Shadow Watch pp-3 Read online

  He lifted the radio back up to his mouth, taking advantage of a lull in the fire to get his orders out.

  “—a couple more scattered behind that mound of dug-up soil over to the left. The rest are still clustered between the jeeps,” he shouted. “My squad’s the shortest distance from that crane, and I think we can swing around back of it pretty quick. I’m going to need Squads Two and Three to go up on the bulldozers. Stick to the right of the road…”

  Less than thirty seconds later, his instructions completed, Carlysle signed off and led his team from the protection of their chase car, running hard toward his self-assigned target.

  * * *

  Thibodeau hastened through the dimness of the corridor, rifle across his chest, eyes moving alertly from side to side. His old jungle recon instincts had kicked in like voltage, heightening every sense.

  Seconds ago he had called for backup, sending the message out wide so it would be squawked by his ground patrols as well as Cody’s team in the monitoring station. Then he’d moved on ahead without waiting for a reply. It might be somebody would be available to help, it might be they wouldn’t, but there was no way he could wait around to find out.

  He’d made his need clear; the rest was out of his hands.

  He turned a bend in the corridor, another, a third, and then stopped abruptly where it forked off in opposite directions. There was still no sign of the men he was trailing. But the path he’d followed had been the only one running from the loading dock. Up until this point. The hallway on the right would take him onto the main floor of the storage bay, the one on his left to a freight elevator that, as he recalled, rose to a catwalk that spanned the bay about halfway up toward its ceiling.

  Which would the invaders have taken? A little while back he’d have figured it was fifty-fifty they’d have gone either way. But the evidence was that they had not stumbled upon this place by chance, that they’d known in advance how to gain access and had a specific goal in mind. And if they were familiar with the building’s layout, it stood to reason they would head straight for the storage bay, where ISS elements were actually kept and maintained.

  Okay, then, he thought. Odds were they had gone down the right-hand corridor. But did that mean he ought to do the same? He was one against several… exactly how many he didn’t know. It would be suicidal to plunge headlong into the thick of things. The principles of engagement ought to be the same here as in any battle. While they had numbers in their favor, the edge would go to whoever held the high ground.

  Thibodeau stood there another second or two, feeling constricted in the narrow sterility of the corridor. Then he hefted his weapon, his mind made up.

  Turning left, he rushed toward the elevator.

  * * *

  Carlysle had approached the mobile crane from its left side and gotten within about three yards of it, the rest of the squad close at his heels, when he thrust his hand out and signaled them to stop behind a pile of bulldozed earth and pebbles. He wanted to take one last look at the invaders before commencing his attack.

  The high-intensity lights from the choppers showed a half-dozen of them spread out behind the crawler’s ringer, a sort of metal apron used to balance its weight when the boom was telescoped upward. This huge configuration was like a circular wall that gave the invaders excellent cover — but the flip side was that it also impeded their field of view and hampered their ability to follow the chase squad’s movements. Even the electronic imaging devices on their weapons were of little use unless the guns were pointed directly over or around the ringer’s edge. The instant one of them lowered his weapon he was blind, whereas the chase squads had their helicopters in continuous radio contact, reporting on the raiding party’s positions, tracking them minute by minute.

  Carlysle had made the most of the opposition’s handicap, leading his team across exposed stretches of ground in short, rapid sprints. But their job was to take the invaders, and to accomplish that they would have to break from hiding and open themselves up to fire. There was no way to avoid it.

  Now he waved his hand briskly in the air to get his men moving again. They raised their weapons and buttonhooked around to where the invaders were huddled behind the ringer.

  By the time the invaders realized they were under attack Carlysle’s men were almost on top of them, dashing up from behind, their VVRS rifles chattering in their hands. Two of the invaders went down instantly, surprised expressions on their faces. Then the remaining four returned fire with their own guns. Carlysle saw Newell fall to his right, his leg covered in blood. Pivoting toward the shooter, he squeezed a burst from his weapon that knocked him backward off his feet. Another invader swung his rifle up at Carlysle in retaliation, but was hit by one of Carlysle’s men before he could trigger a shot. Moaning and clutching his bloody middle, he rolled onto his side and drew himself into a tight ball.

  The remaining two tried making a run for it. Carlysle swung his weapon in their direction and tilted its muzzle toward the ground and fired a short burst at their heels.

  “Hold it!” he shouted in Spanish. That was a tongue they were certain to understand regardless of where on the continent they were from, the lingua franca all regional Sword ops were instructed to use when addressing an unidentified hostile. “Both of you, drop your guns and get down on your bellies!”

  They stopped running but stayed on their feet, holding onto the rifles.

  Carlysle fired into the ground behind them again, spraying up dirt.

  “On your bellies, you sons of bitches!” he said. “Now!”

  This time they listened and went down, hands behind their helmets. A moment later Carlysle and his men kicked their guns aside, twisted their arms behind their backs, and got them flex-cuffed.

  Carlysle ran over to Newell and crouched to check out his leg wound.

  “Lay still,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

  Newell looked up at him, managed a nod.

  Carlysle took a breath.

  It felt as if it was the first one he’d had in a while.

  * * *

  The payload storage bay was an enormous space enclosing three elevated work platforms of sizable dimensions, as well as an interconnected assembly of catwalks, bridge cranes, and other types of metal rigging designed to ease the movement and transfer of equipment between these platforms. Rows of large office windows looked down upon the vaulting room on two sides. A beehive of corridors, elevator shafts, tunnels, and stairwells not only linked it to the rest of the warehouse and manufacturing complex, but also to different buildings within the ISS compound.

  After eliminating the guards outside the warehouse — stealing up on them had been simplicity itself — Yellow Team had entered through its loading dock, raced through several winding passageways, and finally pushed through a set of double doors that gave into the storage bay, where the team’s designated leader, Heitor, planned to drop their satchel charges. Each of the two black canvas bags contained fifteen pounds of TNT, enough high explosive to bring down the steel beam supports underneath the work platforms, the space station hardware on top of them, and quite possibly the walls of the room around them.

  It was much more than the saboteurs had thought they would be able to accomplish. Surely not even Kuhl had expected them to get this far into the compound, Heitor mused.

  Now he hastened to one of the platforms, slipped a satchel charge off his shoulder, and placed it at the foot of a tall support post. Both timer pencils he was using had been preset to a ten-minute delay, an acceptable opening in which to get out before the blast. Silent and vigilant, their weapons held ready across their bodies, his teammates stood watch behind him in the central aisle. The vast room around them was dark except for the few widely spaced fluorescents normally left on after the close of daily operations.

  Crouching at the foot of the support, Heitor removed the timer pin to initiate the detonation sequence. Then he quickly went to the next platform and dropped his other charge.

  I
t was just as he pulled the second pin that Thibodeau stepped from an elevator onto one of the flying catwalks and, looking out over the expansive floor of the storage bay, was shocked to discover what was happening below.

  * * *

  “Thibodeau’s backup is on the way,” Delure said. “I pulled four men from the office complex, another six off other details.”

  “How long before they reach him?” Cody asked from his station.

  “Could be as long as ten minutes for some of them.”

  “Not good enough,” Cody said. He produced a harsh sigh and turned to Jezoirski. “What about Felix? How fast can we bring him to Thibodeau?”

  “Give me a sec to call up a floor plan of the building.” Jezoirski tapped his keyboard, scanned the screen in front of him. “ ’Hog’s in the Level 5 propulsion lab—”

  “How fast?”

  Jezoirski studied the schematic, then lifted his face. “There’s a connecting walkway between the research and warehouse complexes. We can move him straight along this corridor right here to the elevator, then down three levels to the walkway,” he said, plotting a course across the screen with his finger. “From there it might need a minute, maybe a minute and a half to reach the warehouse, another couple to get down to the payload storage bay.”

  “That’s at least six minutes.”

  Jezoirski nodded. “Best we can do.”

  “Suppose we’ll have to live with it then,” Cody said. Sweat glistened in the furrow above his lip. “All right, let’s hurry up and get the ’hog rolling.”

  * * *

  The earthmovers were parked near a ditch they had scooped out of the ground, and had offered solid cover to the invaders until the helicopters marked their positions. As they came under intense fire from a chase squad now, the group of invaders scurried down into the ditch, where they pressed up against its sides and began shooting over its stony rim.

  The Skyhawks stuck to them like the predatory birds that were their namesakes, one nailing the tracked vehicles with its SX-5 searchlight, the other shining its light directly into the trench.

  “Nest’s ready to be cleaned out,” the chopper pilot above the ditch radioed the ground team.

  “Roger, we’re on it,” its leader replied.

  He turned the barrel vents of his rifle to their closed setting and ordered his squad to move.

  The chopper pilot stayed on the horn to guide their advance, and continue reporting on the position of the invaders. As he hovered over the bowl-shaped ditch, the incandescent brilliance and swirling gun smoke inside it gave the eerie illusion that he was peering down into a lava pit filled with almost a dozen trapped human beings.

  But the situation below was such that the distance between illusion and reality rapidly closed. The chase squad attacked in a flanking rush, looping around the dozers and front-end loaders to hose the ditch with their guns. Although return fire was heavy, they had the cold confidence of men who had stolen the offensive and gained a maneuverability their opposition had lost. Surrounded, their FAMAS weapons’ targeting systems overloaded by the unsparing glare of the searchlights, the invaders had in fact run themselves into a trap.

  One of them tumbled down the side of the trench, soil and pebbles spitting up around him. A second rose to trigger an explosive round, but was slammed off his feet by a blaze of fire.

  A third sprang up and looked briefly as if he might attempt a suicidal charge over the rim… but then he backed off, tossed his weapon aside, and dropped facedown onto the bottom of the ditch in surrender, his hands stretched above his head.

  The chopper pilot watched another invader follow suit and disarm, then another, then the rest seemingly all at once. A moment later the chase squad’s leader gave the hand signal to suspend fire, followed by a thumbs-up to the pilot.

  He smiled and returned the gesture. His searchlight would make it impossible for those on the ground to see it, but what the hell.

  Disengaging his auto-hover control, he skipped off to another spot where he might be needed, the other chopper close behind.

  * * *

  Thibodeau would never know what caught the attention of the invader standing lookout on the warehouse floor — the slight movement of his fingers when he raised the gas pressure in his rifle barrel, the click of the hand guard as it locked into its new setting, or maybe something else completely.

  In the end the only thing that mattered was the invader’s bullet, and the damage it did to him.

  For Thibodeau, it all happened in what his combat buddies used to call slow time. There was the surprising realization that he’d been spotted as the invader’s weapon angled up in his direction. There was a spark of alarm inside him, cold and bright, like winter sunlight glinting off ice. Then he felt his reflexes kick in, felt himself reacting, and was sure his reaction was quick enough… should have been quick enough anyway. But as he ducked down below the rail the very air seemed to gain thickness and density, to resist him. It was as if he was sinking through jelly.

  And then there was a loud crack from below, and something walloped him on the right side, and he felt heat spread through his stomach and went crumpling onto the floor of the catwalk as time resumed its normal speed like a train jolting from the station.

  Thibodeau tried to get up, but his body was all deadweight, somehow apart from him. He lay half on his belly, looked down at himself, and saw that his vest hadn’t been penetrated, that the hit was nothing but a fluke, the trajectory of the bullet having carried it up into the space between the bottom of the vest and his stomach, some goddamned nasty bit of gris-gris. And now here he was, blood draining out of him to the floor’s treaded runner, filling the spaces between the treads, flowing down along them in thin scarlet streams — when had he ever stepped on Satan’s tail to earn this one?

  He heard the crash of footfalls, managed to lift his cheek off the floor so he could see more than the blood and the railing in front of him.

  The man who’d shot him was clambering up the metal risers to the catwalk, a second invader right behind him. The two of them coming to finish him off.

  Furiously wishing to God that he knew where he’d dropped his rifle, Thibodeau turned his head downward and saw to his amazement that was it still in his right hand, his fingers clutched around the grip, its barrel jacket pressed almost vertically against his side.

  He dropped his cheek to the floor again, dropped it into a pool of his own blood, no longer able to keep it up. He was funneling all his willpower into getting the hand to move. He told it to move, begged it to move, and when it failed to respond silently began cursing it, demanding that it quit giving him bullshit, insisting angrily that it could fuck with him later on, could fall right off his shoulder if that was how it had to be, but that right now it was going to obey him and raise the goddamned rifle.

  Thibodeau heard himself take a racking breath. He could see the invaders in their black helmets and uniforms, getting closer, pounding up the stairs.

  Come on, you bastard, he thought. Come on.

  And then suddenly his arm was coming up, dragging the gun with it, dragging it through his spilled blood, getting its barrel under the railing and pointed down at the stairs.

  He triggered the rifle and felt it rattle against his body, spraying the stairs with rounds. The invaders almost collided with each other as they halted in their tracks and shot back with their own weapons. Bullets whizzed over Thibodeau’s head, tocking like hailstones against the projecting edge of the catwalk and the wall behind him. Recovered from their surprise at being fired upon, seeing that Thibodeau was badly wounded, the two invaders were coming at him once again, crouching, their guns stuttering as they began climbing the stairs. A third man, meanwhile, had opened fire from the aisle below.

  Thibodeau pumped out another burst, but knew he was weakening, knew his clip would be empty soon, knew he was nearly finished.

  Laissez les bons temps rouler—wasn’t that what he’d told Cody earlier? Let the good times roll
, roll on to the very last, take me rolling down nice and easy, amen, God, amen, he thought half deliriously.

  And fired again at the invaders with the remainder of his strength and ammunition, braced for what he was certain would be the final moments of his life.

  * * *

  “Thibodeau’s down,” Delure said. “Christ, we’ve got to do something.”

  “Give me the ’hog’s position,” Cody replied. He was staring at pictures being sent by ceiling-mounted surveillance cameras in the payload storage bay. Now under the remote control of the monitoring room, their feeds normally appeared on a television screen every ten minutes in a rotational sequence that included feeds from other medium- and high-security buildings, and that should have been automatically overridden in the event of a trespass, with the system tripping an alarm and locking its visuals upon the area that had been breached. But the cameras’ regular transmissions had been neglected as the attack at the compound’s periphery gathered momentum, and the invaders had apparently gained entry to the warehouse through authorized means, defeating the override.

  It was a lapse whose consequences had become terribly clear to Cody’s team in the past several minutes.

  Jezoirski was looking closely at the hedgehog’s video transmissions. “Felix is at the warehouse… about thirty feet down the corridor it’ll bear left, take another elevator down to the storage bay….”

  “You said that means, what, another minute until it’s actually on that catwalk?”

  Jezoirski nodded. “That’s my estimate, yeah.”

  “Thibodeau might not last that long,” Delure said. “I’m telling you, Cody, he needs our help right now.”