Massive Attack (A Guy Niava Thriller Book 1) by Dana Arama (diy ebook reader TXT) 📕

not encouraging. In the room, on the floor, sat a man with a beard, holding the body of a little boy. Next to him, the doctor was listening to the boy’s pulse. There was a look of helplessness mixed with fear on his face, or maybe it looked that way because of the beads of sweat accumulating on his forehead. Was the boy still alive?”

“I suppose that is the real Yassin,” I remarked quietly. “The boy in his arms complicates our solution of a direct hit.”

“Because we cannot hurt the boy or the doctor, that leaves the break-in team with two choices,” the officer of the team stated. “Either we shoot Yassin in the head or we dominate him another way.”

“A shot to the head isn’t a viable option,” I answered. “We need him alive in order to interrogate him.”

“Then we are left with the option of shooting with an anesthetic bullet,” Major Key said.

“Like one would shoot an injured elephant?” I asked, and then, slightly concerned, I said, “We need to remember that we can’t harm the innocent.”

“In the same room where Yassin was sitting, there were two other men standing by. Pay attention,” Major Key noted, “One of them looks like Murat Lenika. He is the first one we should shoot at.”

“He really deserves it,” Linda agreed.

“That is not the reason. We will shoot him first because he seems to be the least calm person in the room at the moment and that makes him unpredictable, and therefore the most dangerous.”

“Look at that terrorist.” I pointed at a man, short with broad shoulders, standing near Murat Lenika. “Try and get a good picture of his face and run it in the system to see if we get a hit on his identity,” I said to Linda, and she did so immediately.

“The way he carries himself leaves no doubt that he is a professional,” Major Key remarked, looking at him. “He is dangerous for the right reasons.” Major Key focused the team on this character and said, “Notice how he checks the windows over and over again, also the roof tops nearby and the ceiling. He was probably a soldier with a history of combat, so he is anticipating a break-in team.”

I also thought it would be a good idea to neutralize him. I studied the picture of the room, frame after frame. “Look at this,” I noted and stopped the picture on the screen. I enlarged it and focused on the line of laptops on the table.

“Don’t harm those computers. I want to take them and hand them over to the NSA to check them out.”

The cameras moved to a darkened room and we could see it on the screen, once the picture had been altered with more light. It was a bedroom, with a bed taking up most of the space. On the left side of the bed a body was visible. The long, light-colored hair on the cushion stood out in the poor lighting. I recognized her from the surveillance pictures we had gathered. In the pictures, Yassin’s wife had looked glamorous. Now, in the darkened room, she looked far from that, and it caused me to shudder slightly. “That is Juliana Graham, Yassin’s wife. The poor woman looks really sick.”

“No one is tending to her,” someone from the back noted and then said what we all were wondering: “Could she already be dead?”

The darkness in the room was like a light for us, because it meant we could enter from there without too much obstruction.

“Focus on the woman lying on the bed, please,” asked Major Key. “If I am seeing correctly, there are electrical wires on her. It seems like she has an explosive tied to her.”

“She may be so sick that they decided to get rid of her,” Linda noted.

“They may all be carrying explosives on themselves,” Major Key answered her.

Two more men stood next to a separate screen: The officer in charge of bomb disposals and his deputy commander. They went over the pictures, painfully slow, and tried to study everything they could see in the room. Another man was seen walking nervously around in the room. He kept setting down the gun he carried and drying his hands. The two hand grenades tied to his belt were cause for concern. If there was something disturbing about a fighter with a hand grenade, a nervous fighter with a hand grenade was even more troubling.

“What are you looking for?” I inquired.

“The wife won’t activate the explosive on her own, so there must be an operating unit for the explosive,” the tall agent answered. “It will look like a remote control of a garage door with one button, or maybe a handle.”

“This?” I asked and pointed to a remote control which was lying on the sideboard under the television set.

“That could possibly be it. Maybe it is hidden in a bundle of keys, which someone may have in their pocket. In any case, we will have to neutralize him before he activates it, or the boy and the wife and all the break-in team will go to heaven faster than planned.”

The operating room filled up with people. Besides the commanding officers of the control team, the intelligence team and the bomb disposal team, the commanding officer of the negotiation team stood by, just in case Yassin agreed to talk to someone. At the same time, I received notifications from the teams in the field, whose job it was to secure the surrounding area. The local police blockaded the streets to prevent civilians from passing by. Also, despite the dissatisfaction of the press, the isolation of the area included them as well. We couldn’t afford anyone reporting live from the field, assuming that Yassin and his men could receive the information immediately.

The commanding officer of the break-in team would not let me participate in the actual break-in, so I remained in the operations room. There, on the big screen, I could watch and listen as they