Chapter Sixteen
MIA
Five minutes became three before the command vehicle had fully stopped moving. Raven had the side monitors awake before Keller put the van in park, one screen holding Hawk’s overwatch feed while another showed the rear lot of the cold-storage facility through a long lens.
The building looked exactly as dead as it had in the surveillance photographs.
Faded blue lettering peeled from the concrete above the loading bays, weeds grew through cracks along the service lane, while a strip of late-afternoon sunlight caught the dirty windows of the front offices without giving us anything useful through them.
The people inside knew how to make an occupied building look abandoned.
I sat behind Raven with my headset pressed tight over my ears.
Keller stood near the open rear doors checking his radio while two German officers waited outside in unmarked vehicles, far enough back that nothing about the industrial road had changed yet.
On the tactical display, Wolf’s team moved toward the west side of the property in separate pieces.
Viper was closest to the building, a dark shape near the low fence with his suppressed SIG held across his chest, weapon light and laser module tucked tight to the handguard.
Wolf stayed several meters behind him with the HK416 while Bear carried the breaching equipment farther back.
Jackal’s marker sat south of the property with two German officers, close enough to cut off the road without showing the warehouse cameras a sudden police presence.
Hawk was barely a marker at all. He had been on the north embankment for hours, buried somewhere in scrub and dead grass with a clear view across the rear lot and loading bays.
Raven touched his transmit key.
“All stations, comms check.”
Viper answered first. “Good.”
Bear followed. “Good.”
Jackal’s voice came through quieter. “Good.”
Hawk said, “Good.”
Wolf came last. “Move.”
There was no countdown after that. Viper crossed the service lane and reached the fence, cutting through the section German surveillance had already identified as partially damaged.
He slipped into the property and disappeared behind a stack of broken pallets.
Wolf followed, then Bear, while Raven tracked them through the external cameras without touching anything inside the network that might trigger an alert.
My hands rested on the edge of the workstation.
I had spent enough time watching them work to know what each marker meant, but knowing did not make sitting still easier.
Somewhere inside that building were women who might have spent days stuck behind old, insulated doors while we were rebuilding reimbursements and fuel receipts.
Kade had walked into the same building that morning and had not come back out.
Raven enlarged loading bay two. Bear reached the personnel door beside it and checked the frame. The camera angle showed only part of his back before Viper shifted into position near the corner.
Wolf’s voice came through my headset.
“Bear.”
“Mechanical. Five seconds.”
Bear put the Halligan into the gap near the latch and worked it once, hard and controlled.
The metal flexed. He reset the tool, drove it deeper, and the door opened inward without the blast I had been bracing for.
Viper went through first. The external camera lost him immediately.
Raven switched to the loading-corridor feed we had compromised earlier.
It showed an empty stretch of concrete under white fluorescent lights, the image slightly warped at the edges. A steel door filled the far end.
Viper appeared at the bottom of the frame, weapon raised. Wolf came behind him. Bear stayed at the entry long enough to keep the door controlled, then moved inside.
“Front corridor clear,” Viper said.
“Office block right,” Raven told them. “Insulated section straight ahead. One camera. No movement on feed.”
Wolf answered, “Take offices first.”
A man stepped out of a side doorway before Viper reached it.
I saw the pistol in his hand a fraction of a second before he raised it, but Wolf was already moving.
He pulled Viper off the angle with one hand as the HK416 came to his shoulder, and two suppressed shots cracked through my headset before the man could clear the doorway.
The camera jerked as he disappeared out of frame.
“One down,” Wolf said. “Weapon.”
His voice did not change. Keller glanced at me once before returning to his radio.
German officers on the perimeter had heard the shots too.
Nobody moved until Wolf called for them.
Viper cleared the office doorway and Bear moved past the man on the floor, checking him only long enough to confirm he would not become another threat.
Raven pulled up the next camera.
“Rear lot still quiet. BMW hasn’t moved. Three vans remain.”
Jackal said, “South road clean.”
Hawk’s voice came from the embankment. “Movement east window. One male, upper office.”
Wolf changed direction without hesitation. “Hold him if he stays inside.”
“Holding.”
Viper disappeared deeper into the office block. Thirty seconds later a woman shouted through his microphone, her voice partly swallowed by boots and doors, and another voice rose behind hers. Viper answered in English, softer than I had ever heard him speak.
“Police. Stay where you are. Hands where I can see them. You’re safe.”
My fingers tightened around the edge of the workstation when he said it.
Wolf came onto comms. “Raven, medical package now.”
Keller was already moving.
“German support advancing,” he said into his radio, then looked at me. “Stay with Raven until interior route is clear.”
I nodded.
On the screen, Wolf crossed the loading corridor toward the steel door at the far end. Bear reached it a moment later.
“Locked from outside,” Bear said.
He crouched near the mechanism. The old cold-room doors had been designed to seal tight enough to hold temperature for hours.
Someone had added a modern hasp and two heavy padlocks to this one, then run a steel bar through a welded bracket beside the frame.
Bear looked once, rejected the Halligan, and reached for the compact hydraulic tool clipped to his bag.
“Thirty seconds.”
“Take them,” Wolf said.
The bar bent first. The camera had no audio from inside the room, but when the final lock gave, the door moved outward less than an inch before stopping against pressure from the other side. Bear froze.
“Something behind it.”
Viper came back to him. Together they pulled carefully until the gap widened. A mattress had been shoved against the door from inside. A bare hand slipped around its edge, trembling hard enough that I could see it on the camera. Bear let go of the tool and dropped his weapon onto its sling.
“Easy,” he said. “Easy. We’re opening it.”
More hands appeared as the mattress shifted. When the door finally opened far enough for the camera to see past Bear’s shoulder, bodies filled the frame along both walls and behind the mattress. I stopped trying to count.
They were packed along the walls and between stained mattresses that covered nearly every section of concrete.
Some stood because there was nowhere else to go.
Others stayed seated with their backs pressed against the insulated panels, arms wrapped around themselves despite the warmth that was probably trapped inside.
Plastic water bottles lay empty beside a bucket near the corner.
The room had no windows, and the only privacy was a sheet tied between two pipes around another bucket.
Several women recoiled when Viper entered.
One grabbed the woman beside her and pulled her backward. Bear stayed at the threshold.
“Raven, tell medical we have nine in room one.”
Wolf did not step fully inside. He looked past them toward the rear wall, then toward Bear.
“Viper, with me.”
Keller touched my shoulder.
“Now.”
I grabbed the photographs and followed him out of the command vehicle. After hours in the heated van, the late-afternoon cold went straight through my jacket as we moved toward the property with two female German officers and a paramedic team behind us.
The warehouse looked larger from ground level, its concrete walls blotting out most of the lowering sun. I could smell diesel from the vans before we reached the open side door, mixed with wet asphalt and something chemical leaking from the building itself.
Keller stopped us at the threshold while Bear checked the corridor.
“Clear to room one,” Bear said. “Stay left. Do not go past my marker.”
Keller repeated the instructions in German for the officers behind us.
I stepped inside. The smell reached me before the room did.
Disinfectant covered the top of it, harsh enough to sting my nose, but underneath was sweat, urine, damp fabric and old food.
Something medicinal hung in the air too, sweet and faintly chemical, the same kind of smell I remembered from the sedatives recovered at Haus Eberhardt.
My throat tightened, and I breathed through my mouth until the first wave of nausea passed.
The loading corridor was colder than the room beyond it, though the refrigeration system had been shut down long ago.
Concrete walls held onto the chill and threw every sound back at us: boots over concrete, radio chatter, a woman crying behind the steel door, another coughing while someone tried to calm her.
Bear stood beside the entrance to room one, one hand up to keep the flow controlled.
“Medical first. No questions unless somebody offers you something urgent.”
Keller nodded. “Understood.”