“Whoa, ladies, ladies, relax now,” said Doc, trying to wade into the crowd. “Leave him to us.”
The women were in no mood for that. Doc had to step back and let them spend their fury.
Shotgun, meanwhile, raced to the restroom and rapped on the door.
“Trace, it’s me — you decent?”
She pulled open the door.
“What the hell took you so long?” she asked.
Shotgun looked in, saw the dead bodies, and whistled. He helped Colina out, then joined Trace in herding the women toward the ladder in the elevator shaft.
“Get everyone up to the roof,” Doc told them, punching into the police network. “I’ll call the police teams outside. When everyone’s out of the building, we’ll send the squad in and start the floor-by-floor search.”
Shotgun cast a hungry eye toward the kitchen.
“Think there’s time for a snack?” he asked.
( IV )
Hearing the shots, the police outside had started to rush the building. Doc convinced them to back off in case there were booby traps, assuring them that the hostages were already safe.
Evacuating the women from the building took another twenty minutes. The SWAT teams had to follow standard protocol, searching the women before taking them to safety.
Shotgun naturally volunteered to handle this personally, but the job was taken by a pair of matrons specially trained in the delicate art of female searches. He did, however, manage to find a bag of Twinkies in his vest, which was a partial consolation.
Meanwhile, Doc stayed in the cafeteria with the beaten tango. He tried questioning him, but between the shot that had grazed the man’s head and the pummeling he’d received, he was too groggy to respond. Doc searched him and found only two things in his pockets — a cell phone and a small radio detonator.
The tangos had set charges to blow the building before waking the women.
“Better send the bomb squad in first,” Doc told the police. “And evacuate the block. These guys aren’t known for skimping on the explosives.”
* * *
By this point, I’d reached the chemical plant.
You’re probably expecting to see armed men all over the building, holding workers at bay, preparing some sort of megabomb to devastate all of Delhi.
So was I.
Imagine my surprise then when I found the guards on duty, and no report of anything amiss.
Not to seem too disappointed at the lack of a catastrophe that would potentially match that of Hiroshima, but WTF?
My first thought was that Shunt had gotten the location wrong. I walked back along the tracks, following the siding right to the building — it wasn’t even blocked off by a fence. The two tank cars were there, sitting close to the building. Glancing at them, I saw no obvious sign that they’d been tampered with.
I’d been sure that the attack on the school would be a diversion — while India’s security people scurried to help the hostages, the tangos would take over the chemical factory and turn it into a giant nerve gas bomb. The amount of alcohol they’d procured made that seem only logical.
But now another thought occurred to me. Maybe the two events weren’t related at all. Maybe the tangos had already finished making their gas, and had in fact shipped it out, not in train cars but in jugs and small sealed containers, distributing it through Delhi or worse, through India or the world. A gallon or two of the gas released simultaneously in a dozen office buildings, dropped into air circulators in a few high-rises or indoor arenas, several shopping malls — the effect might not be quite as dramatic as 9/11, but it would certainly produce a similar level of terror.
That’s the problem with this business. Hang around it for any length of time and all sorts of evil possibilities occur to you. I pity people in the profession who need more than two or three hours’ sleep, because I doubt they can get it.
I was considering my next move — in other words, staring at the train cars with a dumbshit look on my face — when the sat phone rang. It was Doc, telling me they’d freed the hostages and were securing the building.
“Looks like they set some charges,” he said. “The lead tango had a detonator device and a cell phone.”
“What sort of numbers are on the cell?” I asked.
“I don’t want to turn it on, in case it’s a backup for the detonator.”
That’s Doc. Always thinking.
“What I figure is, they’re waiting for an external signal to blow themselves up,” he told me. “Now where the hell are you and what are you doing?”
* * *
At least I think that’s what he said. I was too busy adding two and two together to pay much attention to what he was saying.
Why would the tangos inside the school need to wait for a signal to blow themselves up?
Obviously, something else had to happen.
A VX attack?
Had to be.
Actually, it didn’t. But all the other information had led me here, and I was convinced that there must be a connection. Call it Rogue intuition.
And then I saw the two guys climbing the smokestack.
( V )
According to Doc, I told him to get his butt up to the chemical plant before hanging up. That may be true. I don’t remember saying anything, or even hanging up. All I know is I started for the smokestack, then reversed course, running into the building.
I’d had it right in the beginning; I was just wrong about how far along they were, and what specifically they planned to do.
The men climbing the building were wearing backpacks. They were either intending to blow off the sensors at the top of the stack that shut down the plant when toxic chemicals were detected, or more likely simply wanted to make sure that the gas was released low enough to spread with maximum effect in Delhi.36
For all intents and purposes, the factory was operating normally, and as safely as ever: Day Number 1,643 without an accident, as the sign in the front lobby proclaimed.
That was about to change.
“My name is Richard Marcinko,” I told the guards at the front desk. “I’m working for the Defense Ministry. I need to speak to the head of security right away.”
A little white lie in the heat of the battle never hurt anyone.
The guard looked at my ID, looked at my beady little eyes, then nodded and ducked into the office behind him.
I started to follow. He met me inside the reception room.
“The director is waiting,” he said, stepping out of my way.
I pushed into the room.
“I’m sorry to barge in like this, but you have a serious emergency. The building back by the train siding. There’s something going on inside that has to be che — ”
I stopped short. The director had leveled a .44 Magnum revolver at my stomach.
* * *
My editor suggested a cool scene here where Junior and Mongoose, having rested up down south, “borrowed” the advanced attack helicopter and flew north with it. Realizing that I was being held hostage, they would crash through the windows of the plant, chain gun blazing, and proceed to fly around the interior, laying waste to the pack of dirty rotten scumbags who were trying literally to get on Delhi’s nerves. The final climax would be a scene of fiery death, with their bullets igniting a series of flames. I would jump on the wheel and we would burst out of the building, glass and wood flying, moments before it blew up.
Then we’d land, I’d kiss a pretty young thing, and we’d all retire to the local bar for drinks.
Great ending.
Things didn’t quite go that way, though.
* * *
“We are going for a little walk,” the security director told me.
“I’m ready when you are,” I told him.
“You will remove your weapons,” he said. “And very slowly.”
I took the PK out.
“Drop it on the floor.”
“That’s not a very safe thing to do,” I said.
“Drop the gun.”
I complied.
“No backup weapon?” he asked.
“Do I look like someone who would need a backup?”
Apparently I do, because he had me pull up my shirt and then lower my drawers, demonstrating that I was not, in fact, carrying another gun.
“Shoes come off, and socks,” he demanded. “Roll up your pant legs.”
I had to give up the Rogue Warrior knives. Some people will do anything to get them at a discount.
I looked down at my watch, pressing the button on the dial.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking the time.”
“Give me the watch.”
“It’s just a watch.”
“Give it to me.”
I handed it over. He frowned at it, and started to throw it into the wastebasket.
“It’s a Rogue Warrior watch,” I told him. “Limited edition.”
He looked at it again.
“Worth quite a bit of money,” I added.
“Let’s go,” he said, pocketing it.
“Sure.”
I turned and started out the door slowly. It was a classic takedown situation — as I passed through the door, I would slide to the side, grab the hand with the gun, push down and then push up, keeping control of the weapon while kicking him with my feet.
That was my plan, and it wouldn’t have been a bad one, had not one of the director’s guards appeared in front of me, his own gun drawn.
“The director is a traitor,” I said, throwing myself to the right.
The guard smacked me on the side of the head with his gun, then took a quick step back.
He was a traitor as well. As a matter of fact, the tangos had taken over the entire security shift.
Doom on Dickie.
Doom on Delhi.
* * *
The watch was a Rogue Warrior watch. But it was rigged exactly as Trace’s was. When I pushed the buttons in, Doc got an immediate alert.
“Dick needs us,” he told the others. And within thirty seconds they were on their way.
* * *
Getting pistol-whipped is not my idea of a fun time, but I’ve certainly been hit much harder. I never blanked out. One of the goons kicked at me and got me to my feet.
They walked me down a long corridor. There were people working in the offices, but the guards had holstered their guns and I imagine that we didn’t look too out of place. I worked out various permutations of how I might escape, what to do if someone came, but the right opportunity didn’t present itself.
There was a door at the end of the hall. We went through it and entered a small courtyard paved in concrete. We continued to an older gray building on the left, entering a long gray hallway, dimly lit.
“All the way to the end,” said the director, a few paces behind me.
There were no doors along the corridor — it was as if we were walking through a mine shaft. The door at the end led to an open area covered with broken macadam, pebbles, and debris. I was barefoot, and I used that as an excuse to duck back and forth, thinking it might give me a chance to turn and run. But they quickly grew tired of the game; the guards started pushing me forward in the direction of a large building. They were on to my game. These guys were a lot better trained and several times more wary than any of the tangos I’d dealt with before.
Several stories tall, the building was made of cinder blocks and steel panels. The blocks were on the bottom, about eight or nine feet high. They were worn down by the weather, though not so much that you could see through them. Rust poked through the seams of the steel panels above the bricks. Here and there splotches of brown covered vast parts of the panels, looking like giant blood clots that had burst against the wall.
The smell of a thousand Chinese laundries hit me as we moved through the door. A few steps later, the scent turned to something closer to the odor you get in a pool store, accented by a delicate bouquet of roasted metal. This was quickly replaced by a sweeter smell, almost like lilac water, if you can imagine it being boiled in the middle of your high school chemistry lab right after Dopey Joey burned a beaker’s worth of sulfur onto his Bunsen burner.
The building, one of the older ones on the site, was used to mix chemicals in bulk. Old steel vats stood along the wall on my left. Each vat was at least ten feet in diameter; some looked considerably bigger, maybe thirty or forty feet across. Serpentine metal ladders ran around the sides, with a wide spiderweb of grates and walkways over and across the top.
A veritable pipe organ of tubing was mounted behind each of the vats; there were assorted gauges and crank wheels sprinkled randomly through the gear. A few glass tubes ran in and out of one of the large vats, but for the most part everything was metal, and not particularly new metal at that. I have no idea how old the equipment was, but it gave every impression of having been there since before India became independent.
That contrasted sharply with the right side of the room, where triangular stainless-steel containers gleamed amid a tangled weave of glass, black plastic, and steel pipes. Digital displays and thick fists of valves sat at regular intervals in the piping. At the base there was a control unit with several keyboard and display screens.
The floor — which was mostly where my eyes were aimed — was smooth, epoxy-covered concrete, recently applied. Toward the back of the room, a pair of railroad tracks bisected the concrete. They led to a large barnlike door; it wasn’t hard to guess that the train cars I’d seen sat somewhere on the other side of the door.
Which put the smokestack to my left, above the large brick room punctured by metal octopus arms. Thick wires hung out the side of the arms, dangling like so many severed strands of muscle or, to make a more appropriate metaphor, nerve endings. They led to sensors and feedback controls, part of a monitoring and emergency shutdown system designed to keep toxic materials from entering the smokestack.
As I walked, I heard a clap of thunder followed by heavy rain — the top eighty or ninety feet of the smokestack had just been blown off.
Two men in lab coats were bent over the control station, talking in hushed tones. I recognized them both — our chemistry students, so conveniently deposited into the heart of India by Special Squadron Zero and yours truly. Three or four other men in white coveralls were working in the spiderwork above, checking different wheel handles and working on the pipes.
Two men dressed in security garb, both armed with AK47s, were standing in the middle of the room, watching us come in.
What does that add up to? Counting the guys who’d gone up the chimney, the guards that I knew about, the supervisor — a baker’s dozen to kill or maim hundreds of thousands. Their productivity statistics were out of sight.
One of the men at the control board turned and shouted something in Arabic. Two of the men on the spiderwork above the old equipment began furiously turning cranks, while a third took what looked like a fire hose from the side and put it on the top of one of the tanks. The air started to smell like really bad eggs, or the kind of farts Shotgun emits the morning after killer chili.
I’d love to stay to chat, but really I must be going …
It was past time to make my escape, but there didn’t seem to be an opening. I was surrounded by guys with guns, and it looked like I was the star attraction in an Indian clusterfuck.
My only option was to delay. Sooner or later, I figured, Doc was going to see the signal from my watch and realize what was going on. Of course, the fact that he and the rest of the team were involved in a hostage situation made later considerably more likely than sooner.
“So what’s the overall plan here?” I asked my captors.
“How stupid do you think we are?” said the security director.
“You probably don’t want an honest answer.”
“A wiseass to the end.”
I would have complimented him on his command of American slang, but at that precise moment I was hit across the back of the head w
ith a thick black chain. I went down like a sailor cold-cocked by a marine in a bar fight.
My mind blinked dark for a moment or two; it came back online with a surge of pain — exactly what the sailor felt the next day, waking up in his rack with the ship a few hours out of port.
In heavy weather, I might add.
My hands and legs had been bound in chains, and I’d been lifted hand and foot by two goons. They were carrying me up one of the serpentine metal stairways to the top of the old vats.
The Sharkman was about to become a sulfur chaser.
The smell was even more intense here than below, and I felt myself starting to gag. The two goons carrying me were having trouble as well, shaking their heads and making sounds very similar to those that the sailor I was talking about would make en route to the head.
The guy holding my feet finally let go and turned, leaning over the side and letting loose. The one on my hands yelled at him — then dropped me unceremoniously to the grate.
And why not? I wasn’t going anywhere — roll off and I was in a vat of some putrid-smelling plop that for all I know was acid. If I were Houdini, it would have been the perfect setup for an escape. But the only magic I’ve ever practiced has come between the sheets.
Still, this was about as close to a chance to escape as I’d ever get. I wiggled around, pushing to my knees and then awkwardly to my feet.
Which left me tottering dangerously close to the edge of the grate, right over a vat of brown-colored puke juice.
The director started yelling. I spun — to the extent you can spin while wrapped in chains — then lurched toward a small collection of wires and hoses. I was hoping to do my best Tarzan imitation and swing down off the catwalk. But the wires and hoses weren’t nearly as strong as they looked. They gave way immediately and I fell feetfirst to the floor, bouncing against the side of the vat as I dropped.
Liquid began squirting everywhere. Steam, gas, foul odors — it was like the reception area of hell, or at least the kitchen of the worst Korean restaurant you’ve ever eaten in.
RW16 - Domino Theory Page 33