Made of Fire

2. Tight Spaces

2

Tight Spaces

Eight.

Nine.

Ten.

I ran up the side of the fence horizontal to the ground. When I reached the rolls of barbed wire at the top, I pushed off with both feet.

Eleven.

Twelve.

The wire sucked me up and over as the fence re-charged. I swung across the gap between fence and building, holding tight to the end of the wire. I touched against the reflective aluminium wall of the building with both feet; a figure in black mission gear hanging over a fire exit door, my hair tied securely out of the way in a braided ponytail: my style of choice when attacking JPAC compounds.

Right on cue, a pair of security guards emerged from the door, responding in line with their emergency drills. I descended the wire fast, smooth and silent, clobbering both on the top of the head with the soles of my boots. They fell to the floor of the concrete yard, out like a light.

I touched down and detached the grappling gun from my belt, letting it hang on the end of the wire. I moved in through the fire exit door, into a gloomy corridor stripped to its bare essentials.

“The cat’s through the flap,” I said, unholstering my Glock .22 sidearm and heading up a set of riveted steel steps onto a gantry.

“Copy that,” Philippe said. “The postman’s through the gate. Beware of the guard dogs.”

The first guard dog came at me through a discreet grey door at the end of the gantry, barking at me to hit the floor. I shushed him with a non-lethal round to the shoulder, which put him down against the gantry railing. I moved in through the door, only to be faced by a long, breeze-block corridor with exposed metal pipework running left and right.

“Blueprint, this is Red Herring,” I said. “I could use a little help here.”

“This is Blueprint,” Giles said in my ear. “Where are you now?”

I read out the sign on the wall that said G BLOCK YELLOW..

“You need to head left,” Giles said. “No, right … No wait, I’ve got the iPad upside down … Definitely left. I think.”

“Left it is,” I said, jogging along the corridor, where I swiftly ran into a wall of armed security coming the other way.

I launched into the first guy with a flying kick to the chest, ducked as another threw a punch, letting him crack another guard hard in the chin. I rose and hit the puncher with an elbow to the jaw and as the fourth and last guard pulled his weapon, I twisted it from his hand and threw him to the floor in one move. I flat-palmed him in the nose for good measure and used his gun to crack another guy on the top of the head as he struggled to his feet.

“On second thoughts, right might have been easier,” Giles said.

“Now you tell me,” I said, detaching clip from gun and tossing them away.

I came to a code-locked white door with a pane of wire glass at head height. Giles was quarterbacking the mission from his new conspiracy dungeon back in London. He saw what I saw through a tiny camera sewn into a button on my black jacket.

“Now to get through the next door,” he said, “you’ll need a swipe card and a pre-approved retina.”

I looked further along the corridor; a guard emerging around the corner on his radio. “Hang on.” I said, whistling the guard and dropping to my knees, with my hands behind my head. “I give up.”

The guard hurried towards me with his weapon out. He unhooked a pair of black cuffs from his belt as he came towards me.

He shouted something at me in Uzbek, I think, telling me not to move. I waited for him to come around back, then grabbed him by the belt and slipped backwards between his legs on my knees, pulling my arms down at the exact same time. He hit the floor with a slap, leaving a faceprint on the hard, squeaky white lino.

I pulled him up by the shirt collar, my Glock in the small of his back. I pushed his head in front of the retina scan and ripped the clearance card from a hook on the waist of his trousers.

I kept the card and dropped the man with a gun-butt to the back of his neck, pulling the door open as it buzzed.

Okay, now we were talking. I stepped into something out of a sci-fi movie. Everything slick and sleek, with a glass wall on the inside that ran all the way around the complex.

I saw Philippe on the far side of the building, a few floors down, locked in a gun battle with a tonne of guards. They were just specks on the other side of a vast ocean of data banks stacked up over seven open storeys.

I went looking for an elevator., found one and jabbed on the button.

No juice.

“According to the drill manual, they kill power to the elevators during an attack,” Giles said. “You need a key to override the system.”

I found a door to the stairs instead. It wouldn’t budge. The swipe card didn’t work.

“Everything’s locked down,” I said. “Any other options?”

“Just a sec,” Giles said.

I leaned against the back wall, listening to the thrum from a nest of giant cooling fans on the ceiling of the complex. The glass was largely soundproof, but the pulsing beats of the fans still made it through.

I sang that song to myself while I waited.

A security guard rounded the corner and interrupted me. I smiled and gave him a friendly nod, arms folded, before putting him down with a dampened round to the leg. I shot the weapon from his hand and returned my own to my holster, letting the guard squirm and moan and bleed on the floor. Nothing fatal … I hoped.

“Here we are,” Giles said. “There’s a network of cooling vents. If you can find a panel around the other side of the building, you can drop down a few floors.”

I set off running, aiming for the opposite side of the complex. “You mean, squeeze my way into a claustrophobic network of tunnels from which there might be no escape?”

“Something like that,” Giles said.

I made it to the opposite side of the building and found a mesh panel in the wall, with a cool breeze whispering through.

“That’s the one,” Giles said. “Now you’ll probably need a screwdriver-“

I took a step back and kicked the panel in. I pulled it out of the vent and tossed it away.

“Or a sturdy boot,” Giles said, as I swallowed down a fear of tight spaces and climbed into the vent. I shuffled forwards on hands and knees, the arch of my back bumping against the roof of the aluminium vent.

Giles kept talking in my ear. “Now if I’m reading this correctly, you ought to come to a-”

Without warning, the floor of the vent fell from beneath me.

I slid feet-first at terrifying speed down a vertical drop. I managed to slow my fall by wedging the sides of my boots against either side of the vent.

I slowed into a squeaking slide until I came to a stop. To my left, I noticed a side vent branching out into a floor, I heard gunfire echoing loud through the aluminium.

“I think this is the exit I want,” I said, climbing inside it.

“There should be a panel beneath you,” Giles said.

Sure enough, there was. Through the mesh panel in the ceiling of the fourth floor, I could make out Philippe using a couple of guards as human shields, before returning fire, both ways.

I pulled my sidearm out of my holster and my backup pistol from my ankle strap. There was no easy way to do this, other than …