One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [159]
Jennifer nodded, apparently comfortable in her role.
“Pike, I want you to lead so we don’t make a mistake on the door, but once you’ve pinpointed the objective, I want you to pull security while we’re in the room. Okay?”
Security? That sucks. I didn’t push it. “No issues. It’s all yours. You got any kit for me?”
Knuckles grinned, obviously relieved that I hadn’t demanded to be with the entry team.
“Of course,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t have anything. You never did.” He turned to a man carrying a civilian pack. “Give him the kit we brought.”
Inside the bag was some communications equipment and an H&K UMP, just like everyone else was sporting. It was a small, lightweight submachine gun built primarily of space age polymer, which made it easier to break down and hide from X-ray inspection. While it lost the power of the cartridges chambered in carbines and rifles, the UMP had the appeal for the Taskforce of being easily concealable. There were other automatic weapons that were smaller, but the UMP chambered the more powerful .45 caliber instead of the ubiquitous, but less powerful, 9mm. The .45 had a much greater knockdown power and was a subsonic round, thus making the UMP easy to suppress without the need for special rounds. I pulled it out and did a functions check, knowing it was unnecessary, but doing it anyway out of habit.
Once he saw I was ready, Knuckles started the ball rolling, telling Jennifer, “Showtime. We’ll be thirty seconds behind you.”
She glanced at me with a question. No fear, just unsure of whether she should leave. Wanting my approval before she followed the orders of a stranger she’d just met.
I said, “Time to put your money where your mouth is.”
She broke into a smile and started walking, saying, “Please. I’m just wondering if I should stay behind so I can pull your ass out of the fire.”
Knuckles let her get out of earshot before saying, “Is she good to go? What was that all about?”
“Nothing,” I said. “She’s just good at winging shit. And proud of it too.”
“Fucking great. Just what I need. You guys must be the perfect couple.”
Two minutes later, the entire team was stretched out along the hallway of Carlos’s room. I pulled security the way we had come, the team prepared to enter, with various team members covering the other hotel room doors. One man turned on a sophisticated thermal viewer that allowed him to see heat sources through a variety of construction materials. It couldn’t determine if the source was a man, but it would alert us if a large mass in the room was putting out more heat than the ambient temperature. Short of a space heater being operational, it would be a human, since the device wouldn’t register such things as candles or lighters. The man swept the room quickly, then shook his head. Knuckles turned to the next man, twisting his hand as if he were using a key.
The man immediately dropped to a knee, pulling out a much more sophisticated version of my homemade bump key. It looked like a key on one end, with a baseball sized lump on the other. He inserted it into the lock, pressed a button on the baseball, and swung the door open, leaning back as the entry team blew by him into the room. Five seconds later we were all in the room, discussing what to do next.
“He came back and took the detonator,” I said. “Ballsy guy, I’ll give him that.”
Knuckles said, “You got any idea where he went, or are we now at the ‘let’s go fishing’ stage?”
“I only know he has a safe house somewhere in Bosnia, presumably around here, but it could be anywhere.”
“That’s not much of a help.”
Then I remembered. “Wait. I copied a phone number while I was in here. I’m positive it was something of his. It might only be his contact here, but it might also be the safe house. Either way, we hit that thing and we’ll get something out of it.”
“We’ve both hit jackpot with less in the past,” Knuckles said. “Let’s get the hell out of here before the locals start sniffing around.”