Choke Point

THIRTY

A long raft of clouds obscured the waning moon and left the port in a deeper darkness.

A haunted darkness.

Few lights shone in the windows of the office and apartment buildings behind them as Ross, Pepper, Kozak, and 30K fanned out and moved down the shoreline road leading to the pier and warehouses. The Mediterranean was a sheet of smoked glass, and somewhere out there, a buoy flashed.

With the sea’s dank scent now filling his nostrils, Ross reached the rear wall of the two-story building behind the warehouses, a nondescript facility with no security, signs, or other identifying markers of any kind, but one their intel had identified as a warehouse for medical supplies once supported and run by the old Gaddafi regime. Ross paused as the team reported in:

‘Ghost Lead, this is Kozak. Sensor out, in position. Contacts marked.’

‘Roger that.’

Pepper and 30K reported the same.

‘Ghost Team, continue the sweep.’

‘Maziq?’ Ross called over the command net. ‘Cut the power.’

‘Roger that. Stand by.’

Maziq had recruited two engineers from the NLA to cut the power to several blocks along the pier. In the past, the power was often turned off at night anyway, and both brown- and blackouts were not unusual occurrences.

Ross shifted around the corner, and with his Cross-Com he zoomed in on the Fadakno office’s security camera mounted over the front door. The red status light winked off. And three, two, one, it returned, operating on battery backup.

‘Power’s down,’ said Maziq. ‘Ghost Lead? Confirm.’

‘Confirmed,’ said Ross. ‘Ghost Team? Everybody out of the zone?’

The men checked in. They were.

‘Clear to drop EMP. Stand by.’

Ross withdrew the cylindrical EMP grenade from his web gear, pulled the pin, and hurled it toward the office’s front door, just outside of the camera’s view as it was panning toward the south corner.

The grenade, technically a flux compression generator bomb, was a metal cylinder surrounded by a coil of wire called a ‘stator winding.’ The cylinder was filled with high explosive surrounded by a jacket, and the stator winding and cylinder were separated by empty space. A bank of capacitors was attached to the stator, and a switch connected the capacitors to that stator, sending an electrical current through the wires to generate an intense magnetic field.

As the grenade hit the ground, a fuse ignited the explosive material, and the explosion traveled up through the middle of the cylinder, coming in contact with the stator winding and creating a short circuit that in turn cut off the stator from its power supply. This moving short circuit compressed the magnetic field to create an intense non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse that rendered useless all electronics within a prescribed target radius.

A faint thud came from near the door, followed by another sound, like static from a broken television.

The security camera’s status light winked out once more; it remained black.

‘Ghosts? Move out,’ Ross ordered.

Each of the two Fadakno warehouses was approximately ten thousand square feet, with about a thousand square feet dedicated to secondary offices in addition to the main office building (no bigger than a double-wide trailer) situated between them. Each structure had fourteen-foot ceilings with several windows that had either been tinted or painted black from the inside. Two loading dock doors and a third door with a concrete ramp that allowed vehicles to drive straight inside were located at the far ends.

Based on his own experience trying to get into the minds of his enemies, 30K had voiced his concerns about the lack of security outside the buildings. He’d told Ross that despite the cameras, if those boys had something to hide and protect, they wouldn’t leave it alone overnight, cameras and motion sensors notwithstanding. Sure, the place might appear to be minimally guarded (in an effort not to call attention to themselves), but they should, 30K had strongly argued, expect to find company inside. Heavily armed company.

He reached the front door and glanced back at the shimmer in the air behind him: Kozak under his camouflage. While they entered the east warehouse, Pepper and Ross would take the west.

Standard door lock. Piece of cake. Most companies could not machine their parts to near flawless tolerances and still make money; therefore, men like 30K with intentions of bypassing said locks exploited those manufacturing shortcomings with a few simple tools.

The lock opened. However, before opening, 30K fished out a tiny pump bottle of lube and drenched the door’s hinges to be sure they wouldn’t creak. That done, he glanced back to Kozak. ‘You ready, bro?’ he whispered.

‘Let’s do it.’

Wincing, 30K tugged open the door, and it opened effortlessly. He shifted inside, waited a moment, then shut the door, the darkness turning to liquid as Kozak passed him.

Rows of shelving stretched off into the shadows like monoliths lined up on a moonscape, and now voices echoed from somewhere on the other end, near the loading docks.

Were they speaking Arabic? He wasn’t sure.

‘We’ve got contact inside,’ 30K whispered over the team net.

‘Roger that, so do we,’ said Ross. ‘We confirm that the truck isn’t here. Must be in your warehouse. Move in on it now.’

30K turned to Kozak and gave him a hand signal.

Time to earn their keep.