When nobody spoke, Armont glanced at his watch and frowned. This final briefing had gone longer than expected, but he had to cover more than the usual number of complexities.
For one thing, the hostages apparently were scattered all over the place, always a problem. Unless the team could strike several locations simultaneously, the element of surprise would be forfeited. That meant the insertion had to be totally secure, giving the team time to split up, get positioned, and stage the final assault with split-second coordination. Carrying out one op was dicey enough: he was looking at three, all at once. The alternate strategy would be to focus exclusively on Ramirez. Take him out first, blow their command structure, and hope the others would fold.
The decision on that option would have to be made in about two hours, just before they set down the plane two kilometers west of the island and boarded the Zodiacs for insertion. That was when Vance was scheduled to radio his intel on the disposition of the hostiles and the friendlies. What a stroke of luck to have him there, a point man already in place to guide the team in.
"All right, then," Spiros said, finally coming alive, "let's do a final check of the equipment. We need to double-inventory the lists and make sure everything got delivered. I don't want to hear a lot of crap from you guys if somebody can't find something later on."
The others nodded. Dimitri had had to scramble to get all the hardware together, and Reginald Hall had had to make some expensive last-minute arrangements to obtain a set of balaclava antiflash hoods for everybody. When there were hostages everywhere, the safest way to storm the terrorists was with nonlethal flash grenades, which produced a blinding explosion and smoke but did not spew out iron fragments. But their use required the assault to function in the momentarily disruptive environment they created. The hoods, which protected the wearer's face and eyes from the smoke and flash, were crucial. And since your local hardware store did not stock them, he had borrowed a set from the Greek Dimoria Eidikon Apostolon, a SWAT unit of the Athens city police trained to provide hostage rescue, securing six on a "no questions asked" basis, even though everybody there knew they had only one use.