DARKNET CORPORATION (14 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Arriving at the intersection with the E40 Mert took the
loop back that went up a ramp and onto the highway east. It had taken them the
best part of an hour just to get to here. “They’ve had a couple of hours to
unload the drugs already,” said Bill, venting his frustration. “They’ll
probably all have gone home for dinner by now.” He was disgusted with their
misfortune. He checked the control unit again.
Closing.
Three kilometres.

As they travelled east the transponder signal passed on
their left. Bill looked over at the other carriageway; a line of trees blocked
their view beyond, but he could see it was an industrial area with large
windowless, corrugated steel buildings. Within half a kilometre an off-ramp
gave them access to the town of Bad Hersfeld. They pulled off, the BPOL team
behind them and turned left onto a road into the town. The road went all the
way around the industrial area before a turn left was possible to gain access.
Bill asked Mert to pull over and went to speak to the BPOL detachment.

“We will recce in our vehicle until we can identify
their location. It’s somewhere over in the industrial area close to the
highway. Once we’ve pinpointed it we’ll come back and meet you here,” said
Bill. Then he asked about the whereabouts of the rest of the team.

“Capitan
Tugendhat
is about 30
kilometres away. The
Landespolitzei
have taken
over at the factory. He will be here in
sansicht
minuten
.” Hodge was not exactly sure what that was but he
figured it was ‘soon’.

Mert and Bill turned into the industrial park and they
followed the road towards the transponder.

“Keep your eyes open for lookouts. They won’t be
unloading the stuff without maximum protection. It’s about 300 metres up on the
right. I think we should stop and try to get a view rather than drive by. They
might be more cautious about a car coming towards them than an individual
walking some distance away,” Bill suggested.

They studied the control unit and zoomed into maximum
zoom and identified the location as the far away corner of a large wide span
building, the last of a series before the highway. The road they were on
continued on under the highway, but the industrial area stopped and there was
only farmland beyond the highway.

Bill thought it was a good ambush site. There were a
line of trees on either side and this road was the only approach to where the
transponder was. The warehouse, or whatever it was, could effectively be sealed
off from vehicular traffic with the two BPOL vehicles and the assault teams
could get reasonably close in the cover of the trees.

Bill realised that he could not get any vision of where
exactly the transponder was because of the bulk of the building being in the
way, the transponder was on the far corner and finally decided that driving
past was a better option after all.

As they approached the building they could see that it
was some kind of warehouse with a fence along the roadside and a single gate at
the far end. It was a windowless, modern steel construction and had signage in
German that Bill could not understand.

Mert said, “There are two ‘heavies’ on the gate.” Bill
and Mert studiously avoided their gaze and looked straight ahead as they drove
past. There was no overt sign of firearms, but they looked the type that would
be armed.

When they had almost passed the gates, Bill felt the
guards had ceased to be concerned about them. He glanced over through the
gates. There was a large annexe to the main building that was not as high and
wide, sticking out from the end. It had a series of three roller doors, with a
pedestrian door at the far end. The drugs were in this annexe based on the
transponder signal.

They carried on at the same speed under the highway
underpass and into the countryside.

It took them another kilometre or so before a turnoff
appeared, allowing them back to where the BPOL team were waiting. The pulled up
just as the other BPOL vehicle rolled to a stop behind them. Hans got out and
running forward said, “Have you found them?” Bill nodded.

Bill gave Hans the lay of the land and they agreed a
plan for surrounding the smugglers; entering via the pedestrian door.

Hans said that they would advise the
Landespolitzei
as soon as they started the assault, this time. They would probably block off
the road Bill and Mert had driven down and would need traffic control. The
local police would also have to take over the scene eventually once the
criminals were apprehended for forensics and scene examination. In any case the
local
Hesse
state police were already aware of the
operation from reports of the scene in Gottingen and were keen to assert their
jurisdiction in Bad Hersfeld.

Bill urged Hans not to wait for the local police since
the smugglers already had the best part of two hours to unload the drugs and
they could no longer be certain anything illegal remained inside the warehouse.

They decided to approach the warehouse across the open
ground at the rear, from the cover of a treeline and get into position to storm
the warehouse, avoiding the lookouts on the gate. The open ground was only
about twenty metres, but was unlikely to be visible being essentially the back
of the warehouse.

The plan was to wait until the main team had gone in
before taking down the guards at the gate, peacefully or otherwise. The primary
assault would gain some surprise and be underway, even if the guards chose to
engage in a firefight. The BPOL vehicles would drive up and block the gate as
soon as it all started.

Hans briefed his men and assigned roles and tasks. The
visors all clicked down over their faces and off they went.

Bill and Mert positioned themselves in each of the vans that would block
the gates once the guards were neutralised and waited. Having neither access to
the radio network the team was using with their helmet radios, nor having any
German language skills Bill and Mert were pretty much in the dark about what
was happening.

Bill heard the shout coming out of the headphones and it went off, men
running in and shouting. Four men who had been working their way down the
street behind the trees got the jump on the guards at the gate. The vans raced
up and almost collided at the gates and the drivers jumped out to take up
defensive positions.

Almost bowled over by the sudden stop, Bill gathered himself and jumped
out of the van and pulled his Glock just as shooting erupted from within the
warehouse.

The two guards were trussed up and lying face down hog-tied. The four
officers who had captured them ran forward to join in the warehouse melee. The
two drivers left the hog-tied guards lying where they were, securing their
positions with weapons drawn.

There were automatic bursts and the odd single shots coming from the
warehouse. Then an obvious, very loud, shotgun blast boomed out. For Bill it
was reminiscent of the battlefield and he knew it would be mayhem for a short
period before it would be calm.

People started running out of the warehouse. The firing went on.

“Jesus!” thought Bill, “it’s turning to custard.” Then he saw a bent over
figure duck behind a van parked in a row of cars on the edge of the concrete
and he knew immediately who it was;
Bone
.

He decided instantly that Wood was
his
responsibility and that he
had to make sure he didn’t get away. He moved forward past the BPOL officer
holding their ground by the gates, covering the prone guards and ran along the
line of parked cars towards the van. Mert saw Bill move and instinctively moved
to back him up going to the front side of the line of parked cars.

As Bill got within a few vehicles of where Wood disappeared, he dropped
to his stomach and looked under the jumble of wheels to see if Wood was still
hiding behind the van. No sign of legs. The gun battle was raging on inside the
warehouse. He got up and moved forward holding his Glock steady in two hands
and pointed around the back of the van, but did not see Wood at first in the
vision he had between vehicles. As he moved out from the front of the van he
spotted him to his left running up the bank towards the highway.

A burst of gunfire erupted around Wood’s feet. Mert had spotted him from
the far end of the line of cars. Wood looked back over his shoulder and fired
off three rounds in
Mert’s
direction. Seeing Bill at
the front of the van Wood swung around and fired off another volley which
rattled off the side of the van forcing Bill to pull back out of sight.

Bill was almost happy to be shot at since it gave him justification to
fire back and he aimed four rounds straight back at Wood as he disappeared over
the edge at the top of the incline, climbing over the crash barrier that edged
the highway.

Bill ran forward pointing at the place where Wood disappeared in case he
popped up to fire at him and struggled up the soft grass in the incline up to
the edge of the highway slipping and going down on his knees more than once. He
heard screeching of tyres and the thump of vehicles crashing into each other.
As he breasted the edge and looked over he saw a jumble of crashed cars at odd
angles and Wood, now to his right, forcing a driver over into the passenger
seat of a black BMW at the front of the mayhem, sliding in
himself
and racing off, wheels spinning with black smoke.

Bill brought his Glock up and assessed if he could safely fire off rounds
at Wood with the hostage driver in the car but the angle and distance made him
pause and then Wood was out of range. He looked around but most of the
driveable vehicles that he might commandeer to chase after Wood were behind the
jam of crashed cars.

Climbing back over the crash barrier he heard the deep growl of an engine
and then one of the black SUV’s burst through the far away roller doors
screeching out into the open with a hail of gunfire following it. The BPOL
drivers at the gate also opened up on it and it immediately veered off and
crashed into the back of the line of cars, already on fire from hot rounds
having struck the fuel tank. As the SUV thumped into the parked cars the fuel
from the ruptured tank sprayed forward with the impact and the whole mess burst
into flames.

“Hopefully that was the finale!” thought Bill. As he loped down the hill
he looked over towards the burning car to see Mert on his back at the end of
the line of cars with one of the BPOL guards over him.
“Oh
God!
Mert’s
been hit,” thought Bill and rushed
around the burning wreck to see how bad it was. The sound of sirens in the
distance was growing louder.

As he got to Mert, he saw the BPOL officer pressing a wad of material
compressing a wound in his chest. Mert was unconscious. “How bad is it?” Bill
asked the BPOL officer.

“Der
Krankenwagen
kommt
.”
Bill roughly understood that an ambulance was on its way but
interpreted the facial expression of the officer as “it could be better!”

The
Landespolitzei
arrived in silver grey vans
with a blue stripe marked POLITZEI; lights flashing with an ambulance a few
hundred metres behind them. Two officers appeared with fire extinguishers and
started on the blazing wreck. Two ambulance men clutching first aid cases ran
into the car park looking all around. One was directed into the warehouse by
the officers and the other moved towards Mert who was visibly injured.

A BPOL officer got the two guards to their feet and jostled them towards
the
Landespolitzei
vans. Bill jogged over into the
warehouse annexe. At least the firing had stopped.

Chapter Seventeen

The mist of cordite made Bill gag. He surveyed the damage. There were a
line of five men prone on their stomachs, regulation cable ties binding their
wrists behind them and four others figures lying in various other locations,
not tied. These would therefore be fatalities. Three BPOL agents were attending
to two others who had obviously been wounded in the firefight. One figure lay
under a piece of cardboard, a grey suited leg sticking out; a BPOL officer.

The other vehicles they had been following since Turkey were parked just
inside the doors with a blue sedan pointing outwards in the middle bay. Bill
assumed this was someone picking up drugs. The two electrical transformers were
sitting in the middle of the warehouse, tops unbolted and lying some distance
away. There were trestle tables with stacks of heroin bricks in groups of
different heights and sizes like a Manhattan skyline. Hans saw Bill and came
over to him.

“They were all armed with automatic weapons. One had a sawn-off shotgun.
They started shooting almost the moment we came through the door. I’ve lost one
man and two wounded. Four of them killed; five captured and three escaped.
There was a window at the side they could get through. I’ll ask the
Landespolitzei
to set up a perimeter and get a dog-team in
now,” Hans reported.

“One escapee car-jacked a black BMW on the highway,
going west.
I
didn’t see where the other two went,” Bill responded.

Hans went out to meet with the
Landespolitzei
and
get the man-hunt underway. Bill turned and looked around again. He went over to
where the heroin was stacked up and noticed that every plastic-wrapped brick
had a number on it. Then he saw a familiar laptop, open on the end of one of
the tables. The keystroke USB ‘thingy’ was still in place. Bill pulled it out
and pocketed it. No doubt the Company would not want any of its secret hardware
falling into other hands.

The screen was asleep and when bill pressed the space bar it woke up at a
login page. Bill noted it was
an
‘
darknet
’
page. The login ID was already prepopulated as “security4” and the password
area was blank. Bill keyed in “swnZ4eva” and pressed enter. “Gotcha!” thought
Bill as the screen displayed a menu.

The menu included; Voice, Message, Mail, Tasks, Schedule, Consigner,
Distributer, Payroll, Shredder. Bill clicked on ‘Voice’. Another menu came up
with a list of what he took to be people and a ‘call’ button. “This must be a
phone system,” thought Bill. Mind racing, he realised this would be a good
reason why they had virtually no voice intercepts on all the landlines and
mobiles the CIA were tapping.

Thinking about mobiles, he pulled out his phone and photographed the menu
of names. He could not dare to call any of them, it would definitely give away
the game to actually talk to anyone, no matter how intriguing the prospect.

He pressed ‘back’ and tried the ‘message’ option. A similar list of names
came up with icons next to them. Bill worked out that the icons showed their
‘presence’,
i.e.
whether or not the listed person was online, right now.

Bill scanned down the list: Head, Legal, Identities, Corporate, IT,
Accounts, Sales, Distribution, Purchasing, Shipping, Warehousing, Logistics,
Sourcing, and Security. There was a panel for entering text; an ‘instant
messaging’ application.

He photographed the screen then clicked on ‘Security1’ which was showing
the ‘not online’ icon and a history of messages came up. “Wow,” breathed Bill
and was quick to photograph that too. He started to read the previous
conversation. It was about arriving at the ‘warehouse’ and beginning the break
out. He decided he would read it all later and clicked back to capture as much
as he could.

He was intrigued by the “Consigner” button and clicked on it. There was a
table with useful labels down the left-hand side. These read; ‘Shipment’ with a
number alongside it, ‘Lab’ showing Sadda, ‘Consignment’ with the number 511
alongside it; ‘Purity’ showing 85%, ‘Concealer’; ET2, ‘Transporter’; PFF to
Saray
,
Axa
to distribution, ‘Receiver’;
MNLB.

Bill surmised this was the details of the consignment. Then it struck
him; the 511 was probably the number of bricks. Half a tonne of 85% pure
heroin! He did the arithmetic in his head; about €250million on the street in
Europe. “Bloody hell!” he thought. He photographed it.

He pressed ‘back’ and saw the login page. “What?” he said out loud,
physically jerking back from the
laptop.
He keyed in
the password again and pressed enter and the page just stayed the same. He
pressed enter three times without any change, pressing harder each time.
“Damn!”

There were a set of keys sitting beside the laptop and as he reached to
pick them up he realised that one of the keys was a USB stick plugged into the
side of the laptop. He examined it. The key part was sticking up at right
angles to the base of the key. The handle of the key was the USB connector. He
pulled it out and saw that the USB part folded into the base of the key and
once folded in was undetectable as a USB. “Very clever,” he thought. He slipped
this key off the keyring and pocketed it.

The phone in his hand vibrated and he looked at it. It was Jenkins.

“We got the drugs!” Bill began.

“Excellent! What about intelligence?” Jenkins asked.

“I’ve got a treasure trove of stuff. I’ve got
Bicep’s
laptop and
was able to see what he uses to run this operation,” Bill was triumphant.

“OK. Well we just got an intercept from his mobile. Let me play it for
you.” There was a pause and a click then a telephone conversation came on.
There was the noise of traffic in the background and then Wood’s voice;
high-pitched, rushed and agitated. “The warehouse has been busted.
Police everywhere.
I only got out by the skin of my teeth,”
he blurted out.

The voice at the other end, calm and measured said, “How did they detect
you? And how much product did they get?”

“About a quarter of it.
There were twelve distributions
completed. I have no idea how they found us,” replied Wood.

“What about your laptop?” asked the voice?

“It’s still in there,” replied Wood.

“…and the dongle?” asked the voice, a slight waver of concern starting to
be evident in the timbre.

“Still plugged in,” came back Wood.

“OK. Go to ground and when you think you are safe contact me. Do
not
use your mobile or this landline again. Go to the corporate website and put in
a ‘contact me’ request. Just send in a query about….” He thought for a second,
and then said, “…Fijian Dollars and give your location details as the return
contact and we will come and get you.” The voice finished the command, and hung
up.

Jenkins came back on the line, “did you get all that?” We are analysing
the number and the voice to see if we can identify it.

Bill thinking furiously said, “Can you intercept the ‘contact me’
request?”

“Sure,
if
we knew what their corporate website was, but we don’t,”
replied Jenkins.

Bill changed tack, “There are more ‘distributions’ to be done. I need to
advise BPOL to lookout for people arriving here, but with the commotion going
on here they’ll be warned off.”

Then after thinking more he said, “I think that the access I had to their
system has been
cutoff
after they realised we had the
laptop. The login doesn’t work anymore.”

“Yeah, these are pretty slick bastards,” suggested Jenkins.

“I think there was half a tonne of heroin in those electrical
transformers. Do you know much that is?” Bill asked, as an afterthought.

“It’s enough to buy an awful lot of mayhem,” said Jenkins sounding a
little exhausted. “We also just got an intercept from the keystroke device on
Bicep’s laptop. It looks like him talking on instant messaging with his boss
about distributions. It’ll be in the directory, when you get a chance.”

“I saw that just before I got cut off. I have a photograph of both sides
of the conversation,” Bill noted.

Jenkins said, “Excellent! ‘Talk to you when we have more,” and rung off.

Bill was starting to feel the exhaustion as well. He pulled out the
keystroke USB stick still in the back of the laptop, pocketing it and replaced
it with the device Jenkins had given him. He watched the lights to show it had
copied the hard disk then yanked it out.

Looking around he remembered the transponder and he walked over to the
open electrical transformers, picking up the wrench that had been used to open
them up and peered into the fins looking for the device. When he finally saw it
he used the wrench to knock it free and pull it out from between the fins. The
sticky sides proved difficult to dislodge and awkwardly stuck at every move in
getting the device out. The transponder went into another pocket.

Hans appeared back at the door and Bill told him that there might be more
people showing up looking to receive drugs and he should put out watchers in
case they could spot any of them. Hans was equally sceptical that anyone would
come near this warehouse other than rubber-
neckers
at
present. There was the sound of a helicopter overhead, at which Bill commented,
“Jeez! What a circus.”

Wandering around the warehouse almost shell-shocked from all the action
Bill looked at the piles of heroin. It looked like they had been separated out
into sets for pickup. There were six separate sets. Each one had a different
yellow sticky with a name on it. Bill peered at them but they were clearly
pseudonyms that were unlikely to make any sense to him.

He looked along the row and noted that the last brick on the furthest
away pile was indeed numbered ‘511’. Then he realised there was no payoffs. No
money to pay for the drugs. How did that work? He checked with Hans who
confirmed they had not found any cash.