Redemption (12 page)

He was wearing a balaclava beneath the oxygen mask, folded up so that it covered just his head. He wasted no time pulling it down to protect his face.

Kneeling down next to the vent, he did nothing for the next few seconds – just listened and waited, allowing his mind and body to tune into his new environment.

It was quiet. He could hear no alarms, no shouts or warnings, nothing. The only sounds were the pounding of his own heartbeat and the keening wail of the wind. Life in Khatyrgan went on as normal, whatever that was.

Hearing the crunch of footsteps on the roof, he glanced around as two dark figures ducked towards him, weapons out and ready. Like him, their faces were covered, but he recognised Mason and Frost straight away by their size and shape.

‘That was interesting,’ Mason remarked with a gleam in his eye as he knelt down beside Drake.

‘We’re in. That’s good enough for me,’ Drake said, then glanced at Frost. ‘How are you feeling?’

Her response was simple but heartfelt. ‘I’m never doing that again as long as I live.’

‘Deal.’ He smiled a little, then hit his radio transmitter. ‘Keegan. Dietrich. Sit rep.’

Their radios were burst transmitter units cycling on a random frequency. To tune in, you needed the frequency key, which only Drake and his team knew. Without it, anyone listening in would hear nothing but the occasional static cough – certainly nothing that came close to human voices.

Dietrich replied straight away. ‘We’re in the south-west tower. Stop fucking around and get over here.’

Drake bit his tongue. Now wasn’t the time for petty bickering. Gathering up his discarded gear, he glanced at Mason and Frost. ‘We move. Three-metre spread. Go!’

He went first, with Frost behind and Mason bringing up the rear. Keeping low, he darted across the rooftop to the nearby watchtower, using whatever scant cover he could find.

The tower’s observation deck was about 10 feet above roof level, accessed via a steel ladder fixed into the brickwork. The steel was corroded in many places, and some of the rungs looked dangerously weak, but nonetheless he made it to the top without incident.

Dietrich was waiting for him on the open parapet at the top. It was impossible to tell since they were both wearing balaclavas, but he could have sworn the man was grinning maliciously.

‘Nice of you to join us,’ he said, offering Drake a hand.

He declined it.

‘Where’s Keegan?’ he asked instead.

Dietrich tilted his head towards the observation room behind him.

‘Help the others,’ Drake instructed, following the parapet around until he found the single door leading inside. The padlock that had once kept it secure was lying on the floor beside it, snapped by a pair of bolt cutters.

The room within was a simple observation post, basic and unadorned, with a few plastic office chairs dotted around, a small desk in one corner with a telephone on it, and a stairwell in the centre that led to the lower levels. The stairwell was secured by a heavy steel door, no doubt locked from the other side. He had the feeling this place wasn’t used much, which was hardly surprising. It was freezing cold and draughty, even with the door shut.

Keegan already had his sniper rifle set up and was sweeping from one tower to the other. He glanced around just for a moment as Drake entered before turning his attention back to the weapon.

‘We’re clear. No movement in any of the other towers.’

Drake nodded, dumping his parachute, harness and face mask in a heap off to one side. The other two men had already done likewise.

Mason and Frost ducked in through the door a moment later. Like him, they added their discarded gear to the growing pile. It had brought them here and sustained them during the hazardous descent, but now it was dead weight.

A thermite incendiary grenade tossed into the pile when the team pulled out would vaporise everything within several metres, eliminating any evidence of their presence.

Drake took a deep breath, trying to steady his wildly beating heart. As hard as it was to believe, they had landed and made entry without mishap.

Phase Two of their plan was complete. Now it was time for Phase Three – taking out the security system.

And time was of the essence. Mason’s earlier warning about the storm front heading their way continued to play on his mind. The last thing he wanted was to rescue Maras only to find their transport was unable to retrieve them.

‘Alpha Team, you’re up,’ Drake said, nodding towards the stairwell. ‘Code names only from now on. Move!’

‘On it,’ Frost replied, withdrawing a small oxyacetylene cutting torch from her pack. They had no time to pick the lock, and using explosives to blow the door was out of the question.

The cutting torch was only a small portable unit, with enough fuel for about sixty seconds of flame. But with luck, that was all they would need.

Drake looked away, shielding his eyes from the blinding light as the torch went to work, rapidly heating the steel around the locking mechanism to combustible temperature. A secondary button on the cutting tool blasted the semi-molten metal with a high-pressure stream of pure oxygen, feeding it in a similar manner to a wood fire.

In under thirty seconds the lock mechanism was melted away, destroyed by the intense heat. They were in.

‘Alpha, moving in!’ Mason hauled back the door while Frost, gripping her MP5, pushed forward.

‘Clear!’ she hissed.

Within moments, the two members of Alpha Team had vanished, the sound of their footsteps fading as they descended.

Chapter 18

‘THAT’S IT,’ FROST
said, indicating the steel door on their right as they rounded a curve in the staircase. Gripping the handle, she turned it just enough to check the mechanism, then glanced at her companion. ‘It isn’t locked.’

Mason raised his weapon and gave a single curt nod, indicating he was ready to move.

With a single deft movement, she turned the handle and pulled the door open. It swung inwards, just as the blueprints had said.

Mason was moving as soon as the door opened, and Frost was right behind him, trying to control her wildly beating heart. Her male comrade showed no emotion whatsoever.

They were in a wide corridor, supported by a series of concrete archways and lit by harsh fluorescent lights overhead. Typical of such prisons, the walls were painted half and half – lime green below, and white on top. At least, it had once been white. Years of cigarette smoke, damp and mould had turned them a horrible mottled yellow colour.

‘Three doors down, on the left,’ she whispered, replaying the route over and over in her mind. She had pored over the designs all day, and on the flight out here, committing every detail to memory.

She glanced up, spotting the telltale red glow of a
security
camera mounted between two support arches about halfway along the corridor.

‘Camera, one o’clock,’ she said quietly.

‘Got it.’ Mason brought his weapon to bear and squeezed off a single silenced round without breaking stride. There was a thump, a crunch of disintegrating plastic, and the light went out. Frost barely heard the gentle ping as the spent shell casing bounced off the wall beside her.

They were almost at the door. They were committed now; they had to move fast. The guard manning the security room would soon notice that the hallway camera was out of action.

Two steps ahead, Mason gripped the door handle while Frost shouldered her sub-machine gun and withdrew what looked like a bulky plastic pistol from her webbing. It was an M26; a military version of the taser used by police forces worldwide.

Flicking off the trigger guard that served as a safety catch, Frost took a deep breath and gave the man a nod of acknowledgement.

This was it.

There was a click, and the door swung aside to reveal a low, dimly lit room beyond, filled with the soft glow of video monitors and the hum of machinery. Frost wasn’t paying attention to that. Her eyes were focused on the guard sitting in front of the video screens, engrossed in a magazine.

Alerted by the sound of the door opening, he glanced up and swung around in his chair, no doubt expecting to see one of his comrades.

Without hesitation, Frost levelled the taser at his chest and pulled the trigger.

There was a loud hiss as the two electrodes leapt from
their
housing on a jet of compressed air, their thin conducting wires trailing back into the device itself.

The guard’s brows drew together in a frown as the tiny metal prongs pierced his uniform and buried themselves in his skin. He opened his mouth to speak, but his sentence was abruptly cut off as the taser discharged thousands of volts into his body. Robbed of control, he jerked as if he was having a fit, flopping off the chair and landing hard on the floor.

The torment carried on for a few more seconds, during which he could manage nothing more than a gurgling, agonised moan. He was paralysed, physically and mentally; out of the fight before it even began.

‘Secure him,’ Frost instructed, replacing the taser in her webbing. As Mason went to work cuffing the incapacitated guard with plastic cable ties, the woman’s sharp eyes scanned the room, her mind quickly analysing and processing what she saw.

It was a basic security set-up – six monitors, each cycling through the feeds coming from various closed-circuit security cameras dotted around the facility. A control board on the desk in front of her allowed the user to access specific cameras if necessary. She guessed each monitor had access to four or five cameras.

Some were suffering from pretty severe signal degradation, no doubt due to age and faulty wiring.

This room also served as the prison’s communications centre. A big old-fashioned radio unit in one corner, no doubt tied into a high-gain antenna on the roof somewhere, provided the facility’s only contact with the outside world. Disabling it was as easy as slicing through the power cables and pouring the remainder of the guard’s cup of coffee into a vent in the side.

Data backup was handled by a pair of high-capacity
hard
drives busily humming away in one corner, recording everything that came in from the various feeds. They were perhaps the only pieces of sophisticated technology she had seen so far.

Ten seconds later she had cut power to both units, removed them from the metal storage rack they were resting in, and was busy dismantling them to reach the disk drives within. As soon as she had access to the disks themselves, she would use the cutting torch to reduce them to so much molten slag.

Interrupting her work for a moment, she hit the radio pressel at her throat. ‘Alpha to Bravo. You’re clear to move. Good luck.’

Chapter 19

‘COPY THAT. BRAVO
, en route.’ Drake let out a breath and turned to Dietrich. ‘Let’s go.’

They were moving within moments, quickly descending the metal ladder to rooftop level once more and sprinting along the top of the western block to the north-west tower.

Once more they found a ladder leading up to the observation area. Clambering up and shouldering their weapons, they spotted the guard taken down by Keegan during the descent. His single shot had done its work with deadly efficiency, splattering a good portion of the man’s brains over the floor and walls. Flakes of snow were drifting in through the shattered window, already coating the exposed surfaces with a fine dusting.

Ignoring the grisly sight, Drake went straight for the stairwell door. Much to his relief, the guard on duty in the watchtower hadn’t bothered to lock it behind him when he came up here.

‘We’re in luck.’

Dietrich hit his radio pressel. ‘Bravo to Alpha, we’re going down. What’s the guard situation in north block?’

‘Wait one.’ Silence for several seconds. ‘No activity on the video feeds. There’s a lot of black spots, though. Watch your backs.’

‘Thanks for the advice,’ Dietrich replied in a sour tone. ‘Out.’

Grasping the door handle, Drake hauled it open, revealing a spiral staircase that wound its way down into the bowels of the prison. Rather than bare concrete, the walls had been painted a horrible lime green colour. There were splashes of it on the steps where the painters had been sloppy, and in other places the paint was peeling and cracked. Electric lights were fixed into the wall at regular intervals, burning harsh and bright.

‘Delta, any movement?’ Drake asked.

‘Nothing,’ Keegan replied. ‘It’s all quiet.’

‘Copy that.’ Shouldering his MP5, he glanced at Dietrich. ‘Ready?’

He received a curt nod in response.

Drake went first, his feet echoing on the bare concrete steps as he descended. He was hot inside his thermal suit now as a combination of nervous energy and physical exertion took their toll. Tiny beads of sweat trickled down his back, and the fabric of his balaclava was warm and clammy against his face, but he resisted the urge to remove it. Masks had to stay on until they were well clear of the prison.

His senses were acutely heightened, taking in every detail of his surroundings. The slight weathering on the stone steps where countless sets of feet had passed over the years, the barely audible sigh of Dietrich’s breathing, the rattle of the weapon as he moved, the growing ambient warmth as they approach the inhabited section of the prison.

One of the lights mounted in the wall was flickering and cutting out, plunging the stairwell into shadow every couple of seconds. Drake averted his gaze as they passed. The light hurt his eyes, exacerbating the headache that still dogged him.

The stairs were strewn with rubbish – cigarette butts,
torn
pieces of paper, bits of chewing gum casually spat out, crushed Styrofoam coffee cups … It was a mess. It reminded him of the kind of dilapidated public areas found in shitty council estates back home.

‘What a dump,’ Dietrich remarked, apparently thinking the same thing.

‘I’ll leave them a memo.’

In the security centre, the cutting tool had done its work well. The two hard-drive units had been reduced to a pile of charred, smoking debris that nobody could ever possibly salvage.