by Tom Clancy
Like everyone else in the city, the thirty or so employees of Obeng’s front businesses were aware of his command of the militias and indeed could not have possibly failed to notice the regular comings and goings of his hoodlum lackeys. But only a few knowingly participated in his lawless undertakings or profited from them in any way. The majority of these men and women showed up each morning for an honest day’s work, went home to their families at quitting time, and brought home modest paychecks at the end of the week.
They were what Tom Ricci had called “solid citizens” back when he’d carried a detective’s tin.
They were also convenient human shields for Obeng.
From Ricci’s standpoint, this was not good.
As he sloshed through a foul-smelling drainage culvert in a near squat, his boots awash in brown sludge, his arms, legs, and ballistic helmet soiled with wet clots of grime that had peeled like fresh scabs off the curved, close-pressing top and sides of the channel, Ricci knew the worst things that could go wrong with his maneuver would be having innocent civilians taken hostage, injured, or, even more unthinkable to him, killed during its execution.
Morally wrong, operationally wrong, politically wrong. Rollie Thibodeau had correctly pointed out aboard the Pomona that the mere presence of his RDT on foreign soil shredded several chapters of international law. Without question, the course of action on which they were now embarked would trash the rest of the rule book.
But Ricci had come a long way to collar the Wildcat, stalked him with all the resources at his disposal, and he was not going to succeed by knocking on Obeng’s front door and politely asking that his guest step into the waiting arms of justice.
Neither would he do so by shrinking from a calculated risk.
Given the best opportunity for a nab that was liable to present itself, Ricci damn well intended to exploit it. If he screwed up, he was ready to take the heat. And his darling admirer Megan Breen could flash her razzle-dazzle smile as she watched him swing in the wind like a gallows bird.
Ricci dismissed that unpleasant image from his mind.
He’d been twice on the money today, after all.
As expected, the Wildcat’s ride to the police station had been a classic casino shuffle. Soon after arriving there, he left in different clothes than he’d worn out of the hotel—taking a side exit rather than the back door, the only detail not to meet Ricci’s prediction to the letter—and was then chauffeured off in the passenger seat of an unmarked sedan that pulled into the crosstown avenue’s westbound lanes and clanked along seemingly on two cylinders, an authentic touch that allowed it to blend nicely with the crumpled matchboxes driven by the average motorist in this land of plenty.
Thirty minutes later, that car swung into the parking garage at Gang Central.
Ricci and his strike team had been ready and waiting in the swampy, weed-clogged field out back.
Now he crawled toward the building by way of the subterranean overflow channel beneath the hill, his helmet-mounted torch beam lancing sharply into the dimness. Like the men slogging along at his rear, he was clad in a mottled woodland camouflage stealth suit with protective knee and elbow pads and an ultrathin Zylon bullet-resistant lining. Besides the Five-Seven in his side holster, he was toting a compact version of UpLink’s variable velocity rifle system—or VVRS—submachine gun, a second-generation variant that was half the size and weight of the original, that was manufactured with an integrated silencer, and that fired subsonic ammunition. The rotating hand guard, which manually adjusted the earlier model’s barrel pressure from lethal to less-than-lethal, had been replaced by MEMS circuitry that did the job at the fast and easy touch of a button.
A snap-on attachment under the barrel resembled and was technologically related to a laser targeter, though it served a very different function. While Ricci disliked the way the device threw off his weapon’s balance, its use by the entire team was crucial to their objective.
They had brought other equipment from the tac van as well, some of it defensive in nature.
Because he had taken point, Ricci held in his left hand a portable vapor detector that looked oddly similar to the super-eight movie cameras he remembered from distant childhood, and was presently scanning for environmental hazards that ranged from the toxic methane, nitrogen, and sulfurous gases of decaying sewage to chemical and biological weapons agents to the minutest airborne traces of the explosive ingredients of booby traps. In the event its beeper alarm sounded, a backlit LCD readout would specifically identify the threat, with the beep tones increasing in rapidity as the instrument was brought closer to it. Should that threat prove to be chem/bio or the products of organic decomposition, each member of the strike team was ready to convert the carry bag strapped over his shoulder into an air-powered, filtered-breathing system at the pull of a zipper, worn as if it were a masked and hooded vest. Should a bomb be detected, they would hopefully steer clear of its triggering mechanism.
And there was still more equipment, some of it suppressive, referred to as public order weapons by law enforcement personnel with a penchant for cooking up new euphemisms every fifteen seconds.
Call them what you wished, their fundamental purpose was to incapacitate their targets without causing serious injury.
Ricci’s absolute intent, second only to bagging the Wildcat, was that no harm come to the innocent civilian workers in the building. This was foremost out of bounds. But he was also determined to avoid using deadly force on any of Obeng’s rotten cops, and for that matter against Obeng himself, all of whom held nominal claim to being upstanding members of the population. Even the militiamen would not be permanently damaged, if possible, though Ricci was giving his ops some leeway in dealing with them, as it was unlikely their country’s heads of state, eager to improve relations with America, would raise a commotion over the loss of a few known malcontents whose looting and violent behavior threatened their own government’s stability, and who they were consequently better off living without.
Cramped from kneeling, Ricci led the way through the narrow drainage duct for another ten minutes. Then his torch disclosed its circular mouth a few yards up ahead. He moved forward and saw that it opened out some three or four feet above the bottom of a cementwalled tunnel with room enough for him and the others to stand upright.
He raised a clenched fist to signal a pause, then glanced over his shoulder at Grillo.
“Drop’s maybe a yard,” Ricci told him in a hushed voice. “Everybody be careful. Looks to me like the tunnel’s ankle deep in water. Not much of a flow, but it’s bound to be slippery.”
Grillo nodded and passed the word to Lou Rosander, the man behind him, who in turn relayed it to the next in line.
Ricci inched over to the opening and sprang down.
He landed with a splash. A layer of slime coated the floor under the stagnant water, but he had a good sense of balance and was aided by the corrugated rubber soles of his boots.
The rest of the team hopped from the pipe one at a time, all of them joining him in short order. They immediately formed up in single file.
Ricci looked around. The passage was almost chamberlike measured against the constricted tube from which he’d jumped. Other tunnels of nearly equal width and height branched off from it in various directions.
They had reached a major juncture of the system.
Ricci did not need to consult his underground street plan to know which of the diverging passages to take. He had committed the system layout to memory before proceeding with his mission, just as he’d memorized the location of the drainage pipe’s outflow opening from the high-res GIS data provided by Sword’s satellite mapping unit.
With another crisp hand signal, Ricci turned toward the dark hole of the tunnel entrance to his immediate left and stepped into it, his feet squishing in the muck.
His men followed without hesitation.
“Okay,” Rosander whispered. “I see a single attendant. I don’t think he’s one of Oben
g’s goons. Or that he’s gonna be a problem.”
“He in a booth?” Ricci asked.
Rosander kept peering through a thin fiber-optic periscope that he’d coiled upward through the metal drain cover above him. With maybe four feet of clearance between the floor of the sunken garage and the bottom of the sluice in which they were hunched, a six-year-old would have had difficulty standing erect, let alone the ten grown men of Ricci’s team.
“No,” he said. “The guy’s nodding off in a chair against the wall.”
Ricci nodded.
“There anybody else around we have to worry about?” he said.
“Give me a sec.”
Rosander rotated the fiberscope between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, his other hand making adjustments to the eyepiece barrel to focus its color video image.
“Not a soul,” he said.
“Number of vehicles?”
“I’d say about a dozen, including the rattletrap that brought the Wildcat.”
Ricci nodded again.
He reached into a gear pouch for a breaching charge, peeled the plastic strip from its adhesive backing, and pressed the thin patch of C2 explosive—a compound as powerful as C4, but more stable—against the ceiling surface until it was firmly secured. Then he took the “lipstick” detonator caps out of a separate pouch and inserted them. Before blowing their mouse hole into the sunken garage, his team would back through the runoff duct to keep a safe distance from the blast and falling masonry.
After a moment, Ricci turned to Simmons and handed him the vapor detector.
“I’ll go in first, take down the attendant,” he whispered. “Stay close, and don’t forget the regs.”
“Right.”
Ricci got his radio out of its case on his belt.
While the explosion he was setting off would be small and contained, any explosion was by definition noisy, and therefore would be heard by those in the building unless masked.
Ricci had arranged for something even noisier to do just that.
A few blocks east on the crosstown avenue, two men in the white uniforms of emergency medical responders had been waiting patiently in the cab of a double-parked ambulance.
After receiving Ricci’s cue, the driver cut the radio and turned to his partner.
“We’re on,” he said.
They raced into traffic toward Gang Central, the ambulance’s light bars flashing, its siren cranked to peak volume and howling like a thousand tortured wolves.
Seated across a desk from Obeng in the warlord’s second-floor office, Le Chaut Sauvage heard the ululant wail of the rapidly approaching medical vehicle and tilted his head toward the window.
“Is that one of yours?” he asked, his voice raised over the deafening clamor.
Obeng shook his head no.
“An ambulance,” he said.
The Wildcat gave him a questioning look.
“You’re certain?”
“Yes,” Obeng assured him. He was almost shouting to be heard. “Even here people get sick.”
As he leaped up through the small crater in the garage floor, Ricci didn’t know whether it was the detonating C2 or the eardrum-piercing shrillness of the ambulance siren that shocked the attendant from his dozy position on the chair.
Not that it made a jot of difference to him.
The attendant shot to his feet now, his chair crashing onto its back, his features agape at the sight of men in visored helmets and tactical camo outfits pouring out of a rubbled, dust- and smoke-spewing hole that hadn’t existed a split second before.
Ricci swiftly bound over to him and pressed the squirter of the dimethyl sulfoxide cannister clenched in his gloved fist.
The attendant raised his hands over his face on reflex, but the stream of odorless, colorless DMSO ...
A chemical with myriad properties that was originally an incidental by-product of the wood pulping process, used as a commercial solvent for fifty years, a medical organ and tissue preservative for about forty years, and a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory with limited FDA approval for slightly less than thirty years...
A chemical that in the past decade or so had attracted the close attention of nonlethal weapons researchers because of its instant penetration of human skin and its capacity to completely sedate a person on contact and without side effects if administered in sufficient concentration ...
The DMSO running down over the attendant’s outthrust palms and fingers made him crumple like one of the foam training dummies Ricci sometimes used in hand-to-hand combat practice.
Ricci caught the attendant in his arms to ease his fall, lowering him gently onto the floor. Then he quickly rose and scanned the garage for ways to reach the building’s aboveground levels.
There was a single elevator about ten yards to the right. Not a chance his men were going to box themselves into that death trap.
His gaze found the door leading to the stairwell to his far left, on the opposite side of the garage.
He turned toward the rest of the men, now standing back-to-back in a loose circle, their individual weapons pointed outward, covering all points of the garage while they peripherally watched for his gestured command.
Ricci was about to wave them toward the stairs when he heard the distinct sound of the elevator kicking in. He glanced in its direction, his eyes fixing on the indicator lights over its door.
It was coming down the shaft from the ground floor.
Coming down fast.
Grillo had likewise turned to face the elevator, his eyes narrowed behind his helmet visor.
He watched its door slide open seconds after its hoisting motor activated, appraised its passengers at a glance.
Don’t forget the regs, he thought, needing no real incentive. The man and woman inside were a couple of honest Injuns if there’d ever been any, probably customers leaving one of the quasi-legit businesses right upstairs.
They took maybe a step out of the car and then froze at the scene that met their eyes, both simultaneously noticing the assault team, the unconscious garage attendant, and the debris-strewn hole in the floor.
Grillo didn’t give them a chance to recover from their initial confusion.
He whipped his hand down to his belt, unholstered his stingball pistol, and pulled the trigger twice.
The mini-flash bangs it discharged hit the floor directly in front of their feet, the fragile rounds shattering like eggshells against the hard cement to produce startlingly loud reports and blindingly bright bursts of light.
The couple staggered dazedly, the woman covering her eyes with both hands, the man tripping backward to sprawl with the upper part of his body inside the elevator and his legs stretched out. Its door tried to close, struck his hip with its foam rubber safety edging, automatically retracted, tried to close again, hit him again, the whole sequence repeating itself over and over as he writhed there on the floor of the garage.
Grillo put the stingball gun away, satisfied with how the weapon had delivered. Poor guy was going to have some bruises to show for his unexpected adventure, but what could you do?
He looked at Ricci.
Ricci completed his interrupted hand signal, waving at the stairwell door.
His team dashed across the garage in its direction.
The men climbed the stairs as one, as trained, a single composite organism armored in synthetic materials, their guns bristling like deadly spines.
A few steps below the first-floor landing they paused for Rosander to peer around the corner with his telescopic search mirror, a low-tech, reliable, simple tool. Ricci’s cardinal rule was in play here: Use the fiber-optic scope when you wanted maximum stealth, but when the actual insertion began, when speed was of the essence, you didn’t want to screw with finicky shit like flexible electronic coils and video apertures.
Nobody in sight, they hustled up onto the landing. Ricci motioned for two of them, Seybold and Beatty, to split off from the others and cover the first floor. This
was an organism that could divide and reassemble itself as required.
Up the next flight of stairs, ten now having become eight; Ricci and Rosander were in the lead.
Midway to the second floor, on the next landing, Rosander again stuck the pole around the corner and saw the reflections of three men on the mirror’s convex surface.
He signaled quickly. Two fingers pointed at his eyes: Enemy in sight. Then three fingers in the air, revealing the number of opponents on the way down.
“Militia,” he mouthed soundlessly to Ricci, who was squatted beside him.
Ricci nodded.
His men readied themselves in the short moments available. This time they wouldn’t be facing a bleary-eyed garage worker or a couple petrified with astonishment, literally struck blind on the way back to their car after booking a trip to paradise at the ground-floor travel agency.
They held their guns at the ready.
The militiamen continued downstairs toward the landing.
Ricci’s hand was raised, motionless, slightly above shoulder height: Hold your fire.
It was his show. His and Rosander’s. They could not worry about taking accidental hits from their own teammates behind them.
The militiamen were carrying assault rifles, Russian AKs. One of them glimpsed the assault team below.
His gun muzzle came up as he grunted out a warning to his companions.
Ricci squeezed the trigger of his baby VVRS, its electronic touch control set for maximum blowback. Lethal as lethal could be. And quiet.
The militiaman fell to the landing, spots of crimson on his chest. Then a quick burst of gunfire from above, bullets swarming down the stairwell.
The still body of the guy he’d hit pressing against his shins, weighty against his shins, Ricci stayed put and swung his weapon toward the remaining two. The mirror in one hand, Rosander had lifted his gun with the other and was already spraying them with ammunition. A second man collapsed, rolled downward, olive fatigues stained red. The third kept standing, got off some more counterfire, and Ricci heard a grunt from Rosander as the pole of his inspection mirror flew from his fingers and went clattering against the metal risers below.