by David Archer
Sarah swallowed hard. “Okay,” she said. “And how do we get her out?”
“That’s going to be the tricky part,” Jefferson said. “We considered trying to bribe the guards, but that runs the risk of discovery that could make the mission even more difficult. The most likely chance of success is going to come down to a stealth incursion. Noah, Neil and Marco are going to have to break into the prison, locate you and the target, and then get you both out.”
“Earth to Jefferson,” Neil said. “You’re including me in this insanity? You do remember that I’m the clumsy one, right?”
Jefferson grinned at him. “Of course,” he said. “But don’t worry, Neil, we’ve got you covered. Ms. Ingersoll was arrested almost two months ago, so we’ve had some time to work on the problem. We’ve had a detailed mockup of the prison constructed out in the training areas, and filled it with more than a hundred actors who have been briefed on how the staff and prisoners would act. It’s accurate even down to the colors of the walls, so you’ll be able to practice every move dozens of times before you actually get on the plane to Thailand. You’ve got a week; I’m sure you can get it down to a science in that time, can’t you?”
Neil rolled his eyes and sank into his seat. Noah leaned forward slightly.
“You said a stealth incursion,” he said. “What about weapons?”
“Special and silent,” Jefferson replied. “While there aren’t many escapes from the Bangkok Hilton, it has happened in the past. Usually, it involves help from someone on the inside, but this one is going to be different. You’ll have some special weapons for this mission, because you’ve got to make every effort not to leave any corpses behind you, this time. Live guards who were stunned or don’t know what happened will probably be punished for dereliction of duty, but dead guards would be grounds for a massive investigation. The last thing we need is for anyone to associate the escape of a pair of American girls with potential agencies of the US government.”
“And that’s exactly what they would think,” Allison added. “The diplomatic nightmare that would ensue would make the fallout over Benghazi look like a picnic. I’m not telling you not to take whatever steps are necessary to accomplish the mission, Noah, I’m just asking you to be very, very careful. I told R&D to work up some nonlethal weapons for you. Hopefully, that will avoid leaving any bodies in your wake.”
“Okay,” Noah said. “Mr. Jefferson, you said there is a mockup of the prison for us to practice in?”
“Yep, a duplicate of the women’s section. The entire prison is pretty large, but the women are housed in one small part of it. That section is up against what amounts to the eastern walls of the prison, so we made a mockup of about a fifth of the whole structure. It’s laid out exactly like the real thing, so you’ll be able to get familiar with every twist and turn you might have to make when you go in.”
“Now,” Allison interrupted, “the trickiest part will be after you get them out. You have to stage the escape in such a way that it leaves a trail, and some of our operatives in Bangkok will provide you with a corpse that has been modified to look a lot like Ms. Ingersoll, even down to the fingerprints. The body is of a young woman who has been declared brain-dead after a drug overdose but is currently being kept alive on the physical level. A portable life support unit will keep it breathing until it’s time for Ms. Ingersoll to become officially dead, and then, Noah, you will fire the shot that will become her official cause of death. Once they have the body, the Thai authorities will be more than happy to close the case on her. Sarah, of course, will simply disappear with you. She’ll become one of the legends of people who escaped the Bangkok Hilton.”
“That’s a relief,” Sarah said. “For a minute there, I was afraid I was going to have to get caught with the corpse in order to make it all convincing.”
“Oh, no,” Allison said with a grin. “You’re not getting away that easily, young lady. We still need you.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Sarah said, smiling.
Allison turned to Noah. “Noah, despite your lack of normal emotions, I know that you’ve gone to extreme lengths to rescue Sarah in the past. I have to ask this question, even though I don’t want to. Is this situation we are putting her in going to create a problem?”
“No, Ma’am,” Noah said without hesitation. “I understand the necessity, and rescuing her seems to be part of my regular job description, anyway. The mission comes first.”
“Hey!” Sarah said, but she was grinning.
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Neil said. “We all know good and well that Noah won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
Marco chuckled. “Heck, yeah, even I can tell that.”
Allison smiled, but her eyes were boring into Noah. “It is necessary, and there isn’t another team I could trust with this mission. I’m counting on you, Camelot.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Noah said. “How soon can we begin training?”
“Today. I want you to make a stop out to see Wally, then report to the training center. The gate will know where to send you, and someone will be there to give you a tour. Start working up your mission plans as soon as possible, Noah, because DARPA wants this girl back within the next three weeks. That gives you one week training, one week to get into position and one to pull it all off. If anyone can do it, I know that Team Camelot can.”
The team rose, and Neil grabbed a couple of extra doughnuts on his way out of the briefing room. They had ridden to the briefing in his Hummer, so they climbed back into it in the parking garage and headed out to see Wally at the R&D section.
THREE
Wally Lawson missed out on becoming a mad scientist only because he just didn’t have enough evil in his heart. Had that not been the case, he might well have been the type of genius who could invent orbital death rays and use them to blackmail every nation on the earth to submit to his domination.
Still, Wally’s need to devise creative methods of dealing death and destruction seemed to be inherent in him, and so he had submitted patent applications for several items that would have made James Bond sit up and take notice, all before the age of seventeen. Someone in the patent office had enough intelligence to realize just what the devices were capable of, and referred them to the FBI, who then passed them on to the CIA. A week later, Wally was paid a visit by three people claiming to represent a major defense contractor. Since he had already graduated high school two years earlier and dropped out of college simply because it was boring, he happily accepted the lucrative income that came with the job they offered him in their research department.
Wally Lawson was a genius. Despite a massive charade, it took him less than three days to figure out who he was really working for. That didn’t bother him, so he was running the entire department by the time he was twenty-two. He’d held that position for more than twelve years.
Allison had learned about Wally while she herself worked for the CIA, so when the president tasked her with creating E & E, she had demanded the right to take him along. He’d been with the agency for three years and seemed to be happier than ever. He had also brought along some of the talent he had been developing for the company, and Allison’s recruiting had brought him several more. The R&D center covered almost 30 acres and employed more than sixty people with degrees ranging from engineering to physics and even quantum mechanics. Many of their creations could do things that would’ve still been thought impossible with publicly known technology, but they remained highly classified.
The security guards, who all knew Noah and the others by sight—even Marco had been there numerous times—nevertheless spent more than a minute carefully examining their identification and confirming their identities with retinal scans. Once they were satisfied they were not dealing with impostors, they opened the inner door and allowed the team to enter.
“Camelot!” Wally shouted as he walked quickly up the hall toward them. He stopped in front of Noah and extended a hand, and the two men shook. “They called ahead an
d told me you were coming. I got a quick briefing on your mission last month, so I’ve had my people working round-the-clock to come up with ways to help you out. Ready to see what they’ve got for you?”
“Yes,” Noah said. “I hope they’re giving us something good. Sarah’s going to be dangerously exposed on this mission, and I don’t want anything to happen to her. She’s been through enough already.”
“Well, yeah,” Wally said. “Don’t you worry, we’ll keep her as safe as we possibly can.” He stopped and looked at Marco, then turned his eyes back to Noah. His normally jovial face turned solemn. “I was really sad to hear about Moose,” he said. “He was one of the best.”
“Yes, but he was also a soldier. We all know the risks of our job, and Moose gave his life to protect Sarah and Neil, and even me. I suspect his only regret would be missing out on the next mission.”
“Amen,” Neil said. “That was Moose.”
Wally nodded, and then the smile spread over his face again. “I see they gave you Marco,” he said. “He’s pretty good, think he can keep up with you guys?”
Noah glanced at Marco. “He’s going to have to. We’re being tossed right into the fray, but I think he knows what he’s doing. We’ll all do the jobs we have to do, and do them the best we can.”
“Okay, then, let’s go see what we’ve got. I put Nancy and Mickey in charge of this project, they’re right down this hall.” He turned and started walking even before he finished. Noah and his team followed along.
They came to a green door and Wally opened it and stepped inside, then held it for them all to enter. A young man who looked younger than Neil glanced up from the computer in front of him.
“Mickey, this is Team Camelot,” Wally said. “Where’s Nancy at?”
“Ladies’ room,” the boy said. “She should be back any minute.” He stood and extended a hand to Noah. “Camelot, right? Heard a lot about you, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
Noah shook hands with him, and then the others did likewise. “Pleasure is mine,” he said. “I understand you’ve been working on some things to help us with our new mission?”
“Yeah,” the boy said, nodding. “Nancy is the actual brains, here. I just do what she tells me, putting all the pieces together.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” said a feminine voice. A blonde woman in her thirties stepped into the room behind them. “I come up with some ideas, but Mickey refines them. We’re a pretty good team, but I doubt either of us could accomplish much on our own. Every project we do is a collaboration.”
“Which is why I trust them with the important stuff,” Wally said. “All I have to do is tell them what the situation is, and then they start bouncing the ideas back and forth. Before you know it, they’ve invented something so new and exciting that we have to keep them completely under wraps. If any of our enemies ever found out just how bright these two are, they’d do whatever it takes to steal them away.”
Nancy burst out laughing. “I hope you’re all aware that Wally tends to exaggerate.”
“Just show them what you’ve got,” Wally said. “I haven’t seen this stuff yet, either, so we can all make up our minds together.”
Nancy nodded at Mickey, and he reached over to pick up a small plastic box off his desk. It was about the size of a ring box, but when he opened it up, they saw what looked like a small plastic rod.
“This is the latest thing in subdermal trackers,” he said. “It works like a contraceptive implant, just under the skin. 433 megahertz, ultrahigh frequency RFID chip inside.” He pointed at three small, round devices that were still on his desk. “These units can read the chip from up to half a mile away, or up to 1500 feet through brick and concrete. If you set them around the area where the women’s prison is located within the compound, they’ll triangulate its position within only a few inches. Each one has a battery that’s good for about two weeks of continuous use. We’ll give you these to practice with during your training, but when it comes down to the real mission you will have fresh units with new batteries.”
He picked up something else from the desk. This time it was a device that looked like a common tablet computer. “This is the monitor that receives the encrypted data from the scanners and translates it into an image it can display on a tactical blueprint of the prison, with every room and section marked. That way, you’ll know exactly where Sarah is at all times.”
Noah nodded his head. “Okay,” he said. “That’ll definitely help when it’s time to get her out.”
“Exactly,” Nancy said. “But that isn’t all we’ve got for you.” She nodded to Mickey again.
“The rest isn’t quite as high-tech as that,” the young man said, “but it should come in handy.” He held out another small box, this one containing three devices that looked like small plastic cones. “These little gadgets, when you place them against a wall, can detect movement on the other side. They’re fairly simple, because all they do is pick up vibrations transmitted through the wall. That could be vibrations from someone speaking, or somebody walking along, just about anything. Even the sound of someone breathing will create tiny vibrations in the walls that can be detected. They are ultrasensitive, but only in the direction they’re focused. You can be talking while you’re holding it, and it won’t even notice.”
“You can use these to make sure a room is empty before you enter it,” Nancy added. “You just hold the big end against a wall or door, and watch the needle on the smaller end. If it moves at all, there is something on the other side that’s causing vibrations. You can get an idea of the type of vibration, as well, by watching the needle. People walking will be rhythmic, people talking will be erratic and fluctuate. Breathing will be rhythmic, but soft.”
Mickey nodded. “You’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly,” he said, then stepped around his desk to a workbench and picked up what looked like a toy submachine gun. “Now, this little baby will come in handy when you go in, and especially if you encounter resistance. It fires a gel capsule filled with a gas at surprisingly high pressure. The gas is derived from scopolamine, and a single whiff of it is enough to render someone essentially motionless for several minutes. It doesn’t knock them out, but it inhibits thought and intention. Basically, anybody who gets a sniff of it suddenly can’t remember what they were doing or think of anything else to do, so they just stop wherever they’re at and do nothing until it wears off. A side effect is that they usually won’t remember anything from the last few minutes before it hit them until the point where they realize they’ve been out of it, so they won’t even be aware they’ve been affected. We’ll also give you some little sticks of chewing gum that act as an antidote, so it won’t affect you even if you walk through a cloud of it.”
“Chewing gum?” Neil asked.
“Yes,” Mickey said. “The antidote is embedded in it, and it is absorbed rapidly into the bloodstream through the tissues under your tongue. We’re talking like within one or two seconds, that fast.”
“Okay,” Noah said. “And how long does the effect last, once we shoot somebody with these?”
“The immobility will last seven to nine minutes, so you’ll have to move pretty quickly once you use it. We’ve got three of these ready for you, and they each hold about 120 shots.”
Neil grinned. “So, we just shoot somebody in the face with it?”
Mickey chuckled at him. “You don’t even have to hit them. The gas will spread out quite a ways, so if you hit the wall anywhere near them, they’re going to get a sniff. The guns are set for three round bursts, and even one burst can stop a small group of people.”
“How accurate are they?” Noah asked. “Do you have any dummy rounds we can practice with?”
“Actually, yes,” Mickey said. “I figured you’d want to get the hang of them, so we made up a thousand rounds with just air inside. The gel capsules burst on impact with anything, because the pressure inside is just barely low enough to keep them from bursting on their own.”
Noah nodded. “Okay, so we can keep track of where Sarah is at inside the prison all the time, we can scan a room for occupants before we enter it and we can incapacitate anyone who gets in the way. What about a way for her to let us know when she’s made contact with her target?”
Nancy smiled and took a step closer to Noah. “Well, that presented a bit of a problem, because there’s no way she can take any sort of communication device in with her. We thought about adding a transmitter to the implant, but anything that emits an active radio signal is likely to be detected and might even expose her. I was forced to resort to desperate measures, so I just told Mickey there was no possible way we could accomplish it.”
Wally let out a loud guffaw. “Telling Mickey something can’t be done is a surefire way to get it accomplished. Right, Nancy?”
She nodded, still smiling. “Exactly,” she said. “Mickey came up with the idea of yet another little implant, one that will emit a signal just once. The same receivers that triangulate the tracker will receive that signal, letting you know that she’s ready for extraction.”
Sarah spoke for the first time. “You guys sure get off on shoving stuff into my body,” she said. “Are you certain none of this will hurt me?”
“Not a bit,” Nancy said. “We’ve got some anesthetic gel that will keep you from even feeling it when we implant them. The tracker is going into your right thigh, and the extraction signal…”
“I call it the panic button,” Mickey put in.
“Okay, the panic button will be inserted just under the skin outside your left rib cage. You’ll be able to feel it with your fingers, and all you have to do to set it off is press it until it snaps. You’ll be able to tell when you got it done, and your team will get the signal to come snatch you out.”
Sarah gave her a sour grin. “Okay, so when do you stick me with this stuff?”
“Oh, not until you’re ready to go. We’ve got some made up that won’t be actually implanted for you to use during your training.” She nodded at Mickey, who picked up a larger plastic box and passed it to Sarah. “There are three panic buttons and one tracker in there. They have tape on them, just stick them to yourself. Other than that, they work just like the real one. Camelot, you’ll use the scanners and monitor during training, so that you get the hang of them.”
