With our change of plans, we now had to cut south. Before we crossed the road, we checked either side once more to make sure no dock workers were around. I got out from our cover and looked down the road. Nothing.

  “Left side, clear”, I said.

  “Right side, clear”, James replied.

  We raced across the road, keeping low in case that situation changed. After following that southbound road for some time, we arrived at the southern wall of the port and turned back east. The drone footage showed that the port authority office was a short distance away. It was a two story building, with the second floor having windows running along the outside. The roof was a came to a point at the center, making it into effectively a guard tower.

  As we grew close to the building I would see the occasional thermal signature. just members of the union going between the warehouses deeper in and the entrance. We could hear them playing music and laughing. They hadn't noticed us yet.

  When we were just a building away from the port authority office, Max called for us to stop, “Alright team. I know we all hear the dockworkers over ways. We should send two into the building, and keep two out to keep security.”

  “Okay, in that case, you and Valencia head in. James and I can hold the fort out here”, Alex replied.

  “This is all good and well, but how are we supposed to actually carry these storage drives? We don't exactly have any bags”, I interrupted the two with.

  The rest of the team looked at me for a moment, dumbfounded.

  “That's actually a good point”, James replied.

  “Fuck, I'll call up dispatch, and see if we can't get any support from the drone team. Until then, you two just go in, and grab any computer storage you can find”, Alex ordered.

  I sighed before running to and stacking onto the door. Max stacked up behind me, waiting for me to go in. I flipped my eyes to night vision, and tried the handle. The door was locked, but the door wasn't secure. It was a simple wooden door with a glass window. I gave the window a quick jab, shattering it.

  I quickly reached into the door, and undid the lock, letting us inside.

  I opened the door, and entered the office, Max following behind. The office was a simple open room setup, with 7 cheap metal desks in the room lining the close and far wall. From the entrance, the room was wider than long, and on the far side of the room was a staircase going to the second floor. There were cork-boards showing off workplace programs and regulations hanging from painted metal walls. I-beams stood next to every desk creating a natural walking path, and at the top of the beams were joists running along the ceiling.

  Max and I started our destructive work. We had found the computers were locked down, so we would have to break the locks to gain access to the storage drive cages inside of the boxes. Once finished getting the drives out, we began to stack them on the desk closest to the door. Soon we were finished with the first floor, the carcasses of 7 computers littered on the ground.

  “Max, I’m going upstairs. Gotta check if there’s any drives up there.” I told Max.

  Max just nodded his acknowledgment.

  I crept up the stairs, trying to stay as quiet as possible. There was a distinct click on the metal stairs as I took each step up, until I eventually hit another landing. There was a door similar to the front door for the head of the office. This one was luckily unlocked. I opened the door and entered the office.

  This office was significantly nicer to the one downstairs. The walls were wood paneled or at least made to look that way. On all four sides of the room were long windows, giving a view of the surrounding area of the dockyard. There were a couple of paintings depicting old ships. One being from the age of sail and the other being an old ironclad steam ship. The desk looked to be made from walnut, housing a nicer monitor for the computer somewhere within. The manager’s desk had a nice office chair behind it and chairs in front.

  I hopped behind the desk and checked under the desk. There were wires going from the monitor through the desktop, underneath, and into the left hand side which was a cabinet. The cabinet door had a lock on it, and once more, I broke the lock to reveal the computer within. I ripped the side panel off, grabbed the drives, and quickly got up to leave.

  My eyes strayed outside, and I saw the entrance. People were sitting in lawn chairs around burn barrels. There was eating, drinking, and smoking all around. I saw a few of the dock workers dancing poorly with a portable speaker, the bassy music wafting up to us. By the time the sound got to us it was a muddled facsimile of the original songs. I hurried down the stairs and added the drives I got from upstairs to the pile.

  I headed back outside, meeting up with James and Alex. I was about to let the two of them know we were just about done inside, when I noticed something rapidly approaching us. A longshoreman was heading toward our position from the direction of where we made our ingress.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Team, check drone 2’s feed. I think one of the guys we let pass found the evidence we hadn’t cleaned up.” I whispered to the two of them.

  “We need to take this guy out before he gets to the entrance alerts the whole team there”, Alex said, sullen. “James, Valencia, you two need to take this guy out.”

  The three of us piled on inside to the second floor of the manager’s office, opening the windows. I checked the drone feed, and noticed the man was running the same route we had taken to get to the port authority office. James and I would get a small window to hit the target and at a poor shooting angle. I stood, bracing my rifle on the side of window, whereas James was kneeling, bracing his on the base. I flipped my eyes to thermal vision and turned my gun sight camera to night mode.

  My heart was pounding.

  Bu-Bum. Bu-Bum.

  I took deep breaths, trying to slow my heart rate. I focused the gun sight camera downrange, waiting. I tracked the worker as they ran through the drone footage. He turned the corner. As the man came into view, I saw three visions of the man. The drone footage of him set in night vision. The gun cam with high contrast infrared, showing targeting data on how to aim better, and my own eyes in thermal vision.

  “Now!”, I thought.

  I squeezed the trigger, and again, and again. In all I fired three times to the man’s chest. James’ rifle reported 4 shots, each shot drifting further up. My eyes showed a colorful splash as the 7 shots hit the worker from the chest to the face. The gun camera simply notified, “target eliminated”, and the drone footage showed the Longshoreman slumping to the ground, lifeless and bleeding.

  The muddled sound of music stopped, and the drone of voices from the entrance quieted down. The noise of our little engagement had spooked them, and were most assuredly not going to like what we had just done. The noise that grew louder on the other hand, was the high-pitched whine of a drone’s electric engines. The drone team really chose a great time to fly down here to pick up those drives.

  The team and I ran down the stairs of the port authority office. I quickly grabbed the drives off the desk nearest the exit and ran outside, behind everyone else. The drone had gotten close enough for me to get to work. The drone had a thick plastic bag hastily affixed to the hull with tape. The drone landed, and I stuffed the drives into the bag while calling up the drone team.

  “Drone team, get this out of there NOW! I think we’ve been compromised.” I whisper shouted

  to our support.

  “Understood, exfiltrating the drone now”, they acknowledged.

  The drone lifted off, flying above and away from the port. Nearby, I could hear the scuffle of shoes on pavement growing in volume.

  “Team, I think it’s time to get out of here. Vernan’s welcome team will probably treat us similarly to how we treated them”, Max said in a controlled panic.

  We were pretty close to the warehouse 17. We started sprinting toward there, trying to put ground between us and the port authority. We ran for a bit and ducked into a loading bay where cargo trucks were currently parked in order to catch our breath.

  We hadn’t noticed the dock worker come up until he spoke.

  “Well, well, well. It looks like I found OCP’s lapdogs sneaking around. How about you come with me, and we go meet the boss. I’m sure he’d love to show you how the union treats guests.”

  The dockworker had us dead to rights. He had an old mass-produced semi auto rifle aimed right at us. We knew that we could take a pistol round at distance, but a point-blank rifle shot was something none of us wanted to try. I had frozen for half a second, and was about to dearly pay the price.

  “Yeah, yeah, how about we do that? Let's just get moving right along.”, Alex said.

  In a moment so swift, that I barely registered it, Alex had drawn his pistol and fired from the hip, dumping the magazine into the chest of the dock worker. He shot 17 times. The pistol was not silenced. For 17 times, Alex had alerted everyone in the dockyard to where we were. We were fucked.

  “What the fuck was that?” James yelled.

  “Jungle work”, answered Alex.

  The sound of angry Longshoreman's Union workers was growing louder.