Chapter 3

Dwight had somehow arranged for me to take my finals a week early so I could attend fourteen weeks of the nineteen-week training course. After my last final, he drove me to the airport and handed me a letter as I was boarding my flight to Glynco. “Dan is the agent in overall charge of the training center. Give this to him if he starts to become a nuisance,” he chuckled. Barely an hour after finishing my last final, my flight was wheels up and I was headed for Georgia.

I had left my car in my assigned spot at the apartments. Holly had keys to the car and the apartment. I had asked her to check on the apartment occasionally, and to drive the car at least once a week.

My parents wondered why I was taking the nineteen-week course to be a Marshal instead of coming home for the summer. I explained that I helped the Marshals occasionally and needed to take the course so I had a better idea of what they were doing.

Dan definitely gave me grief when I arrived. “The Marshals Service doesn’t have part-time Marshals,” he explained, glowering at me. “We have some semi-retired Marshals, but no part-time Marshals.”

“I know,” I replied coolly.

“Then why does your application say that you’re a part-time Marshal?” he demanded.

“Because I am,” I answered calmly.

“Here,” I said, handing him the envelope. “I was told to give you this if you started getting upset. I figure that I might as well save you the time and effort,” I explained as he stared at the envelope.

“What does it say?” he asked when he saw a letter folded up inside the envelope.

“I have no idea; it was meant for you,” I replied.

“But the envelope isn’t sealed,” he protested.

“So what? The letter was for you; I didn’t read it,” I explained.

He finally read the letter, actually two letters folded together, and then looked at me appraisingly. “It seems that reports of your ability to sense danger have been greatly exaggerated,” he said smugly.

“There has been a sniper rifle trained on you since we met,” he boasted.

He was getting on my nerves. “Hmmmmm,” I said, pretending to be thinking, “perhaps the fact that the sniper has no real intention of shooting me means there is no real danger for me to sense,” I retorted sarcastically.

“We’ll see,” he replied with a bit of a challenge in his voice. “Deputy Marshal Spencer suggests a sparring match between you and the instructor of my choice,” he said, grinning. “Perhaps he failed to remember that I’m also a martial arts instructor,” he chuckled.

“I’ve only worked with him occasionally, but Deputy Marshal Spencer doesn’t seem to be the type to overlook details. I have a feeling that he was sure you’d rise to his challenge,” I replied. I wasn’t sure, but had faith in Dwight. At least I got a raised eyebrow in response from Dan.

Half an hour later, after barely having time to change into my gi and to work out the kinks from both sitting through this morning’s physics final and then the flight, I faced Dan on the mats. “Maybe this will be a decent workout,” he taunted when he saw my black belt.

“Perhaps,” I replied confidently. I only wore my level 1 black belt when I was in a competition, or was otherwise required to wear it, and I hadn’t had time for any competitions since my arrival at college.

Dan came right after me, but it was a feint. The feint was easy to spot by watching his center of gravity. I purposely responded tentatively, hoping to make him overconfident. When I responded tentatively to his second feint, he wasn’t expecting my counter. “Point,” the referee called out seconds later, pointing to me.

“Perhaps I have sorely underestimated the recruiting skills of my best pupil,” Dan commented after standing back up and brushing himself off. We bowed and faced off again.

“Oh, yeah,” I thought to myself several minutes later after probably the best sparring match I’ve ever had. I felt alive and felt the blood coursing through my veins as I helped Dan up off the mat for the third time.

We bowed and Dan looked me over appreciatively. “It would appear that I owe you an apology for doubting your skills,” Dan said. In my peripheral vision, I saw the referee’s mouth drop open.

“You’re an instructor; your job is to doubt those skills until proven, because people’s lives could depend on them one day,” I replied. Dan accepted the offered olive branch and shook my hand.

“I would like to see for myself what your skills are like on the firing range, even though Dwight assures me that you are quite competent,” he said. I noted his use of Dwight’s Christian name and assumed the contest of wills was over.

I learned something at the range. After sparring, I was more centered, and my senses and reflexes were heightened. Firing quickly, at twenty-five, fifty, and even seventy-five yards I grouped five shots in the center of the head and five in the heart with my Glock. While I had practiced a great deal this semester, I had never scored that well at seventy-five yards. I even had three of five shots centered in the head and four of five centered in the chest at a hundred yards, although I took a second between each shot at that distance, and the grouping wasn’t as tight as on the closer targets.

My prowess with the AR-15 was similarly enhanced by our sparring match, as was that with my sniper rifle. Previously, two of ten in the center ring at 1000 yards had been my best with the M-24. Today I hit six of ten.

I had studied the extra material Dan gave me because the class would already be five weeks ahead of me. I was able to cut back on the time I spent on PT, martial arts, and at the range to give me extra time to study.

Two weeks after my arrival, Dan and Dwight pulled me out of class. “We’re planning the final raid against that gang tonight,” Dwight explained. “One of the men we captured finally spilled his guts. He told us everything and even drew out diagrams of the main warehouse. His sister is part of the gang, and he doesn’t want her killed,” Dwight said.

I shook my head. “No, something about that last sentence is dangerous, something about his sister,” I said. It had made the hair all over my body stand up.

Dwight was on his phone immediately telling someone to do a deeper background check on the informant, especially anything related to his alleged sister. Dan joined us on the flight. I made sure to take my weapons and armor. Since the flight was on a Federal Law Enforcement plane, I didn’t have to deal with all the garbage for checking in my weapons and armor like I did for the commercial flight I’d taken to Georgia.

After receiving an in-flight phone call, Dwight looked solemnly at us. “The informant’s sister was the Jane Doe who died in the last raid,” he told us. “Aside from the fact that we’ve identified other gang members arriving at the location he gave us, we have to assume everything else he told us is a lie, probably some sort of a set-up or ambush. We’ll have infrared telemetry from overhead tonight before we make our final decision.”

We flew into MCAS Cherry Point instead of the airport in Raleigh. The target of our raid was in New Bern, some twenty miles north of us.

Before dinner, Dwight drove me near the site, stopping a mile away to the southwest. “Man, there are so many danger points that I can’t count them,” I commented after closing my eyes and concentrating. I still did the best that I could from our location as far as drawing lines on the surveillance photo indicating the direction of the worst instances of danger. I used two different pens to indicate two different levels of danger, high and very high.

With Dan watching over my shoulder, we moved to a location northwest of the site and I repeated the exercise. “This is by far the biggest danger,” I told them, pointing to where two black lines intersected near the center of the target warehouse. Two blue lines intersected at or near both roll-up doors of the warehouse.

“These others are also very dangerous,” I said, motioning to the six places where blue lines intersected. Those intersections were on the three buildings to the north, west, and south of the warehouse. To the east was the bay. Each surrounding building had two intersections over the building, indicating two sources of danger.

Dwight and Dan looked over the marked-up surveillance photo. “These look like the warehouse doors might be booby-trapped,” Dwight commented. Dan nodded in agreement.

“If that’s a bigger threat than booby-trapped doors, there’s probably a large cache of explosives of some sort there. It may be triggered by the doors, by motion inside the warehouse, or even by remote control,” Dan mused.

“These points on the surrounding buildings are in the vicinity of upstairs windows,” Dwight said as he reviewed ground-level photos of the area. “They probably have people there to fire down on us from the rear when we move in to enter the warehouse. Maybe they’re hoping we’ll rush through the doors to take cover instead of taking our time to check out the doors before we open them,” he commented thoughtfully. “Man, that could have been a super ugly,” he exclaimed as he scrubbed his palms against his face as if he was washing his face.

Dwight drove us back to MCAS Cherry Point where the rest of the Marshals, as well as the ATF and DEA agents for this attack were waiting. He and several squad leaders held an animated discussion for about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes after the meeting adjourned, Dwight finally finished his phone calls and exited the conference room.

“We have help coming. The SOG (Special Operations Group for the U.S. Marshals Service) is on the way from Louisiana. The governor here agreed to send National Guard troops from Fort Bragg. They’ll both be here in three hours, so everyone eat dinner and kick back. The mess closes in an hour. Meet back here at 2000 hours,” he instructed.

I was surprised when Dan came over to sit with me in the mess hall and looked at me appraisingly. “Now I understand why the Marshals Service is so interested in you,” he said. “Dwight says you still intend to be a farmer,” he said, although the inflection in his voice made it a question.

“It’s who I am. How well would you do as a taxi driver or middle management in some faceless corporation?” I asked, and then watched him shudder.

“Why a farmer, though?” he asked.

“It’s in my blood. My mom has some genealogical stuff and our branch of the Reynolds family have been farmers for as far back as she can find. They were farmers when they came here from England more than a hundred years before the Revolutionary War. I grew up on a farm and I love it,” I explained.

“Speaking of family,” Dan said, “is it just a coincidence that the head of the Marshals Service who wrote one of the two letters you gave me has the same last name as you?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted, shrugging. “The Reynolds family is huge, and I’ve met more cousins and other distant relatives than I can ever hope to remember, but I don’t know of any working for any branch of federal law enforcement.”

When we finished dinner, I found Dwight trying to negotiate with the base commander to get a camouflage BDU for each of the marshals who were already here. With the plan of attack now changed, our mode of dress changed, too. “Here,” I said, handing the base commander my credit card, “charge them all to me.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’m good for it,” I told Dwight when he started to protest. Once I got my BDU, I found a quiet corner, set the alarm on my cell phone for 7:00, and napped for half an hour. When the alarm woke me, I used the restroom and then changed into the BDU. Once dressed, I stretched and then went through my kata to center myself.

Dwight handed me back my credit card when I finished, but kept the receipt, insisting that he would reimburse me despite my assurance that it wasn’t necessary. Nothing had been said, but I was certain that my “gift” from, and back to the Raleigh PD had surfaced when they did my background check.

Once everyone was assembled, Dwight went over everything, explaining the target, the probable booby-trapped doors, probable explosives inside the primary target, and ambush teams inside the three surrounding buildings. He admitted that we had no idea how many ambushers there were, but the infrared telemetry showed at least twenty.

“Are the buildings connected by tunnels?” the National Guard commander asked.

“We received blueprints of all four buildings from the county an hour ago. There are no tunnels on the blueprints, but these people had a month or more to plan this ambush and could have dug tunnels. With so much explosives inside the primary target, I don’t know why they’d want to be in that building, though,” Dwight replied.

At 2130 hours, we loaded into vehicles provided by the National Guard. I was awed by the firepower I saw while we were loading, including several .50 caliber machine guns. Four M2 Bradleys led the column with one more bringing up the rear. The rest of us rode in the back of troop transport trucks provided by the National Guard unit.

At 2200 hours, we were two miles away from our target and ready to advance on foot. First, Dwight had me review a new recon photo. Most of the intersections were the same, but there were four new ones. The new intersections were along the outer perimeter of the property and were probably lookouts or snipers in trees. Since hundreds of trees ringed the perimeter of the two-hundred-acre property, it would be difficult to pinpoint a single tree for our snipers unless we used IR imaging. “I can help get two of them,” I offered.

“There is no threat coming from this small building across the road to the south,” I explained, pointing to the building on the photo. “I can enter the building from the rear and use it to get the first two sentries. Someone else will have to get the two on the north using IR imaging. None of the shots should be longer than three hundred yards.”

The leaders had a quick confab and then handed me a suppressor for my AR-15. My next request drew raised eyebrows when I asked Dan to spar with me for a couple of minutes before I left. “It increases my focus. When I use the range after sparring, my accuracy increases markedly,” I explained.

After stripping off my vest, Dan and I stepped to a nearby grassy area. Dwight refereed, although neither of us really attacked the other like our first match. “Time,” Dwight called three minutes later. Even after three minutes, I could feel a marked increase in my focus, even more than after completing a kata.

I stripped down to underwear and a T-shirt. After slipping on the gym shorts I brought, I donned my SWAT armor. A combat harness carried my Glock 22, as well as extra magazines for the Glock and the AR-15. I even had a couple of water bottles.

The eight-man SOG team led the way to the building, which turned out to be an empty office building for a defunct insurance company. Since we were blocking all radio and cell phone transmissions, one member of the team directed a single flash from a small flashlight toward the command vehicle to indicate that we had arrived at the building safely. I wondered how many men were in the relay since the light couldn’t be seen two miles away due to the terrain.

I chose to use the bathroom window since it was the smallest. If anyone figured out I was firing from this building, they would probably shoot at the bigger windows first. I carefully lifted out the movable window and cut out the screen. Then I used duct tape to secure my SWAT shield against the wall in front of me. The crumbling stucco on the outside of the building definitely wouldn’t stop any rounds fired at me. Even a bumblebee flying into the stucco would probably break off more of it.

I set up the tall tripod the SOG team gave me to use. That way, I could stand and still keep the suppressor for the AR-15 inside the window. I spent a couple of minutes locating my two targets, quietly explaining what I was doing to the team leader who was at my side.

Whoever had the two sentries to the north took fifteen minutes more to get in place. They evidently signaled their readiness because a bullhorn began announcing. “You are surrounded, drop your weapons, and come out with your hands in the air.”

They made the announcement several times before it changed. “This is your last chance to surrender. Otherwise, we’re coming in.”