'They brought him in about a half hour ago on the end of a chain,' MacDonald said, 'beat to shit, and now they're hauling him around like a goddamn dog.'
'We want him alive,' the Louisiana sergeant said.
'Fine with me,' MacDonald shrugged. 'Okay, here's what we'll-'
At that moment, a pair of crashing gunshots rang out, followed by the sound of a loud, pulsing alarm that echoed through the huge underground facility.
The volley of gunfire in the distant corridor sent Lisa Abercombie running back into the command-and-control room, where she found Dr. Morito Asai trying to follow the movements of the invading law-enforcement officers on a bank of monitors as he spoke into his headset microphone. The communications technician had long since disappeared.
'Who are they?' Abercombie demanded as she closed and locked the glass-paneled door behind her.
'I don't know yet.' Asai shook his head as he continued to adjust one of the security cameras.
'Look, there!' he said, pointing to the main screen.
'Who… wait a minute!' Lisa Abercombie's eyes bulged. 'That's Paxton! He's supposed to be dead!'
'And Agent Stoner, too,' Asai said as he switched over to the outside helipad camera. He focused on the huge agent who was guarding the entry into the facility.
'And Takahara, and… oh, my God, Lightner, he's here!' Lisa Abercombie whispered as Asai focused security camera number twelve on his easily recognizable face.
'Yes, definitely him,' Asai smiled as he hit a button with his foot and spoke into his headset microphone.
'Maas, I can see eight intruders outside the lower-level stairwell. One of them is Lightner.'
'Ah, gut!' The German assault-group leader's voice echoed over the speakers.
Then Asai and Abercombie whirled around with a start, Asai going for his shoulder-holstered semiautomatic pistol pistol, as Paul Saltmann entered the control room with a Smith amp; Wesson. 44 Magnum revolver in his muscular hand.
'Christ! You scared the shit out of me,' Lisa Abercombie gasped as she glared at her intelligence specialist. 'What the hell is going on out there?'
'Looks to me like MacDonald and Brickard changed sides,' Saltmann said as he glanced over at one of the monitors and saw the two combat-uniformed soldiers. 'How many of them are there?'
'Not so many,' Asai shrugged as he took his hand away from the grip of the small automatic. 'Maybe ten at the most.'
Saltmann smiled and shook his curly head sadly. 'Those poor bastards. Maas can handle that many by him- Oh, shit!' The intelligence specialist blinked, his eyes widening in surprise as he stared at one of the far monitors.
'What's the matter?' Abercombie demanded, and then stared in horror at the row of camera monitors that showed the expanse of land surrounding the facility. Each of the six small screens showed at least two assault-type helicopters landing and unloading armed combatants.
Saltmann shook his head and turned to Asai. 'Can you tell who they are?'
Dr. Morito Asai made several rapid adjustments to the control panel. The camera lenses zoomed in until all three of them could easily read the lettering on the raid jackets and the sides of the helicopters.
'FBI and U.S. Army,' Lisa Abercombie whispered. 'My God, what are we going to do?'
Dr. Morito Asai turned to look at Abercombie, and she realized that he was waiting for her to make a decision.
It occurred to her then that she might have a chance, after all, if she could tell her story to the right people… to someone who would appreciate the significance of what they had tried to do and the magnitude of the risks that were necessarily involved.
Someone who would understand.
'Tell Maas that we must surrender immediately. There are too many of them for us to fight,' she said to the Japanese team leader, who nodded solemnly and turned back to his control board.
Paul Saltmann raised the. 44 Magnum and triggered off a high-velocity round that blew Dr. Morito Asai out of the console chair like a rag doll. The concussion sent Lisa Abercombie staggering back against the glass wall in shock, her hands clenched tightly over her ears.
'Why did you do that?' she shrieked, deafened by the explosive force of the contained gunshot, unable to hear the words even as she screamed them.
'Sorry, folks, but we are not going to surrender,' Saltmann said evenly. He shifted the aim point of the powerful handgun in his two-handed grip and fired a second expanding. 44 bullet. The creator of ICER, hit square in the chest, was flung backward through the shattering glass wall.
Paul Saltmann checked to make sure that no one else was around, moved up to the control board and called up the menu on the computer screen. He selected 'Security,' typed in his password, and selected 'Destruction,' typed in a second password, checked his watch, typed in the numerals 45, selected 'Activate,' and then 'Confirm.'
Then, after working through a similar set of commands to cancel all other passwords out of the system, Paul Saltmann ran out into the tunnel corridor leading to the ICER team's quarters while red warning lights began to blink overhead and a blaring alarm began to pulse and echo through the building.
No one had bothered to tell Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald that the engineers who created the Whitehorse Cabin training facility had incorporated an interesting twist into the design of the lower-level command-and-control center: namely, the destruct sequence overrode the manual settings and automatically closed the five exterior emergency doors that provided access to the secured facility.
Dwight Stoner discovered this when a heavy concrete door suddenly started to roll across the twelve-foot opening. The crippled agent took one last look at the rapidly approaching helicopters, shrugged, and barely managed to jump inside the access tunnel before the leading edge of the six-inch-thick panel slammed into the locking mechanism on the opposite side, effectively sealing off the facility from outsiders.
Shaking his head and mumbling to himself, Dwight Stoner grabbed his crutch in one hand, a twelve-gauge shotgun in the other, and began hobbling down the sloping corridor toward the sound of distant gunfire, barely audible over the pulsing alarm.
The stairwell leading to the upper level of the training facility had become a free-fire battle zone.
As the agents, state wildlife officers, and military instructors moved up the stairs to the upper level behind the concussive blasts of flash grenades and directed gunfire, and the ICER counterterrorists continued to retreat, both sides shot out lights to conceal their position and their intended movements. As a result, most of the available light in the smoke-filled stairwell and upper-level hallways came from red emergency lights pulsing in a synchronous rhythm with the echoing alarm.
And thanks to the frenzied antics of Gunter Aben and Carine Mueller, who delayed the raid team's advance with bursts of 9mm submachine gun fire, the bullet-pocked stairs and hallways were now slippery with blood and expended brass casings.
Of the ten men who had begun the raid from the deceptive landing of the white-painted helicopter, two Louisiana officers were dead and four others-Brickard, Lightstone, Paxton, and the Louisiana sergeant-had been wounded.
On the ICER team side, Carine Mueller was now bleeding from the nose-the result of being too close to the stairwell door when a flash grenade went off-and limping from a ricocheting chunk of buckshot in her upper thigh. Gunter Aben had sustained at least four or five minor wounds, which hadn't slowed him down at all. He continued to dive and twist and roll from one barricade to another, sending three- and four-round bursts of 9mm ball ammo at anything that moved in the reddish-streaked darkness.
Farther back in the forestlike Hogan's Alley, Gerd Maas worked with cool, calm, and deliberate movements to set the stage for his latest, and possibly his most exhilarating, brush with death. He ignored the curses and screams of Alex Chareaux as Kimiko Osan guarded her assault group leader's back with careful sweeps of her laser-aimed Colt Commando submachine gun.
When Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald and Special Agent Mike Takahara burst into the lower- level command-and-control room, they first spotted the bloody, lifeless body of Dr. Morito Asai, then looked out through the broken glass and discovered Lisa Abercombie, equally dead.
Both men looked up when the curly-haired man in the distinctive blue FBI raid jacket stepped into the room.
