And along the way to graduation each recruit had to navigate the hothouse, which was a three-story concrete tower with steel
shutters over the windows, welded shut. The interior configuration, with its mesh floors, allowed a fire at the bottom to
shoot smoke all the way to the top in seconds. The luckless recruit got thrown into the third floor and had to use his sense
of touch, guts and instincts to find his way to the bottom and out to safety. Your reward for surviving that was a bucket
of water in the eyes to clear out the smoke there, and the chance to do it again a few minutes later with a hundred-and-fifty-pound
dummy on your back.
Crammed in between all that was tens of thousands of rounds fired, classroom drills that would have perplexed and confounded
Einstein, fitness grinders that would have left many an Olympian heaving from exhaustion, plus enough paralyzing split-second
decision-making scenarios to make a man give up booze and women, crawl in a padded room and start talking to himself. And
every step of the way were the real HRT operators grading your sorry butt on every mistake and every triumph, and you just
hoped you ended up with far more of the latter, but you never really could tell, because the HRTs never talked to you. To
them you were scum, busting-your-ass scum, but still scum. And you knew they wouldn’t even acknowledge your presence until
and if you graduated. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even attend your funeral if the tryout managed to kill you.
Web had somehow survived it all, and upon graduation from the New Operators Training School, or NOTS, as it was known, he
had been “drafted” as a sniper and spent two more months at the Scout Sniper School of the Marine Corps, where he had learned
from the very best the skills of field craft, observation, camouflage and killing with rifle and scope. After that Web had
spent over seven years as first a sniper and later an assaulter either being bored to death at long standoffs, often in miserable
conditions, or else shooting or being shot at all over the world by some of its most deranged inhabitants. In return he got
all the guns and ammo he wanted and a pay scale equivalent to what a sixteen-year-old could earn programming computers during
his lunch hour. All in all it had been really cool.
Web walked by the hangar facility, which housed the team’s big Bell 412 helicopters, and the much smaller MD530s, which they
all referred to as the Little Birds, because they were fast and agile and could carry four men on the inside and four more
on the skids at a speed of 120 knots. Web had ridden the Little Birds into some hellish situations and the 530s had always
brought him back out, a couple of times dangling upside down from a rope hooked to the chopper’s swing arm, yet Web had never
been picky about exactly how he survived a mission.
The motor pool was behind a chain-link fence. Web stopped and zipped up his jacket against a chilly wind. The sky was quickly
becoming overcast as a storm system swept into the area, something it routinely did this time of day at this time of year.
He went inside the fence and sat atop the team’s sole armored personnel carrier, a hand-me-down gift from the Army. His gaze
swept across the row of parked Suburbans. The vehicles had been reconfigured with ladder packages such that they could drive
right up to a building and extend the ladder and go knock-knock-surprise! on the fifth floor of some criminal’s lair. There
were mount-out trucks that carried their gear, Jet Skis, food service trucks and a rigid-hull boat with inflatable gunnels
that had been designed by Navy SEALs. The thing had twin Chrysler V-8s whose effect Web could only equate to being inside
a building while it was being demolished via wrecking ball. He had ridden in it on numerous occasions—or more aptly had survived
it.
They had it all here, from equipment for jungle assaults to arctic expeditions. They trained for every contingency, put everything
they had into the work. And yet they could still be beaten by coincidence, by the blundering luck of inferior opponents or
by the skillful planning and insider knowledge of a traitor.
It started to rain, so Web ducked inside the training facility, which was a large warehouse-style building with long corridors
to simulate hallways in hotels and moveable, rubber-coated walls. It was very much like a Hollywood studio back lot. If they
were lucky enough to get the blueprints of a target, HRT would reconstruct it on-site here and train within exact parameters.
The last set they had built here was for the operation where Charlie had ceased to be. As Web studied this configuration,
it hadn’t occurred to him that he would never see the insides of the actual target for real. They had never even gotten to
the front door. He hoped they would tear out the guts of this place soon, get it ready for the next operation. The result
couldn’t be any worse, could it?
The rubber-coated walls here absorbed the slugs, for HRT often practiced with live fire. Stairways were made of wood that
would not allow ricochets; however, the team had discovered, fortunately without serious injury, that the nails in the wood
could catch a bullet and send it on to unintended places. He passed by the aircraft fuselage mockup that had been constructed
so they could practice on skyjacking scenarios. It hung from the rafters and could be raised or lowered for training purposes.
How many imaginary terrorists had he shot down in here? The training had paid off, for he had done it for real when an American
airliner had been stormed in Rome. The terrorists had ordered the plane flown to Turkey and then on to Manila. Web and crew
had gone wheels up at Andrews Air Force base within two hours of learning of the skyjacking. They had followed the hijacked
plane’s movements from their airborne perch in an USAF C141. On the ground at Manila where the jetliner was being refueled,
the terrorists had tossed out two dead hostages, both Americans, one of them a four-year-old girl. A political statement,
they proudly announced. It was the last one they would ever make.
The hijacked plane’s takeoff had been delayed first by weather and then by mechanical failure. At around midnight local time,
Web and his Charlie Team had boarded the plane disguised as mechanics. Three minutes after they got on the plane, there were
five dead terrorists and no more slain hostages. Web had shot one of them with his .45 directly through the diet Coke can
the guy had been holding up to his mouth. To this day he still couldn’t drink the stuff. Yet he never regretted pulling the
trigger. The image of an innocent little girl’s body on the tarmac—American, Iranian, Japanese, it didn’t matter to Web—was
all the motivation he would ever need to keep pulling the trigger at rank evil. These guys could claim all the geopolitical
oppression in the world, call upon all the grand and omniscient deities in their religious warehouses, make every half-assed
justification they wanted to, so they could detonate their bombs and fire their weapons, and none of it meant a damn thing
to Web when they started killing innocent people, and in particular kids. And he would fight them for as long as they wanted
to perform their perverted little dance of sin and mayhem across the globe, for wherever they could go, so could he.
Web moved through small rubber-walled rooms where posters of bad guys pointing guns at him hung on support poles. He instinctively
drew a bead with his finger and blew them away. With an armed person you always keyed on hands, not the eyes, because no one
in history had ever been killed by a pair of eyes. As he lowered his “gun,” Web had to smile. It was all so easy when no one
was actually firing at you. In other rooms were the heads and upper torsos of dummies on poles, their “skin” and bulk replicating
that of a real human. Web threw side kicks to their heads followed by a series of paralyzing kidney punches and then moved
on.
From inside one room he heard some movement and looked in. The man there had on a tank shirt and cammie pants and was wiping
the sweat from his muscular neck, shoulders and arms. Long ropes dangled from the ceiling. This was one of the rooms where
the men practiced their fast-roping skills. Web watched as the man went up and down three times with graceful, fluid motions,
cords of muscles in his arms and shoulders tensing and then relaxing.
When the man finished, Web stepped inside and said, “Hey, Ken, don’t you ever take a day off?”
Ken McCarthy looked over at Web and his gaze was not exactly what Web would have called friendly. McCarthy was one of the
snipers who had been overhead along the alley the night Charlie Team had disappeared under the wave of .50s. McCarthy was
black, thirty-four years of age, a Texan by birth as well as an Army brat who had seen the world on Uncle Sam’s dime. He was
a former SEAL yet did not exude the flagrant cockiness that most SEALs tended to. Only five-ten, he could bench-press a truck
and held advanced multidegree black belts in three different martial arts. He was the most skilled water operator HRT had,
and he could also place a bullet between a person’s eyes at a thousand yards in the dead of night while straddling a tree
limb. A three-year veteran of HRT, he was quiet, kept mostly to himself and lacked the ghoulish sense of humor that most operators
had. Web had taught him things McCarthy hadn’t known or was having trouble picking up, and in return McCarthy had shared some
of his remarkable skills with Web. To Web’s knowledge McCarthy had never had a problem with him, yet the man’s look right
now possibly heralded an end to that streak. Maybe Romano had turned everyone against him.
“What’re you doing here, Web? Figured you’d still be in the hospital nursing your injuries.”
Web took another step toward the man. He didn’t like Mc-Carthy’s tone or words, yet he could understand where they were coming
from. Web could also understand where Romano was coming from too; it was just that sort of a place. You were expected to do
your job, perfectly. Perfection was all they asked for here. Web hadn’t come close. Sure he had knocked out the guns, after
the fact. That counted for zip with these men.
“I take it you saw it all.”
McCarthy slipped off a pair of workout gloves and rubbed his thick, heavily callused fingers. “Would’ve fast-roped down to
the alley, but TOC told us to sit tight.”
“There was nothing you could do, Ken.”
McCarthy was still looking at his feet. “Finally got the go-ahead. Took too long. Hooked up with Hotel. Took damn way too
long,” he said again. “We kept stopping, trying to raise you guys on the mic. TOC didn’t know what the hell was going on.
Our chain of command sort of broke down. Guess you knew that.”
“We were prepared for everything except what went down.”
McCarthy sat on the rubber mat floor and drew his knees up. He glanced up at Web. “Heard you were a little late coming out
of the alley and that you kind of fell down or something.”
Or something.
He sat down next to McCarthy. “The guns were triggered by a laser, but the laser was probably activated by a remote so the
fifties wouldn’t kick on prematurely and hit the wrong target. Somebody had to be around there to do that.” Web let that last
statement hang as his gaze remained on McCarthy.
“I’ve already talked to WFO.”
“I’m sure.”
“It’s an ongoing AFO, Web,” he said. An AFO was an investigation of an assault on a federal officer, actually lots of them
in this case.
“I know all that too, Ken. Look, I’m not sure what happened to me. I didn’t plan it that way. I did all I could.” Web drew
a long breath. “And if I could take it all back right now, I would. And I’ve got to live with that every day of my life, Ken.
I hope you can understand that.”
McCarthy lifted his head and his hostile look faded.
“There was nothing to shoot, Web. There wasn’t a damn thing for the snipers to blow away; all that training and no party to
show it off at. We had three guys on the buildings overlooking the courtyard and not one of them could get even a decent bead
on the mini-guns. Hell, they were afraid to fire because they thought one of their ricochets might nail you.”
“How about the kid? Did you see the kid?”
“The little black kid? Yeah, when he came down the alley, with your cap and the note.”
“We passed him going in too.”
“You guys must have blocked our view. And the light in that alley really reflected weird up where we were.”
“Okay, how about the other guys? The dudes doing the drugs?” “We had a sniper on them the whole time. They never left where
they were until the firing started, then they took off running. Jeffries said they seemed as surprised as anybody. When TOC
gave us the green light, we took off.”
“What happened then?”
“Hooked up with Hotel, like I said. We saw the flare, stopped, fanned out. Then the kid came to us. We got the note, your
warning. Everett and Palmer went forward as scouts. Too damn late.” McCarthy paused here, and Web saw a single tear slide
down the man’s youthful, handsome features; normal features like what Web had once possessed.
“I never heard gunfire like that in my life, Web. I’ve never felt helpless like that in my whole life.”
“You did your job, Ken, and that’s all you can do.” Web paused and then said, “They can’t seem to find the kid. Know anything
about that?”
McCarthy shook his head. “Couple guys from Hotel took charge of him. Romano and Cortez, I think.”
Romano again. Shit, that meant Web had to go talk to the man. “What’d you do?”
“I went into the courtyard with some of the others. We saw you, but you were out of it.” He looked down again. “And we saw
the rest of Charlie.” He glanced at Web. “A couple of the snipers told me how you went back out there, Web. They saw what
you did and still can’t believe you did it. Said you must have the luck of the Irish somewhere in your back pocket to have
gone back out there. I don’t think I could have.”
“Yes you would, Ken. And you would’ve done it better than me.” McCarthy seemed startled at this praise.
“After you came back out of the courtyard, did you see the kid?”