The Enemy Within

Helen crawled closer until she could watch the monitor picture while he gingerly fed the cable through a slight crack under the right-hand door. The tiny TV showed a worm’seye view of the worship hall’s thin carpet. She saw nothing out of the ordinary and motioned to the left. Brett obeyed, sliding it back and forth to scan the carpet near the other door. Still nothing. At another signal from her, he withdrew the cable, bent it almost into a right angle, and then slid it back under the door. By rotating the angled portion of fiberoptic cable, he gave the monitor a clear view of the areas near the door hinges and latches. Again, she saw nothing. There weren’t any trip wires connected to explosives and not even anything as simple as tin cans rigged to sound a warning if someone burst through the doors.

Helen shook her head in mingled relief and disgust. These so-called terrorists were rank amateurs. Of course, that actually made them more unpredictable and potentially more dangerous. Professionals often followed set patterns that could be exploited.

Hand signals brought the rest of her assault force right up to the doors while Brett repacked his camera gear. She risked another whispered radio transmission. “Charlie One and Three, this is Alpha One. We’re outside the hall.”

“Acknowledged, Alpha,” the gravelly voice of her senior sniper said.

“We’re ready.”

From her crouch, Helen reached up and gripped the handle on the right-hand door. Slowly, carefully, she turned the handle and pushed gently. The door swung inward silently.

For the first time they could hear sounds from the choir loft overhead muttered growls and curses from the terrorists and the soft sobs and moans of frightened children. Grim-faced now, the FBI agents wriggled through the narrow opening and split up. Helen and her Alpha team went right. Frazer and the rest of Bravo went left.

They came out into a vast open space. Temple Emet’s worship hall cantered on an altar positioned dead-canter between the two enormous stained-glass windows. Behind the altar stood the Ark a sliding curtain fifteen feet high and six feet wide that concealed the synagogue’s Torahs, the scrolls of the Old Testament and Jewish law. Two lecterns stood beside the altar one for the rabbi and one for the cantor. Rows of chairs for the congregation faced east, toward the altar and the Ark. Just inside the big double doors, carpeted staircases on the north and south walls led up into the choir loft.

Helen knelt by the southern stairs and peered upward with the submachine gun cradled in her hands. The terrorists and their hostages were still out of sight above her and around a bend in the staircase. She glanced over her shoulder. Frazer and his men were set.

She took a deep breath, trying to settle her racing pulse, and then let it out. She keyed her mike. “Charlie Team, this is Alpha One. Go! Go! Go!”

Before she finished speaking, four sections of the huge stained-glass windows shattered inward. Four muzzles poked through the jagged holes. Two of the weapons were Remington-made sniper rifles. The other two were M16s equipped with the M203 grenade launcher.

WHUMMP. WHUMMP. The launchers coughed once each, hurling two flash/bang grenades into the loft.

Helen was on her feet and charging up the stairs even before the grenades went off. Bursts of blinding light and deafening noise smashed at her senses. She rounded the corner and threw herself up the last few steps into a wild, shrieking tumult. Women and children and grown men staggered everywhere in utter confusion.

With her submachine gun held at shoulder level, Helen yelled, “FBI! FBI! Everybody down!”

Deeper voices echoed her shouts from behind her and from the other side of the loft. Most of the disoriented people in her field of view began diving for the floor. All but a few.

Out of the left corner of her goggles, Helen saw a young, hard-faced man whirling toward her with an assault rifle in his hands. She spun left and squeezed the trigger on her submachine gun. Three rounds fired at a point-blank range slammed into the terrorist. His chest and neck exploded and he toppled backward out of sight over a row of chairs.

A sniper rifle cracked off to the right. She glanced that way in time to see a tall, black-haired man shriek in horror and agony, stagger backward, and tumble over the railing into the synagogue below.

Two down.

Still probing for targets, Helen advanced through the tangle of seats and writhing bodies. Purposeful movement near the organ caught her eye. She turned that way and saw a third man in camouflage fatigues, older and gone to fat, painfully crawling toward a metal box. Different-colored wires led out from the box to all four corners of the loft.

She fired another three-round burst. So did several of her men. The older man’s body literally disintegrated under a hail of steel jacketed bullets. Blood, shattered bone, and torn flesh sprayed across the organ keyboard.