Undeclared War (22 page)

Even for a street tough, Jerome could get nervous when facing something he didn't understand. These two didn't move like normal sheep did when they saw his blade. And their eyes looked anything but scared as they bore into the younger man's gaze. The black masks only covered the bottom half of the men's faces, but that was enough to intimidate him. The fear only helped to make Jerome angry at himself.

“Give it up, you mothers,” Jerome said, brandishing his knife.

Reaper had had enough of the young punk and he was tempted to give him what he asked for—even if
he didn't know it. Instead of raising a weapon, Reaper slipped his hands into the pockets of his overcoat—the same overcoat that Bear wore, a style that covered them to their ankles.

“I don't think you want any part of this,” Reaper said, and he pulled the front of his coat open.

Jerome was suddenly looking at more hardware than he had ever seen even in the hands of SWAT cops. Then the other dude opened up his coat and he had an even bigger gun strapped to his chest than the first one did.

Even youthful enthusiasm loses ground when a young pup looks at the growling teeth of a pair of wolves. Standing his ground, but only because he was frozen with fear, Jerome completely forgot about the knife in his hand as it dropped from his nerveless fingers.

“Go your way,” the big, bad dude in black said. Then the two of them turned back to the direction in which they had been moving and started to step away.

Jerome voiced one last burst of reckless bravado, in spite of feeling the results of his fear trickling down his leg in a warm flow.

“You say what, moth—” he started to shout.

Then the taller man in black, the one who had spoken, turned around sharply. His movement caused the long coat to fly open. His hands were no longer in his pockets, but were holding that horrible-looking gun strapped across his chest. Jerome knew that if he uttered one more word, that awful weapon would start talking to him—and it would be the last thing he would ever hear.

Jerome never looked back as he turned and ran
away. At any moment, he expected to feel slugs stitch across his back. It was something he would never mention to anyone. The two men he had just faced had to be stone-killers—the taller one looked and sounded like Death himself. Jerome would never know just how right he had been.

With a quiet sigh, Reaper turned back to the task at hand and both men moved quickly to cross the last few meters to their target. Along the way, the two SEALs fully pulled up the hoods of their balaclavas, completely covering their heads in black Nomex cloth, and shed their black overcoats. They stashed them nearby, where the coats could be picked up later during the extraction. If they had to be abandoned it wouldn't matter; they had been purchased from a thrift shop and were effectively untraceable anyway.

The western side of the Factory towered above the two SEALs as they ran up to the wall. The facade of the building was the last place they wanted to hang around. The red clay bricks had been painted years ago with a now-peeling coat of white paint. In spite of the gang graffiti along the first-floor wall, the two black-clad SEALs stood out in stark contrast against the white surface.

Reaper prepared to go up the corner of the chain
link fence when Bear grabbed him by the shoulder. Pointing, Bear indicated a corner of the building only fifteen feet away. The loading dock or garage building, had two fifteen-foot-high roll-up overhead steel doors, set about three feet back from the edge of the sidewalk. The main structure came right up to the edge of the sidewalk.

In the shadows of the corner caused by the setback, a four-inch-diameter steel pipe was strapped to the walls and extended up two stories to the upper roof, to the point where a number of the chimneys, stand pipes, and ventilation stacks started. Plans had to be fluid to meet a changing situation. Climbing up the fence and dealing with the barbed wire wasn't set in stone as being the only way up the side of the building.

The big steel pipe looked like a staircase to two men with Reaper and Bear's climbing skills. Grinning under his balaclava, Reaper went over to the pipe and started to climb. He placed a hand to either side of the pipe and pulled back hard on the steel to make sure it was still anchored solidly. When the pipe didn't move, Reaper set his feet on either side of it and, in a crouching stance, walked up the side of the building, pulling with his hands to maintain traction for his feet.

When Reaper gained the first roof, he unhooked the Hi-port weapons catch on his Chalker sling and swung the MP5K-PDW into position for use. Bear followed up the pipe. Even though the tube had been sturdy enough for one man to climb it, two men on it at the same time might have put too much stress on it. So while Bear ascended, Reaper held his position and maintained an overwatch.

Now the big climb loomed up in front of the two
SEALs. From their present position, they had to go up more than four stories to gain access to the roof of the factory building itself. The photos they had taken combined with their inspection during the drive-by only gave them so much information about the pipes and stacks. Seen up close they looked like a viable means of assaulting the building. But only a thorough inspection would tell Reaper and Bear which pipes were sound, and which stacks had walls thick enough to not echo like giant drums when they climbed them.

The first two stacks proved far too exposed for comfortable use by Reaper. And they turned out to be little more than sheet metal when examined. Putting your feet on the sides of these stacks would have caused the stacks to boom like dull cannons.

The rest of the stacks rose on the far side of the freight elevator housing. To cross around the structure, Reaper and Bear had to crawl out on a foot-wide ledge and make their way more than twenty feet to get to the far roof. The tar of the very short overhang roof had been cracked and pebbled from years of winter freezing and summer heat. The surface of the roof looked like wet alligator hide in the faint moonlight—and felt about as slippery, too.

But both men reached the other roof with little more than a fast heartbeat to show for their exertions. Reaper immediately went to a set of four large square stacks near the center of the building. The two middle piles had been shoved tightly together, while the outside stacks left a good two-foot space between themselves and the center ones. Best of all,
the sheet-steel sides sounded solid, as though they were filled with insulating cement.

At the corners of the smoke stacks were steel shafts, pipes really, about an inch in diameter. The shafts were part of a support structure for the stacks that extended all the way up to the roof. By 0315 hours, the two SEALs had confirmed their means of reaching the roof and were still on schedule. Their alleyway incursion hadn't slowed them much, despite Reaper's sense that they had taken far too long just to reach the Factory.

Now they climbed up the side of the inner two stacks. Both men remained covered from almost any observation by the smoke stack on the outside of each of them. The shadows in between the sets of stacks concealed them from all but the closest inspection. No casual observer would be able to watch them make the climb.

The climbing technique to go up the stacks used both the sides of the structures and the pipes up along their outsides. Reaper and Bear would jam their toes into the space between the pipe and the stack. Performing a lay-back maneuver, they leaned back and pulled with their arms and practically walked up the side of the stacks.

Going up the stacks became a long and tedious climb. Only men in exceptionally good shape could even attempt such a feat. Reaper felt gratified that he had kept himself in top condition and Bear had always held up his end. The other SEAL may not have exercised to the point that Reaper did, but he had never, ever, let his partner down.

Both men had their loops of rope for prussic knots to rest with while on the way up. The climb went easily enough and no rest was needed by either man so the rope loops stayed in their pockets. Once they got to the top of the climb, the rope loop climbing aids came in handy for another purpose.

The tops of the smoke stacks were surrounded by a two-foot-wide steel grid catwalk. On top of the catwalks, guardrails made of steel pipe ran around them. Reaper saw no easy way up to the roof beyond the top of the stacks; the catwalks were in the way. They would have to use climbing techniques to get around the obstructions.

Taking one of his loops of rope, Reaper slipped it around the pipe and then put the end of the loop through the knot he had just made. Pulling the loose prussic knot up as high as it would go, Reaper snugged the knot down. Now he had a loop of line that he could place a foot into and it wouldn't slip down the pipe.

Reaper lifted one leg up and stuck his foot into the loop. He stepped on the loop and leaned far out into the air. He didn't look down, and he didn't think about the hundred-foot fall to the ground. Instead, Reaper worked to place his second prussic knot loop around the pipe stanchion at the corner of the catwalk that held up the guardrail. Once that knot was secured, it was a simple matter, though still a physical strain, to put his other foot into the loop. Now he could stand up and climb onto the catwalk, passing underneath the guardrail.

Being the faster and more experienced climber, Reaper made the top of the catwalk well before Bear did. But his partner followed almost exactly the
same steps to reach the top of the catwalk. No more than a minute later Reaper bent over and helped Bear up to the grid. Now the two SEALs stood on the roof of the Factory, and their real mission could begin.

Like all of the other industrial roofs the two SEALs had seen, the top of the Factory roof consisted of a poured tar surface covered in rough gravel. The gravel looked old and thin in spots. The same thing could be said for the hundreds of pounds of bird droppings that covered the roof, the only difference being that the layer of guano wasn't thin in spots.

It had only taken the two men about twenty minutes to make the climb, putting them on the roof at 0342 hours. They had forty-five minutes to make their search of the interior and begin their exfiltration. If they had to climb down the outside of the building, it would be a lot easier and faster than coming up had been. If they found Reaper's family and got pinned down, as a last resort, they would call in the police and just hunker down until they arrived. But all of this depended on their getting inside the building, and doing it fast.

There was a central structure that ran the length of the Factory roof. It looked like a long, low building raising up from the gravel and tar. There were doors, windows, and vents in the structure, that was a skylight and ventilation system for the sixth floor paint shop.

One of the doors stood ajar and Reaper could feel a draft moving through it. The door had been tied off to a guardrail on a set of steps leading down into the building. It must have been propped open for ventilation when someone didn't want to run the big
blowers. Peering around the frame of the open door, Reaper could make out a dim light inside, just enough to see by. He wouldn't need the red-lensed pilot's penlight he had clipped to his shirt pocket.

It looked like the best way in. Reaper could not see any alarms or trips around the door, so he signaled Bear and set up to enter. Bear snugged up behind Reaper, who was kneeling low to the ground in preparation to going in as the point man on the entry. With his Beretta up and pointed forward Bear squeezed Reaper's shoulder in the go-ahead signal. Both men rapidly went through the door and down the stairs, breaking to the right and left as they came to the floor.

It was pucker time: that moment when they first entered the building and were the most vulnerable. They raised their suppressed weapons ready for use, but found no one there to use them on. The floor spread empty before them, the lights they had seen came from a few bare lightbulbs standing up on floor fixtures. The lights were too few and too dim to really illuminate the football field-sized floor area. But they were enough to allow Reaper and Bear to see details of the interior.

The far eastern end of the building comprised the office area. That was Reaper's primary target. The two SEALs moved out across the floor to get up to the southern wall. Once near the wall, Reaper maintained a watch forward while Bear covered the way they had come. Both men trusted the other completely. This was their element, the darkness and danger made them feel at their most alert, their most alive. Reaper considered the reason for being here the worst he had ever known. Now that he had gone
into action, the feeling of helplessness that had dogged him for days was gone.

Tracked areas on the floor and overhead showed where the car bodies had been moved along for work. Dominating the middle of the floor, several long sheds had tracks going in one end and out the other, had the look of paint booths or drying ovens to Reaper—something that they could come back and examine after they had covered the primary search area: the offices.

One of the booths had its big doors closed and plastic chemical drums were stacked up around most of it. If the light had been better, Reaper would have seen that those drums appeared much cleaner and brighter than anything else in the huge room. The drums were new and held the solvents used in the drug lab, the lab hidden behind the closed doors of the booth. The black booth walls and doors combined with the bad lighting to make it look as if the doors didn't even exist—no light leaked out from the drug operation inside.

The floors felt weird to walk across. Then Reaper remembered that the whole factory had been paved with wooden blocks to cut down on vibration. The concrete support pillars that had been noted by Bear during his visit to the first floor were up on the sixth floor as well.

The pillars blocked a clear view of the whole production floor. Piles of machinery, mostly abandoned flexible belts for the assembly lines and mounds of steel matting, grids, and wires, lay scattered around haphazardly. Yet, pathways appeared in places around the floor. Reaper and Bear used these paths
to skirt along the edges of abandoned factory parts as they crossed the big room.

At the far end of the room a cinder block wall separated the production floor from the hallway beyond and the offices beyond that. Big doorways penetrated the wall at three points that Reaper could see. The biggest one was a double-wide opening near the southern side of the building. Lights remained on in the hallway, more than in the main floor area. The lights were not bright enough to make the area well illuminated, but they did show that no shadows could be cast across the floor. That became the deciding factor for Reaper to choose the right-side entrance as his way into the office area.

Normally, Reaper would have acted as the point man for a stack of at least four SEALs to go through the doorway and take control of the hall beyond. But since Bear was his only Teammate, they didn't have the manpower to work the doors and halls as securely as their training demanded. Reaper adapted their tactics to fit the situation. He and Bear crossed over to the far (north) side of the big door area and set up their short stack of two men to go through the doorway. The need for additional manpower became immediately evident as Reaper took his squeeze signal from Bear and swung around the end of the wall, straight into Musclehead who sat there on a chair.

The two men ended up right on top of one another, too close for Reaper to even bring his MP5K-PDW into play. In spite of his surprise, and the big bandage on his left forearm, the man in the chair responded amazingly quickly. The powerful man stood and grabbed the Raptor suppressor of the
MP5K-PDW in a single motion. He wrenched the weapon around, forcing the muzzle away from him. Reaper responded with the only action that made sense to him—he let go of the submachine gun.

In spite of his trying to wrench the weapon from Reaper's control, Amman was surprised when his opponent suddenly gave it up. As he pulled the weapon back and away from Reaper, Amman saw that it was attached to the other man by some kind of strap and buckle. Unable to free the weapon from its strap, he pulled even harder to yank the other man off balance.

As the strong man tried to pull Reaper over by yanking on the MP5K-PDW attached to the Chalker sling around his chest, the SEAL snapped his left hand up and yanked on the release. That feature of the sling was intended for exactly the situation Reaper was in.