Operation Caribe

PART FOUR





Team Whiskey and

The Phantom Pirates





16

Two weeks later

IT WAS A slow night in Morrisville.

The clock atop the only church in the tiny southeastern Virginia hamlet clanged twice. Morrisville had only four policemen; two were on patrol tonight. The bell’s toll signaled that their coffee break was over.

Parked near the town ball field, officers Perry and Tripp had just finished their thermos of black, no sugar, when they got a call from their dispatcher. A citizen claimed to have seen four men climbing into the Morrisville National Bank through an open window.

Perry and Tripp didn’t believe the report. They couldn’t imagine anyone breaking into their tiny bank. There was so little money inside, stealing it didn’t seem worth the effort.

Still, they drove the quarter mile to the bank on Main Street, and as they were rolling by, happened to see the silhouette of a man passing in front of the bank’s side window.

Maybe the bank got a night cleaning crew? Perry wondered. Tripp said no—Morrisville was so small, if the bank had hired a night cleaning crew, it would have been front-page news.

They parked their cruiser around the corner on Elm Street and approached the bank on foot. They did not draw their guns. Peering through the bank’s front window, sure enough, they spotted three more dark figures inside.

Curiously, these people weren’t near the bank’s tiny vault; rather, they were gathered around its main computer terminal, looking intently at its low-lit screen.

Perry and Tripp moved to the rear entrance. Here, they found the open window, its alarm wire disconnected. There were greasy palm prints all over the sill, along with remains of the snipped wires. Below the window, large chunks of grass had been torn up, caused by the men climbing in.

There was a large briar hedge at the rear of the bank. Perry and Tripp stepped behind it and waited. The four men climbed out the open window a minute later.

Perry and Tripp finally drew their weapons and showed themselves. They ordered the men to the ground. The intruders hesitated. Each was dressed in black, ski masks and baseball caps.

They stayed frozen for a moment, looking bewildered that someone had actually caught them. Finally, they obeyed the officers’ orders and lay down on the damp grass.

But Perry and Tripp were still baffled. The whole thing didn’t seem real.

Perry began thinking these people might be terrorists, possibly homegrown terrorists.

He reached down, intent on pulling the ski mask off one of them. But then he heard a thump and saw his partner’s body crumple beside him. He turned just as the butt of a rifle came down on top of his head.

Then everything went black.

When both cops woke up about ten minutes later, the four men were gone. The bank window was closed. The greasy handprints had been cleaned off, and even the pieces of grass that had been torn up had been replaced and tamped down.

It was as if nothing had happened at all.