Chapter 47
WE HAD BEEN warned not to do this. But how could we obey? What’s more, how could anyone expect us to obey when so many lives were in danger? And maybe we could argue that the raid was solely a hit on al Qaeda and had nothing to do with the Wolf. Hell, maybe it didn’t.
The apartment where the terrorists were staying, and where Geoffrey Shafer might still be, was a fairly easy one to monitor. The front of the redbrick building had only a single entrance. The rear fire escapes emptied onto a narrow alley where we had already put closed-circuit wireless cameras. One side of the building abutted a textbook printer; the other opened onto a small parking lot.
Was the Weasel still inside?
An HRT assault force and a SWAT team from the NYPD had taken over the top floor of a TriBeCa meatpacking plant a couple of blocks from the Holland Tunnel. We assembled there, fine-tuning the assault, waiting for word to come about whether the attack would happen or not.
HRT wanted a go, and they were pushing hard for an assault between two and three in the morning. I didn’t know what I would do if it were my call. We had a cell of known terrorists, and possibly Shafer, in our sights. But we’d been warned about the consequences. It could also be a setup, some kind of test for us.
At a little before midnight word began to circulate that HRT surveillance had turned up something else. About one in the morning I was called in to a small bookkeeping room that was serving as headquarters. It was getting close to put-up-or-shut-up time.
Michael Ainslie from our New York office was the senior agent in charge. He was a tall, reed-thin, good-looking man with loads of experience in the field, but I had the distinct impression he would have been more comfortable on a tennis court than in the middle of a dangerous mess like this one.
“Here’s what we have so far from surveillance,” Ainslie told the group. “One of HRT’s snipers picked up a couple of images and then we shot some more. We think it’s all pretty good news. Take a look for yourselves.”
The visual images had been downloaded to a laptop, and Ainslie played them for us. The video stream was a series of wide and tight shots showing half a dozen windows on the east side of the building.
“We were concerned that these windows haven’t been covered up,” Ainslie pointed out. “These little shits are supposed to be smart and careful, right? Anyway, we’ve identified five males and two females inside the building. I’m sorry to say that Colonel Shafer hasn’t shown up on any of the surveillance tapes. Not so far, anyway.
“We don’t have anything on him leaving the building, either, just going inside. We’re using thermal imaging to see if we might have missed him or any others.” The Washington PD hadn’t been able to afford thermal, but I’d seen it work since coming to the Bureau. It picked up heat variances, hot spots, which allowed surveillance to see right through walls.
Ainslie pointed to the close-up shot that was on the laptop screen now. “Here’s where it gets interesting,” he said, and froze a shot showing two men seated at a small table in the kitchen.
“On the left is Karim al-Lilyas. He’s number fourteen on Homeland Security’s hit list; he’s definitely al Qaeda. Suspected of involvement in the ’ninety-eight bombings of our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. We don’t know when he arrived, or why, but he sure as hell is here now.
“The man beside al-Lilyas, Ahmed el-Masry, is big number eight on the list. He’s hot. He’s also an engineer. Neither of these bastards was on earlier surveillance tapes.
“Both must have just snuck into town. For what reason? Under ordinary circumstances we’d be in that kitchen with them right now, making mint tea for everybody, getting ready for a nice long chat.
“They have these same pictures downtown and in Washington right now. We ought to hear something soon, one way or the other.”
Ainslie looked around the room and finally cracked a smile. “For the record, I recommended that we go in, make some tea, have that chat.”
The small room broke into loud applause. For a brief moment there, it was almost fun.
Chapter 48
SOME OF THE more devil-may-care, gung-ho guys from the Hostage Rescue Team, which is just about all of them, call this kind of dangerous operation “five minutes of panic and thrill. Their panic, our thrill.” The very personal thrill for me would be bringing down Geoffrey Shafer.
HRT and SWAT desperately wanted to
go into the building and were at the ready. Two dozen heavily armed, state-of-the-art warriors were strutting around the wooden floor of the meatpacking plant; they were pumped up and supremely confident in their ability to do the job right and very quickly. Watching them, it was hard not to be, and even harder not to ask to be included in the raid.
The real problem was that if they succeeded, we all might lose. We had been warned and been given dramatic lessons about what would happen if we disregarded the orders handed down by the Wolf. And yet, the men under our surveillance might be his attack team in New York. So what did we do?
I knew every detail about the job. Taking down the building would involve full-team deployment of the group, including both HRT and NYPD SWAT. There were six assault teams and six sniper teams, which HRT believed was two too many. They didn’t want help from SWAT. The HRT sniper teams were called X-Ray, Whiskey, Yankee, and Zulu; each included seven members. One FBI team was assigned to each side of the building; SWAT would assist on the front and rear only.
The interesting thing for me was the certainty that HRT was the superior assault team, the opposite of what I’d felt when I was with the D.C. police. The HRT snipers were disguised in “urban hide” kits, individualized bunches of black muslin, rope, dark PVC tubing, and the like. Each sniper had a specific target, and every window and door in the building was covered.
The question remained: were we going in?
And was Shafer still there? Was the Weasel in that building right now?
At 2:30 in the morning I joined a two-man sniper team in the brownstone directly across the street from the targeted one. This was starting to get very intense and very hairy.
The snipers were holed up inside a ten-by-ten room. They had made a tent out of black muslin set back about three feet from the window. The window itself was kept closed, and I was given an explanation by one of them. “If we get the signal to go, we’ll use a lead pipe to knock out the windowpane. Seems kind of crude, but nobody’s come up with a better option.”