John Ringo: Unto the Breach

“Please step out of the vehicle,” the policeman said, stepping back and gesturing. He also hadn’t pocketed the money.

“Why?” the driver said. “I’m not drunk.”

“I need to ask you a few questions,” the policeman said, waving again with is left hand and placing his hand on the butt of his service pistol. “Out of the truck!”

At this the passenger side door was yanked open and the officer on that side grasped the driver’s mate, pulling him down to the road.

“Okay, okay!” the driver said raising his hands then lowering them to open the door and climb out. “What’s the big deal?”

“To the side of the road,” the policeman said, sternly. “Hands above your head.”

“Fine, fine, whatever,” the driver replied, shaken. “What is all this about?”

The answer was a cold sensation in the back of his head and then blackness.

The “police officer” slid the silenced Makarov pistol back into the rear waistband of his perfect uniform trousers and looked at his watch. As he lowered his hand a man wearing the identical coveralls to the driver, right down to the Arenska Pharmaceuticals badge on his left breast, walked out of the woods carrying a body bag. He unrolled it next to the body and then the “driver” and the “policeman” lifted the driver’s body into the bag. The “driver” zipped it shut and then the two lifted it and carried it to the rear of the panel van.

When they got there six men in heavy battle dress were already there, opening up the back door. Four of them boarded and caught the tossed bodies, rapidly stacking them on the shelves lining the side of the panel van. The remaining two were carrying weapons, coveralls and body armor. As the bodies were being stacked one of the policemen slid on the coveralls as the two porters handed off their burdens to the four stackers in the van. The second stripped of his police uniform revealing the uniform of the Federal Security Executive underneath. He was handed a heavy jacket, a fur hat and correct equipment for his position. When the “policemen” were dressed, all four climbed into the now crowded panel van.

Three seconds after the door slammed the panel van started rolling again. From braking to a stop until moving the van had been in place for two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, three seconds ahead of plan. The “driver” considered this and reduced his speed by one kilometer per hour. It wouldn’t do to be there early.

A rubber boat crunched to a stop on the shingle of the island and the six men in black immersion suits and body armor spread out in three teams of two. Each team had one man carrying two Russian RPO-A disposable rocket launchers while the second carried an SV-98 sniper rifle. Each man was wearing night-vision goggles and ran through the darkness as if they had done it a thousand times, easily avoiding the many large rocks that littered the beach.

One of the teams paused and took a knee as the team member carrying the sniper rifle pulled a heavily weighted device from his belt. The device was, essentially, a tomahawk with a heavy head. The “front” side of the head was a razor sharp axe blade. The “back” side was a hammer-head.

After a moment there was a crunch of shingle a sentry stepped off a worn trail onto the shingle and started walking to the east, away from the crouched team.

The team sniper stepped forward silently, placing his feet carefully to prevent the shingles crunching and pausing to let the wind carry the slight sounds he was forced to make away from the sentry. This silent, but rapid, stalk brought him to within a arm’s length of the sentry in less than a minute. As soon as he was within reach he brought the axe, which had been held up over his right shoulder the whole time, down and across from the left, burying it slightly sideways at the very top of the sentry’s neck. Leaving the axe in place, he caught the falling body and lowered it to the ground then gestured to the trail and followed the rocket-man up.

Just over the slight rise to the north was a hexagonal building, guarded on it’s vulnerable rear by three heavily armed, and armored, bunkers…

As Dr. Arensky was screwing a blue blinking cylinder into a pyramidal device the regular morning delivery from Arenska Pharmaceuticals pulled to a stop at the outer gate of the facility.

The outer gate was on a narrow causeway that led to the mainland. The hexagonal facility was on a small island in Astrakhan. The only way on and off were by helicopter, boat or across the narrow, kilometer and a half, causeway.

“Where’s the regular guy?” the guard asked, blinking. It was breezy as hell on this guard post and he’d been huddling in his unheated shack trying to survive until he saw the headlights. Being out in this whipping wind wasn’t his idea of fun, either.

“Drunk? Sick? Quit? I dunno,” the driver said, unpleasantly, handing over an Arenska ID and manifest stating that he was Ivan Sorvoso, Arenska Pharmaceuticals Employee Number 54820 and that Ivan Sorvoso, Arenska Pharmaceuticals Employee Number 54820, was the correct driver for the vehicle on this day for this load of biological chemicals, precursors and testing samples, inventory enclosed. “All I know is I got called at damned midnight for this shit. So I’d like to be done and gone as soon as possible.”

“Fine by me,” the guard said but studied the documentation carefully. He was new and motivated, which was why the old guys had stuck him on the outer guard shack. That way the little snot wouldn’t be grumbling all the time about them being asleep. He nodded after a moment’s careful perusal and handed the documents back. “All in order,” he said, stepping back into his guard-shack and pressing a solenoid to raise the heavy metal pole across the road.

Without so much as a wave the truck jerked to life and headed towards the vast hexagonal building ahead.

As the panel van pulled away from the guard-house the three sniper/rocket teams reached their pre-attack points. Each of the sniper members pulled out periscopic night vision devices and checked the bunkers. Each was manned, with lights on in the interior. Tactically, they should have been red or blue but over the years the various users had substituted white bulbs so the bunkers stood out like neon signs. It also meant that the users would effectively night-blind.

Almost simultaneously, although separated by eighty yards, the three snipers snapped their periscopes down and picked up their rifles.

As the sentry was being taken down, four of the eight entry specialists in the panel van slid off as it passed the front doors. The reason for the hexagonal shape was purely security; the hexagons made it possible to fit more area in while maintaining a reasonable number of external cameras. A rectangle had less internal area, a circle created too many “blind” areas.

Unfortunately, the excellent theory had run into far too typical Russian inefficiency. The front cameras, in fact, left precisely that dead zone to the left of the front doors. The eastern camera pointed slightly outwards as did the western. This was supposed to be covered by the two cameras over the door, but those left a solid gap, about six meters wide, along the wall. The team of four crouched in that gap for a moment as the lead checked his watch. Then he nodded and waved one of the armored and masked figures forward.

The figure, the “policeman”, drew his silenced pistol again and fired one round. The shot took out the right-hand camera and he darted forward, reaching into a pouch. From it he extracted a small device and, quickly unplugging the left-hand camera’s port, he inserted the device and replugged the assembly into it. He stepped back and extracted a small PDA and looked at it for a moment. Then he hit a button on the PDA turned his head and nodded.