The Dragon Factory (22 page)

The door to the office stood ajar and we crouched down on either side and fed a fiber-optic camera in for a snoop. Nothing. Bunny checked for trip wires and booby traps and found nothing. We moved inside.

According to the intel Bug had provided there were four guards on each shift, two two-man teams made up of ex-military or ex-police. We found them right away, and right away we knew we’d just stepped into something bizarre and unbearably ugly.

The four guards had been killed, and there was a fifth man in a business suit. Sloane, the sales manager. Each had been shot repeatedly, but their bodies were in an indescribable condition. Legs and arms were broken and jerked out of their sockets, the victims’ heads were smashed, their faces brutally disfigured.

I couldn’t stop and stare; there was too much to do. We rushed deeper into the building and worked as a three-man team to clear each room, taking it in turns to be the one to open a door and step inside while the others provided high and low cross-fire cover. There were six rooms in the building. Mostly offices and a bathroom. Nothing else, and no one else.

We returned to the guardroom.

“Holy mother of God,” whispered Bunny.

Top and I moved into the room and checked the bodies. “Multiple gunshots, Cap’n,” he said. “Heavy-caliber hits.”

“How long?”

“These guys aren’t even cold. Maybe two hours, not more.”

I tapped his arm and pointed to the blood spatter on the floor and walls. There are three major categories for blood spatter: passive, projected, and transfer. In the first case the bloodstains are caused by gravity with blood dripping from wounds. Projected stains come from blood under pressure—say from a torn artery—or rapid movement, as with someone shaking blood off their fingers. Then there are transfer spatters where something covered in blood comes into contact with a surface. Footprints, fingerprints, that sort of thing.

We were seeing a little of everything, but it didn’t look right. There were spatter marks on the walls, but they didn’t have the tight grouping you see with arterial sprays. These were random, erratic.

Top watched me and then went through the process himself, calculating the amount and distribution of blood. Then he looked down at the broken bodies.

“This is some voodoo shit right here.”

“Talk to me.”

He kept his voice low. “Those patterns only make sense if someone
shook
blood off these boys. Like whipping water off a towel. Or threw these boys around. But . . . that’s wrong, ain’t it?”

I didn’t want to answer. “Top . . . look at the pools of blood under the bodies. Corpses don’t bleed unless there’s a wound under the body, in which case gravity will pull the blood down to the lowest point and then out through a wound. Not all of the blood, just whatever’s in that part of the body. You with me?”

He was right with me. “I think someone messed with these boys after they were dead.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tore ’em up, threw ’em around.”

“Wait—what are you saying?” asked Bunny, who had come up behind us.

Top shook his head. “I don’t know . . . this looks like rage. Someone went apeshit here. Whoever did it was a strong motherfucker. I couldn’t do it. I doubt Farmboy here could.”

Bunny squatted down and picked up several shell casings. “Well, well, well . . . check this out.”

He showed us a steel-cased 7.62 × 39mm FMJ shell casing.

Top looked at it and then at me. “That’s a Russian short, Cap’n. Same thing we saw in Wilmington.”

Bunny turned to look at the bodies and then back to the casing. “Now, how the hell’s this stuff connected to Wilmington? And how the hell are the Russians involved?”

I was just reaching for my commlink when a
bing-bing
in my ear signaled a call from DMS command. It was Grace.

“This is a secure line, Joe. I have a situational update.”

“So do I, but let’s make it fast. We’re in the woods with the bears.”

“We’ve ID’d two of the four Russians who ambushed Echo Team in Wilmington. They’re ex-Spetsnaz.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll see your dead Spetsnaz and raise you a full hit team.” I told her about the shell casing and the dead guards. I described the blood spatter and the postmortem mutilations.

“Bloody hell.”

“What the hell are we into here, Grace?”

“I . . . don’t know.”

“Is there any whiff of official Russian involvement? Could this be something political?” Spetsnaz was a catchall label for Russian Special Forces and included operatives of the Federal Security Service, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and units controlled by the GRU—their military intelligence service. After the USSR crumbled and the Russian economy collapsed, a lot of these soldiers were either discharged or they went AWOL. The Russia Mafia employed a lot of them worldwide, but they’ve also been recruited by private security companies for dirty work everywhere mercs were useful. Which is a lot of places in these times.

“I don’t think so, and in our current position we can’t call the State Department and ask. Mr. Church thinks the team in Wilmington were mercenaries. These may be part of one large team . . . but we have no idea who they’d be working for,” she said. “Any sign of Hack or Jigsaw?”

“No, but we’re still topside. We’re heading down now. We could use some backup.”

“I’ve none to give. We’re locked up tighter than a nun’s chastity.” She paused, then said, “Joe, if you wanted to abort the mission I’d back you.”

I did, but I wasn’t going to. She probably knew that.

“Jigsaw,” was all I had to say.

“Look, Joe . . . at the moment I care bugger all about protocol. If you run into anyone down there who isn’t DMS . . .” She let the rest hang.

“Roger that, Major.” I almost called her “Major Babe” but luckily my presence of mind hadn’t totally fled.

I clicked off and told the others about the Spetsnaz connection. I saw the information register, but it didn’t take the heart out of either of
them. Even so, Bunny looked rattled by the condition of the corpses. His eyes kept straying to them and then darting away, then straying back. I knew what was going through his head. He understood killing, but the rest . . . that wasn’t soldiering. It had a primitive viciousness about it that was inhuman.

“Cap’n,” said Top from across the room. “Looks like the power’s still on in here. The elevator lights are green.”

“Phones?”

He pulled one off the wall, shook his head.

“We’re going to be out of communication real fast,” said Bunny. “Without a hard line we’d be better off shouting.”

I tapped my commlink for a patch to Brick, filled him in, and told him to establish a command link with Major Courtland.

“If the elevator’s working I can come in—,” he started to say, but I cut him off.

“Truly appreciated, Gunny, but we need to move fast. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“And make sure no one else comes in here who doesn’t belong to the club.”

“I guarantee it.”

We took one elevator, but we sent all six of them down at the same time. We stopped two of them—ours and one other—at the next to last level, and as soon as the doors opened and we cleared the area around us we bent low and listened to the sounds coming up from the elevator shafts. We heard the other cars stop, heard the doors open.

The limestone caverns were huge and dark and smelled of mold and bad dreams. There were long rows of fluorescent fixtures overhead, but the power to the lights was off. The elevators must have been on a different circuit or had their own power supply. It made sense that the intruders would leave the elevators on—it was a mile-long climb back into the sunlight if they had to take the stairs.

We crouched and waited, using night vision to look for movement, but there was nothing. No ambush gunfire. No explosives.

It didn’t mean that there weren’t Russian shooters lying in wait—it
just meant that they weren’t shooting randomly at anything that moved. That could be good or bad. I pointed to the stairwell door, and after checking it for trip wires we entered the stairwell and looked down.

All of the battery-operated emergency lights had been smashed, and the stairwell was a bottomless black hole.

The night-vision devices used by the DMS are about six cuts above anything on the commerical market and a generation newer than most special ops teams had. A lot of the standard NVDs used passive systems that amplified existing environmental ambient lighting; ours had an option for an active system that emmitted an infrared light source to provide sufficient illumination in situations of zero ambient light. The downside was that the infrared from an active system could be spotted by someone else wearing night vision. It’s a risk that also had rewards if the other guys weren’t using something as sophisticated, and that wasn’t likely. The only other option was flashlights, and that screwed with your natural night vision and was a sniper’s paradise. The other useful feature of our NVDs was the new panoramic lens that gave us a ninety-five-degree field of clear vision and a thermal-imaging component. If there was something alive down here, we’d see it in total darkness and we’d see it better than a hunting owl. With night vision everything is a ghostly green, but we were all comfortable with it and we all automatically made the mental shifts necessary to function with top-level efficiency.

Even so, when I looked down the stairwell all I saw were flights of stairs at right angles that descended beyond the effective range of the NVP optics.

We went down slow and careful, expecting traps.

We found the first trip wire thirty-seven steps down. In my goggles it was a slender spider’s web of glowing green. Whoever placed it was smart, setting it close into the back of the riser so that it wouldn’t trigger as someone stepped down on the ball of his foot but would catch the fall or rise of the heel. Smart.

I showed it to Bunny, who nodded his appreciation, but Top shook his head dismissively. He was more seasoned than Bunny. The trap was smart, but it was too soon to be smart. The best way would have been to
rig an obvious trip wire and then the more subtle one. Set and then exploit the expectations of the person you’re trying to trap.

We moved forward slowly and found one more trip wire. Same as before. Like the first, it was attached to a Claymore and set back near the riser. Bunny disabled them both. If backup came, we’d like them to arrive in one piece.

A few times we encountered something smeared on the banister, but with the night vision it looked like oil. It smelled of copper, though. Blood.

“Maybe a guard clipped one of those Russian boys,” Top suggested in a whisper, but I didn’t think so. The smears were on the outside of the railings that surrounded a central drop all the way to the floor. You might get smears like that if something was thrown down the shaft and hit rails on the way down.

At the bottom of the stairwell we solved that mystery. A man in unmarked black BDUs lay twisted into a rag-doll heap at the bottom of the stairwell. It was clear he had been thrown over the rails and had struck several times on the way down to the concrete floor. His body was torn to pieces. I looked up through the vacant hole around which the stairwell curled for over a mile. It was a long, long fall. I wondered if the man had been alive during any of that horrible plummet.

Top knelt by the man. He checked first for booby traps, and when he found none he went through the man’s pockets. No ID, no personal effects. All he had on him were gun belts and equipment bags. Some hand grenades and lots of spare magazines. The ammunition was 7.62x39mm FMJ. Russian.

Top weighed a magazine thoughtfully in one hand and looked up at me. “Jigsaw?” he suggested.

“I don’t know,” I said, but in truth I didn’t like the feel of this.

Bunny was by the door to J-level, checking it for traps. “We’re clear here,” he reported.

I pulled up the floor plan on my PDA and we studied it. Right outside the stairwell door was a wide corridor with elevators on one side and the first of the storage units on the other. The schematic couldn’t
show us anything more than a blueprint, so we had no way of knowing what kind of actual cover might be out there.

“Scope,” I said, and Bunny fished a fiber-optic scope from his pack and fed it under the door. The scope fed images to a palm-sized screen that folded down from his chest pack. He had it set for night vision, but that couldn’t show thermals. Bunny turned the scope in all directions. We saw a row of electric golf carts and stacks of file cartons. Thousands of them standing in rows that trailed off far beyond the visible range of the optics. Nothing moved.

Using hand signals, I indicated that we would open the door and give cross-fire cover as we exited. I’d use the shelter of the stairwell landing to provide cover while they ran out and went left and right. They nodded and Bunny stuffed the scope back into his pack. I finger counted down to zero, and then we went through into the cavern.

Gunfire shattered the silence around us and suddenly we were in one hell-storm of an ambush.

The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland

Saturday, August 28, 3:13
P.M.