Back Blast

49

Arthur Mayberry shook his head in disbelief, but Bernice Mayberry nodded her head as if she had known all along.

They both sat in plastic chairs in an all-night laundromat three blocks from their home. Arthur wore his pajamas and a blue jacket handed to him by an ambulance driver. He stared ahead, still unable to process what was happening around him, and Bernice sat next to him in her housecoat, equal measures scared and angry, but she had already professed herself to be wholly unsurprised by tonight’s events.

Out through the windows of the laundromat law enforcement officers stood around, radios to ears. On the street ambulances and paddy wagons idled, and first responders waited for the order to roll forward.

Arthur and his wife had been roused by a phone call, just after three a.m., asking them both to very quickly and quietly come to the front door to speak with police officers. They’d complied, of course, and when they did they were told they needed to leave their home immediately. Bernice had demanded to know what was going on, and an officer said there was a chemical spill on the nearby train tracks, and everything would be explained at the command center. They were whisked away by a team of armed cops in body armor and taken here to the laundromat, where dozens of cops were already set up, and whatever they were planning on doing didn’t look to Arthur like it had one damn thing to do with a chemical spill.

Guns, grenade launchers, night vision equipment, riot shields. Arthur hadn’t seen so much military gear since Saigon in 1969.

He and his wife were led to seats near the front of the laundromat and, as a group of cops parted to let them through, Arthur saw a large photograph of his basement tenant posted on cardboard and leaning against the wall.

“Oh, hell no,” Mayberry mumbled under his breath.

Fifteen minutes had passed since then, and now Arthur watched while the police looked over his hand-drawn diagram of his basement, including the corner apartment he built with his own two hands. He imagined when this was all over he was going to be in some serious trouble for all his building code violations, but he looked on the bright side… He sure as hell wasn’t in nearly as much trouble as Jeff Duncan.

He’d done what he could to deflect blame away from the man in his basement. Jeff Duncan was probably up to no good, but the very idea the mild-mannered white man living on his property was some sort of a terrorist was asinine. Arthur had seen something on the man’s face; a world-weariness, a hardened interior, maybe. But he wasn’t as bad as all this, Arthur felt sure.

Bernice, on the other hand, kept muttering to herself that she knew Jeff Duncan was low-down and no-account, and she berated her husband mercilessly for not seeing this for himself.

The Washington Metro Police Department refers to its SWAT unit as ERT, the Emergency Response Team. The head of the ERT unit had sat down with Mayberry a few minutes earlier and asked, “You are certain there is no access to the house from the basement apartment?”

“Look, young man. I told the other officers. I built that place myself. You would need to knock a hole in the wall to get into the basement, and even if you could bust through, you’d be over there on the side with the furnace and the water heater.”

Arthur had then drawn up the diagram, and although the police seemed to be very concerned about the man in the basement, Arthur could tell the Emergency Response Team captain was glad he wouldn’t have to split his men and hit multiple entrances at the same time. They could, instead, enter the basement, and then, if the subject wasn’t there, they could exit and reenter the home to clear it. Another thirty police officers were on the scene and charged with cordoning off the block to keep anyone from entering or exiting. If the cordon around the property was any good, and their suspect was inside, they’d get him, wherever they found him.

Now Arthur and Bernice sat quietly, waiting for the tactical officers to get on with their raid and remove their tenant from their home in handcuffs, so they could go back home and back to bed.

Denny Carmichael awoke from a deep sleep on his sofa.

The phone on his desk trilled and he grabbed it, both surprised and hopeful.

“Mayes?”

“It’s Brewer, sir.” She sounded almost out of breath.

“Talk.”

“D.C. Emergency Response Team has surrounded a house in Columbia Heights. They think they have the suspect from Dupont Circle holed up inside.”

Carmichael clenched the receiver tight. “And why do they think this?”

“A Crime Stoppers tip led them to the area. Detectives came out and interviewed neighbors, showing them a picture taken from the Easy Market, and another taken at Dupont. They got a hit, apparently.”

“And why are we just learning about this now?”

“We aren’t monitoring tip line calls, there are a hundred every hour, most all of them useless. We only monitor the radio traffic of dispatched police units. This call went over a landline directly to a supervisor, and not out over the radio. He used his mobile phone to send out detectives, they weren’t dispatched regularly. I guess they are suspicious a terrorist might be listening in to police radio traffic. When they decided it was a legit lead they called everyone out. We’re a good twenty minutes behind the action.”

Carmichael was furious the TOC hadn’t accounted for the possibility the D.C. police would have a special protocol set up for Crime Stoppers tips.

“Where is JSOC?”

“En route, but they won’t make it in time. ERT is going to hit that house any second.”

“Give me the address, now!”

She did so, Carmichael hung up, and immediately he called Murquin al-Kazaz.

If ERT attacked, Court might die, but if he lived and escaped, the Saudis needed to put themselves in position in time to cut him down.

The worst-case scenario, for Carmichael anyway, was for Gentry to be taken alive by Washington, D.C., law enforcement. The thought of Court Gentry secure in a jail cell talking to a public defender made his stomach boil with acid.

D.C. Metro Police Department! Search warrant!”

Court opened the small hatch just as the shout came from outside his front door.

He knew the cops weren’t going to wait for him to answer, and he was right. One second after the call came he heard a shotgun blast; a slug was fired into one of the hinges of the storm door. A second shot came one second later, and the door fell from the frame.

A battering ram would crash through the wooden door any second.

But Court wasn’t waiting around for that. He had the hidden escape hatch door out of the way and he pushed his backpack through the hole, then he backed into it and reached for the hatch door to pull it back into place.

The battering ram slammed into the wooden door of his apartment as he did so.

The chair propped under the knob held for the first strike of the ram, and even the second, but as Court reseated the hatch and backed into the basement proper he heard the chair break fully and the door crash in, and then he heard another noise, followed by just exactly what he expected would come next.

He heard the screams of men.

The ERT team leader was fourth in the stack of eight men. He kept his M4 rifle high and his gloved left hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him. As the breach man smashed through the door with the battering ram and moved to the side, the first two shooters began pushing into the basement apartment. They had not made it fully inside the building before a loud rushing sound filled the patio, and then a massive orange ball of fire erupted out of the apartment, engulfing everyone in front of the door.

The three men exposed to the fire stumbled back, falling onto one another, finally getting themselves below the flame, which continued spraying straight out the door all the way up the cement steps to the driveway. As other team members grabbed the men and pulled them out of the fire, the team leader tried to understand what was happening.

All he knew for sure was that a massive cone of flammable propellant was spraying from the apartment through the doorway, and there was no way to make entry here. He had no idea if some sort of booby trap had been tripped or if the suspect was standing there with a fucking flamethrower, but he knew he had to get his team away from danger so they could regroup.

He called into his headset microphone. “Fall back! Fall back!”

Court crawled along next to the hot furnace on his elbows and knees, doing his best to ignore the agonizing pain from the old bullet wound on the right side of his rib cage. After several feet he was able to climb up to a low crouch. When he was up full and running for the steps out of the basement, he passed the home’s main circuit breaker and he pulled down the lever, enveloping the entire home in darkness. He then ripped out all the fuses, dropped them on the concrete floor, and stomped them till they shattered. He imagined SWAT men would have NODs, night observation devices, but he also imagined they wouldn’t have the newest models. Instead the cops would be looking through narrow tubes that would give them limited peripheral vision, and he hoped to use their weakness to his advantage. He then raced up the stairs, out of the basement, and into the kitchen, his pistol out in front of him.

Evacuating the sunken patio outside the basement apartment devolved into utter chaos for the ERT unit. The three men who’d been hit by flame were not seriously injured, but they did not know this yet. More than anything they were disoriented by the incredible light and heat that had encircled them moments before. The fact that the stairs to the driveway were right in front of the apartment door and therefore still involved in the fire meant everyone had to climb up and over the wall around the patio and onto the driveway, and this was hampered by the three injured men who needed to be helped out, as well as the difficulty in keeping rifles high and at the ready in case the fire stopped and Jeff Duncan charged out of the little room with a weapon in his hand.

After nearly forty-five seconds, though, all eight ERT officers were up on the driveway and to the side of the unrelenting exhaust of flame, and four of them covered the extraction of the wounded men.

More police ran up the driveway to help with the evacuation.

By the time everyone was off of the Mayberry property and positioned in the street, behind the cover of a pair of armored ERT trucks, the glow from the patio had finally died down.

There was concern for a moment as to whether the home itself might have caught fire, but when no evidence of either flame or smoke presented itself after five minutes, the ERT team leader called again into his microphone, “On me! We’re going back in!”

The second breach of the basement apartment went much better than the first. The apartment was empty; that was determined quickly, but only after they entered to find a rolling propane tank with a toy airsoft gun mounted on top of it. A triggering mechanism with an electric lighter and a length of bungee cord completed the improvised automatic flamethrower.

The plastic gun had melted into the top of the tank, but the booby trap had proved effective in delaying entry. The propane expelled was primarily vapor, but the compressed gas in the airsoft gun had propelled it outward. The ERT leader couldn’t figure out how the suspect could have left the apartment after having set the trap, but he didn’t spend too much time thinking about it.

Instead he said, “He’s not here. Let’s clear upstairs.”

Two teams of eight men each hit the house. Alpha came through the front door and Bravo came through the back near the kitchen.

After Alpha cleared the living room and dining room, they left a man in position to cover this area. Bravo cleared the kitchen, a laundry room, and then the basement. They left one of their officers to cover here. The rest of Bravo rallied at the bottom of the stairs with Alpha, who then left an officer here in the hall so he could cover the bottom of the stairs and remain in visual contact with both the man in the front of the house and the man in the back of the house. In this manner they formed a rear guard, in case an attacker had been missed in the cleared area or else found some way to double back past the main stack of ERT officers.

The remaining members of the two teams moved in a tight train up the stairwell, slowly and carefully, guns high.

The Bravo rear guard officer stood on the threshold in the kitchen that led down the stairs to the basement area. The lights were off all over the house, but he used his NODs to see around the space down at the bottom of the stairs. The full eight-man Bravo team had checked the basement, so he wasn’t worried about anyone being down there. Instead he just turned away and kept his eyes up the hallway that led from the kitchen to the stairs, ready to train his rifle on any “squirters,” or suspects trying to flee past the ERT officers still clearing upstairs.

This, as it turned out, was a mistake.

He never heard the man in stocking feet come up the basement stairs; he only knew someone was there when the pistol’s barrel touched his left temple.

In a soft whisper he heard, “You make a sound into your mic and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

The ERT officer made no sound. As he stood there, still looking up the hallway, he saw the two officers positioned with him on the ground floor look up the hall in his direction, as they checked to make sure he was covering his territory. The three men shared eye contact, but soon enough the others turned around and moved a few feet into the living room. They were unable to see the tip of the pistol barrel sticking out of the open basement doorway and pressing against the side of their teammate’s head.

The Bravo officer was pulled by the neck into the basement, then stripped of his rifle, NODs, and communications gear. In the dark the terrified man heard the door next to him shut softly and a bolt slide into place, then he was directed by the barrel of the gun against the back of his neck to move down the steps. He followed the whispered instructions, walking all the way back in the direction of the furnace.

In the middle of the basement the suspect pulled the Bravo officer’s pistol out of his drop leg holster. He then heard, “You have forty-five seconds to get everything off. Go.”

It was impossible for the ERT officer to get all his gear, his armor, his tunic, his boots, and his pants off in forty-five seconds, but he did his best. Court knew he couldn’t do it, but he also knew he’d work faster with an impossible timeline.

While the man stripped, Court dressed, but he put the man’s radio headset in his ear first so he could listen in.

Soon in a soft voice he heard, “This is Alpha One. Hold all positions. We’ve got a closed closet door in the master bedroom with movement indicated under the door.”

Court now had a tunic, body armor, a balaclava, and night vision goggles on.

“Speed it up,” Court whispered to the man as the cop fought to get his belt off.

A new call from upstairs came over the radio, asking all elements to report status before they confronted whatever was hiding in the closet. Court spoke to his hostage, who by now was down to his underwear. “Quick… what’s your call sign? Think before you answer. If you’re wrong, I drop you right here.”

“Bravo Four,” the man said.

Court zipped up the black tactical pants while the radio came alive.

“Bravo One, check.”

“Two check.”

“Bravo Three check.”

Court clicked the transmit button, but he rubbed his headset mic against the stubble on his chin as he spoke to mask the sound of his voice. “Four check.”

The next man on the team continued the roll call.

Court fastened the utility belt around his waist, not taking time to thread the belt through the loops. It was a little large for him, like the rest of the gear, but he made it work.

Court then cuffed the ERT officer to a pipe extending from the water heater, then he pulled a flash bang grenade out of the officer’s load-bearing vest.

Alpha One stood outside the master bedroom on the second floor of the Mayberry home. Two of his men trained their laser aiming devices on the closet door at the far end of the room. Under the door, faint shadows moved back and forth at irregular intervals.

Alpha One shouted, “D.C. Metro Police! Come out of the closet! Hands high!”

There was no response then, nor when he repeated the command two more times.

Finally Bravo Six entered the room, moved to the side of the door. He let his rifle hang from its sling and pulled his pistol from his drop leg holster, then he used his free hand to reach for the door. Everyone else tightened for action, their laser pointers evenly spaced across the door as Bravo Six slid it open.

On the floor in the back of the closet, a flashlight stuck out of a woman’s shoe. In front of this was a huge puddle of milk, and around the puddle, three cats moved around, lapping it up hungrily.

“Son of a bitch,” the ERT man mumbled.

A flash bang grenade went off on the ground floor below them.

The four regular police officers watching the backyard of the house from the neighbor’s yard saw the flash of light in the windows. The explosion broke glass in the kitchen that flew out over the patio. As they knelt behind a fence and watched, they heard in their radios the calls of the tactical team as they lined up on the second-floor stairs, ready to hit the floor below them from the stairwell.

It was clear they were missing a man, but these four in back understood why. A single tactical officer, his rifle in his left hand and his right hand clutching his left elbow, appeared in the side yard. The cops thought he might have come either from the front of the house or the basement apartment.

He ran up to them; clearly he was hurt, but at least he was ambulatory. While one of the cops made the officer-down call, the other three covered for the wounded ERT man as he ran past their position, all the way through the yard, and towards the street on the other side of this property. None of the men noticed the cop was wearing a backpack that was not police issue.

One of the officers started to run to help him, but he was called back by the other three. They knew they needed to hold their position in case the suspect appeared and tried to run after the fight inside.

Court ran to the street, where two police cars sat parked on the corner. The cars were both empty with their doors open, but four armed officers stood nearby, ready to block any traffic trying to get into the neighborhood.

“Ambulance is on the way!” one cop called out when he saw the tactical officer. “How bad is it?”

Court was all the way up to the two vehicles when he slowed and stopped. He let go of his arm now, and raised the rifle. “Show me your hands.”

“What the hell?”

“Where are the keys?”

No one spoke; they were all clearly stunned. Court glanced in one of the cruisers and saw the keys in the ignition. “Drop your weapons on the street, kick them away.”

All four did as instructed, and Court leapt into the cruiser, fired it up, and then raced off.

He knew this drive would be a short one. The helicopter pilot above would be informed of the situation in seconds, and it wasn’t tough for a cop in the sky to track a cop car on an empty street.

He pulled under a covered parking space in an apartment complex just seven and a half blocks away, parked the squad car, and leapt out, leaving the rifle behind. Just as the helo above neared his position, he sprinted through the parking lot, then he climbed a fence and dropped down into a drainage canal that ran at the back of the apartment complex.

He knew where he was going, after having studied satellite maps of his neighborhood to plan for rushed escapes.

He raced along the canal, ran to a large culvert, and ducked in. As he moved through pitch-darkness he pulled out his phone to light his way, and with this he saw a smaller drain, waist-high and not more than four feet in diameter, that ran off at a ninety-degree angle. Water gushed down from it into the culvert.

This wasn’t sewage; it was just runoff water from the streets, but there wasn’t anything clean about it. Court climbed up and into the long, narrow shaft, and he knelt low. This killed his wounded ribs, but he ignored the pain and moved as fast as he could from the area.

He wasn’t sure where the drain went — this wasn’t on the sat maps — but he had a flashlight, and he had a sense that he was moving to the east. If he just stayed in here for a few blocks and climbed out he’d find himself somewhere in the middle of the city, and from there he was sure he would be safe from the immediate threat.