The muscles tensed in the fireman’s cheeks as he clenched his jaws. Then he relaxed. “Don’t worry about it, pal. We’re all desperate.” He dug into his jacket and found a pair of protective gloves which he handed to Callahan. “Try these.”
Callahan took the gloves and stood there as stiff and lifeless as a waxwork dummy. He held his hands palm up, as if he were cupping water. Somewhere along the way I got the feeling that Eddie and Tommy, the bodyguards, meant more to Callahan than hired muscle, but I didn’t know what was going on between them. Callahan looked like he was going into shock as he looked at the pile of concrete and metal.
“You take the right glove, I’ll take the left,” I said to Callahan. He looked at me but said nothing as I picked one of the gloves out of his outstretched hand.
I was right-handed, but my genetic engineering gave me nearly equal dexterity with both hands. I found a long, rough slab of concrete. Holding it with my gloved left hand and balancing it with my right, I pushed it away from the pile.
“How did you know?” Callahan asked as he pulled on his glove. “How did you know this would happen?”
“I knew because Billy Patel is a galactic-class terrorist and you’re nothing but a two-bit punk,” I said as I traced the fallen arch of a doorway.
“A punk?” Callahan asked. He sounded more stupefied than offended. “What does that mean?” He got his foot twisted in some wire and fell on his back.
“It means that there was no way you and your two-bit operation was going to sell out a big player like Billy the Butcher without him knowing it. He knew we were watching him. He knew you were watching him all along.
“When he ditched his car and turned to look back at us. He knew exactly where to look. We were right where he wanted us and he couldn’t resist a quick look back just to gloat. He must have figured you were too stupid to guess what he was up to. Know what I mean?”
“Get specked, Harris.”
“You asked,” I said.
“So why did you pull me out?” Callahan asked. “You would have made it out more easily on your own.”
“Look at this,” I said. I was standing beside a long heavy beam that looked like it might have been made out of white marble. I found leaves from the hedge that had run around the edge of the terrace.
The man who gave Callahan the gloves returned. “You found something?”
“We were just leaving the building when the bombs went off,” I said. “There were people right about here.” I squatted and brushed away a layer of dust, then picked up a smashed branch with five teardrop-shaped leaves.
The man wore a radio clipped into his collar. As he knelt down to see the crushed shrub, he whispered into the radio. “Send a team. Full gear. We might have something.”
Now that they had located a promising spot, the firemen ushered Jimmy Callahan and me away as they did serious excavation. They placed jacks and lifts under that beam, which must have weighed a good five tons.
“You think anyone is alive down there?” Callahan asked as two burley rescue workers wrestled a large ultrasonic cannon over to their dig. By this time it was late at night. Now that the helicopters had cleared the streets, fire engines and ambulances could drive right up to the buildings. The firemen placed tripods with spotlights around the dig. The spotlights were tiny, about the size and shape of a coffee cup, but their beams could be seen from twenty miles away.
We stood huddled at the front of a crowd that had gathered just behind the lights. Somebody had handed Callahan a blanket and a cup of coffee. His clothes were torn and bloody from the dig. He had wiped his cut up hands on his shirt and pants, and the dust and blood made him look like he had been in the heart of the explosion.
“I’ve never seen anyone pulled out alive,” I said. I supposed that they probably did find survivors sometimes, but I had never seen it happen.
The rescue team’s ultrasonic cannon reduced rock and glass to powder. If they fired it at the marble beam that stretched across their dig, they could destroy it, but that was not their goal. With the jacks supporting its weight, that beam now acted as a roof over their dig, protecting any survivors buried beneath.
The ultrasonic cannon fired sound waves that passed through liquid, air, and wood. You could fire it into a pond without bothering the fish, but the rocks in the pond would disintegrate. It did not hurt people. The shock waves from the ultrasonic cannons did not affect plastic or steel, but they reduced stone to dust.
The firemen used the cannon to clear a three-feet deep crevice under the beam. Two rescuers lugged a stiff, wide-bore hose into the hole. The hose was almost a full yard in diameter with some kind of cage in its opening.
“What is that?” Callahan asked.
I’d never seen anything like it and did not answer.
“Stand clear,” one of the men with the cannon shouted, and the other rescue workers backed away from the site. There was so much dust in the air that I could watch the shock wave as it fired from the cannon. It looked like a pattern of ripples as it passed through the airborne dust. There was a soft sound, not unlike the sound made by a quick shake of a baby’s rattle, and suddenly the rubble beneath that gigantic hose compressed into a powder that was finer than sand. The hose sucked the dust up.
A fireman with a tow cord strung around his waist walked up to the crevice left by the hose. He stared down into it for a moment. The man wore an oxygen mask over his face and held a crowbar in one hand.
Another fireman approached and handed him something small that he tucked in his belt. “You ready, Greg?” the second fireman asked as he patted the first one’s shoulder.
The fireman wrapped his hands around the cord, turned so his back was toward the hole, and rappelled out of sight. A moment later his voice echoed over multiple radios. “I found one. It’s a woman.”
“Condition?” a man on the fire engine asked.
“Alive.” The crowd around me cheered. Jimmy Callahan rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet blowing warm breath nervously into badly gashed hands.
Two more firemen lowered themselves into the hole. Someone handed a stretcher down to them as a fire engine and an ambulance drew just a few feet away. The fire engine extended a ladder over the hole and dropped a winch to the firemen. Tense silence followed. Then the rope tightened. Most people cheered and a few even cried as the winch raised the stretcher from the hole.
Two medics received that stretcher. They detached the cord from the stretcher and pulled the woman into the back of their ambulance. In less than one minute, they loaded her, sealed up their rig, and sped away into the darkness. Another ambulance immediately filled the vacancy.
The rescue workers found seventy-six people in that one area—sixty-two were alive. Tommy and Eddie were alive. As the explosions had come closer, they had crawled under a table and made it out virtually untouched. Tommy had a badly broken jaw. Eddie’s knee was shattered. Both of those injuries were my doing. The explosion barely scratched them.
I was glad Jimmy Callahan’s boys were alive. Callahan was going to need all the help he could get. He had some powerful enemies. Considering the devastation that I had just seen, I doubted that “Silent” Tommy and “Limping” Eddie could protect Callahan from much of anything.
CHAPTER FOUR
How to describe Ray Freeman?
Freeman stood over seven feet tall. When he walked through a crowd, other men came up to his chest. His hands were so large that he could bury your face in his palm and plug your ears with his thumb and little finger.
Every inch of him was sinew …no gawky limbs on Freeman. He had a large head, heavily muscled arms, and shoulders so wide that he had to move sideways through narrow doors. His body was hard and cylindrical, his waist being nearly as wide as his chest, and all of it muscle.
In the galactic melting pot of the frontier, race meant nothing. Terms like African, Caucasian, and Oriental were obsolete. The population was so intermarried that the physical characteristics could no longer be matched to
