AT THREE, DECKER RADIOED Hackworth again. “Before you ask,” the captain said, “the answer’s no—we still don’t have the warrant. How much longer is the chain saw plan workable?”
“Not much. Thirty minutes, tops. There’s only an hour of daylight left. Besides, when’s the last time you saw a tree-trimming crew start work at four? That’s quittin’ time, boss.”
“Don’t give up on it,” said Hackworth. “We’ll get that warrant yet. Maybe you can take him down first thing in the morning. Wake him up with a chain-saw serenade—that might knock him off balance even more.”
“If we have to stay out here all night, Cap, tree branches might not be the only limbs we go after with the chain saw.”
“Ha. Steady on, Deck. You’ll know the second we’ve got the warrant. Stay sharp. And stay safe.”
WHEN FOUR O’CLOCK CAME and went without the warrant, Decker sighed and shelved the tree-trimming plan, then gave the order to break out the night-vision gear—one rifle-mounted scope for each team leader and each sniper, plus one for McElroy. The scopes were big and heavy—1960s technology, military surplus leftovers from Vietnam—and the image they gave was grainy as hell. Still, grainy night vision was better than no night vision, when lives were on the line. Decker was constantly lobbying for newer, better gear, and constantly being shot down, but he owed it to his guys to try.
Things had remained quiet at the house; the rock music had stopped once the Led Zeppelin album ended, and a light had come on in a room at the back of the house, according to the rear spotter, Cody. Judging by the light’s random flickering—and the audio Cody could hear smatterings of—the suspect was watching the local news.
Decker’s two best options, as he saw it, were to storm the house sometime after Satterfield went to bed, or to sit tight till morning and send in the tree trimmers then. He hated the thought of waiting another fourteen hours, but he also hated the thought of sending a team into a pitch-black house to capture an ex-soldier, even with night-vision gear. Better to wait it out, much as he despised waiting.
He was just about to radio this assessment to Hackworth when his earpiece erupted. “Lieutenant! It’s Cody! I hear a woman in the back of the house—in the den or whatever that room with the big window is. She’s screaming her head off!”
“I’m hearing it, too, Lieutenant,” said McElroy. “She’s screaming bloody murder.” Even Decker could hear it: a series of shrieks that made his stomach lurch—shrieks that combined fear and pain like he’d never heard.
Decker snapped his fingers to get the attention of the emergency team. “Guys, let’s go!” he said. “Front door. Go go go.” He turned and pointed to one of the men. “E.J.,” he said. “You haul ass around back. When you hear us hit the front door, you put a flashbang through that big rear window.” He headed around the front corner of the house at a crouch, three of the men following close on his heels, as E.J. peeled off toward the back of the house.
Decker took the four front steps in two strides. “Fireplug, you ready?”
“Ready,” came the answer from one step behind him. Fireplug was a squat, burly former Marine; he carried the team’s forty-pound battering ram as easily as Decker could have carried a baseball bat.
“In five,” Decker counted, “four, three, two, one!” Fireplug had begun his windup on “three,” rotating his torso away from the door, swinging the battering ram like a pendulum. Then, as the arc reversed, he spun toward the door, his entire body—two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew—pivoting into the swing. The broad, flat head of the ram slammed into the knob, punching it through the wooden door and across the room to the opposite wall. The door crashed open and Decker scurried through, moving in a half crouch, the H&K submachine gun sweeping the room in tight arcs that tracked the direction of his gaze. He’d have felt safer with the short-barrel shotgun, but in a potential hostage situation, the shotgun’s swath of devastation was too broad and indiscriminate.
When Decker was two steps in, the foyer lit up as brightly as if a camera flash had just fired in the next room, and the house shuddered from the concussion of the flashbang—the stun grenade—that E.J. had thrown through the rear window, right on cue.
Without even having to think, Decker began mentally ticking off the seconds: one Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . If the suspect had been within ten feet of the stun grenade, the flash and the concussion would have blinded and stunned him, and Decker would have five seconds or so to find him and overpower him.