White: A Novel (32 page)

The fifth man laid the blunt probe against the top of Jeremy’s eyelid and pulled the retractor up, rolling the eyelid back to expose the pink, mucus-lined membrane beneath.

Their identifying mark is a traditional Christian cross, modified with a
P
at the top of the staff,
he remembered.
Two numbers are usually written beneath the cross: two and five: Numbers 25, their motto.

“Do you see it?” Ellis asked. “Does he have the mark?”

This motherfucker is gonna hurt,
Jeremy remembered the tattoo artist saying back at Harvey Point. He remembered how the huge, tea-sipping Redbeard had rolled Jeremy’s eyelid back. He remembered the excruciating pain of the tattoo needle biting him over and over as the man inked a Phineas cross and the tiny numbers two and five beneath it.

“Well, Mr. Walker, I guess we owe you an apology,” Colonel Ellis said. He motioned with his hand, and the fifth man released the pressure on the retractor. Jeremy’s strained flesh snapped back down over his eyeball.

Thank you, Redbeard,
Jeremy thought. The pain of the tattoo would have paled in comparison to what this session could have offered.

“Don’t worry about it,” Jeremy said, shaking his head like a swimmer, trying to clear the fluid out of his ruptured ear. “Like I told you, I never thought this would be a bloodless fight.”

“IS IT JEREMY?”
Caroline asked the HRT commander. She recognized a certain resignation in her own voice. Maybe it was the hour and the cold dark room around her.

“Yes, but nothing to worry about, Mrs. Waller,” he assured her over the phone. “I just wanted to let you know that you might see stories about the team on the news in the next couple of days. Jeremy won’t be involved, so don’t worry.”

There was a pause. Caroline didn’t dare say what she was thinking.
Don’t worry? How could I not?

“I wanted you to know that he’s a great patriot trying to save American lives,” Mason added. “He’s doing what he was trained to do.”

Jeremy had always spoken highly of Mason, but the HRT commander struck Caroline as a callous, unapproachable man.
Of course he is a patriot doing what he was trained to do, but he is a husband and a father, too. Don’t any of these men ever admit to emotions of the heart?

“I miss him,” she said. Jeremy would have wanted her to say something brave and selfless, but at this point, it was the best she could muster.

“I know you do, ma’am,” Mason said. “And we’re going to get him back just as soon as we can. Until then, I want you to know you can call me personally at any time. I have team members all over the world right now, but I recognize the sacrifice you wives are making.”

Christopher shifted in his mom’s arms, and Caroline felt the tears coming.

“Thanks,” she said.

Then she hung up.

“Sacrifice,” she whispered to herself, remembering the bodies of innocent women and children destroyed in the terrorist attacks. She caressed her son’s dreaming face. How could she call this sacrifice compared to what other families had to endure? At least she still had a husband to worry about.

Book III

EXECUTION

There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

XV

Friday, 18 February

05:07 GMT

Hillcrest Woods Mall, Columbus, Ohio

“
ECHO ONE TO
TOC,” a voice whispered into a bone mike. “Have yellow, request compromise authority and permission to move to phase line green.”

Ed Damon stood at the corner of a Payless Shoe Source in a suburban Midwestern strip mall. Light from a lone streetlamp had just been extinguished with the silenced burp of a 9mm MP-5SD. A low overcast of rain and sleet shrouded the crisis site in darkness perfectly suited to a midnight raid.

“Copy Echo One,” Les Mason responded. “Stand by.”

Stand by:
the toughest two words in this job,
Damon thought to himself. As leader of HRT’s mobile assault team, he oversaw the lives of six other men. Now they were strung out in front of him like some deadly centipede awaiting orders to kill.

And kill they would. Contrary to what many believed, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team was no SWAT crew. They were America’s civilian counterterrorism asset, a fail-safe tactical team responsible for in-extremis action, which began when all other options had ended. They used explosive door breaches instead of “knock and announce” warrants, flashbang diversion grenades instead of fiberoptic entry cameras. They punctuated their intentions with submachine-gun bursts instead of orders to surrender. If a bad guy held a gun when HRT entered the breach, he died where he stood.

“You have compromise authority and permission to move to phase line green,” Mason announced. The HRT commander sounded resolute but calm. He had stood in Ed Damon’s boots a time or two himself.

The point man needed no further authorization. Once the HRT commander issued compromise authority, commitment became an eighth member of the team.

Speed, surprise, and violence of action,
Damon thought to himself, mentally running a tally sheet of details he had seen to in the hours leading up to this assault.

They had arrived just before dark that evening, all fifty operators and the twenty-four-member support staff. The Columbus field office had cordoned off an area in the parking garage—typical road quarters for HRT.

After a team briefing in which the S-4 operations officer had read the five-paragraph warning order, Xray and Whiskey snipers had deployed to prearranged shooting positions. The objective was a former Golden Corral restaurant that had been converted to an Assemblies of God church, then sold to a group registered with the IRS as an Islamic charity. The sign outside still carried a Christian cross and the faded shadows of its former denomination, but the people inside were anything but pious.

Command initiated assault,
Damon thought to himself.
Secure the door, set the explosive breach, enter dynamically in a standard SAS clear.

Surveillance by the Columbus SOG had placed half a dozen men and two women inside the building. Investigation to date had shown financial transactions with a Saudi government funding mechanism that had been tied in several previous cases to suspected terror cells within the United States. Unfortunately, ties between the former White House and members of the Saudi royal family had foiled previous FBI and DHS efforts to take them down.

They are a legitimate religious group, tied to a close and vital Middle Eastern ally,
the previous administration had argued.
Without concrete evidence of wrongdoing, they are not to be harassed.

More political bullshit, the investigators had groused. Just about everything Saudi had been untouchable during the previous four years, from members of the bin Laden family who were whisked out of the country on U.S. government jets right after 9/ 11 to the highly questionable financial channels that threw government investigators into a tizzy. Whether you blamed it on oil or personal relationships between the president and the House of Saud, it just added to the cynicism that the war on terror often hinged more on money than justice.

Phase line green,
Damon told himself as the point man held at the near edge of a plate-glass window. They had left “yellow,” their last position of cover and concealment. Now the whole seven-man team was hung out in the open.

Without further prompting, the third man in line ducked under the window and scurried to the other side. Hunched over between the door and the expansive window, he pulled out an odd-looking device.

Damon watched as the Echo team breacher extended a collapsible aluminum pole with a one-gallon milk jug full of water at the end. An opaque tube the thickness of weed-eater cord ran the length of the pole to a trigger mechanism at its base.

Explosives worked in three ways, Damon had been taught—they pushed, blasted, or cut. HRT used them in all three ways, but in this case, they would use water—noncompressible, and thus instantaneously destructive—to “tamp” the explosive charge. On the command to execute, the breacher would lift the water bottle to the center of the eight-foot-wide window and set it off. The blast would clear the glass in a flash of overpressure, neutralizing anything on the inside and offering a much safer entry than the door.

“Echo at green,” Damon whispered once he got a thumbs-up from his breacher.

The team waited for the countdown. Each man knew the objective: a computer room at the back of the storefront. There were no hostages to rescue tonight, but investigators believed information on the hard drive might save thousands.

“Hotel at green,” another voice announced. A second group of assaulters had staged at the building’s back door. Xray and Whiskey snipers covered the perimeter and any targets of opportunity from somewhere out there in the dark.

“HR-One to all units: stand by, I have control,” Mason said.

Damon felt his heart rate slow, his mind clear, his breathing settle. A counterintuitive calm fell over him—the peace of conviction and ability that always led him into battle.

“Five, four, three, two . . .”

Rifle shots rang out behind Echo Team as snipers took their marks.

“One . . .”

BOOOOOM!

The water charge removed the glass window.

“Execute, execute, execute!” Mason called out, launching brave men into harm’s way.

“A BLACKOUT? WELL,
just . . . just turn it back on!”

The president of the United States sat on an antique organ bench in the Oval Office, fumbling through a nineteenth-century arrangement of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” His beloved Estey harmonium groaned and squealed through a room restricted, now, to the vice president and just four of his closest advisors.

“David, we can’t turn it back on,” Beechum told him. She stood just off his left shoulder, trying to hide her pity. “There has been another attack. Two relay stations . . .”

“Terrorists?” the president yelled. He stopped for a moment, as if trying to place the word, then continued with the second verse.

“Do you understand what the vice president is telling you, David?” Andrea Chase asked. The chief of staff stood up from one of the couches and walked over to her boss. Venable sat in his blue robe, the belt hanging at his sides, its collar turned up around a tangle of salt-and-pepper hair, as if a new storm had blown in through open windows.

“Airliners.” He nodded, suddenly breaking out in a hymn his mother had taught him in grade school. “O where, My Lord, shall the great horn blow . . . terrorists? Home Depot. Disneyland, that’s the problem with Medicare, the OMB projects we can’t fund it and Social Security, well . . . what I hope to offer the American people and the Democratic party is . . . we need your help to take the White House back from . . .”

He rubbed his fingers against his temples, as if his mind had cramped up and massaging it might restore proper function.

“I, uh, I hope you all . . .”

Venable pressed a key, then scrunched up his face at a mis-struck note and stopped altogether. The president sat at the antique organ, fingers still at the ivory but lost for a moment to the world around him.

“Mr. President,” a third voice broke in. “It’s Doctor Hernandez. Do you remember me?”

The White House physician looked appalled by what he had just seen. Sunken eyes, loss of fine motor skills, slurred speech, sallow skin, disorientation, even hallucinations. He had witnessed the effects of sleep deprivation—insomniac psychosis at this point—during his years in Vietnam. The battlefield had reduced perfectly capable men to babbling infants after as little as forty-eight hours with no rest. This man had been up for four days.

“Hernandez . . . S-S-Spanish . . . d-d-doctor . . . ,” Venable stuttered. “Spineless cowards. They murdered innocent women and children. Barbaric. Evil in the name of religion . . . don’t forget to tell Chase that this teleprompter just isn’t keeping up with . . .”

“He thinks he’s giving Monday night’s speech, for God’s sake, Doc,” Oshinski said. The uniformed commander remained seated with Havelock on a couch. “He doesn’t even know we’re here.”

The president started in again at the organ, but his fingers worked at odds with his mind, creating a cacophony of wheezing bellows and poorly orchestrated reeds.

“Doctor, a moment?”

The vice president took the White House physician by the arm and pulled him back to where Oshinski and the national security advisor sat. Andrea Chase followed them and huddled close.

“We have to do something,” Beechum said. “I gave him the dose you prescribed and look—it barely fazed him. He’s clearly breaking from reality.”

“This is not atypical in moments of extreme stress, but it can be very dangerous,” Doctor Hernandez said. “The human body can go weeks without food, days without water, but it breaks down quickly without sleep. He will be fine once his mind recalibrates, but clinically . . .”

“Mother! Mother, I’ve finished my lesson!” the president yelled. “I want to go out and play!”

“For God’s sake, somebody get those reporters off the south lawn!” Oshinski called out.

Everyone looked up to see a FOX camera crew setting up a prearranged live feed. They appeared not to have noticed anything unusual in the Oval Office.

“I’ll take care of it,” Chase said. She hurried out.

“Doc, we need to sedate the president. We need to do it now.”

Beechum left no room for a second opinion.

“In medical terms, that’s as simple as an injection,” Hernandez said. “But this is no ordinary house call, Elizabeth. We’re a country in crisis, and the medication I prescribe will render him virtually co-matose. Are you sure you have the authority to make that decision?”

“If you don’t, I will,” Oshinski growled. “Look at him, Doc! He’s a good and decent man. Do you really want history to remember him calling out for his mother? For Chrisakes, put the poor bastard down.”