Operation Sea Mink by Addison Gunn Read Free Book Online Page A

stairwell, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. Behind him followed du Trieux, Hsiung, and Morland, in that order.
    Now that the call for aid had been sent from the chopper, it was time to secure the cargo. With any luck, they could load the missile onto the bird and lift it back to the compound before the aid arrived. Miller wasn’t one-hundred-per-cent certain of who’d arrive when, or if, aid came. If a squad of Harris’s men showed up, things could get complicated.
    Miller’s hands slid down the stairwell railing, then quickly dropped off once he reached the first landing. He activated the search light he’d mounted to the side of his rifle, flashing it around him.
    There would have been a reason why the captain and his squad had disappeared trying to secure the cargo, and they’d probably had ten men. Miller had four. His palms felt slick with sweat, but he proceeded, allowing the remainder of his team to follow.
    The lights in the cargo hold were non-functional when Miller tried to toggle the switch. Overhead, long rectangular fluorescent fixtures hung dark and lifeless.
    From what he could see using his mounted light, there was a one-meter-wide walkway, without a railing, that went around the perimeter of the cargo hold. A center catwalk led across the middle to the other side. The pathways were narrow enough to maneuver around the hold, but Miller and his team could only advance in single file.
    The walkway itself was clear of debris, but the mouth of the cargo hold below housed crates upon crates—stacked several meters high, reaching up and toward the ceiling and creating a maze-like labyrinth.
    How Miller was supposed to find one crate amongst all these others, he had no idea. Not to mention how he and his team were going to get to it once they located it. There didn’t appear to be any ramp or stairs leading down.
    A loud crash sounded to the left.
    Swinging around, Miller led the group down the walkway and toward the noise. At the tip of the hold, Miller stopped and angled his mounted light down toward the cargo.
    Below, a stack of wooden crates had been smashed opened. There appeared to be leafy greens inside. Lettuce, spinach, and some variety of purple kale. A pack of a half-dozen goliath brutes were making a meal of it.
    They didn’t take too kindly to having the sharp glare of the lights flashed into their beady black eyes. They growled and, with surprising speed, scattered into the maze of crates like cockroaches.
    “Shit,” Miller breathed.
    “Over there,” Morland said, shining his light farther into the center of the cargo hold, near the middle catwalk.
    With Morland in the lead, they returned from the direction they came.
    The bodies of the captain and his crew were strewn along the floor, crunched between crates and crushed into bloody pulp. Some had been disembowelled; their entrails lay splattered against the hold floor.
    “They don’t have flashlights,” Morland said, shining his light on the remains.
    “So the lights worked at some point,” Hsiung offered.
    “Think we can get them back up and running?” Miller asked du Trieux.
    She shined her light across the ceiling, following the electrical cords from the light fixtures to their origin, a panel in the wall housing a circuit breaker of some sort. “I’ll see what I can do.”
    “How are we supposed to know which box is the one we’re looking for?” Morland asked.
    Hsiung shone her light near the center of the cargo hold. “It’s right there.”
    “What?” Miller twisted around to see.
    “See that long crate right there? It’s the only box labelled in English,” she explained, “and the captain and his posse’s bodies are surrounding it. They were trying to protect it. They’d already rigged a pulley system to that crane over there. Are you all blind?”
    “It’s dark in here,” Morland said.
    “Uh-huh.”
    Miller signalled the others to follow suit as he reached across and grasped the dangling