Chapter 171: CLXXI
Levi's POV
The intelligence came through at eleven at night.
Marcus knocked on the study door where I had been reviewing the grid investigation reports, and when he came in his expression had the specific quality of someone carrying information that required immediate action.
"We found one of their bases," he said and I put the report down.
He spread a physical map on the desk, an old habit from years of pack security work where he didn't trust digital maps for sensitive planning.
The map showed the territory and the surrounding areas, the borders, the neutral zones, the stretches of forest and industrial land that surrounded the pack on the eastern and northern sides.
He put his finger on a point about eleven kilometers northeast of the pack border.
"Abandoned water treatment facility," he said.
"Been decommissioned for about fifteen years. The land technically belongs to a property holding company that dissolved twelve years ago, so there's no current registered owner. Nobody patrols it, nobody has reason to go near it."
"How did we find it?" I asked.
"Hall," he said.
"The communications officer when we went back to him this afternoon with more specific questions about what information he had passed and where the collection point was, he gave us a location.”
“He said he had been leaving physical drops at a point about two kilometers from the facility. We ran surveillance on that point for three hours this afternoon and picked up movement from the direction of the facility."
"How many?" I asked.
"Thermal imaging gives us between twelve and eighteen inside the main building," he said.
"Could be more in the outer structures. The facility has several buildings. We only have clear imaging on the largest one."
I looked at the map twelve to eighteen, possibly more. Enhanced with Covenant compound, armed with silver-edged weapons based on the attacks to date.
An eleven-kilometer drive through territory I knew, a facility I had no internal layout for.
"Do we have any structural plans?" I asked.
"The council of the time filed plans when it was decommissioned. I have them." He put a second document on the desk, the original facility blueprints, old enough that the paper had yellowed at the edges.
"The main building is single-story except for the control section on the north end, which has a raised level. Three entry points that were operational. Likely more that were sealed during decommissioning but could have been reopened."
"Windows?"
"Industrial-grade at the original construction, mostly metal-framed. The imaging suggests some have been removed or damaged."
I looked at the blueprints for several minutes, going through the layout, identifying the areas of advantage and the areas of risk.
"We're going tonight," I said.
Marcus nodded he had expected that.
"I want twelve men," I said.
"Our most experienced combat team. Nobody who has been on border patrol in the last forty-eight hours, I need people who are rested.”
“Weapons silver-core ammunition, physical restraints, and document recovery equipment. I want anything in that facility that has writing on it or electronic data stored on it."
"You want prisoners?" Marcus asked.
"If possible," I said.
"But the priority is information. If they fight, we respond accordingly."
"They will fight," Marcus said.
"I know," I said.
"Plan for it, brief the team in forty minutes and we will move at one."
The drive out took twenty minutes twelve pack fighters in three vehicles, lights off for the final two kilometers, navigating by the maps we had memorized before we left.
The facility materialized from the dark as we approached on foot, the outer fence line visible first, then the shapes of the buildings against the lighter dark of the sky.
The main building was large, a flat-roofed industrial structure that had once housed the filtration and processing equipment and was now hosting something considerably different.
There were two guards on the outer perimeter.
My team took them down before they completed their next rotation. Clean, quiet, leaving both of them unconscious rather than dead because unconscious meant available for questioning.
We moved to the main building.
I led the entry team myself through the northern access point, which the blueprints showed as the largest and which the current surveillance had indicated was the least monitored internally.
The door was not locked, which was either carelessness or confidence that nobody knew this place existed.
The inside of the main building was lit by industrial work lights strung from the ceiling supports, the kind that ran on a generator, and the generator hum was audible from somewhere beneath the floor.
The space was large and the center of it was occupied with equipment I recognized immediately: the compound production setup. Chemical processing containers, measuring equipment, storage units holding the enhanced compound that had been given to the attacking rogues.
This was not just a base, this was a production facility. The twelve to eighteen individuals that thermal imaging had shown were distributed through space.
Some working, some apparently resting on improvised bedding along the walls, two of them at a monitoring station on the raised northern level.
We had approximately four seconds before someone reacted. I used three of them to position my team at the entry points. On the fourth second, one of the people at the monitoring station looked up and saw us.
What followed was not clean. It never was, regardless of how well you planned it. The rogues in the facility were enhanced, which meant the response to encountering our team was faster and more physical than a standard rogue engagement.
The first group came at us with the coordinated aggression of people who had expected potential discovery and prepared for it. They hit hard and my team hit back.
I was in the center of it within the first thirty seconds, which was where I needed to be. Not directing from a position of safety, but present in the engagement, because my Lycan level gave our team a visible force anchor that changed the calculus for the rogues facing us.
We fought through the main floor systematically. My team worked in the pairs they had trained in, covering each other, managing the enhanced strength of the opposition with technique rather than trying to match force for force.