by JT Brannan
There were six armed guards patrolling the grounds, and according to the techies back in Forest Hills, the men belonged to a private security firm hired by the developers who had bought this site. It seemed like overkill for a place like this though, as it appeared that nobody had had any interest in doing anything with the buildings for years. The concrete walls were smeared with old graffiti, and the ground was littered with wrappers, broken bottles and assorted drug paraphernalia that also looked as if they had been there for years.
So what were they protecting?
Perhaps Dementyev was a private investor in the development group, and he’d come to check the place out. Government officials often had their hands in a variety of murky investments, and a plot of this size had to be worth a considerable amount of money.
But why had he come here now, during the working day, when there was so much else going on? And why had he been here so long? He’d been on-site for over six hours now, and surely there wasn’t that much to see?
The answer, Chaiprasit decided, was that this wasn’t merely an abandoned waterpark, but something much more. Information from Force One indicated that the original plans for the waterpark listed twelve floors, three of them underground, and – given the fact that she could get no heat signatures from the visitors – it was clear that this was where Dementyev had gone.
But what was down there?
Obviously, it was a covert base of some kind, but what was its purpose?
She knew that there was only one way to find out, and that was to do as Devlin suggested and move in closer.
‘Okay,’ she told him, ‘but you first, okay?’
Devlin laughed softly, and nodded. ‘Okay,’ he agreed. ‘Let’s go.’
Kurt Hejms had successfully handed Veronika Galushka over to officers from CIA’s Moscow station, and had now joined the rest of his team outside Akvadroma.
Barrington was glad to have him, as it meant that two observation teams could watch over Daw and Mike, an observer and a shooter; and it also meant that – if the shit hit the fan – she would have one more combat veteran to count on.
Force One wasn’t like any other unit she had been a part of. She was a senior officer within what many considered to the most elite group in the United States armory, the CIA’s Special Activities Division. A part of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, which was the successor to the agency’s Department of Operations, the SAD was responsible for covert action abroad. Barrington was a team leader with the SAD’s even more elite Special Operations Group, a paramilitary unit which carried out direct action missions on enemy targets. With only one hundred and fifty active personnel, the SOG only recruited the finest men and women available, the cream of the cream.
But then Barrington had been seconded to Force One, and discovered that perhaps the SOG wasn’t the tip of the spear, as she’d believed.
Force One personnel were recruited on a mission-by-mission basis, and only the very best made the cut; anything less, and they wouldn’t be able to make the concept work. Operators were brought together on short notice, and would immediately have to work with one another, would have to gel into a smoothly-operating team from the moment they met. Only a handful of men and women in the world would be capable of doing this, people so professional, so good at their jobs, that their trust in one another would be absolute, right from the word ‘go’.
Barrington had never worked with Hejms before, but she trusted him implicitly; if he was here with Force One, then the simple fact was that he was one of the best operators alive in the world today, and the thought gave her enormous confidence.
There were only six of them, operating illegally in a foreign nation, but the truth of the matter was that she would rather have these five people with her than an entire hundred-man company of regular soldiers.
Her radio beeped, and she answered. ‘It’s me,’ she heard Vinson say over the secure channel. ‘We’ve looked into it a bit more, and it looks like the development group that bought Akvadroma is actually controlled by Ros-Tec, which is a front company owned by the SVR’s personnel department. Among other things, it’s responsible for land, real estate and property used by the SVR.’
Julie wasn’t surprised; she’d already decided that Akvadroma was some sort of secret SVR base.
‘What’s more,’ Vinson added, ‘we’ve got some evidence that the main directorate involved in requesting the acquisition was Analysis and Information.’
‘Don’t they run the SVR’s interrogation program?’ Barrington asked.
‘They do,’ Vinson responded, ‘and we suspect them of running various covert prisons and interrogation centers scattered across Russia and her former satellites.’
‘You think it’s a prison?’
‘Looks like.’
‘You think Navarone might be there?’ she asked, heart skipping a beat.
‘It’s a long way from a certain bet,’ Vinson said cagily, ‘but it is a possibility.’
Barrington’s mind worked fast. ‘Sir,’ she said at last, ‘if Navarone is there, and Dementyev leaves, what do you want us to do?’
‘Dementyev is still there?’
‘Yes,’ Barrington said, ‘at least we think so.’
‘Okay,’ Vinson said, ‘then here’s what I want you to do.’
Chaiprasit and Devlin stalked painfully slowly through the jungle of broken rubble, inside the gigantic structure for the first time.
They had timed their entry to avoid the foot patrols, and were now moving across a sweeping concrete avenue, shielded by huge metal girders surrounded by scaffolding poles and thick, unfinished columns. Their weapons were out in front of them, silenced H&K MP7s that were perfect for close-range combat. The laser sighting system was designed to work with their night-vision goggles, enabling fast and accurate shooting even in the dark.
They proceeded with caution, aware now that the basement levels might well house some sort of SVR prison, and that Jake Navarone himself might be down there. Word had come from Force One headquarters that a combined rescue of Navarone and rendition of Dementyev was to be attempted, and even now, Barrington and the rest of the team were readying themselves for the assault.
But nobody was going to be moving in until she and Devlin had gained entry and done a preliminary recon. As good as Force One operators were, going in blind would be near-suicidal. They were called in to do work that nobody else could, but nobody expected miracles; she and Devlin would check the place out, and Barrington would use that info to plan their attack. She and her partner were wearing head-cams that were sending back live video to the rest of the team, enabling them to make plans on the fly; and she knew Barrington would be uploading it back to Forest Hills, in order to get second opinions from the experts at home.
But she understood that all the hi-tech in the world didn’t matter without ‘boots on the ground’, and she knew that today, those boots belonged to her and Devlin; if they didn’t manage to access the basement levels, there would be no rescue mission to plan.
‘Over here,’ she heard Devlin whisper, and she turned her head, saw the eerie outline of her colleague as he pointed through the night-vision-enhanced evening darkness toward a blackened doorway within a gigantic central concrete cylinder that ran up through the middle of the complex. It was like a central spoke in a bicycle wheel, the rest of the construction running off from it, and it seemed to ascend right to the top of the broken-down roof, nine stories above them. ‘If it goes up,’ he said quietly, ‘maybe it also goes down.’
Chaiprasit nodded her head and used her imagers to locate anyone nearby. A heat signature passed near the doorway, the another. Chaiprasit nudged Devlin, showed him the images. ‘Two of them,’ she whispered, ‘looks like they’re packing assault rifles.’
They crept closer and closer, aware that any sound, any movement that was too sharp, too rapid, might catch the guards’ attention. They passed through the empty basin of a swimming pool, the concrete cracked and broken, v
egetation straining to break through, and they used the lower ground for cover as they approached the central hub ahead of them.
They got to the edge of the pool and used the lip for cover, only letting their heads and weapons appear above the parapet.
‘Now what?’ Devlin asked, and then he watched as Chaiprasit picked up an old tin can from near her feet and tossed it over the side of the pool like a grenade. The loud crash as the can hit the concrete and bounced across the floor into the nearby metal scaffold echoed around the cavernous complex with frightening volume.
The guards immediately came flying out from the doorway, and Devlin followed Chaiprasit’s lead as they popped up over the ledge of the pool and shot the men with their silenced submachine guns, two rounds apiece. They dropped to the ground next to the doorway, and Devlin turned to his partner. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I thought we were just here for recon?’
‘We are,’ said Chaiprasit as she hauled herself up out of the pool basin. ‘Now come on and let’s find out what’s down there.’
16
Dementyev dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief, then checked his watch.
Hell, it was past six o’clock in the evening and he had achieved nothing. A whole day, wasted.
It would be eleven in the morning in New York, and his president would be hard at work at UN headquarters, making deals with the vain and power-hungry Clark Mason. The outcome of that meeting would, he knew, have a very real impact on the success – or otherwise – of Project Europe.
Dementyev, for his part, had met this man, this ‘Aleksandr Petrushkin’, had questioned him at length; then, furious with the prisoner’s inability to cooperate, he had watched with morbid fascination as the technical teams had gone to work on him. Doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists; experts in electro-shock therapy, drug treatment, sensory deprivation and hypnosis; even out-and-out old-school torturers with pliers and scalpels; all had been given their time with this man, under Dementyev’s supervision – against the advice of the chief medical officer – but the only result had been the prisoner’s near-total breakdown, both mental and physical.
Dementyev had learned nothing, had soiled his conscience by bearing witness to the depravity, and had all but destroyed the man in the process.
And for what?
He shook his head sadly.
For the plan.
The project.
Yes, he told himself, it was for his project that this had been necessary, for the ongoing success of his project, the plan he had been working on – in one form or another – his entire life.
How could he feel bad about that?
He couldn’t, but – as he viewed the barely-living remains of the foreign agent before him – he did feel bad that his day had been wasted, a day when he could have been doing other things.
The goings-on at Yasenevo had disturbed him greatly, for instance, and he had not been there to deal with them. Who were the people in that news van? What had they been doing there? Where had they gone, when they’d escaped from SVR security and the local police?
And then there was that car exploding in the lot outside; investigators had confirmed that it was caused by a high-explosive round to the gas-tank, and from the line of fire they had traced the shooting point, what appeared to be an observation post in the trees to the eastern side of the compound.
Further investigations had revealed evidence of another OP in the park on the other side of the compound, and then a bag had been found, buried in the earth under a stand of trees located within the compound itself.
Someone had been inside SVR headquarters, and the thought was terrifying.
Even now, camera footage was being examined, electronic data from the security logs of each building were being gone over with a fine-toothed comb.
Dammit, what did it all mean?
But he knew one thing; it was time for him to leave this forsaken place. He had done all he could here, and perhaps more.
He wiped his brow again, exhausted beyond measure.
Hell, maybe he would even allow himself to go home for the night, watch the Security Council meetings on the TV and then get some proper rest?
But then his head whipped around, as the sounds of automatic gunfire filled the hallways outside, mixed with the screams of injured men.
He drew his own pistol and started to move.
Rest, he thought sadly, would continue to elude him.
Barrington fired two more shots from her ARX100, the 5.56mm rounds taking down one more bad guy.
The team had started moving in as soon as she’d seen Chaiprasit and Devlin shoot the two sentries; she’d decided she’d just have to plan things on the go, otherwise time would soon run out. The dead bodies had been dragged out of the way, but if anyone noticed that two guards were missing, the place would go into immediate lock-down. But plans, she knew, rarely survived contact with the enemy.
Chaiprasit and Devlin still had the point though, and even while she and the others broke into the compound and made their way toward the central stairwell, taking out the rest of the foot patrols with well-aimed, near-silent shots as they went, she was simultaneously monitoring the live video feed from their head-cams.
The two scouts had found a stairwell that went down to a locked door, gone back upstairs and retrieved keys off the guards. They’d then opened the door and gone through into an old service area, as old and run-down as the rest of the place except for a steel door that concealed an elevator to the lower levels.
Knowing that it would be foolhardy to simply take the elevator down into the unknown, Devlin had deployed a special device which used wireless signals to check for human presence behind walls or floors. Using a technology developed at MIT known as RF Capture, it emitted wireless signals that passed through solid materials like concrete and then bounced off what was on the other side, where they were picked up again by the device and converted into an image.
By time Barrington, Hart and Hejms were there – Walgren was waiting in a stolen truck outside, ready for the extraction – her two scouts had built up some idea of what they were dealing with below them, including the possible location of people, along with an outline of walls and rooms.
It was only the one floor, but Barrington knew it would have to do; a staircase had also been located, and so Hart and Hejms had gone that way, while Barrington, Chaiprasit and Devlin had called for the elevator.
They had synchronized their attack, come at the guards from both sides, and had quickly cleared each and every room. The area was smaller than they would have expected, and clearly hadn’t been built to house many people. Security was also less tight than they had feared; obviously, the idea was that the place would never be found in the first place. There had only been eight soldiers guarding the cellblock, along with a handful of non-uniformed administrators. The guards were now dead, the non-combatant staff hogtied on the floor.
They searched the cells, found only four inmates, all ghost-like figures who could say and do very little; Barrington had left them while they performed another wireless recon of the floor below.
The information from the scanners tied in with that gained from a quick tactical interrogation of the administrative staff, and the team managed to build an accurate picture of the floor below.
There were more cells, although apparently only two were being used; the rest of the space was used for interrogation chambers, which consisted of several different environments, from stark-white, scrubbed-clean doctor’s office, to blood-stained, dark-stoned torture-palace.
According to one of the staff members, Colonel Dementyev was downstairs with his bodyguard and the entire interrogation staff in one of the rooms, along with a further eight security personnel patrolling the corridors beyond.
Barrington doubted that anyone downstairs would have heard the suppressed rifle shots that had taken out the men on this level, and she knew that nobody had had the time to sound the alarm; she therefore hoped that their attack would be a
complete surprise.
There was one prisoner in a cell, and one in the interrogation room, surrounded by staff; Barrington had no way of knowing which one – if either – was Navarone, but there was no other choice; they were going to go in, and go in hard. She just hoped that Jake wouldn’t be hurt in the crossfire.
They had stripped their prisoners of all electronic devices, then locked them in the cells, keeping them out of the way for the next phase of the attack.
It had been going well, the assault coming in once again from two angles, the elevator and the stairs, and Barrington had started to believe that they might have a chance of doing this cleanly and surgically.
But then one of the guards had managed to get off a lucky shot, a burst of non-suppressed 9mm ammunition from his Kiparis submachine gun nearly deafening in the confines of the corridor.
Barrington had taken him out with the ARX100, saw him drop as Hart and Hejms reached the door to the interrogation room.
She hoped they weren’t too late, and raced forward to join them.
Dementyev had started moving, but then thought better of it; where was there to run to? There was only one way in or out of this room, and the shooting seemed to be coming from right outside.
‘Pass me your radio,’ he said to his bodyguard, and snatched it out of his hands as it was offered. ‘Code Twelve Alert,’ he yelled into it after choosing the correct security channel, ‘we have a breach at Akvadroma, send all available units’ – he paused for a moment as he watched the door explode inwards, two masked men, assault rifles up and aimed, racing in after at – ‘I repeat, all available units, immediately!’
He threw the radio away, watched as his bodyguard shook with the impact of the invaders’ bullets, and quickly wrapped his arm around the prisoner’s neck, placing the barrel of his gun to the side of his head.