At 0140 Clark turned to Johnston and Loiselle and nodded. The two snipers slipped out the door and disappeared into the darkness. Clark donned his headset.
Five minutes passed. Ten minutes.
Over the radio came Loiselle’s voice: “Omega One, in position.” Followed ten seconds later by Johnston: “Omega Two, in position.”
“Roger,” Clark replied, checking his watch. “Stand by. Assault teams moving in ten.”
He could hear a pair of “Roger” double-clicks in reply.
“Alistair . . . Ding?”
“No movement. All quiet.”
“Same here, boss.”
“Okay, get ready.”
At this, Chavez handed his binoculars to Clark and joined his team at the door. Weber and his team, who were tasked with the ground-floor breach on the front/west corner wall, had farther to go to get into position, so they would go first, followed four minutes later by Chavez and his shooters.
Clark scanned the embassy compound one more time, looking for movement, changes—anything that didn’t pass his k-check, or kinesthetic check. Do this kind of thing long enough, he’d learned, and you develop something akin to a sixth sense. Does it feel right? Any nagging voices in the back of your head? Any unchecked boxes or overlooked details? Clark had seen too many otherwise good operators ignore the k-check—more often than not to their detriment.
Clark lowered his binoculars and turned to his teams, poised in the doorway. “Go,” he whispered.
20
CHAVEZ WAITED the requisite four minutes, then led his team down the steps and to the head of the alley. As Clark had requested, the Libyans had turned off the streetlights for a block around the embassy, something they all hoped the bad guys wouldn’t notice, since the compound’s pole lights were still on and pointing inward. Also by request, a trio of Army trucks had been parked single file down the middle of the street between the command-post apartment and the east side of the compound.
Using hand signals, he sent each man down the sidewalk, using the shadows and the trucks as cover until they reached the next alley, where a line of hedges ran in front of the next building, a private medical practice, Ding had been told, cleared of civilians earlier that day.
Once the team was safely behind the hedges, he followed at a walking pace, half hunched over, MP5 at ready-low, his eyes scanning ahead and to the right and over the top of the embassy compound’s wall. No movement. Good. Nothing to see here, tango.
Chavez reached the hedges and stopped in a crouch. Over his headset he heard Weber’s voice: “Command, Red Actual, over.”
“Go, Red Actual.”
“In position. Setting up Gatecrasher.”
Chavez half wished he had Weber’s job. Though he’d used Rainbow’s newest toy in training, he’d yet to see it in live action.
Developed by Alford Technologies in Great Britain, the Gatecrasher—which Loiselle had dubbed the “magic door maker”—reminded Ding of one of those tall, rounded rectangular shields the Spartans carried in 300, but a more accurate analogy would be that of a quarter-scale rubber raft. Instead of air in the outside ring of tubes, there was water, and opposite them, on the hollow side of the Gatecrasher, a sunken strip into which strands of PETN detonator cord were packed. The det cord, backed by the water jacket, created what was known as a tamping effect, essentially turning the det cord into a shaped charge—a focused explosive cutting ring that could cut through a foot and a half of solid brick.
The Gatecrasher addressed a number of issues that had long plagued special operators and hostage rescue teams: one, booby-trapped entry points, and two, the “fatal funnel.” Terrorists, knowing the good guys had to come through either doors or windows, often rigged them with explosives—as they did during the Breslan school massacre in Russia—and/or concentrated their firepower and attention on likely entry points.
With the Gatecrasher, Weber and his team would be through the front west wall of the building about three seconds after detonation.
“Roger,” Clark replied to Weber. “Blue Actual?”
“Three minutes to wall,” Chavez reported.
He scanned the compound one last time through his night vision, saw nothing, then moved out.
For getting over the wall, they’d chosen a decidedly low-tech method: a four-foot stepladder and a Kevlar flak jacket. Among the many axioms special operators lived by, KISS was one of the most important: Keep it simple, stupid. Don’t over-think a simple problem, or as Clark often put it, “You don’t use a shotgun on a cockroach.” In this case, the stepladder would get them level with the top of the wall; the flak jacket,