The rest of the team hopped from the pipe one at a time, all of them joining him in short order. They immediately formed up in single file.
Ricci looked around. The passage was almost chamberlike 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 plan 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 location of the drainage pipe’s outflow opening from the 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.
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 “lipstick” detonator caps out of a separate pouch and inserted them. Before blowing their mouse hole into the sunken 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 whispered. “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 just that.
A few blocks east on the crosstown avenue, two men in the 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 and turned to his partner.
“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.
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 organ and tissue preservative for about forty years, and a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory with limited FDA 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 because 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 concentration…
The DMSO running down over the attendant’s outthrust palms and fingers made him crumple like one of the foam training dummies Ricci sometimes used in hand-to-hand combat practice.
Ricci caught the attendant in his arms to ease his fall, lowering 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 themselves into that death trap.
His gaze found the door leading to the stairwell to his far 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 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 indicator lights over its door.
It was coming down the shaft from the ground floor.
Coming down fast.
Grillo 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.
Don’t forget the regs, he thought, needing no real incentive. The man and woman inside were a couple of honest Injuns if there’d ever been any, probably customers leaving one of the quasi-legit businesses right upstairs.
They took maybe a step out of the car and then froze at the scene that met their eyes, both simultaneously noticing the assault team, the unconscious garage attendant, and the debris-strewn hole in the floor.
Grillo didn’t give them a chance to recover from their initial confusion.
He whipped his hand down to his belt, unholstered his stingball pistol, and pulled the trigger twice.
The mini-flash bangs it discharged hit the floor directly in front of their feet, the fragile rounds shattering like eggshells against the hard cement to produce startlingly loud reports and blindingly bright bursts of light.
The couple staggered dazedly, the woman covering her eyes with both hands, the man tripping backward to sprawl with the upper part of his body inside the elevator and his legs stretched out. Its door tried to close, struck his hip with its foam rubber safety edging, automatically retracted, tried to close again, hit him again, the whole sequence repeating itself over and over as he writhed there on the floor of the garage.