I lifted my mic and transmitted, “No rush, guys, but any chance you came across signs of an unspecified cargo inside the office building?”
“Yeah,” Worthy whispered over the speaker box, “a shitload of heroin. Twelve crates’ worth, each four-foot cubes and all but one sealed and probably full to the brink. I examined one kilo and pulled a sample before we had to bail. Have pictures of everything.”
Before I could respond, Ian reached for his mic and said, “What color was the powder?”
“Very light brown, kind of beige.”
Ian looked at me and shook his head. “High purity, probably refined in Southwest Asia.”
“So?” I shrugged. The source of a narcotics load seemed the least of our concerns, but Ian’s eyes darted across the CCTV and wireless camera feeds as he replied, speaking quickly.
“So it takes ten tons of opium to produce one ton of heroin. You’re talking about over 2,000 kilos of almost pure product from a major laboratory. By the time it gets diluted with additives at the destination, purity decreases to anywhere between ten and sixty percent. That means the hundred million or so of heroin they just found amounts to a street value in the hundreds of millions.”
Ian’s ability to calculate those estimates in his head nearly took my breath away, but not so much as the final figure he mentioned. It was so staggering in scope that I had trouble contextualizing it into some commercial equivalent in terms of legal products, and before I could, Ian spoke again.
“The question is, what is Gradsek getting in return?”
That sent me into a whirlwind of guesswork. If the hostage timeline was as tight as Duchess seemed to think, then we probably wouldn’t get a second chance at infiltrating the Gradsek port complex.
And even if we did, I thought, what were the risks? We’d be repeating the same cycle 24 hours from now at best, subject to the same or worse threats of being detected, particularly considering that Cancer hadn’t had time to re-pick the office building locks. Once someone noticed that, they could easily assume the worst.
On the other hand, we more or less had what we came for: evidence of a Gradsek conspiracy of some kind, albeit none relating to the three missing hostages. Still, we now owned photographs and a heroin sample, both irrefutable in the CIA’s eyes. A single question loomed large over my psyche: should I pull my men out now, or commit them to additional risk in the hopes of further illuminating the intelligence picture?
The mission creep had gotten out of hand in Nigeria. Since arriving, our attempted interdiction of Usman’s convoy had been the only excursion that was remotely within our wheelhouse, and at this point we were routinely endangering our lives on the scantest chance of acquiring new information. Our team existed to fulfill a very specific mandate, and part of that was to live as ghosts with the knowledge that our own country would not save us if we got caught. My initial enthusiasm in pursuing the Lagos lead was fading to a very real sense that Duchess was using us as pawns to trade political favors at Agency headquarters, putting us under immense risk for increasingly nebulous goals.
Ultimately, however, it wasn’t any particulars of the mission or even the hostages that drove my decision.
Instead, I thought of my wife’s scar from the July 4th attack, paired with the horrors my daughter had witnessed. We had exactly one lead from that day, pursued from America to China with a single name emerging from that vast ether: Erik Weisz, now trailed via money flow to West Africa. Now, the only thing standing between following the thread or losing it altogether was my team.
Still, the decision wasn’t easy. I wasn’t on the ground inside the Gradsek facility; my men were. Any decision I made short of an immediate exfil would further endanger their lives.
Keying my radio mic, I transmitted, “Entry team, halt movement. There’s one more location I need you to scout.”
I felt Ian’s eyes upon me during the long pause before Cancer replied gravely, “What is it?”
Consulting the laminated objective graphic, I replied, “Building 8, a warehouse north of the Gradsek office. Two loads of outbound cargo are set to ship in exchange for most of the heroin you just found, cargo codes Y210 and L13. I need to know what they are.”
The I was the imperative part of that last sentence, I thought, knowing my motivations were more personal than professional at present.
Then I continued, “Send your current location, and stand by for guidance.”
Cancer replied, “We’re halfway down Route White, have recovered all cameras up to this point.”
Ian, also scanning the objective imagery, transmitted, “Head northbound once you get to Route Black. That will end at a paved road, Route Green on our reference graphic, which you’ll need to follow about fifty meters east before hitting Building 8 on the north edge of the harbor. Due to CCTV angles and probable alarm systems at the warehouse, you’ll need to hold short of Route Green until we receive confirmation that the techs are on top of it.”
“Copy,” Cancer growled. “Moving now.”
The route was the least of our issues—Cancer and his entry team could access the same central reference imagery on their Android devices, and for now I had no choice but to provide our CIA handler an update.
Transmitting over the command frequency, I said, “Raptor Nine One, Suicide Actual. Be advised, entry team has completed their mission uncompromised and undetected. Twelve crates’ worth of heroin found and documented along with a coded trade schedule indicating presence of two unspecified import loads diverted to Building 8 in exchange for the drugs. I’m sending the entry team there for a follow-on exploitation, request alarms in Building 8 be disabled along with all CCTV cameras that have angles of visibility on the path between Route Black and Route Green leading up to the target.”
Duchess responded, “Copy all, stand by for confirmation.”
I set down my mic, then looked at Ian helplessly. “Well, here goes nothing.”
Reilly trailed behind Cancer down the row of containers, both men following Worthy to Building 8.
Emplacing new wireless cameras wasn’t a problem—Reilly had brought three extra camera and router setups, though they were intended as a backup for any technical issues with his primary units. He’d already set up two of the three spares and would need the final one to cover the road leading up to their new target building; but his preparedness with technical equipment was about the only good thing he could say about the matter at hand.