The corridor beyond, as far as he could tell, headed out. But he didn’t look around because there were guards at the far end. There was a double set of doors, obviously in frequent use from the dirt, almost across from the locker room. He stepped into them and looked around. Ahah. Even better. The room was filled with chemical suits and respirators. He quickly shucked his clothes and pulled on a chemical suit and mask, then picked the wrench back up and stepped through the far door.
He had never been in a chemical plant but this one looked pretty much as he’d envisioned. There was lots of piping on the ceiling and big tanks. There were some people crawling on the tanks and he kept an eye on them as he worked his way along one wall. Suddenly, he heard English and stopped to check a dial.
“Can you people not understand the words ‘quality control’?” a man shouted in a thick eastern European accent. Mike ducked his head around the tank he was using for cover and saw his friend from before waving his arms at two other figures in suits. “The temperature has to be kept to precisely one hundred and fifteen degrees Celsius! Not one hundred. Not one fifty! One hundred and fifteen! The entire batch is ruined! Now we have only the original test batch to show! Am I to explain this to your president? He is depending on this to stop the Americans and you have put us back by six months.”
Interesting, but not really getting him anywhere. Mike kept moving along the wall, trying to look like a worker who was trying not to work, and headed for the back of the facility. He’d noticed that most of the markings were in French, those wonderful people. Where the Germans just built the bunkers, the French built the chemical plants. And here they were, both of the finest lights of Europe, perfectly represented. The point, though, was that he could quite often decipher what was in the tanks. And when he came to one that was marked, quite clearly, H2SO4, he knew he’d hit pay dirt.
A pipe ran out of the bottom of the very large tank to a pump, then went vertical across the high room. Mike followed the pipe, keeping behind tanks, until he found where it started to split up. He went around to the rear of the room and cautiously removed his chemical suit, hoping like hell that whatever mix they made in this place wasn’t filling the air, then pulled out a bunch of the Semtek and some detonators. There was a phone conveniently situated near where the pipes branched and, after putting his suit back on, he spent a short time partially disassembling it, then finding some wire in a maintenance area. From time to time he’d look at a gauge or wave his wrench at a pipe, and twice people passed him but paid little or no attention to what he was doing. Finally, he found a ladder and climbed up to the branching, trailing wire behind him. He rigged the Semtek, most of this bunch, at the branch, then ran the wires from the detonator down behind some pipes to the phone. He also ran a wire across to the tank and fitted just about the last of the Semtek behind it.
When all the material was in place he carefully attached the last wire, wincing as he always did. But there was no immediate explosion. Now, as long as the phone didn’t ring, the material wouldn’t detonate. And he definitely wanted to be out of the room before it did.
Demo in place, he casually strolled towards the entrance, wrench in hand. As he was disrobing, the foreigner came into the room, carrying a sample case. He got undressed — his clothing clearly wasn’t in the room — and more or less followed Mike into the locker room, muttering in what Mike took to be Russian.
The doctor went to one of the lockers, setting the sample case on the bench, and took out his clothes. As he was preparing to put his pants on, Mike swung the wrench into the back of his head.
It was a spur of the moment decision but one that Mike didn’t regret. Win or lose, he’d taken the primary intelligence out of the WMD effort. And the doctor clearly had more access than a worker. He might even be able to find the girls. Or be told where they were.
Mike stripped out of his clothes and donned the doctor’s, stuffing the body in the locker. Then he looked in the sample case. There were two things that looked like smoke grenades. One was labeled “Sarin” and the other “VX.” There was a larger canister labeled “Sarin Area Weapon” and a can of what looked like wasp spray labeled “Mustard.” Mike put that together with “test batch” and realized that he was, probably, holding live agents in his hands. That caused him to put the material back in the sample case and close it rapidly.
He picked up the doctor’s glasses and looked in the mirror, trying for the proper expression of distracted and pissed off. The glasses made things a bit fuzzy but he could see well enough and he was pretty sure he’d gotten it right. The Herr Mad Scientist also had a pair of rubber gloves. Those went in the sample case. The last thing he did was pick up the belt with the gas mask and put it on.
He paused in thought, then shrugged, opening up the sample case and lifting out the rack with the samples in it. He still had about a kilo of Semtek left and he molded it into the bottom of the case. The nice thing about plastique was that it looked like plastic. Only a close examination would reveal it. He slid the detonators into his shoes, wincing. They shouldn’t go off. He’d have been fine if they were NONEL; you couldn’t get NONEL to go off without electrical current, period. But he wasn’t positive with Skodas.
With that done, he hid the MP-5 and walked out of the locker room, practically running into a man in one of the purple camouflage uniforms.
“Doctor Chayanov?” the man said in passable English.
“Da?”
“You are late,” the officer replied, grabbing his elbow. “Are those the samples?”
“Da,” Mike answered in his best Russian accent. “Is terrible quality control. All of your people are shit, just shit.”
“Well, you probably need to try not to say that to the president or the Great One,” the officer replied tightly. “Be very polite.”
“Da, I am polite,” Mike replied as they hurried down the corridor. At the far end there was a door on the right guarded by two of the purple soldiers. That led to another corridor, with more soldiers, and the sound of the pumps from the facility on the right-hand wall. Halfway down the corridor was a single-person door on the left. The only door along either wall. This led to another corridor. That one dead-ended in a wall. There were two doors halfway down, with two guards in front of either door. If Mike wasn’t completely turned around, and he had pretty good spatial referencing ability, the door on the left led to his hidey hole. They took the door on the right. The corridor was practically identical to the hidey-hole corridor, which added to the likelihood. The exception was that there was an exit at the far end and two guards were in front of one of the doors. If the design matched the other side, it was the “storage” room. He was taken to this room and stopped.
“You must be searched,” the officer said. One of the guards handed his weapon to the other and then gave Mike a brief pat down, ignoring Mike’s shoes. That was why the detonators were there; shoes and feet were untouchable to an Islamic. The guard looked at the locking blade knife and then gave it back. Then he gestured to the sample case.