Echo Six: Black Ops 7 - Tibetan Fury by Eric Meyer

greeted them with a surprised look.
    "You guys going out again. Don't they ever give you a rest?"
    Talley gave him a friendly nod. "Not too often. How are we fixed for take off?"
    "Fueled up and ready go. Just say the word."
    He went into the cargo hold, dumped his gear bag, which contained his weapons and equipment, and found the least uncomfortable position to make the journey a fraction less painful. The crew was finishing their preflight checks when a Humvee roared across the airfield and stopped close to the ramp. They assumed it had brought their equipment, but a man climbed out, walked across to the aircraft, and up the ramp. He wore the khaki working uniform of a United States Naval officer, instead of NATO issue camos. Behind him, two men began carrying a number of wooden crates aboard.
    "I thought I'd join you," Vice Admiral Carl Brooks grinned, "After you drop into Nepal, the aircraft will land in North-East India, where I have an SUV waiting to transport me across the border to our embassy in Kathmandu. I'll be controlling the operation from there. It's as near as I can make it."
    "That's good news, Sir. This op looks like it's just been thrown together. We'll be working almost blind once we're inside the country."
    "Yeah, that's what I thought. However," he delved into his briefcase, "I brought you these, photos of Prison Number 529. It's the MSS jail where they're holding Campbell."
    He passed them over. Guy joined him, and they glanced through the package. They were grainy eight by tens, black and white, and obviously taken by clandestine means. But they were enough to show what they were up against. The first shot was an aerial view, probably taken from a satellite, a blurry image of a vast complex about a kilometer outside Lhasa. It was on a flat plain, covered in a pristine blanket of snow, and with a small village almost next to the wire, probably where some of the guards lived with their families. There'd be local stores for food and other services. A brothel, the Chinese were known to recruit local women to deal with the needs of their men. But it was the prison itself that drew their attention.
    About four hundred meters square, with a high, barbed wire fence that surrounded it. Brooks saw the direction of their gaze. "Razor wire, not barbed." They nodded, "The inner fence is electrified, by the way. We're not sure of the voltage, but I guess it'll be enough. You see the guard towers?"
    "Yep."
    "Four of them, one on each corner. Each one mounts a Type 67 machine gun. That's the Chinese made 7.62mm belt-fed version of the Russian DP. There are always three men manning each tower, an NCO and two privates. They carry assault rifles, and the NCO will have a set of night vision binoculars."
    "Dogs?" Talley asked.
    Brooks shook his head. "They tried them once, but the prisoners are kept hungry, and they eat the dogs. No dogs."
    "Uh huh." He was studying another photograph. "The gate, it's the only way in or out?"
    "Yes."
    "Okay. These huts, there are twenty of them. They look big enough for forty or fifty men apiece, so eight hundred to a thousand prisoners. What's the guard strength?"
    "Correction, the total number of prisoners at Prison Number 529 stands at six thousand five hundred, give or take. They make a lot of arrests in Tibet, and they tend to pack them in."
    "Jesus, over three hundred men to a hut. They must be jammed in like sardines in a tin."
    "They are. As for the guard force, we estimate one hundred men. They rotate twelve-hour shifts, with fifty soldiers on duty at any one time. The other fifty can be roused out of bed within minutes if there's a problem."
    "I get the picture. The vehicle park is outside the main gate. That's interesting. What's this structure, in the center? Kind of a raised platform."
    "That's the execution site. They roust out the entire camp and make them watch. They also film it, and we've heard they like to replay it from time to time."
    "Nice. So that's where they'd kill