Chapter 56
E LKTON , V IRGINIA
F RIDAY, BEFORE DAWN
S tate police had established DUI “checkpoints” at both ends of the narrow dirt road along the South Fork of the Shenandoah River.
Plainclothes detectives, in unmarked vehicles, were positioned farther back in case anyone tried to turn around and avoid being stopped. The last thing they wanted was for word to leak.
In the meantime, agents from the FBI’s Richmond Field Office had assembled for the serving of a search warrant on the five-hundred-acre farm of a Paul Taylor Jordan—titular head of the Iron Tree movement.
Based upon the chilling testimony of Ricky Russell, it was one of the fastest warrants to have ever been approved in the history of the state of Virginia.
The farm had been under surveillance for several hours. The plan was to launch the raid before dawn. The weather, however, wasn’t cooperating.
A front of thunderstorms had moved in and parked themselves over the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was pissing down rain.
Even worse, the claps of thunder were so loud that it had to be near impossible for anyone on the property to be sleeping.
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 different shooters, 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.
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 colleagues radioed 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 facade, 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 Bearcat and 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.
Minutes ticked by. And with each one that did, he was left to wonder what they planned to do with him.
Eventually there was the sound of heavy footsteps descending the stairs into the basement. Because of a set of shelving, he couldn’t see who it was—not right away—but the person moved with a quiet, almost dark purpose and confidence that was instantly unnerving.
When the man was finally revealed, Jordan could see he was wearing rubber gloves and an N95 mask. In one hand he carried a small Igloo cooler. In the other was an AED defibrillator.
“Mr. Jordan,” said Harvath as he set his equipment down on the nearest workbench, “I’m going to give you one chance to cooperate. If you do, this will be over quickly and we can get you the further medical treatment you need. If you don’t cooperate, I can make this quite painful.”
The man looked at him and spat, “Fuck you.”
“Option B,” Harvath replied, smiling behind his mask. “I was hoping that would be your choice.”