Blades of Winter (29 page)

“Good timing,” Domicles says. He points out the car window. “There is White Stone’s front gate.”

We’ve traveled into the desert, west of Riyadh. If you look up “middle of nowhere” in the dictionary it’ll be a picture of here. Except for the occasional small house and vegetable stand, there’s nothing out here but sand. Well, except for the ominous installation we’re approaching.

Graccus slows down as we pass a tall heavy-duty chain-link fence with a gate in the middle. The fence is topped with a coil of razor wire. An unassuming sign has the facility’s name in Arabic and German. The German part reads “
Weisser Stein Forschung Institut
” for White Stone Research Institute. A one-story sheet-metal guardhouse sits inside the perimeter. It’s big enough to provide shelter for half a dozen guards or so. Opposite the metal shelter is a skinny twenty-foot-tall guard tower. A grim trio of well-armed men glare at us as we pass by. The net effect is serious enough to repel the riffraff but not so zealously defended that it attracts undue attention. Which of course attracts our attention.

Graccus accelerates, and the surly guards dwindle in our rear window.

Domicles turns to face us. “So now you have seen the entrance to Kazim’s facility.”

“Yes, thank you,” says Patrick. “Can you get us some flexible transport, Domicles?”

“Most certainly.”

Trick nods to our Greeter and comms to me, “Okay, we’ve completed our recon. Now we begin the next phase of our mission.”

I comm back, “You mean where we bust in and see what’s cookin’ in there?”

Trick winks at me. “You got it, Hot Stuff.”

Now I’m frozen! What’s with this fucking place? It’s roasting hot during the day and icy cold at night.

“I hate deserts!” I yell to Trick, who doesn’t respond. He’s busy comming with his Info Coordinator while I drive our all-terrain vehicle across the dunes. It’s one of those three-wheeled jobs with fat, knobby tires. It’s not very fast, but it’s quiet because it’s got so much muffling on the exhaust. Patrick sits behind me with his arms around my waist. He has to hold on tight because the ATV squirms around like a greased iguana while I struggle to keep us from flipping over. Who knew that you could stack sand so steeply?

Trick leans forward and puts his mouth right next to my ear. I feel a little thrill from the contact as he says, “Turn left about ten degrees.” He can’t comm to me because he’s still on with his Info team back in Washington.

I turn to the left. Even with my starlight vision and the compass in my Eyes-Up display, it’s no picnic to stay on course. We’re in the middle of an unfamiliar, featureless desert in the middle of the night. “How’s that?” I ask over my shoulder.

“A little more.” I turn a little more left. “Perfect.” Trick goes back to his comm call.

There’s a glow ahead, but it’s obscured and hard to see clearly. The desert air isn’t as clean as I would have expected. It’s surprisingly foggy or smoky. Patrick finishes his comm call and sniffs the air.

“Trick, what is this fog?”

“It’s sulfur and hydrogen sulfide. They’re by-products
of petroleum refining. It’s unusual to see a whole fog of this stuff.”

“Whew! It stinks! Is this shit bad for us?”

“Not nearly as bad as our jobs at ExOps.”

The chemical fog gets thicker as we drive closer to our destination, the White Stone Research Institute. The glow turns out to be security lights from a long, low building set in a small valley.

I ease off the throttle and stop between a couple of tall sand dunes. Trick and I hop off the ATV and crawl to the top of the dune closest to the facility. We’ve successfully placed ourselves at the back side of the installation, as far from the front gate as possible. The place is a series of large rectangular blocks, all stuck together. It’s lightly covered in dust. The painted beige metal walls and roof are rust-free, I assume because of the dry climate. The huge building is a string of prefab boxes that snakes along the valley floor, with an occasional box stuck to the side as though someone needed another room in the middle. Security lights illuminate the corners and several spots along the walls’ length. The whole place is ringed with a tall fence that’s topped with coils of razor wire.

I lean over to Trick. “Think that fence is electrified?”

“Oh, most definitely.” He pulls out his handheld millimeter-wave radar device, points it toward the fence, and slowly waves it back and forth. “The radar shows a line of hidden pits and moats in front of the fence.”

“Can we go around them?” Trick doesn’t answer but continues to scan the area. I mutter, “I’ll take that as a no.”

He says, “Hang on, I’m still surveying the ground. They’ve got it dug up pretty good.”

Something catches my eye along the shadowy walls. Inside the perimeter, off to my left, two men come into view. They walk together near the building, each cradling an assault rifle. I silently wait for them to pass on
to my right while my partner quietly works his gadgets. The two men turn the corner and disappear.

I comm, “How wide are the moats?”

“About ten feet. Got a plan?”

“Yeah. Is there any surveillance equipment?”

Patrick stows his radar gun and takes out a pair of binoculars. “I don’t see any. Maybe cameras don’t survive the sandstorms.”

“Good. I think we can jump that fence.”

“What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe? I don’t have your physical enhancements.”

“I’ll carry you.”

Patrick takes his binoculars away from his eyes and stares at me. “Scarlet, I weigh twenty pounds more than you. You think you can vault over a fence this high with that much extra mass?”

“Of course! It’ll be like in New York when I jumped over the alley with that chick on my back. C’mon, let’s go. These mugs will never expect this move.” I pull Trick to his feet and lead him down into the valley. He puts his sensor gear in his bag of tricks, and we creep up as close to the fence as we dare.

I have Trick stand with his back to the fence. I face him, then we put our arms around each other. Trick wraps his legs around my waist so I carry all his weight. I bend my knees down into a squat. I have my neuroinjector spritz me a splash of Madrenaline.

“Ready?” I ask.

“I think so.” Trick is nervous, and with good reason. If we land on the fence, we’re fucked. I take a deep breath and launch us up and forward. My left knee gives a pop, and my arms strain to keep Trick with me. His body tenses as we fly over the top of the razor wire.

Made it!
I let go of him on the way down. He spins around, and I push him away from me so we don’t land on top of each other. We both hit the ground on all fours and roll onto our backs. We pick ourselves up and brush the sand off our clothes. Trick gives me a thumbs-up and
a wink. He pulls out his heat and motion scanner, plus the millimeter-wave radar again.

While he gets them booted up, I rub my knee. It stings, but there’s no time to repair it. I dose some Overkaine and hope I didn’t screw it up. Getting an operation done on your knees really sucks. It can take a week to recover from the surgery, and the Med-Techs make sure it’s as long a week as possible.

I follow Patrick toward the factory. My hand holds Li’l Bertha out in front of me so I can see her target sensor. This mission is a Creep ’n’ Peep, so we stay quiet and keep our eyes and ears wide open.

There aren’t any guards in sight. They must think the fence and an occasional patrol is sufficient for keeping people out. A cluster of communications antennas on the roof nestle against a row of radar dishes that all point in different directions.

We tuck up against a wall. Both of our sensors show activity inside but no movement outside. We slink along the structure’s perimeter, looking for an entrance we can sneak through. The idea is to be so foxy that they’ll never know we were here. We tiptoe around a corner, then run to get through a spotlit area as quickly as possible. Trick is in front with his handheld sensor gear, and I cover our rear with Li’l Bertha’s sensors. I wrap my fingers around one of the belt loops on my partner’s pants so I can follow him while I walk backward. I notice that the ground here has been packed down so hard that we don’t leave any footprints. Suddenly Trick stops and kneels. We hear male voices arguing.

He whispers, “There’s an entrance up ahead.”

“The main entrance?”

“No, it’s more like a shipping entrance. There’s a truck and three guys with rifles.” Patrick surveys the situation for a moment and says, “I have an idea.” He tells me his plan.
Ooh, it’s a good one
. Trick takes a pair of thin disks out of his bag. They’re the size of nickels; one is black, and the other is white. He slings his bag’s
strap over my shoulder and sneaks into the shadows away from the lights.

I pussyfoot back around the corner. Then I crank some Madrenaline, face the building, and sprint straight at it. My feet
clang-clang-clang
on the sheet metal as I use my momentum to run up the side of the structure. I grab the lip of the roof and haul myself on top of the facility.

The guards’ loud conversation stops. They run around the corner, stand directly under me, and peer into the darkness away from the structure. It always amazes me how easy it is to hide above people. The jamokes snoop around a little before returning to the shipping entrance. Maybe they think it was the metal popping as it relaxed from the day’s heat. After a minute or two, Trick returns. I swing myself off the roof, hang from the lip for a moment, and drop to the ground. I favor my right leg as I land.

“How’d we do?” I ask as we sneak back to within sight of the shipping entrance.

“Good. I got the acid patch planted.”

“How long till it goes off?”

“Any moment now,” Trick answers as he takes his bag back. We crouch near the corner. I visualize the two scrunched-together disks as they chemically react with each other and transform from a pair of boring nothings into an excitingly corrosive blob of acid. We hear a loud pop sound. One of the truck’s tires has just suffered an attack of instant manufacturing defect. The guards move to the front of the truck as we scuttle down the length of the wall, pass through the doors, and get inside the building.

We’ve entered a storage room filled with rows and rows of big steel containers and wooden boxes. We duck behind a stack of crates to the left. I scan the room for people and security devices while Patrick checks out the containers. The ceiling is just an unfinished roof held up by steel trusses. Plain metal lighting fixtures cast a yellow
glow onto the room’s contents. It’s all very sparse and functional.

In situations like this we’ve been trained to have the IO investigate material evidence while the Interceptor provides security. Trick is about to walk into the main passageway between the containers when we hear steps outside approaching the shipping door we came though. He jumps back behind the crates with me, and we both stand still, holding our breath.

One of the gorillas from outside clomps in, shambles down the center aisle between the crates, and exits through a set of double doors on the far side of the room. He returns momentarily with a toolbox and a couple of canteens. The dude moseys back outside.

I turn to Trick and use our sign language. “Let’s go.”

We sneak down the row of crates and through the double doors. We enter a long corridor with four doors along each wooden wall and another set of double doors at the far end. Our heat and motion sensors are at full sensitivity as we ease our way down the hallway. My heat sensor picks up a group of warm, motionless blobs in the rooms to our right. The blobs are in stacks of three, and the stacks are arranged in long rows. They’re people sleeping in bunks. We must be passing through a barracks area. It’s the middle of the night watch, so these guys in bed are the day watch.

We creep through the next set of double doors and enter a high-ceilinged open room with a couple of forklifts, a pair of pickup trucks, and a huge Mercedes oil tanker truck. We’ve found the garage. There are six large windows, but instead of facing outside, they reveal brightly lit rooms full of computers, tables full of microscopes and glass vials, a group of big round tanks, lots of pipes, and rows of machinery. A handful of fair-skinned Europeans busily mill around all this equipment, along with a dozen or so swarthy Middle Easterners. All these people carry clipboards and wear white scientist coats. Some of the white coats are vigorously discussing something.
Their debate is accompanied by a lot of animated hand gestures.

“Labs,” Trick whispers. “We’ve got to move closer.”

We sneak behind a forklift and look around the garage. It’s surrounded on two sides by the windows looking into the laboratories. We’re on the side that leads to the barracks. The last side is dominated by three truck-size garage doors and a few more guards armed with pistols. The guards noisily joke and laugh with a big hairy guy wearing a sweat-stained wife-beater shirt. Hairy Guy shouts something to the guards as he connects one of his tanker truck’s big hoses to a pipe that runs from the unfinished ceiling into one of the labs.

I look around. We’re too conspicuous. “We can’t stay here.”

“I know. Let’s find some lab clothes.”

We double back to the barracks area. The stacks of warm sleeping blobs are now to our left, so we gingerly open the first door on the right. It’s a storage room for office supplies, boxes of paper, file folders, that kind of crap. We try the next door and discover a locker room with a long row of open closets like professional athletes get, except these are for the scientists and technicians. Trick stashes his doctor’s bag in one of the closets, and we shrug ourselves into the smallest lab coats we can find.

As we exit the locker room, a big bearded guard with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder walks out of the garage and nearly bumps into us. None of our spy gear is visible, which saves our mission. Nobody would believe that any of the white coats would skulk around with military-grade weapons and targeting equipment.