Shadow Watch pp-3 Read online

  Ed nodded, his hands working the sticks. Mitch Winter was the best copilot on the installation. They thought alike and got along well, which made partnering together easy.

  He took the bird down lower as Mitch sent his message out to base and the rest of their fleet. A hundred feet beneath them, the jeeps had come to an abrupt halt, their drivers and passengers craning their heads back, staring directly up at the Skyhawk.

  Peering out his bubble window, Ed briefly released the cyclic and hit the chopper’s Starburst SX-5 searchlight. At the same time Mitch touched a button on his comm unit to shift from radio to public-address mode.

  The searchlight’s 15-million candlepower beam washed over the men in the convoy, its stark illumination transfixing them, turning night into brilliant noonday.

  Ed glanced at Mitch. “Okay, all yours.”

  Mitch nodded and raised the control mike to his lips. “Stay where you are and—”

  * * *

  “—drop your weapons!”

  Bathed in merciless light from above, Kuhl thrust his head out his open window and looked back down his row of jeeps, shielding his eyes with one hand. The command booming from the helicopter’s PA had been unequivocal. His response would be equally straightforward.

  “Open fire,” he shouted. “Ahora!”

  * * *

  The four members of Yellow Team had approached to within a few yards of the building, darting from one position of concealment to the next like specters in the night. Their probings had led them to conclude that their primary objective was too heavily guarded to be achieved, but they had been prepared with flexible alternatives and the one ahead of them looked much more vulnerable.

  Pausing behind a maintenance shed to check their weapons, they heard the burp of automatic gunfire from off near the west gate, and then the overlying sounds of cars and helicopters converging on the area.

  It might for all intents and purposes have been a prearranged cue.

  Moving as one, they slipped toward their target.

  * * *

  Bullets rattling against his underfuselage, Graham shoved forward on the cyclic and added collective to pull pitch. The cockpit’s lightweight boron shielding had literally saved his ass, but he wasn’t about to press his luck by taking any more direct hits. Not without being able to return fire owing to Brazilian restrictions against Sword’s fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft being fitted for attack capabilities. Muito obrigado to whoever came up with that one.

  As the Skyhawk banked into a steep climb, he glanced out his windscreen and quickly noted the firepower his attackers were bringing to bear. Neither the rifles nor the HMDs to which they were connected looked like anything he’d ever seen before.

  “I’m sticking around till you get a shot of those lunatics out to the chase teams, Mitch,” he shouted, nodding toward the television screen on their console. “I don’t want anybody being surprised by their hardware.”

  Mitch returned his nod and reached for the video controls. Gripping the sticks hard, Graham figure-eighted back toward the jeeps to get his nose pod aligned for a good camera angle — and then some of the gunmen abruptly jumped from their vehicles and began darting for cover.

  There was, he observed, a considerable amount available to them, mainly crawler cranes, bulldozers, excavators, wheeled compactors, and other heavy equipment that had been rolled into the area for construction of some new buildings. They were big and stationary, their sheer size making them ideal places to hide behind.

  Graham continued to orbit the scene in a weaving pattern. Out beyond the bulking machinery he saw the radial web of access routes that led in toward the installation’s hub, and turning his gaze northward, spotted the burning ruins of two chase cars on the main roadway from the motor pool. An emergency rescue vehicle and additional cars had pulled up nearby. A number of security men were walking up and down the road with long-handled mine sweepers, while others milled around the wreckage in a desperate attempt to extinguish the flames and locate survivors.

  Then he saw what had sent the invaders scrambling. Their roof lights flashing, two quick-response squads were speeding toward them on secondary access roads, one on the left, the other on the right, each three-car group escorted by a Skyhawk. They would be on top of the jeep convoy within seconds.

  “We sending down pictures yet?” he asked, glancing at Mitch.

  Mitch nodded again and gestured at the television screen. It showed a detailed IR image of the gunmen in one of the jeeps.

  “Nice shot, real nice,” Graham said. “Now let’s pray the guys on the ground are seeing them clear as we are.”

  * * *

  The pictures were just fine, coming through on the monitors of the chase cars and helicopters exactly as they appeared to Graham and Winter in the air. Moreover, the information relayed by those pictures proved invaluable to the QR squads, giving them an instantaneous heads-up on the number of invaders they would be facing, the positions they held, and the type of weapons they were carrying.

  The guns in particular looked formidable, but the men in the cars took some comfort from their own specially modified firearms. The Variable Velocity Rifle System, or VVRS, was an M16 chambered for 5.56mm dual-purpose sabot rounds and fitted with a vented barrel and rotating hand guard. A twist of the hand guard would widen or narrow the vents, increasing or decreasing the amount of blowback gas within the barrel, and thus the velocity at which the rounds were discharged. At a low velocity, the padded plastic sabots would remain around the bullets and cushion their deadly impact. At a high velocity, they would peel apart like shed cocoons, and the bruiser ammunition would turn lethal.

  There was little question about whether to use deadly force in the mind of QR squad leader Dan Carlysle as he came up on the convoy’s left flank. The men scrambling from the jeeps had killed without hesitation. Their weapons presented an obvious mortal threat. It had to be met with a willingness to respond in kind.

  Still, Carlysle wanted explicit authorization if at all possible. Some political elements in Brazil were already upset by UpLink’s powerful security presence, and would be further incited by a small war occurring on their soil. While Carlysle was ready to make an on-the-spot decision, he was aware of the diplomatic mess that might follow and preferred getting a nod from his immediate higher-up.

  Tearing along in the forward chase car, he reached for his dash microphone and hailed Thibodeau on the radio.

  * * *

  “You do what you gotta, Dan, hear me? We catch heat from the locals, soit, we’ll deal with that later.”

  “Yes, sir. Over.”

  Thibodeau clipped his radio back onto his belt, lit up a cigarette, and smoked in silence. Far out at the western edge of the compound he could hear a percussive exchange of gunfire, tires screeching, and more overlapping volleys punctuated by loud explosions. Christ, the whole thing was insane. He had not in his wildest imaginings expected to find himself in an engagement of this magnitude outside of the military. Nor did he relish giving orders and instructions from a distance, sending others into action rather than participating in it himself. But tonight the full responsibility of command had fallen upon his shoulders.

  Still, he wished he didn’t have to hear that hellish clamor.

  He dragged on his cigarette, standing outside a cluster of five low-rise concrete buildings that housed the installation’s key personnel and their families — each four stories high with between eight and ten apartments per floor, lodging a combined total of 237 men, women, and children. Thibodeau had concentrated his manpower around them in the likelihood the invaders had kidnaping or hostage taking as their goal… which was not to say there weren’t other probabilities to consider. Theft of the multimillion-dollar ISS components on base — or their design blueprints — might be an equally powerful motive for the raid, but safeguarding human lives was his foremost concern regardless.

  He stood there and thought, tobacco smoke streaming slowly out his nose. Caught shorthanded,
he was trying his best to manage the situation and make optimum use of his resources. Toward these ends, all non-security personnel had been restricted to their apartments for the duration of the crisis. Over two thirds of his available operatives had assembled around the residential complex, enclosing it in a defensive ring. He could see them on patrol now, and was confident they would hang tough against any attack.

  However, it worried him deeply that bolstering his strength here had required shifting people away from the industrial section of the compound. The detail charged with its protection was too small in number, too thinly dispersed around a large area — a weakness that could be easily exploited by determined raiders with surprise on their side. He continued to know almost nothing about them, but what might they know about the layout of the installation? The strength, tactics, and priorities of his force? From the time they’d first appeared, his opposition had led the dance while he’d reeled and stumbled trying to keep up.

  What might they know? Considering the damage they’d already inflicted, it seemed the answer was too much. Could they have used that knowledge to manipulate his decisions?

  Thibodeau thought about that a moment, his heart pounding. Mon Dieu, were they dancing him right into quicksand?

  His inspection of the scene suddenly concluded, he snapped his half-finished cigarette to the ground and started off toward the warehouse and factory buildings.

  * * *

  Taking cover behind a jeep, Antonio balanced his Barrett.50 across its hood and aimed down its reticulated scope at the lead chase car. With the car coming straight at him, he had made a split-second decision to shoot for one of its front tires, thinking it would be an easier target than the driver, whose head was ducked low behind the windshield.

  He pulled the trigger. There was a crack as the gun stock recoiled against his shoulder, then a popping out-rush of air as the tire exploded in a storm of flying rubber. The car’s front end bounced down, then up, then down. But although it slowed a little, it barely veered off course — to Antonio’s utter surprise.

  Its wheels holding to the middle of the road, the car kept moving dead-on toward the convoy of jeeps.

  * * *

  Carlysle was racing up on the jeep pulled crosswise ahead of him when he saw the twinkle of partially suppressed muzzle flash above its hood, heard a gunshot, and then was jolted hard in his seat as a bullet blew his right front tire to shreds.

  Clenching the steering wheel, he resisted the impulse to slam on his brakes, and instead tapped the pedal lightly and repeatedly with his toe. The car bounced another couple of times and tried slewing toward the right, but he held on tightly and kept it under control. In a moment he got the feel of the runflat roller that had been emplaced within the tire and was now in contact with the road, ragged bits of rubber flapping around it, its shock-absorbent elastomer surface preventing the wheel rim from being damaged, stabilizing the car, and allowing him to keep moving almost as if the shot had never been fired and his tire was still intact.

  As the invaders opened up on them, the QR squads reacted according to well-rehearsed tactical procedures. Carlysle’s trio of cars broke sharply to the left and stopped aslant the road, their wheels turned outward. The other group cut to the right shoulder of the access-way on which they were approaching and halted with their tires at a similarly extreme angle. Then the men in both squads poured out the sides of their cars, using their open doors and outturned wheels for protection.

  Carlysle had no sooner gotten into a crouch behind his door than bullets came ripping into it from several different directions at once. The man who’d been riding shotgun with him, a recent transfer from the Malaysian ground station named Ron Newell, returned fire, aiming toward the spot where he’d seen the slender outline of a rifle angling out from behind a mobile crane, and then flattening against the car just as more gunfire studded its armored surface.

  Squatting beside him, Carlysle thrust the barrel of his VVRS weapon around his door and squeezed out a long volley. He couldn’t help but wonder when their remote comer of Brazil had turned into Dodge City.

  He looked over at Newell, saw that he hadn’t been hit, and gave him a thumbs-up to indicate he was also doing okay. Then there was another burst of incoming, followed by a bright flash in the darkness, and a whistling noise that rapidly got closer and louder. An instant later some kind of explosive projectile smashed into the chase car to Carlysle’s right, detonating with a bright rush of flame, crunching in the flank of the Mercedes as if it were the side of a tin box.

  Carlysle stayed put, his ears ringing from the blast. The situation had to change, and change ASAP. He would not let his men remain pinned down behind their vehicles, where they were sitting ducks for whatever was being hurled at them by an enemy that could draw an accurate bead without breaking cover.

  His right hand around his pistol grip, he reached into the car with his left and snatched his dashboard microphone off its hook, pressing one of the mike’s control buttons as he eyed the video screen above it. The invaders’ advanced night-vision equipment was formidable, but he and his men had something else going in their favor. Something that could prove even more advantageous if used to its best capacity.

  They had the Skyhawks.

  * * *

  In the copilot’s seat of his circling chopper, Winter lowered his handset and turned toward Graham. Carlysle had just broken contact after sending up his request over a ground-to-air channel.

  “We need to peel the blankets back from over those fuckers’ heads, give our guys downstairs a better fix on where they’re shooting from,” he said above the roar of the blades.

  Graham gave him a look. “If we go any lower, it’ll be hard to avoid the ground fire.”

  Winter made a face that said he knew.

  Graham shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said. Then: “Here’s how I want it done.”

  * * *

  How Graham wanted it done was for his chopper and one of the others at the scene to pull in tight over the invaders and provide closeups of their positions, while the third aircraft continued making passes from a greater height, beaming down wide-angle images. The picture-in-picture options on the QR cars’ monitors would enable all three video feeds to be seen simultaneously, giving the chase squads a composite view of the fire zone.

  * * *

  It was, as Graham and Winter had acknowledged, a risky plan. Submachine guns burst up at the two Skyhawks the instant they dropped in altitude. Steeling himself, Graham slipped between two huge earthmoving vehicles where some of the invaders had taken cover. Bullets sprayed his fuselage as he swept over them, rattling against it like gravel.

  Graham steadied the bird and hovered. To his right, he saw the second descending Skyhawk come under heavy fire. Never a religious man, he was surprised to find himself muttering a silent prayer on behalf of its crew.

  His fingers moist around the sticks, Graham hung over the attackers for several more seconds, his camera transmitting its information to the mobile receivers. Then he throttled into high gear and leapfrogged off toward another group of invaders, hoping he’d given the ground units what they needed.

  * * *

  The guard was sprawled on his stomach, his face turned sideways so one cheek was in the dirt. His name tag read BRYCE. He had been stabbed from behind, the knife driven in below the shoulder blades and then upward and across into the soft organs. There were tiny bubbles of blood and saliva in the comer of his mouth, and they glistened in the revealing output of Thibodeau’s flashlight.

  Thibodeau knelt beside him and touched the pulse points on his wrist and neck, but felt nothing. Dead. Like the two other guards he had discovered around the corner of the building. In their case a gun, or guns, had been used. Probably, Thibodeau thought, the shots had attracted Bryce’s attention. His position suggested he had been rounding the side of the building to investigate when his killer came up and sank the knife into his back.

  Thibodeau turned his fl
ash onto the warehouse’s loading dock, and was not surprised to find its door half raised. Countless dollars had been spent on providing security for the installation — the ’hogs alone cost hundreds of thousands — but their placement had been largely intended to detect outside intruders, and in any event, no system was without gaps. While this section of the warehouse complex held important spare parts for the ISS’s laboratory racks, it was not among the handful of restricted storage or R&D areas. The level of security clearance needed to gain access was minimal. An employee swipe card taken off one of the dead guards would have been all it took.

  Rising from the body, Thibodeau stepped over to the partially open door. He would need to call for assistance, but it would take at least five minutes for the nearest men to arrive, possibly as long as ten. If he waited, what sort of damage might the intruders do in the meantime?

  Hesitant, a sick taste in his mouth, Thibodeau glanced again at the corpse on the ground. Bryce. He had a smooth, clean-shaven face and hair the color of wheat, and was maybe twenty-five years old. Barely more than a kid. He’d been new on the job and Thibodeau hadn’t known him too well. Never would now.

  Thibodeau stood there outside the warehouse entrance and looked at him. The foam of oxygenated blood on his lips was the kind that came brewing up from the lungs with a deep stab wound. His scrubbed features were still contorted with the agony of his final moments. The killer had been savage and pitiless.

  Frowning unconsciously, Thibodeau shined his flashlight through the partially open door, pushed it further up, and stepped into the darkened space beyond.

  * * *

  “We’ve got ten, twelve of them behind that big half-track crane on the near left, about half as many using the ’dozers for cover, a couple more—”

  Momentarily releasing the “talk” button of his radio, Carlysle held his breath as a stream of ammunition babbled noisily in his direction, striking the outer flank of his car. Thus far his plan was working, the chase squads’ aerial support providing a visual lock on their opponents’ positions. Those chopper pilots, opening themselves up to direct fire, putting their lives in jeopardy… if he hadn’t been busy trying to keep his own skin from acquiring any unwanted holes, he’d have been singing their praises to the sun, moon, and stars. But maybe there would be a chance to express his gratitude later.