Splinter Cell

27

Armed with Third Echelon’s revelations about Namik Basaran, I head out of Baku in the Pazhan to the address I found in Zdrok’s safe. The built-in GPS in the OPSAT leads me to a heavy industrial area south of the city on the Abseron Peninsula, probably the most polluted part of Azerbaijan due to the predominance of petrochemical plants and oil refineries. The land itself is semidesert, the earth is scorched by oil, and derelict derricks stand like forgotten sentinels amidst a panorama of desolation. The images invoke a bizarre postapocalyptic hell on earth.

The sun is setting as I reach my destination. I’m surprised to see that the building is a diaper factory and warehouse. Who are they kidding? I’ve heard of deadly weapons of mass destruction, but this is ridiculous.

I wait until it’s completely dark, but the night sky tends to glow from the fires of the surrounding refineries. There’s not much I can do about it, so I hope for the best and leave the Pazhan dressed in my uniform. I make my way around to the back of the building, where I find a loading dock with a long ramp inclining toward it, a large folding steel door, and an employees’ entrance. A vast, flat field stretches three hundred feet or more behind the building and I’m perplexed as to why nothing is built there. No time to wonder about that now.

The lock picks work easily on the employee door and there are no burglar alarms. Too simple. I utilize the corner periscope to peek through the door before opening it wider. This part of the building is a warehouse, of course, full of boxes and crates with the diaper company logo on them. Work lights illuminate the place much too brightly for my taste. I scan the ceiling and corners and see in the mirror a lone surveillance camera trained at the door. Damn. There’s no way I can get inside without it seeing me, even if I blast it with the Five-seveN. I have to figure out something else.

I move to the side of the building and get lucky. Two hinged slat windows are ajar approximately fifteen feet above the ground. I look around for something to stand on and remember seeing an empty oil drum by the loading dock. I go back to retrieve it and roll the thing until it’s in position. I climb onto the top, pull myself through the window, and jump to the floor inside.

I’m still in the warehouse portion of the building. I see several sealed barrels near the loading door — presumably full of gasoline for the truck that sits in a bay next to the dock. I’ve never seen so many boxes of diapers in my life, if indeed that’s what they are. There’s also a large open space on the floor, probably where more diapers sat until they were shipped, but it’s huge — maybe a hundred by a hundred feet.

Before moving, though, I look for more cameras and find none. The only one in the warehouse is aimed at the employee’s entrance. Good. I dart to the nearest crate and pry it open with my knife. Inside I find… diapers. I move to the next crate and repeat the process. More diapers.

I take a look at the truck, a twenty-four footer — that can hold a lot of diapers. The lock picks open the padlock in the back, and I find the vehicle completely empty.

A folding vertical steel door separates the warehouse portion of the building with the diaper-making half. I figure they raise the door and use forklifts to bring boxes of diapers from one side to the other. I take a peek into the factory area and see the heavy machinery that’s employed to make the diapers. Before I check out that space, I want to see the rest of the building.

I go to the front of the warehouse, locate a door to the rest of the building, and open it carefully. The hallway beyond is dark and empty. I flip on the night-vision goggles and go through. As expected, there are a couple of offices, an employee room with vending machines, a broom closet, and an electrical room. I take a look at the latter and study the circuit panel. I find switches for the warehouse and front-area spaces, but that leaves a series of additional switches that have no labels. What are these circuits for?

I make my way back to the warehouse and stand in the square open space, trying to figure out what I’m missing. There’s got to be something here and it can’t just be diapers. Directly in front of me is the huge vertical folding door that opens when the loading dock ramp is in use. It suddenly hits me that the boxes and crates are stacked evenly and in straight lines on three sides around me. It’s almost as if there was an imaginary square drawn on the floor and the rules state that no crates or boxes can be stacked within the square. Could it be that they leave this space free for a reason?

Using the fluorescent mode on the goggles, I look at the floor and finally notice an honest-to-God faint outline of a square. Then I see a pair of tire-tread tracks leading from the door to the edge of the outline.

Could it be…?

I jump up and land with force. The echo below me indicates that the floor is hollow. I’ll be damned — it’s a trapdoor. There’s a whole other level beneath the warehouse. So that’s what the extra circuit breakers are for.

Without moving in front of the surveillance camera, I go into the small foreman’s office near the employees’ entrance. I examine the desk and walls, and sure enough, there’s a locked compartment on one wall that appears to be a telephone access box. I quickly try the lock picks but it’s a more complicated obstacle and might take too long with the conventional tools. I pull out a disposable pick, set the charge, and blast a hole in the box. Now it opens and there’s a thick heavy switch inside. I throw caution to the wind and flip it up.

The big empty space in the warehouse begins to lower, like an elevator.

I leave the little office and approach the opening in the floor. There are lights on below and I hear movement. I whip the SC-20K off my shoulder, check that it’s loaded with bullets, and wait.

As soon as the platform is completely lowered to the bottom level, two men dressed in jeballas and turbans walk onto it. They’re carrying AK-47s around their shoulders but are at ease. Apparently they believe whoever’s up here is a friend.

One of them calls to me in Arabic and then realizes I’m not who he thinks I am. The other man shouts something in alarm, and both of them swing the guns into their arms. I let off two rounds, hitting them both squarely in the chests. The guards drop the weapons and fall to the platform, their blood spreading across the robes.

I listen carefully for more signs of occupancy. The silence tells me it’s safe. It’s a good forty feet to the bottom, so I use the rope and grappling hook/cigar holder to fashion a vertical passage down. I slither to the lower level.

The place smells like fuel — aircraft fuel.

I notice that the perimeter of the moving platform is lined with built-in lights, flush on top. Off to the side are sets of wheel chocks, the things they use at airports to block wheels to keep aircraft from rolling. There’s a fuel tank with an extra-long hose attached — just the kind that’s used to fill up an airplane. A fire extinguisher sits nearby.

I’m in a fully functional but empty hangar. The flat field behind the building serves as a runway. The plane rolls up the ramp, onto the loading dock, and into the warehouse, where it is lowered to the underground hangar. I’ll bet the platform turns so they can point the plane in the proper direction for its next liftoff.

Leave it to the Shop to keep a secret airplane hangar underneath a diaper warehouse. But where’s the airplane?

Without warning I hear a gunshot and feel the heat of a bullet whiz past my face. I drop to the platform instinctively and roll toward one of the corpses. The maneuver sends a bolt of pain through my injured shoulder, but I grit my teeth and ignore it. The shot came from the portion of the lower level directly beneath the factory area. Using the dead man as cover, I glance over the body and see more crates and boxes — many of them stamped with the familiar Tabriz Container Company logo. Then I spot movement behind one of the crates. How many guys are there?

More shots. They hit the dead Arab, but I’m concerned the rounds might go through him and strike me. I take the risk of swinging the SC-20K off my shoulder, which puts me in the line of fire for a couple of seconds, and then I drop facedown. I lower the goggles and aim the rifle in the direction of the sniper, but one of his bullets strikes the platform directly in front of my face. Shards of concrete perforate my cheeks and mouth and it burns like hell. Thank heaven for the goggles, which are made of a highly concentrated Plexiglass that’s nearly impossible to shatter. The shards would have blinded me for sure.

I take a moment to wipe my face on my right sleeve. There’s a lot of blood, but I imagine that the wounds are small. Hopefully they’ll be like shaving nicks — bleed a while, and then coagulate. I overlook the pain and concentrate on finding my prey. Then I see him. It’s another Arab and he’s the only one back there. He must have seen his buddies get killed and then decided to hide until I came down. I take aim and squeeze the trigger. I miss — he’s covered well, but I watch him move to cover behind a crate.

I’ve got him now. My bullet will go right through the crate, depending on what’s inside it.

I fire and—holy shit! — there’s a massive explosion on his side of the floor! I don’t know what I hit, but it sure was nasty. The space fills with thick black smoke — something I didn’t want to happen because I’m not finished down here.

I jump up, grab the fire extinguisher I saw earlier, and run to the fire, which luckily is contained within a small space. I aim the extinguisher and let her rip.

It takes about a minute to put out the fire. As the smoke clears I see the charred remains of the sniper. The guy’s in a few pieces and it’s not pretty. The crate he was crouching behind is obliterated, but I was successful in keeping the rest of the cache safe from harm.

The draft from the platform opening in the ceiling sucks out the smoke pretty quickly, so I move to the other boxes and crates. I know what I’m going to find in there, but I open a crate just so I can say “I told you so” to myself.

Guns. Explosives. Military gear. Stingers. Uniforms. Surveillance stuff. Damn, it’s a Terrorist Kmart. I’ve just found one of the Shop’s main storehouses. When orders come in through the Swiss-Russian International Mercantile Bank, product is shipped from here. Maybe they use the airplane to deliver goods. Perhaps it’s out calling on customers at this moment.

I snap a few pictures of the place with the OPSAT and wonder what I should do. I could leave it to the military to bomb the shit out of the place, or I could take peremptory action and do something myself. Glancing over at the first two dead Arab guards, I get an idea. I go back to the cache of goods and look in the boxes where I found the uniforms. There are flaksuits, camouflage wear, and traditional Arabic dress such as jeballas and turbans. I take a jeballa, but I’ll be damned if I know how to wrap a turban. Instead, I go over to one of my dead friends and steal his headgear. I try it on without unraveling it and find that it’s a perfect fit.

I take a frag grenade from my Osprey, set it to manual mode — which allows me to ignite it from a distance by pressing a button on the OPSAT — and I place it underneath the hangar’s fuel tank. For good measure I place another grenade on the control panel that operates the platform. Before I climb the rope back to the upper level, I shove the dead guards off and onto the floor. I ascend the rope, replace it in my backpack, and go back to the foreman’s office. I flip the switch to raise the platform and wait until it’s in place.

I exit the building the way I came in. I make a careful countersurveillance sweep of the area and determine I’m alone. I run back to the Pazhan and change — I put on the jeballa, fix the turban so it looks correct, and then saunter back to the building.

This time I use the picks to open the employee entrance and walk inside, in full view of the surveillance camera. It will record an ordinary Arab walking into the warehouse. I take one of the Tirma pamphlets I stole from Basaran’s place in Turkey — excuse me, I mean Tarighian’s place — and drop it on the floor where I’m standing. I then proceed to set and plant frag grenades all over the place. I pay special attention to the gasoline drums. As I go around the building, I drop Tirma pamphlets.

Finally, when I’m done, I leave the building and drop the remainder of the Tirma literature on the loading dock, the ramp, and on the runway field. Investigators will surely find whatever Tirma pieces are not obliterated in the coming fireworks.

Back at the Pazhan, I get rid of the jeballa and turban, sit in the car, and activate the OPSAT trigger. The diaper factory goes up in a massive fireball that turns the night sky into an orange-and-yellow backdrop. I’m sure the thunderclap is heard for miles.

I drive away from the disaster area and can’t help smiling. I’d love to be there when Andrei Zdrok gets the news that his terrorist department store has been blown to kingdom come. And with the “evidence” I left behind, hopefully he’ll think the Shadows are responsible. Beautiful.

As I approach the city limits of Baku, I receive a message on the OPSAT from Carly St. John. I laugh out loud when I read it, for it serves my little plan that much more.