“This is our time and opportunity,” he said. “What are we going to do?”
“Right now, it seems that dying is at the top of the list,” Jolaine said.
“Not yet,” Graham said. The bruises on her face seemed to be worsening as he watched.
“What, you think they’re going to let us live now that they’ve got what they want? I’ve been telling you from the beginning—”
“I lied,” he whispered.
A beat. “Excuse me?”
“The code,” he said. “It’s not the right one. I transposed some of the characters, and made up others.”
Jolaine looked confused. “But how? He made you repeat them.”
“So?” No matter how many times people talked about his memory, they always had a hard time grasping the reality.
“Could you have actually recited it backward?”
He smiled. “No. That was a bluff.” The smile went away, however, as he thought about the misery that lay ahead when the assholes found out what he’d done.
“Well, shit,” Jolaine said. “We need a plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Raven crashed on impact and broke apart, just as it was designed to do. A soldier-proof system, it was built to be frangible on impact so that the wings and the horizontal stabilizers in the rear would separate easily from the fuselage. That eliminated the need for smooth surfaces to allow for long roll-out landings. Georgie found the crash to be particularly entertaining, laughing far too loudly for the otherwise quiet night.
“A little stealth would be good right now,” Jonathan said to him as he collected the pieces and laid them across the bed of the Expedition. He locked the door when he was done and went back inside, where Boxers had cued up the recorded images.
“I’ve been looking at this, Boss,” Big Guy said as soon as Jonathan entered the room. “Good news — this is definitely the target.”
Jonathan smiled. “Confidence level?”
“Ninety-nine and change. Look here.”
Jonathan kneeled next to the chair Boxers had commandeered.
Big Guy rolled the wheel on the mouse and zoomed in on a sedan that was parked in the rear of the plant. “Look at that license plate.”
“That’s our guy,” he said. The plate matched the one that transported Jolaine from the jail. He clapped Boxers on the back. Since this adventure began, they’d been chasing assumptions. Before any shooting started, it was good to know that they were really in the right place. “What tactical info do you have?”
“I know we’ve got at least six bad guys, but it’s probably safe to assume twelve to fifteen.” He pointed to the screen with a capped pen as he spoke. “We’ve got two on each of the three main entrances — the white, black, and green sides. The red side is the loading dock, where the blueprints show an overhang. The IR doesn’t show anyone there, but no guarantees that’s not guarded, too.”
Boxers clicked the mouse, and the screen changed to the infrared view. The imagery transformed to black and silver and the details got fuzzy, nearly to the point of being a blur. “Here, we’re limited by technology,” Boxers said. “You can see on this section here”—he pointed to a spot against the black (back) wall that was twenty feet from the green (left) wall—“that it’s much, much colder than anywhere else in the building. I think that means they’ve turned the freezer on.”
“Which means they had a reason for doing it,” Jonathan said, closing the loop. “Assuming they’re not just cooling beers, the freezer holds something we want to see.”
“That’s where I was going,” Boxers said. “So if we assume eight people on the doors, nobody’s gonna work alone inside, so that’s at least ten. No way we can have a hard count. The kids say twenty to twenty-five.”
Before raiding a place, it helped to know precisely how many bad guys there were. It mattered less when the opposing force was massed together — say, in barracks, where mass-casualty tactics could do a lot of harm with relatively little effort or danger. But when the enemy was spread around like this, the team was looking at a lot of individual gunfights, and there was no way to know when the last bad guy had been dropped.
Enter the concept of the force multiplier. Through advanced fighting techniques, Jonathan and Boxers could tilt the odds away from the strengths of the enemy — cover and knowledge of the surroundings — toward their own strengths. Chief among those strengths were the ability to maneuver and shoot effectively in darkness.
“Superimpose the electrical feeds Mother Hen sent us,” Jonathan said.
“I guess we’ve got to assume that they haven’t jury-rigged something on their own,” Big Guy said. “If that’s the case, there appear to be two of them. The main box is here on the red side, on the loading dock. Then there’s another one — a big one — on the black side, on the outer wall of the freezer.”
Jonathan squinted, staring at the screen. It was so much easier to blow one source of power and move in. Now they would have to sequence two blasts. That wasn’t a big deal, necessarily, but it meant more time on target, and time meant additional exposure.
“That’s not the shit I worry about,” Boxers said.
Well, of course not, Jonathan thought. Boxers was most self-actualized when he was playing with explosives.
“I worry about how we’re going to get close enough to do what we need to do without being seen.”
He raised a good point. Breaching a fence was barely a challenge, but then what? Getting in was only half the mission. Getting out quickly with precious cargo intact was the greater challenge. With the entire perimeter fenced in, and with guards stationed outside, they couldn’t just crash the front gate and race up the driveway because it would take too much time and make too much noise. The key to an 0300 operation was to get the precious cargo out alive. With that kind of advance warning, the bad guys might panic and create a barricade situation that rarely ended well for anyone.
“Is there a back gate in the fence?” Jonathan asked.
Boxers shook his head. “We don’t have plans for the fence, and it doesn’t show in the imagery.”
“Sort of,” LeBron said.
Jonathan and Boxers turned in unison to face him. In his peripheral vision, Jonathan noted that Dawn’s face wore a similarly intrigued expression.
LeBron grew uncomfortable with the attention. “There was stuff back there,” he said. “Lots of scrap metal that nobody wanted, so maybe someone cut a hole in the fence.”
Dawn was aghast. “You stole? How could you do that? You have a family to support now. The judge told you that one more—”
“I didn’t steal,” LeBron said. “It was just there. It’s junk. Nobody wants it.”
“Why steal it, then?”
“For money. I sold it for scrap.”
“How did you get it to the scrap yard?”
“In Doobie’s truck,” LeBron said.
Jonathan raised a hand to interrupt the conversation. “Excuse me,” he said. “My clock is ticking here. LeBron, how big was the hole you cut?”
“Big enough for the truck.”
“No way that’s still there,” Boxers said. “These guys would have patched it up.”
“But they didn’t,” LeBron said. “We kinda patched it back up ourselves because we didn’t want to put up with a lot of shit from the cops if they found it — like they’d ever drive back there. We put the section we took down back up with a little wire to hold it in place. I was back there a few days ago, and nobody had changed nothin’.”