The Dragon Factory

by Jonathan Maberry

  Deep Iron looks like a water treatment plant. From outside the gate all we could see were a few medium-sized buildings and miles of electrified security fence. According to the info Bug had sent me, the surface buildings were mostly used for equipment storage and garages. The main building had a few offices, but mostly it’s a big box around a set of six industrial elevators, two of which were big enough to fit a dozen SUVs. The real Deep Iron is way underground. The upper tiers of storage start one hundred yards down and the rest are far below that.

  Brick drove us to the front gate. There was no guard. We exchanged a look and Bunny opened the door and stepped out. He checked the guard shack and leaned close to the fence for a moment and then came back, a frown etched into his face.

  “Guard shack is empty, no sign of struggle. The fences are electrified but the juice is off,” he said.

  Top pointed to my PDA. “Stuff Bug sent says Deep Iron has its own power plant.”

  I took out my cell and dialed the contact number for Daniel Sloane, the sales manager, but it rang through to voice mail. I called the main office number, same thing. “Okay, we’re playing this like we’re on enemy territory. Lock and load. Bunny, open the gate.”

  Bunny pulled the gate open and then jumped onto the back step-bumper of the truck as we rolled into the compound. Brick did a fast circuit inside the fence. There were eleven cars parked in the employee lot. None of them was a DMS vehicle. We paused at the rear guard shack, but it was also empty. I told Brick to head to the main office and we parked outside, the vehicle angled to keep its reinforced corner toward the building’s windows. We were already kitted out with Kevlar and we used the truck’s steel door to shield us as we stuffed extra magazines into pockets and clipped night vision onto our steel pots. None of us said it aloud, but we were all thinking about Jigsaw Team. A dozen of them had come out here this morning, and now they were missing. Were they in hiding? Was there still that chance? Or were they truly MIA?

  Now three of us were going down into an unfamiliar vast cavern system that may have swallowed all of Jigsaw. No backup except Brick, and he had one leg. We couldn’t even call the State Police or the National Guard.

  I caught the looks Top and Bunny were shooting back and forth and made sure my own eyes were poker neutral as I began stuffing flash bangs into a bag.

  I glanced at Brick. “Don’t take offense at this, Gunny, but are you able to provide cover fire if we need it?”

  He grinned. “Don’t need two legs to pull a trigger, Captain. Little Softee here,” he patted the side of the truck, “has a few James Bond tricks built in to her.”

  Brick clambered into the back of the truck, folded down a small seat by the wall closest to the building, and fiddled with some equipment on rails. There was a hydraulic hiss and a metal case on the floor opened to allow a six-barreled, air-cooled minigun to rise and lock into place. Brick reached across it and slid open a metal vent on the side of the truck, then turned back to us, beaming.

  “The whole floor has rails on it so the gun can be maneuvered to either side and down to cover the rear. I have grenade launchers fore and aft, and the truck body is half-inch steel with a ceramic liner. I’ve got enough rounds to start a war, and probably enough to end it.”

  “Fuck me,” said Top.

  “Hey, boss,” said Bunny, “can we send him in and wait here?”

  Brick chuckled. “Five years ago, kid, I’d have taken you up on that.”

  “Outstanding,” I said. “Okay, Gunny, if the power’s off in there we may not be able to use landlines, and once we’re down deep we’ll lose cell and sat phone communication. I don’t even know how to estimate how much time this is going to take, but if Church can get the NSA to back off then I’d very much appreciate you calling in every U.S. agent with a gun and send them down after us.”

  “You got a bad feeling about this, Captain?” he asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Shit . . . I’ve had an itch between my shoulder blades since I got up this morning.”

  “Keep one eye on the sky, too,” said Top. “We didn’t see any vehicles that don’t belong here. These jokers may have come by chopper.”

  “I got me some SAMs if I need ’em,” Brick said. I really wished he had two good legs.

  I said, “If you send anyone down after us, give ’em today’s recognition code.”

  The day code was “bluebird” for challenge and “canary” for response. Anyone in DMS tactical who logged in after 2:00 A.M. would know it. Anyone we met down there who didn’t know it was likely to have a worse day than we were having.

  We synched our watches and checked our gear. I gave them the nod.

  Even with all the unknown waiting for us, it felt good to stop running and start hunting.

  BUNNY TOOK POINT and he ran low and fast from the corner of the truck to the corner of the building while we covered him. Except for the whisper of his gum-rubber soles on the asphalt of the parking lot there was no sound. There was no wind at all, and the sun was behind us. Bunny hit the wall and crouched to cover Top as he ran in, and they covered front and back as I joined them. We couldn’t see Brick, but knowing that the cold black eye of the minigun was following us was a great comfort. Brick had the look of the kind of soldier who generally hit what he aimed at, and I doubt anyone ever caught him napping.

  The door to the office stood ajar and we crouched down on either side and fed a fiber-optic camera in for a snoop. Nothing. Bunny checked for trip wires and booby traps and found nothing. We moved inside.

  According to the intel Bug had provided there were four guards on each shift, two two-man teams made up of ex-military or ex-police. We found them right away, and right away we knew we’d just stepped into something bizarre and unbearably ugly.

  The four guards had been killed, and there was a fifth man in a business suit. Sloane, the sales manager. Each had been shot repeatedly, but their bodies were in an indescribable condition. Legs and arms were broken and jerked out of their sockets, the victims’ heads were smashed, their faces brutally disfigured.

  I couldn’t stop and stare; there was too much to do. We rushed deeper into the building and worked as a three-man team to clear each room, taking it in turns to be the one to open a door and step inside while the others provided high and low cross-fire cover. There were six rooms in the building. Mostly offices and a bathroom. Nothing else, and no one else.

  We returned to the guardroom.

  “Holy mother of God,” whispered Bunny.

  Top and I moved into the room and checked the bodies. “Multiple gunshots, Cap’n,” he said. “Heavy-caliber hits.”

  “How long?”

  “These guys aren’t even cold. Maybe two hours, not more.”

  I tapped his arm and pointed to the blood spatter on the floor and walls. There are three major categories for blood spatter: passive, projected, and transfer. In the first case the bloodstains are caused by gravity with blood dripping from wounds. Projected stains come from blood under pressure—say from a torn artery—or rapid movement, as with someone shaking blood off their fingers. Then there are transfer spatters where something covered in blood comes into contact with a surface. Footprints, fingerprints, that sort of thing.

  We were seeing a little of everything, but it didn’t look right. There were spatter marks on the walls, but they didn’t have the tight grouping you see with arterial sprays. These were random, erratic.

  Top watched me and then went through the process himself, calculating the amount and distribution of blood. Then he looked down at the broken bodies.

  “This is some voodoo shit right here.”

  “Talk to me.”

  He kept his voice low. “Those patterns only make sense if someone shook blood off these boys. Like whipping water off a towel. Or threw these boys around. But . . . that’s wrong, ain’t it?”

  I didn’t want to answer. “Top . . . look at the pools of blood under the bodies. Corpses don’t bleed unless there�
�s a wound under the body, in which case gravity will pull the blood down to the lowest point and then out through a wound. Not all of the blood, just whatever’s in that part of the body. You with me?”

  He was right with me. “I think someone messed with these boys after they were dead.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Tore ’em up, threw ’em around.”

  “Wait—what are you saying?” asked Bunny, who had come up behind us.

  Top shook his head. “I don’t know . . . this looks like rage. Someone went apeshit here. Whoever did it was a strong motherfucker. I couldn’t do it. I doubt Farmboy here could.”

  Bunny squatted down and picked up several shell casings. “Well, well, well . . . check this out.”

  He showed us a steel-cased 7.62 × 39mm FMJ shell casing.

  Top looked at it and then at me. “That’s a Russian short, Cap’n. Same thing we saw in Wilmington.”

  Bunny turned to look at the bodies and then back to the casing. “Now, how the hell’s this stuff connected to Wilmington? And how the hell are the Russians involved?”

  I was just reaching for my commlink when a bing-bing in my ear signaled a call from DMS command. It was Grace.

  “This is a secure line, Joe. I have a situational update.”

  “So do I, but let’s make it fast. We’re in the woods with the bears.”

  “We’ve ID’d two of the four Russians who ambushed Echo Team in Wilmington. They’re ex-Spetsnaz.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll see your dead Spetsnaz and raise you a full hit team.” I told her about the shell casing and the dead guards. I described the blood spatter and the postmortem mutilations.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “What the hell are we into here, Grace?”

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  “Is there any whiff of official Russian involvement? Could this be something political?” Spetsnaz was a catchall label for Russian Special Forces and included operatives of the Federal Security Service, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and units controlled by the GRU—their military intelligence service. After the USSR crumbled and the Russian economy collapsed, a lot of these soldiers were either discharged or they went AWOL. The Russia Mafia employed a lot of them worldwide, but they’ve also been recruited by private security companies for dirty work everywhere mercs were useful. Which is a lot of places in these times.

  “I don’t think so, and in our current position we can’t call the State Department and ask. Mr. Church thinks the team in Wilmington were mercenaries. These may be part of one large team . . . but we have no idea who they’d be working for,” she said. “Any sign of Hack or Jigsaw?”

  “No, but we’re still topside. We’re heading down now. We could use some backup.”

  “I’ve none to give. We’re locked up tighter than a nun’s chastity.” She paused, then said, “Joe, if you wanted to abort the mission I’d back you.”

  I did, but I wasn’t going to. She probably knew that.

  “Jigsaw,” was all I had to say.

  “Look, Joe . . . at the moment I care bugger all about protocol. If you run into anyone down there who isn’t DMS . . .” She let the rest hang.

  “Roger that, Major.” I almost called her “Major Babe” but luckily my presence of mind hadn’t totally fled.

  I clicked off and told the others about the Spetsnaz connection. I saw the information register, but it didn’t take the heart out of either of them. Even so, Bunny looked rattled by the condition of the corpses. His eyes kept straying to them and then darting away, then straying back. I knew what was going through his head. He understood killing, but the rest . . . that wasn’t soldiering. It had a primitive viciousness about it that was inhuman.

  “Cap’n,” said Top from across the room. “Looks like the power’s still on in here. The elevator lights are green.”

  “Phones?”

  He pulled one off the wall, shook his head.

  “We’re going to be out of communication real fast,” said Bunny. “Without a hard line we’d be better off shouting.”

  I tapped my commlink for a patch to Brick, filled him in, and told him to establish a command link with Major Courtland.

  “If the elevator’s working I can come in—,” he started to say, but I cut him off.

  “Truly appreciated, Gunny, but we need to move fast. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “And make sure no one else comes in here who doesn’t belong to the club.”

  “I guarantee it.”

  We took one elevator, but we sent all six of them down at the same time. We stopped two of them—ours and one other—at the next to last level, and as soon as the doors opened and we cleared the area around us we bent low and listened to the sounds coming up from the elevator shafts. We heard the other cars stop, heard the doors open.

  The limestone caverns were huge and dark and smelled of mold and bad dreams. There were long rows of fluorescent fixtures overhead, but the power to the lights was off. The elevators must have been on a different circuit or had their own power supply. It made sense that the intruders would leave the elevators on—it was a mile-long climb back into the sunlight if they had to take the stairs.

  We crouched and waited, using night vision to look for movement, but there was nothing. No ambush gunfire. No explosives.

  It didn’t mean that there weren’t Russian shooters lying in wait—it just meant that they weren’t shooting randomly at anything that moved. That could be good or bad. I pointed to the stairwell door, and after checking it for trip wires we entered the stairwell and looked down.

  All of the battery-operated emergency lights had been smashed, and the stairwell was a bottomless black hole.

  The night-vision devices used by the DMS are about six cuts above anything on the commerical market and a generation newer than most special ops teams had. A lot of the standard NVDs used passive systems that amplified existing environmental ambient lighting; ours had an option for an active system that emmitted an infrared light source to provide sufficient illumination in situations of zero ambient light. The downside was that the infrared from an active system could be spotted by someone else wearing night vision. It’s a risk that also had rewards if the other guys weren’t using something as sophisticated, and that wasn’t likely. The only other option was flashlights, and that screwed with your natural night vision and was a sniper’s paradise. The other useful feature of our NVDs was the new panoramic lens that gave us a ninety-five-degree field of clear vision and a thermal-imaging component. If there was something alive down here, we’d see it in total darkness and we’d see it better than a hunting owl. With night vision everything is a ghostly green, but we were all comfortable with it and we all automatically made the mental shifts necessary to function with top-level efficiency.

  Even so, when I looked down the stairwell all I saw were flights of stairs at right angles that descended beyond the effective range of the NVP optics.

  We went down slow and careful, expecting traps.

  We found the first trip wire thirty-seven steps down. In my goggles it was a slender spider’s web of glowing green. Whoever placed it was smart, setting it close into the back of the riser so that it wouldn’t trigger as someone stepped down on the ball of his foot but would catch the fall or rise of the heel. Smart.

  I showed it to Bunny, who nodded his appreciation, but Top shook his head dismissively. He was more seasoned than Bunny. The trap was smart, but it was too soon to be smart. The best way would have been to rig an obvious trip wire and then the more subtle one. Set and then exploit the expectations of the person you’re trying to trap.

  We moved forward slowly and found one more trip wire. Same as before. Like the first, it was attached to a Claymore and set back near the riser. Bunny disabled them both. If backup came, we’d like them to arrive in one piece.

  A few times we encountered something smeared on the banister, but with the night vision
it looked like oil. It smelled of copper, though. Blood.

  “Maybe a guard clipped one of those Russian boys,” Top suggested in a whisper, but I didn’t think so. The smears were on the outside of the railings that surrounded a central drop all the way to the floor. You might get smears like that if something was thrown down the shaft and hit rails on the way down.

  At the bottom of the stairwell we solved that mystery. A man in unmarked black BDUs lay twisted into a rag-doll heap at the bottom of the stairwell. It was clear he had been thrown over the rails and had struck several times on the way down to the concrete floor. His body was torn to pieces. I looked up through the vacant hole around which the stairwell curled for over a mile. It was a long, long fall. I wondered if the man had been alive during any of that horrible plummet.

  Top knelt by the man. He checked first for booby traps, and when he found none he went through the man’s pockets. No ID, no personal effects. All he had on him were gun belts and equipment bags. Some hand grenades and lots of spare magazines. The ammunition was 7.62x39mm FMJ. Russian.

  Top weighed a magazine thoughtfully in one hand and looked up at me. “Jigsaw?” he suggested.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but in truth I didn’t like the feel of this.

  Bunny was by the door to J-level, checking it for traps. “We’re clear here,” he reported.

  I pulled up the floor plan on my PDA and we studied it. Right outside the stairwell door was a wide corridor with elevators on one side and the first of the storage units on the other. The schematic couldn’t show us anything more than a blueprint, so we had no way of knowing what kind of actual cover might be out there.

  “Scope,” I said, and Bunny fished a fiber-optic scope from his pack and fed it under the door. The scope fed images to a palm-sized screen that folded down from his chest pack. He had it set for night vision, but that couldn’t show thermals. Bunny turned the scope in all directions. We saw a row of electric golf carts and stacks of file cartons. Thousands of them standing in rows that trailed off far beyond the visible range of the optics. Nothing moved.