Judgment at Alcatraz by Dave Edlund (carter reed .txt) 📕

Alameda. These are some of my students. We’re studying the Civil War. Some field trip.” She frowned.

Her brunette hair cascaded in graceful waves before being pulled together with an elastic band just below her shoulders. She wore turquoise-rimmed glasses that rode low on her nose, giving her a scholarly appearance.

A guard meandered toward the group. Danya tilted her head toward the card game while keeping the guard in view through her peripheral vision. Just then, one of the students reached out and snatched the pile of cards, eliciting laughter from the other players. Danya smiled, pretending she was following the play. After a minute, the guard turned and moved away from the group.

Sue had taken notice of her visitor’s reaction to the armed man.

“Who are they?” she said.

“Does it matter?”

Sue raised an eyebrow again, but didn’t voice her thoughts.

Danya said, “Consider them the wolves.”

“Then that would make us the lambs?”

“You catch on quickly.”

“And what about you?” Sue appraised her new companion. “I don’t see you as a lamb.”

“Me?” Danya gave a thin smile, but there was no mirth in her eyes. “I suppose I’m the shepherd.”

“Did you come to rescue us?”

Danya leaned in close to avoid her voice carrying.

“Not exactly. Look, Sue, it’s really important that you remain positive, okay? We’re gonna get out of this, and you need to keep a cool head and make sure your kids are safe. They’ll look to you for direction. Just play it smart. If there’s shooting, get everyone to lay down immediately, okay? No hesitation, right? Just get your kids to lay flat on the floor. You, too.”

With her brow crinkled, the school teacher from Alameda stared at Danya.

Finally, Sue nodded. “Okay,” she whispered.

Danya turned her gaze back to the card game. The children were so innocent, to the point they could laugh and joke while in the midst of a life-and-death ordeal. Only, they didn’t know that. Children never did.

She thought back to another hostage situation that had unfolded halfway around the world. It was less than a dozen years ago, but in other respects, a lifetime had passed since then.

She’d been part of a team sent to rescue a school bus filled with kids. The bus had been hijacked near a farming commune in the Golan Heights. Extremists claiming loyalty to Syria had taken the youths and the driver hostage, demanding that the Golan Heights be returned to Syria. Two days into the negotiation, the bus driver was executed—a single bullet to the head. The entire grotesque event live-streamed to social media.

The Israeli prime minister, with a grim nod, agreed that time had run out. Photographs and real-time video from a high-flying drone confirmed that the school children were being held on the bus. The bus was essentially a solar oven, even with the windows open, and concern over the children’s health was high.

Despite warnings that an outright assault was likely to result in collateral damage—optimistic estimates ran as high as half of the children being killed, whereas others feared that all could be lost if the bus was rigged with explosives—the prime minister authorized an elite team, selected from Mossad’s best field operators, to engage the terrorists. No ambiguity in the order. The terrorists were to be killed. Surrender was not acceptable. There would be no quarter, no mercy, and no public trial, which other extremists would use as a reason to recruit new Jihadists. No, the terrorists would simply vanish into obscurity.

Under cover of darkness, Danya and three other operators silently landed five hundred meters from the bus. They’d parachuted from high altitude. Their black canopies, shaped like air foils, had allowed the team to literally fly their chutes to the landing zone. The plan was straightforward: Pair up and form two teams. Flank the camp, shoot the terrorists, and extract the children. Although it sounded simple, she knew the truth.

Once the site was secure, a ground team would race in to provide transportation back to safety. Five military helicopters would be in the air and ready to transport the most severely wounded to the nearest hospital. Medical teams onboard each aircraft would include trauma nurses and doctors with the capability to undertake emergency surgery. The mission planners didn’t think this was merely a possibility, but rather a guaranteed outcome.

At least one drone was always overhead, unseen and unheard, providing a direct video link. Just before the Mossad team exited their C130 aircraft, the images showed the school bus illuminated by the flickering light from two small fires, one on either side of the school bus. The high-resolution video also revealed the terrorists—five total—on a roaming patrol around the bus, establishing a perimeter only twenty meters away from the vehicle.

The two Mossad teams, designated Alpha and Omega, landed and released their chutes. After a final update, they split to flank the bus. The black sky was marked by thousands of tiny points of light, but the moon had yet to rise. With the aid of state-of-the-art military night-vision goggles, the darkness did not present an impediment to Danya and her teammates. As if it were a sunlit day, they slipped to their positions two hundred meters from the bus.

She was the spotter. Her shooter was a man named Seth Meier. Before this mission, she’d never met Seth, but their brief introductions onboard the C130 led her to believe he was a disciplined and capable operator.

Once in position, Seth quickly set his weapon—an Israeli Weapons Industries DAN .338 Bolt-Action Sniper Rifle chambered for the powerful Lapua Magnum round, topped with a high-power scope on its bipod—and dropped into a prone position behind the stock. At two hundred meters, he could hit a dime nine times out of ten. And the .338 caliber bullet, traveling more than twice the speed of sound, was lethal.

Danya reached into her pack and removed a high-magnification spotting scope, configured for low-light amplification.

“I’ve got three tangos,” she whispered. “The other two must be on the far side of the bus. Standard AKs fitted with suppressors.”

Although