22:57 – Steve quietly rapped his knuckles on the camper’s rear door. Alarmed, Ty dropped his half-eaten sandwich and nearly choked on the large bite in his mouth. Looking out through the curtain, Ty expected to find a police officer or at least a security guard, questioning him about being parked in this shopping center parking lot. However, spotting Steve, dressed in all black and sporting a futuristic headset, Ty opened the door and whispered, “How did you find me, here?”<\/p>\n
“Sorry if I startled you, but it wasn’t very hard,” Steve replied, his fingers tapping the infrared headgear perched above his brow. “You being the only heat signature sitting in a cold camper, I approached from the rear to see if it was you or one of our targets standing guard. If I were going to set up a stakeout, this is a spot I would have picked and my infrared set showed you sitting in a position to view the house so I figured it must be you. I’m Captain Steve Thomas (referring to his prior military rank was a hard habit to break since all of his team called him Captain). We met at the press conference the evening the mission was announced. I assume you were informed I would be arriving.” Steve held out his hand to greet Ty. “Has there been any movement?”<\/p>\n
“No,” Ty answered, shaking Steve’s hand. “That is, one suspect left earlier in the day, around 15:00, but came back about an hour and fifteen minutes later with what looked like two small bags of groceries. Nothing since then.”<\/p>\n
With his other hand Steve reached in and patted Ty’s shoulder, “I really appreciate the assist. Now, we’ll take it from here. You should head home and catch up on your sleep.” Glancing around Ty and seeing the crumpled up assortment of fast food, candy bar and gum wrappers, Steve observed, “Looks like you’ve been on stakeout for quite a while.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Ty squinted tiredly at his watch. “Almost thirteen hours, but I’m going to wait until you go in so this old engine starting up won’t rattle the neighborhood. You probably don’t want the kidnapers looking out the windows while you’re trying to sneak up on ’em.”<\/p>\n
“Good thinkin’, man. Thanks, again,” Steve told him, then turned quickly and faded into the darkness under the trees lining the road.<\/p>\n
Steve’s team had worked closely together for nearly eight years, with all of the same men remaining on the job. One or two had been nominally wounded on more than one occasion, but so far they had not lost a single man as a result of being killed in the line of duty. When Steve recruited his team, he and his trainers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), near Brunswick, Georgia, had really done their homework. Two years worth of homework in fact, training Steve as a Federal civilian, finding the men for his team and convincing them that civilian government work was more rewarding than their current military life.<\/p>\n
Knowledgeable of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, these fraternity brothers are able to perform seamlessly and communicate in several ways. Line of sight communications could be exploited by a system of precise hand signals, adapted from American Sign Language, with the team relaying messages down the line from one man to the next. Messages to all were conducted via a series of specific clicks on their two-way radios, similar to Morse code, and heard only through their earpieces. They communicated silently, safe from the eavesdropping enemy.<\/p>\n
It didn’t take long for the team to take up their designated positions. By means of four vantage points, with each commando having a different view of the house through their infrared headgear, they obtained four head counts for comparison. Conferring, they concluded there were four people in the house: Mike slumped in a straight back chair in the middle of the living room with one figure continuously pacing around him, and two people reclining in the two main floor bedrooms. No one was on the second floor, making a stealthy attack much easier. Gliding through shadows and sidling up next to the outside of the house, the commandos utilized miniature cameras to examine doors and windows for booby-traps and as possible entry points. From a window, the kitchen door could be seen clearly with no signs of danger from entering that way. Following a stealthy check of doorknobs, no open portals were found and it appeared the kitchen door would be their best bet.<\/p>\n
Though an unlocked door may appear inviting, it would also be too easy an entry and it might well be wired to alert the perpetrators or booby-trapped. The team always erred on the side of caution, especially in situations involving human life. As another precaution, suction-cup microphones were affixed to windows to pick up any conversations from the kidnappers inside or other sounds that might affect their plans. No unusual sounds were detected and the team decided to proceed. A specific series of clicks on the radios signaled ‘go’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
22:57 – Steve quietly rapped his knuckles on the camper’s rear door. Alarmed, Ty dropped his half-eaten sandwich and nearly choked on the large bite in his mouth. Looking out through the curtain, Ty expected to find a police officer or at least a security guard, questioning him about being parked in this shopping center parking lot. However, spotting Steve, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":197,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chapter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":371,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}