torso, the metal peeled back by the blast, and within the remains of a human male still burned wildly. Shannon managed to twist around and spotted one of the Cleveland cops reloading his shoulder-fired missile launcher, a look of grim satisfaction visible through the clear faceplate of his helmet.
As clarity slowly returned to Shannon, she became aware that her own faceplate was spiderwebbed with cracks, and that her whole body was one giant ache from head to toe. It was best she find out now just how badly she’d been hurt. Pulling away from the RSC troopers who had been half-carrying her, she managed to stand on her own and discovered that at least her legs weren’t broken.
She shook her head to clear her vision, then threw back her helmet’s fractured faceplate and looked around as she struggled to keep up with the squad. They were about halfway down the cargo ramp, and there were no enemy troops in sight from where they were to the shoulder-high stack of palleted cargo containers that blocked off the end of the ramp. A quick count told her they were short by two people.
“Casualties?” she snapped, jogging up beside Lieutenant Priata, the Emergency Response Team leader from Cleveland ’Plex.
“Two of my people dead,” he told her—his face was hard, but she could see the pain behind his eyes. “Tripper Scott and John Rubinstein.” The names meant nothing to her, and she felt a sudden sting of guilt. He looked her up and down. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, surprised she could still hear after the concussion from the blast. “But I don’t have time for a physical.” She glanced around. “Did anyone pick up my rifle?”
“Here, ma’am.” One of the cops passed her a bullpup identical to the one she’d been carrying but with a grenade launcher mounted under the barrel. “Your stock was broken—this one belonged to Trip.”
She took the rifle without a word, checked to make sure a grenade was loaded in the tube, then took the point back from Priata.
“You two.” She gestured to the man and woman trailing their extended file formation. “Check around the other side of those pallets.” She singled out the man with the missile launcher. “You hang back and cover our rear —I don’t want any more of those armored things surprising us. Everyone else, follow me.”
While the pair she’d designated sprinted to the right side of the twenty-meter-wide ramp to flank the cargo containers, Shannon led the rest up along the left-hand wall. It was oddly silent within the high-ceilinged chamber, the battle sounds from outside only faint murmurs through the insulated walls, and Shannon felt chills running alongside a trickle of perspiration down her back.
Maintenance catwalks stretched overhead, parallel to the tracks for heavy loading equipment, choice perches for an enemy sniper, and the end of the ramp lurked in hidden menace behind the cover of dozens of cargo containers. Her eyes danced back and forth between the two threat areas, distracted here and there by the blinking lights of control panels and displays, and she began to understand how Jason must have felt as he walked through the hostile streets of Kennedy. She became conscious that she had slowed down to a crawl and made an effort to speed up while still staying alert—this wouldn’t be a good place to be if any of the Protectorate troops decided to retreat from the attack.
She dearly wished she wasn’t walking point, but the simple fact was that she’d had more tactical training and practical experience than even the ERT cops, whose most hazardous duty was probably smoking out some endorphin dealer from the city’s maintenance tunnels. Actually, she admitted to herself, she wished that Nathan were here.
Shannon trod carefully into the narrow aisle between the left-hand wall and the unbroken row of cargo containers, watching the open space beyond for any tell-tale shadows that would reveal a hidden enemy, then came to a halt as she approached the last of the containers. The line of closed security doors against the far wall could conceal anything, but the first order of business was to clear the backside of the pallets. Turning back to the rest of the squad, she motioned Priata forward and signalled to him to “watch high.”
The ERT leader nodded and backed into a standing position at the edge of the last cargo container, shoulders pressed against the bright-blue thermoplastic, rifle held at high port. Shannon fell into a crouch just in front of him, facing the line of security doors on the back wall, her weapon across her chest. She took a deep breath, then signalled Priata with a slap on the leg and dove forward on her left shoulder, gun and eyes aimed across the front of the row of pallets.
Movement at the far wall tightened her finger on her rifle’s trigger, but she let off a gram’s worth of pressure away from firing as she saw it was the two RSC troopers she’d sent around the other side of the cargo containers. The lead of the two Janitors signalled an all-clear, and Shannon motioned for them to take up a position against the far wall, watching back the way they’d come.
She turned back to the half-dozen security doors, trying to remember the rough sketch Klesko had drawn for her, and finally decided on the double-doors marked simply with an oversized “Three.” The keypad on the door yielded to the emergency override codes the Presidential Security Agent had provided, hissing open slowly, giving Shannon time enough to jump to the side out of the line of fire.
But the long, downward-slanted hallway beyond was deserted and Shannon allowed herself a breath of relief as she moved into it, waving the squad forward. The three she’d left to guard the entrance remained in place—she didn’t like depleting her already-small force by another third, but she’d like being trapped in there even less.
The squad spread into a close wedge in the wide hallway, stretched out lengthwise over twenty meters, and moved quickly down the corridor. Here and there the odd security office or utility closet beckoned and had to be checked, but all were dark and deserted as Shannon knew they would be. Klesko had told her that the real guts of the place were further down, and that was where she was sure they would be holding the President.
Finally the hallway terminated in a circular
“Back off, everyone!” she ordered, waving them back into the hallway. “On the ground.”
While her troops took up prone positions about twenty meters back into the corridor, she paced off another ten meters past the last of them, then fell into the crouch facing the door. Racking her brains to recall her brief familiarization training with the old M-46 Individual Weapon, she adjusted the grenade launcher’s sight and brought it to bear on the door.
With an expectant wince, she pulled the trigger.
She had vague ideas of going prone as the buttstock of her rifle kicked her in the shoulder, but before her body could react the hallway was filled with smoke and thunder. Shannon stood at the center of the storm of sound and heat, feeling the patter of low-velocity shrapnel off her ceramic stealth armor. Then it was past and the door was a dozen bits of twisted metal in a haze of smoke.
Shannon let her breath out in a hiss and advanced on the stairwell, not noticing the incredulous looks the men and women of her squad gave her as they rose to follow.
Quickly, they moved downward into the darkness.
Greg Jameson had just managed to drift off to sleep when the far-off rumble of an explosion brought him upright on his cot. Blinking in confusion, he stared at the bare, white walls of the storage room his captors had converted into a cell, automatically checking his watch and cursing as he realized it wasn’t there.
The Invaders hadn’t left him so much as a sharp edge with which to slit his wrists, and God knew, by now he was almost ready to try it. The only escape he’d been allowed in the month he’d been confined to the three meter by three meter room was one trip to the washroom every three hours—and, of course, the daily interrogation sessions. At first, he’d entertained thoughts of heroically resisting, defiantly refusing to answer their questions no matter what tortures they put him through, while he expertly plied them with questions and learned more about them than they did about him.
Unfortunately, his captors held no such romantic notions: he’d been unceremoniously dragged from his cell, injected with truth drugs and pumped like a cryogenic fuel tank for over three hours. Since that first session, the interrogations had become less regular and far less lengthy, but he still felt a perpetual stupor nagging at him from the lingering effects of the drugs, and his shirt was stained from the vomit that always accompanied his return to consciousness. And the most humiliating thing about the whole business was that he knew just as little now about
