* * *
My first step out of the locker room was the longest I’d taken in days. I wasn’t sure what I was dealing with.
I did, at least, have my clothes on. There was a lot to be said for that.
I’d also tied one of the bandannas the tangos were wearing around my head. I figured they’d put them on for identification — you see someone in the hall wearing a red band around their head, and you don’t shoot him. Everyone else gets terminated.
The stadium was a big place. Had it been completely taken over? How many other people were involved? A dozen? Two dozen? There was no telling.
The two men in the locker room were wearing black ninja clothes, which was the squadron’s standard uniform, but I didn’t recognize either one as a member of the squadron. Still, not knowing what was going on, I wasn’t about to trust the members of the squadron.
I couldn’t even call for help, though I did have my phones with me. Neither my cell nor my satellite phone could get a signal, either because I was so deep in the stadium that the signals were blocked, or because the security blocking system had been activated.
I held my breath and sprung out, spinning in both directions, finger gently against the trigger.
Sprung is an exaggeration. I was feeling pretty beat up, all the energy from the shower gone. Fortunately for me, there was no one watching the hall.
I sprinted to the end, pausing near the doors. There was no one there either. I started to think that whoever had taken the place over had vacated. That notion was dispelled a few moments later as I heard voices ahead. I ducked into a room at the side of the hall, leaving the door open a crack so I could listen. Two men came trotting down the hall, running past before I could jump them. Unsure whether my gunshots might alert someone else, I decided to let them go rather than try to chase after them and shoot them down.
I waited a few seconds, then continued down the hall in the direction of the rooms where we’d locked the security team.
Like all stadiums, there were several levels to the building below field level. The rooms where I was heading were two stories down, reachable by a freight elevator or one of two staircases on either end of the building. My preference was the staircase at the north end of the stadium; the door was only a few yards from the rooms. But I heard voices as I neared it. As I pushed back against the wall, I noticed a wire on the floor. I followed it with my eyes down the hall to an exposed girder that formed part of the arch over the hall.
The bastards were wiring the place to explode.
The voice got a little louder, and I had to backtrack — there was no place to hide in the corridor.
Suddenly I heard a shout from the direction of the locker rooms. Fearing that the two men who had passed earlier had found my friends and were sounding the alarm, I ducked into the nearest room, hoping to hide until they passed. But as I stepped into the darkness I bumped against a set of ropes that were next to the doorway, and realized I’d gone into one of the shops.
Besides the athletic events, a fair amount of pomp and ceremony was planned for the Games, and the organizers had already started working on the stages and the assorted displays that were going to be used. This was done in the workshop area that I had just entered. It was a maze of half-built sets, ladders, carts, and piles of material.
It was also a way down to the basement, since the freight elevator opened onto the field here. The elevator was noisy as hell — half the stadium shook when it moved — so I didn’t want to turn it on. But I figured I could use the shaft to get below.
It wouldn’t be the first time I got the shaft, no?
And then?
Breaking out of the stadium clearly was going to require some assistance. And I had a ready reserve in the basement — the guards we’d locked in the two rooms.
I had a destination, motivation — staying alive — and a plan. Can’t ask for more than that.
Except for a warm, curvy body and a cold beer, of course.
I walked through the room like a blind man, stumbling and trying desperately not to knock too much over. Disoriented — I’d only been in the shop area once — I walked into a workbench. I reached around the surface and shelves, hoping to find a flashlight, but all I could come up with were some screwdrivers and other assorted hand tools. Finally I found my way to the elevator, bumping my knee on the pipe rail that guarded the perimeter to prevent accidents. I climbed over and started searching for a manhole or something else to get down below through.
A hinged hatchway sat at the far end. I had trouble figuring out how to open it — you had to turn two large lugs in recessed compartments — and then nearly fell through.
My balance restored, I located the ladder and started working my way down. It wasn’t until I reached the first-floor opening that I realized I had another problem — the large panel doors to the elevator were closed.
Well, duh.
I know there are typically emergency levers and other mechanisms to open the damn things when there’s a problem, but in the dark I wasn’t about to find them. I climbed all the way down to the lowest subbasement, hoping there was no elevator door on that level.
But there was. I patted the walls, looking for a release or some other way out, and eventually found an access door to the elevator pit a few rungs up, just to the right of the ladder. This put me in a room the size of a phone booth, where I stumbled around cursing until finally I found a light switch. I held my breath, then turned the light on, figuring I might just as well see where the hell I was trapped before I died.
It was a maintenance closet. Somehow I’d missed the doorknob opposite me.
A locker was recessed into the wall on the right. I found a pair of flashlights on the top shelf. I doused the overhead light, undid the lock so I could get back in if I had to, and went into the hall.
I’d slung the AK47 on my back while climbing down. I left it there now, walking slowly through the hall to get my bearings. I made nearly a full circuit before realizing the sentries were locked one flight above.
Assuming that they were still there — at this point, I couldn’t take anything for granted.
I used the south stairway to get up to their level. I could hear someone talking at field level, two flights above where I was going. I tiptoed, and moved as silently as I could, forcing myself to breathe as quietly as possible.
* * *
I mentioned earlier that the sentries had all been sprayed and marked before being locked in the rooms. They were in a great mood when I unscrewed the locked door and let myself in.
Let me say this: I now know a lot more curses in Punjabi than I did before I went into that room.
Eventually I calmed them down and found the supervisor. I told him that I thought the stadium had been taken over by terrorists. They’d apparently overpowered the people who had overpowered them — which meant they could win back their pride by retaking the place.
Maybe my pep talk rallied them. More likely they were so ornery from the pepper spray that they were itching to tear someone, anyone, limb from limb.
We had eighteen men, not counting myself. I split them into three groups. I left one group at the bottom of the south staircase, telling them to charge up once they heard us attacking from above. Then I led the others back to the elevator shaft.
I went up the ladder first. Marut, a guard who spoke good English and knew his way around the shop, came with me. Armed with the flashlights from the closet below, we checked out the workshop, hoping to find some sort of weapons. But I couldn’t find anything more lethal than a hacksaw.
“Could we use the pyro?” asked Marut.
Pyro as in fireworks.
Hell yeah, we could, depending on what they were. We found a bunch of Roman candles, some cherry bombs, and M60 firecrackers: quarter sticks of dynamite. Nasty stuff if it explodes in your face.
What we didn’t find were fuses. They were all rigged to go off by electrical charge, and the ignition devices were not yet in the stadium. Without time
to figure out how to deal with the wiring, I stuffed some of the M60s in my pocket and left the rest.
Marut went back to lead the others up the ladder. I snuck out to the hall. I paused by the door, listening, but couldn’t hear anything. So I slipped out into the corridor and began walking to the staircase.
Nothing.
Then I spotted the explosives.
The wire I’d seen along the wall earlier was connected to a small gray box filled with plastic explosives and taped against the girder. I undid the tape and pulled the wire gently from the assembly, hoping like hell the damn thing wasn’t arranged in such a way that doing that would set it off.
Unlikely, but not impossible.
It wasn’t, fortunately. I followed the wire back to the stairs, around a corner, and up into the fire alarm system. The tangos had used the alarms as their wiring backbone. Pulling an alarm anywhere in the building would blow it up.
I was about to conclude that they’d gotten the hell out of there when I heard footsteps in the hall behind me. I got to the corner and saw two ninjas with red bandannas running toward me with a wire reel between them.
I took them out with the AK, both shots through the head. Only one of them was armed — he had a Beretta handgun in his waistband.
Marut and some of the others came up while I was grabbing the gun.
“We feared the worst,” he said.
“You any good with a rifle?” I asked him.
“I am not bad. Not too good, not too bad.”
That wasn’t the answer I was hoping for. I gave him the rifle anyway — I’d have a better chance of hitting something with the pistol than he would.
“Where’s the master panel for the fire alarms?” I asked.
Marut didn’t know. The shift supervisor said it was in the main security office one level above where we were.
“They’re probably there, waiting for the wiring to be finished,” I said. “Is there another panel as a backup? Something to disable the entire system?”
If there was, the shift supervisor didn’t know where it would be. The main circuit breakers were on the basement level where they had been kept prisoner; there were backup generators there as well.
Would cutting the power to the fire alarms disable all the bombs? Or would it ignite them?
Unfortunately, the only way to find out was to try it.
( II )
I told Marut and the supervisor to take the tangos out, post by post. It was possible that some Special Squadron Zero people were holed up somewhere, perhaps by the entrances, but everyone with a red bandanna was the enemy.
Except me, of course.
I was still optimistic that some Special Squadron Zero people were in the building alive somewhere. I shouldn’t have been optimistic, but I was. So I told the guards to simply arrest anyone who seemed legitimate, as long as they were willing to surrender peacefully.
“Try and get them to surrender,” I said. “But don’t risk your life for it.”
There were a few nods. Mostly there was a look of evil in their eyes — these guys wanted revenge for the humiliation they’d just suffered.
Which was a good thing, as long as they didn’t decide I was the easiest target.
“When I cut the power, the lights in the whole place will go out,” I continued. “There won’t be backup either.”
The supervisor shrugged. I didn’t trust his English, so I had Marut explain it to him in Hindi. He shrugged again.
“We have been through so much this evening,” he explained. “One more hardship is nothing.”
I nodded. There was no sense telling him that killing the power might also bring the house down.
I went straight down the staircase, taking the steps two at a time. I ran, not walked, to the power room. I didn’t stop to turn on the lights …
… dropped the damn flashlight fumbling to get the door open …
… picked it up and saw someone coming down the hall from the other direction.
The light behind him framed his silhouette in the hall. He had a roll of wire in his left hand, and an AK47 in his right.
Doom on you, Rogue Warrior.
* * *
No, he didn’t fire at me. At that particular moment, I didn’t know why. I thought it was just luck. I held the flashlight in his face, but he kept on running toward me, squinting.
Then I realized why — I was still wearing the bandanna.
He raised his hand, waving at me with the wire to stop shining the light in his face. I pulled the flashlight away, then swung it hard against the side of his head, knocking him out.
So hard, in fact, that I busted the damn flashlight. The lamp snapped off, ricocheting down the hall. I lose more flashlights that way.
I grabbed his gun and put a round through his skull. Then I went back to work on the door.
The fact that he’d been coming down with the wires probably meant that the explosives hadn’t been wired in yet, but I wasn’t about to take any chances. I killed the backup power unit first, ripping out the long cable that snaked from the generators into the large steel boxes where the circuit controls were. Then I found the master switch and pulled it down.
Instant darkness.
If the flashlight were still working, getting back upstairs would have been easy. But once more I stumbled around, knocking into the wall and bruising my knee before finding the hall.
It was just as dark in the corridor, but the wall gave me something to use as a reference. I went back up to the stairwell and started climbing up toward the security office on the upper level.
The stairwell was lit by skylights at the roof, and while it wasn’t exactly bright, the dull gray was easier to navigate than the halls below. Once my knee stopped throbbing, I took the steps two at a time.
I heard gunfire as I neared field level. Two bodies lay on the stairs near the landing. Both were wearing bandannas. I stepped over them and kept going.
The next two bodies weren’t wearing bandannas. One was a Special Squadron Zero private I remembered from our training sessions.
The other was Captain Birla. Both men had been shot from behind, and some time before — the blood around them was already sticky, starting to dry.
At least I knew he wasn’t a traitor.
I continued up the stairs to the top floor where the administrative offices were, walking now instead of running. There was a ripple of automatic weapons fire as I reached the landing. I slipped into the corridor and joined two of the guards crouching by the wall near the main office.
The guard next to me turned around and jerked back, startled.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Marcinko?”
“Yeah, it’s me. What?”
He tapped his forehead and pointed to me. I was still wearing the bandanna; he’d thought at first I was one of them.
The main office had a set of long windows separating it from the hall. Most of the glass was gone, and there was just enough light for anyone inside to get a good view of the hall. There were at least two tangos inside the room toward the back barricaded behind some desks, with what figured to be plenty of ammunition.
Right then I decided I was getting them out alive. I wanted to find out what the hell was going on, and shooting up the bastards, though satisfying, wouldn’t help. And I wanted to get them out myself — waiting for reinforcements to help would probably mean that I’d never get a chance to interrogate them.
My bandanna gave me half an idea.
Just then, Marut and the shift supervisor came up on the other side of the hall, two guards behind them. That gave me the other half. I waved at them to stay there, then got down on my belly and started crawling across the glass on the floor to tell them what I had in mind.
I was about three-quarters of the way past the office when whoever was inside fired a few rounds. That gave me a burst of adrenaline and I just about flew to the other side.
“I want you to shout to the others — say they’
ve got people coming up the stairs behind you and you’re going to evacuate the floor,” I told Marut. “Then shoot up the front office and fall back.”
He nodded, but even in the dim light I could tell he had an expression on his face that said I was nuts.
“One more thing,” I said, spotting some more of the wire they used for charges running along the baseboard. “Give me your flashlight.”
* * *
A few moments later, the hall began crackling with gunfire. I waited a few seconds, then fired off a burst myself. Marut, at the end of the hall, yelled something, then screamed as if he were dying.
It was an Academy Award performance.
I made my move, jumping toward the shattered glass at the front of the office. I dove down, rolling beneath the wall.
They’d seen my bandanna, but whether it was that or the shock and awe of someone flying at them from the side, nobody fired.
A second later, there was a loud explosion at the back of the office: the M60s going off.
I saw a figure on my right, framed in the flash. I threw myself on him, just as Marut and the shift supervisor came in from the other side, guns blazing.
When it was over, the three men who’d been at the back of the office were dead. Two had already been severely wounded, possibly dead when we attacked. An ocean’s worth of blood pooled around the third.
The man I jumped on had taken some glass shrapnel in the forehead. He was dazed, but alive.
Oh, yeah. The estimate on how many were there was off by one hundred percent. Par for the course.
I could hear the police sirens as I hauled him down the street to one of the Special Squadron Zero vehicles. I threw him in the back and drove over to the Maharaja Express, determined to find out what the hell was going on.
( III )
Mohammad al Jazra was a member of People’s Islam. He’d been born in southwestern Afghanistan toward the end of the 1980s. His father had been a poppy farmer whose complicated relationship with the local Taliban waxed and waned depending on their changing views toward his crop of choice. By the mid-nineties, the family had moved to Pakistan, settling in Karachi.
RW16 - Domino Theory Page 22