Jihad

CHAPTER 111

Karr sidled up next to the door of the barn, the shotgun in his hand. The pungent odor of manure mixed with the smell of gas, diesel, and fertilizer, though the nearby fields had not been plowed in at least a year. Two of the ground teams had joined Karr’s group, surrounding the barn. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team was poised near the door, ready to enter.

Koch, the HRT leader, adjusted his radio to act as a public address system and broadcast a warning, telling the people inside the barn to come out with their hands up. Karr tensed, expecting the answer would be gunfire.

They waited a minute, then Karr motioned for the agent to make the call again.

“You have a chance to come out peacefully,” said Koch. “This is your last warning.”

The large door had a chain that pulled down to release it; once released, the door would swing outwards. The HRT members had rigged a rope so they could open the door from the distance.

“We can toss flash-bangs in through the windows on the side,” said Koch. “Pull the door open when they pop, throw more flash-bangs, secure the interior.”

“I’d like to get them out alive,” said Karr. “That’s kind of a high priority.”

“We can try tear gas. Barn this old, there’s a good chance of a fire, especially with that gasoline I smell.”

“Maybe we can get a better idea of where they are inside.” Karr rubbed his chin, examining the side of the building. There were no windows or other openings, just the main door and a closed hayloft door on the second floor. When he was eight or nine, he’d spent weekends at his Uncle James’ house, playing hide-and-seek with his cousins. They had an old barn just like this. Once used to store onions, it was slowly disintegrating; one winter holiday they’d taken some boards off it and used them as snowboards. He walked around the side of the barn, looking at the boards, but none seemed loose enough to pull off.

Then he got another idea.

“Start haranguing them on the loudspeaker,” he told Koch. Then he grabbed hold of a nearby tree and shimmied up the trunk. Koch, realizing the loudspeaker was supposed to cover any noise Karr might make, explained in loud detail that there was simply no hope of escape and that it was possible and even very likely that the judge and jury would go easy on whoever was inside if they surrendered peacefully.

Karr stepped onto the roof as gently as he could, then climbed up to the top, where a large, louvered cupola provided ventilation to the antique structure. Handmade, the cupola measured at roughly four feet by four feet square. Karr slipped the barrel of his shotgun into the top slot and pried; rather than pulling off the roof of the cupola as he thought, he lifted the entire structure.

“Give me some noise,” Karr told Koch. “Couple of flash-bangs. Don’t go in yet though.”

The grenades, designed to produce a very loud boom and flash of light but not harm anyone, went off in quick succession near the barn door. As they did, Karr yanked the cupola off the roof and threw it to the ground. Then he peered in over the side.

He couldn’t see anyone. The problem was, the floor was a good nine or ten feet below the opening; if he jumped, the people downstairs would hear him. He put a pair of video bugs on the rafter and sat back.

“Anyone stirring?” Karr asked Koch.

“Not that we’ve seen or heard,” said Koch from the ground.

“Put two ropes together and toss one end up to me. Then anchor it against a tree.”

“You’re going inside?”

“Nah. Just playin’ Tarzan.”

Lia checked on the state police units, making sure they were in position as the helicopter circled above the plantation. She hated the fact that she was up here, useless.

Not useless, exactly, but up here, away from what was going on. She heard Karr and his plan to climb onto the barn roof and thought That should be me.

“Rockman, how does the video from the surveillance plane look?”

“Clean. All the action’s at the barn.”

“Yeah.”

By the time the rope had been tossed to him, Karr had swapped his shotgun for the submachine gun. He wanted the people inside alive, but not at the expense of his life.

“You watching that top floor for me, Rockman?”

“No one came up.”

“All right, FBI, here’s the story,” Karr told Koch, testing the rope. “Give them one more chance again, as loud as you can. Toss some feedback screeches in, sirens, anything you got. I’ll climb down, get near the stairs at the far end, have a look at the interior. I say go, hit the flash-bangs and come on in. Don’t fire too high, all right? I’m the only guy who’s going to be on the top floor.”

“Are we still trying to take them alive?”

“Not if it means our guys get hurt.”

“Thanks.”

“Lia, have the chopper make a couple of passes near the field to add to the noise level. Starting now.”

“Roger that.”

Karr eased himself into the barn as the helicopter came overhead. Landing a little heavier than he wanted, he opted for speed rather than stealth, sprinting to the open landing. He pushed back against the nearby wall, then slid around so he could cover the stairway.

Empty.

He bent down and leaned forward, looking first in the direction of the door to the left of the stairs. There was no one near it. A sheetrocked wall separated the barn interior in two.

“There’s a wall on your right as you come in,” Karr whispered to the FBI team. “I’m at the top of the steps on your left. There’s no one in the middle of the barn but I can’t see below me. Go! Go!”

The interior flashed bright white and the air snapped as the door to the barn flew open. In seconds, the team was inside the barn. No shots had been fired.

No terrorists had been spotted either.

So where were they?

The logical explanation was behind the metal door in the sheetrocked wall. The HRT lined up, ready for the next phase.

“Door opens out,” said Koch. “We can blow off the hinges and go in.”

“You’re assuming it’s locked,” said Karr. He went to the wall and nudged one of the agents aside. Then he got down on his hands and knees as he crawled next to the door opening. There was about a half-inch clearing between the door and floor, just enough for a video fly to peer through. He took one out, activated it, and held it between his thumb and forefinger, sliding it across the opening.

“Whatchya seein’, Rockman? Besides my thumb?”

“Nothing. Shadows.”

Karr put the fly level on the floor and then tapped it through the opening with his finger.

“Anything?”

“I can see a table. There’s no one by the door.”

The stench of manure practically choked him as he got back to his knees. Karr remembered the downside of visiting his uncle’s farm — mucking the horse stall.

Though it had never smelled quite this bad.

“Give ’em more of the spiel before we get asphyxiated,” he told Koch. The FBI agent gave the Miranda warning yet again, this time adding a Spanish translation.

“Movement?” Karr asked Rockman.

“Negative.”

“You see a booby trap on the door?”

“I would’ve told you if I did.”

Karr slid out his PDA and did a scan anyway, looking for a magnetic field that would indicate an electric current. Then he tried the knob. It was indeed locked.

“You want us to force the door?” asked Koch.

“Just a second. I need some air,” said Karr.

He slipped back and went outside the barn. “Lia — start looking around the perimeter for a tunnel or something like that. I think these guys have flown the coop.”

Lia radioed the state police backup units in, spreading them out along a road that ran along the southern and eastern perimeters of the plantation property. In the meantime, her helicopter pilot spun toward the west, giving her a better view of that side of the target area. The Dauphin hovered to the north.

“I think we have some movement fifty yards west of the small house,” said Rockman, examining the infrared from the overhead army plane. “Yeah — two figures running through the woods there, in the direction of that creek.”

Lia sent a police unit up the road to a bridge over the water. She scanned the area near the creek without seeing anything.

“You see them, Lia?” asked Rockman. “They’re cutting across the creek. Three of them.”

Lia caught one shadow as it slipped up the embankment. By now men from the assault team were in pursuit, moving toward the water.

“That field over there,” Lia told the pilot, pointing to an open area beyond the woods. “We’ll let them get into that about halfway, then buzz down in front of them and tell them to surrender. If we can slow them down, our people on the ground can surround them.”

The shadows popped from the woods sooner than she expected; the troopers hadn’t gotten up to the road yet.

“Get down there,” Lia told the pilot.

“What are we going to do if they shoot?”

“I’ll take care of that,” said Lia, taking out the two pin grenades she had in her belt. “Get us between them and the road.”

The pilot pitched the Bell practically onto its side, skidding in the direction of the road. Lia cracked open the door, pulled the pins on the grenades, and dropped them into the field. Then she picked up the mike for the PA system.

“The next grenades will be high explosives,” she said. “Throw down your weapons and put your hands up.”

Two of the men complied. The third began running toward the road.

A contingent of troopers reached the side of the field and began approaching the two men who’d stopped. But they were too far to catch the third man, who continued across the field toward the road. A thick patch of junglelike woods sat on the other side. The vegetation was thick enough that even their infrared vision gear would have a hard time picking him up.

“Put me down on that road,” Lia told the pilot.

“What?”

“Go. I have to get that guy,” she said.

Not designed for quick exits, the helicopter door slapped against Lia’s arm as she pushed out, throwing off her balance just enough that she fell to the ground. As she rolled to her feet, she saw the man cutting toward the road about twenty yards away. Lia scrambled after him, guided by the spotlight from the helicopter. The ground was uneven and the brush seemed to bite at her as she ran. She barely gained ground, but just as he was about to reach the road, the helicopter descended in front of them, sending a spray of dirt and herding him back to her right. The man seemed to have forgotten her, or at least lost track of where she was, and within a few seconds she was close enough to hear his huffing breaths. Just as she reached out to grab him, he cut back toward the road. Lia lunged; she got hold of his pant leg and shoe, tripping him up. He tumbled free, but as he rose she leapt onto his back, her forearm smacking his head.

To Lia’s surprise, the man not only managed to get to his feet but continued running. He flailed his elbows as she tried pulling him down; finally he tripped over something and they both sprawled to the ground.

Lia had had enough of this. She pulled her pistol from its holster near her ribs as she got to her feet.

“I’ll blow your ankles apart if you move,” she warned the man.

Either he got the message or was too exhausted to run any more.

The FBI team used a shotgun with special metal slugs to blow off the hinges and lock; three quick blows and they were inside.

The room was empty, a trapdoor open on the right. Three of the walls were filled by large shelves stocked with boxes and large bottles; the fourth was bare, with a padlocked door at the center. The smell here was more chemical than barn-yard, and Karr finally realized what they’d found.

The HRT men scrambled downward and began working their way through the passage out to the plantation’s southern field.

“Big-time drug factory,” said Koch. “Methamphetamine. That’s sulfuric acid, rock salt — that’s probably the lab room in there.”

He pointed at the padlocked door. Karr went over and examined the lock.

“We don’t want to blow that door down,” the FBI agent added. “We’re going to have to call a hazardous materials team. We’ll probably need a new warrant, given that the door there is locked and this doesn’t look like a terrorist setup, at least not—”

“Well, look at this,” said Karr loudly, slipping his lockpick back under his belt, “the door is unlocked.”

He bumped his shoulder against the jamb and the door swung wide open.

The room was better stocked than most high school chemistry labs and could have given a few college classes a run for the money as well. Rather than simply extracting ephedrine from over-the-counter cold medicine and making methamphetamine from it as most meth labs did, this operation apparently produced the illegal drug using raw ingredients obtained from Mexico. Sometimes called crank or speed as well as meth, methamphetamine was an illegal stimulant popular with bored suburban youth, rural yahoos, and people seeking a high to accompany sex.

The lab also had the ingredients needed to made ecstasy and mescaline as well.

“This is a huge haul,” said Koch. “Might be a record, at least for this area. Congratulations.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be much consolation for the folks back home,” said Karr.