“What do we do with it now?” Crocker asked.
Lasher: “Was that the only green canister?”
Mancini: “There were about a dozen more like it.”
“You check those, too?”
“No.”
Lasher: “Doesn’t matter. We’ll take this one back as evidence. NATO will have to figure out how to deal with the rest.”
Jabril was feeling better. He said, “It’s too dangerous to handle.”
Lasher: “I brought a lead sheet in the truck. We’ll wrap it in the lead sheet and take it with us.”
Crocker: “Sounds like a plan.”
They’d parked the van at the second gate-the one that connected the military base to the chemical plant. Lasher and Ritchie volunteered to walk back and get it.
While the others waited, Crocker and Davis went to explore the far side of the hill. There they found a vent hidden behind a boulder, but nothing else.
Davis said, “Sometimes I wonder what kind of world we brought our kids into.”
“It was a hell of a lot easier to defend yourself when men fought with rocks and slingshots,” Crocker answered.
“You read about all this apocalyptic end-of-time stuff and it makes you wonder.”
“Sure does.”
They sat in the shade talking about how advances in technology, designed to make the world safer, seemed to be having the opposite effect. Crocker heard a car horn honk three times.
“There’s the van,” he said getting to his feet.
He had taken half a dozen steps around the hill when he heard angry voices speaking Arabic, and stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Davis asked.
“Listen,” Crocker whispered back, pointing to the other side of the hill, then holding a finger to his lips.
Davis looked perplexed.
Very carefully, Crocker craned his head around the edge of the hill to look. In the distance he saw the van driving away, accompanied by two white pickups armed with.50-caliber machine guns. In the foreground, approximately two hundred feet from where he was standing, a dozen men wearing black and brown kaffiyehs pointed automatic weapons at Mancini and Jabril, who were seated on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs.
As Crocker watched, the armed men led Mancini and Jabril to two more white pickup trucks, pushed them into the back, then piled in themselves and drove off, leaving behind a cloud of dust. The canister was gone.
“Who the hell are they?” Davis asked.
“I didn’t see any patches or insignia. Did you?”
“No, but there was a green flag painted on the door of the truck.”
“Fuck.”
The two SEALs ran along the back of the three hills and arrived at the fence surrounding the military base. Seeing parked pickups on the other side, they hid behind some rocks and waited almost an hour, until the sky started to turn dark, so they could enter the base with a diminished risk of being discovered.
“What do we do now?” Davis asked.
“First we climb the fence. Then we try to find our guys.”
Chapter Eleven
Pain is weakness leaving the body.
– Tom Sobal
Climbing the chain-link fence was the easy part, the only danger being the razor wire on top. Once Crocker and Davis got over that, they scrambled down the other side, crouched on the lid of a dumpster, then eased themselves down to the ground. They were completely unarmed and had no comms.
A wild animal howled in the distance. Otherwise, the landscape around them was eerily still. Abandoned tanks and vehicles in front of them, the shooting range to their left. Most of the camp, including the barracks, storage shed, and water tower, stood to their right. Beyond that rose the front gate.
“You wait here near the dumpster,” Crocker said. “I’ll go surveil the base.”
“Careful, boss.”
“Let’s hope our guys are still here.”
“What do we do if they’re not?”
“We’ll figure that out later.”
His excitement grew as he moved alone in the dark, hiding behind the wheels of an abandoned transport truck, checking to see if the coast was clear. He felt like he was a kid back in the town he’d grown up in, playing with stolen cars. Canvas flapped in the breeze that arrived as the sky turned black. A window on one of the storage sheds banged open and closed.
The four white pickups were parked thirty feet in front of him, the barrels of their.50-cals pointed at the stars.
Seeing no one near the vehicles, he ran toward them in a crouch, then heard someone cough and spit to his right. He ducked behind a barrel that reeked of urine, his heart pounding.
There was an armed man at two o’clock. Another farther to Crocker’s right, smoking a cigarette. They stood at the entrance to one of the barracks, talking in low voices, cradling AK-47s, recognizable by their long, curved magazines. A chill ran up his spine as he remembered the dozens of them that had been fired at him in places like Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iran.
Here I go again.
He waited for the soldier to toss his cigarette butt to the ground and enter the barracks with his colleague behind him. Then Crocker continued to the trucks, hoping to find a weapon of some kind. When he looked into the cab of the nearest Toyota, he saw a man sleeping on the front seat clutching what looked to be a brand-new Soviet-design PPSh-41 submachine gun.
Crocker thought for a second of wrestling it away but decided the noise might attract attention. He needed to assess the layout of the base first.
So he made a wide arc to the water tower, pausing to hide behind its legs, then continued to the far end of the two-hundred-foot-long concrete barracks. This part of the structure was badly in need of repair. Windows were missing on both floors, and so were many of the tiles on the roof. Dozens of bats darted in and out.
No sign of the van or the men. Desperation started to creep under his skin.
Someone screamed near the other end of the barracks, causing his hair to stand on end.
He saw a light on the second floor, then heard the man screaming again. This time it sounded like Jabril.
He ran along the front of the barracks and abruptly stopped when he saw two soldiers sitting out front. One of them tossed a rock toward the trucks. Crocker held his breath, turned on his toes, and hurried back.
This time he circled around the back of the barracks, which seemed deserted. What appeared to have been an exercise yard was now littered with garbage and pieces of rusting metal. The long building had been constructed in three forty-foot-wide sections, each with its own entrance in front and back. Each section had its own metal fire escape that ran the length of the six second-story windows and led to a ladder in the middle.
He hurried past barrels, broken bicycle parts, and rats scurrying through the trash to the ladder at the first section. Dim lights shone from the windows above. He heard someone talking in a loud voice.
The bottom of the ladder was beyond Crocker’s reach, so he jumped, held on to the bottom rung, and pulled himself up. As the ladder extended, it made a screeching metal sound.
The man who was speaking stopped. But no way was Crocker turning back, now that he’d come this far. He climbed to the second floor, lay facedown on the metal slats, and waited, feeling his chest rising, adrenaline rushing through his body.
One minute passed, then another, then three. No sound from inside. He looked along the length of the barracks.
Seeing no soldiers, he pulled himself up onto his knees and walked in a crouch to the window with the light. Eased his head up so that his eyes barely reached the bottom of the window. Saw shadows against the wall and ceiling, but his view was blocked by the backs of several men in mismatched camouflage.