by Ross Sidor
There was barely any sound around them, other than an occasional bleating goat, chirping crickets, or the sound of the wind carrying past them. Along the way, they encountered no one else, but spotted the occasional fox or rabbit, which either fled or stopped to observe them cautiously from a safe distance. Most of the villages here are centered in the valleys, where there is fertile soil and water, not on the flat, arid plains the team now hiked over. The temperature had dropped to forty degrees, cold but not frigid, and their digital camou fatigues kept them comfortable and warm.
22:50. When they were within a mile, the cement factory slowly took shape in the distance against the dark of the night. Easily discernible were the silhouettes of the tall pre-heater tower rising up from the ground, with the shape of the Ka-226 perched atop the landing pad, and the remix silo standing high above the hilltops, near the rock quarry, along with the glow cast over the land from floodlights and from the moon and the stars above.
Here the team paused to sweep the terrain through their binoculars or scopes and look out for any roving patrols. There were none. The only signs of life were those of the two men lingering on one of the high scaffoldings on the pre-heating tower. As they CIA element drew slowly nearer, and Reaper scanned the location through the scope on his MSG-90, he spotted the AK-47 rifles in the hands of the men in the tower, plus two long RPG-7s leaning upright against the railing. The men looked of Turkic/Central Asian descent, with hard, weathered faces, and dressed in native garb.
The five American operators approached from the south, from over the hills and in the direction of the mouth of the kiln. This is a one hundred meter long, rotating tube, six meters in diameter, into which the raw materials from the rock quarry are fed from the pre-heater tower and then heated to a thousand-plus degrees as the load passes down the length of the tube. At the opposite end, the resultant slurry then passes through a cooler and onto a long conveyor belt inside the mill building.
They would breach the facility through the kiln. This would be the quietist method of entry, long as nobody inside turned on the oven and incinerated them, assuming the infrastructure even functioned as a working cement factory and wasn’t simply a façade. The previous thirty-six hours of aerial surveillance, contrary to Cramer’s intelligence reports over the past year, indicated that the plant did not appear to be in the business of actively producing cement, not even to maintain the charade of its cover.
The aerial surveillance also indicated there to likely be at least sixteen people present, including the HVTs and the prisoner, Aleksa. It was unknown how many people had been on-site before the Predators and satellites started watching and were therefore unaccounted for. It was a fairly large building, three stories high, and they didn’t know the layout of the interior, only that, unlike the exterior, it likely did not resemble a cement mill. There must have been some type of living accommodations inside, since this was the second night Cramer and the others spent here. The hardest part would be locating Aleksa inside without alerting the enemy to their presence.
23:06. From the hills on the south, the team dug in, lay completely still, and observed the facility. After thirty minutes, the two men in the tower were relieved, and Avery and Poacher decided to bid their time before moving against the target, since a fresh set of eyes would be more alert and not yet have grown complacent.
After several minutes, one of the men in the tower raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth, said something, and waited for a response. So there was someone still awake inside the facility who the guards were communicating with.
Continued observation, however, indicated that the guards did not appear to check in with anyone on a regular basis, and they didn’t see either of the guards use a radio in the twenty minutes that transpired next.
During this time, another pair of men, one of them brandishing an AK, emerged from the mill and did a patrol around the factory grounds. They stayed within the perimeter of the twelve-foot high chain-link fence.
When the roving guards came around the south end of the fence, their voices carried through the still air to the hills. They spoke Uzbek with a smattering of Russian. IMU mercenaries that comprised the elite of the Taliban’s ranks, and they probably had Russian/Soviet army training, too.
00:38. Reaper remained behind, maintaining his sniper’s perch, and covered his teammates’ approach as they descended the rocky hills quickly and carefully, taking precise, deliberate movements so as not to kick any loose rocks, while staying within shadows. Reaper watched over them, keeping a bead on the two guards in the tower through his rifle’s Hensoldt 6 x 42 scope, which was adjustable and accurate out to six hundred meters.
Once they breached the outside of the fence, Avery and the others would still have to cover the distance to the kiln, and that was an area with large swatches of land illuminated by lamps. It would be nearly impossible for the guards in the tower, if they were halfway alert, not to see the intruders. So, Reaper patiently awaited the signal to drop the two guards, or, if it appeared they had spotted the team, he’d take them out immediately, hopefully before they could raise the alarm.
00:57. Avery stopped at the bottom of the rocky hills in a low gully, where the shadows and hills still provided adequate concealment. Sixty feet of clear, flat land lay between them and the fence. They’d be out in the open and exposed, and it was a bright night. If nothing else, the men in the tower, if they were looking, would at least see dark shapes scurrying across the land below them.
00:59:27. Poacher pressed the push-to-talk clipped on his vest near his left shoulder three times with a two second break between each transmission, the signal to Reaper to execute.
Reaper passed his scope’s illuminated reticle over the first guard in the tower, who leaned forward with his arms resting against the platform’s railing, gazing into the Tajik countryside. Reaper centered his crosshairs over the man’s bearded face. The second guard stood four feet away, his back slightly half turned to his partner, smoking a cigarette, totally ignorant to the fact that he had precious seconds left to live his life.
The pad of Reaper’s index finger firmly tapped the trigger, pressing it back until the striker ignited the cartridge’s primer. His shoulder absorbed the subsequent recoil as the stock forcefully kicked back. He caught a quick glimpse of the hole bursting open in the space between the Afghan’s nose and upper lip, while blood, bone, and brains exploded out the back of his head. As the body dropped, Reaper shifted his aim, acquired his next target, and blasted the wide-eyed, dumbfounded expression off the second guard’s face as the man raised his walkie-talkie toward his mouth. The cigarette dropped from his lips, and he landed on top of it.
The MSG-90’s suppressor reduced the muzzle flash sufficiently that no one could possibly have seen it unless their eyes were fixated directly on Reaper’s position when he pulled the trigger, and the silencer rendered the rifle’s report inaudible to anyone inside the target building, although Avery and the Sideshow operators, in the hills below, still faintly heard it.
Reaper hit the transmit button twice, signaling that both targets were down, indicating that they were clear to proceed.
Avery immediately popped up from the gully and broke into a full-out sprint. He quickly covered the distance to the perimeter fence, tracked for threats through his rifle’s sights, and hand-signaled for Poacher, who dashed over. Flounder was next, followed by Mockingbird.
Meanwhile, Reaper scanned the facility through the lens of his scope, pausing over the heavy front doors of the mill building, the vehicle entrance, and the tower’s scaffoldings, looking out for more targets to emerge and finding none. No additional lights lit up, no sirens blazed, and no armed guards came rushing out in frenzy. The plant was still and quiet and it seemed no one inside had been alerted to the kills.
Now they needed to act fast, before anyone tried to raise the dead guards on the radio or someone walked by and noticed they were down.
00:59:54. Reaching the fence, Avery dropped into a
low crouch in the darkness. Coming up beside him, Poacher pulled a pair of mini bolt cutters from his vest. He quickly snipped the links one at a time, starting near the ground and going up and over in an arc, then he ripped the section of fence out with his hand.
With Mockingbird covering them with his HK416, Avery immediately slipped through the hole in the fence and dashed across the ten meter distance to the rotary kiln in a half-crouch. Avery’s body wasn’t moving as easily as when he functioned at a hundred percent, and he pushed his legs harder. His breathing was labored, and he felt slow and heavy, but there was no going back now.
With his back flattened against the kiln, Avery covered the others with his M4 until they reached his position. Then he snapped his rifle onto his vest’s harness, and Poacher gave him a boost up the outer wall of the eight foot tall cylindrical material feed shaft. Avery’s gloved fingers just barely graced the edge. He squeezed hard to compensate for the poor grip and muscled his weight onto the top shaft, swung one leg over, and rested there. He leaned forward, the movement sending waves of fresh pain coursing through his chest, to reach down and help Poacher up.
Both men then hauled Flounder, easily the heaviest and least agile man on the team, up the side of the shaft, while Mockingbird kept his back against the base of the tower, HK416 shouldered, and kept a lookout until all of the team had dropped into the dark space of the shaft one by one.
01:02. Avery let his legs absorb the impact as he dropped into the shaft, a little less gracefully than he had intended. He shouldered his M4, switched on his rifle’s night optic image intensifier, and peered through the scope down the length of the tube. They didn’t use tactical lights, which could potentially give away their position to the enemy, if any were present in the mill building. He stepped forward into the thick darkness of the rotary kiln, and heard Poacher drop down the shaft behind him.
The air in the kiln was dry, heavy, and smelled of old gas. It was like being inside an old, unwashed oven, but hopefully no one turned on the heat or decided to pour a couple hundred tons of slurry from the mixing tower through the kiln. Rocks and pebbles crunched beneath their feet and scrapped across the kiln’s surface, sounding like fingernails on a chalkboard, so Avery lifted his feet high with each step, to avoid kicking more rocks and debris around.
The kiln’s diameter was tall enough to stand in, but Avery still instinctively moved at a half-crouch, head down, with his M4 leading the way into the seemingly endless darkness of the tunnel. Poacher and Flounder were behind him at four foot intervals, with Flounder frequently swinging his HK416 back around to check their six an instinctive but unnecessary check, since Mockingbird or Reaper would have alerted them to anyone following them down the shaft. They covered the distance as quickly as they could without having the sounds of their footfalls bounce off the interior of the tube and into the factory.
01:04. The team reached the end of the kiln, which came to an abrupt dead end five feet in front of an open space in the floor. Looking down, Avery saw that the surface of the tunnel dropped straight down into the clinker cooler. He once more fastened his rifle to his vest.
Pressing his hands to the walls of the shaft, Avery carefully and silently lowered his weight into the cooler tank, then crept slowly forward the length of the tank and got down on one knee near the flimsy rubber flaps that led directly onto the idle conveyor belt which ran across the main floor of the factory interior.
Avery withdrew his silenced Mk 23 SOCOM pistol from its holster and leaned forward to peer through the flaps. The air seeping through felt cold and sterile, with a metallic taste. He heard voices chattering somewhere inside, the scraping of metal on metal, and the high pitched shrieking whine of power tools, but he saw no one from his limited, obscured vantage point.
Once the tools powered down, Avery tilted his head, held his breath, and opened his jaw slightly to hear better and concentrated on the voices. It sounded like rapid-fire Dari. Several seconds later, from another direction, he heard a smattering of Russian, which was answered with laughter.
A couple minutes later, Mockingbird hit the transmit button ten times in two second intervals, indicating that he’d made a sweep around the exterior of the building with Avery’s Radar Scope II and detected ten occupants on the ground level.
Avery raised a hand and motioned for Flounder to come over to him.
From a compartment on his vest, Flounder extracted the thin, flexible fiber-optic cable with a fisheye camera in the tip. Imperceptibly slow, he moved the cable between and barely past two of the flaps, careful so as not to disturb them and create movement, and panned left to right.
Avery and Poacher huddled close to see Flounder’s small handheld monitor.
To the right of the conveyor belt, about twenty-feet away, they watched four dark-skinned Pakistanis in lab coats, including one they immediately recognized as Ali Masood Jafari, working on a milling machine. There were many industrial grade machine tools. Avery couldn’t identify all of the equipment. Much of it was probably dual-use and legitimately purchased. A couple workstations were contained within a glass compartment, accessed by an airlock, with a decontamination station, and there several hazardous materials suits hung near the entrance.
Flounder continued panning the camera and stopped on two Russians standing nearby. One had an SR-3 submachine gun hanging casually from a sling around his shoulder. The second had a pistol holstered at his hip. They watched over the Pakistanis from a distance, giving them space to work. The Russians had relaxed posture, but they looked focused and alert. They weren’t going to become complacent and lazy from long guard duty.
There were also three Afghans or Uzbeks, with beards, craggy faces, steely eyes, and black turbans. Two had pistols; one had a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Flounder continued sweeping the assembly floor with the fisheye camera, but, given the poor line of sight his current position offered, he couldn’t locate the HEU containers. That was possibly a good sign. It meant they were still working to bring the weapons assembly plant online and were not yet ready to start making weapons. The canisters were probably still sealed and in storage somewhere.
Suddenly, a new voice resonated, this one distant and speaking Ukrainian-accented Russian. One of the Pakistanis gave a startled jump, looked over his shoulder, and gave an irritated scowl. Flounder moved the cable, following the Pakistani’s line of sight to a tall, wide man with a mustache and angular face who had just come down the metal staircase in the far corner of the assembly floor.
It was Aleksander Litvin.
Avery felt his blood simmer. His finger tensed over the SOCOM pistol’s trigger. His visceral reaction arose mostly from the prospect that Cramer would not be far behind Litvin, and Avery had to calm himself so that he didn’t do something impulsive, but the seconds passed and the American traitor never appeared.
Instead, Litvin was accompanied by another unpleasantly familiar face.
Mullah Arzad sported his ever present scowl as he hurried past Litvin to get an update from Ali Jafari. Litvin and Arzad looked satisfied with what they heard from the Pakistani scientist, and, after several more minutes, Litvin yawned and disappeared back up the stairs, leaving Mullah Arzad and the others on the assembly floor.
01:30. Four minutes after Litvin stepped away, Avery hand signaled to Poacher and Flounder to prepare for entry. They’d execute a silent take-down of the main level, then, with their silenced weapons, they could perform a stealth sweep over the next two levels. They didn’t have the manpower to take any prisoners. Anyone they encountered was a dead man.
Avery made sure that his M4 and other gear were securely fastened to his vest, so that nothing would rattle around or get snagged on anything as he slipped through narrow entrance into the mill building. It would be too cumbersome maneuvering with the rifle through the narrow space going from the cooling tank onto the convey belt, so he was going to use the SOCOM pistol for the takedown. Besides, the silenced pistol was a hell of a lot quieter t
han the rifle, and all of the targets were within a hundred feet, half of them unarmed.
Avery studied the feed on Flounder’s handheld monitor, and then peered back through the flaps, acclimating himself to the layout of the factory floor and the positions of the tangos, especially the two armed Russians, who, from where they stood, would easily see the first man making entry. The Russians needed to be taken out first. They’d be the best Litvin had to offer, KGB- and spetsnaz-trained. Avery didn’t imagine that the Pakistani scientists and technicians would be armed. The Afghan and Uzbek fighters were the second priority threat.
Avery nodded to Flounder, who then shut the surveillance gear down, replaced the items on his vest, and switched to his own SOCOM pistol. The expression on Flounder’s face showed that he’d mentally made the switch to combat mode and was ready to kill.
So was Avery, just like before going into the terrorist safe house in Yazgulam. Everything else, including Cramer, was far removed from his thoughts. Squatting, on the balls of his feet, ready to pounce, Avery positioned himself just behind the dangling flaps, with his finger indexed over the Mk 23’s trigger guard.
Poacher held up his hand with upright fingers and counted off five seconds.
Avery launched himself through the flaps onto the conveyor belt.
An alert Russian saw him immediately, and Avery dropped him with two fast subsonic .45 hollow points to the face before the Russian’s brain could process what his eyes saw and transmit the proper signal to his gun hand or to his mouth.
Avery jumped off the stationary conveyor belt onto the floor, with Poacher coming through the flaps right behind him, as the second Russian swung his SR-3 in their direction, and someone shouted something in Pashtu. Avery and Poacher both took up aim and fired until the Russian hit the floor.
On his second step across the floor, Avery shot down a nearby Uzbek and tracked for more targets.