We ran. Ahead of us a door opened and a man stepped out and leveled an AK-47 at us. It was the same man who had argued with the cop. Top put two into him before he could get off a shot.
The hallway ended at another T-junction. The left-hand corridor ended in a brick wall; to our right a set of heavy steel doors stood ajar. A man was trying to pull it shut when Bunny leaped forward and grabbed him by the hair and shoulder and slammed him face forward into the wall. Bunny pounded three vicious uppercuts into his kidneys. The man groaned and sagged to his knees. If he lived through all this he’d be pissing blood for a month.
“Drag him inside,” I ordered. Top guarded the hallway while Bunny then threw the dazed man like a sack of cornmeal into the next room. We flanked the doorway to provide cross-fire protection. There were four people in the room, which was a large laboratory cluttered with dozens of worktables and metal shelves of chemicals and materials. Set against one wall were two familiar-looking big blue cases. Both doors were still shut. Three of the men were Middle Eastern, two in lab coats and one dressed in jeans and a tank top. The guy with the tank top had a.45 and was swinging the barrel up when I gave him a triple-tap: two in the chest, one in the head. The men in lab coats were unarmed, but the one closest to me held a small black plastic device in one hand. The other one was already raising his hands in surrender.
The fourth man was Ollie Brown. He was strapped to a chair and his face was covered with blood.
I pointed my gun at the man with the plastic device. “Don’t do it!” I yelled in Farsi and then in several other languages.
He cried, “Seif al Din!” in a high, hysterical voice and made his move. I shot him in the shoulder to try and stop him from pressing the button on what had to be a detonator, but it was no good: it was rigged with a dead- man’s switch. Even as my bullets tore his shoulder to rags his hand flexed open. The signal was sent.
Suddenly there was a rumbling explosion on the far side of the building, the whole place shook all the way down to its foundations. The floor tiles rippled beneath our feet. Lab equipment vibrated to the edge of the tables and fell with a crash to the ground.
The man I’d shot writhed in pain, but he was laughing in triumph, still chanting, “Seif al Din!”
The Sword of the Faithful. The holy weapon of God.
The deep-throated roar of the explosions slowly subsided.
“Mother of God!” gasped Bunny.
“That oughta tell the cavalry to come running,” said Top. There was a sound in the hall and he leaned out. “Shit. We got company.”
“Walkers?” I demanded.
A barrage of bullets pinged and whined as Top ducked out of the doorway and back-kicked the door closed. Bullets pelted the heavy steel. “Not as such,” Top said dryly.
“Those are AKs,” Bunny said, listening to the gunfire. “Not our boys.”
“Cavalry’s always late,” Top muttered as he threw the locks.
Bunny grabbed the remaining scientist and punched him in the stomach then snapped plastic cuffs on him. “Deal with you later, shitbag.” He crossed to Ollie and slashed at his bonds with a folding knife. “How you doing, hoss?”
Ollie spat blood onto the floor. “I’ve had better days.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:32 A.M.
“MA’AM, I’VE LOST the signal,” reported the tech who was hunched over the communications board inside one of the ambulances. He tried another line, then another. “Cell lines are out, too. We haven’t yet set up the landline to ops. We’re blind and deaf. Everything’s being jammed by a very powerful transmitter. Has to be military grade, nothing else could cut us off this bad.”
Grace bent forward to look at his display and then tapped her earpiece, heard only a hiss.
“Ma’am,” called the tech again, “right before we lost our feeds audio picked up a change in ambient sound. I think the refrigeration units have all shut down. I got ten seconds of thermals before we went blind and it looks like the temperature inside the building is spiking.”
Allenson, Grace’s second in command, gave her a sharp look. “Mr. Church said that Captain Ledger requested backup in silence plus ten minutes.”
She turned to the tech. “Do we have that landline yet?”
“Negative. ETA five minutes.”
“Bugger that.” To Allenson she said, “This whole thing is wrong, I think Echo Team is in trouble.”
Allenson grinned. “Alpha Team is locked and loaded, ma’am.”
Grace pointed to a technician sitting in front of a screen that showed nothing but white noise. “You! You’re a runner. Find Mr. Church, tell him we have a total communications blackout. Apprise him of the temperature change. We need a full-team hit and we need it five minutes ago. Tell him the next sound he hears will be Alpha Team kicking in the door. Move!”
The runner leaped out of the van and tore across the parking lot to the fake cable news van parked outside the gates.
Grace Courtland snatched up her helmet. “Let’s go.”
By the time the team was assembled at the door one of her men had a fast-pack charge beside the knob. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled and everyone fanned back as the doorknob blew apart. The door swung violently open but beyond it was a flat gray wall. The agent pounded his fist on it. “Steel plates. Going to take a hell of a big bang to get through that.”
Then a moment later there was a second and much heavier explosion, but this one was deep inside the building. It shattered the glass in the windows and sent a shiver through the walls, then subsided into a threatening silence.
“That was inside,” Allenson said.
Another sound rent the air as heavy steel shutters slammed into place over every window in the building. Grace let out a string of vile curses and hoped that Church had the backup coming fast.
“Make me a hole, Corporal,” she snarled, but the man was already sliding the pencil detonators into place.
God, she prayed as they backed away from the explosives, don’t let this be another St. Michael’s. For one brief moment she closed her eyes and imagined Joe Ledger being dragged down by a sea of hungry white-faced ghouls. Please, God!
The side of the building exploded.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:33 A.M.
“WHAT HAPPENED?” I asked Ollie.
He shook his head like a dog shaking off fleas. “I don’t know. I was blindsided. Maybe Tasered. I remember a whole lot of pain and then it all went black. Next thing I know I’m duct-taped to a chair and some asshole is smacking me in the face and yelling in Arabic.”
Top gave him a quick once-over and found a wet burn mark on his neck just above the collar and the back of his shirt was soaked. “Looks like you got hit with a liquid Taser, boy.”
“Damn. I didn’t think those things worked that well.”
“Little dab’ll do ya,” Top said from where he knelt by the scientist I’d shot, applying compresses to the wounds.
Bullets were still whanging off the door, but so far they didn’t seem to be able to get in, and eventually they stopped firing. I don’t know if Bunny, Ollie, or Top thought that was strange, but I sure as hell did. There was a keycard station outside. How come nobody was trying to use a keycard? I almost said something to the others, but decided to keep it to myself for the moment. As the saying goes, “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean you
