Falling silently for the first four thousand feet, staying high allowed the helicopter to quietly travel over the data center. It's next job was to drop down when it was a kilometer away then reverse course to creep back, losing altitude until it could drop the two men to the roof of the other large building on a low hill nearly a eight hundred yards away from the LazaRuss data center. Easier than dropping on the ground, sliding down a rope was more silent as well. It posed no problem to the men who'd learned the technique in a four week climbing school then used it through their career, when needed. That done, the helicopter would return to a large, empty parking lot a mile away on the other side of the long row of hills that framed the Rosario area, their part in this operation completed.
Falling faster, reaching his terminal velocity of 120 mph, Jabo concentrated on keeping his body from spinning or sliding away from the aiming point he'd chosen visually before he dropped out, content to orient himself in the right direction for now.
A beep sounded in his ear, then changed to a sequence of tones that got closer and closer together then it was continuous, the signal for him to pull his ripcord and inflate the large winged parachute, slowing him in seconds. Stable, he pulled at the GPS unit so the small LCD popped out. The rushing air of rapid descent was over. It could have ripped the thin plastic LED display off the base unit attached firmly to his chest, something others had learned in combat to their embarrassed dismay and occasionally, death.
Jabo started following the display, turning so his travel lined up with the grid work of streets, indicated by the streetlights and traffic lights he could see sequencing below him. His drop rate was displayed in feet per second along with forward motion over the ground – all within the parameters the GPS was calculating and updating each hundredth of a second. At most he might have to crab off some altitude or flare to slow his forward speed, both easy with a chute system as refined as the one he'd received from the GPS maker, his son's long distance para-wing glider. The large screaming eagle on the chute's surface expressed Jabo and his mission. Death from above!
It was fun, if doing a combat jump armed to the teeth could be considered amusing. It wasn't proving difficult to keep himself on track as he slowly descended, using the overly large canopy to fly nearly a quarter mile from the point he'd pulled the handle to release and inflate it. His high lift to drag ratio chute had halted his initial descent quickly, banging the nylon harness into his crotch, a price he knew he'd pay for the huge canopy with it's incredible flight and control characteristics – more a wing than a parachute.
It also gave him plenty of articulation when he landed, which was going to be tricky, given the large amount of gear he'd stashed in packs around his body. The largest and heaviest being the one he'd let go to dangle on a heavy nylon tether, twenty feet below him. Approaching the well lit, light blue colored warehouse, he saw the edge of the data center's roof, he began pulling back on the trailing edge the the cloth parachute wing. It created lift and generating drag that temporarily traded forward speed for a small jump upward, timed to merge with the loss of lift that quickly followed as he slowed down then finally luffed the wing, destroying its lift in a few seconds by turning its surface nearly vertical. It was what birds did every time they flew in to drop on a branch, but knowing how to do it, the science of flight turned into a set of actions didn't make it any easier.
The large pack hit first and started tumbling, making a loud 'whump', when it slammed into something on the roof's surface. That triggered the hardest move, letting go of the traces on the chute for a second to bang the quick release on his chest then reach back up to grab them again, suspending himself inside his harness, ready to let him go, holding on with arm strength. He kept the flare going until the dark surface loomed up, nearly impossible to see. He bit on a switch in his mouth to turn on the powerful LED lamps on his helmet, lighting the black surface. It was another gift from the GPS maker, safety gear his dead son had found useful on night jumps.
“Fuck,” too low, he jerked even harder on the leads in his hands while lifting up his feet, going into a landing roll before he wanted. Contact made him tumble, tucking into a nice ball his Judo instructor would be proud of. He snapped up, on his feet, still moving forward as he released the parachute traces, jogging involuntarily across the roof. His harness was jerked off his chest, taken by a light wind that inflated the chute, pulling the rig up and off his body. Running after the billowing sail, he worked up the lines, collecting them quickly, working the traces to deflate the huge wing again so it fell, limp and lifeless, five feet waving against the side of the building where it had fallen over the edge. It was a glaring sign someone had parachuted onto the building. Jabo tugged the huge canopy back from the roof's margin, hoping it hadn't shown up in any of the many cameras on the rim of the building that Grigor and his crew were monitoring inside.
He didn't have time to worry. His plan required he signal he was down and ready to go to his team on the other building roof, a click away, on overlook. They'd brought a large caliber sniper rifle and spotting scope with night optics, overkill in the area bathed with street and parking lot lights. His shooters weren't trained for covert operations, rather they were the electrical repair technicians who serviced the power for Fort Hood. They fixed everything from the huge transformers that accepted and stepped down the incoming high tension lines very high voltage electricity, to the 'cans' or green boxes on the ground, producing the familiar 220 -110 A/C electricity that powered the lights and equipment in every building on the base.
Sending a light signal might seem antiquated, but it was highly secure, given the infra red channel they were using, invisible to the human eye. It was very easy to see when you used an amplifier and filter designed to pick it up, as they were.
“That's it, he's ready for phase one, go ahead, take out the main drop box. Shit, this is fun, I've always wanted to see what the hell happens when you blow up a big transformer under load. All we ever get to do is fix them when a lightning bolt or a truck hits them.” His compatriot grinned then looked through the huge light sucking telescope, that made the easily identified transformer unit loom up, a General Electric setup they were very familiar with, what was standard in this part of Central Texas.
Sgt Willis raised the long barreled Barrett M82A1 fifty caliber sniper rifle, colored with mottled, beige camouflage – standard these days, since most of the remote operations were in desert locations in the Middle East. Taking aim at the center of the dull green metal box to produce maximum damage, he pulled the trigger slowly as he'd been taught by his drill instructor years ago, letting the inner tension of the trigger mechanism build up until it chose the moment to release and let the firing pin slam into the base of the large brass cartridge, igniting the primer which flamed into the powder of the cartridge and sent the very large explosive round flying out to impact and explode.
Armor piercing and issued only to the Military, it did it's job. It easily punched through the mild steel case to bury itself deep in the coils of insulated wire that made up the transformer, exploding there when it impacted. It instantly shorted thousands of volts, of very high amperage electricity which produced a secondary explosion. Both quickly expanded into a fat ball of electrical sparks and flame. The pressure inflated the metal shroud outward, doing what it was designed to do under failure, but the pressures created by the explosive material in the armor piercing round combined with the electrical fireball to stretch the metal housing until it failed as well, tearing into large chunks that went flying, along with the internal components of the transformers and burning spray from the insulating oil that bathed the coils, making a spiraling pattern of metal flying at different directions and speeds like an over the top firework. The fragments of metal housing and pieces of the heavy transformer coils inside arced up to fall among the cars parked nearby, shattering windshields and in one case, catching the car on fire which produced a column of dark smoke rising to the air. It was a one shot war zone.
“Oh hell, that's the coolest thing I ever saw,” Sgt Willis immediately high fived his compatriot then they both settled behind their optics, watching the front of the building, where three very pissed, well armed men appeared, right on schedule, as Jabo had predicted.
“Given the length of the hallways from here, the central control room, where the bad guys are, watching their TV screens, ready to pounce on anyone who is stupid enough to attack them on the ground. A small squad will check it out after their screens blink, recording the the giant fireball when we light up their transformer before they die out, leaving them in the dark or battery powered lights high on the walls.”
“Give them say ten seconds to understand what happened then they'll take about twenty seconds to run out to see what the heck happened. They'll rush outside, to see for themselves and look around, assuming it was an opening for an attack or a freak accident.
“There can't be too many people on his 'go' team, including him, maybe three up to five or six, max. They'll assume the concrete walls of the building are protection enough for anyone they leave inside. His crew will leave someone behind to man the screens as the rest of them run for the front doors where the leader, Grigor will leave a few men to guard the entrance. It's the only one, beside a fire door in the back that is hardened steel and impossible to break into quickly, from the outside. Then he'll go with a few men to inspect the damage outside, probably talking to the people at LazaRuss on his cell phone, which is where you two come in,” Jabo had pointed at the other two soldiers he'd asked his friend from the teams to find and bring along.
Experts in RF intelligence, snagging Grigor's cell phone transmissions, recording them, then identifying the SIM card and every other bit of data about the phone he was talking to was child's play, what they did with regularity in the field, but never on American soil, on a civilian phone call, due to the onerous laws and penalties on wire tapping that made it highly illegal, except in this case, as his CIA and NSA contacts had told him.
Albert's CIA contacts had confirmed his guess about the woman who'd attacked him, their rapid interrogation had revealed she was a Russian national who'd been inserted into the country to perform an act of war on an active duty, serving officer of the US Army. Wire tapping laws and lots of other restrictions didn't matter now. An attack on one serving member of their military, on the job – Jabo – was war, intentional or not.
His new commission and rank, as well as re-upping for another four years had come in handy in a new way he hadn't anticipated. Grigor and his Russian bosses had gotten a bit too used to breaking the law in the USA. They'd assumed the Americans would be bound by their Constitution and laws, unable to do something about their activities inside the country. Bad idea Ivan.
The computers downstairs in the building consumed huge amounts of power, needed to run the millions of computer chips and their associated memory chips, as well as the humming hard disk arrays connected to the metal cabinets holding the computer boards. It all used enough electricity to power a town of a thousand people, watching TV and keeping their refrigerators and air conditioners humming. The delay from his 'Landed I am OK' light signal to now, the 'Execute Plan' signal gave Jabo time to open up the large bundle he'd dropped on a lanyard. It had hit an air duct which had a big dent in the side, thanks to the heavy metal crate that had slid into it. Inside were all the tools he needed for the next part of his plan.
Power loss was a computer guy's nightmare scenario, especially for the LazaRuss people who were probably calling up Grigor to scream at him to get the power back on immediately or their precious research information and all the ongoing experiments with their data and tweaked programs were going to be lost – years of work, eliminated in a few critical minutes.
To save all that he'd soon have to come through Jabo on the roof, where the diesel powered backup power generators had been installed, a backup measure for just this possibility. It would have worked great unless someone like him parachuted on the roof to break in and turn them off. It was identical to the feat done by the Germans in the last big war, sending a team in gliders to crash land on a huge fort on the Belgium border, Eben-Emael. They disarmed it piece by piece until the thousands of men inside surrendered and walked out. It's loss opened the door for the flood of men and machines to overrun Belgium and eventually conquer all of Western Europe in a few weeks. Like the motto of the SAS says, 'who dares, wins'.
Soon after he'd landed he'd retrieved the metal saw to cut through the locks on the door to the diesel systems. It's industrial blade cut steel like it was butter. After checking for booby traps he'd turned on the lights inside to examine the interior. His plan required him to to turn the engines off correctly. That had been his first question to the men who'd blown up the transformer box beside the building. This was part of his plan to bring down Grigor and his crew.
It was a bit sloppy, killing outside power for the building, then sabotaging the backup power system on the roof. Much of the data in the computers below would be compromised and much lost, data stored for innocent companies who happened to be using the same warehouse for their server farms. But it was just information, not human lives. It was the kind of digital snarl most of those geeks below and outside consultants for the companies that used this center lived for, overtime and exorbitant fees to put everything right in a few days or weeks, depending on how elegant and well run their backup systems were.
If LazaRuss had scrimped on that part of their business operations then too bad, he wasn't doing anything worse than mother nature might do in a freak storm, the kind that had put Houston under five feet of water – everywhere – including the former President's mansion and most of the chemical plants and refineries lining the ship channel that linked the ocean to that most industrial of American cities. Mother Nature Texas style.
As Jabo was thinking about his next step the big engines growled on, doing their job, distracting him. He waited for one very long minute, then blinked his infrared signal to his troops as he stood at the edge of the roof. Try to read that you Russian asshole. His sniper team would relay the code word to begin the next phase to the rest of his team using their cell phones – new ones bought and activated hours before, so there was no chance Grigor and his counter intelligence people could penetrate them. He'd gained a new respect for the Russians when the assassin had showed up at his hotel room. Sending a ruthless killer was a risky move Grigor had been willing to take after Jabo's taunts – challenging his manhood to make him overreact. Out of control, he'd removed Grigor's greatest asset, a frosty mind in the midst of a hot conflict.
Although the grid was down in this area, the cell towers had their own diesel and battery backup, designed to operate for days if the input power was gone. This redundancy also brought up buildings around him, winking back on like the LazaRuss systems had, lighting it up inside and out, along with the critical computer servers. Everything was fine as far as they knew inside, but not for long.
Hurrying back, Jabo arrived out
side the low, steel building as the diesels rumbled inside. He held his collapsible AR-15 against his chest covered with extra magazines wearing his trusty 9mm Beretta on his hip, with more mags for it around his waist. He was a walking, one man firefight. Flipping down his night goggles to test them once again, he clicked them back up, preferring his eyes to the limited field they gave, but they might prove useful later.
After his rough landing he'd easily found the shipping container style backup module he'd identified the first time he 'glassed' the data center. It held six Allison diesels that had started after his team had killed outside power going to the building. They assured him the building would also have a rack of large industrial batteries inside, only good for fraction of an hour. They'd also provide an immediate stopgap for the seconds it would take for the automatic system to detect power loss from the outside then fire up the diesels to take up the load.
Grigor and his bosses had assumed he'd want to find a way to penetrate the data center to carry out an attack on their servers and data. Jabo had reversed the problem. Grigor would have to come to him to bring his servers back up to speed by turning his backup generators back on. There was nothing of importance inside, just computers that would be all shut down when he clicked off the backup power, a bunch of silicon that was useless, cooling off until electricity was turned back on. No matter how sophisticated their shutdown procedures they were sure to lose huge amount of information, since everything in their system was stored here, by design. And he had the key to take down all their storage, the core of their business network – one man who stood at the door of the diesel backup building. If Grigor wanted to get his computers going again, to salvage their information, he'd have to come here, though Jabo.
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