Scorpion: A Covert Ops Novel (Second Edition) (29 page)

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 than 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.  

As he jumped off
the conveyor belt to clear space for Flounder’s entry, Poacher took the nearest
Pakistani technician with two shots through the back of his head as he
attempted to flee, then Poacher shifted aim and double tapped an Afghan as he
threw the rifle that had been slung across his chest into firing position.

Simultaneously,
coming off the conveyor belt, Flounder dropped onto one knee and eliminated
another Uzbek guard.

Avery came
around the conveyor belt. A blur of movement registered in his left peripheral,
and he shifted his pistol around. Ali Masood Jafari kept his head low as he ran
for the metal staircase, yelling in Dari along the way. Avery popped him twice
between the shoulder blades and put another round through the back of his head
as he hit the floor.