And there was still more equipment, some of it suppressive, referred to as public order weapons by law enforcement personnel with a penchant for cooking up new euphemisms every fifteen seconds.
Call them what you wished, their fundamental purpose was to incapacitate their targets without causing serious injury.
Ricci’s absolute intent, second only to bagging the Wildcat, was that no harm come to the innocent civilian workers in the building. This was foremost out of bounds. But he was also determined to avoid using deadly force on any of Obeng’s rotten cops, and for that matter against Obeng himself, all of whom held nominal claim to being upstanding members of the population. Even the militiamen would not be permanently damaged, if possible, though Ricci was giving his ops some leeway in dealing with them, as it was unlikely their country’s heads of state, eager to improve relations with America, would raise a commotion over the loss of a few known malcontents whose looting and violent behavior threatened their own government’s stability, and who they were consequently better off living without.
Cramped from kneeling, Ricci led the way through the narrow drainage duct for another ten minutes. Then
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his torch disclosed its circular mouth a few yards up
ahead. He moved forward and saw that it opened out
some three or four feet above the bottom of a cement;
walled tunnel with room enough for him and the others
to stand upright.
He raised a clenched fist to signal a pause, then glanced over his shoulder at Grillo. v “Drop’s maybe a yard,” Ricci told him in a hushed | voice. “Everybody be careful. Looks to me like the tun- Sffnel’s ankle deep in water. Not much of a flow, but it’s | bound to be slippery.”
Grillo nodded and passed the word to Lou Rosander, the man behind him, who in turn relayed it to the next ^in line.
Ricci inched over to the opening and sprang down. He landed with a splash. A layer of slime coated the floor under the stagnant water, but he had a good sense of balance and was aided by the corrugated rubber soles of his boots.
^ The rest of the team hopped from the pipe one at a I toe, all of them joining him in short order. They im- pinediately formed up in single file. .”:, Ricci looked around. The passage was almost cham- ; berlike measured against the constricted tube from which he’d jumped. Other tunnels of nearly equal width and height branched off from it in various directions. They had reached a major juncture of the system. Ricci did not need to consult his underground street tplan to know which of the diverging passages to take. ‘ He had committed the system layout to memory before |;’proceeding with his mission, just as he’d memorized the |tocation of the drainage pipe’s outflow opening from the
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high-res GIS data provided by Sword’s satellite mapping unit.
With another crisp hand signal, Ricci turned toward the dark hole of the tunnel entrance to his immediate left and stepped into it, his feet squishing in the muck.
His men followed without hesitation.
“Okay,” Rosander whispered. “I see a single attendant. I don’t think he’s one of Obeng’s goons. Or that he’s gonna be a problem.”
“He in a booth?” Ricci asked.
Rosander kept peering through a thin fiber-optic periscope that he’d coiled upward through the metal drain cover above him. With maybe four feet of clearance between the floor of the sunken garage and the bottom of the sluice in which they were hunched, a six-year-old would have had difficulty standing erect, let alone the ten grown men of Ricci’s team.
“No,” he said. “The guy’s nodding off in a chair against the wall.”
Ricci nodded.
“There anybody else around we have to worry about?” he said.
“Give me a sec.”
Rosander rotated the fiberscope between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, his other hand making adjustments to the eyepiece barrel to focus its color video image.
“Not a soul,” he said.
“Number of vehicles?”
“I’d say about a dozen, including the rattletrap that brought the Wildcat.”
Ricci nodded again.
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He reached into a gear pouch for a breaching charge, peeled the plastic strip from its adhesive backing, and pressed the thin patch of C2 explosive-a compound as ^powerful as C4, but more stable-against the ceiling surface until it was firmly secured. Then he took the “lip= stick” detonator caps out of a separate pouch and inserted them. Before blowing their mouse hole into the sunken l.garage, his team would back through the runoff duct to |;keep a safe distance from the blast and falling masonry.
After a moment, Ricci turned to Simmons and handed ‘him the vapor detector.
;, “I’ll go in first, take down the attendant,” he whisipered. “Stay close, and don’t forget the regs.” “Right.”
Ricci got his radio out of its case on his belt. While the explosion he was setting off would be small and contained, any explosion was by definition noisy, and therefore would be heard by those in the building unless masked.
! Ricci had arranged for something even noisier to do I just that. H?”
jfjk few blocks east on the crosstown avenue, two men in ^ihe white uniforms of emergency medical responders had been waiting patiently in the cab of a double-parked ambulance.
After receiving Ricci’s cue, the driver cut the radio r;and turned to his partner. I “We’re on,” he said.
They raced into traffic toward Gang Central, the ambulance’s light bars flashing, its siren cranked to peak /Volume and howling like a thousand tortured wolves.
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Seated across a desk from Obeng in the warlord’s second-floor office, Le Chaut Sauvage heard the ululant wail of the rapidly approaching medical vehicle and tilted his head toward the window.
“Is that one of yours?” he asked, his voice raised over the deafening clamor.
Obeng shook his head no.
“An ambulance,” he said.
The Wildcat gave him a questioning look.
“You’re certain?”
“Yes,” Obeng assured him. He was almost shouting to be heard. “Even here people get sick.”
As he leaped up through the small crater in the garage floor, Ricci didn’t know whether it was the detonating C2 or the eardrum-piercing shrillness of the ambulance siren that shocked the attendant from his dozy position on the chair.
Not that it made a jot of difference to him.
The attendant shot to his feet now, his chair crashing onto its back, his features agape at the sight of men in visored helmets and tactical camo outfits pouring out of a rubbled, dust- and smoke-spewing hole that hadn’t existed a split second before.
Ricci swiftly bound over to him and pressed the squirter of the dimethyl sulfoxide cannister clenched in his gloved fist.
The attendant raised his hands over his face on reflex, but the stream of odorless, colorless DMSO …
A chemical with myriad properties that was originally an incidental by-product of the wood pulping process, used as a commercial solvent for fifty years, a medical
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organ and tissue preservative for about forty years, and j a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory with limited PDA | approval for slightly less than thirty years …
A chemical that in the past decade or so had attracted |”:the close attention of nonlethal weapons researchers be:cause of its instant penetration of human skin and its capacity to completely sedate a person on contact and ^without side effects if administered in sufficient concen- \ tration …
The DMSO running down over the attendant’s out- thrust palms and fingers made him crumple like one of ythe foam training dummies Ricci sometimes used in |^and-to-hand combat practice.
Ricci caught the attendant in his arms to ease his fall, ‘ ‘towering him gently onto the floor. Then he quickly rose and scanned the garage for ways to reach the building’s aboveground levels.
There was a single elevator about ten yards to the right. Not a chance his men were going to box them- ffelves into that death trap.
His gaze found the door leading to the stairwell to his ffar left, on the opposite side of the garage. : He turned toward the rest of the men, now standing back-to-back in a loose circle, their individual weapons pointed outward, covering all points of the garage while l| they peripherally watched for his gestured command.
Ricci was about to wave them toward the stairs when :’he heard the distinct sound of the elevator kicking in. |’.;’He glanced in its direction, his eyes fixing on the indi|cator lights over its door.
It was coming down the shaft from the ground floor. Coming down fast.
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Grille had likewise turned to face the elevator, his eyes narrowed behind his helmet visor.
He watched its door slide open seconds after its hoisting motor activated, appraised its passengers at a glance.