Page 111 of Edge of Honor

Worst of all, however, were the intense flashes of lightning. Any hope the FBI had of using the cover of darkness to hide their approach was all but dashed. The odds were stacked in the bad guys’ favor that they’d not only be awake when the raid happened, but that they’d see it coming too.

The Virginia State Police had provided three six-man tactical teams,along with three Bearcat armored vehicles, a critical addition considering how quickly the rain had turned the road to mud.

With the forecast showing no letup in the storms anytime soon, Carolan and Fields, in conjunction with their FBI colleagues and the leader of the tactical teams, made a decision. Lightning, thunder, and rain be damned, they were going in.

Word was passed over the radios, weapons were checked, and body armor was adjusted. It was time to roll.

Because of the size of the Bearcats, four FBI agents could ride with each tactical team. Carolan and Fields rode in the lead vehicle. The pucker factor was off the charts.

According to Ricky Russell, the Jordan farm had been a training ground for Iron Tree members in hand-to-hand combat, fully automatic weapons, fire-and-maneuver techniques, improvised explosives, and a host of other military operations, especially those on urban terrain. In Russell’s words, the farm was like a “Hillbilly al-Qaeda” camp.

Riding in the first Bearcat, Carolan and Fields had no idea what they might face. Had the road been laid with mines? Were there antipersonnel devices, such as claymores, hidden around the buildings? Had these guys gotten their hands on standoff weapons like grenade launchers? Russell had only been able to comment on what he had seen while he had been a member of Iron Tree. What steps they were taking now and what additional weapons they had availed themselves of was anyone’s guess. That was one of the purposes of the surveillance.

In the time that they’d been watching the compound, several vehicles had arrived. By their count, there were at least seventeen different trucks and cars parked at the farm. Due to the weather, it had been impossible to get a drone in the air. Intelligence had to be gathered the old-fashioned way—through binoculars and long-range rifle scopes. They didn’t dare send anyone in on foot and risk blowing the operation.

To that end, agents from the Richmond Field Office had been kept in the dark about the high-risk warrant service for as long as possible. Whoever the Bureau’s leaker was, Carolan, Fields, and Gallo wanted to make sure that this person was cut off from any information that might have let the bad guys know that they were coming.

The cluster of buildings, including the main farmhouse, a barn, a bunkhouse, and a large garage-style structure, was a half mile in from the main road. Thankfully, it wasn’t a straight shot. The long, windy drive ducked in and out of the trees, which, along with the storm, helped deaden some of the sound from the Bearcats’ turbo-diesel engines.

“Thirty seconds!” the tac-team leader announced.

All around them, the men in their helmets and night-vision goggles adjusted their slings, tightened their grips on their weapons, and made sure their magazines were firmly seated in the mag wells of their rifles. Fields said a quiet prayer that they would be kept safe and no one would be injured.

“Five seconds!” came the booming voice of the tac-team leader.

It had already been planned how everyone inside the armored vehicles would debus. The first and second tac teams would exit and take up defensive firing positions, while the third team would hit the farmhouse and make a swift, overwhelming, no-knock entry.

The idea, storm notwithstanding, was to catch Paul Taylor Jordan in his bed, take physical custody of him, and get him to convince his followers to stand down. No one wanted a Ruby Ridge or Branch Davidian–style bloodbath.

Nearing the farmhouse, the Bearcats split off out of their column and came to a halt. As soon as they did, the back doors flew open and the tac-team members leapt out into the storm.

Team three ran up to the front door of the darkened farmhouse and called their breacher forward. Stepping up to the threshold with his thirty-five-pound battering ram, he drew it back and then sent it crashing into the door.

The moment it connected, splintering the door and ripping it from its hinges, a high-pitched whine could be heard from inside.

Before the breacher could step back from the frame and warn his teammates, the entire house exploded.

The shock wave knocked the members of teams one and two to the ground, showering them with flaming debris, and could even be felt by the FBI agents inside the armored vehicles.

No sooner had the farmhouse detonated than two differentshooters, armed with heavy, belt-fed machine guns, opened up on them—one from the barn’s hayloft and the other from a window at the corner of the bunkhouse.

The remaining tac teams scrambled to their feet and immediately began returning fire. Pouring out of the back of all three Bearcats, the FBI agents—shotguns and M4 rifles in hand—joined them.

The bloodbath they all hoped they would avoid was well underway.

Soon enough, the tac-team leader was radioing for team one to get back in their Bearcat. They were going to make a run for the barn.

Moving quickly, Fields and Carolan got in first, followed by the rest of the team. As soon as they closed the rear hatch, the Bearcat driver had the vehicle in gear and was speeding toward the barn.

As he drove, the heavy rounds of the machine guns slammed into the heavy armor plating and thick bulletproof glass of his vehicle. He didn’t let any of it slow him down. In fact, he had been ordered by the tac-team leader to increase his speed.

The man wanted him to rip through the barn, taking out as many structural supports as possible. If they could cause a full or even partial collapse of the structure, it would hopefully dislodge the shooter in the hayloft.

Crashing through the old, empty barn in a shower of splintered wood, the Bearcat driver aimed for every structural support beam as well as the stairs leading to the hayloft.

At the far end, as the machine gunner tried to readjust his weapon, he slammed on the brakes and allowed two tac-team members to bail out to the back. As soon as the hatch had been reclosed, he returned to Berserker mode and sent the twenty-thousand-pound Bearcat on one final rampage before blasting through the wall on the other side, back into the storm.

Looking through the window on the rear hatch, they could see multiple flashes of gunfire as the structure began to tilt precariously to the right, before completely collapsing.

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