Pipe Dreams (28 page)

CHAPTER 50

P
art of an elite force,
CoCo and the five men who accompanied him had completed many difficult missions, but inching out of the small office and into the dimly lit warehouse, they were all edgy. CoCo didn’t have a good feeling about this one. Beneath the flickering, fluorescent lights, the team was vulnerable to a threat that couldn’t be deterred by the silenced M4 carbine in his arms, the sleek sidearm on his thigh, or the knife strapped to his chest. The defensive formation the team assumed across the concrete floor would not protect them. This mission was a different animal entirely. He had no idea what they faced. Taking a deep breath, he tried to calm his nerves. As team leader, he couldn’t let the men see his fear.

At the end of the first row of empty pallet rack
s, they halted. The point man went low, aiming his rifle as he scouted the terrain. The second man stayed high. When the point man deemed it safe to move, they continued. They needed to get out of the warehouse and into the main part of the building. CoCo presumed blueprints would be stored in a security office or maintenance room. The blueprints would show power, water, and gas lines and reveal the location of a lab.

As he rounded the corner of the giant rack, hairs on his neck stood up and his heart raced. The metal structures had been redesigned as cages, human cages. A thick piece of Plexiglas was attached to the ends of two sets of racks. The racks themselves had been covered with hardware cloth, making it impossible for the occupants to escape. In the first cage, four people slept on thin mats. Open sores covered their skin-and-bone bodies and the air around them smelled like rotting meat.
CoCo stifled a scream and the urge to run. He had no idea what ailed them, but whatever it was, he didn’t want it. It took him a few paces to stop trembling and regain perspective. If these people suffered from something highly contagious, they wouldn’t be in a cage like this. They would be in a sealed, airtight room so they couldn’t expose passersby to their infection. Still, he couldn’t wait to get away from them.

The team quickened its pace. He tried hard not to stare into the Plexiglas prisons as he passed. Each of them were a batch of misery he had only seen paralleled in African refugee camps where lack of food, clean water, and medical care was evident in every starving and forlorn face. The difference between here and there was the noise volume. The warehouse, save for the hum of electricity, was silent. Though some of the captives were awake, their hollow eyes tracked the team without comment.
CoCo surmised they were too sick to care what happened next and, for that, he was grateful. The corridor was a death trap in every way.

When they reached the last, towering pallet rack, they approached the interior wall of the warehouse. A series of closed doors ran along its face. Instinct told him to stay close to the exterior of the building so he chose the last one to his right. Too exposed to hook up the camera, they simply opened the unlocked door and kept their weapons ready.

Flipping on their night-vision, they crept down a long, dark corridor. Each time they came to a door, they opened it, hoping to find something that showed the layout of the building. Most of the rooms were empty. A few were still furnished, but covered in dust. When they came to a T intersection, CoCo took the right hand turn. The hallway ended in front of a large conference room smelling of stale coffee.

The team turned around, passed the intersection, and continued until forced to turn a corner. Pressing themselves flat against the wall, they waited for the point man to signal. When he didn
’t, the sweat under CoCo’s arms grew cold. A door creaked and the sound of voices caused him to hold his breath. A man said goodnight, the door shut, and footsteps echoed on the linoleum floor. They waited several more minutes, but there was no further noise. Finally, they rounded the corner. About thirty feet in front of them, light shone through the cracks of doorframe on their left.

All at once,
CoCo changed his plan. There had only been two voices. The ensuing silence after the footsteps had faded indicated the person in the office was alone. He signaled to his team, using his hands to communicate his intentions. Then the team approached the door. They split, three on each side, and CoCo knocked.

It didn
’t take long before the door opened. A tall man with stooped shoulders stepped into the hallway. As he did, one of CoCo’s men grabbed him from behind and clamped a hand over his mouth. Another stepped in front and placed the point of his rifle on the man’s forehead. Then, in a low and threatening voice, the SEAL said, “Move and you’re dead.”  The man complied, wide-eyed.

CoCo
’s men bound the captive’s wrists, gagged him with tape, and dragged him back to the truck bay. Once the drainage grate was open, they cut the zip ties on his wrists and freed his hands so he could grasp the rope. The point man dropped into the tank, followed by two more members of the team. As soon as they reached the bottom, they aimed their rifles at the opening in the floor. CoCo pointed to the rope and instructed the man to descend. He did as he was told.

When he was down,
CoCo lowered himself. The remaining men waited until he was clear before following. They paused, clinging to their respective ropes, while they pulled the grate back into its original position. The first SEALs were already climbing a collapsible ladder attached to the drainage pipe on the other side. The prisoner ascended next, trailed by the rest of the team. They scuttled through the narrow passage to the larger pipe on the far side of the street. When they arrived, they shoved their captive to his knees and aimed the flashlights attached to their rifles in his face.

“I
’m going to ask you some questions and you are going to answer them to the best of your ability. If you scream, we will kill you. If we think you are lying, we will hurt you. Am I clear?” CoCo said.

The man nodded. He had sandy brown hair, a ruddy complexion, and a pug nose. Like a favorite uncle, he wasn
’t tough or hardened. To his credit, however, he hadn’t wet himself and wasn’t shaking. He appeared only resigned. CoCo gestured to one of his men, who removed the gag from the prisoner’s mouth.

“What
’s your name?” CoCo asked.

“Mac.”

“Mac? Mac what?”

“
Devon Macgregor. I go by Mac.”

“Okay, Devon Macgregor I go by Mac, we
’re looking for something. You’re going to help us find it.” Mac nodded again. Wincing against the bright glare from the flashlights, he licked his lips and pushed himself into a kneeling position.

“You
’re from the mainland, aren’t you?” he asked. His question hung in the musty air like a drop of water on the edge of a faucet. Then it fell. He heaved a sigh and sagged forward. “I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time. I’ll tell you everything I can. I expect you’ll kill me and I wouldn’t blame you, but I’d like to see my family again before I die. If that’s in your power, I beg you for that one small favor. After that, I don’t really care what happens to me.”

The commander signaled to his men. One of them pulled an electric lantern from his pack and turned it on, casting a circle of light on the muddy floor of the pipe. They turned off their flashlights, but kept the muzzles aimed at Mac.

“Okay, Mac, let’s start with who you are and why you’re here,” CoCo said. Swallowing, Mac told them about his abduction from a small college on the outskirts of Boston. He had been completing research for his doctoral thesis on synthetic narcotics. As a child, he had witnessed first hand the effects of drug addiction. A new strain of an old recipe had taken the lives of both his parents when he was six years old.

In college, he had met a woman, fallen in love, and married her. She had majored in criminal forensics and hoped to have a career in law enforcement. Together, they had focused their energy on the rapidly growing use of synthetics. His wife
’s ambitions had been cut short when she was diagnosed with cancer shortly after the birth of their second child. The aggressive leukemia had killed her quickly.

The medical bills were staggering and he was the sole support of his young children. He had accepted a position with an obscure bio-tech firm. The job had paid ridiculously well and the company
’s stated objective was in line with his ethics. So, in spite of instinctive misgivings, he had signed a contract with them to help develop a hybrid synthetic which would provide effective, long term relief to patients without many of the negative side effects of traditional, morphine based sedatives. What he had achieved had been nothing short of spectacular. Unfortunately, the drug was intensely addictive.

Shortly after the company had supposedly killed the project, he was invited to view a new lab in
Edenton, New York. The company had extended a tenuous offer for him to become director of the new facility. He had made the trip, enticed by the salary that would come with the job. That had been a little over six years ago. Since then, he had been held hostage. His prison was the plant. His jailers were the private mercenaries who guarded it, and the warden was his former boss at the bio-tech company. Mac had been brought to the plant to oversee the manufacture of the drug he had helped to invent. Its street name was Triple X and it was distributed worldwide.

Mac finished his story and scoffed. “Ironic isn
’t it?  My whole life was about doing something to stop the distribution and use of illegal drugs and I end up being the primary manufacturer of a drug so addictive, and so financially lucrative, it makes heroin look like aspirin.”

CoCo
had not interrupted to ask questions. He couldn’t refrain any longer. “How are the drugs getting off the island?”

“I don
’t know. That area is off limits to me and heavily guarded. These guys shoot first. I guess I’m kind of a coward, but I have no desire to die here if I can help it. I want to see my kids again, though I’m sure they think I’m already dead,” he replied.

“Is drug manufacturing the sole focus of the plant?”

“No. They’re doing other research here as well. It’s some kind of medical research, but I’m not involved with that. They keep the two labs isolated from each other. As my workers get too ill to continue, they bring me fresh recruits. I’ve begged them for better protective gear, but they don’t listen. I get the impression they don’t want to keep people alive for too long. The only reason they’ve kept me is because no one else is capable of supervising the production. The chemicals are volatile. The cooking is more of an art than a science. I make sure the mix is consistent and the techs don’t blow anything up.”

“Where are the labs? Can you diagram the building for us?”
CoCo asked.

“Are you going to let me see my kids?”

“I don’t have the authority to promise that. The best I can do is try to keep you alive and hope to get you off the island.”

Mac pondered this for a minute and then nodded. “That
’ll have to be good enough. Hell, maybe if I’m gone the lab will blow. Wouldn’t that be something?” Bending over, he used his finger to draw in the damp dirt. He sketched the outline of the plant and looked up again.

“Why are you here? Is it for the drugs?” he asked.

CoCo grunted. “I wish. Rumor has it they’ve developed an airborne virus that’s got the capacity to genetically alter the DNA coding of every living person on the planet. Imagine zombies, without aggressive tendencies, who can reproduce. This thing gets out, we’re all walking dead. There’s supposed to be a vaccine to protect the people at the top. We’re here to find it.”

“Jesus. Really? What for?  I mean why would anyone want to do that?” Mac asked.

“If you had an infinite number of slaves who posed no threat and would do anything you wanted without complaint, you’d own the world. Right?” 

“My
god. That’s insane.”

“Yep. So you going to show us what we need to know?”
CoCo pointed at Mac’s crude rendering.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. The plant has two wings. This one, the one we just came out of, is the warehouse and loading area. This middle section here is where the other lab is located. It
’s on one of the upper floors, but I don’t know which. I’m not allowed in the elevator.”

“Then how do you know it
’s there?” CoCo asked.

“I
’ve been living in this place for six years. Guards talk,” Mac replied.

“Yeah, so if you
’re so friendly with the guards, why should I trust you?”

“Maybe you shouldn
’t, but it doesn’t look like you’ve got a choice.”

CoCo
grimaced. He was edgy, hot, and impatient and they were wasting valuable time. He bit his tongue and pointed to the floor. “Touché. Go on,” he said.

“This wing houses the drug lab, processing
room, and shipping department. The skilled techs and I eat and sleep here.” Mac indicated the area where they had found him. “There aren’t many of us. The rest of the workers are housed in this section.”  He drew three lines on the west side of the wing.

“Where
’s the shipping area?”

“On the north side, facing the lake.” Mac marked it on his map.