Phoenix Sub Zero

It took a half-hour to work through the wing to the brick building, and the search had found nothing. The entire wing was devoted to mechanical assembly, machine shops, sheet-metal fabrication, a small foundry. Not even any assembly drawings for weapons. The whole facility had the dusty look of disuse.

The door to the main building led to a cinder-block corridor that ran the length of the wing. Morris’s platoon turned right and began on the east end, hitting pay dirt. The northeast-corner office was large with windows on two walls looking out at the mountain view. Probably the director’s office.

Morris had expected the office to be full of stacks of papers and binders. But the desk and table tops were clean and tidy, the bookshelves filled with bound and old volumes, the titles Arabic, French, German, occasional English. The few that were legible in English were texts on physics, sub atomic particles, fluid mechanics, gas dynamics. Morris didn’t bother with them since they were all published texts.

He was looking for three-ring binders full of scribbled or typed data, lab notebooks, piles of graph paper, design drawings. In the director’s office there was none of that. There was, however, a computer perched on the table behind the large chair. A European model, fairly new. Morris waved his men on to the next office and took the monitor off and unplugged the main processor unit, snapping his fingers for Monkey Max to unpack a tool bag. Max slapped a screw driver into Morris’s hand with the efficiency of a surgeon’s nurse. Thirty seconds later the unit’s cover was removed.

Morris was no whiz at computers, but the hard disk drive was easy to find, particularly since it was labeled. He unplugged two cords and severed the power wiring, wrapped the unit in bubble wrap while Max taped it, the unit vanishing into Morris’s backpack. Morris didn’t bother to reassemble the unit. Soon the whole complex and the entire UIF would know they had been there. He rifled the drawers of the office, finding a half-dozen floppy disks that he taped together, bubble-wrapped and tossed in the backpack.

Morris and his platoon covered the six offices that surrounded the director’s, finding only two lab notebooks but removing the computer drives. Farther down the hall second platoon had found a mainframe computer unit and a network file server, the data-storage units of both being packed for carrying. An old tape-drive unit was set back against the wall, unplugged and unused, several shelves of tapes next to it, more data tapes than they could hope to carry. Morris decided to ignore it. Anything on the tapes would be a few years old by the looks of it.

They were more concerned with current data.

Third platoon, on the west end, was going slowly through two chemical labs, finding several boxes of lab notebooks, Morris directing them to take the most recent of the pile.

Fourth platoon was harvesting an alcove devoted to design work, an open bullpen of a dozen drafting tables, three of them the computerized CAD tables. The CAD file server’s disk drive was already removed and packed in one of the seal’s packs. Several original vellum drawings were being pulled from the manual drafting tables and rolled up for carrying out.

The harvest was nearly complete. Morris checked the other platoons in the metal building wings, some units finding nothing, some finding some interesting prints. In the corner of one of the wings was a room behind a heavy door, with a vault behind another heavier door. A secret material repository. Two of Morris’s men finished a cut with a torch, finding shelves and file cabinets full of material. Morris was unimpressed since most of the material was old and dusty, relics of the ages before the offices were computerized. Still, there was the odd file that the men pulled, a few large files of drawings.

Finally there was nothing to be done but wait for the second harvest and wire up the demolition charges. Morris’s watch read 0535 local time. Any minute. At 0600, the first person arrived for work, a short heavyset

Iranian man in a long overcoat and furry-eared hat and a large briefcase, looking annoyed at the absence of the sentry. He came into the lobby and found the light switches near the door. The main hallway lights came up as he stepped in the door to the east-west hallway. He turned toward Morris, his eyes wide in shock. Morris took the briefcase as his seals taped the man’s hands behind his back with duct tape, the tape also wrapped around his mouth and his ankles. He was led to an office and seated in a chair. Morris checked his watch again, deciding to give it another half-hour. In any lab the work horse scientists were there hours before the official starting time and hours after quitting time, the op-order read. The second harvest of scientists would be gathered at dawn and removed to the assembly area.