60. Chapter Sixty
Chapter sixty
In fact, during Oscar’s career, most of the critical intelligence he’d gathered had been attained in a restaurant or coffee shop, sometimes a dive bar, sipping a drink and chatting.
Far from the Hollywood conception of spies breaking into heavily guarded facilities in a black watch cap with a pen light clamped between their teeth, most spy work could be done with a handshake and a smile.
Oscar looked down at the pistol in his hand, took a deep breath and started toward the target building, watching the shadows for any sign of movement.
One part of his brain was checking all the angles, calculating which busted out windows might hide snipers, where the traps were likely to be set.
The other part of his brain was busy trying to remember how long it had been since he’d fired a weapon.
Had it been ten years? More? How long since he’d cleaned it? Would it even work?
Horst Denborough and Robby Webber piled out of the car and hurried along behind Oscar. They also had their guns out. The two younger agents had wide eyes and looked a lot like Oscar felt, like gazelles walking willingly into a lion’s den.
Oscar reached the corner of the building first, put his shoulder against the clammy stone, and waited for Webber and Denborough to catch up.
He raised a finger to his lips, signaling them silence, then slipped along the wall, shoulder whispering against the brickwork.
His stomach tied up in knots and his legs felt like they were full of electrical current.
The door was sixty feet away, hidden in the shadows created by a passage way cutting between two buildings. An attack could come from any angle. It was a fact that was not lost on Jankowitz.
Keep it cool, Oscar told himself. Take it slow. Play it safe.
Untold millions of lives might be riding on his actions over the next few minutes.
Oscar wanted to do it right. He didn’t have a family of his own, but he had a sister back in Allentown, along with a pair of nieces.
One had just graduated college and was about to tie the knot.
He’d be damned if he was going to let radicals release a virus that might hurt those girls.
Reaching the door, Oscar searched his coat pocket with his left hand, found the small penlight and clicked it on. The beam pierced the darkness, winking on a slim line of wire stretched across the bottom of the door, less than an inch off the ground.
Oscar made sure he pointed the tripwire out to his two comrades.
Horst Denborough’s eyebrows went up and he let out a barely audible whistle.
Oscar used his flashlight beam to follow the line along the bottom of the wall to a small collection of busted pallets and empty boxes piled against the side of the factory. The wire would be attached to a shaped charge, probably with ball bearings or nails for shrapnel.
Robby Webber took a can of highly reflective glow in the dark spray paint from his pocket and used it to mark the wire.
It wasn’t enough for Oscar and his team to know about the trap.
They needed the QRF team coming later to know about it as well.
It wouldn’t do to have the military guys come later and accidentally set off an explosion.
Just because Oscar and his team had spotted the line, didn’t mean the SpecOps would as well.
Any time the United States Military has to surround and secure a location, it’s always a kinetic, often confusing situation. Mistakes can, and often do, happen.
Oscar could not afford any mistakes. Not here. Not on his watch.
Once Webber had marked the wire, Horst went to work picking the lock on the heavy iron door. It took him entirely too long. Seconds turned into minutes and sweat dripped from Denborough’s long nose while he searched for tumblers in the dark.
At last they heard the lock click and the door hinged open.
“Go slow,” Oscar warned the younger men in a whisper. “Go slow and watch for traps.”
A good thing too because they found another tripwire in the cramped hallway beyond the door. The line ran up the wall into a small hole in the dropdown ceiling. They propped the door open with a loose brick, carefully marked and crossed each of the traps, then pressed deeper into the facility.
Oscar realized his entire body was slick with sweat. It had soaked through his button-down shirt. His toes squished inside his shoes, like someone had filled his socks with grease. He mopped fat wet drops from his forehead as he crept along the hallway.
One of the doors opened onto a small makeshift guard shack equipped with a cot, a closed-circuit TV, plenty of water, and a collection of firearms that would make most small-town police departments in rural America jealous.
The door and the outer wall had been reinforced with Kevlar.
A man inside that room could hold off a group of determined attackers for hours.
The fact that it was empty now meant who ever had been here, had cleared out.
And they’d done so in a hurry or they would have taken all that firepower with them.
At least, Oscar sincerely hoped. If the bad guys had cleared out in a hurry, that meant two things for Oscar and his team; first there wouldn’t be any shooting. Second, and probably most important, the terror group had likely left behind critical intel.
Denborough eyed the collection of small arms leaning against the wall and selected an AK47 rifle for himself.
He looked up to find the others watching him.
He shrugged. The meaning was clear. Just because they hadn’t encountered any resistance yet, didn’t mean they wouldn’t.
Best to be prepared. A rifle with a thirty round magazine was a lot better in a fight than a handgun with ten.
Webber motioned for Denborough to pass him a rifle a moment later, Oscar did the same.
Equipped with better firepower, the three men pressed deeper into the facility. At the corner, they marked another tripwire before stepping onto the factory floor where forgotten manufacturing equipment covered in decades of dust mingled together with newer, state-of-the- art facilities.
“Pay dirt,” Denborough whispered.
“Spread out,” Oscar ordered. “Make sure we’re alone.”
The three men separated. Webber took one side of the spacious factory while Denborough took the other. Jankowitz went right up the middle, going slow, taking extra care where he placed his feet. When they had done a complete sweep of the facility, Robby spread his arms and announced, “We did it.”
From the other side of the factory Denborough called out, “Guess that makes us heroes.”
Jankowitz allowed himself to breathe easy for the first time since the call came in.
A smile hitched up one side of his face.
He cautioned, “Don’t get cocky, fellas. Now we have to hold this place until the cavalry arrives.
Let’s police up as much intel as we can before they get here.
The gung-ho SpecOps guys are bound to make a mess of the place and muddle up any useable info. Just be careful.”
“Roger that,” Denborough said.
Webber motioned with the barrel of his rifle to the sealed off testing facility, safe behind thick plastic. “We going to toss that for intelligence?”
“No way.” Jankowitz shook his head. “Leave that for the CDC guys.”
“You couldn’t pay me to go in there,” Denborough said. He had already turned to the tables of computers. The facility had no power, which meant the computers were not running, but he set to work with a small screwdriver, opening the backs and removing the hard drives.
Oscar placed a video call to Samantha Gunn back at Langley while he ran the beam of his flashlight along the heavily shielded virology lab which had been erected in the middle of the unused factory. “Gunn, you getting this video?”
“Coming through crystal clear,” Samantha told him. “Is that the factory?”
“We’ve got the place secured,” Jankowitz assured her.
“Thank God,” Samantha said. “That’s a load off my mind.”
“How long until the military guys get here?”
“I’ll see if I can get you a sitrep. In the meantime, what can you tell me?”
“Looks like the whole place was run on a series of diesel generators,” Oscar said, as he followed the power lines to a busted window where the cables snaked out of view. “They’ve got a state-of-the-art set up here. These guys were doing serious business.”
“I’m less interested in their power set up and more interested in where they might be now,” Sam said. “Are you plugged into their computers yet?”
“We’re working on it.” Jankowitz turned back to the folding tables, where Denborough was busy tethering the hard drives he had removed to his own encrypted laptop. He paused long enough to give a thumbs up.
“How long do you need?” Jankowitz asked.
“Give me a minute.” Denborough pushed a pair of heavy framed glasses up the bridge of his nose and rapped keys.
His flaming red hair stood out in the shadowy darkness.
Light from the laptop screen bathed his freckled face in a pale blue frost fire.
He nodded, as if finding exactly what he expected to find.
“As I suspected, they reformatted the computers before they left.”
From the phone, Sam asked, “Can you get anything from them?”
“Deleted is rarely ever really gone,” Denborough explained. “They deleted the files, but they didn’t wipe the drives. I can still recover the info. Well, most of it anyway. But it’s going to take time.”
“Time is a luxury we can’t afford,” Samantha reminded them.
“Working as fast as I can,” Denborough said.
While they were speaking, Jankowitz’s ears pricked up at what he thought was the sound of a helicopter in the distance.
A moment later, all doubt was removed. He definitely heard the steady hard whomp-whomp-whomp of an incoming Huey.
The tangle of nerves in his belly finally started to let go.
The SEALs—or maybe they’d be Delta—were here now.
They’d lock down the area and dismantle the explosives.
Jankowitz felt a ponderous weight slide off his shoulders.
The professionals with the big guns would be on the ground in minutes. He smiled. “I hear choppers.”