Headed for Trouble - By Suzanne Brockmann Page 0,34
their hotel just as the entire Troubleshooters team had met in the lobby for breakfast.
Needless to say, Lindsey and Mark had not joined them for the meal. The SEAL had soul-kissed his spouse, right there in the lobby, thrown her over his shoulder, and carried her into the elevator—and that was the last anyone had seen of either of them until they’d all met for this op at 2300.
But no one had teased her about it. Too many of them knew what it was like to have or be a spouse in the military. Time with one’s partner was precious—and too-often infrequent.
And that made Jules think of Ben, which was exactly what he didn’t want to be thinking about …
Wait, Lindsey hand-signaled now, then vanished ahead into a part of the tunnel that didn’t have dim moonlight shining in through heavy cast-iron drainage grates.
Two other Troubleshooters operatives, curly-haired computer specialist Tess Bailey and elegantly blond Sophia Ghaffari, who was clearly in training or at least a bright green rookie, hung back, obeying Lindsey’s command, while Jules and Alyssa continued to guard their six.
Even though it was unlikely that there was anything down here to guard them against.
Their mission was to prove that the Nachtgarten barracks were vulnerable to terrorist attack via these ill-protected tunnels that wound beneath the entire city. Because—as if the idea of tunnels that crisscrossed beneath the military base wasn’t enough of a threat—there was also a no-longer-used, buried and long-forgotten massive oil tank that sat, still two-thirds full, just beneath the facility’s main housing.
With some correctly placed C4, aided by that enormous tank of oil, any terrorist with a little Internet-acquired know-how could create an explosion that would take down the multistory building and make the Khobar Towers bombing look like child’s play.
And as far as the Internet went …
Alyssa and Sam, acting as agents for the country’s most elite personal security team, Troubleshooters Incorporated, had written and submitted a detailed report on this installation months ago. They’d outlined, quite specifically, the dangers of what they believed to be a serious threat, due to that very oil tank.
But after the powers-that-be thanked them for their time, absolutely nothing was done to safeguard the lives of the thousands of servicemen and -women quartered at the base.
And then, a few short days ago, Jules had found out that Sam and Alyssa’s top secret report had actually circulated the White House via nonsecure email—which meant that the barracks at Nachtgarten were now even more vulnerable. The report, which mentioned the long-forgotten oil tank, had floated about on the Internet for a solid week before anyone noticed it contained classified information.
Jules had taken the news of the leak up the chain of command to his boss in the FBI, Max Bhagat, who’d been furious about the security breach—enough to get Admiral Chip Crowley involved.
Crowley, a Navy SEAL himself, was a man of action, and before Jules had even left Max’s office, a task force had been formed and Troubleshooters Incorporated once again had been hired. This time they were to play the part of the “red cell” in a mock attack of the military base.
Their job was to get, covertly, into Nachtgarten and once again find said oil tank—which was supposedly “too costly to locate and remove,” and, also according to the geniuses in charge, “too difficult to locate to create any real threat to the army personnel housed therein.”
Yeah, maybe it had been too difficult to locate until some bureaucrat wrote an email about it, attached Sam and Alyssa’s report, and then freaking sent it to all their friends …
God. Nothing pissed Jules off more than stupidity.
Hopefully, after tonight’s exercise—complete with weapons that fired only rubber bullets, and Hey, Nachtgarten security teams, you think that might be a hint that some war-gaming might be going on tonight?—the stupidity would finally end.
There was, of course, no guarantee of that.
But the Troubleshooters red cell had been ordered to plant a “bomb” atop that oil tank—which would hopefully help wake people up. They weren’t going to use real explosives, of course. Instead, they would affix to the tank an electronic device that was the equivalent weight of the C4 needed in an attempt to take down the building. With this device and a nifty computer program that would receive and read the box’s signal, analysts would be able to accurately measure the amount of oil that remained in the tank, as well as the effect of an explosion on the barracks above.