Oppression
"How are you handling this so well?" Tunnel Rat's whisper distracted Nightshade for a split second. She glanced away from the lock she was fiddling with, pausing the careful manipulation of the tumblers to see him nervously watching her nine-o'clock.
"Breaking into an abandoned embassy in the middle of fuck-all Africa? Kinda my gig." She shrugged slightly and turned back to picking the old mechanical lock.
"I think he means the children," Scarlett, on her six-o'clock, tossed the observation over her shoulder.
"Yeah, who the fuck uses kids as their army?" Gung-Ho sounded more irritated than shaken.
Frowning, Nightshade wondered if there was something wrong with how well she was handling the situation. Bluffing their way past children, some as young as eight, armed with Uzis and machetes, had seemed easy while they were doing it.
"The Congolese obviously," Nightshade opted for the bravado path, trying to cover how strangely detached she felt from all of this. "Cambodians, Vietnamese... most of the Latino gangs in America."
As soon as she said it, she knew why she wasn't as affected. The lock clicked open, and Nightshade twisted the knob slightly. She'd been essentially a child soldier. It wasn't a war of ideologies that she'd been conscripted into, but it was a war. Learning how to gun men down at fourteen had obviously left a stain on her soul.
"We're in." She stated quietly, stepping back from the cracked open door.
Gung-Ho turned in to take the lead on the breach. They all had their roles to play. Scarlett knew what they were looking for, some kind of hidden room in the embassy where they needed to recover hard drives with some incriminating evidence on them. Gung-Ho was their muscle. Tunnel Rat was not only the one that could disarm and defuse any explosive surprises they came across, but he was also a trained field medic. All Nightshade had to do was get them inside, past doors locked with sophisticated electronic locks that turned into weighty hunks of mechanical ingenuity when they were robbed of power.
Inside the embassy stank like rot and decay. The humid August air was fetid and damp, and seemed to sink in on the Joes as they carefully picked their way inside. Evidence of a sloppy firefight was all around. Bullet holes riddled walls, brass casings threatened to roll under a wrongly placed foot. But the smell was the worst. Diplomatic Security specialists left to rot in the sealed building. Corporeal remains liquefying on stairs, not even enough left to feed flies.
Tunnel Rat was trying to keep his dry heaves silent. Gung-Ho couldn't decide if smelling it, or tasting it was a worse fate. Scarlett's eyes watered, because here and there among the ruins of bodies, were ones that were smaller, children casualties of war.
Security had made their stand there in the foyer. Beyond those confines, the scene was less horrific. Instead of bodies, there were just rooms, empty, papers strewn about, cords and computers torn off desks and smashed against the floor. The ransacking had been fairly complete, each room thoroughly tossed. Windows smashed. Walls defaced with the radical insurgent sigil, carved by machete into the wallpaper.
The entrance for the hidden room was beneath a heavy teak desk in the ambassador's main office. Tunnel Rat checked it for wires or triggers before helping Gung-Ho move it out of the way. Then it was Nightshade's turn again. This one had no actual lock to pick, instead it had pressure panel of buttons and switches that manipulated the tumblers. And it had some kind of separate power source, as the buttons when depressed, flickered faintly green or red.
The pacing of the men in a patrol circle didn't phase her one bit. A tiny screwdriver took care of loosening the pressure panel enough so she could peer at the mechanism beneath it. Wires connected buttons to switches, and switches to the slide-and-lock mechanism of the tumbler. And a blinking yellow light. She caught Tunnel Rat's attention as he passed her by again, and the two of the lay on the floor to get the best view.
"Boobytrapped." Tunnel Rat breathed with glee.
"I can get us in if you can handle the failsafe." She realized she was more nervous about the fact that she was sitting on top of a bomb, than she was upset by the death and carnage in the surrounding embassy.
The heat only seemed to get worse, pressing them down into the moldering carpet as they worked together to disarm the bomb. Nightshade could only hold the pressure plate a few centimeters above without pulling a wire that might trigger the bomb. Tunnel Rat had to work around her, and occasionally direct her to cut this, or disconnect that.
Eventually, it was done, and the final wire snipped, not only did the blinking yellow light go dark, but the trapdoor in the floor slid away to reveal a ladder into the hidden basement. Scarlett and Gung-Ho dropped down, leaving the other two to stand guard. After fifteen minutes, Scarlett came back up the ladder, reaching back down to retrieve four narrow rectangular hard-drives from Gung-Ho.
There was too much data, too sensitive to encrypt and upload directly to the Pit. The drives were stowed in carefully protected, armored pockets on each of the Joes, one for each of them.
"The hard part is getting back across those siege lines." Scarlett admitted as they began the trek back to through the carnage out of the abandoned sector of town.