White Cell

Prologue

Had anyone been able to get close enough, they might have wondered why an abandoned all-glass office building on the outskirts of Atlanta had attracted half a dozen black stretch limousines. Of course, had they been able to get close enough, they might have simply disappeared. All of the limousine drivers sported nasty-looking (and very expensive) submachine guns. That those weapons came from Heckler & Koch, among the best weapons makers in the world, meant the bearers had the power and the pull to take care of spies -- permanently and without a trace.

Inside the building, six of Atlanta’s biggest drug dealers held their quarterly meeting. Though a strange anomaly for criminal warlords to work together, nevertheless the gatherings had been effective. This time around, the racially-diverse group of drug lords had just agreed to divide up territory in Southwest Atlanta while avoiding gang turf battles. The five men and one woman also renewed a pledge to get the gangs under control as Atlanta’s rising crime rate was bringing more federal law enforcement down on their heads.

An hour or so later, the meeting broke up and the drug lords retreated to their vehicles, each flanked by two or three heavily-armed bodyguards. Outside, the drivers made ready to start their vehicles. Each had a preplanned exit to avoid suspicion from passing motorists who might take notice of immaculate automobiles coming out of an abandoned business park.

The drivers stopped simultaneously, their ears straining to detect the source of a whistling sound that seemed to grow louder with each passing second. The whistling abruptly ended and transformed into a massive explosion, letting the drivers know they no longer needed to locate the source. Instead, half of them died, cut to ribbons by the shrapnel of a Desert Storm-era mortar. The other half stumbled about haphazardly, obviously disoriented by the explosion's devastating shock wave.

Within seconds of the blast, the bodyguards roughly grabbed their clients and began to propel them back into the building. Alas, the building was mostly glass. The second mortar landed next to five wall-size windows. Five thousand deadly shards of glass slivers turned three drug lords and twelve bodyguards into human pin cushions.

Repulsed by the blood and the bodies missing limbs, the other drug lords turned around and headed for their limousines even though their drivers were in no shape to drive. This was life or death now; they'd drive the vehicles themselves. Unfortunately, they didn’t see the Russian-made rocket-propelled grenade until it blasted the lead car to scrap metal, flipping it over to land on a driver and a bodyguard.

What the mortars and RPG’s failed to take care of, the M2 Browning .50-caliber machine gun finished off. A swath of bullets capable of penetrating the armor of a military Humvee found considerably less resistance from human tissue. It mattered little if it was a crime lord or a burly bodyguard; they were all shredded like Swiss cheese.

Some were decapitated; others lost limbs, ripped off at the knee or shoulder for the recipient to bleed to death. A bodyguard who had been one of the top heavyweight bodybuilders in the world toppled back, massive holes blasted through through chest muscles once described by a sports reporter as "tougher than steel." The female drug lord had spent six months of grueling workouts to carve out six-pack abs to impress her fellow drug lords. It took less than six seconds for the .50-caliber to carve into those abs and cut her in half.

One limousine did manage to tear out of the area, ironically with a drug lord at the wheel and his bodyguard in the back seat. It got almost 200 feet before a second RPG found its windshield. Thus, it suffered the same fate as the other vehicles, blasted by firepower the crime lords could never have comprehended.

When all was said and done, nearly 25 men and women lay dead. All six limousines burned furiously. The building, not to mention the entire immediate vicinity resembled a war zone in Iraq.


In the hills overlooking the site, a broad-shouldered blue-eyed man with a blue baseball cap covering dirty blond hair poured water over the heated barrels of his Browning (or "Ma Deuce" as he lovingly called it). While he waited for the weapon to cool, he disengaged the large box that had caught the spent brass, flipped closed a lid on the gun side and placed it in a small wagon. He then picked up thick workman’s gloves from the conveyance, put them on and hefted the machine gun off its tripod, placing it on the wagon. The stand soon followed. Moments later, he wheeled the wagon along a faint path into the undergrowth.

Nearby, another man, who looked Oriental but not quite like someone of Japanese, Korean or Chinese descent, broke down his mortar and, together with the remaining charges in a burlap bag, made his way deeper into the woods.

The last member of the deadly trio surveyed the carnage through hi-tech binoculars that adjusted distance and range at the touch of a button. When he pulled them down, he revealed a face that had obviously seen far too much in its short life. A long and jagged scarred occupied his right cheek, running from just under his eye all the way to his ear lobe. An inch or so higher and he might have been totally blind, as he had already lost his left eye, the socket covered by a black patch. And when he reached down to pick up his rocket launcher, the gloves on his hands slipped forward enough to reveal the beginnings of hideous burns.

He said nothing as he followed his compatriots into the darkness of the copse of trees just as the cacophony of police sirens in the distance grew louder.