Court shouted to Catherine King, twenty-five feet away in the attic. “Lie flat on the ground, facedown, hands out to your sides. Cross your legs at the ankles. No matter what happens, you don’t move till they move you. You do all that and you’ll be safe.”
Two decades of yoga had not instilled in Catherine the sense of calm necessary to endure all that was happening around her. She thought her heart would burst, but she complied with Court’s instructions, lying on the dusty old wooden floor near the stairwell. Looking across the darkened attic, she could barely see him, kneeling in front of a large backpack.
She called out to him. “Let me talk to them! Maybe I can—”
“No! Do not move from where you are!”
“Six, lie here with me! They will kill you if you don’t—”
“Just stay there, Catherine,” he ordered.
She looked at him again. Cocked her head. “What are you doing? What . . . what is that?”
—
Harley set the breaching charge on the door to the attic, unwound the det cord, and backed down a few feet. He called, “Fire in the hole!” and the explosion blew dust and splinters on the men all around.
Dakota took the second position as the assaulters rushed up and past Harley and through the blown door. As soon as they were in the dark room the first operator in the stack shouted, “Don’t move! Don’t move!”
Dakota stepped to the side and saw the woman from the Washington Post lying on the floor, in a compliant stance. Her head was down, her arms were out, and her legs were crossed behind her. Someone had given her a lesson in how to not get shot by a tactical team.
While the first assaulter kept his gun trained on her, a massive explosion to Dakota’s left knocked him off balance, all the way down to his kneepads.
The room filled with smoke, and when he spun around and looked in the direction of the noise he couldn’t see a thing, even through his panoramic night vision goggles.
All the men in the stack were in the attic now, covering the main part of the room with their rifles, desperate to find a target through the thick smoke.
Another noise came from the smoke. It wasn’t an explosion; more like the sound of an electric engine.
Dakota didn’t want his men running into a trap. “Hold positions! Hold till you can see your way forward!”
The smoke cleared a little, but the NODs weren’t cutting through it. Dakota called, “White light!” into his mic, then he flipped up his goggles and actuated the flashlight on the bottom of his rifle. Quickly the other operators followed suit.
The smoke was still thick, but they could see him now. Twenty-five feet away their target stood still in the middle of the room, his arms wrapped tightly around his body, his legs together.
His eyes on the six men in front of him.
Above him Dakota could see stars—there was a jagged eight-foot-long hole in the roof above Violator’s head.
Dakota shouted, “Contact front!” and he pressed his trigger.
And then, just like that, their target was gone. He fired straight up, into the air and through the hole in the roof.
The six JSOC operators stood there, guns trained on empty space. Dakota had gotten one round off, but he didn’t think he’d hit anything.
The team leader was the first to run forward. He looked up at the hole in the ceiling now, and he saw nothing but the nighttime sky.
Harley stepped up next to him. “There is no way that just happened.”
77
Court soared through the broken roof, his eyes closed and his appendages tight against his body lest he rake them across the jagged edges marking the border of the breach created by the charge he’d affixed to the ceiling soon after his arrival here at Alexandria Eight. Once he felt the cool of the night air on his skin he opened his eyes, and he watched the large CIA safe house fall away below him as he rose, shooting upwards as fast as he would if he were flying in a plane.
He still wasn’t feeling great about his chances—his heart pounded and his stomach cinched tight with terror—but he’d made it out of the range of the JSOC boys, so he knew there was nothing else he could do to affect his chances now.
Court told himself he should just sit back and enjoy the ride.
Instead, however, he fought a wave of nausea as the motion and the nerves played havoc on his insides.
—
At the Special Activities Division cache in Harvey Point, North Carolina, Court had run across a new piece of equipment that immediately reminded him of something very old.