by Peter Nealen
When we got to a major office and broke through the locked door, Derek could barely contain himself. “This stupid fuck right here!” he exclaimed, plucking a sticky note off of a computer monitor. He shook his head with a disapproving noise. “Thinks the locks are good enough that he doesn't have to secure his fucking login info. You gon' learn today, motherfucker.” He sat down at the desk, leaning his AR against it, and went to work.
“Holy fuck, this is a fucking haul,” he said. “Where do we want to transfer a few hundred million dollars?” Even at current exchange rates, that was a lot.
I stepped over to look over his shoulder. “Good question.” We didn't exactly have a bunch of numbered offshore accounts for this kind of skulduggery. “If we drop it into company accounts, somebody's going to notice.”
“How much time have we got?” he asked.
“Assume not much,” I replied. We had no idea if they had called somebody else before reacting. If they were halfway competent, they must have, at least when the explosives cut through the door and shattered the glass in the lobby.
“Fuck.” He thought for a second, then chuckled, digging in his pocket before pulling out a flash drive.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
He grinned. “Just part of my little toolkit,” he said as he plugged it in. “It's kinda like American Express; I don't leave home without it.” He brought up a new window and started working furiously.
I had no idea what he was doing; cyber was kind of out of my wheelhouse. I was getting somewhat better versed in it from being around Derek; he thought of it as a vital skill to have on the team, and I was starting to see why. I kept checking my watch and straining my ears for any sound of reinforcements on the way, though Eddie would alert us before we heard shit from inside, most likely.
Finally, he sat back from the keyboard. “Okay, it's not finished, but it'll do for now.”
“What's not finished?” I asked, as he started shuffling through the rest of the files he could get to.
“I locked down the funds in those accounts,” he explained. “They're encrypted now, so only I can access them. On the surface, the accounts are all now showing zero balance, but I got a back-door built in so that I can access them elsewhere and scoop up all that tasty loot to somewhere more secure.” He grinned again. “We just got a bigger operating budget.”
“Great,” I said. I understood some of it, if not all the technicalities. “Anything else there?”
“Oh, yeah. Oh, fuck yeah.” He was dragging files onto another drive that he'd pulled out of his pocket. “Thank you, office numbnuts.” He briefly opened one for me to see. “How does a list of assets in Mazatlan grab you?”
I shared his feral grin. “By the spine,” I said. “Grab it. They just gave us an updated target list.” I shook my head. “It's like Christmas come early.”
“Already done.” He yanked the drive out, swapping it with a third. I was starting to wonder just where he was keeping all the damned things. “Now to go at this fucker with my little digital wrecking bar.” That lasted a matter of seconds, while he chuckled evilly the entire time. “Aaaaand, now their network is fucked. At least this node and anything else connected to it.” He pulled the last drive and got up. “Let's blow this Popsicle stand.”
The rest of the team had been hard at work smashing anything that looked valuable, except for anything that looked like paperwork or laptops we could use. Larry was lugging a trash bag full of possible intel. Bryan and Nick were putting the finishing touches on the incendiaries that would gut the inside of the building about five minutes after we got off-site.
I joined Eric and Little Bob, who were still watching the night shift contractors. “Time to go,” I said. Their faces fell when they saw the flex-cuffs dangling from my off hand.
“Look, man, we won't tell anybody anything,” the white guy started to say.
“I'm sure you won't,” I replied. “But we're going to make sure you don't say shit to anybody until we're long gone. To do that, we've got two options. We can kill you, or you can come for a little ride with us until we're clear.” I smiled bleakly at him. “Your call.”
He didn't hesitate, though he looked like a kicked puppy as he held up his wrists for the flex-cuffs. His buddies did the same. In moments, we were hustling them out the door. “Geek, Hillbilly,” I called ahead. “Coming out.”
“Roger,” he replied immediately. “Just in time, too. Outer cordon's spotted what looks like it might be a react force incoming from the north; about five minutes out.”
That got us moving a little more quickly. I checked my watch; the incendiaries would go off almost in their faces. I didn't like the fact that we were essentially having to go towards the reinforcements to get out, but you don't always get to pick the terrain when you've got only five minutes. We hustled northeast, hooking around the block to come at the junkyard from the east.
We'd barely made it around the corner when a half a dozen trucks pulled up quickly to the building, just as the windows blew out in a noisy fireball.
With a crunch of gravel, the vans pulled off the road just north of the tiny village of Palmillas, several miles outside of Mazatlan. Swinging the back doors open, Eric and Little Bob hauled our unwilling guests out and clipped off their flex-cuffs.
“Mazatlan's back that way.” I pointed over the hill to the west. “Though I'd suggest that you make yourselves scarce. Somehow I doubt your employers are going to be that appreciative of you after what just happened.” While I was sure it was true, I also was hoping these guys would just boogie instead of telling the Fusang Group that a bunch of American paramilitaries had just gutted one of their offices. I was sure that they'd figure it out quickly enough, but the longer they stayed in the dark the more maneuvering room we had.
The four contractors didn't say anything; they were all wearing the “dead face.” They knew they'd lost this job, and now they were being dropped on the side of the road in Mexico. “Hey, guys,” I said cheerfully, “it could be worse, remember.” We climbed back into the vans and drove away.
“That went surprisingly well,” Bryan said as we sped down the road.
“That's because they weren't expecting us,” I said grimly. “Even if our play in Culiacan alerted them that something's going on, they probably still thought that they were insulated. Now that we've hit them here, they'll be stepping up the security. We're going to have to move fast to stay ahead of them.” Another large-scale raid like we'd just pulled off probably wasn't going to work as well again.
Fortunately, we had lots of ways to hurt the Fusang Group without using two teams at once.
Chapter 24
“These are ridiculous,” Bryan grumbled as he strapped on his new fins. They were covered in weird ribs and flashy shapes, and were blue and bright red. Of course, in the dark they looked black and gray, but it was the principle of the thing—they weren't “tactical.” We hadn't brought amphib gear with us, so when we'd gone through the info we'd captured from the offices and found which freighters presently in Mazatlan's port belonged to the Chinese, we'd had to improvise. Fortunately, even with the violence going on in Mexico, Mazatlan still had a reasonably thriving aquatic sports scene, so we'd been able to get everything we needed for a water infiltration, even if it wasn't quite colored right.
“At least we didn't get the white and green ones,” I pointed out as I strapped on my own, identical fins. “Those would have actually showed up in the dark.”
“I miss my bios,” he muttered.
“And I miss my frogs,” I replied. “Bios” were what we'd referred to split fins as while in the Marine Corps, while the “frogfoot” fins were long and wide, and provided plenty of power underwater. 'Unfortunately, we haven't got either, so we make do.”
The two of us were sitting on the rocks on the west side of Isla de La Piedra, across the channel from the Mazatlan docks. We weren't heavily kitted out; we'd cached our clothes and boots in the rocks and were down to sh
orts, knives, and heavily oiled pistols. Next to us were four large packages, wrapped tightly in rubberized canvas dive bags. Each package had a quartet of rare-earth magnets secured to one side and a fuse and igniter coming out of one corner. Inside was enough explosive to punch a good-sized hole through both hulls, assuming the Da Dan Xia and the Li Ming had double hulls. If not, so much the better.
We had a long target list in Mazatlan, and a short period of time before we expected the Fusang Group's security to notch up to the point where the whole city became non-permissive. We had to do as much damage as possible before that happened, and that meant we were split up into pairs and quartets, scattered around the city, running small-scale hits and large-scale sabotage like what Bryan and I were about to do.
There were all of three freighters tied up at the docks, and two of them were the Fusang Group's vessels. That was going to make it easier.
Once we were sure all of our gear was properly secured on our bodies, we slipped into the water. It was plenty warm this far south; I had brief memories of the Pacific's biting cold on the coast of California. Making as little surface splashing as possible, we kicked off for our targets.
We stayed together on the way across the channel. It was about a five hundred meter swim, and since neither of us had done much finning in a while, it was rougher than it should have been. Swimming with fins uses the muscles quite a bit differently than just swimming slick, but there was no way we were going to make it with our improvised limpet mines doing the fucking breaststroke.
It was a slow swim; we weren't trying to beat the Recon standard. We were aiming at stealth, and not getting run over by the handful of fishing boats that were still moving up and down the channel even at that late hour. A couple of times we had to stop, take a deep breath, and sink beneath the surface for a while to avoid being spotted.
We finally reached the other side of the channel. I didn't bother to look at my watch; I wasn't going to risk the flash of green light, and it wouldn't matter what time it was anyway. The only time constraints we were on were to get back across the channel and out of sight by sunup, and to get clear before the charges went off. Shockwaves tend to do a lot more damage in water than in air.
We had stopped at the side of the Da Dan Xia, the black and red steel of her hull rising like a sheer cliff over our heads. There were plenty of lights on around the harbor, but we were fairly well shadowed. We floated there for a second, watching and listening for any indication that we'd been spotted.
“I'll go first,” Bryan whispered, barely audible over the lapping of the waves against the steel. I took one of his limpets from him and kept treading water while he took three deep breaths then ducked beneath the surface, dragging the other one down with him.
It probably felt like a lot longer to him than it did to me before he came up, suppressing his gasp for air. He gave me an “OK” sign, and I passed off two of the remaining three limpets as I kicked slowly toward the ship's stern. We reversed roles, and I went down into the darkness, dragging the charge with me.
I had to do the placement by feel, working my way far enough below the waterline that I was confident that the hole wouldn't be easily patched, then carefully easing the charge against the hull, trying to keep the magnets from clamping it on hard enough to make an audible noise against the steel. There was a little bit of a clunk, but not the catastrophic clang that I'd been afraid of. My lungs were starting to burn, my tissues crying out for air. I hadn't done this in too long. I groped for the time fuse, found the igniter, and pulled it. It would go off a few minutes after the first charge, but we'd cut the fuses to burn for an hour and a half apiece, so unless things went terribly, terribly wrong, we should be well away before they went off.
I kicked back to the surface, gasping for breath as quietly as I could, and Bryan handed me one of the last two charges. As soon as my breathing had slowed down, we kicked off for the Li Ming.
I was starting to get anxious about the timing by the time we got to the other freighter. We were still probably all right, but all the various ways that Murphy can fuck with you have a tendency to start going through your head when all you've got to do is swim toward a target ship in a de facto hostile port, towing explosives to be attached to the hull of said target ship, fuses already burning behind you.
But we got to the steel wall of the Li Ming's hull without incident, and in only a few minutes. Bryan continued on toward the bow, while I took a couple of deep breaths to oxygenate my tissues before diving down to place my last charge.
The charge placed, I pulled the igniter and swam for the surface. It had been too long since I'd done this much swimming, and it felt like my bones hurt as I gasped as quietly as I could for air. I couldn't see Bryan, but I swam toward the ship's centerline, where we had planned to meet up.
I almost collided with him in the dark. Getting ourselves sorted out, I flashed him an “OK” sign, which he returned. Since there wasn't any further reason to stick around, we kicked out across the channel. There was probably only about an hour left on the fuses burning under the Da Dan Xia anyway. We couldn't afford to waste time.
We positively sped across the channel on the way back to the Isla de La Piedra. Finning without dragging fifty pounds of explosives is a lot easier.
I checked my watch after we got back to the rocky shore and dragged ourselves up out of the water. While it was only a rough estimate, the first charges should be going off in about forty-five minutes.
It had only been a little over a kilometer of swimming, but I was smoked. Training was going to have to get stepped up when we got home.
We'd hit shore a few dozen meters north of our gear cache, but we stayed put for the moment, watching and listening to make sure we didn't have company. Meanwhile, the evidence of the rest of the guys' work was starting to show.
I counted at least four separate fires on the horizon, and even as I watched, a mushroom cloud went up with a dull boom. If the Fusang Group owned or operated it in Mazatlan, we were blowing it up or setting it on fire. The target list for that night was over fifteen sites long, and that was just to get started.
Satisfied that we were alone on the rocky strand, we scrambled over to the cache and retrieved our gear. We stripped off our fins, one at a time. While Bryan got his off, I held security with my pistol, then we switched. Neither of us got dressed yet. We'd wait, make sure the charges went off as planned, and dry out. It wouldn't do to get spotted moving away from the target area soaking wet. Granted, we still had a good half hour before the first charges were supposed to go off, so we'd be long gone by the time anyone made the connection, but getting rolled up for something out of the ordinary could be just as disastrous.
We took the opportunity to thoroughly dry and re-oil our pistols, again one at a time. Salt water is vicious on gunmetal.
Finally dry enough, we got dressed and moved off the rocks and into the brush, pistols out and fins in hand. Once back in the thick vegetation, we hunkered down and watched. Carefully checking my watch, I guessed that we had about twenty minutes left.
It felt like a long, long wait, but was actually less than fifteen minutes. Sirens were starting to sound across Mazatlan, as the policia started to react to the rash of bombings and arson spreading across the city. We weren't really in the assassination business that night; most of the functionaries weren't as demonstrably dangerous as Los Hijos had been. There were a few who were considered targets of opportunity; if we spotted Xi Shang or any of the other Chinese officers who had been at Laguna de Masaya, they were fair game. So far, nobody had reported any such sightings, so we settled for doing millions, possibly billions, of dollars worth of damage to the Fusang Group by sabotage.
Finally, there was a dull, muted rumble, and water boiled up from the side of the Da Dan Xia, leaping dozens of feet into the air. The second charge went off a couple minutes later, but by then the ship was already listing, and going down in the bow, as water poured through the holes punched in the inner and ou
ter hulls. The second charge just brought it down faster. The freighter settled to the bottom of the channel, not quite awash, but definitely not going anywhere for some time.
It was a few minutes before the Li Ming's charges went off, this time closer together. She rocked with the dual impact, and rolled halfway over before sinking to the bottom, her superstructure now flat to the surface of the water. She'd cost even more money and effort to get recovered than her sister ship. Our job was done for the night.
We crept through the brush and back to the dirt road among the little houses and bungalows that covered the Isla. Our ride was waiting over by the baseball diamond to the south, but we weren't going to head for it just yet. While there weren't a lot of policia on the Isla—the police station was about the size of a shoebox—there were going to be people coming out to see what was going on. The explosions, while muffled by the water, hadn't been all that quiet.
Sure enough, there were excited voices on the other side of the bushes. We stayed put and hunkered down, deep enough in the brush that we couldn't be seen, and wouldn't be stumbled upon easily. Now it was just a waiting game.
When we finally made it back to the safehouse, Derek was sitting in front of his computer, a huge, shit-eating grin on his face. “Guess what, dudes?” he said.
When he didn't elaborate, I sighed and asked, “What?”
He swiveled the laptop around so we could see the screen. It looked like an email inbox. “Our boy Xi Shang is due in town tomorrow—no, this afternoon,” he corrected himself after glancing at his watch. “He'll be landing at the international airport out to the east at about 1600.”
“How the hell did you find that out?” I asked.
“I told you I put a backdoor in their systems,” he replied.
“I thought that was just in the accounts you froze them out of.”