here, in the wrong place, doin
g nothing?

  Torsten signaled the team together and they crouched in the shadow of a huge air conditioner some twelve feet tall and twice that wide and long.

  “Thoughts?” Torsten breathed.

  “Maybe we were wrong,” Rebel went ahead and said aloud, since she knew they were all thinking it.

  Surprisingly it was Avi who came up immediately after her and said, “No. I think you got it right, Rebel. I vote that we sit tight for a little while. Let’s spread out and get angles on this whole area and see if our tangos join us. They’ve got a three-hour or more window left to attack in before that basketball game finishes and the Group B security people move back to their original positions.”

  Torsten glanced around. “Devil’s advocates?”

  Zane, who knew Mahmoud better than any of them, weighed in. “Even if we’re wrong, we’ve got nothing else to go on. Where else would we go if we weren’t sitting here? This is the only spot we found in an exhaustive search that matches Mahmoud’s training mock-up. The guy is thorough and obsessive. He would plan a large-scale attack down to the tiniest detail and not deviate from it. I think we’ve correctly identified his target. If not tonight, he’ll come up here tomorrow night or the next night. But this is the place.”

  “We sit tight then?” Torsten asked.

  Everyone nodded. In truth, this wasn’t a democracy. The team would do whatever Torsten decided to do. But a good leader gave everyone a chance to be heard and to add their thoughts if there was time to do so before making a final decision.

  Torsten ordered, “Beau, Tessa, set up watch here for now.”

  The pair turned and faced opposite directions, looking outward from the group, and commenced scanning the roof for any movement. While they did that, Torsten laid his copy of the drawn diagram on the ground. The others clustered over it.

  “Since we’ve got the time to set up an ambush, let’s do it. We’ll surround this entire area.” He started pointing at positions on the drawing and assigning pairs of Medusas to each. “Rebel, Avi, you’ll go here. It should give you the best overall view of the area so you can film whatever you need to.”

  Torsten quickly reviewed fields of fire with everyone and even called in Tessa and Beau to take a look at the setup before they returned to scanning the roof.

  In any situation where a fire team was surrounding a target and shooting inward, it become vital not to shoot one’s own team members by accident. It was a maneuver they practiced exhaustively because of the inherent risks, but Rebel still appreciated the reminder to everyone of how this would go down.

  Torsten pocketed the diagram and murmured, “Move out.”

  Tessa and Beau were a trained sniper team, spotting for each other and tag team shooting, and they moved off to climb on top of the tallest structure in the area, an enormous metal box with fan blades behind a grill that was at least eighteen feet tall. From there, Tessa and Beau would have the best vantage point to perform a true overwatch function and knock out threats invisible to the Medusas moving around at roof level.

  Rebel and Avi moved to their designated hiding spot, behind a small maintenance shed.

  Avi murmured, “You know, we could move inside this shed and take out the ventilation grill in the bottom of the door. We’d have better cover and could move around more to observe the area and record video.”

  She nodded and pulled her lock picks. Avi smiled briefly and stepped out of her way. They’d already established she was the better lock picker. The door sported a well-made double-action dead bolt, and it actually took her a full minute to get through it.

  They slipped inside. While she quickly shifted and stacked equipment out of the way in the back corner, clearing a space in front of the door, Avi unscrewed the two-foot-wide and about one-foot-tall metal grill from the door and set it aside.

  He lay down in front of the door, rifle cradled in his elbows, and she joined him in the same pose. Her entire side plastered against his, and her focus and calm derailed in an instant. Well, hell.

  Avi, of course, immediately sensed her disquiet. He whispered off-mike, “Breathe.”

  “I know what to do,” she whispered back.

  “Look. I know this is uncomfortable for you. It’s not easy for me, either. I’m sorry for everything. I would like to talk later and work it out. If you never want to see me again, or you just want to be friends, or you want to give a long-term relationship a go, we can both be adults about this and arrive at an amicable resolution.”

  God. Did he have to be so reasonable all the time? Continuing to scan the area, and continuing to whisper off-mike, she replied, “Fine. We’ll talk later. But there isn’t much to talk out.”

  “I shouldn’t have treated you as a challenge. I was wrong,” Avi whispered.

  “I probably should thank you for showing me happiness, truth be told,” she admitted.

  He actually glanced over at her for a moment before yanking his gaze back to the roof. “Then why are you mad at me? Is it because I blew up your worldview? Do you resent me suggesting that there’s more to life than work?”

  She hadn’t articulated her anger in exactly those terms, and she took a moment to consider it. “That’s part of it,” she responded. “But the other part of it is that you’ve never taken me seriously as an operator. You keep treating me like a little lady who can’t take care of herself.”

  He exhaled on a silent gust of laughter. “Oh, I’ve not mistaken you for that ever since I saw you totally prepared to take out that guy in the grove at the park, single-handedly. And I certainly had no illusions about your skills after you took on the two guys who jumped you outside the soccer stadium.”

  “Then why do you insist on treating me like I can’t take care of myself?” she asked in frustration.

  “Because part of how I show esteem and affection for someone is to take care of them. I feed them and entertain them and make sure they’re safe and happy. It’s just who I am. I treated my mother that way, and I treat my friends that way. You’re no different. You’re...family...to me.”

  She’d been in the Special Forces world long enough to understand the significance of that. Operators classed everyone as not-family or family. Those who made it into the inner sanctum of trust were few and far between, but once a person was dubbed family, an operator would do pretty much anything for that person. Up to and including dying for them.

  Had she been misinterpreting Avi’s behavior all along? Had it been nothing more than him giving her his unreserved trust? She felt her walls of anger and distrust start to crumble around the edges, and the sensation scared the hell out of her.

  She’d lived her entire life in a hard, protective shell she’d carefully constructed around herself. No one got in. No one made her feel deeply. No one hurt her.

  In retrospect, it had been how she defended herself from her father’s rage and her mother’s apathy. It had been how she’d walked away from previous relationships without ever looking back. And it had been how she’d become the Special Forces operator she was today. She had a rare ability to compartmentalize her feelings, fears and doubts, not letting anything emotional distract her from the mission.

  But then, along came Avi.

  She blurted, “How is it you can feel things and still go out in the field and maintain complete focus?”

  “It’s not easy sometimes. Like now. Not only am I worried about your safety—” He added hastily as she started to make a noise of protest, “And that of your teammates. But I’m also jonesing to nail Mahmoud Akhtar once and for all. The bastard has been a thorn in Israel’s side for longer than I care to think about.”

  “Same for the United States,” she agreed.

  “It’s not that I feel much when I’m on a mission. I shut most of my emotions down. That’s what all those exercises you’ve learned for calming and focusing self are for.”

  Sh
e smiled wryly. “I always thought those techniques, tricks and exercises were overkill. I naturally compartmentalized and never felt much need for external ways to do it.”

  It was Avi’s turn to pull a wry expression. “Welcome to the world the rest of us live in. We all had to do it the hard way and learn to forcibly contain our emotions.”

  “Oh.”

  He replied dryly, “Yeah. Oh.”

  Clearly, when she got back to Louisiana, she had some work to do. She was going to have to go back through all those training exercises and relearn them. And this time, she would have actual emotions in need of suppression. She wasn’t sure whether to be grateful to Avi for that or furious with him.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” she confessed.

  “Of course you can. You’re one of the smartest, bravest, strongest women I know. You can master anything you set your mind to. Including your feelings.”

  The vote of confidence from him meant the world to her. But now was probably not the time to express that to him.

  “There’s still the issue of you living in Israel and me living in Louisiana,” she threw out in desperation.

  “That is a problem,” he allowed. “I’ve been thinking about—”

  She interrupted him tersely. “Movement. Six o’clock.”

  Avi went perfectly still beside her, breathing so lightly and quietly she couldn’t hear him, and she was only inches away from him. She was massively relieved when her own breathing settled, calming and slowing into utter readiness for violence.

  Thank goodness for all those months and thousands of hours of training Torsten had put the Medusas through. She took her own advice to Lynx and reminded herself to trust the training and not to overthink anything.

  Tessa murmured into Rebel’s earphones, “Four tangos have emerged from the same stairwell we used, more coming. They’re moving fast. Not exercising stealth tactics. Each one carrying a bulky duffel bag. Faces obscured. No positive ID available.”

  That might be the last verbal Rebel’s teams used tonight, for as their targets approached the Medusas all fell into the frozen stance of predators waiting to pounce.