Page 52 of The Fourth Option
“Just behind it. See the yellow?”
“Motherfucker.”
It had been common practice for insurgents to use yellow plastic water jugs as part of IED construction. Most civilians used them to haul water. The Taliban filled them with aluminum powder and ammonium nitrate.
“Rocks on both sides,” Staub added, eyes still pressed to the binos.
“Yep.”
“Wish we had assets up telling us if there are any active cell phones in play.”
“Yeah.”
“We are pretty remote out here. Might be a pressure plate that the Taliban knows to drive around.”
“Or this is an obvious ploy to get us to drive around and right into an actual IED.”
“Could be. Maybe we wait and see if a vehicle comes by and either drives around or goes right through.”
“Could. Or we could go take a look,” Walker said.
“We?”
“I could go take a look.”
They turned to see Rina and Fatima returning from behind the rocks.
“Have Rina take Zahra from my vehicle to the bathroom. I’ll leave the family with you.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to go defuse a bomb.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
New Orleans
Present Day
IT WAS FOUR-THIRTYin the afternoon, the end of the workday for many in government service. But not for Jarrett Stanton.
Inside the sterile, fluorescent-lit conference room on the third floor of the Federal Building, the air was cool and dry, humming with the low buzz of a ceiling vent. The walls were bare except for a whiteboard filled with color-coded charts and a corkboard pinned with maps of the great state of Louisiana, each one marked with pins and string like a spiderweb of crime.
Stanton stood at the head of the table, sleeves rolled to the elbows of his crisp white shirt, tie loosened, correctly indicating he had been at it since dawn. His dark eyes scanned the room like a hawk circling a field. He was in his element, his weekly Trends meeting, where data was gospel and patterns were prophecy.
The room was quiet, professional, anodyne. Two rookies sat stiffly at the far end of the table, trying to fit in.
“He always like this?” one of them whispered.
“Oh yeah,” came the reply from a grizzled agent with a coffee-stained tie. “We do this every week.”
The door creaked open, and Augustus Lloyd, the special agent in charge of the New Orleans Field Office, poked his head in. He was a big man with a double chin, a slow drawl, and a thinning hairline in sharp retreat, his face aged with sunspots.
“We’ve got that call with the DA,” Lloyd said.
Stanton checked his smartwatch. “Trends meeting, sir. Just finishing up.”
“I’ll get us dialed in.” Lloyd gave a mock salute and disappeared down the hall.
