“How are the rest of the guys, Pete?”
“Okay, but Charlie is bitching about his stomach, something he ate, I guess.”
“Oh, yeah? Maybe I’ll see him, too,” Killgore thought. So, number three will be in here tomorrow, probably. The timing was just about right. After Chester’s earlier-than-expected symptoms, the rest of the group was right on the predicted timeline. Good.
More telephone calls were made, and by early morning, people rented cars with false IDs, drove in pairs or singly south from France to Spain, and were waved through the cursory border checkpoints, usually with a friendly smile. Various travel agents made the necessary reservations at park hotels, all mid-level, and linked to the park by monorail or train, the stations right in the shop-filled hotel lobbies, so that the guests wouldn’t get lost.
The highways to the park were wide and comfortable to drive on, and the signs easy to follow even for those who didn’t speak Spanish. About the only hazards were the huge tourist buses, which moved along at over 150 kilometers per hour, like land-bound ocean liners, their windows full of people, many of them children who waved down at the drivers of the passenger cars. The drivers waved back with smiles of their own, and allowed the buses to plow on, exceeding the speed limit as though it were their right to do so, which the car drivers didn’t want to risk. They had plenty of time. They’d planned their mission that way.
Tomlinson reached down to his left leg and grimaced. Chavez dropped back from the morning run to make sure he was okay.
“Still hurts?”
“Like a son of a bitch,” Sergeant Tomlinson confirmed. “So go easier on it, you dumb bastard. The Achilles is bad thing to hurt.”
“Just found that one out, Ding.” Tomlinson slowed down to a walk, still favoring the left leg after running over two miles on it. His breathing was far heavier than usual, but pain was always a bad thing for the endurance.
“See Doc Bellow?”
“Yeah, but ain’t nothing he can do ‘cept let it heal, he says.”
“So, let it heal. That’s an order, George. No more running until it stops hurting so much. ‘Kay?”
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Tomlinson agreed. “I can still deploy if you need me.”
“I know that, George. See you in the shooting house.”
“Right.” Tomlinson watched his leader speed up to rejoin the rest of Team-2. It hurt his pride that he wasn’t keeping up. He’d never allowed any sort of injury to slow him down-in Delta Force he’d kept up with the training despite two broken ribs, hadn’t even told the medics about it for fear of being thought a pussy by the rest of his team. But while you could conceal and gut out bad ribs, a stretched tendon was something you couldn’t run on – the pain was just so bad that the leg stopped working right, and it was hard to stand up straight. Damn, the soldier thought, can’t let the rest of the team down. He’d never been second-best in anything in his life, back to Little League baseball, where he’d played shortstop. But today instead of running the rest of the way, he walked, trying to maintain a military one-hundred-twenty steps per minute, and even that hurt, but not enough to make him stop. Team-1 was out running also, and they went past him, even Sam Houston with his bad knee, limping as he ran past with a wave. The pride in this unit was really something. Tomlinson had been a special-ops trooper for six years, a former Green Beret drafted into Delta, now almost a college graduate with a major in psychology – that was the field special-ops people tended to adopt for some reason or other – and was trying to figure out how to complete his studies in England, where the universities worked differently, and where it was a little unusual for enlisted soldiers to have parchment degrees. But in Delta they often sat around and talked about the terrorists they were supposed to deal with, what made them tick, because in understanding that came the ability to predict their actions and weaknesses-the easier to kill them, which was the job, after all. Strangely, he’d never done a takedown in the field before coming here, and stranger still, the experience hadn’t been at all different from training. You played as you practiced, the sergeant thought, just like they’d told him every step of the way since basic training at Fort Knox eleven years before. Damn, his lower leg was still on fire, but less so than it had been in the run. Well, the doc had told him at least a week, chore likely two, before he’d be fully mission-capable again, all because he’d hit a curb the wrong way, not looking, like a damned fool. At least Houston had an excuse for his knee. Zip-lining could be dangerous, and everybody slipped once in a while-in his case landing on a rock, which must have hurt like a bastard …. But Sam wasn’t a quitter either, Tomlinson told himself, hobbling forward toward the shooting house.
“Okay, this is a live-fire exercise,” Chavez told Team”. “The scenario is five bad guys, eight hostages. The bad guys are armed with handguns and SMGs. Two of the hostages are kids, two girls, ages seven and nine. Other hostages are all females, mothers. The bad guys hit a daycare center, and it’s time to do the takedown. Noonan has predicted the location of the bad guys like this.” Chavez pointed to the blackboard. “Tim, how good’s your data?”
“Seventy percent, no better than that. They’re moving around some. But the hostages are all here in this corner.” His pointer tapped the blackboard.
“Okay. Paddy, you got the explosives. Pair off as normal. Louis and George go in first, covering the left side. Eddie and I go in right behind with the center. Scotty and Oso in last, covering the right. Questions?”
There were none. The team members examined the blackboard diagram. The room was straightforward, or as much as it could be.
“Then let’s do it,” Ding told them. The team filed out, wearing their ninja suits. “Your leg, George, how is it?” Loiselle asked Tomlinson.
“We’ll just have to see, I guess. But my hands are okay,” the sergeant said, holding his MP-10 up.
“Bien. ” Loiselle nodded. The two were semi permanently paired together, and worked well as a mini-team, almost to the point that one of them could read the other’s mind in the field, and both had the gift for moving unseen. That was difficult to teach instinctive hunters just knew it somehow, and the good ones practiced it incessantly.
Two minutes later, they were on the outside of the shooting house. Connolly set the Primacord around the door. This aspect of training kept the base carpenters pretty busy, Chavez thought. It took only thirty seconds before Connolly backed off, waving his hand, thumb up, to indicate he’d connected the wires to the detonator box.
“Team-2, this is Lead,” they all heard over their radio earpieces. “Stand-to and stand by. Paddy, three . . . two . . . one . . . MARK!”
Clark, as usual, jumped when the ka-BOOM! sounded. A former demolitions expert himself, he knew that Connolly was his superior, with an almost magical touch for the stuff, but he knew also that no demo expert in the world ever used too little on a job. The door flew across the room and slammed into the far wall, fast enough to cause injury to anyone it hit, though probably not fatally. John covered his ears with his hands and shut his eyes because next through was a flashbang that attacked his ears and eyes like an exploding sun. He had the timing down perfectly, as he opened back up to see the shooters come in.
Tomlinson ignored the protests from his leg, and followed Loiselle in with his weapon up. That’s when the first surprise hit the shooters; this exercise was to be a tricky one. No hostages and no bad guys on the left. Both men went to the far wall, turning right to cover that side.
Chavez and Price were already in, scanning their area of responsibility, and also seeing nothing. Then Vega and McTyler had the same experience on the right side of the room. The mission was not going as briefed, as sometimes happened.
Chavez saw there were no bad guys or hostages in view, and that there was but one door, open, into another room. “Paddy, flash-bangs, now!” he ordered over his radio, while Clark watched from the corner wearing his white observer’s shirt and body armor. Connolly had come through behind Vega and McTyler, two flashbangs in his hands. One, then another, sailed through the door, and again the building shook. Chavez and Price took the lead this time. Alistair Stanley was in there in his white don’t-shoot-at-me garb while Clark stayed in the front room. The latter heard the suppressed chatter of the weapons, followed by shouts of “Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!”