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Lewis reached into the van’s glove compartment and brought out two paper bags, each containing a bottle of cheap, nasty vodka. “Nice work, Lewis,” Freeman observed. “Anyone got Coke and ice?”
“You first,” Lewis said and liberally splashed his dreadlocked colleague with the cut-rate booze.
“Fuck,” Freeman spat. “We joking around now?”
Ridge accepted his own dousing with better grace. “Did you ever meet a wino who didn’t smell of booze?”
“Open, don’t swallow, then spit,” Lewis instructed, and Ridge let the mouthful of booze trickle sloppily down his front.
Freeman shook his dreadlocks, showering the alley with alcohol. “Just nobody light up around me, alright? These dreads are a fuckin’ fire hazard.”
“I’ll wait until we separate,” Corbett said; near-constant smoking was an established part of his reconnaissance persona. “Everyone wired for sound?”
They checked the tiny transmit/receive devices hidden in their trench coat collars and in Corbett’s baseball cap. “Green across the board,” Lewis reported from within the van. “Get going. It’s almost ten already. Tell me again what you’re looking for?”
The three men spoke in unison. “Entrances and exits. Windows. Movement. Vehicles. Unusual sounds.”
“Top of the class. And what do you say if there’s trouble?”
“Awwww, man,” the three said together.
“And if you have eyes on Raven?”
“Yeah, man,” the three chorused.
“Good work. See you at zero four hundred unless you’re recalled. Any questions?” There were none.
Freeman left first, quickly settling into his drunken shuffle. Corbett went next, zipping out of the alley on his skateboard with a ‘fuck everyone’ expression on his face. Then came Ridge, apparently even more drunk than Freeman, staggering left and right, occasionally leaning on the alley wall for support. Given the lead-time and their limited resources, Lewis reflected, it was as good a recon operation as they were going to get.
He returned to the van and traced the routes of his team on his laptop screen. The van was shielded by a residential street, largely abandoned, and by a long, tall row of houses. Past the row were the remains of a building that had completely gone, leaving a broad patch of rubble and grass. Beyond that was a small parking lot, which served the main building.
Ridge left the alley and made his way along the walls of abandoned houses. Lewis had assured them that these buildings were empty, though their infra-red helicopter pass had found sufficient warmth in the main plant building to raise suspicions. Ridge leaned against the wall of the last house and let his eyes adjust. With no street lighting and almost no vehicle traffic, his shambling approach would, at least, have the cover of darkness. It was perhaps three hundred yards across the rubble-strewn wasteland to the main building.
He took his time, counting his paces as he walked, and after thirty he would slump to the ground and just listen. Then, raising himself with a drunken wobble, he would continue. Uneven ground and jagged rubble added realism to his stagger, and then the debris gave way to a flatter, cleared area perhaps fifty yards from the factory building, where parking places were indicated by cracked, faded yellow paint. After perhaps an hour of painfully slow progress, he slumped against the factory’s brick wall and collapsed into a grateful, booze-soaked pile.
Blueprints of the plant building had shown a huge, open space where the aircraft would have been assembled, flanked on the near side by offices and on the far side by storage spaces. Corbett would proceed around to the storage, while Freeman would try to get inside and survey the assembly floor. Ridge’s target was the row of offices. He slid along the outer wall of the plant, looking for an entrance, but found only the main door to his left and a locked metal fire door near the far corner. Spying Freeman homing in slowly on the main entrance, Ridge continued along to the metal door, hoping it might open without noise.
It was padlocked, one of three problems Ridge was equipped for. He looked around carefully, and then stood, bringing out a small syringe. He stuck the needle into the padlock’s keyhole, then depressed the plunger. There was a horrific, acrid smell, then the lock simply fell apart, Ridge coughing loudly to mask the clatter as its broken parts hit the ground. He pried the door open with the tip of his knife, listened intently, and moved slowly inside.
The fire door was at the end of a hallway, with offices to the left and right. There were lights on, he saw, in perhaps two of the offices, though most had their furniture stripped out and wires dangling from the ceilings. Ridge took time to let his eyes adjust once more and slowly stumbled down the hallway to peer into the brightly lit room.
“Yeah, man.” It was Freeman in Ridge’s earpiece.
“Confirm?” came Lewis’s voice.
“Yeah, yeah, man,” whispered Freeman. “Three male suspects, one female hostage.” Ridge’s heart leaped.
“RTB, all confirm?”
Return to Base. Ridge controlled another surge of emotion, a frustration that they couldn’t act immediately but had to withdraw and get organized. “Confirm,” he whispered.
He quickly completed his sweep of the offices, finding nothing but broken filing cabinets and strewn papers, and then returned to the fire door. Every part of him wanted to charge through the assembly room and rescue her. He bit down his habitual desire for immediate action.
The journey back to their alley was faster, but all the way his troubled mind repeated a desperate mantra:
Baby, I hope you’re OK.
CHAPTERFOURTEEN
