Mahmad waited to see if there were any further instructions before he saluted his new general and made ready to leave.
“You wish these announcements to be released immediately. General?”
Fahid preened at the sound of his new title.
“Without delay,” he confirmed.
Bogner had been crouching in the darkness for over two hours when he was no longer able to detect the sounds of the guard detail searching the building. Twice NIMF guards had unlocked the door, poked the beam of their flashlights into the room, made several cursory sweeps across the floor of the room, and decided there was no reason to probe further. Each time Bogner had been ready with the knife from Mafraqi’s aux pack just in case. Now it was time to move out. He was counting on the dim lighting and the fact that the guards, having already conducted two sweeps of his end of the building, would have moved on. He managed to inch his way to the service door at the end of the hall, unlocked it, and discovered a steel staircase leading down one flight to a lower level.
His main concern now that he was in the basement of the building was whether or not the guards had already conducted their search of the lower level.
At the bottom of the stairwell was another series of steel-reinforced doors. The entire structure had the look of something Baddour had designed and constructed to withstand the kind of missile attacks the Iraqis had been subjected to in the Gulf War some ten years earlier and the more recent Desert Fox attacks. To Bogner’s left there was an open, oversized service door monitored by an electronic sentry. It led to a twenty-foot-wide underground concrete-reinforced passageway that had been designed to accommodate supply and personnel movements that would go undetected on the surface. Undoubtedly it was connected to a network of similar accesses to other buildings in the complex.
At the same time, the ceiling of the twelve-foot-high tunnel was laced with a latticework of heating and water pipes, control valves, and electrical conduits. Good old Robert Miller — Packer’s man Friday had guessed right again. From the outset it had been Miller’s contention it wasn’t what was on the surface of the Nasrat compound that should be concerning them, it was what was going on underneath.
To Bogner’s right there was another series of steel doors spaced at roughly twenty-foot intervals on each side of the passageway that led back under the confinement building. Bogner’s first impulse was to ignore them and find out what was at the other end of the tunnel… but that would require finding a way to bypass the electronic sentry.
To do that he needed both tools and a gimmick of some kind. Instead he followed his second option, and the one he knew made more sense; make certain he knew what was where — particularly if this was where he had to survive until he figured out a way to get out of the complex.
One by one, Bogner began systematically checking out each of the rooms. The first gave him access to the boiler room and the second appeared to be nothing more than a cluttered storage area for surplus furniture along with a few cardboard boxes, empty crates, and the like. Neither appeared to offer much in the way of materials he could use. It was in the maintenance and supply rooms, just moments later, that he found the kind of supplies he was looking for. While Fahid was busy posturing and waving the bogus confession around, Bogner was finding what he needed to give his Iraqi hosts a couple of king-size headaches.
And to do that, all he needed was a little time and a little Yankee ingenuity.
The last two hours hadn’t been wasted. Not only had Bogner stayed hidden and made certain the guards didn’t discover his whereabouts, he’d also had time to do a little scheming of his own — and the plan was finally beginning to take shape. The entire effort had to revolve around being able to ferret out the information he had come for — and the thought that maybe he could throw in a little Bognerlike bonus: finding a way to put a serious crimp in Fahid’s Nasrat operation. In order to be effective, though, phase one of his “serious crimp” had to involve something more than just a couple of superficial dings in Fahid’s armor. It had to be something that gave the NIMF leader real operational problems.
He closed the door to the maintenance room, locked it, and began sorting through the supplies.
It didn’t take long for Bogner to find enough to get him started. He located three quart glass bottles of cleaning fluid, emptied them, and refilled them with a mixture of two-thirds gasoline and one-third lubricating oil. Then he took a cleaning rag, tore it into strips, soaked the strips in gasoline, and stuffed one end of the strip in the opening of each bottle to act as a fuse. He finished by putting the caps back on the bottles, wrapped them in rags, and finally, used more rags to construct a crude carrying case.
Through it all, Bogner continued to think about what he had to work with. The inventory of usable components was limited, but there was some consolation in the fact he had already figured out how to use what he had. To start with, he had the contents of the aux pack he had stripped from the NIMF guard. There were two boxes of twenty-four rounds of ammunition, a field knife with a heavy six-inch blade, a small spool of wire, wire cutters, and two lovely antipersonnel grenades. In addition he had the guard’s Mk 2 automatic, a flashlight, a supply of batteries he had found in the maintenance room, and a good idea where and how he intended to use most of it. The only hurdle he hadn’t cleared was how to get past the multitude of electronic sentries and negotiate the length of the subterranean passageways between the buildings.
The tunnels presented him with a major obstacle.
There was no place to hide once he got past the electronic sensors, and he would be vulnerable to anyone opening the doors at either end and opening fire.
Finally, there was the matter of targets to consider.
While he had been forced to wait for the guards to complete their bumbling search of the confinement area, he had tried to figure out which of the areas were most critical to Fahid’s operation.
The primary target was obviously the area where Fahid’s people were producing the chemical and biological weapons. But that, he figured, would be the most difficult to get to, a real long shot. In his briefing, Miller had indicated he was convinced the production area was beneath the main Nasrat structure. If that was the case, it would be well fortified, well protected, and extremely difficult to penetrate. Less difficult to accomplish and with a higher probability of success would be knocking out some of Fahid’s fleet of helicopter gunships — not exactly a crippling blow, but Bogner figured it would annoy the hell out of Fahid.
The choice of targets was further complicated by the fact that until he could figure out how to find his way through the labyrinth of underground service tunnels, he was going to have to conduct a series of hit-and-run operations. If that was the case, he was most likely to be successful if he focused on acts that disrupted essential services: base power, communications, maybe even Fahid’s radar installation. Finally, there was the long-shot possibility of being able to get to Dr. Zilka Rashid or even Fahid himself.
Bogner was still toying with his options when he picked up his bag of Molotov cocktails, checked for sounds outside his door, opened it, and peered out into the dimly lit corridor. When he did he could hear the sound of footsteps in the confinement area on the floor above. Bogner held his breath. If the guards were backtracking and double-checking their first two sweeps through the building, there was no reason to assume they would not eventually work their way down to the lower level. He backed into the room, closed the door, cleared off one of the workbenches, removed the small glass covering over the wall thermostat, cupped it in his hand, smeared the convex side of the glass bubble with a thin coating of the light lubricating oil he had used to make the cocktails, and waited.