White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel (26 page)

Jasso was lying on the ground next to
him, the rifle barrel propped on a backpack. He didn’t bother
replying. He just pushed his thumb up into the air and kept his
gaze on the sights. It wasn’t a sniper rifle, but a long sniper
rifle would have been impossible to haul up the cliffs. Jasso
didn’t seem bothered that he had to use a normal rifle. He had
trained with the United States army in an exchange program and they
had put the polish on one of the best natural shots in the
Vistarian Army and turned him into a superior sniper.

Duardo wondered briefly how much the
wind would screw with Jasso’s accuracy, then let the problem drop.
Jasso was good enough to compensate.

The guard they had spotted completing a
desultory round of the back fence came back into view as he rounded
the north corner. This round had taken him even longer to complete
than the last two. He hugged the buildings, his shoulders rounded
and his cap pulled down low over his eyes. As a guard, he was
almost useless. He wasn’t expecting anyone to try anything in this
weather and wasn’t looking at anything but his boots.

Duardo bent and patted Jesso’s shoulder
lightly.

The rifle bucked, but Duardo didn’t hear
the shot. The wind silenced it. But the guard crumpled and was
still.

Valentin and Trajo broke from their
cover behind the salt bushes and ran for the fence. Trajo had the
bolt cutters in his hand and Valentin carried the meter and wire
clippers. Valentin was the closest to an electronics expert among
them.

They crossed the twenty yards of open
ground in three seconds. Trajo dropped the bolt cutter to the dirt
at the foot of the fence, then dipped and picked Valentin up on his
shoulders, boosting him up so he could reach the coils of barbed
wire at the top. Valentin worked quickly, rewiring the alarm
circuit to include an extra six feet of wire. He dropped to the
ground and Trajo bent and picked up the bolt cutters and began to
snip the fence, opening it up.

The wind gave an extra hard gust and
Trajo gripped the wire, keeping himself on his feet.

Duardo signaled to the rest to move out
and they sprinted to the fence, where it was sagging and folding up
on itself. A two-foot gap had opened up.

Following the directions Duardo had laid
out earlier, before the wind had made hearing too difficult, Jasso
moved through the gap and took up guard, his rifle at his shoulder.
Rickardo took the other direction, while everyone else wriggled
through the fence and shouldered their packs.

Another hard gust of wind plucked at
them and Duardo staggered sideways, thrusting out his boot to
compensate. He signaled to Emile, then moved over to the side of
the building. Being closer to a structure didn’t seem to reduce the
power of the wind at all, but it would delay being spotted if
someone came around the corner.

Emile roped them together quickly,
putting Adjuno and Trajo at the ends, for they were the heaviest of
the team. This time there was only a few feet of slack between each
of them.

They took up a stance in a loose
semi-circle, facing the wall of the building. It was featureless,
unbroken by a window or door, which was often the case with
prefabricated buildings like this.

It was Emile and Valentin’s turn. They
dropped to their knees close to the side of the building and dug in
their backpacks. Duardo pulled the Glock out of his holster and
cocked it, watching over his shoulder. Jasso and Rickardo were
still guarding their flanks.

Emile and Valentin worked quickly. This
particular type of prefabricated wall was made of two layers of
thinnest plywood, held together with light aluminum studs. Paint on
the inside and a spray of stucco on the outside disguised the
construction. No insulation was added. It was the cheapest sort of
building possible and light enough to be airfreighted to wherever
it was needed.

Valentin was using a stud-finder to
locate the nearest studs. Once he had them located, Emile used the
small crowbar he had withdrawn from his backpack to pry up the
edges of the sheet of plywood where it ended over the stud. Once it
was lifted far enough to get their fingers under it, they both
hauled on the edges, peeling the plywood back like orange peel. The
sheet may have groaned or cracked, but the wind whipped the sound
away.

The wind was a banshee howling, tearing
along the open area between the building and the nearest trees and
making the loose ends of the chain link rattle. It muffled Duardo’s
hearing and diminished his vision. He might have felt cut off,
except the rope tying him to the next man was strangely
reassuring.

The sheet of plywood came free and was
tossed to one side. The wind picked it up and tumbled it along the
ground until it fell flat and lay with one corner lifting,
threatening to take off again.

The interior cavity behind the plywood
was empty except for wiring running through holes in the metal
studs. The interior sheet was an unadorned brown wood, with green
stenciled letters declaring the plywood manufacturer’s name.

Duardo stepped forward and pressed his
ear against the wood and listened. The wood flexed inward as his
weight settled against it. It was possibly even thinner than the
exterior layer.

There was nothing moving behind the wall
that he could hear. That didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone there, but
the odds were small. With a storm like this approaching, anyone
with intelligence would be on the move, finding shelter and
gathering water and food.

He stepped back out of the way, taking
three slow steps against the wind. Just in the time since they had
stepped through the fence, the wind had grown stronger. While he
had been listening, Valentin had pulled out his wire cutters and
was crouched down by the side of the gap in the wall, the blades
hovering over the wiring. He was watching Duardo.

Duardo raised his Glock and wished for a
moment he had his SIG assault rifle, but Daniel had refused to
return it after the White Sands thing. Still, even a Glock would
drill through the parchment paper-thin wall. He nodded.

Valentin cut the wires.

Garrett found a metal ruler in a box of
office supplies and flexed it, pleased. Carmen watched him move
over to the door from her place on the folded blanket. He had
insisted she stay where she was and she was happy to comply. Her
shoulder was a solid block of throbbing hurt and even breathing
seemed to put pressure on it. Her arm was almost completely
useless.

Garrett studied the door, running his
fingertips over the hinges. It was a simple hollow core door that
swung into the room. Because the frame was on the outside, they
couldn’t kick the door from its lock. They could possibly kick
through
the door for it was a flimsy thing, but whoever was
guarding the door on the other side would hear them doing it long
before they finished busting down the door.

Just like the door, the hinges were
normal, too. Garrett worked the thin edge of the ruler into the
small gap between the head of the hinge pin and the hinge beneath,
working the ruler deep. He kept working it, bending the ruler up
and down and pummeling the opposite edge with the side of his
fist.

The pin slowly worked its way upward. If
it squeaked, then Carmen didn’t hear it. The wind was screaming
along the outside of the building now, making even her thoughts
fuzzy and discordant.

Once the pin was extended above the
hinge by an inch, Garrett worked it with his fingers, lifting it
out of the metal tube the hinge created. The hinge didn’t move.

He dropped to his knees and worked on
the bottom hinge the same way. When both pins were lying on the
floor next to the doorframe, he got to his feet and came over to
where she was sitting. “I’ll need your help,” he told her. He had
to lift his voice to be heard over the shrieking wind.

She struggled to her feet and Garrett
helped her over to the door. She looked at him expectantly.

He put his lips close to her ear. “We
pull the door out. You deal with whoever is on the other side. If
there’s two, I’ll take the second.”

She went over to the box of office
supplies where Garrett had found the ruler and rummaged through it.
She spotted what she was looking for and hauled it out from the
bottom of the box. The paper punch was a heavy duty metal one, with
a rubber sole. She gripped it and gave it a swing, glad that her
left shoulder had taken the shot. Swinging any sort of weight at
all was impossible with that hand, but she was right-handed.

Garrett was still working at the door.
This time, though, he had slid his fingers underneath the door
itself, scraping his knuckles against the concrete floor. Carmen
settled herself to one side of him and watched. Now that the door
had no hinges, that side would open like a normal door, with the
lock on the other side acting as a hinge of sorts…unless there was
a bolt on that side. But she didn’t remember seeing a bolt, just a
normal office doorknob, round and bronzed, with a key slot in the
middle of it. On this side of the door, the knob used to have a
locking button, but someone had jimmied the knob and removed the
button.

Garrett got a grip on the bottom of the
door and looked up at her. She nodded.

He started to haul on the bottom of the
door, the tendons in his neck standing out. Carmen watched the side
of the door, which didn’t seem to be moving at all.

Garrett stood up, swearing. It sounded
soft, under the noise of the wind. He rubbed at the tips of his
fingers, which were mottled, as he studied the hinges. Then he held
out his hand. “Give me that for a moment.”

She handed him the paper punch and he
weighed it in his hand, still studying the hinges. Then he swung
and struck the top one, the rubber base of the punch bouncing off
the hinge.

Then he hit the bottom one. The blows
seemed like they were completely silent. There was too much sound
and fury everywhere else to hear the muffled sound the punch must
have made.

After three strikes against each hinge,
Garrett paused and looked at them again. The curled-over sections
that slotted into each other to form the tube where the pin slid
through were out of alignment by a fraction of an inch. Now Carmen
understood what he had been trying to do with the punch. The hinges
had been almost glued together by time, dust, the load of the door
itself and the pin holding them together. Oil or graphite added to
make the hinges work without squeaking or friction would have dried
over the years, forming a crust that had to be broken, too. By
hitting the hinges with the punch, Garrett had jarred the two sides
of the hinges far enough apart that they should now move
freely.

He gave her the punch and bent down to
slide his fingers under the door once more. He didn’t kneel this
time. Instead, he put his weight on the back of his heels and
leaned back, using his body weight to haul at the door.

The hinges gave a little bit more and
Carmen gripped the punch harder, her heart slamming against her
chest. All Garrett’s instructions over the last few weeks were
echoing in her brain.
Keep your weight spread on both feet, it
lets you take off faster. The first person to strike is usually the
last, so make sure you’re the first. Breathe deeply before you
start. You won’t get a chance to breathe again until later.

She breathed deeply, watching the door
pull slowly away from the frame. As soon as it separated from the
frame completely, Garrett stood and pushed his fingers around the
side and hauled with all his might.

The door moved fitfully, the handle
holding it in place giving way a fraction of an inch at a time.
There was three inches of space between the door and the frame now.
Surely one of the guards would notice?

Then the lights went out.

“Shit!” Garrett breathed.

Then, somewhere down the corridor, a
muffled crash sounded, loud enough to be heard over the wind.

Adjuno was the heaviest in the team and
Duardo had deliberately picked him for his body weight, knowing
that something like this might be needed. He watched Adjuno step
back from the plywood wall and grip the studs to either side,
bracing himself. Then he lifted his boot and rammed it against the
strained and splintered wood.

Unlike normal wood, the wall didn’t
crack down the length of the grain, because there was no grain.
Instead, Adjuno put his whole boot through the wall. Then he threw
himself at it, ramming the wall with his elbow and full weight. He
repeated the action two more times.

The wall didn’t crumble. It tore away
from the rivets holding it to the studs and flew across the room to
skid up against the wall there.

Almost directly opposite, there was a
closed interior door. No light showed under it, because they had
clearly cut every critical circuit in the building. As Adjuno
stepped into the room, Duardo moved up to the gaping hole in the
wall and leaned in to look around. On the wall to the left, there
was a junction box, painted to match the wall. It was a small piece
of luck.

The room had been a manager’s office of
some sort. A big desk still stood at the far end, but there was no
other furniture. Dust was thick on every surface.

A small, round hole appeared in the
closed door and Duardo felt something tug at the leg of his
trousers and it wasn’t the wind. He looked down. There were two
neat bullet holes—in and out—passing through the excess material by
his ankle.

Someone was shooting through the door,
using the same logic they had used to peel open a back door for
themselves through the thin building material.

Duardo held up four fingers then pointed
them at the door. Then he crept through and to one side, letting
everyone else in. The cessation of the powerful wind was a relief.
He coughed as the wind pushing through the opening stirred the
dust, then tore at the quick release knot tying the rope around his
waist. The rope slithered to the floor. Each man did the same as he
stepped through, until the rope was coiled on the floor. Duardo
left it there and strode over to the door.