Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [276]
They stacked up at the door at the end: Clark, Jack, Chavez, and Caruso. Clark gestured: Two by two, right and left. Everyone nodded. Clark tried the knob, then turned and nodded. They pushed through the door, stepping right and left, guns tracking. Clark held up his fist—hold—then pointed at the lump under the covers on the bed. He then pointed at Chavez, then the closet. Ding checked it, shook his head.
Clark padded up to the bed. Jack and Dominic took the end, and Ding the other side. All four trained their guns on the figure under the covers. Clark holstered his gun, then clicked on his LED penlight, grabbed the edge of the sheet, and jerked it back.
“Shit,” he said.
85
KERSEN KASEKE left his house at four a.m., drove two blocks to an all-night gas station, and bought a large cup of coffee. On whether coffee was in fact haraam—forbidden to Muslims—Kaseke had yet to find a definitive answer; until that time, he would allow himself the indulgence. It was his only, after all. He neither smoked nor drank nor let his eyes linger too long on the relative nakedness of the women here.
He got back into his car and drove to Open Heart Congregational Church. The streets of the city, rarely crowded anyway, were especially quiet. It had been raining since mid-afternoon, and now the only people moving about were those who had no choice in the matter: early-morning workers, delivery drivers, police … Of the latter he saw no cars, a sign, he believed, that Allah was with him.
He circled the church once, then parked a couple of blocks north of the church in a video-store parking lot, then hefted his backpack over one shoulder and got out. Out of habit, he did not walk directly to the church but took a circuitous route. Finally satisfied he wasn’t being followed, Kaseke cut across the church’s front lawn to the hedges bordering the entrance steps, where he knelt down.
From his pack he withdrew the first mine. Officially known as the M18A1 and colloquially as a “Claymore,” it was designed for use as an antipersonnel/area denial weapon. Shaped like a convex rectangle, the Claymore’s guts were uncomplicated: a layer of C4 plastic explosive supporting a layer of seven hundred steel ball bearings, each the size of #4 buckshot, embedded in a layer of resin. Upon detonation, the C4 sprays the seven hundred fragments outward at four thousand feet per second. As instructed and as trained, Kaseke had the previous night removed the Claymore’s outer casing and carefully sprinkled six ounces of rat-poison pellets amid the ball bearings. The poison’s active ingredient, Difethialone, an anticoagulant, would with luck keep even the smallest of wounds from clotting. It was a tactic his Palestinian brothers had used to great effect in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It hadn’t taken Israeli first responders long to catch on, but during that all-too-short grace period, many dozens had died, bleeding to death from what would have otherwise been minor lacerations. Having never seen such attacks before, paramedics here would face the same horror and confusion.
Once satisfied the pellets were evenly distributed, Kaseke sealed the poison in place with a thin layer of candle wax, let it harden, then reassembled the Claymore’s outer shell. The manual had recommended tissue paper coated in a sheer layer of spray-on fabric adhesive, but the wax would work just as well, he knew. Next he checked each screw in turn, then the gapping, to ensure the shells were properly fitted.