375: Chapter 375 Mole Breaks Through the Soil, Iron Centipede Crushes

The whole town was waiting.

Five kilometers east of the town, a complex surrounded by three-meter-high reinforced concrete walls was one of the largest scam compounds under Chen Feng's command—the "Poipet Wealth Center."

The compound covered about sixteen hectares, square and solid like a military fortress.

The top of the wall was lined with two layers of razor wire, and each corner had a steel observation tower, each equipped with a knock-off Type 56 squad machine gun and a searchlight.

Inside the compound were six dormitory buildings, two "office areas," as well as a power room, a canteen, and a material warehouse.

In the basement, four hundred and seventy-one "employees" abducted to this place were locked up—from the Dragon Kingdom, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and even Malaysia. The oldest was sixty-two, and the youngest was only fourteen.

The security chief of the "Poipet Wealth Center" was named Pu En, in his forties, a retired Cambodian Army sergeant.

He had worked in Poipet for eight years, rising from a thug to security chief. During this time, he had handled three riots, seventeen escape attempts, and countless "customer complaints"—the customers, of course, were not the victims, but the heads of the scam syndicates who rented the workstations and scripts.

Pu En's style of doing things was simple: catch the escapee, beat them with an electric baton for five minutes, then lock them in the basement solitary confinement cell, giving them only water and no food for seven days.

Over the past eight years, the fingernail marks on the walls of the basement solitary confinement cell could piece together a dictionary.

At this moment, Pu En stood in the center of the compound courtyard, lecturing the one hundred and twenty armed guards he had brought.

"Listen up," he said, holding an electric baton. The arc at the tip of the baton flashed with blue-white light in the pre-dawn darkness. "There is a war going on outside. But it is not aimed at us. We are not at the border, not in Pursat Province, not at some Cardamom Pass. We are in Poipet. Poipet has the Cambodian military, the Ream base invested in by the Japanese, and big casinos invested in by various countries. The Thai Army won't bomb this place; it's not worth it."

He pointed with his chin toward the wall.

"But if anyone tries to run during the chaos, or if anyone outside tries to sneak in during the chaos—what did I say? The first time doesn't count as a warning."

He pressed the switch on the electric baton, and the arc crackled.

"The second time counts."

The one hundred and twenty guards were all armed—knock-off Type 56s and a few shotguns. They saluted Pu En and dispersed toward their respective posts. The searchlights swept across the inner edge of the wall, dragging long, slowly moving spots of light on the ground.

Pu En returned to the main control room. This main control room was located on the second floor of the main building. On the wall were sixteen surveillance screens, covering every wall, every iron gate, and every corridor of the compound. Pu En poured a cup of coffee from a thermos and placed it on the table, his eyes scanning the screens—

The screen flickered. It wasn't a power outage, it was a flicker—all screens showed extremely short-lived static simultaneously, then recovered. It was no more than 0.2 seconds. Pu En thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, rubbed his eyelids, and continued drinking coffee.

What he didn't see was that at that instant, an "iron centipede" electronic warfare platform at an altitude of three thousand meters above the compound fired a directional microwave pulse toward the direction of the main control room. The energy of this pulse was not strong enough to burn out the equipment, but it was enough to make all surveillance cameras lose the image for the second they rebooted. In that very second, six figures wearing "Shadow Dancer-3" optical camouflage crossed the eastern section of the wall.

They didn't climb over the wall. They drilled out from under the wall.

Night Owl's brother unit, "Shadow Blade-7," had used a tracked micro-tunneling robot in the past two hours to dig a two-meter-deep narrow path from an abandoned drainage culvert one hundred and fifty meters away from the wall, leading directly beneath the power distribution room on the first basement level of the compound. The cross-section of the tunnel was no more than eighty centimeters square, enough for a soldier to crawl in on one knee. When Pu En was lecturing, the six "Shadow Blade-7" members had already silently passed through the tunnel and broken out from under the floor tiles of the first basement level's power distribution room.

This was a miniaturized version of the "Mole" tactical tunneling system put into use after Zhang Cheng's military reform—the last time it appeared before the world was during the Mandalay siege, when it drilled through the roof of the Myanmar Army's underground command post. Now, its drill bit was so quiet that one could hear the rustling sound of mud being ground up by the spiral blades.

4:03 AM.

An armed guard was leaning outside the door of the power distribution room smoking. He heard a faint friction sound behind him—like a mouse running in the wall—and didn't pay any attention, flicking the ash from his cigarette. The next second, a hand wearing a carbon fiber glove reached out from behind his head, covering his mouth, while the other hand twisted his gun-wielding wrist behind his back. The muzzle of a silenced pistol pressed against the outside of his right scapula, and a shot was fired into the non-lethal area of his lung lobe. The guard collapsed to the ground, was dragged into the power distribution room, tied up, and injected with a dose of rapid sedative. Before he completely lost consciousness, the last image he saw was a pair of cold-light tactical goggles and half a face with no expression beneath the goggles.

The six members figured out the structure of the entire first basement level within five minutes, confirmed the detention locations of the four hundred and seventy-one detainees, and physically accessed the surveillance system from the backup port of the main control room, obtaining all real-time footage of the compound. Through the same sixteen monitor screens Pu En used, they were in turn watching him drink coffee.

4:10 AM.

In a rubber forest on the outskirts of Poipet town, a Thai Army VN-22 infantry fighting vehicle sat quietly without lights on. The unmanned weapon station on the roof slowly turned toward the compound, and the thermal imaging screen had already marked Pu En in the main control room as an orange-red sitting shadow. The vehicle commander, Lieutenant Eka Chai, was an armored command type infused with the Advanced Death Soldier, and he said softly into the communicator: "All units in position."

Behind him, under similar rubber forest cover, sixteen armored infantry squads waited for the attack order. These squads were the "iron centipede" D-type—mixed detachments of tracked combat robots, each detachment equipped with two "iron centipedes" responsible for frontal assault, and four soldiers following up to clear. In addition, ten compounds in directions including Poipet, Pailin, Pursat, and Sihanoukville were being simultaneously assigned to their respective assault units at this moment. In Zhang Cheng's operational plan, these targets were arranged into a grid, with each grid assigned a main attack group, a blockade group, and a follow-up containment group. The note Old K wrote on the tactical briefing had only three words: "Zero escapees."

4:15 AM.

At exactly 4:15 AM, the green lights on all peripheral nodes of the ten compounds lit up simultaneously. Then, the attack was launched from all directions at once.

In Poipet, two demolition rounds fired from the direction of the abandoned rubber forest accurately hit the steel sliding gate and guard booth of the compound—the first round cut through the steel gate, and the second round blew over the guard booth. Before the sound of the explosion had dissipated, two "iron centipedes" had already rolled over the concrete rubble still tumbling in the air, and the 20mm chain gun fired short bursts, knocking apart the machine gun bunkers on the observation towers one by one. Before the fragments had a chance to all land, the assault team members under optical camouflage had already infiltrated the dormitory buildings. They moved while sticking to the corridor pillars, and their door-breaching actions were all three-second standards—advance, confirm target, disarm or neutralize. Some of the armed guards hadn't even steadied themselves from the dizziness of being woken up by the shockwave when they saw the barrels of their guns twisted toward the ceiling by a hand, and then they received a kick in the knee, falling over sideways.