Christopher Whitcomb - Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team

Copyright 2001 by Christopher Whitcomb

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

First Edition

Hachette Book Group,
237 Park Avenue,
New York, NY 10017

For information on Time Warner Trade Publishings online publishing program, Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

First eBook Edition: November 2008

ISBN: 978-0-446-55121-2

The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Book design by Bernard Klein

Contents

To Rose

At the FBIs request, all names have been changed, except those of widely known public figures. Some events and details have been slightly altered to protect sensitive investigative techniques. The opinions and observations expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect those of the FBI.

The world looks different through a rifle scope. Even here, in this dark jungle, where the moon peeks through the double canopy in slivers, I can feel the power of holding life and death at the pull of a trigger. The smells of damp steel and leather fill my nose as I tuck the stock into my shoulder. My eye hovers behind the reticle, searching the distance for just the right combination of windage and elevation. My index finger rests lightly on the trigger guard, conditioned not to reach past the safety until its time to kill.

Sierra One to TOC. I have subject movement on the white-blue corner. Copy?

Light drifts off the green Birdsong finish of my barrel as I collect information through a Unertl ten-power scope, one observation at a time.

Copy, Sierra One.

Radio traffic. People talk differently with a microphone to their lips.

Sierra One, in our language, means sniper position one the highest observation post on this dank mountainside. From here, I can look down with anonymity on our subjects and gather information about all aspects of their day-to-day lives. I can observe the color of their hair, whether they shaved this morning, what they ate for breakfast. Sometimes I get so close, I can almost smell the cologne on their neck and the garlic on their breath. Thats the irony in long-range surveillance: intimacy. Even at 300 yards, you learn things about your subjects that no one else gets to see.

Sniping is a lonely, intrusive business built on long hours of boredom and rare moments of epiphany and thrill. For every shift wasted in tedium, you might get a single moments adrenaline maybe a passing glimpse of a fugitive youve hunted for weeks, or a clear shot at a hostage taker that negotiators have written off as rabid. These moments come quickly, at the margins of a mission; sometimes just a face in a window, or a figure shuffling through a passing crowd.

You study him, the man in the scope, scouring his habits, his environment, for bits of information the street agents havent discovered. Watch carefully and hell offer you a small gesture that intimacy we trust when we think were alone. Sometimes hell dance to music on the car radio. Sometimes hell catch his reflection in a store window or a mirror and make faces at himself, imagining how hell chat up a pretty woman or respond to a rivals taunt. People let their guard down when they think no one is watching. Theyll show you whats inside, next to their thoughts.

Tonight, I lie beneath the heavy first drops of a tropical squall, waiting for opportunity. The air tastes moldy.

Dya ever try to run a dado blade through longleaf pine?

Bobby Metz, my Chicago-bred partner, tries to get comfortable on a poncho in a makeshift tent behind me. This is downtime for him, but sleep comes hard out here, and he wants conversation. We rotate shifts on target every two hours, trying to stay focused.

Its hot. Even at 2:07 A.M., the air feels rheumy against my skin. The sounds of dancing women filter up through the trees, coloring the jungle with energy, calling us down.

There are other distractions. An iguana the size of a Chesapeake retriever sidles through the ground cover just off to my right. I heard him coming a few minutes ago and trained my night vision goggles on his vicinity just to make sure of his intentions. I dont mind lizards, but the rats hes sniffing out make my skin crawl.

I pay a dollar ninety-five a linear foot for that stuff when I can find it, Bobby says. I get the shakes every time I think about trying to make a cut.

I dont know much about longleaf pine. Ive never even heard of a dado blade.

What you making? I ask.

These are the courtesies we extend each other on surveillances, during the long stretches of quiet between moments. I listen to him, then he listens to me in a sort of reciprocal tolerance. I dont give a shit about woodworking. The only thing I know about pine is how good it would feel, right now, carved into an Adirondack chair.

Sierra Two to TOC. We got a vehicle passing the checkpoint. White sedan, three to four occupants.

I pan right, about ten degrees, trying to pick up a shadow moving along the narrow street below us. Cars always kill their lights at the checkpoint. That makes discerning things like license numbers and faces more difficult.

Box, Metz says.

What kind of box?

Just a box. You know, to hold all that crap in your top drawer. A man needs a box.

Bobby loves tools: big Shopsmith power saws with turning lathes and automatic air filtration systems, Matco hex drivers with day-glo handles, box sets of -inch sockets. He cant pass a tool store without dragging the rest of the team in for a look.

Sierra Two to TOC. We just lost them around the corner. Looks like subject Carlos, returning.

Bobbys voice trails off into the jungle as I concentrate on the scene down below.

Hold it, buddy, Ive got traffic, I say.

Bobbys off his radio. He cant hear Sierra Twos assessment of the only significant movement weve seen in the last two hours.

Whats the situation? he asks.

The situation, to be precise, involves eight Hostage Rescue Team snipers and a hyperviolent Puerto Rican street gang responsible for supplying the eastern half of the island with everything from Jamaican sinsemilla to black tar heroin. Agents working the case out of the San Juan office have tagged a half-dozen main subjects with a string of carjackings, gang murders, and drug-related hits that would have made Tupac jealous. While they work up search warrants and indictments through the court system, we sit up here, gathering intelligence that will help facilitate the assault. The rest of the team is coming at dawn.

From here, I can look 257 yards due east down into a ragged suburb called Villa Pilar. Mountains surround the village, choking all traffic through a small one-lane road. Buyers must pass through armed sentries at the gate. That makes security easy on the dealers and hard on us. Previous attempts at search warrants have produced nothing. By the time the cops get through the gate, all the drugs have disappeared into the jungle.

Sierra One to TOC. I have a white Mercedes sedan four door with three adult males stopping in front of Building One.

I whisper the intelligence update into the bone mic resting against my jaw. Party noise echoes through the hills. Dogs bark at the shadows. Theres no way anyone down in the village can hear my voice, but whispering is a tough habit to break. Something about sneaking around and spying on people makes you want to talk in hushed tones.

I roll away from my rifle, a .308-caliber thunderstick custom built by FBI gunsmiths on a Remington Model 700 bolt-action receiver. It holds five match-grade 168-grain boattail hollow-point bullets in a spring-loaded magazine. The jeweled trigger is tuned to break at two and a half pounds of pressure. The leather cheek pad on the stock is stained dark with sweat.