Dying Breath (Cobra Book 2) Read online

  “But you don’t want to hit the target on pickup because you want to hit the factory at the same time. So that narrows it down to outside or inside the factory gate.” He shrugged and spread his hands. “No brainer, pal. It has to be inside. The kill is easier outside, but then you have the problem of getting in to hit the factory.”

  “Unless…”

  “Unless what?” He had made an accurate sketch map of the port and the factory. He stabbed the gate now with his finger. “Once you hit that car the factory will go into lockdown. The gates will close. Private security will be all over the place like a rash on a missionary, and before long you’ll have the police swarming all over the port like ants—but not before private security has given you a good seeing to. You’ll never get inside, and you’ll never leave the port, not in a million years.”

  I smiled. “Unless…”

  “OK,” he said and refilled our glasses. “Unless wha’?”

  “Unless I am already inside.”

  “Say what now?”

  “The car gets hit before coming in to the factory. It looks like an attack from the outside and the factory goes into lockdown. Private security and the cops are looking out for the attacker, but the attacker is already inside, and that gives me relatively easy movement around the plant to lay my charges.”

  “OK, that’s nice. But two questions: one, how do you take her out if you’re on the inside? And two, how do you get in in the first place?”

  I pointed at the area of wasteland opposite the factory. “I need a UV laser hidden among the trash in this area of wasteland. The laser acts as a trigger either for a laser-guided RPG or a couple of pounds of C4 concealed at the gate.”

  He pulled down the corners of his mouth and gave his head a small sideways twitch.

  “If you take that route, I’d say you’re better safe than sorry. You don’t know if the car’s blast-proof. You want at least four pound a’ C4 for a job like that. And then you’ve got the worry about where you put the package. If we start digging holes outside the gate now, we’re going to attract attention.”

  “We?”

  “Manner a’speech, pal. I think you want UV laser targeting with an integrated trigger attached to an RPG launcher. We can set that up tonight and put it in place in the wee hours.”

  “Two rockets, with a two-second delay.”

  “Ay, no problem. And how are you going to get in?”

  “Is an EMP too much to hope for?”

  He puffed out his cheeks and blew. “No.” He shook his head. “To be honest it’s no’. But if it’s going to have any range at all you’ll need a fuckin’ truck, and it’ll take two months to get that bastard here.”

  “We only need to blow out the closest streetlamps and the cameras over the gate.”

  “Ay, and then what? You go over the wall?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’re you going to find on the other side?”

  “I don’t know, but so far security doesn’t seem too tight.”

  “Tha’s no an approach you learned at the Regiment, pal.”

  “No,” I shrugged, “but we haven’t got the luxury of a proper recon. We just haven’t got the time. This has to go down tomorrow morning and I have to be in there tonight.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me for a while, then sat back and crossed two arms over his chest that could have crushed a boa constrictor.

  “D’you mind telling me why it’s so important you do it tonight?”

  I drained my glass and sat examining it for a while, sucking my teeth. I handed him my glass to refill, and as he pulled the cork from the bottle I said:

  “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. And that is part of what makes it urgent. The target works for UCP, United Chinese Petrochemicals, as a molecular biologist. But for the last five years she has been working undercover in Morocco, posing as a high-class hooker, while a Chinese guy has acted as her public face. Testing of whatever it is she’s been developing was carried out, with the collusion of corrupt government officials, on remote villages along the coast of western Africa.”

  “And you was sent to close her down.”

  “Yeah, but when I got there we discovered that the research she was engaged in was all about vaccines, and the facility they had in the desert in Morocco was some kind of experimental research facility where they were testing…” I spread my hands and shook my head, “…viruses? Bacteria? I don’t know, but two gets you twenty they were making something that would require a vaccine.”

  “They were creating a demand for their product.”

  “Exactly. Only, the place was destroyed before I could find out what, exactly. They had people in cages in a hangar, and those people were dying, in a lot of pain.”

  “So she got away.”

  “She got away and the Moroccan Royal Air Force took out the site. Now she’s shown up here, at that factory,” I jerked my chin at the drawing, “and my gut is telling me that the bacteria or the virus, whatever it is, is done, and what they are doing now is to finish up the vaccine. Beyond that I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what they are planning or when they aim to execute that plan. What I do know is that I need to stop it before she has a chance to see it through. And I also…”

  “You also need to know exactly what her plan is. Biological warfare is nay fuckin’ joke. Millions could die.”

  I sighed. “That’s not my mission.”

  “Says who?”

  I was surprised by the question and my face told him so. He gave a short, dry, nicotine laugh. “Anyone can give you a mission, Harry. Only you can accept it. Likewise, there is nothing to stop you from takin’ on a mission of your own.” He put his hand on his chest. “Tha’ was always my reading of the Regiment. None of us was ever recruited because we were obedient. We were recruited because we worked from our own fuckin’ initiative. Am I wrong?”

  “No.”

  “And if you are thinking, as I am thinking, that these bastards are aiming to create some kind of fuckin’ pandemic so they can clean up on the vaccine, then I think you need to set yourself the personal mission of finding out what the fuck they are up to. Tha’s just my fuckin’ interpretation of the situation. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  I nodded for a while. “I agree. I think I had pretty much come to that conclusion anyway, but it’s nice to have somebody confirm it.”

  “Ay, pal. I know. I’ve been there. Now, there’s only one problem left.”

  I knew what he was going to say. I suppressed a smile and downed my shot, then refilled the glasses. “What’s that?”

  “You can’t fuckin’ do this on your own. It’s the craziest fuckin’ plan I ever heard. Buddy told me you’re good, but however fuckin’ good y’are, you won’t last ten minutes on your own.”

  “You volunteering?”

  “Well, it looks like we’ll be fighting the fuckin’ zombie apocalypse if I don’t. So whether I like it or not, looks like I haven’t much choice. Let’s go up to the kitchen, fix some coffee and scrambled eggs, go over the plan in detail, and make a list of the hardware we’re going to need. We also need some kind of extraction plan. You don’t seem to have thought about that.”

  “I haven’t exactly had time.”

  “Ay, I know. How d’yiz like your eggs?”

  We spent the next four hours going over the plan, such as it was, in minute detail, examining all the potential eventualities and discussing how we would deal with each one.

  I told him about the lab in Morocco, and how it had looked poorly guarded from the outside, but how there had been over thirty soldiers there, guarding the place and waiting for me to show up. When it comes to the art of war, the Chinese are subtle, and it had struck me at the time that Mary Jones and her pals had half expected me, and wanted to lure me into an apparently undefended lab, only to trap me and kill me once inside.

  He made a face and sipped strong black coffee, leaning back in his chair against his vast American fridge.
r />   “Maybe. But I tell you what, you can do that in a desert like the Sahara. It’s not so easy to do it in a city, especially at a busy port. You might find there are heavily armed guards in there. I don’t doubt it. But I doubt there’ll be more than ten or max fifteen guys, and the heaviest weapon you’re going to come up against is an AK47.”

  “OK, I buy that. So what do you suggest?”

  “We set up the hit like you said, with the UV laser targeting and trigger. We disguise it with a couple of cartons and a pallet or two. Again, like you said, we take out the cameras and the streetlamps with a small EMP in the car boot. Then we go up on the wall, you at the south end, me at the north. That way we cover the yard in a crossfire. We’ll need night-vision goggles. If we meet hostiles…”

  “Maxim 9 for close quarters, crossbows for longer distances. Question, what range has the EMP got? Will it knock out any radios in the yard?”

  “’Bout two hundred yards. Ay, it will.”

  “OK, so if we encounter hostiles in the yard we take them out with crossbows or Maxim 9s. Now here we have to make a choice. If we encounter no resistance we simply lay low until morning, and when all hell breaks out at the gate we go in and let all hell loose inside. But if we do encounter resistance in the yard, it’s not so easy. We need to decide whether we lay low and risk the bodies being found…”

  “Which they will be.”

  “Or go in immediately, destroy whatever this facility is, and risk the alarm being raised and Mary Jones doing a runner.”

  We sat in silence for a while, he staring at the crumbs on the Formica tabletop, I staring at the blackness of predawn in the kitchen window. Finally I said, “There is no realistic option. If we encounter hostiles in the yard we take them down, and then we go in all the way and finish the job—or at least lay the charges to finish the job in the morning.”

  “Agreed. So how do we stop them alerting your target?”

  My mind went back to a certain night at Salton Sea. “Can you recharge the EMP?”

  He shrugged. “Ay, I could…”

  “Then we rethink the whole thing. Listen: I go up on the wall, you stay in the car and recharge the EMP. I’ll take out any hostiles using the crossbow. Then I drop and open the gate. You drive in, right up to the building, release another blast and we take out all the electronics in the building. Then we go in and kill everybody, collect all available intel, set the charges and wait for the target in the morning. Take her out and destroy the facility. No need for the UV laser. We let her and her driver in, and we take them out quietly.”

  He nodded slow and steady for a long while. Then said, “Ay, tha’s the way to go. Silenced TARs.”

  I nodded. “Agreed.”

  He gave me a Sig Sauer P226 TacOps with extended magazine which I tucked under my arm in a shoulder holster, and a Fairbairn and Sykes which I slipped into my boot. It’s the best fighting knife ever made, and the fact is I feel naked when I’m not wearing it.

  As well as that we packed a kitbag with two small but powerful crossbows with six quarrels each. Frankly, I prefer a longbow, but a small crossbow is easier to carry. Scotty selected two Israeli TAR-21s. I have a personal preference for the HK416 because I am used to it, but if there one assault rifle on Earth that tops the Hekler and Koch, it’s the Tavor. It’s tough and reliable, you can fit a grenade launcher and a night-vision sight, as well as a silencer; plus, with an extended magazine it can load a hundred rounds and deliver nine hundred rounds a minute. It is a serious piece of hardware.

  Scotty fitted the extras, then packed night-vision goggles, ten pounds of C4 and remote detonators.

  All of that bar the rifles went into a rucksack in the trunk of my car. In the trunk of his car, down in his garage, we placed a crate four foot by three, and three feet deep, that weighed a good fifty kilos. It was the EMP machine.

  “How reliable is this thing?”

  “To be honest, I haven’t used it a lot, but so far it’s pretty good. They’re still kind of experimental. Buddy’s lads are trying to develop a more efficient version, but at the moment they’re big and awkward and pretty limited.”

  I nodded. “I know. I’ve used one, bolted to the back of a truck.”

  “Oh, aye? I look forward to tha’ story. We’ll need to get right up close to the building to be sure of taking out all the communication.”

  I slammed the trunk closed. He dropped a tablet on his front passenger seat and pointed at it.

  “I control it from that baby. I’ll go in first and park outside the site. When you see the lights go out, you approach, go over the wall, do what ye have to do and open the gates. And pal, you had better be fuckin’ greased lightning. Then we’ll take in both cars. That OK?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  I watched him pull out of his garage and the automatic door closed, shutting him out of view. I turned and climbed the steps at a run, stepped out into the muggy, small hours of the city and slipped behind the wheel of my hire car, then set off, for the second time that day toward Rayong. If we pulled it off, if we could make it work, it should be a simple, efficient operation. But if it went wrong…

  If it went wrong I had no idea what might happen, but I knew it would be bad. Real bad.

  Chapter Twenty

  I left a good fifty to eighty yards between us. The port area was desolate: a vast area of darkness relieved by pools of limpid light that hung like gossamer over dead factories and silent cargo ships. I stopped at the corner and watched the yellow halo of Scotty’s headlamps, and the two red daemon-eyes of his taillights recede along the road and come to a halt outside the factory where Mary Jones had driven in the day before. The glow of the headlamps died, and a fraction of a second later so did the red spots of his taillights. I counted five seconds and the two streetlamps outside the factory died too.

  I fired up the hire car, left the lights off and accelerated along the road to pull in just behind Scotty. I already had the crossbow on my back and the night goggles on my head as I jumped out of the car and made for the wall. Scotty was already there, making a stirrup of his hands. I placed my left foot on his linked palms. He heaved and I reached for the wall, got a firm grip and pulled myself up, swarming onto the thin ledge.

  I remained motionless. I could hear bodies moving and quiet voices. I slipped down the goggles over my eyes. The world became a familiar yet eerie black and green place of imminent death.

  There was a yard, maybe thirty paces across, fifteen or twenty deep. On the far side there was a large, concrete nave with a gabled roof. At either side of the building the yard fed into a passage that seemed to lead to the back. It was simple and functional.

  Beside the door there were two guys with rifles. They were not in uniform. They were looking about them, like they thought the explanation for the loss of light might suddenly appear in the air.

  I sat up, took the crossbow from my back and fitted a quarrel with a broad tip. I took careful aim at the guy on the right and loosed the shaft. It whispered and thudded home right through his heart. Death must have been almost instant.

  He didn’t move. He just stood there and died, and as his legs died he started to keel over. By that time I had loaded again and lined up his pal, who was now looking up at the air. It struck me as ironic that he was looking for light in the darkness. I get deep like that sometimes.

  His pal hit the dirt with a heavy thud. He turned his head to see what the noise was and the second shaft thudded home with the information he was looking for. He gave a little shudder and joined his pal in the Land of Eternal Nod.

  I took fifteen seconds to scan the area, listening for movement in the darkness. There was none, so I slipped off the wall and lowered myself down. Then sprinted on silent feet to the gate and opened it, dragging it back on its rollers.

  I didn’t wait for Scotty to come in. I ran for my own car, slipped behind the wheel and drove in fast. When I got there I saw that Scotty had reversed right up to the wall, beside the door, ma
ximizing every foot of range of the EMP. And while he discharged it for a second time, I rolled the gate closed again.

  I dumped the crossbow in the trunk of my hire car and pulled out the rucksack. I slung it on my back and grabbed the two TAR-21s. Scotty grabbed one and took up his position beside the door. I blew out the lock, yanked open the door and Scotty stepped in with his weapon at his shoulder. He stepped to the right and I went in after him, moving to the left.

  In this black and green world there was a broad staircase that rose directly ahead of us, with a passage to either side. The floors were luminous, surrounded by darkness. An indistinct voice echoed along the tiles and was answered. They came from along the corridors that flanked the stairs.

  I signaled to Scotty to go right and I went left. As we circled around the stairs it became clear that the two passages met in a single corridor behind the staircase. That passage ran the length of the building to the back wall. Approaching we saw two black figures dancing and weaving as they walked toward us, playing a couple of brilliant green flashlights ahead of them. I looked for Scotty and found him fifteen paces away, beyond the stairs, on one knee with his rifle at his shoulder. There was no need for verbal communication. We both knew what had to be done.

  I lined up the guy on the left. I knew he’d take the one on the right. Our rifles spat, triple tapped, and the two men went down, and the flashlights did a crazy green dance on the floor.

  We moved forward at a silent run, the TARs still at our shoulders. We confirmed the kills and took in what we had ahead of us. It was a long corridor with doors to right and left, evenly spaced every twenty feet or so.

  I signaled Scotty to cover the stairs and I moved down the passage from door to door, opening them one after another. Each one of them was empty. Marks on the walls showed shelves and benches had been attached and then removed, but aside from that the rooms had nothing to show, nothing to tell. And at the end of the passage there was just a blank wall.

  I returned at a run and found Scotty on one knee at the foot of the stairs with his weapon trained on the empty space at the top. He put his finger to his lips and tapped his ear. He had heard something. I pointed to the far side of the stairs, and then up. He gave me the thumbs-up and we started to climb in silence. I had the left side, covering the right. He had the right side, covering the left.