Because he had taken point, Ricci held in his left hand a portable vapor detector that looked oddly similar to the super-eight movie cameras he remembered from distant childhood, and was presently scanning for environmental hazards that ranged from the toxic methane, nitrogen, and sulfurous gases of decaying sewage to chemical and biological weapons agents to the minutest airborne traces of the explosive ingredients of booby traps. In the event its beeper alarm sounded, a backlit LCD readout would specifically identify the threat, with the beep tones increasing in rapidity as the instrument was brought closer to it. Should that threat prove to be chem/bio or the products of organic decomposition, each member of the strike team was ready to convert the carry bag strapped over his shoulder into an air-powered, filtered-breathing system at the pull of a zipper, worn as if it were a masked and hooded vest. Should a bomb be detected, they would hopefully steer clear of its triggering mechanism.
And there was still more equipment, some of it suppressive, referred to as public order weapons by law enforcement personnel with a penchant for cooking up new euphemisms every fifteen seconds.
Call them what you wished, their fundamental purpose was to incapacitate their targets without causing serious injury.
Ricci’s absolute intent, second only to bagging the Wildcat, was that no harm come to the innocent civilian workers in the building. This was foremost out of bounds. But he was also determined to avoid using deadly force on any of Obeng’s rotten cops, and for that matter against Obeng himself, all of whom held nominal claim to being upstanding members of the population. Even the militiamen would not be permanently damaged, if possible, though Ricci was giving his ops some leeway in dealing with them, as it was unlikely their country’s heads of state, eager to improve relations with America, would raise a commotion over the loss of a few known malcontents whose looting and violent behavior threatened their own government’s stability, and who they were consequently better off living without.
Cramped from kneeling, Ricci led the way through the narrow drainage duct for another ten minutes. Then his torch disclosed its circular mouth a few yards up ahead. He moved forward and saw that it opened out some three or four feet above the bottom of a cementwalled tunnel with room enough for him and the others to stand upright.
He raised a clenched fist to signal a pause, then glanced over his shoulder at Grillo.
“Drop’s maybe a yard,” Ricci told him in a hushed voice. “Everybody be careful. Looks to me like the tunnel’s ankle deep in water. Not much of a flow, but it’s bound to be slippery.”
Grillo nodded and passed the word to Lou Rosander, the man behind him, who in turn relayed it to the next in line.
Ricci inched over to the opening and sprang down.
He landed with a splash. A layer of slime coated the floor under the stagnant water, but he had a good sense of balance and was aided by the corrugated rubber soles of his boots.
The rest of the team hopped from the pipe one at a time, all of them joining him in short order. They immediately formed up in single file.
Ricci looked around. The passage was almost chamberlike measured against the constricted tube from which he’d jumped. Other tunnels of nearly equal width and height branched off from it in various directions.
They had reached a major juncture of the system.
Ricci did not need to consult his underground street plan to know which of the diverging passages to take. He had committed the system layout to memory before proceeding with his mission, just as he’d memorized the location of the drainage pipe’s outflow opening from the high-res GIS data provided by Sword’s satellite mapping unit.
With another crisp hand signal, Ricci turned toward the dark hole of the tunnel entrance to his immediate left and stepped into it, his feet squishing in the muck.
His men followed without hesitation.
“Okay,” Rosander whispered. “I see a single attendant. I don’t think he’s one of Obeng’s goons. Or that he’s gonna be a problem.”
“He in a booth?” Ricci asked.
Rosander kept peering through a thin fiber-optic periscope that he’d coiled upward through the metal drain cover above him. With maybe four feet of clearance between the floor of the sunken garage and the bottom of the sluice in which they were hunched, a six-year-old would have had difficulty standing erect, let alone the ten grown men of Ricci’s team.
“No,” he said. “The guy’s nodding off in a chair against the wall.”
Ricci nodded.
“There anybody else around we have to worry about?” he said.
“Give me a sec.”
Rosander rotated the fiberscope between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, his other hand making adjustments to the eyepiece barrel to focus its color video image.
“Not a soul,” he said.
“Number of vehicles?”
“I’d say about a dozen, including the rattletrap that brought the Wildcat.”
Ricci nodded again.
He reached into a gear pouch for a breaching charge, peeled the plastic strip from its adhesive backing, and pressed the thin patch of C2 explosive — a compound as powerful as C4, but more stable — against the ceiling surface until it was firmly secured. Then he took the “lipstick” detonator caps out of a separate pouch and inserted them. Before blowing their mouse hole into the sunken garage, his team would back through the runoff duct to keep a safe distance from the blast and falling masonry.
After a moment, Ricci turned to Simmons and handed him the vapor detector.
“I’ll go in first, take down the attendant,” he whispered. “Stay close, and don’t forget the regs.”
“Right.”
Ricci got his radio out of its case on his belt.
While the explosion he was setting off would be small and contained, any explosion was by definition noisy, and therefore would be heard by those in the building unless masked.
Ricci had arranged for something even noisier to do just that.
A few blocks east on the crosstown avenue, two men in the white uniforms of emergency medical responders had been waiting patiently in the cab of a double-parked ambulance.
After receiving Ricci’s cue, the driver cut the radio and turned to his partner.
“We’re on,” he said.
They raced into traffic toward Gang Central, the ambulance’s light bars flashing, its siren cranked to peak volume and howling like a thousand tortured wolves.
Seated across a desk from Obeng in the warlord’s second-floor office, Le
“Is that one of yours?” he asked, his voice raised over the deafening clamor.
Obeng shook his head no.
“An ambulance,” he said.
The Wildcat gave him a questioning look.
“You’re certain?”
“Yes,” Obeng assured him. He was almost shouting to be heard. “Even here people get sick.”
As he leaped up through the small crater in the garage floor, Ricci didn’t know whether it was the detonating C2 or the eardrum-piercing shrillness of the ambulance siren that shocked the attendant from his dozy position on the chair.
Not that it made a jot of difference to him.
The attendant shot to his feet now, his chair crashing onto its back, his features agape at the sight of men in visored helmets and tactical camo outfits pouring out of a rubbled, dust- and smoke-spewing hole that hadn’t
