"You stay in the vehicle," I say. "You don't get out for anything."
She looks at me.
"I mean it. If it goes wrong in there, you drive. You don't wait for me, you don't wait for anyone. You drive."
"Okay," she says.
"Say it back."
"If it goes wrong, I drive. I don't wait."
I look at her for another moment. "Get in the support vehicle," I say.
She picks up her camera bag and goes.
We roll out at five in the morning.
Eight bikes and two support vehicles. The vehicles are for equipment and for moving the girls if we find them, the bikes because that's what we are and that's how we move when it matters.
The sound of eight bikes leaving Magnolia Bend in the dark is a sound that carries across flat Delta land for miles, and I have always thought there is something right about that. We don't pretend to be invisible. We announce ourselves to whatever's ahead of us.
The Chalmette facility sits at the edge of the parish, water access on the south side, a commercial road on the north thatsees just enough traffic to pass for ordinary. Recon's surveillance gave us six men inside; two on the main floor, two in the back corridor where the containers are, one on the dock, one on the mezzanine above the main floor with a sight line to both access points. The mezzanine position is the problem. A man in elevation with a clear sight line means the first thirty seconds of the breach are the most dangerous thirty seconds of the operation.
Delta takes the mezzanine before we breach.
He goes up the east exterior ladder in the dark while the rest of us hold position on the perimeter, and there are forty-five seconds where the radio is silent and nobody breathes, and then two clicks.
Delta's voice comes across quietly. “Clear.”
We go in.
The east door goes at seven forty-seven and the west door three seconds behind it. The facility erupts into the specific violence of men who didn't see us coming and are trying to process an ambush while also trying to stay alive, which is a problem that always favors the ambush.
The first man in the main floor gets his weapon up but not level before Pawn takes him down — two shots, fast. Pawn goes to one knee immediately after because the man got a round off in the process and it catches Pawn in the thigh. Not arterial. He tells me himself, still on one knee with his piece still up, voice completely controlled, to keep moving.
I keep moving.
The second man in the main floor goes for the dock door and Boomer cuts him off at the west entrance. The fight there is not clean. It's close and loud and ugly, the specific violence of men in a confined space who are both trying to win a fight that only one of them walks away from.
Boomer's nose breaks against the man's elbow on the second exchange. He finishes it anyway. Sisco gets the dock door. The man on the dock drops his weapon when he sees the numbers coming and goes to his knees, which is the rational choice.
I head for the corridor.
The back corridor is two men and they've had time to position since the breach started. The corridor is narrow — eight feet wide, metal shelving on both sides, a fluorescent overhead that flickers and makes the light unreliable — and the two men in it have the advantage of knowing the space.
I go in low, take cover at the first shelving unit, and I work it the way you work a tight corridor when you don't have options: methodical, patient, each position taken before the next move, no rushing because rushing gets you killed.
It takes four minutes.
That's a long time. In the Army I've done corridor work that felt longer but wasn't, and I've done work that was technically longer and felt shorter because the adrenaline compressed it. This is the longest four minutes I've spent since Kandahar.
For approximately two of those four minutes I am aware of Jesslyn in the support vehicle outside and I am aware that if something goes sideways fast there is a version of the next thirty seconds that ends very badly, and then I put that awareness somewhere it can't affect my hands and I get on with it.
The first man goes down at the end of minute two. He tries to move position, and I'm already moving to cut off the angle. The exchange that follows is close enough that I can see his face when it ends. The second man holds longer — he's better, more disciplined, the kind of man who's been in rooms like this before — and we do three full exchanges of position before I find the angle, and when I find it I take it.
I catch a graze along my left forearm from the second man's last shot. Not serious. The kind of wound that bleeds impressively and hurts less than it looks. I don't stop for it.
Two men went through the dock door during the first sixty seconds of the breach. Recon's exterior team should have caught them. Didn't. They're in the marsh or they're in a vehicle or they're somewhere I can't account for right now, and I file that alongside everything else that doesn't get resolved tonight.
