The Silent Man (45 page)

For now they had the name he was using in the United States. And something even more precious. Avis equipped its vehicles with LoJack, the antitheft system, which could be activated remotely to broadcast a stolen car’s location. According to the system, the G6 was parked on a farm outside the town of Addison, New York—three hundred miles from Washington, and slightly closer to Manhattan. The farm belonged to a surgeon named Bashir Is’mail, who worked at a hospital in Corning.

Now two companies of Rangers had been scrambled from Fort Drum, a big army base about 150 miles north of Addison. FBI agents were en route from Buffalo and Albany. The New York State Police had been given the plate number and description of the G6 and asked to set up observation posts—not roadblocks—on the highways and state roads around Corning. And a half-dozen F-16 fighter-bombers were being put in the air from Andrews Air Force Base.

Meanwhile, the job of taking the house had been given to a Delta unit that was officially called the 9th Special Operations Group/Emergency Response and unofficially known as Red Team. Red Team had two squads, one based at Andrews and the other at West Point. It worked alongside the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, a group of scientists responsible for finding and defusing nuclear and dirty bombs. The Red Team soldiers carried gamma and alpha ray detectors and radiological protective gear and were authorized to shoot on sight anyone they reasonably suspected of carrying a nuclear weapon. Each Red Team squad had twelve soldiers and two Black Hawks dedicated to its transport and was ready to scramble within thirty minutes, twenty-four hours a day.

“When are they taking off?” Wells said. He’d been sitting in Shafer’s office as Shafer flicked between calls and e-mail and IM to track the plan. But Shafer was focused on his screen and paid no attention to the question. “Ellis.”

“Company C is shipping out in fifteen from Andrews,” Shafer said. “They’re gonna set down in Corning, switch over to SUVs that the state police will have waiting, go in on the ground instead of helicopter so whoever’s at the farm won’t hear them coming. I don’t want to tell you this, but they’ve got a spot for you. They’ve got eleven guys and you’ll make twelve. You want to ride with them?”

“What do you think?”

“What I think and what I wish are two different things.”

“Aren’t they always?”

 

 

 

TWENTY MINUTES LATER,
Wells stood on a helipad at Langley, shielding his eyes from the winter sun as the Black Hawk swept in. He wore a helmet and his lightweight bulletproof vest and carried an M-4, an automatic rifle with a grenade launcher attached below the barrel.

The helicopter touched down and Wells ran through the frigid wind-storm whipped up by its blades and jumped into the cabin. He strapped himself in and the crew chief hopped out to check on him and then they took off. He didn’t expect to know any of the men, but as he looked around he recognized one, Brett Gaffan, a sergeant he’d met a few months before in Afghanistan. Gaffan and he had spent a long night together, pinned on open ground under fire from Taliban guerrillas.

After the mission, they’d traded e-mail addresses and vowed to stay in touch, but they hadn’t. Wells guessed that his reputation intimidated Gaffan, who wouldn’t want Wells to think he was sucking up, keeping in contact in case Wells could do him a favor. But Wells had no such excuse. He’d simply forgotten. He remembered the men he killed but forgot the ones he saved or fought beside.
You just have this,
Exley had said. He didn’t want to believe her, but she was right.

The Black Hawk’s cabin was frigid as they flew over the hills of western Maryland and then into Pennsylvania, roughly tracking U.S. 15. They passed a stretch of open fields, two low ridges facing each other, the landscape as familiar to Wells as a dream, and as the helicopter swept by he realized he was seeing Gettysburg. But even before he could imagine Grant and Lee and the armies in blue and gray, the fields were gone. They were running at 170 knots, roughly 200 miles an hour, the effective maximum cruising speed for these modified Hawks.

They rolled north along ground that was heavily wooded and hilly, blurred towns disappearing as fast as they came, heating oil tankers and tractor-trailers chugging on the roads beneath them. At Harrisburg, the State Capitol flashed before them and then was gone. For a while they flew along the Susquehanna, the river flowing wide and sluggish, chunks of ice floating in its dark brown water. In front of them, the hills grew until they were the Appalachians and the patches of snow on the ground thickened until they weren’t patches anymore.

No one in the cabin spoke and no one smiled. Wells understood. The quickest reflexes and all the Kevlar in the world wouldn’t matter if this bomb blew. So Wells closed his eyes and listened to the music in his head, Springsteen asking,
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true? / Or is it something worse? . . .

Would he ever see Exley again? Whether or not he survived?

 

 

 

THE HELICOPTER SLOWED
and Wells opened his eyes. They came down in an empty parking lot outside an abandoned factory, its bricks cracking and its smokestacks stained. The other three Black Hawks were already down, and eighteen soldiers stood beside them, checking their gear, along with about fifteen state troopers. Four Suburbans, two marked and two unmarked, and two unmarked Crown Vics waited for them, lights on and engines running.

As the fourth Black Hawk landed, the Deltas began to huddle around a tall man who, unusually for a Special Operations officer, wore a standard camouflage uniform, a lieutenant colonel’s oak leaves on his shoulderboards, and
Giese
on his name tag. As Wells joined the huddle, Giese looked at him and nodded. Wells nodded back, all the introduction he needed, and all he would get. Giese spread a four-foot-square satellite photo of the Repard farm on the hood of one of the Suburbans. The property had two buildings, the main house and a stable behind it. The G6 was clearly visible, parked in front of the main house, along with a second vehicle, a Ford Expedition.

“We’re guessing that whatever they have is in the back building. But it could be in the basement of the main house or even hidden somewhere else on the property,” Giese said. “We put up a sniffer”—a plane with equipment that could detect radioactive particles—“but it didn’t find anything. So we really don’t know.

“C Company’s going in first. We’ll leave the Black Hawks here, drive to the perimeter of the property and move along the driveway on foot. The state police have blocked the road that leads to the farm where it runs across Route 417. The police are giving us a ride, but they’re not going in. Meanwhile, B Company will ride in and land between the house and the stable. But only after C has hit the buildings. I don’t want these guys to know we’re coming.”

Giese handed out wallet-sized copies of the Newark immigration photographs. “Our primary targets. Our ROE”—rules of engagement—“say you can shoot on sight, no warning. We don’t know what they have, whether it’s a bomb or just material. But I want you to assume the worst. Assume they have a megaton bomb and they can trigger it remotely. And act accordingly. Any questions?”

“Whose property is it, sir?”

“According to the records, it belongs to a surgeon from Egypt. He bought it a couple of years ago and we can assume he’s part of whatever they’re doing. We’re still getting a photograph of him, but it doesn’t matter what he looks like. Once we cross that perimeter, everyone you see is subject to the ROE. Women and children included.”

“Children, sir?”

“If a child has the detonator, then he’s more dangerous than any adult. Other questions?”

Silence.

“All right. I’m going to ride lead. We don’t have time for any fancy speeches, and I don’t have to tell you what this means. So I won’t. But I would like to offer a quick prayer. If you want to join, huddle up and bow your heads and close your eyes.”

Every man did. Including Wells.

“Dear God, please help us overcome the enemy we face and keep our country safe from this most dangerous weapon. And please return us this night to our families and homes. Amen.”

“Amen,” twenty-three voices said in return.

“Saddle up.”

 

 

 

THE TROOPERS DROVE FAST,
lights flashing but no sirens. Wells and Gaffan sat in the rear Crown Vic.

“Sergeant.”

“Mr. Wells.”

“What did I tell you about calling me mister? Or sir? I wish I’d known you were in D.C. We could have had a beer.”

“I just got moved a couple months ago, sir. I mean John.”

“Who’d you piss off to wind up on this detail?”

Gaffan laughed. “I requested it. My wife was joking about divorcing me if she didn’t start seeing me more, and after a while it didn’t sound like she was joking. Anyway, I was tired of Afghanistan. Chasing those Talibs around the caves. It never ends, does it?”

“It does for some. When we get through this, we’re going out for a drink. And this time, I want you to hold me to it.”

“I’ll do that. Think they have a bomb?”

Wells shook his head. No point in guessing.

The convoy turned off 86 and onto 15. Then onto 417, and five minutes after that through a roadblock and left onto a nameless narrow road into the woods. A minute later, they pulled up outside the driveway, a rutted asphalt track that disappeared through thick woods over a low rise. A gray wooden mailbox beside the road announced “Repard” in faint black letters.

The Suburbans and Crown Vics pulled over and the soldiers threw open the doors and stepped onto the road. When all twelve men were out, the vehicles rolled away. The only sound was the trickle of snow-melt dripping off branches. Without a word, the Deltas dropped the safeties on their M-16s and M-4s, checked the slides on their pistols, adjusted their Kevlar and bulletproof vests. They nodded to each other and lined up in pairs by the side of the driveway. Then Giese threw two fingers forward, and they began to run.

At the top of the rise, they threw themselves down. The house was two hundred yards down the driveway, the Pontiac and Ford parked in front. The lights were out and Wells saw no signs of motion inside. Now they had to choose. They could run up the driveway, moving quickly but visible to anyone inside the house. Or they could spread into the woods, a slower and noisier but better hidden route. After a few seconds, Giese pointed his fingertips down the path. Two by two, the commandos ran toward the house. The first six men ran around it and toward the stable in back. The next four set up on the porch with a battering ram, preparing to break open the front door. Wells and Gaffan ran to the back of the house.

The back door was unlocked. Wells slung it open and followed Gaffan into the kitchen. Three plates sat on the table, along with a dish of cucumber slices, a carton of orange juice, and a basket of pitas. Wells pulled open a cheap wooden door that looked like it led to the basement. Bingo. Gaffan took the stairs two at a time and Wells followed.

In the basement, three clean whiteboards, a broken Ping-Pong table, three cans of Coke. No bomb, no terrorists hiding in corners. They ran back up the stairs and into the kitchen, where the other two teams waited. The other soldiers shook their heads. The house was clear. The stable, too, apparently. They hadn’t heard any shots or explosions or calls for help. These men, whoever they were, had eluded them again.

Then Gaffan’s radio buzzed. “The stable,” he said.

 

 

 

GIESE POKED
with his foot at the brutalized corpse on the floor of the stable. “Seems they had a falling-out,” he said.

“We know which one this is?” Wells said.

Giese shook his head. “You find anything?”

“The house is empty but there’s food in the kitchen,” Wells said. “Looks like they ate breakfast and left. It’s”—Wells looked at his watch—“one-thirty now. Say they left between seven and ten.”

“In six hours, they could get three hundred, four hundred miles,” Giese said. “They could be in New York already, or Washington. Halfway to Chicago.”

“Unless we shut down the whole eastern half of the country, we can’t freeze them. And if we do, they’ll know where they stand and they’ll blow this thing wherever they are.”

“That’s a White House decision,” Giese said. “But in a couple hours, they’re going to have to cancel the State of the Union and then the game’s going to be up anyway. And for all we know, word’s leaking already. Too many people have bits of it.” He sighed and reached for his phone. “I have to call in. They’ll probably bring us back to Andrews, let the Rangers and the state cops take over here. You going to ride with us?”

Wells shook his head. He wanted to look around the house and the stable, see if he could connect anything he saw with Bernard Kygeli. There was something he wasn’t remembering. Maybe the house would spark it.

“Mind leaving me Gaffan?” he said. “I know him from Afghanistan.”

Giese tilted his head. “Guess we’ll make do with ten. Here’s my cell.” He passed on the number. “You think of anything, let me know. Time’s short.”

“Indeed.”

W
hat are we looking for?” Gaffan said.

“We’ll know when we see it. Wear gloves and leave everything how you found it.”

They went back into the house, looked into the closets, under the beds, inside the heavy wooden furniture. With its rocking chairs and patchwork quilts, the house looked more like a bed-and-breakfast than a terrorist camp. The closet in the master bedroom was filled with skirts, long and modest, and long-sleeve blouses. Four people had been here—the two terrorists, Bashir, and a woman. Three were gone, one dead. Wells didn’t understand. Had they fought over the woman? Had one lost his nerve? And why had they left? Had Bernard gotten an alarm to them? If this house had the answers, Wells couldn’t find them.