Standoff by Jamie Thompson

Author:Jamie Thompson [Thompson, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

20

The Master Breacher

SWAT officer Jeremy Borchardt crept through the second floor of the community college, his M4 raised. He was an assistant squad leader and one of the most experienced on SWAT, a former rifle instructor, a rappelling master, and one of the team’s lead breachers, authorized to carry a cache of explosives in a locked crate in his Tahoe. As he entered the college, Borchardt listened to the police radio on his vest. He heard SWAT break in between the shouts of patrol officers, alerting the team that they had a shooter pinned down on the second floor. He could hear the stress in their voices. They were somewhere inside this rambling building, and he needed to find them fast.

As one of the team’s master breachers, Borchardt’s job was to help get SWAT around barriers—a critical part of any operation. Breachers were thinkers and problem solvers. These “lead sled dogs,” as supervisors thought of them, had to be able to pick up a trail on any path, lead the way. Whenever the team got an infusion of new guys, supervisors studied them to see who might make good breachers, searching out those with a natural mechanical ability, men who weren’t afraid to take risks but also had a high maturity level, creative thinkers who were ice-calm under pressure. They had to be skilled at mechanical tasks—picking locks, running chain saws, “breaking and raking” windows. Breaching required an understanding of how things were put together, in order to take them apart. It was about exploiting weaknesses, finding vulnerabilities.

Borchardt could spend hours roaming the aisles of Home Depot, searching for some tool or fitting to use on a breach. He’d performed more operational breaches than any officer in the history of Dallas SWAT. Although Borchardt used many tools, his passion was explosives. “I could talk for hours,” he’d say, “about blowing shit up.” The team used explosives sparingly, on a couple dozen calls a year, but that was more than in times past. Borchardt had been drawn to the specialty because of its competing demands of precision and creativity. The act of exploding your way past a barrier was limited only, Borchardt believed, by a breacher’s imagination. He’d never excelled at math in school but enjoyed the equations of explosives, calculating room volumes and standoff distances.

Now, as Borchardt rounded a corner, he spotted his teammates pointing rifles in the other direction. He locked eyes with Canete, who looked back at him with a mixture of relief and anger—what had taken him so long? Canete pointed to where the gunman was hunkered down. All Borchardt could see was a small sliver of hallway. This position is shit, he thought. If the guy came out shooting, they wouldn’t see him until the last moment. It would be a draw at best.

Borchardt looked around and studied the Sheetrock walls, pulverized by bullets. So many rounds had been fired, he couldn’t believe no one had gotten hit. It was only a matter of time. Borchardt knew better than any of them the danger of working such unprotected scenes.

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