[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (2 page)

I thought they were coming to investigate the ruckus, but they made no move to do so beyond kicking over the limp body of my follower. I kept my head low and eyes peeled as I stumbled down the hall. When we came to the end of the corridor, we took a turn right and made our way up a set of concrete steps. Two guards behind me very kindly assisted my progress with a few kicks; otherwise I was left alone.

We were led to the courtyard behind the building. Stumbling, I took my place at the end of a line of prisoners who were kneeling in the direction of Mecca. I’m not very big on praying, especially to Allah; a guard watching the line helped me into position with a punch between my shoulder blades; I put my head down and caught my breath as a loudspeaker began barking the call to prayers.

A few phrases into the proceeding, I recovered enough to raise my head slightly and look around for Garrett. There were maybe a hundred inmates in our little corner of paradise; none looked even remotely like the man I’d come to rescue.

Prayers over, the inmates were allowed to walk for a few minutes before being led to dinner. I mingled silently. The courtyard was about twenty by fifty feet—spacious for a Saudi jail—and bounded by a high chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. There was another fence a short distance away, with another courtyard on the other side of that.

I circled around, mumbling to myself in a combination of random street Arabic and the occasional French and English. Anyone who heard me would think I was deranged—all in all, not a bad assumption, actually.

He didn’t seem to be in our courtyard. I sidled next to the fence and slid down to my haunches.

“Garrett?” I asked, raising my voice loud enough to be heard in the neighboring yard. None of the men close to the fence looked anything like him.

“Garrett?”

Some of my cellmates had gathered nearby and started talking loudly. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the glances they threw me convinced me I better pay some attention to them. I was just about to when someone pressed against the fence behind me.

“You? What are you doing here?” said a voice in perfectly enunciated English.

I turned and looked through the fence. A young man who looked remarkably like my old shipmate was staring through the chain links. His face was battered—eyes bloodshot, cheeks checkered with cuts, his left temple the color of an eggplant at harvesttime.

“Garrett Taylor?” I whispered, though I was sure I had found my man.

“Marcinko?” He shifted a bit, trying to get a better view. “Demo Dick? Here? Why?”

“I came to get you out.”

“Oh yeah?”

He sounded a little more skeptical than I would have liked. Admittedly, his location in the other building presented a problem, but that was only temporary.

“You could sound a little more enthusiastic,” I said.

“Well, we’ll see how enthusiastic you are after you get the crap knocked out of you.”

“That’s already happened,” I told him.

“I meant from them,” he said, pointing.

I turned back around. Three of my cellmates were stalking across the small courtyard in my direction. They didn’t look like they were in the mood for prayers.

*   *   *

But before I get pummeled, let’s go back to the beginning of this twisted tale. Like Paul on the Road to Damascus, my route to enlightenment in the Saudi prison was anything but direct.

It started in Germany, a few days before, when I went to a bank to make a withdrawal …

(II)

Actually, I had an experience many of us do when we go to a bank—I was shafted.

In my case, though, this wasn’t a figure of speech. I was literally in an air shaft,
die
Luftshact,
of a large international bank. The narrow, brick-lined vertical tunnel smelled of rotting garbage and at least one dead cat. It was also extremely dark. But it happened to be the easiest way into the computers used by the American International Bank, a modest institution of some $875 billion in deposits, with branches all over the world.

I’d been hired by the bank to investigate some suspicious transactions. The person who hired me, however, soon acted suspiciously himself. Which aroused further suspicions.

My thoughts shaded toward embezzlement. And here’s the beautiful thing about that: federal law provides for a 15 to 30 percent “finder’s fee”—also known as a Whistleblower’s Tax—for exposing fraud. Slap some zeroes around and that’s serious money, more than enough to endure all manner of discomfort, including the growls emanating from the stomach of my assistant, Paul “Shotgun” Fox, who was crawling up the shaft behind me.

“God, I’m hungry,” griped Shotgun.

“When have you ever not been hungry?” I said. “Let’s go. We have two more stories, then we’ll be at the computer center.”

In order to reach the air shaft, we had rappelled down a much larger one in the center of the building, crawled through a four-foot-square ventilation hole, and then begun climbing upward through the cramped rectangular space. The odd construction was the result of a long series of renovations to the building, performed over several decades. Pipes and several large bundles of wires ran up all four sides of the shaft. We had to avoid the temptation to use them as handholds—if they were broken, the penetration would be easily detected.

Feel free to insert the prophylactic joke of your choice.

I maneuvered myself diagonally, placing my hands between two boa constrictor–sized runs of wire, and pulled up against the bricks. A thick wedge of slime blocked my next handhold; I shifted around and found another.

When I pulled up I knocked my head against the top of the shaft.

Which shouldn’t have happened for another two floors.

I glanced up, playing the small LED light around the ceiling. It was concrete, and fairly new.

I mentally recalculated, hoping I’d made a mistake and lost track of the floors. But I hadn’t. The computer center was on the eighth floor of the building, and we were on the seventh.

“What’s up?” asked Shotgun, coming up behind me.

“We’re a floor short. I’m going to kill Shunt.”

Shunt—Paul Guido Falcone—had stolen the building’s architectural plans by hacking into the Berlin code enforcement office’s computer system, where all the building plans were conveniently stored online. Apparently they hadn’t been updated.

You could blame Murphy—the author of the ubiquitous law that states anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but only at the worst possible time. I preferred to blame my wop genius.

“Can we get through it?” asked Shotgun.

I pounded my knuckles against it, listening to see if it was hollow.

“Anyone home?” asked Shotgun.

Instead of dignifying that with a response, I reached into the pouch at my waist and took out the little Dremel tool I had there. I had to balance myself with one hand and use the drill with the other, which not only made my leverage weak but meant I was drilling on an angle as well. It was slow going.

I figured that if I could cut a small hole, I’d use the miniature crowbar I had in my ruck to hammer out the rest of the concrete. But the barrier was too thick; the Dremel’s drill bit didn’t go all the way through.

Worse, it snapped off about halfway around the hole. I put in a backup and completed the circle, but the plug wouldn’t come out. Running the drill across the diameter of the circle, I snapped the new bit; that left me as the only functional item in the tool kit.

It was time to go to Plan B.

“This isn’t going to work. We’ll have to back out,” I told Shotgun. “I’ll tell Mongoose. Wait for me on the roof.”

“Already heard,” radioed Mongoose, aka Thomas Yamya. The team radios were set to always transmit. “Things are quiet out here.”

Mongoose was in the rental up the block, listening to us on the radio circuit and monitoring the video cameras we’d planted around the building. The cameras—or “cams”—beamed their signals via satellite to a Red Cell Internet site. Mongoose accessed the site via a tablet computer in the car. The devices gave him a full view around the perimeter of the building, in effect doing the work of a small army of lookouts.

(The computer looks like an iPad, but has a number of improvements, including a faster processor and a proprietary operating system. I got it from a friend and Team Six plank owner, Frank Phillips, who first used it in one of his operations with Golden Seal Enterprises, a Class A training and special operations company. Shunt made a few customizations.)

Plan B called for us to enter via a bathroom on the floor where the data center was located. Getting into the room was easy—a fire escape ran right by the window. But according to the schematics Shunt had stolen, the hallway between the restroom and the computer center was protected by a motion detector. I’d have to defeat it before we could proceed.

Motion detectors generally fall into one of two categories: those that work by infrared—heat sensors—and those that work by ultrasound—a little like radar. The techniques for each group are very different, as you can imagine: you can’t freeze a detector that’s sending out sound impulses, and you can’t hum your way close to an IR unit.

The mechanical plans indicated where the sensors were located. They also stated that the whole building system was wired together. We had been inside the building two days before, and confirmed that the detectors used on the floor
downstairs
were all thermal. It was therefore reasonable to expect that the one on the computer floor was thermal as well.

But the appearance of the ceiling where there shouldn’t have been one meant I couldn’t take anything for granted.

Shotgun was waiting on the roof, eating a bag of potato chips—or “crisps” as they were called in Europe.

“Hungry?” he asked as I emerged from the shaft. “They’re onion and garlic.”

“I can smell them. No thanks.”

“You’re missing a treat,” he said, rising to join me as I made my way to the fire escape.

“Sure you don’t want me to come down with you?” Shotgun asked.

“No, I need you out here to create a diversion if we need it,” I told him. “Just like we rehearsed. There’s no place to hide inside.”

“You got it.” He reached into his tactical vest and took out a candy bar as I started downward.

The restroom window was locked by a flimsy turn screw. This was easily pried to the side; I was past it in less than a minute. The red emergency exit sign at the window, indicating the fire escape, was all the light I needed to see as I squeezed inside, checked to make sure the stalls were empty, and then went to the hallway door.

Now the fun began. The door was almost certainly within “sight” of the sensor; if I opened the door there and attempted to reach it from the opening, it would have registered the fact that the temperature of the air in front of it had changed.

I needed to defeat the sensor without exposing my warm body to it. This would mean I’d have to climb the wall behind the door, open it ever so slightly, and maneuver a small piece of glass over the sensor unit. The glass would be held in place by the metal arm I used to get it there, thanks to a spring-loaded piece at the back. We’d remove it on the way out.

Yes, I have done this before.
1

While detection units are generally aimed so that they can’t pick up something close by at the ceiling, you can’t necessarily take this for granted. So the first thing I had to do was get the glass and arm at room temperature.

My laser thermometer found a ten-degree difference. That might not actually be enough to trigger the motion detector.

Then again, did I really want to take the chance?

I went to the sink and ran the cold water over the glass and rods for a few minutes, until my laser thermometer declared the apparatus a perfect 18.23° Celsius, or 65° Fahrenheit—the bank kept the data center floor relatively cool.

Then I took two of the waste cans from next to the sink and taped them together with the help of some duct tape. This gave me a small platform behind the door.

With everything in place, I climbed up, dug my fingernails into the edge of the wood, and eased the door open. Slipping in a small wedge of toilet paper from one of the stalls to keep it ajar, I examined the sensor with the help of a pair of low-tech but powerful opera glasses.

I spotted the telltale plastic shield of the IR detector immediately. The arm pointed downward, covering the area where anyone exiting the stairs would walk. The detection angle was definitely aimed at the stairs, but would sweep around in an angle behind, making it harder to approach from where I was.

Harder, though not impossible.

But wait. There was something else on the wall to the right.

An ultrasonic device. This was smaller, and looked a little like an electric razor with a circular head. The red light in the hall—another exit sign—glinted off the metal mesh at the detection dish.

I thought the Germans believe in documenting everything they do. Why wasn’t the ultrasound system in the plans?

Sloppy, sloppy.

In theory, ultrasonic devices don’t have to be completely defeated—by wearing padded clothing and moving very s-l-o-w-l-y, you can fool the device into thinking that its waves are returning normally. (The devices look for a Doppler shift in the waves, but the shift has to be relatively large or they’d always be going off.)

That’s the theory. The reality is, most people, burglars especially, don’t wear padded clothing. Nor do they have the patience to walk very slowly across a room—so slowly that it might take a half hour to go thirty feet, which is generally the distance the devices are reliable at.

I had patience, but neither the time nor the clothes. So instead I took out a small radio scanner and turned it on. The scanner “listened” for a few seconds, then declared that it had found the wavelength of the sound waves the device was using.

Pushing a button at the side of the little device, I set it to the detector’s frequency, then climbed down and slipped it near the crack in the door. By squawking in the same frequency as the detector, the device masked any other returning waves.