Len felt something dissolve in his chest. One anomaly could be coincidence. A second almost certainly spelled trouble. “Wake everybody up,” he commanded. “Turn on the yard lights, and send a five-man team to the end of the bridge. I want that area scoured. I want to talk personally to whoever they find.”
“Suppose it’s the police?”
Dmitri said, “If it’s the police—”
Len raised his hand to silence him. “If it’s the police, then we are done here, and we do all the damage we can do.” He hung up.
“I’m proud of you,” Dmitri said.
Len smiled and donned the coat that had been draping the back of his chair. “I told you dozens of times, my friend. Growing old and tired does not make me less committed to our cause.”
On the wall opposite Len’s desk, a gun rack held three AK47s and two American M16s. Len walked to the rack and grabbed an AK and a bandolier of spare magazines. He gave it to Dmitri. “Speed is now of the essence,” he said. “We need to get the trucks loaded and back on the road as soon as possible. It could be that this is nothing, or it could be that we are under attack. Either way, the sooner we get the trucks rolling, the better off we’re going to be.”
Dmitri racked the bolt to chamber a round. “And you?”
Len gestured to the bank of computer screens on his desk. “I’m going to organize the defense. Let’s get this done.”
The door on the far side of the vestibule opened onto a dimly lit hallway. Probably enough light for Yelena to see where she was going, but not enough to flare out the NVGs.
“Clear,” Jonathan said of his view down the left-hand side of the hallway.
“Clear,” Boxers said of the right.
“Sidesaddle,” Jonathan said at a loud whisper. “On me. Now.”
He never looked to confirm — instead keeping his eyes trained continuously on his segment of the kill zone — but he heard her footsteps as she cleared the jamb. Directly across from the vestibule door was the secured passageway that led to a cross hall that led to the cell blocks, the second largest one of which, designated Building Bravo, had reportedly been converted to barracks for the folks who minded the store here.
Jonathan told Yelena to close the vestibule door behind her and put her hand on his rucksack.
The door latched. Yelena said, “I can see all right.”
“You’re arguing,” Jonathan said. “It’s not about what you can see. It’s about not shooting you because you get in the way. If your hand is on my ruck, I know where you are.”
He felt the tug in his shoulders as she grabbed on. “Moving left,” he said. He led the way, his weapon at his shoulder, knowing that Boxers was moving as his shadow, in reverse, as they made their way past a heavily reinforced door on the right that led to the north-west quadrant of the yard. This main hallway served in the old days as the primary conduit from the north end of the prison to the south end. Since it was an administrative area, it lacked the internal security walls and gates that blocked free passage through the cell blocks themselves.
Jonathan was still ten feet from the closed chapel door when he caught the first hint of the aroma of explosives. He’d heard others describe the smell as that of almonds, but that never resonated with him. As far as he was concerned, it was a chemical smell unique to itself. For the odor to escape the size of the door he was looking at, there had to be a shitload of them. In the slice of time it took to snap a finger, he’d begun to second-guess his own plan. It was one thing to create a diversion. It was something else to blow up a chunk of Canada.
“I’m at the door,” Jonathan announced. He found the knob — actually, another ring — and he turned it. This time, while the lock turned, the deadbolt clearly had been set. The deadbolt actually looked new. “Hey, Big Guy. Take a look.”
Boxers bent at the waist to get closer to the lock. Then he stood tall and looked at the hinge side of the jamb. “If you’re asking my opinion, I think the Mossberg is a waste of time on this.”
“I agree. But a GPC—”
“—is a bad idea. There’s a shitload of boom-boom in there. For all we know it’s stored right up against the door. I vote we use the irons.”
“All right. Yelena, look at me.”
She did.
“Watch both ends of the hallway. If you see anyone, shoot them. And I mean anyone who’s not Big Guy or me.”
She looked terrified.
“You said you’ve done it before,” Jonathan reminded. As he spoke, he shrugged out of his ruck and laid it on the floor. “You go to hell for the first one. After that, the others don’t count. Can you do it?”
“Of course.”
Jonathan was learning that one of the most surefire ways to motivate Yelena was to imply that she was somehow soft. “Safety off, finger off the trigger till you need it, and don’t point that muzzle anywhere close to me.”
Point made, Jonathan unstrapped the irons kit from the outside of his ruck. “Irons” was the collective name for a mini-Halligan bar, a five-pound sledgehammer. and a K-tool, a nifty device that resembled a stylized letter K, and was specifically designed to pull the cylinders out of deadbolts. It worked by sliding the K-tool to the edge of the lock’s keyway, and then seating it with a few sharp hits from the hammer. Once it was seated, you inserted the flat end of the Halligan into a slot on the K-tool and through pure leverage, you stripped the cylinder from the lock. After that, the rest was normally easy.
The thickness of the door translated to the need for a lot of leverage. Jonathan’s first attempt proved to be light.
“Get out of the way, little man,” Boxers said.
“Bite me.” On the next try, Jonathan all but jumped on the end of the Halligan. It budged, but didn’t clear. The third try took care of it. The cylinder cleared the lock casing and launched across the hall with a metallic clang. With the mechanism exposed, the next step was some quick work with a pick, and the door floated open.
“There you go,” Jonathan said. “Now, it’s your turn.”
As Jonathan reassembled the irons, Big Guy scooted past with a huge grin on his face. Truly, Boxers was at his happiest when he got to blow shit up. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said.
Boxers’ slice in the hierarchy of assault team assignments was the deployment of heavy weapons, the piloting of vehicles, and the placement of explosives. Big Guy was a true artist when it came to breaking things. He could fashion a shaped charge out of C4 if he wanted to poke a hole in steel, or he could turn a flat spot into a crater if shock and awe were the orders of the day.
Tonight’s mission was all about using a small explosive to detonate a lot of explosives. There wasn’t much elegance to it, but it was astonishing what a few blocks of C4 connected by a few feet of detonating cord could do. Det cord was Jonathan’s greatest friend. Essentially a plastic tube stuffed with PETN, known to chemists as pentaerythritol tetranitrate, detonating cord could transmit an explosion from one charge to another at a velocity of about four miles per second.
Jonathan stayed in the hallway with Yelena, watching the darkness.
The dead sentry’s radio rasped in his pocket, “Central, the trucks are arriving.”
The now-familiar Russian-accented voice said, “Unit One, go check on Units Three and Four. I can’t raise them on the radio.”
Yelena’s eyes grew huge. “This is bad.”
“As good a word for it as I can think of,” Jonathan said. He keyed his mike. “Big Guy, we’re in trouble. Step it up.”
“Never rush an artist.” It didn’t sound like it, but that was Boxers-speak for “okay.”
Thank God for satellite maps. Jonathan had already figured out the routes from one place to another, and unless he was woefully mistaken, the quickest way for the yard guards to access the front gate was to pass through the door that was just fifteen feet from the spot where he was standing.