They converged from three directions on the four gray-metal warehouses, standing in a row on a weed-choked cement apron. The traffic roar on Mayachina a block away was barely audible. The buildings were streaked with rust and the roofs sagged. Hand signals from the flankers indicated there was no one around. A bird chirped and a cricket zinged from the weeds. Nate squatted and took a breath. Too quiet? A thought of ambush flickered in his mind. Would the GRU leave munitions unguarded like this? He processed sounds and looked into the shadows under the far trees. All clear. Witold knelt beside him.
“What is it?” said Witold. The back of his shirt was wet.
“How does it feel to you?” said Nate.
“I know what you mean,” said Witold. “Doing this in daylight is not normal. But we need the light, and the buses stop at nine. The plan is solid.”
“Would they leave rockets and mines unattended?” said Nate.
“Do not forget, these are Russians,” said Witold. “This is the GRU engaged in an illegal operation; they will be determined to keep it secret, especially from the Ukrainian locals.”
“Alarms? Booby traps?” said Nate. DIVA had not reported anything, but she might not have been briefed on such details.
“Jerzy will check the door and look for motion sensors. They have not made the system he cannot defeat,” said Witold. “Ryszard will look out for trip wires.”
Nate signaled, and Jerzy knelt by the dented, tin side door, and ran his fingers around the edges, feeling for protrusions or gaps in the door that could indicate alarm heads on the other side. He shook his head. Nate nodded at Piotr, who picked the tarnished lock with a snake rake and torsion wrench in fifteen seconds, then eased the door open an inch while Jerzy again ran his fingers along the edges. Negative. Piotr eased the door open, leaned inside, then stuck his head back out and waved them forward. Nate clicked his fingers softly and the last pair came from the other side.
The interior of the warehouse was relatively small. A cracked concrete floor was powdery with fine gray dust. Rusty vertical steel beams set in the floor supported the latticework roof joists. “Watch footprints, handprints,” whispered Nate to Witold, pointing to the dusty floor. There were no windows along the walls, but milky light came from two bird-spotted skylights. An angular shape in the center of the warehouse was covered by a dark-green tarp. The crates.
“Don’t touch the tarp,” whispered Ryszard. “It could be wired to a pull fuze.”
Nate nodded. He started to walk around the covered mound, but Ryszard stopped him. “Shine your light along the floor,” he said.
Nate pointed his light—a 250 lumen NEBO SLYDE—in front of him. A double line appeared on the floor—an invisible trip wire and its shadow—running to the closest beam where a black box with a copper cone held by a metal arm was strapped. The cone was like a small megaphone and pointed at the tarp-covered pile.
“SM-70 antipersonnel device” whispered Ryszard. “Eighty tiny steel cubes, twenty-five meter kill zone; they used to put them on the frontier fences.”
“Can you defuse it?” said Nate.
“Have to leave it intact. They’d notice if we disarmed it,” said Ryszard. “We have to work in a live kill zone. Take our time. Don’t fixate on the trip wire. They want you to follow the line and miss a pressure plate concealed somewhere else. Booby trapping the booby trap.”
They slowly peeled the tarp off the crates. The trip wire from the SM-70 disappeared under the near crate. “Don’t lift or move that one,” said Ryszard, pointing.
There were a total of fifteen crates of unpainted pine, with hinged tops, stamped metal draw bolts, and folding metal handles at each end. There were no stenciled markings of any kind to indicate the contents. The lids and bottoms of each crate were reinforced by wooden skids, to facilitate stacking. Nate estimated that eight of the crates were about five feet long—they each looked like a coffin for a child—and would contain the RPG-18 Mukha launchers, and the separate propelled grenades. The remaining seven crates were square and deep with rope handles on the ends. Those would be the mines.
