15 Scorched Earth by George Galdorisi

Author:George Galdorisi [Galdorisi, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Op-Center Headquarters, Fort Belvoir North: Springfield, Virginia

July 20, 0815 Eastern Daylight Time

Williams had asked Roger McCord and Jim Wright to meet him in his office. He had news he needed to share with them.

“A lot has happened in the past twenty-four hours,” Williams began. “The FBI is in chaos now that the director has been sacked so abruptly. I talked with his deputy and asked him to revisit that warehouse up near BWI with canines, and he agreed. They’re likely on their way there now.”

“Thanks, boss. Jim’s been talking with their watch-floor folks. They promised to let him know ASAP what the dogs discover.”

The three men wanted to ensure they were doing everything they could to rescue Jay Bruner, and they embarked on an earnest conversation and reviewed the bidding. The JSOC-Ranger engagement just outside the Mosul airport gave the FedEx chief executive little choice but to divert the flights destined for Mosul to Baghdad International, and Dawson, Rodriquez, and the JSOC team were poised to intercept those flights when they arrived. But the fact that the admiral wasn’t in the refrigerated box they thought he’d be in caused them to wonder if he was ever spirited out of the country.

Wright was in favor of getting Op-Center’s domestic component—Allen Kim and his team at Quantico—moving out, and McCord was in agreement. Williams was mindful of not having Op-Center go outside its mandate and tread in domestic areas that should be handled by the FBI. But the chaos induced when the FBI director was sacked, as well as McCord and Wright’s urging, moved him to lean forward.

“All right, fellas, I’m listening. How should we do this?”

“Jim can bring you up to speed on where we want to deploy Allen’s team,” McCord said.

Wright slid next to the Op-Center director and pulled up a map on his secure iPad. “Best we can figure is that the people who took Admiral Bruner have gone to ground, and likely not far from BWI. When they jumped off Route 1 and Berwyn Road, the FBI CIRG lost them. A while after that, we got one fuzzy traffic-cam hit on the van on the inner loop of the Beltway, and several on the BW Parkway, and then nothing. We’re guessing—but we feel it’s a good guess—that they didn’t get to BWI in time to make the FedEx flight they were going to put him on—”

“It’s likely they’re holding the admiral somewhere and waiting for instructions from whoever is pulling the strings at ISIL—probably al-Dosari himself,” McCord interjected.

“Do we see them still trying to get him out of the country?” Williams asked.

“It’s a possibility, boss, but the people who snatched him and the other guys in the warehouse likely reported everything that happened back to Mosul. They’ve got to figure we’re going to lock airports around here down tight, and given all the preps they had to make to put him into that box, trying to do that all over again and get past our net around local airports, well, it’s just not the most likely scenario.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.