The New World Order Ch. 02

A New World Order - Prologue

Pushing the first domino!

Somewhere else in the warehouse, at about the same time as the woman was shot; a man ran into one of the maintenance closets and sneaked into one of the ventilation shafts.

CRACK!

The sound of a gunshot tore through the shaft. He braced himself, thinking he had made a sound that had given him away and they were shooting at the vents. However, when the silence returned, he realized the sound had been from far away and if it wasn't for him being in the shaft he probably wouldn't have heard it.

Fear gripped him as visuals of his wife being shot flooded him but the adrenaline in his blood was quick to counteract. He exhaled heavily to calm down.

"She's safe and in the damn dinghy by now", he told himself. He pushed onward.

Up till now he had done excellently. He had come in with a plan. Sneak in undetected. Use the vents to move around and cause distractions to pull men away from the path of his wife's escape. Then when this seemed to have been done, blow up some explosives to distract the men on his tail, sneak out and escape. His plan was way more detailed but that was the crux of it.

He kept moving slowly but steadily, careful to not make too much noise when passing over aisles or through rooms. The vents thankfully were, like everything else in the warehouse built with state-of-the-art materials, meaning that they were properly lined with specialized materials for sufficient insulation. As a side effect, his sound couldn't be heard outside so long as he was careful and crawling. That was made possible thanks to the sounds of machinery that constantly filled the warehouse except for a few soundproof rooms where he was extra careful and the ground clearance given the high ceilings. Moreover, he had charted his course being mindful of the sound issue.

He dropped down in another maintenance closet sometime later and made his way out and seeing the vicinity clear sneaked out. He knew that thanks to this distraction the guards were nowhere near his path, there was a miniscule possibility that he could be spotted once he exited the wing and took to the metallic walkways over the loading bay. It was however within his risk parameters. When planning for the mission, he couldn't make a plan that was absolutely risk averse. The warehouse was a fortress. He however had racked his brain and successfully managed to pull together a plan that had so far worked brilliantly. That's all that mattered.

His only viable exit plan was stupid risky. However, the last few distraction bombs had been to make it as safe as he could. Unfortunately, his luck was about to run out.

At the exit door he opened it a crack and peered out. It looked clear. Just before he was about to pull it ajar, he saw a man passing through. The guards had wizened up; his bomb had failed to distract all of them. There shouldn't be a need for patrols but his distractions had worked. The warehouse security was full of men who had seen combat in some form. Ranging from ex cops to extreme special forces. But even the workers were well trained and drilled. If caught he was almost certainly dead.

He however was fearsome in his own right. He had a gifted mind tactically speaking. In the academy, he had been offered by a general to work for him and the special forces. Even during his time at the agency, he was offered to work for the spec ops unit under the black ops division. He had worked for them a long time before he had met her and fallen for her then he had partnered with her to protect her. She was a brilliant agent but alone there was only so much she could do. With him being her overwatch, they were close to invincible as a pair. They had an unrivaled record. Until this damned mission. It was going great, a deep cover mission, but she got pregnant. Fortunate or unfortunate, only their survival would answer that.

He observed the patrol pattern for a while being cautious of his surroundings to be aware. Then when he deemed safe, he pulled the door ajar and sneaked out and took the stairs closest to him. On the walkway, he tiptoed but still made enough noise. He would have been surprised if his cover wasn't instantly blown if it weren't for him being dressed like the warehouse workers. He was sure by now the warehouse security had taken his mugshots from the CCTV footage and circulated, so regardless of his attire, he was one close look away from his cover being blown. Moreover, his rucksack, though not totally out of place, was enough to arouse suspicion.

He prayed that nobody would connect him. The walkway was long and noisy. Someone did, a shot rang out just as he had almost made it across. It struck the railing ahead of him. Warning shot, the orders were to capture him alive. He turned and ran.

He couldn't go back the way he came. He split left. The walk way had a perpendicular turning built into it that went inwards. His plan originally was to cross the walkway and cross 2 more rooms and exit through the service entrance of the loading dock. From there he was going to blend in as a worker loading a truck and then hide in one of them when the opportunity presented itself. He was carrying a silenced pistol, so getting rid of the driver and his partner would have been easy. He however had only the magazine he had loaded so a firefight wasn't an option now.

He crossed the loading dock without getting shot. He was now in the storage area of the warehouse. He kept running as guards pursued him. The workers paid no attention, he would have to be in their path for them to attempt capture, until then their ROE was to work through the commotion.

He kept running, the sound of his boots pounding the corrugated steel walkways along with the ones of his pursuers filled his ears as did their voices shouting instructions to each other.

"There"

"Call for backup"

"Box him in"

"Capture him"

Workers swarmed the corridors below transporting forklifts in patterns that would have boxed him in had he been below. Using the walkway for exfil would have been considered stupid, which is why it had almost worked out. He was like a chameleon. He would never know it but the only reason he was caught was because the news of his wife's supposed death had been relayed and the orders now were capture alive.

He could see as he ran the density of guards was increasing as more and more guards trickled into the storage area. They would follow him into the ones adjacent. He needed to put some distance between them. So far, he had survived because for storage areas several walkways ran parallel to each other, each interconnected. He kept switching between them at random so even if the guards caught up, he would duck them. Diagonal shots weren't an option because the cables held the walkways in place and even one snapping would be a disadvantage for them and an advantage for him.

His lungs were starting to burn, his legs starting to ache. He refused to acknowledge either.

He quickly went through a door at the end of the walkway and locked it once inside, stopping for a moment to catch his bearings and give his lungs and legs some recovery. The floor was concrete; the corridor was narrow and lined with doors. He closed his eyes and pushed his panic down and within a moment he knew where he was. It was but a moment's calm, but it was enough.

Months earlier he had peered through countless satellite photos and drone footage, then his wife infiltrated as a worker daily and brought back detailed accounts. Once his wife had to stop due to pregnancy, he did. They had clearance levels. He had risen through, further than his wife. He had accepted the contract trap that Thaye used to ensure the contract workers wouldn't talk. The workers knowingly committed financial fraud. Anyone who betrayed would be behind bars and authorities under the misconception that the whistleblowers were fraud. What Thaye hadn't known then that the identity he had used was a cover, a fake, an excellent fake. The infiltration was more to understand the people and to hack into the CCTV to fill the gaps that other surveillance missed. He of course hadn't mapped the warehouse in its entirety but he knew enough through scans to know most of it.

Every piece of information they'd gather, he would go through it over and over again. Every moment he had he would spend on going over it all in his head, connecting the dots the information couldn't yet see. The only time he'd spend not studying was when he was with his wife. Especially while his dick was balls deep in his wife. This mission had been so much about reconnaissance that the only time they could do nothing were the nights when only the ones vetted by Thaye's inner circle had been doing unloading and storage as well as the loading and transport to the ships. They'd sleep through it. Initially, when they were just doing recon and no infil, they were just tiring their minds. So, to tire out physically, he'd daily rock her world. He'd use condoms, she'd be on pill but still she got knocked up. It was a difficult decision to keep the child and she was due to fly out in a few days while he completed the mission.

The moments he spent to recover he had gone through his head, how he had reached here. He already knew roughly where he was. His body had given itself up to his instincts, his mind had already gone into full blown panic, atleast the conscious part of it. His sub conscious though had all the information at its fingertips and was processing it at lightning speed. He broke into a run again and turned a couple of corridors then through the stairs. He was navigating on instinct.

From what he knew the storage space he exited was a sorting space, from there containers were unloaded and goods moved to the storage spaces. He was in the mid-section; all the black-market goods were here. Weapons, fuel, explosives, electronics, smuggled goods, the upper stores housed Humvees, lower grade armored vehicles, maybe even tanks. The upper most stores and roof housed helicopters, and aircraft that were downed and repaired and lost. This warehouse didn't just arm terrorists but also revolutionaries and warlords. His best shot was chaos. Absolute mother fucking chaos. He would have to become the fucking devil that unleashed the inferno. Because otherwise he could escape but the armada would catch him and he'd be toast.

His pursuers had closed in; he desperately needed to put some distance again. He racked his panicked conscious brain. Blankness.

His mind had given up; he was at his physical limits. He wasn't a field agent. He trained and was fit but the sharpness of a field agent, he lacked. That was often the crucial element of survival.

A bullet grazed his thigh, it burned, he stumbled and in process another graced his shoulder. He pushed his will through his calves and sprung back into a sprint rounding a corner and darting through a maintenance corridor.

Behind him his pursuers missed the corridor.

He exited through the other end.

Another set of guards spotted him.

He darted into another corridor, as bullets struck the corner walls.

He fucking hated this. He wasn't cut out for it. He was surviving on will and sheer dumb beginner's luck.

He was the guy in the shadows. The bat that watched and listened. The owl that saw what nobody did and the pack of wolves that planned and plotted and trapped the prey for the alpha to pounce upon, which was his wife.

The ninja work of entering unnoticed, leaving without a trace was his wife. The only place he could be an alpha was in the bed, where she was the slut, he had to dominate.

This was not fucking this was fucking survival. He hated it absolutely. The only thing which made him effective was the memory of his pregnant wife. That is what made him push into her realm and draw upon her skills and use them as his own.

He darted through corridors; this storage space also served as an exhibition space; each storage room was packed to the brim with one kind of product with a small area around the door to showcase it. Therefore, each room was surrounded on two sides either with corridors or narrower maintenance pathways. Navigating had been easy enough. He exploited pack mentality to lose his tail again and again. But the guards by now were too many. Loose one group and another was hot on his heels.

He used one of his bombs as he closed his checkpoint. Still running on instinct, he knew a few moments to a few seconds was all he would get. He flung it across to the end of the corridor as if he was headed in another direction and darted through a service corridor. The problem was that these were bombs on a mere technicality. In reality they were just high-end crackers. Loud but packing no significant punch.

Finally, he rounded another set of corridors. He had lost his pursuers. He knew it wouldn't be for long but his mind had calmed down enough now. Not enough to be smart but just enough to plan his escape. The plan to unleash hellish chaos had already formed in his mind. Maybe he could have been subtle, in hindsight he would see better options but, in the moment, he was rattled and this was the best he could come up with. Eventually life would show him that this was the first domino. Right now, though, he had run through the ground floor and arrived at the gate that read, "DEMO ROOM".

He needed a bigger distraction. This was the room where he could create one.

Months ago, his wife had spotted one of the buyers, a lawyer who represented an arms dealer who was facilitating a buy for a warlord. He had bought a technician with him to inspect the merchandise. She had hired two whores to meetup with them in a club at the warehouse district, seduce them, gain access to the lawyer's suite, drug them and get mug shots of them in compromising positions. Her agenda was to steal his laptop and blackmail him with evidence about his boss. She got lucky, they were both married. Together, the evidence made them hit their pants and blabber all she needed to know.

To be safe she had questioned them as a masked lady covered from head to toe in clothing that went with the local guests at the hotel and questioned them after drugging them with truth serum. Once done she had upped the dosage for them to pass out. They woke up naked in the bedrooms of the suite each with one of her hired whores. They assumed it was nightmare because everything else was setup to look untouched. To them too much intoxication had caused them to sleep and dream stuff that would compromise them. If everything had gone as per plan, the evidence against their boss would have made it to the agency for them to nab him. It still was going to only not until a week at the least.

It was while interrogating them she had gotten to know everything about this room and it was central to his plan.

He quickly tried the door, unlocked, he opened and got in. Several times during the chase he had gotten lost, he had almost been caught. He had even suffered bruises while running through maintenance corridors that doubled as storage areas for supplies and stuff.

His lungs were burning. Legs were aching. Bruises flaring up. Grazes roaring.

He slumped against the locked door to catch his bearings.

He pushed his will against all the sensations of his body and then those of his mind. The fear, the panic, everything. He was going to be a father. He'd be damned if he failed.

This was a reinforced room; they weren't breaking through. Finding the master key would take time. Or a cutting torch or breaching charge. Enough time for him to set up. This was the room where prospective buyers inspected gear. In front of him lay range and a couple of blast protected rooms to test explosives. Beside the door extended rows and rows of shelves, each stacked with weapons and explosives of all kinds. Enough for him to smirk, his wife would have decided to fight, he just had to survive.

He planted the last of his crackers down range along with several weapons across the sandbags, barricades, vehicle hulks, artificial terrain, urban mock-ups, concrete barriers etc. This was a humongous one-of-a-kind range. At first glance the distraction would work; the guards would think he had decided to take a last stand and use the gear to fight them while changing positions. Hoping that them being in open gave him enough of an advantage to beat them and escape.

If wars were a commodity, the salesmen had made this room a buyer's desperation trap. This room was designed to fuel the weak egos that men usually possessed, to attack the testosterone that flooded their blood in such a setting usually. The buyers would be eager to pay for gear seeing the destruction it caused.

He wasn't stupid; the hordes and hordes of guards meant he would eventually be overwhelmed after an initial advantage gained through machine guns. No, his aim was something more chaotic.

Sometime later the men entered, having cut through the locking mechanism with the torch. His distractions went off and the men started moving down range. It was easy to think he was drawing them in closer. Which he was, only it wasn't how they thought.

"He's in there. Keep distance"

"He's hiding, be alert, don't give him a chance to open fire"

The men slowly scanned the room. Minutes ticked by and one of them wizened up. Switched to thermal. There was no one except for them. He lifted the thermal but before he could speak to the comrade close by, everything went white.

He felt the tremors and heard the bangs. It would have been a small chunk of armada but every guard in the room had been swallowed up by the explosions. The room and its layout despite the force probably weren't damaged irreparably but the features that made it effective had become debris; small fires had enveloped the room and would have been extinguished by the sprinkler system but the heavy-set explosions had wrecked them in all likelihood.

The man had long since escaped through one of the maintenance hatches built into the floor. The guards never knew about them. Most buyers never did. Only the workers, a few salesmen and a set of buyers who had visited the warehouse without a specific shopping list. The secrecy wasn't intentional it was coincidental. These were functional service corridors leading to storerooms that housed spares of materials that made up features of the range. Targets, sandbags, etc. The lawyer turned out to be one such buyer. The technician tested quite a lot of gear. RPGs, assault rifles, Snipers, pistols, SMGs, grenades, explosives and more. The targets and several other features were replaced multiple times. The lawyer had seen men come out of the hatches carrying spares and replacing them.

The man had gotten to know of the hatches and prodded one of the basement workers over drinks. He had gotten to know that the store rooms connected to lower levels as the worker and his team were responsible for maintenance and transport of restocking the range and a lot of other rooms when they weren't servicing the range. He knew roughly which direction every kind of gear was stored in the warehouse. It was delivered to him and he had to merely restock the shelves or deliver it to buyers who wanted to test some of the gear in "greater detail".

The man however was annoyed at the crucial information being incomplete and rough.

Chaos scared the shit out of him. With all the chaos he found himself in he was scared shitless. The thoughts of his unborn child field his fight against his inner turmoil.

He'd spent his entire life behind desks and screens.

Now in the field with the initial adrenaline wearing off, his escape plan starting to look like a chaos engine. Him finding himself amongst eerie silence in the moment didn't help him. He was on the verge of a breakdown. He felt like he had killed a similar no of people directly as he had indirectly. That weighed on him in this silence.

Behind a screen, it was easy to convince yourself that your hand in the killing served a greater purpose. Right here right now, it all seemed so pointless.

He needed to calm down. For the first time, the thoughts of his wife and unborn child only added to his desperation. He knew he needed to get out of the chaos but his brain, both parts of it, were clueless on how. Uncertainty in the way forward blared in his mind like a loud warning horn and red lights flashed not just in his mind but in front of his eyes. He was seeing things.

Getting a momentary grip, he imagined the procedure that the warehouse must follow now. Smoke must be bellowing in the ventilation shafts, dust and soot must be raining downwards as the room settled down. Guards must be trickling in. Looking for him.

"He was in here, CCTV showed him enter. Where the fuck did, he go."

Bodies. Dust. Soot. All, covering the hatches, most of them. Someone would discover one of the few visible still.

"Hatch in the floor. He must have gone through."

Guards had been drawn in from the vicinity but they couldn't have come from the same floor or the floor above. He had drawn them in. They had come from the floor below. Uncertainty wasn't a problem anymore.

In reality it would be some time before this happened exactly as he'd envisioned. By then he would be at his next destination. But in the moment imagining the procedure he knew nothing about had triggered his rational nerves which had brought in the realisation that helped him pull himself together.

He had been thrown off by the need to improvise. He hated improvisation. His wife was the queen of it but he liked procedure and rule book. Mannuals, guidelines. Following them. He had all of those at his fingertips. Now calm, he pictured his wife in the dinghy at the wharf, waiting for him.

"I am coming my dear", he whispered to himself.

He left the room and sneaked around until he spotted a worker moving away from him. Taking a moment to pull out his pistol, hiding behind cover, out of sight. He pulled the slide with an audible click sound. Inaudible to his target.

He left the cover and sneaked behind the target; the moment he was in range he unleashed a well-placed shot at the back of the man's head with the squeak of a silencer. He slumped over. He immediately went to him and dragged him in a closet and took his clothes and his walkie. Then hiding the pistol under the clothing, leaving behind the rucksack, he left the closet.

He blended amongst the workers. The disguise didn't need to stick for long, just a few minutes. It worked as he made his way through several corridors before reaching the stairs. Upstairs he found himself in another storage space. This was the area that housed explosives. He went to a maintenance room and grabbed a garbage bag, making his way through the rooms he stocked up. This was an area that had emptied after the explosions. With no shipments for the night needing explosives, the workers' movement was absent here tonight. The guards had been pulled away.

He made his way to another area with barrels of fuels. He armed the explosives he carried in each room and then making his way into another maintenance closet he made his way inside the ventilation duct. He crawled without needing caution. There was too much noise outside with alarms and machinery. He could now be swift. He made his way to the nearest exit. A parking lot for the workers. He exited the duct for rain to lash across his face.

For the first time that night he was underneath open sky. He did not have time to reminiscence. He scanned the lot and spotted a police cruiser and 2 men with rifles patrolling the lot. He hid behind the closest car. He saw the gate at the far end; 2 more security guards armed with rifles. He needed the armoured cruiser. Thankfully both sets of guards were far enough away to be dealt with separately.

The guards patrolled the yard and met at the cruiser every few minutes. While they were there, he would sneak closer and closer until he was close enough to strike. Hiding behind the adjacent car, he waited for them to stop at the cruiser. This time, they were facing each other and talking. He sneaked behind one of them and shot the one in the head that was facing him and saw him. The other guard turned and lunged with his rifle, slapping the pistol from his hands. Continuing the motion fluidly, he went to shoulder the stock of his rifle.

Unnoticed by him he had struck only the right arm of his assailant. The rest of the body had been rooted. The man knew he lacked the training to shoot both in quick succession; he had expected the attack to his hands but was already ready and in a stance to kick while the momentum was pushing him backwards. He unleashed the kick and the rifle went flying as the man holding it stumbled backwards on the ground.

The guard was up first with his knife drawn as he feinted for the shoulder and carved the ribs of the man. Head spread across it. Blood was drawn. The rain burned the wound. He drove a clumsy punch towards the jaw. One that was easily dodged. The guard answered with a knee to the gut. Air left his diaphragm. He folded over. The guard's elbow crashed in his back. He hit the wet ground as the world lurched sideways. A punch slammed into his head as the other side crashed into the ground.

Several moments passed before the next attack came, which he dodged. He then lurched with a sweeping kick and holding his head pushed the weight against the car to stand up as the guard himself stood up and circled having been swept off his feet. The knife came again, he sidestepped in an attempt to dodge and grab, he failed to grab the assailant as his bare hands slept against his bare, wet arm. Had he been wearing gloves like the man he wouldn't have been struck by the knife again as the guard pulled back. More blood. The guard then pommelled his face. His vision blurred. The knife then sliced his shoulder. Probably tearing off some muscle strands. Pain shot through it. He rolled away, dodging a fatal strike while holding his shoulder.

He scrambled to his feet as his arm slipped against the wet metal of the car. The guard charged as momentum pommelled him against the SUV he was now against. Crashing against steel was a stupid move as he too had rebounded against the man and stumbled backwards, striking the car adjacent. His knife fell. Both men lunged for it. The guard got there first and dug it into his other shoulder. Terror gripped him. For a heartbeat the world stopped. He fell to his knees.

The guard smiled, but it immediately vanished as the man banged his head into the torso of the guard, knocking the wind out of his diaphragm, followed by a kick in the jaw and he was down. He grabbed the knife and pulled out. Blood spurted out. Bad move. The pain was unreal. He staggered backwards and fell. His vision narrowed and earth tilted sideways again. The guard crawled to him and struck wildly. Not aiming. Only keeping the man with the knife at a distance. The man answered with a slice hitting the guard's arm and then another in his thigh. Both fell, wounded and out of breath. For several long seconds the rain poured.

Then the ground trembled. Both men looked at the warehouse. A dull thump echoed inside. Not loud yet. Just enough for them to feel through the ground. Another explosion followed. Louder, closer. Then another. It was a detonation. The ordnance was now burning and exploding, one after another. The tremors continuous. The chain reaction had begun. The guard stared in disbelief transfixed as windows exploded outwards and fireballs erupted. The man stumbled upright expecting this.

The guard distracted never saw the knife strike his neck as he gargled blood before falling and bleeding out. Then came the shockwave. This one he knew was the room with tons of c4 stored. This one broke through several storeys of concrete and through the roof destroying everything in its path triggering secondary explosions that ripped through the warehouse.

Expecting a few explosions was one thing, he hadn't expected the explosions to breach the floor let alone the roof several stories higher. Concrete sections must have collapsed the fire now burned bright as explosions continued. Steel sections would soon begin inching to glowing orange. Detonations continuously raced through the warehouse.

He couldn't wait around. He got into the police cruiser, breaking the widow first, cleaning the glass with his jacket and the remain glass from the widow with the knife. He stuffed the knife in the glove box. Recovered the pistol and drove to the gate. The guards blocked his way. The barricade was lowered. He slammed the guards into the barricade before any of their shots could even find the wind shield. They too were distracted by the warehouse, with wind knocked out of them, they were slow to recover. He was quick to escape the cruiser. Two headshots and they were done. He moved their bodies away from the path of his cruiser then went to the guard room and raised the barrier.

He searched for their first aid kit, finding it he made his way to the car and drove off.

"I am coming my dear...."