Expecting to find an office where the records were kept, I discovered only a single desk a few feet from the rear door. There was a brand-new Dell computer at the side, with a modest display screen and a wired keyboard on the desktop. I booted it up, finger over the screen button so I could turn it off if I heard someone coming.
The machine booted into Windows 7 without asking for a password. A few clicks later I had an Internet connection. I typed in the URL of a site Shunt had set up and hit Return.
The site looked like a garden-variety page of porn, featuring your usual big bazookas and unprotected flanks. I moved the cursor to a sensitive area on the first picture and clicked.
A message appeared: Access denied. It wasn’t really, though—it was a fake message that would be stored in the computer. Five seconds after I cleared the screen, Shunt was looking at the computer’s hard drive, starting to download the data.
I went and looked around. The place was a druggist’s wet dream—there were pills of every shape and size imaginable, identified only by bar codes. Large bottles were stacked neatly near some of the machines; boxes with other bottles were packed in different pyramids around other stations. The place could cure a thousand different diseases, I’m sure.
The far side of the room contained a cascading collection of metal containers, miniature silos of different chemicals. An area at the front contained shelves of more boxes and a few very large bottles, all with writing in English identifying what they were.
How good were the drugs that were being made here? The machines to mix and press the pills practically gleamed in the dim light, and there were no rats or other vermin in the place—present company excepted, of course. Would I buy my acetylsalicylic acid from here? Lansoprazole? Codeine? Xanax?
I’d gone back toward the front of the room when I heard the outer door opening. Ducking down, I hid behind a stack of boxes, slowing my breathing as the door opened.
This time the guard switched on the light. I squeezed my shoulders down, trying to make myself invisible. I took my pistol, in case that didn’t work.
The guard mumbled to himself as he walked through the room. I leaned forward just enough to get a glimpse of him as he peered left and right. Satisfied that the room was empty, he came back and began working his way methodically down the small storerooms at the south side of the room, checking each one.
I sidled around, waiting for him to finish. But as he came out of the last one, he happened to glance to the back of the room. Something caught his eye: the computer screen, which I had neglected to turn off. He walked to the machine and began complaining loudly. I’m not sure what he was saying, but I would guess it was along the lines of Those dipshit techies never remember to turn anything off.
By the time he left the room five minutes later, my sat phone was shaking so hard it could have pounded a nail into my leg.
“What the hell is going on?” asked Shunt when I answered. “Why’d you turn the computer off? I wasn’t done downloading.”
“It wasn’t me, it was a guard. How much time do you need?”
“A few minutes.” I went to the computer and turned it back on. “Find anything good?”
“Some lists of people they do business with. Nothing jumped out at me. They also have the names of shipping agents they use. We can track through them if I don’t get any other information.”
“OK.”
“Say, do you think you could pick up some codeine while you’re there? I have a tooth that’s bothering me.”
“I’ll cure it when I get back,” I told him. “I have some rusty pliers that’ll do the trick.”
“Thanks.”
I restored the connection. Shunt’s program finished doing its dirty work in a few minutes and he placed a “rat” on the hard drive—a type of program that would share whatever happened on the computer with Shunt’s network back home.
“We’re done,” he said.
I shut down the machine and started to take my leave. But as I cracked open the back door, light flooded in—enough light to shoot a movie. Closing it quickly, I retreated to the side room where I’d come in to see what was going on.
The guards had activated a set of floodlights surrounding the building. The lights weren’t as much of a problem as the people in front of them were: the grounds were filled with workers, several of whom had chain saws. Apparently the guards’ supervisor didn’t want a repeat of the “accident” that had broken the window.
If he was sending people to take care of the trees, what about the window itself?
I made it out of the room just in time, ducking behind a set of machines as three men came in from the front. They were workmen, carrying tools and several very large panes of glass. The men were wearing lab coats—why that was necessary, I have no idea, but it did provide me with an easy means to escape. While they were inside the room, I skirted through the machinery, went over to the storeroom nearest the front, and selected the largest coat and cap I could find.
By that point, the window had been repaired. The men came out of the room and began examining the machines, making sure there was no damage. They were techies, not glaziers.
A quick wave to the two guards in the guardhouse on the left, and I was out.
Almost. One of the guards yelled to me in Bengali. I have no idea what he said, but I replied in a universal language all guys would understand: sweeping around, I mimed myself unzipping my pants and relieving myself, rocked my arms as if running, then spun and walked quickly into the woods.
Works every time.
* * *
The connection to Veep via the bank account was a thin reed. The fact that the unlicensed drug plant manufactured goods similar to those I was buying was an intriguing coincidence.
The fact that the cell phone I had taken the call on in Djibouti had been purchased by the same credit card that paid for a bill to the drug company—now that was interesting.
“It wasn’t actually a bill to the drug company,” Shunt said, correcting my paraphrase of what he’d just told me. “What they did was, they bought chemicals and then had them delivered to this office in Rangpur. That office is rented by the people who own the drug company. Got it?”
Shunt had a lot of information about the overall operation, thanks to his downloading of the hard drive on the administrator’s machine. Among his choicest finds were e-mails sent to a man in Chittagong who acted as a shipping agent. The bootleg drugs apparently were shipped from the building right alongside other shipments to India. Once they reached the port, they were placed on a different ship, and from there, traveled to Africa, Europe, or the Middle East, wherever the buyer had specified.
That gave him a dozen leads to pursue. As he pursued them, he confirmed that the most recent shipment was aboard the Indiamotion, the same ship Garrett had mentioned. It was headed to Europe. He’d done some research on the company.
“Research” in this case being Shunt’s word for breaking and entering.
“Pretty typical shipping company computer system,” he told me. “They have this interface where their company officials and the ships’ captains can check the position of all the ships. They think it’s pretty innovative. Easy to break into, though.”
“Which you did.”
“Yeah. Wasn’t very hard. Indiamotion is off the coast of Africa,” said Shunt. “The boat’s going through the canal up to Europe. If we could bug the boxes, we’d get a lot more information. I could coordinate arrivals with payments, maybe figure out the whole network. I don’t know if it’s an Allah’s Rule shipment,” Shunt added. “But until I get more information, you know, it’s what you always say—don’t ass-u-me.”
Shunt started babbling technical information and other things he’d been working on. I started to zone out—until something in the middle of his diatribe about 0s and 1s caught my attention.
“… The shipping line’s security is so easy to breach, that a bunch of people have done it. I put a tracker on, and guess whose
computer has been used to access the company site?”
You can always tell when Shunt thinks he has earth-shattering information: he answers his questions with breathless answers.
“Veep.” Shunt was hyperventilating. “His computer goes on that site regularly. He’s checked that ship like two or three times this week.”
“Veep?” I asked.
“We have that earlier connection, now this. There’s got to be something up with him, right? I mean, not to ass-u-me, but, right? Right? Right?”
“What were the ports again?”
“Hang on.”
I was thinking we could follow the shipments once they landed, but the logistics would be tricky—I’d have to set up in every port they were planning to land in. Meanwhile, we’d still have to set up for the Allah’s Rule delivery, assuming it was a separate shipment.
No, it would be much smarter to visit the ship before it landed. And so a visit was arranged.
(II)
Forty-eight hours later, I stood behind a curtain at the rear of a 727, sucking on pure oxygen and waiting for a signal from the cockpit. We were flying right around 29,000 feet, following the general course taken by cargo flights from India to Djibouti—which made sense, as this was a commercial cargo plane on a scheduled run.
I wasn’t going all the way to Djibouti. My destination was a speck in the ocean several hundred miles to the east.
Connections inside the Indian security forces—and a good amount of hard American currency—had helped make it possible for me to hitch a ride. And now as the lights flashed in the hold, it was time for me to take my leave.
I have fond memories of 727s stretching back to my days with Six. They tell me the aircraft are obsolete now, due to aging airframes, changing airline requirements, flight regulations, and unfortunate developments related to the price of fuel. Boeing stopped making the planes decades ago, and no major American passenger line I know of still uses them. But the engineers who designed them and the men and women who put them together knew what they were doing, and those that have been properly maintained still ply their trade around the world.
My enthusiasm isn’t so much for their versatility and dependability, but rather the door at the back of the plane. It opens to a retractable set of stairs, famously used by D. B. Cooper over the northwest mountains in 1971 when he escaped with a bag of money. At SEAL Six we installed a metal slide over the stairs so we could expeditiously exit the whole team. The “laundry chute” strewed agents of mayhem across the sky.
I tumbled out of the plane into the slipstream, struggling to get my body into a frog-like position. Skydiving is a lot like riding a bike—you never forget how to do it.
Then again, it’s not a big deal if you do. You will land. One way or the other. After all, you don’t really fall through the sky—the earth just comes up to meet you.
Quickly.
* * *
Junior was not with me. I had sent him back to the States the day before. I told him I needed him to help Danny as he set up surveillance on Veep, which was true enough. We’d need someone with high-tech skills to monitor bugs and whatever electronic intelligence we gathered.
I’d also told Danny to keep an eye on him, and gave him a quick rundown of what had happened.
I can’t say that Junior was happy to be going home, and he would have been even angrier if I’d told him that I was jumping from the plane—he had night-qualified for parachute jumps a few weeks before, and undoubtedly would have loved the chance to strut his stuff.
But I was concerned about him. His outburst at the border camp, and the effect the little girl’s death had on him, weren’t good. He was still wearing his heart on his sleeve. Even at SEAL Team Six, I didn’t expect my people to be automatons without emotion. But they had to be able to control it. I didn’t like what I’d seen from Junior.
The perils of parenthood: Was I being too hard on him because he was my son? Was the real issue the fact that I was worried he would be hurt, or worse? Was I the problem, not him?
Those thoughts crossed my mind as I plummeted downward. My position was marked on the visor in my helmet, which included handy little arrows to show me where to go. The unit could even give me advice on how to correct my course, if asked. Made by my friends at Innovate Technologies, the unit came with a money-back guarantee—if it sent me more than thirty meters off-course, the price of the helmet would be refunded.
My estate would no doubt be overjoyed. I had a similar guarantee from the parachute company; put them together and half my funeral would be paid for.
I was feeling awfully cold, even with the thermal layer and wet suit. Nothing like plunging through several thousand feet at terminal velocity to chill your blood.
A few more technical notes on the helmet while I’m falling: from the stern, it looks a lot like your basic military-style A-Bravo half-shell. It’s black, lightweight, and has the basic four-point suspension with a Bungee Molle fastener. Come around the side and you start to see some differences. There are small but noticeable wedges above the ear area for the embedded antennas. The helmet shield is made of a substance similar to the Gorilla Glass found in iPhones and other electronic gizmos. Gorilla Glass—made by the fine folks at Corning in New York—uses a special ion-exchange process to make the surface hard to scratch or break. In the helmet, there’s an LCD layer sandwiched inside to provide the displays. The LCDs are embedded and arranged in a way that you can still see reasonably well through the visor.
That will change in the next version, where the image will be synthetic, provided by small cameras at the top of the helmet—basically you’ll be watching a movie of your life, not only in living color, but in infrared and whatever other imaging system occurs to the geeks at Innovate Technologies. And I suppose if you’re bored on the long trip down, you can always catch Netflix or Hulu.
“Prepare to engage,” said a voice in the helmet. It sounded English—the engineers at Innovate apparently believed men would pay more attention to a girl with an accent … or they were married, and accustomed to taking directions from a female.
I checked the screen. I was coming down toward four thousand feet. She was right on time.
“Three seconds. Two…”
At 3,800 feet, I pulled the ripcord. An instant later—
Ugh…!!!
The sound you heard was the tightening of my body harness against the tender morsels of my anatomy, resulting in a plaintive cry from all of my future generations.
Better than the alternative, certainly, since it meant that my parachute had correctly deployed. I did a quick check above, making sure I had good cells, then got down to some serious navigating. I was no longer a brick—I was a certifiable flying man, moving with purpose and some amount of grace toward the red triangle that appeared in my helmet.
The triangle was homing in on a radio signal from the small boat I was heading for. I’ve made over 110 night jumps, enough to lose count but not to lose the memory of each one. They’re all the same, and different—you remember the tugs and the way the wind kicked you, the spray of water when you landed, or the time Murphy played with the lines.
Tonight was an easy one, with no wind to speak of, or at least not enough to interfere with me as I glided toward the radar signal. I was just passing fifteen hundred feet when an almost imperceptible light flashed ahead of me—Shotgun and Mongoose were watching from the boat, and gave me the high sign.
Sure now that I had the course set, I turned to the next problem—a water landing. The boat the boys were in was too small for me to touch down on, which meant I had to hit the waves next to them. Land on the waves when you’re not quite ready for them, and you might as well be landing on concrete.
Actually, concrete is a little better.
Because it was dark, I had little depth perception—at night, depth perception over water is nil, since there are no horizontal reference points to gauge height against. Thirty feet off the water looks the same as three hundred fe
et. So I had to rely on the helmet to know when I was going to hit, er, touch down. In theory, that was great—a high-tech visual aid to assist in what is one of the trickier problems of a night jump. But the best theory takes quite a bit of practice to become a reality, and it had been several months since I’d last jumped with the helmet. So I got my feet out a second or two early, then wondered what the hell was going on when I didn’t splash when I thought I would splash.
A second later I did “walk” into the ocean, a little off-balance, but down at least, and only a few yards from the Zodiac I was aiming at.
You’ve heard of a paper trail; I had a nylon trail streaming after me. My first order of business was to shed it, slit it so there’d be no air pockets, and then bundle it up to be weighted down and sunk as shark bait. I worked quickly, not because I was afraid of being seen, but because I didn’t want to spend more time in the water than necessary.
The Indian Ocean is the world’s warmest sea, with surface temperatures that have been measured at just under 37 degrees centigrade. But the average human being’s temperature is 0.5 degrees higher, and even on the hottest day in the warmest part of the ocean, everything around you is cooler than you are. Thermodynamics being what they are, your body tries to accommodate the temperature difference by warming up the rest of the world; sooner or later, you’ll freeze your butt off.
“Hey, now, Dick, about time you dropped in,” said Shotgun, adding a few choice words of greeting, mostly of the four-letter variety.
Mongoose, meanwhile, leaned over the side and helped pull me into the small craft.
“Target is five miles away,” he told me as I settled in. “They’re just chugging along. We can catch them easy.”
“Want some licorice?” asked Shotgun.
“No saltwater taffy?”
“Damn. I should have thought of that.”
We set a course for the ship. The boys filled me in on recent developments, such as they were, as well as the latest on what was going on with the ship.
According to the company records, it was bound for passage in the Suez Canal, and from there to ports in Greece, Cyprus, and France. Our plan was to get aboard, find the shipment, and put some bugs in it. Then we’d hop back on the Zodiac and return to Djibouti.
[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel Page 20