“If we can halfway nail down where the hostages are and whether they’re lumped together or split up . . . But if I had to make a snap call, I’d say enter on the second floor, south and east walls, clear that level, and then head down. Standard small-unit tactics, really. Take the high points on the map and the bad guys are at an automatic disadvantage.”
“Go on,” Clark said.
“The first-floor windows are out. We could handle the bars, but not quickly, and it would make a lot of noise. But those balconies . . . the railing looks pretty solid. Should be easy to get up there. A lot’s going to depend on the layout. If it’s more open, not too broken up, I say start high. Otherwise, we rattle their cages with some flashbangs, breach the walls in a couple places with Gatecrashers, then swarm ’em.”
Clark looked to Stanley, who nodded his approval. “The boy is learning,” he said with a grin.
“Fuck you very much,” Chavez replied with his own smile.
Clark checked his watch again. Time.
The bad guys hadn’t made contact, and that worried him. There were only a couple reasons to explain the silence: Either they were waiting to make sure they had the world’s attention before announcing their demands, or they were waiting to make sure they had the world’s attention before they started tossing bodies out the front door.
19
SURPRISING NO ONE, the blueprints did not arrive within the hour but closer to two, and so it was not quite ninety minutes before sunset when Clark, Stanley, and Chavez unrolled the plans of the compound and got their first look at what lay ahead of them.
“Bloody hell,” Stanley growled.
The blueprints weren’t the original architect’s set but rather a taped-together photocopy of a photocopy. Many of the notations were blurred beyond recognition.
“Ah, Jesus ...” Richards said, looking over their shoulders.
“I’m sorry, they said—”
“Not your fault,” Clark replied evenly. “More games. We’ll make it work.” This was another thing Rainbow did very well: adapt and improvise. Bad blueprints were just another form of insufficient intel, and Rainbow had dealt with its fair share of that. Worse still, the good colonel’s intelligence service had refused to give the Swedes blueprints to their own damned building, so they were out of luck there, too.
The good news was the embassy building did not have a basement, and the floor plan looked relatively open. No chopped-up hallways and cookie-cutter spaces, which made room clearing tedious and time-consuming. And there was a wraparound balcony on the second floor overlooking a large open space that abutted a wall of smaller rooms along the west wall.
“Forty by fifty feet,” Chavez observed. “Whaddya think? Main work area?”
Clark nodded. “And those along the west wall have gotta be executive offices.”
Opposite them, down a short hall that turned right at the base of the stairs, was what looked like a kitchen/dining area, a bathroom, and four more rooms, unlabeled on the plans. Maybe storage, Clark thought, judging by their size. One’s probably the security office. At the end of the hall was a door leading to the outside.
“There’s no electrical or water on these plans,” Chavez said.
“If you’re thinking sewer to get in,” Richards replied, “forget it. This is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Tripoli. The sewer system is for shit—”
“Very funny.”
“The pipes are no bigger around than a volleyball, and they collapse if you look sideways at them. Just this week I’ve had to detour twice on the way to work to avoid sinkholes.”
“Okay,” Clark said, bringing things back on track. “Richards, you talk to Masudi and make sure we can get the power cut when we give the go.” They’d decided to leave the utilities on, lest they agitate the bad guys this close to Chavez and his teams going in.
“Right.”
“Ding, weapons check?”
“Done and done.”
As always, the assault teams would be armed with Heckler & Koch MP5SD3s. Noise-suppressed and chambered in 9 millimeters with a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire.
Along with the standard load-out of fragmentation grenades and flashbangs each man would also be armed with an MK23 .45-caliber ACP with a modified KAC noise suppressor and a tritium laser aiming module—LAM—with four selector modes: visible laser only, visible laser/flashlight, infrared laser only, and infrared laser/illuminator. Favored by Navy Special Warfare teams and the British Special Boat Service, the MK23 was a marvel of durability, having been torture-tested by both the SEALs and the SBS for extreme temperature, saltwater submersion, dry-firing, impact,