Dead or Alive Read online

  Clark said, “Richards, when’s sunset?”

  “Three hours, give or take. Weather report is for clear skies.”

  Shit, Clark thought. Operating in a desert climate could be a pain in the ass. Tripoli had a bit of pollution, but nothing like a Western metropolis, so the ambient light from the moon and stars would make movement tricky. A lot would depend on how many bad guys were inside and where they were positioned. If they had enough bodies, they’d almost certainly have surveillance posted, but that wasn’t anything Johnston and Loiselle couldn’t handle. Still, any approach on the compound would have to be planned carefully.

  “Johnston ...” Clark called.

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “Go for a stroll. Pick your perches, then come back and sketch it out for coverage and fields of fire. Richards, tell our escort to pass the word: Let our men work and don’t get in their way.”

  “Okay.” Richards took Masudi by the elbow, moved him a few feet away, then started talking. After half a minute, Masudi nodded and left.

  “We have blueprints?” Stanley asked Richards.

  The embassy man checked his watch. “Should be here within the hour.”

  “From Stockholm?”

  Richards gave a negative shake of his head. “Here. Interior ministry.”

  “Christ.”

  There was no use having them transmitted in piecemeal JPEGs, either. No guarantee they’d be any better than what they already had—unless the Libyans were willing to take the shots to a professional printer and have the pieces stitched together. Clark wasn’t going to hold his breath for that.

  “Hey, Ding?”

  “Here, boss.”

  Clark handed him the binoculars. “Take a look.” Along with Dieter Weber, Chavez would be leading one of the two assault teams.

  Chavez scanned the building for sixty seconds, then handed back the binoculars. “Basement?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Bad guys usually like to hunker down, so I’d say they’re concentrated on the first floor, or in the basement if there is one, though that’s iffy—unless they’re really dumb.”

  No exits belowground, Clark thought.

  “If we can halfway nail down where the hostages are and whether they’re lumped together or split up . . . But if I had to make a snap call, I’d say enter on the second floor, south and east walls, clear that level, and then head down. Standard small-unit tactics, really. Take the high points on the map and the bad guys are at an automatic disadvantage.”

  “Go on,” Clark said.

  “The first-floor windows are out. We could handle the bars, but not quickly, and it would make a lot of noise. But those balconies . . . the railing looks pretty solid. Should be easy to get up there. A lot’s going to depend on the layout. If it’s more open, not too broken up, I say start high. Otherwise, we rattle their cages with some flashbangs, breach the walls in a couple places with Gatecrashers, then swarm ’em.”

  Clark looked to Stanley, who nodded his approval. “The boy is learning,” he said with a grin.

  “Fuck you very much,” Chavez replied with his own smile.

  Clark checked his watch again. Time.

  The bad guys hadn’t made contact, and that worried him. There were only a couple reasons to explain the silence: Either they were waiting to make sure they had the world’s attention before announcing their demands, or they were waiting to make sure they had the world’s attention before they started tossing bodies out the front door.

  19

  SURPRISING NO ONE, the blueprints did not arrive within the hour but closer to two, and so it was not quite ninety minutes before sunset when Clark, Stanley, and Chavez unrolled the plans of the compound and got their first look at what lay ahead of them.

  “Bloody hell,” Stanley growled.

  The blueprints weren’t the original architect’s set but rather a taped-together photocopy of a photocopy. Many of the notations were blurred beyond recognition.

  “Ah, Jesus ...” Richards said, looking over their shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, they said—”

  “Not your fault,” Clark replied evenly. “More games. We’ll make it work.” This was another thing Rainbow did very well: adapt and improvise. Bad blueprints were just another form of insufficient intel, and Rainbow had dealt with its fair share of that. Worse still, the good colonel’s intelligence service had refused to give the Swedes blueprints to their own damned building, so they were out of luck there, too.

  The good news was the embassy building did not have a basement, and the floor plan looked relatively open. No chopped-up hallways and cookie-cutter spaces, which made room clearing tedious and time-consuming. And there was a wraparound balcony on the second floor overlooking a large open space that abutted a wall of smaller rooms along the west wall.

  “Forty by fifty feet,” Chavez observed. “Whaddya think? Main work area?”

  Clark nodded. “And those along the west wall have gotta be executive offices.”

  Opposite them, down a short hall that turned right at the base of the stairs, was what looked like a kitchen/dining area, a bathroom, and four more rooms, unlabeled on the plans. Maybe storage, Clark thought, judging by their size. One’s probably the security office. At the end of the hall was a door leading to the outside.

  “There’s no electrical or water on these plans,” Chavez said.

  “If you’re thinking sewer to get in,” Richards replied, “forget it. This is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Tripoli. The sewer system is for shit—”

  “Very funny.”

  “The pipes are no bigger around than a volleyball, and they collapse if you look sideways at them. Just this week I’ve had to detour twice on the way to work to avoid sinkholes.”

  “Okay,” Clark said, bringing things back on track. “Richards, you talk to Masudi and make sure we can get the power cut when we give the go.” They’d decided to leave the utilities on, lest they agitate the bad guys this close to Chavez and his teams going in.

  “Right.”

  “Ding, weapons check?”

  “Done and done.”

  As always, the assault teams would be armed with Heckler & Koch MP5SD3s. Noise-suppressed and chambered in 9 millimeters with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire.

  Along with the standard load-out of fragmentation grenades and flashbangs each man would also be armed with an MK23 .45-caliber ACP with a modified KAC noise suppressor and a tritium laser aiming module—LAM—with four selector modes: visible laser only, visible laser/flashlight, infrared laser only, and infrared laser/illuminator. Favored by Navy Special Warfare teams and the British Special Boat Service, the MK23 was a marvel of durability, having been torture-tested by both the SEALs and the SBS for extreme temperature, saltwater submersion, dry-firing, impact, and a weapon’s worst enemy, dirt. Like a good Timex watch, the MK23 had taken a licking and kept on ticking—or in this case, kept on firing.

  Johnston and Loiselle had bright and shiny new toys to play with, Rainbow having recently switched from the M24 sniper rifle to the Knights Armament M110 Sniper System, equipped with Leupold scope for daylight conditions and the tried-and-true AN/PVS-14 night sight. Unlike the bolt-action M24, the M110 was semiautomatic. For the assault teams, it meant Johnston and Loiselle, shooting cover fire, could put more rounds on target in a whole lot less time.

  At Clark’s direction, each sniper had earlier done a walk-about of the area, circumnavigating the blocks surrounding the embassy compound, picking out perches and sketching out his fields of fire. Of the spots Chavez and Weber had chosen as their entry points, Johnston and Loiselle would be able to provide absolute cover—until the teams entered the building proper, that was. Once inside, the assault teams would be on their own.

  Fifty minutes after sunset the team sat hunkered down in their makeshift command post, lights out, waiting. Through the binoculars Clark could see the faint glow of light seeping through the embassy’s plantation shutters. The
exterior lights had popped on, too, four twenty-foot-high poles, one at each corner of the compound and each topped with a sodium-vapor lamp pointed in toward the building.

  An hour earlier the muezzin’s call to salaat had echoed over Tripoli, but now the streets were deserted and quiet, save the distant barking of dogs, the occasional car horn, and the faint voices of the People’s Militia guards still on perimeter duty around the embassy. The temperature had dropped only a few degrees, hovering somewhere in the upper eighties. Between now and sunrise, as the heat dissipated into the cloudless desert air, the temperature would plummet another thirty degrees or more, but Clark was confident that by sunrise the embassy would be secure and Rainbow would be packing up. He hoped with no friendly casualties and a few live bad guys to hand over to ... whomever. Who would oversee the post-mission mop-up and subsequent investigation was probably still being debated.

  Somewhere in the dark a cell phone trilled softly, and a few moments later Richards appeared at Clark’s shoulder and whispered, “Swedes on the ground at the airport.”

  The Swedish Security Service, the Säkerhetspolisen, fielded the county’s antiterrorist division, while the Rikskriminalpolisen, or Criminal Investigation Department, was its version of the FBI. Once Rainbow had secured the embassy, it would be turned over to them.

  “Good, thanks. Guess that answers the question. Tell them to stand by. As soon as we’re finished they can come in. Nothing about our timeline, though. Don’t want that getting out.”

  “You think the Swedes would—”

  “No, not intentionally, but who knows who they’re talking to.” Though Clark thought it unlikely, he couldn’t discount the possibility of the Libyans throwing a wrench into the works: The Americans came here, failed in their mission, and now people are dead. A publicity coup for the colonel.

  It had been nearly twenty-four hours since the embassy had been stormed, and still no sign of life from inside. Clark had chosen 0215 as their go-time, reasoning that the terrorists were likely assuming any assault would come with nightfall. Clark was hoping the delay would cause them to relax, even if only a bit. Plus, statistically, the hours between two and four in the morning were when the human mind starts to lose its edge—especially human minds that have been saddled with the twin demons of stress and uncertainty for the past twenty-eight hours.

  At 0130 hours Clark told Johnston and Loiselle to get ready, then gave the nod to Richards, who in turn gave it to Lieutenant Masudi. Five minutes and an extended walkie-talkie discussion later, the Libyan reported back: the perimeter guards were ready. Clark didn’t want some nervous grunt taking a pot-shot at his snipers as they moved into position. Similarly, he had Stanley and Chavez on the binoculars, keeping a close watch. However unlikely, there was always the possibility that someone—a sympathizer or just some asshole private who hated Americans—might try to signal the terrorists that the game was about to start. If this happened, there wouldn’t be much Clark could do except recall Johnston and Loiselle and try again later.

  With Johnston and Loiselle geared up, M110s draped across their shoulders, Clark waited five minutes, then whispered to Stanley and Chavez, “How’re we doing?”

  “No change,” Ding reported. “Some walkie-talkie action, but that’s probably the word getting passed.”

  At 0140 Clark turned to Johnston and Loiselle and nodded. The two snipers slipped out the door and disappeared into the darkness. Clark donned his headset.

  Five minutes passed. Ten minutes.

  Over the radio came Loiselle’s voice: “Omega One, in position.” Followed ten seconds later by Johnston: “Omega Two, in position.”

  “Roger,” Clark replied, checking his watch. “Stand by. Assault teams moving in ten.”

  He could hear a pair of “Roger” double-clicks in reply.

  “Alistair . . . Ding?”

  “No movement. All quiet.”

  “Same here, boss.”

  “Okay, get ready.”

  At this, Chavez handed his binoculars to Clark and joined his team at the door. Weber and his team, who were tasked with the ground-floor breach on the front/west corner wall, had farther to go to get into position, so they would go first, followed four minutes later by Chavez and his shooters.

  Clark scanned the embassy compound one more time, looking for movement, changes—anything that didn’t pass his k-check, or kinesthetic check. Do this kind of thing long enough, he’d learned, and you develop something akin to a sixth sense. Does it feel right? Any nagging voices in the back of your head? Any unchecked boxes or overlooked details? Clark had seen too many otherwise good operators ignore the k-check—more often than not to their detriment.

  Clark lowered his binoculars and turned to his teams, poised in the doorway. “Go,” he whispered.

  20

  CHAVEZ WAITED the requisite four minutes, then led his team down the steps and to the head of the alley. As Clark had requested, the Libyans had turned off the streetlights for a block around the embassy, something they all hoped the bad guys wouldn’t notice, since the compound’s pole lights were still on and pointing inward. Also by request, a trio of Army trucks had been parked single file down the middle of the street between the command-post apartment and the east side of the compound.

  Using hand signals, he sent each man down the sidewalk, using the shadows and the trucks as cover until they reached the next alley, where a line of hedges ran in front of the next building, a private medical practice, Ding had been told, cleared of civilians earlier that day.

  Once the team was safely behind the hedges, he followed at a walking pace, half hunched over, MP5 at ready-low, his eyes scanning ahead and to the right and over the top of the embassy compound’s wall. No movement. Good. Nothing to see here, tango.

  Chavez reached the hedges and stopped in a crouch. Over his headset he heard Weber’s voice: “Command, Red Actual, over.”

  “Go, Red Actual.”

  “In position. Setting up Gatecrasher.”

  Chavez half wished he had Weber’s job. Though he’d used Rainbow’s newest toy in training, he’d yet to see it in live action.

  Developed by Alford Technologies in Great Britain, the Gatecrasher—which Loiselle had dubbed the “magic door maker”—reminded Ding of one of those tall, rounded rectangular shields the Spartans carried in 300, but a more accurate analogy would be that of a quarter-scale rubber raft. Instead of air in the outside ring of tubes, there was water, and opposite them, on the hollow side of the Gatecrasher, a sunken strip into which strands of PETN detonator cord were packed. The det cord, backed by the water jacket, created what was known as a tamping effect, essentially turning the det cord into a shaped charge—a focused explosive cutting ring that could cut through a foot and a half of solid brick.

  The Gatecrasher addressed a number of issues that had long plagued special operators and hostage rescue teams: one, booby-trapped entry points, and two, the “fatal funnel.” Terrorists, knowing the good guys had to come through either doors or windows, often rigged them with explosives—as they did during the Breslan school massacre in Russia—and/or concentrated their firepower and attention on likely entry points.

  With the Gatecrasher, Weber and his team would be through the front west wall of the building about three seconds after detonation.

  “Roger,” Clark replied to Weber. “Blue Actual?”

  “Three minutes to wall,” Chavez reported.

  He scanned the compound one last time through his night vision, saw nothing, then moved out.

  For getting over the wall, they’d chosen a decidedly low-tech method: a four-foot stepladder and a Kevlar flak jacket. Among the many axioms special operators lived by, KISS was one of the most important: Keep it simple, stupid. Don’t over-think a simple problem, or as Clark often put it, “You don’t use a shotgun on a cockroach.” In this case, the stepladder would get them level with the top of the wall; the flak jacket, draped over the glass shards jutting from the top of the wall, would
keep Chavez and his team from losing some fluid while going over.

  Chavez slipped out from behind the hedges, dashed to the wall, crouched down. He keyed his headset: “Command, Blue Actual. At the wall.”

  “Roger.” Stanley’s voice.

  A few seconds later a red laser dot appeared on the wall three feet to Chavez’s right. Having already mapped out the surveillance camera’s blind spots, Alistair was using his MK23’s LAM to show Ding the way.

  Chavez sidestepped until the laser dot was resting on his chest. The dot disappeared. He quickly and quietly set up the ladder, then gave the move up signal to the rest of his team.

  Showalter went first. Chavez handed him the flak jacket, and he mounted the ladder. Ten seconds later he was up, over, and out of sight. One by one, the rest of the team followed suit until it was Ding’s turn.

  Once on the other side, he found himself standing on a plush green lawn bordered by hibiscus bushes. The Swedes’ monthly sprinkler bills must be a bitch, he thought absently. To his right lay the front of the building, and directly ahead, twenty feet away, the east wall. Showalter and Bianco had taken up over-watch at each corner of the building. Ybarra sat crouched beneath the balcony. Ding started toward him.

  “Hold.” Loiselle’s voice. “Movement, south side.”

  Ding froze.

  Ten seconds later. “Clear. Just a cat.”

  Chavez crossed over to Ybarra, slung his MP5, then climbed on the stout Spaniard’s back. The balcony’s lowermost rail was just beyond finger reach. Chavez stretched. Ybarra steadied himself and stood a little straighter. Chavez caught the railing, first with his right hand, then with his left, then chinned himself up. Five seconds later he was crouched on the balcony. He un-clipped a section of knotted rope from his harness, clipped the D ring to the rope railing, and dropped the end over the side.