Seawolf End Game (45 page)

The two men crossed the road at a sprint and went to work on the first of three fences. The first line of defense was relatively easy to penetrate. It took less than a minute to cut a four-foot-high hole in the galvanized wire mesh. Carabineers and lengths of rope were then used to pull the fence apart and the rest of the team sprinted through. The breaching team closed the opening behind them, trying to leave as little evidence of their passing as possible.

Farid and the rest of the assault team took up defensive positions short of the next fence. It was a fifteen feet high, similar to the previous one, except for the sinister humming coming from it. His breaching team, with their protective equipment on, went to work. Embedded in the fence just above ground were electric wires carrying ten thousand volts of electricity. The breaching team used an insulated bundle of high capacity copper cables to reroute the power from a section of the fence and then cut a four foot square opening.

There was a third and final fence for the team to pass through. It wasn’t electric, but there were motion detectors built in to detect anyone trying to climb over. But they weren’t sensitive enough to pick up the breaching team as they cut an opening, allowing the team to pass through unnoticed.

Farid kept an eye on his watch. By plan, they had ten minutes to breach the three fences. During training, their best time to breach all three was seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds. This night, they made it through in under nine minutes.

A full minute ahead of schedule.

Farid turned to his men, searching their faces. No fear. No doubt. They all knew what fate lay ahead of them, but he saw no hesitation in their eyes.

He’d chosen well.

Farid led them through the final opening and directly into a water-filled drainage ditch. Nearly a foot of rain had fallen within the last few days. An acceptable discomfort, he allowed, since the moving water made motion detectors useless here. One hundred meters later they were beyond the motion detection grid. The team went down to one knee, with just the CCTV cameras to deal with now.

Mahmud, his electronics specialist, moved closer.

“I’m ready, brother,” the youngest member of the team whispered.

Farid held up a fist to silence everyone. A roving patrol of two security guards, unaware of the infiltrators close at hand, discussed a recent rugby game as they passed. Farid waited until the two men had disappeared behind the facility’s fire station.

“Now,” he whispered.

Mahmud broke from cover and raced toward the back of a solid blockhouse. A grey junction box was mounted on the rear of the building. Farid watched nervously, knowing that this was potentially the riskiest part of their infiltration. The box contained the CCTV cables for every camera on this side of the facility. The box was locked and alarmed with a magnetic trigger.

Farid watched as Mahmud opened the box in less than forty seconds and began splicing into the various CCTV cables. There were thirty of them, and he needed to find five specific ones. But Mahmud was as well trained as the rest, and he took just under four minutes to complete his task. Once finished, the CCTV cameras between Farid’s team and their objective had been corrupted. The security center a mile away would see only the constant image of quiet streets and empty fields when Farid and his men moved forward.

The cameras now disabled, Farid turned to his men.

They had come so far. During the planning phase of the operation, there’d been doubt by many that his team would get to this point. Their intelligence about the facility had been detailed, but there were always the unknown variables such as new security upgrades, roving patrols, or human error. The biggest danger, though, was a possible infiltrator within the cellular structure who’d sold out Farid and his brothers. This had been Farid’s greatest concern during the planning, training, and infiltration into South Africa. It had seemed the height of arrogance to think they would get this far, and he was prepared to carry out his mission even from the drainage ditch.

But now, with his team within one hundred meters of their objective, it was too late for anyone to stop them.

Farid smiled at his men and spoke softly, “Now’s the time, brothers. Paradise awaits!”

Buy The Pelindaba Conspiracy from Amazon

Weaponized anthrax. So deadly a mere gram has over 100 million lethal doses, and terrorists are now in possession of it. When the world’s intelligence agencies are unable to locate the extremists before they unleash their pandemic, governments turn to the Friends From Damascus. This rogue counterterrorist team will go anywhere and take any risk to deliver their form of justice to extremists. But this time the team faces an unexpected challenge from within its own elite ranks.

Their newest member, Katya Petrova, has lost all faith in humanity – the world’s and her own. Her bleak and ravaged past as a Russian agent has destroyed her sense of self-worth. Before the team can hunt down the terrorists and the toxin, Petrova must learn to believe in herself again. Then she must earn the trust of the team’s sniper, Joe Proffitt.

Outcast, mercenary, convict and founding member of Friends From Damascus, Proffitt’s brutal life has taught him that all people are either hunter or prey. This former Marine and lone wolf trusts no one – so why should he trust scarred and hardened Katya Petrova?

Galveston National Laboratory, University of Texas Medical Branch

D
r. Dhann Singh sat quietly in his second floor office and toyed with the plastic vial in his hand, opening and closing it over and over again as he quietly considered the tenets of his faith. As a Sikh, life was precious, something to be respected and protected. He’d become a doctor for that very reason, with the goal of helping his fellow man. He was charitable and regarded by people of every faith in his Texas community as a generous man.

Yet he held the small plastic tube, a tube he wasn’t supposed to have. It was smaller than his pinky, and any decent high school biology lab would have literally thousands of similar tubes. But not here… not in this place.

He looked up at the three faces gazing at him from behind the glass of the trifold picture frame and felt the bitter pill of anger in his stomach. His faith taught him that they had lived good lives, and their souls were already born again to live another, more enjoyable existence. But this belief, something he had been taught since his early childhood, gave him no solace as he stared at the three smiling faces… the three lives cut short by an act of mindless rage. Sikhs didn’t believe in violence. All life was sacred, since all life was endowed with an eternal soul. It was wrong to kill.

Yet he held the tube in his hand, an act that would lead to severe disciplinary actions against him if anyone were to learn of this significant breach of safety protocols.

But of everything Sikhs believed in, of all the teachings of the Gurus, it was the words of Guru Gobind Singh Ji, “It is right to use force as a last resort when all other peaceful means fail,” that had been reverberating in Dhann Singh’s head for nearly two months, ever since the day when blind hatred had taken his entire world from him.

He stared at the smiling faces. His only son Ajaib’s black, bushy hair refusing to sit properly, his lovely daughter-in-law Harpreet’s smile that had not only captivated his son, but had melted Dhann’s heart as well. Then, the last—the most tragic—his greatest treasure, his granddaughter Amita wearing a priceless smile that showed a space where two recently lost teeth had been. She would be the only granddaughter he would ever have, Harpreet his only daughter and Ajaib his only son.

They had seen to that.

Freedom fighters they had called themselves.

Mindless thugs, Dhann had concluded succinctly. Mindless, foolish thugs who’d decided on violence to advance their goals. But they had no concept of the chain of events they had set into motion…the horror their senseless act would eventually unleash upon their world.

They’d failed to consider Dhann and the pain of a father’s loss.

Karma.

This was another of his faith’s beliefs.

It had been karma that had led the extremists to choose violence.

The Pakistani government’s intelligence agency had trained them, equipped them, provided the terrorists with the documents to reach Mumbai. This had been karma as well, just as it had been fate which had chosen that particular hotel and that specific date for his son and family to visit India.

Now karma would continue to rule the day. Only this time, it was Dhann’s destiny.

Finally, as Dhann sat at his desk, staring through misty eyes at his lost treasures, he considered the last tenets of his faith: truth and, above all, justice. The one criminal who’d been taken alive had admitted, even boasted of his guilt. Yes, the Indian government had questioned him, and he’d admitted to the world Pakistan’s involvement in the attack. Some nations had even expressed outrage before going back to business as usual and turning a blind eye to the enormity of the crime and Dhann’s loss.

There would be no justice coming from India or from the United Nations. The guilty would never be held accountable for their recklessness… their foolishness.

Or so they believed.

Dhann’s world had been stolen from him. The years of watching little Amita grow up, the chance of more grandchildren… all lost. Those responsible thought they were untouchable behind the façade of decency created by a world government. They assumed they were immune to prosecution. Surely the Pakistani government would never do what was necessary to root out the evil within their ranks.

But Karma had seen to that, too.

It was now perfectly clear to Dhann that his entire life had led him to this time and place. There was nothing random about his career path from pure medicine to biological engineering; there had been nothing unsystematic in his steady advance up the ladder of academia to his current position at the University or at the laboratory. The odds were too astronomical, too impossible to calculate the chance that any of this had been mere happenstance. There was no coincidence, only providence.

Karma was in control and Dhann just its tool.

He walked into the small lavatory and washed his face clean. It wouldn’t do for anyone to see him sweating or the tears staining his face. From there he removed his sport coat and pulled on his lab coat. He placed the contaminated tube in his desk drawer and removed a fresh tube containing a tiny amount of transport medium. Similar to other tubes he’d used since high school, this one had a double O-ring seal that, once in place would prevent anything outside the tube contaminating the interior, or more importantly, prevent anything inside from escaping.

Deep within him, the last vestiges of his humanity pleaded with him to reconsider his plan. The rational side of him, the compassionate doctor that had personified his existence for his entire adult life begged him to alter his course of action. It wasn’t too late. He could stop the chain of events carefully laid out before him after two months of painstaking planning.

But karma was inescapable.

He slipped the plastic tube into the pocket of his coat, clipped his security access badge to his lapel and then stepped from his office toward the elevator leading to the upper floors. He passed through the biometric sensors that protected access to the inner sanctum of the building and the laboratories hidden away there.

The building was in fact a bunker to safeguard the deadly secrets inside. From the outside, it looked like any other building on campus. But this gentle exterior was another façade to hide the truth locked deep within. The building’s pilings were sunk over one hundred feet into the earth. Its engineers had designed it to withstand the worst nature might throw at it. It could brush off the fury of a Category-5 Hurricane sweeping in from the Gulf of Mexico. All the building’s laboratories were positioned a full thirty feet above the hundred-year flood plain. Vehicles couldn’t approach within two hundred feet of the building, making the threat of a car bomb more of a nuisance than a danger. Even aircraft turned into flying bombs would find the structure virtually invulnerable. State of the art intrusion detection monitored every square inch of the building, and the most elaborate security system ever devised protected the horrors within from ever escaping.