Locked On

12

Captain Helen Reid banked onto final approach at Paris — Le Bourget Airport just after five in the morning, positioned the nose of the Gulfstream toward runway 25, just behind another executive jet, a Falcon 900EX. The Falcon touched down and then taxied onto the taxiway, and the G550 followed suit ninety seconds later.

Captain Reid brought the aircraft to a large yellow box on the ramp that was the designated customs area. Once there, the aircraft idled with its door sealed, as per customs requirements, and Jack Junior arranged his luggage on the seats for the customs inspector to look over. Adara had arranged for a customs officer to be waiting for the flight so that they could be cleared immediately, and within a few minutes there was a knock at the door. Adara opened the door and greeted an extremely sleepy-looking man. He boarded, shook hands with Jack and the crew, and made a perfunctory glance into one of Ryan’s bags. All in all, he spent a grand total of two minutes on board doing this, as well as stamping passports and looking over the aircraft’s registry information, before telling the captain that she was now free to park the aircraft at a nearby FBO.

The tired-looking customs official bid everyone on board bienvenu, bonjour, and adieu, and he stepped back down the steps and off into the darkness enveloping the ramp.

Five minutes later, Captain Reid and Country shut down the aircraft at the FBO, and Adara opened the cabin door once again. Dominic Caruso, himself a recent arrival to France, greeted Ms. Sherman on the other side of the door, and then he and Jack unloaded the four backpacks full of gear from the airplane and put them in the back of the Ford Galaxy.

The Gulfstream crew walked toward the lounge of the FBO to arrange for the jet to be refueled and for the oxygen stores to be replenished. They would then wait on the jet until it was time to leave France, whether that moment was to be in three hours or three days.

Dominic and Jack drove off the airport grounds in the Galaxy with no security check whatsoever of their gear or their documents.

When hauling contraband around the world, private aircraft was, indeed, the only way to fly.

At this time of the morning it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Paris — Le Bourget to the Paris safe house. Jack Junior himself had secured this apartment the day before, just after sending Ding and John from Frankfurt to Paris. At that time, he could not have imagined he’d be pulling up at the door himself just nineteen hours later.

The men parked the minivan in the street in front of the apartment. They began unloading the backpacks by themselves, but Driscoll and Chavez appeared at their sides in the dark, and all four men unloaded without speaking. Once the men were back inside the small, furnished flat, the bags were laid out on the floor, the door was shut, and only then was the overhead light turned on.

Under the illumination of a simple steel chandelier, John Clark handed Ryan a cup of coffee. Clark nodded with a crooked smile. “You look like shit, kid. Staff Sergeant Buck has been putting you through the ringer, hasn’t he?”

“Yes. I’ve learned a lot,” replied Jack as he accepted the hot caffeine.

“Excellent. There is a box of day-old croissants and some ham and cheese on a plastic tray in the fridge.”

“I’m okay for now.”

“You were wined and dined on the plane?”

“Perks of the job.”

“Damn right. Okay, then let’s get right to it.” Clark addressed the room: “Everybody front and center.” He stood in front of the television while the four others found seats in the modern living room.

Clark referred to a notebook as he talked. “We’ll organize gear in a bit, but for now let’s go over the op. The plan, in short, is this: I’ve got us the room right above Rokki’s, and a room right next to his. We’ll hit them hard and fast, and from multiple entry points, all while they’re sipping their morning coffee.”

“You got two rooms at the Four Seasons George V? Gerry is going to love that invoice,” Ryan said with a chuckle.

Clark smiled himself. “He knows, and we aren’t paying for it. The rooms were already booked for tonight, so Gavin Biery went into the hotel’s reservation system and moved the existing reservations to other rooms. He made our reservations with a credit card number that we have, which is linked to a guy in Islamabad who moves money between Saudi fat cats and AQ accounts. It will be, according to Gavin, as if someone changed the reservations from one of the terminals at reception in the lobby. The Campus is clean on this operation, and the only vague trackbacks investigators will find after the fact will be the credit card, and that will lead them to an AQ player in the Middle East. When we hit the URC, it will look like some sort of lovers’ quarrel between the two groups.”

“Nice,” said Dom appreciatively.

John smiled. “At the end of the day, gentlemen, we are professional troublemakers.” That got a round of tired laughs from the room.

“Biery is also going to kill the security cameras at the Four Seasons as we come through the front door. He says it will look like the plug was pulled on the inside.”

“Amazing,” said Jack.

“Yes, he is, and he knows it.”

Then Clark turned serious. “Ding and I will lay out exactly how this hit will go down in a minute, but first there is a significant complication we need to talk about.”

The three men who had just arrived leaned forward or sat up straighter.

Chavez took over now, standing and facing the room. “DCRI, French internal security, has been tailing the guy they only know as Omar 8 since he arrived from Tunis yesterday. When he and his mates left their Seine-Saint-Denis safe house last night, the surveillance team tailed them here to central Paris, but they ran into some bad luck. Rokki and his guys had a mutt on a motorcycle pulling a surveillance detection sweep behind him, and we’re ninety percent certain that motorcycle man spotted the backing car.”

Jack winced. “So … French security is burned?”

“Looks that way, but French security doesn’t seem to know it. They completed their tail to the Four Seasons, and now a DCRI static surveillance team is set up around the corner from Rokki’s place in the Hôtel de Sers. They got a room with line of sight on Rokki’s suite. I’m going to guess they needed to be that close because they are using a laser microphone system until they can get a better bug in place.”

Sam looked down at a map of the Eighth Arrondissement. “Wow, DCRI are right on top of the action. Really close, in fact.”

“Too close, we think,” said Clark. “If they have line of sight on Rokki and Rokki knows he’s being monitored … well, we have to proceed on the assumption the URC cell has spotted the French officers in their hotel room at the other hotel.”

Sam asked, “What do we know about DCRI? Are they any good?”

Clark said, “Damn good. We liaised with them in Rainbow on multiple occasions. But they are like the investigators in our FBI. If you need detectives, surveillance men, man hunters anywhere in France, then that’s who you call. But if you’re sitting on top of an assassination team in the heart of Paris that looks like it’s about to go loud … then surveillance time is over, and these guys are out of their depth. They usually aren’t even armed.”

Sam asked, “Any chance the URC will just bug out? Call off whatever they were planning and leave town?”

Jack Ryan answered this. “Under normal circumstances, yes. That’s what we would expect them to do. But these are desperate times for the URC. We’ve seen them take some crazy chances since the disappearance of the Emir was acknowledged. Remember, we think Rokki is there because his boss, al Qahtani, is pissed off at the French government for policies he interprets as anti-Muslim. Rokki doesn’t want to fail his boss, so if he’s pegged the DCRI as just a hotel room full of surveillance guys with microphones and cameras, which is, in fact, the case … well, that just might not scare Rokki and his goons off.”

“Have we figured out what Rokki’s plan is?”

“No idea at all. All we can say with confidence is that it will be somewhere here in the area and it will go down today unless we do something to stop it.”

Dom spoke up now. “You know me, I’m all for a good fight with these assholes, but why don’t you just alert the local authorities that the URC is here and they are on to the men watching them? We can pay a kid twenty euros to go knock on the DCRI’s door and tell them they’ve been burned.”

Clark said, “Because the five of us have the best chance to stop Rokki, right here and right now. Plus, frankly, we need him alive and in our custody. This is our opportunity to get a line on Abdul bin Mohammed al Qahtani. Al Qahtani is the last real leader of the URC.”

Everyone in the room nodded.

Clark continued, “Okay. Now on to the op plan. Guys, we’ve gone most of a year without drawing blood.” He looked down to his watch. “In about three hours, that is going to change.”

Ryan’s heart was pumping a mile a minute. He looked around the hotel room and wondered what the other men were feeling. Dom seemed somewhat amped up, but not much. Driscoll, Chavez, and Clark looked like they could be sitting at a Starbucks, sipping a cup of coffee and doing the crossword puzzle of the Sunday Times.

Chavez spent the next twenty minutes laying out everyone’s duties during the operation to come. He used his notebook with hand-scribbled maps. He and Caruso would enter the suite above Hosni Iheb Rokki’s third-floor suite, and they would attach three long ropes to an anchor point, most likely the iron pipes leading to the toilet in the master bath. Dom and Ding would attach themselves to two of the ropes, and lead the other one out the balcony and then swing it down to Sam, who would be waiting in the room next to Rokki’s.

Clark would enter the hotel after texting Gavin Biery in Maryland, giving him the order to disable the cameras. Then Clark would head quickly and calmly to the hallway outside Rokki’s door. When all elements were ready, Sam Driscoll, attached to a nylon harness, would swing over to the bathroom window of the suite. If the bathroom was unoccupied, he would attempt entry there; if someone was using the bathroom, he would make his way along the wall to the bedroom balcony and enter there. He would be armed with a suppressed Glock 23, but his mission would be to take Hosni Iheb Rokki alive by administering a self-contained propellant-powered injector of anesthesia that would knock him out cold.

When Sam was in position hanging over the courtyard, Chavez and Caruso would rappel from their balcony down to the balcony of Rokki’s living room, and they would use their suppressed MP7A1 short-barreled submachine guns to take down Hosni Rokki’s confederates. John Clark would hit at the same time from the front door. He also had a CO₂ injector of anesthesia, along with a suppressed SIG Sauer pistol.

Ryan would serve as the wheel man down on the street, but he would also be tasked with watching out for any signs of police and, if any of the four tangos squirted out of the ambush, he might well be called on to go after them.

After Rokki’s goons were down and Rokki was unconscious, they would put him in a large rolling bag and take him out the front door of the hotel. Ryan would pick them all up and return to the safe house. With luck, they would be wheels up at Paris — Le Bourget ninety minutes after Clark gave the men the go to execute the op.

Finally, when he finished, Clark stood back up and asked, “Any questions? Comments? Concerns?”

Jack was confused by something. “If DCRI are watching the suite, they are going to see every bit of this.”

Chavez shook his head. “See? No, it’s a corner unit, and they have line of sight on the southwest-side window, and we are hitting from the balconies over the courtyard on the north. Sam, Dom, and Ding will be shielded from view, but if the French are using a laser mike to get audio, they will damn well hear some noise. We will communicate with hand signals while in the suite.”

Caruso shrugged, then spoke up: “A lot of moving parts on this one, Mr. C. Lots of stuff that can go wrong.”

Clark nodded, a severe expression on his face. “Tell me about it, kid. It’s the nature of the beast with this type of urban hit. Whacking the guys would be tough, but taking one of them alive makes the danger go up exponentially. Anything specific you don’t like?”

Dom shook his head. “No. I like the plan. Let’s do it.”

Clark nodded. “All right. Rokki and his men have called for one pot of coffee and one pot of tea to be delivered to their room at eight-thirty. We’ll hit them at eight forty-five. We leave in one hour.”

And with that, the meeting broke up so that each man could take a few minutes to organize his gear as per the op plan Chavez had just laid out. Sam and Ryan checked their .40-caliber Glock pistols and suppressors; Dom and Ding performed function checks on their submachine guns. They threaded their silencers on the barrels, nearly doubling the length of the weapons, but still they found them compact, lightweight, and well balanced.

They also checked their other equipment. Rappelling ropes, encrypted mobile phones with voice-activated Bluetooth headsets. Flash-bang grenades, smoke grenades, small shaped charges to breach doors or make doors, whatever the case may be.

They didn’t plan on using smoke grenades or flash-bang grenades, and they had no plans to breach the walls of the Four Seasons. Chavez’s laundry list of items that Ryan had brought with him from the States was designed for the mission in mind, but he’d also added a few other odds and ends in case everything went “tits up.”

Clark went into the kitchen, pulled items from another bag that Ryan had brought from the States. After giving the team time with their gear, he called them over.

On the table his men saw he’d laid out what looked like five small spongy pieces of rubber.

“What are these?” Sam asked. He reached over and picked one of the “bags” up. It felt like a small wad of rubbery dried glue.

Clark lifted one himself. “We don’t have time for a long tutorial, so I’ll just demonstrate.” With that, he turned away from the room, fumbled with the item for several seconds, and then leaned over. Driscoll looked to his colleagues seated around him for an idea of what was going on. They all just watched.

Clark stood back up, turned toward his men, and Sam Driscoll gasped audibly. John’s face had completely changed features. His cheekbones were more pronounced, his nose seemed to have taken on a more angular profile, his square jaw had rounded out noticeably, and the deep creases around his mouth and eyes had filled in. After staring at him for several seconds, Sam could discern that the face did not look natural — it was somewhat alien, frankly — but if he were just passing him by in the street, he would neither notice anything amiss nor, and this was the important thing, be able to recognize John Clark.

“Jesus,” Driscoll said, and the other men voiced their amazement as well.

“There is one of these for each of you. As you can hear, it doesn’t alter your voice or your ability to speak at all. It just fills in shallow areas and restructures soft tissue on your face to make you unrecognizable. It is a tube; there are holes at both ends so your hair is not covered. Also, your ears are exposed, so we can use our Bluetooth headsets. Go ahead and try them on.”

By now the rest of the men were putting on their masks like boys playing with new toys. They all found it difficult to orient the eyeholes and pull the tubes over their heads. As they worked and struggled, Clark continued talking. “These things aren’t perfect. They are uncomfortable to wear and hard to put on, and as you can see, they make you look creepy, like you’ve either had way too much plastic surgery or you come from another planet. Primarily they are to foil facial-recognition software, to change our faces so we can’t be recognized after the fact, and to confound any eyewitnesses to our actions.” Clark looked around the room. He chuckled. “Jack, you still look like a million bucks. Ding? Amigo, I’m sorry to say this does nothing for you.”

The men looked at one another and laughed, a light moment in what was sure to be an incredibly tense day. They then shouldered up to each other in front of a wall mirror.

Dom said, “They sure do the trick, but I’m going to need a lot of practice getting this thing on. If I have to do it on the fly for some reason, it’s not going to be pretty.”

Clark said, “The same goes for all of us. We’ll keep these with us on the op just in case, but we’ll have regular ski masks we can use if we need to throw something on quick. If we run into trouble and need to get out of there surreptitiously, then we’ll go with these for the exfil. Also, it’s very important to use sunglasses, too. Most facial-recognition algorithms use the distance between the eyes as a key identity measurement. Shades mess up their ability to determine identity more than anything else. In fact, when you leave this house, I want you wearing shades. You can put the masks on later if you need them.”