The Jungle

They all wore dark jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts, and their equipment was stuffed in duffel bags. The air was markedly cooler, though the humidity remained high. They walked normally along the cracked sidewalk as if they didn’t have a care in the world. There was no traffic, and the only sound came from a barking dog several blocks over.

When they reached the jungled lot behind the target house, the men faded into it as if they’d never existed. From here on out, they were invisible. Bags whispered open, and equipment was triple-checked. They oozed their way through the foliage. If any of them noticed that most of the plants were studded with wicked sharp thorns, no one gave any indication. After five minutes of silently crawling through the underbrush, they came into the clear. A wooden fence, missing slats like a mouth missing teeth, encircled the backyard and blocked most of the view. Unperturbed, Cabrillo hefted the thermal imager from a bag strapped to his side and climbed atop a chunk of concrete left over from when this parcel had been a home.

The sca

Cabrillo could see four distinct heat signatures, which glowed white in his vision, and a squat rectangle of absolute black, which would be the cold water stored in the only bathroom’s toilet cistern. There were three other spots showing heat. One was cylindrical and would be the hot-water tank. Another was much smaller and was the warm compressor motor for the refrigerator. There was no glowing pilot light, so the stove was electric. In this way not only did Juan see the occupants, he could decipher the house’s layout. Three of the people were in repose, their bodies seeming to float a few feet above the floor because the sca

He concentrated on the seated person for fifteen minutes, and in all that time the figure didn’t move once. If Juan had to venture a guess, he’d say the guy was sound asleep.

Next he moved off to the right about twenty yards, through the grass, until he came up against the trunk of a tree. He was close enough now to peer over the fence. He scoped the house a second time. Because he’d shifted position he saw the same objects from a different angle and could confirm that his mental picture of its layout was accurate.

He rejoined his team, and they retreated back into the woods.

Cabrillo’s voice was barely above a whisper. “There are three Tangos, one at the front of the house asleep in a chair. A second one is alone in a back bedroom. The third is in the bedroom next to it with MacD’s daughter.” He felt Lawless stiffen next to him. “Before you ask, they’re in separate beds.” He’d been able to distinguish her from the others because of her small stature.

They’d earlier determined that the house, though small by American standards, was too big to use the knockout-gas trick they’d employed to “rescue” Setiawan Bahar. They would have to go in silently and without a hint of hesitation. The heat signatures were too clear for any of the kidnappers to be wearing a bulky suicide vest, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have them close by.

For the next two hours they took turns watching the house through the thermal imager. At one point, the guard in the front room roused himself to use the bathroom and when he returned the sca

As the minute hand of Juan’s watch swept to three a.m., they moved out, advancing in a crouch and then vaulting over the fence like ghosts. They were so silent that the few nearby crickets didn’t stop chirping. There was a single door that led to the backyard from the kitchen. Juan and MacD do

While Linc was working, Cabrillo drizzled oil from a small can over the hinges and worked it into the gaps with his fingers. The door unlatched, but Linc kept it closed, as a slight breeze had come up from behind them and would have blown into the house had he opened it.

The men’s weapons were mere .22 calibers, and the silencers attached to their barrels were the size of soda cans, making them unbalanced and unwieldy. Such pistols had only one purpose. These were the tools of assassins. The ammo was mercury tipped but carried less powder than normal. It was a trade-off of power versus stealth. But when the silencer was placed against a target’s head, the extra gunpowder would have been superfluous anyway.

The breeze died down, and Cabrillo nodded. Like a black panther, Linc inched open the door and slid his big body through, followed immediately by Cabrillo and Lawless.

There was enough light spilling from the front living room to make it seem like noon in the filthy and reeking kitchen. A barrel-sized trash can was overflowing with rotting food and used paper plates. Skillets and pans were mounded in the sink, covered in congealed grease and doubtlessly home to a sizable roach colony. An unadorned archway led to the living room while another exit gave way to a hallway where the bedrooms and bathroom were located.

Moving so that his feet barely left the unmopped linoleum floor, Cabrillo glided through this second doorway with MacD on his heels. The bedroom doors were both closed. From one there was silence. From the other came deep, sonorous snoring. The snorer was with Pauline Lawless, yet one more torture for the poor girl.

As agreed, they struck thirty seconds after parting in the kitchen to give each other enough time to get into position. Juan counted down those last few seconds in his head as accurately as a Swiss chronograph. At the precise last second, he heard two muted coughs from the front of the house. Linc’s man was dead. Juan opened the cheap pressboard door and saw his target sprawled on a plain metal bed. Next to him was a stand with a pistol and a book on top. On the floor was a pile of clothing and another garment that had nothing to do with protecting the wearer from the elements. Juan could see the bulges of plastic explosives and wiring looping all across the vest.

Without pause, Cabrillo strode across the room, held the barrel an inch from the kidnapper’s head, and put two muffled rounds into his skull. The body jerked at the first impact but was still for the second.

He felt nothing at that moment. Not remorse at killing another human being, not elation at taking out a terrorist. On his moral balance sheet, tonight’s action was a wash. He would derive neither pleasure nor guilt from it, but he would bury this memory as far down as humanly possible. Killing a sleeping man, no matter what he’d done to deserve it, simply wasn’t the Chairman’s style.

When he came out into the hallway, MacD stood there with a little blond girl, still asleep, in his arms. Cabrillo held the deactivated suicide vest in his.

“Clear,” Juan called, and pulled off his and Lawless’s NVGs.

“Clear,” Linc echoed. He entered the hallway also carrying a suicide vest. “What do you want to do with this?”

“We’ll take them with us and deep-six them in Lake Pontchartrain.”