Page 112 of Edge of Honor

Over the roar of the Bearcat’s engine, the storm, and the continuing heavy gunfire from the bunkhouse, you could sense the tac-team operators in the vehicle holding their collective breath until their colleaguesradioed that they had taken out the shooter in the barn and had safely escaped its collapse.

The sense of relief they felt, however, was short-lived as the driver warned them all to brace for immediate impact.

Jerking the wheel at the last moment, he ran the Bearcat down the length of the bunkhouse, sheering off its entire façade, exposing the full interior and all of the Iron Tree members gathered inside.

As soon as the armored vehicle had cleared the line of fire, the members of team two began to light it up—putting round after round on the now fully exposed enemy.

Positioning themselves to flank, the Bearcat sloshed to a muddy stop, the tac-team members jumped out of the back, and, joined by Carolan and Fields, they all started firing.

The gunfight was punctuated by slashes of lightning that tore through the sky and even more thunder, which shook the ground beneath their feet.

Together, the FBI and Virginia State Police tactical teams felled the Iron Tree attackers one by one, starting with the heavy machine gunner and working their way through their ranks.

When the gunfight ended, the ground was a sea of spent shell casings and empty magazines. The Iron Tree members had been ready for combat, but not for an armored vehicle to upend their dug-in, defensive advantage.

With their FBI partners, the tac-team members spread out, searching for survivors. But what they found were only a handful of dead bodies.

“Over here!” Fields shouted from the kitchen area of the bunkhouse.

As soon as Carolan saw what she was looking at, he ordered, “Do not touch that! Step away. Right now.”

Fields did exactly as her boss instructed.

The tac-team leader brought over one of his demolition experts, who studied what Fields had uncovered. Peeling back a rug, she exposed a trapdoor. Where it led—and who or what was down there—wasn’t apparent. What they all did know was that, like the front door of the farmhouse, it was very likely booby-trapped.

Ordering everyone to exit the bunkhouse, he went out to the Bearcatand returned with a spool of galvanized steel cable and a handful of other items he needed.

He ran the cable over one of the wooden beams above the kitchen, attached it to the door’s ring pull, and unspooled enough cable to get him outside to the safety of the armored vehicle. There, using a hand winch, he began reeling in the cable and lifting open the trapdoor.

When the door got to a certain point, there was an enormous explosion. Shrapnel, which would have killed anyone standing nearby, erupted in all directions. Like the booby trap on the farmhouse, this one had also been designed to be incredibly devastating.

Waiting for the smoke to clear, the tac team reassembled and descended into the dark, underground space beneath the bunkhouse.

It was a small basement area with workbenches covered in tools and electronic components.

At the far end was a set of metal lockers. Examining them, one of the tac-team guys figured out that they had been hung on a cleverly hidden track.

Once he found the release, he slid the lockers to the side, revealing a long, rough-hewn tunnel lit by industrial string lights.

The tac team flooded into the tunnel and soon found that it wasn’t just one tunnel, but a whole, interconnected series of them beneath the compound. They also discovered lots of blood on the ground. Apparently, this was the escape route for all the Iron Tree members who had been able to make it out of the bunkhouse.

Soon enough, however, they came upon their first body. The man had either been carried this far and subsequently abandoned or had made it to this point via his own power and had expired from his gunshot wounds. Either way, he was dead.

Fifty feet later, they came across another corpse.

When they stumbled upon a third man, motionless on the ground, they assumed they had another lifeless body. Then the man moved.

“We’ve got a survivor,” the lead tac-team member radioed as his colleagues stripped the injured attacker of his weapons.

Paul Taylor Jordan wasn’t much of a talker. After receiving medical attention and being deemed fit for interrogation, both Carolan and Fields—in multiple rounds of bad cop, worse cop—had gone to work on him while the tac teams had searched the rest of the tunnels and the woods beyond for the remaining Iron Tree members involved in the shoot-out.

Not only did they not get anywhere with Jordan, he soon began complaining of the pain he was in and saying he wanted an attorney. They had hit the proverbial brick wall.

And it was at that point, when they were absolutely certain that Jordan wasn’t going to give them anything, that Gallo had said he wanted to be notified.

Up on the road, he had been present for the entire operation and had brought something with him just in case.

Handcuffed to a chair in the basement, Jordan—a paunchy man in his early sixties with rheumy eyes and severe psoriasis—watched as Carolan and Fields left him alone and returned upstairs.

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