“Won’t that cause collateral damage?” Coleman said.
“Might,” Smith said, “but it’s less risky. The thirty-millimeter rounds have shaped charges, but their burst radius is only four meters. I can fire a burst just ahead of the lead Corolla. The shrapnel will tear the shit out of the car and probably kill the driver and front passenger, but you won’t get secondaries or the shock wave a Hellfire would generate.”
“What about the rear Toyota?” Coleman said.
“Two options,” Smith said. “We can try the thirty-millimeter trick in reverse by walking the rounds toward him from the rear. If he slows down in response to the lead vehicle biting it, there should be no problem.”
“If he doesn’t?”
Smith shrugged. “You tell me. If he pulls a one-eighty to head back down the mountain toward Pakistan, I can put a Hellfire through his roof. Same if he drives around the lead Corolla. But if he gets too close to the van, we could be in trouble.”
Coleman nodded.
It was impossible to completely de-risk any kinetic operation and this was doubly true for engagements planned on the fly. That said, there was a difference between acceptable risk and idiocy. Coleman had shed blood with every member of his team. He was confident in their abilities. He couldn’t say the same for his new aviator friends.
“No bullshit,” Coleman said. “What’s danger close for a thirty-millimeter engagement on the lead vehicle.”
The question the SEAL was asking sounded simple.
It was not.
The definition of danger close was different for each ordnance, but the concept was easy to understand—the minimum safe distance between friendly forces and an exploding munition. But what Coleman was proposing threw some very large wrinkles into that equation. The Apache gunships would actually be aiming at an offset impact point from their targets.
From their moving targets.
“The textbook answer is seventy meters for thirty-millimeter rounds,” Smith said, “but nothing about this is textbook. My troopers are good, but the cannon is an area weapons system. Diving fire helps tighten the shot group and we can run our engagement parallel to the target to cut down the risk of short rounds, but I’d say you probably want to be eighty meters away to be safe.”
Eighty meters.
Almost the length of a football field. A combat-loaded man would require twenty seconds or more to sprint eighty meters. Too long. Coleman needed to surprise the occupants of the second vehicle.
He had to be closer.
“What about here?” Coleman said, indicating a dip in the terrain about twenty yards off the road. “This depression could be our foxhole. If we’re hugging the dirt, we should be okay even if a burst of thirty-millimeter falls short.”
Smith studied the map and slowly nodded. “It’s gonna be loud, but you’ll be out of our line of fire. If you’re good with it, I am.”
Coleman wasn’t sure that good with it was an accurate characterization of how he felt. He’d seen enough clips of Apache gun tape to know what the 30mm munitions did to a human body. The munitions were point-detonating, meaning that they exploded when the bullets made contact with the ground. It would be noisy as hell, but the razor-sharp shards of metal that were so effective at slicing apart a target should pass harmlessly overhead. Unless a pilot fired a burst directly into Coleman’s foxhole.
If that happened, there wouldn’t be enough left of Scott to fill a trash bag.
But at least his ending would be quick.
“Okay,” Coleman said. “Here’s how we’ll run it.”
CHAPTER 61
ABBOTTABAD, PAKISTAN
“HERE we go.”
Mitch Rapp looked from the computer screen to the anxious CIA analyst sitting behind the keyboard. His name was Taylor Moore and he spoke with the slow diction and smooth vowels of someone who’d grown up south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Though Rapp hadn’t spent a ton of time with the kid, Moore seemed to know his stuff. That said, Rapp might still have to kill him if the twenty-something kept with the running commentary.
Rapp was standing in the living area of a CIA safehouse located in the Bilal Town suburb of Abbottabad. As safehouses went, the accommodations weren’t bad. The place had the vibe of a vacation home in the country. The house was nestled at the base of the foothills leading to the lesser Himalayas. The property was surrounded by trees and boasted its own modest privacy wall.
The rural locale meant that the dwelling was bordered by wheat fields, and a solitary dirt road provided the only vehicular access. A mangy dog prowled the property grounds at will and provided an alarm of sorts, while a rooster of uncertain origin strutted along the tops of the privacy wall and crowed at random intervals. Rapp would charitably describe the house’s furnishings as rustic, but he’d certainly seen worse.
Dusty couches and odd décor aside, Rapp was most interested in the high-tech equipment that had turned the safehouse’s large living room into an intelligence fusion cell. No fewer than six laptops sat open on a series of folding tables that had been converted to desks, while a bevy of secure communications equipment graced the kitchen counter. The dining room was devoted to a pair of monitors that displayed the results from the impressive amount of signals data being collected, correlated, and deciphered by several surreptitiously installed antennas.
The safehouse was manned with a mixture of case officers and analysts with a lone paramilitary officer named Jason Beighley thrown in for good measure. Until Rapp’s appearance, the crew had been passively monitoring the bin Laden compound, which was within line of sight of the safehouse’s large bay windows. Now that the passivity had been replaced with the hustle and bustle that accompanied an ongoing operation, the air seemed saturated with equal parts adrenaline and fear. Even so, there was a way to deal with mission jitters without aggravating fellow teammates.
Moore had yet to learn this lesson.
“You sure your girl knows what she’s doing?”
Rapp’s eyes narrowed as he looked from the computer monitor to the man standing next to him. “What kind of dumbass question is that?”
His response carried through the house. To his credit, the man who’d spoken, a case officer named Connor Sullivan, had the grace to look embarrassed, but Rapp wasn’t ready to let bygones be bygones just yet. Moore could be forgiven his nerves. The kid was manning the laptop attached to a low-profile high-definition camera mounted to the safehouse’s roof.
This was Moore’s first operational tour, and it was a doozy. He was charged with monitoring a compound that might just hold the terrorist mastermind of the century in a country full of people who bordered between indifference and outright contempt for Americans. Many of these same people considered the man in the compound a hero. The men who staffed Pakistan’s government weren’t much different. If the safehouse became compromised, Moore would get a firsthand look at a Pakistani jail.
But Connor Sullivan was a different matter.
“Sorry, Mitch,” Connor said. “That was out of line.”
Rapp could have just accepted the apology and moved on.
He did not.
