‘Ghost Lead, this is Kozak. Sensor out, in position. Contacts marked.’
‘Roger that.’
Pepper and 30K reported the same.
‘Ghost Team, continue the sweep.’
‘Maziq?’ Ross called over the command net. ‘Cut the power.’
‘Roger that. Stand by.’
Maziq had recruited two engineers from the NLA to cut the power to several blocks along the pier. In the past, the power was often turned off at night anyway, and both brown- and blackouts were not unusual occurrences.
Ross shifted around the corner, and with his Cross-Com he zoomed in on the Fadakno office’s security camera mounted over the front door. The red status light winked off. And three, two, one, it returned, operating on battery backup.
‘Power’s down,’ said Maziq. ‘Ghost Lead? Confirm.’
‘Confirmed,’ said Ross. ‘Ghost Team? Everybody out of the zone?’
The men checked in. They were.
‘Clear to drop EMP. Stand by.’
Ross withdrew the cylindrical EMP grenade from his web gear, pulled the pin, and hurled it toward the office’s front door, just outside of the camera’s view as it was panning toward the south corner.
The grenade, technically a flux compression generator bomb, was a metal cylinder surrounded by a coil of wire called a ‘stator winding.’ The cylinder was filled with high explosive surrounded by a jacket, and the stator winding and cylinder were separated by empty space. A bank of capacitors was attached to the stator, and a switch connected the capacitors to that stator, sending an electrical current through the wires to generate an intense magnetic field.
As the grenade hit the ground, a fuse ignited the explosive material, and the explosion traveled up through the middle of the cylinder, coming in contact with the stator winding and creating a short circuit that in turn cut off the stator from its power supply. This moving short circuit compressed the magnetic field to create an intense non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse that rendered useless all electronics within a prescribed target radius.
A faint thud came from near the door, followed by another sound, like static from a broken television.
The security camera’s status light winked out once more; it remained black.
‘Ghosts? Move out,’ Ross ordered.
Each of the two Fadakno warehouses was approximately ten thousand square feet, with about a thousand square feet dedicated to secondary offices in addition to the main office building (no bigger than a double-wide trailer) situated between them. Each structure had fourteen-foot ceilings with several windows that had either been tinted or painted black from the inside. Two loading dock doors and a third door with a concrete ramp that allowed vehicles to drive straight inside were located at the far ends.
Based on his own experience trying to get into the minds of his enemies, 30K had voiced his concerns about the lack of security outside the buildings. He’d told Ross that despite the cameras, if those boys had something to hide and protect, they wouldn’t leave it alone overnight, cameras and motion sensors notwithstanding. Sure, the place might appear to be minimally guarded (in an effort not to call attention to themselves), but they should, 30K had strongly argued, expect to find company inside. Heavily armed company.
He reached the front door and glanced back at the shimmer in the air behind him: Kozak under his camouflage. While they entered the east warehouse, Pepper and Ross would take the west.
Standard door lock. Piece of cake. Most companies could not machine their parts to near flawless tolerances and still make money; therefore, men like 30K with intentions of bypassing said locks exploited those manufacturing shortcomings with a few simple tools.
The lock opened. However, before opening, 30K fished out a tiny pump bottle of lube and drenched the door’s hinges to be sure they wouldn’t creak. That done, he glanced back to Kozak. ‘You ready, bro?’ he whispered.
‘Let’s do it.’
Wincing, 30K tugged open the door, and it opened effortlessly. He shifted inside, waited a moment, then shut the door, the darkness turning to liquid as Kozak passed him.
Rows of shelving stretched off into the shadows like monoliths lined up on a moonscape, and now voices echoed from somewhere on the other end, near the loading docks.
Were they speaking Arabic? He wasn’t sure.
‘We’ve got contact inside,’ 30K whispered over the team net.
‘Roger that, so do we,’ said Ross. ‘We confirm that the truck isn’t here. Must be in your warehouse. Move in on it now.’
30K turned to Kozak and gave him a hand signal.
Time to earn their keep.
THIRTY-ONE
To the casual eye, everything about the warehouse appeared legitimate, from the hundreds of various-size boxes stored on rows of steel industrial shelves to the orders packed on shipping pallets with attached invoices, the boxes stacked two meters high and bound together by clear stretch wrap.
At least twenty such pallets were lined up near the loading dock doors, and these commanded Ross’s attention. He gave the signal for Pepper to lead them silently toward them, his Cross-Com displaying the current positions of the guards.
Ross had assumed that the three men inside were either ex-police or military, hired from the local population — but once they began speaking in Spanish, he concluded they were FARC troops, trucked in under cover each night to guard the shipments from the inside, thus drawing little attention from the locals. They were armed with compact Skorpion submachine guns procured from local stockpiles. They were probably aware of the clandestine shipping operation but weren’t told much else, lest they be captured.
At the moment, the men were understandably confused, arguing over whether they should remain in place or venture out to see why the power had gone down. One remarked that his cell phone no longer worked and he was concerned that something very bad had taken place, perhaps at the capitol. Perhaps something nuclear. Ross smiled inwardly. Their imaginations were running wild. They began to fight over whether or not they should contact their buddies in the next warehouse, and one said he’d run over there to see what was happening.
Ross patched his own Cross-Com’s signal into 30K’s heads-up display so that the man could see the red outlined image of the guard hustling from the warehouse and moving toward him with a small flashlight in hand.
‘Got ’em, boss. No worries.’
‘Roger, stay sharp.’
There’d been some discussion of a plan to lure the guards out of the warehouses prior to the team entering, but once again, the fewer occurrences out of the norm, the better. The power outage and subsequent EMP burst were all Ross was willing to risk. Mitchell’s intent was clear: They were to identify and tag a cargo shipment heading back to that plane and get out before these six men knew what was happening. The team needed to do that right under the guards’ noses via technology and superior tactics, a mission perfectly suited for the GST.
However, just as Ross’s confidence level was beginning to spike, Pepper, under camouflage but whose heat signature was visible in Ross’s HUD, raised his hand, the signal to halt.
One of the guards was walking straight toward them, leaning over, frowning as though he’d seen something lying on the floor. His flashlight’s batteries were weak, and the pale yellow beam barely lit his path.
Ross shifted slowly toward the shelves to his right, clearing a path down the aisle. Pepper did likewise.