the building. We’re taking heavily casualties. Please advise; please advise.”
Cyrus gasped. “It’s the Twins! It has to be…”
“How could they-?”
“They must have taken the team that we sent. Pinter and Homler both know about the Hive.”
“They’re trained operatives,” argued Otto. “They’d never talk.”
“That witch Hecate… my
Otto waved the aide away and slammed the door to the alcove.
“We have to move fast,” Otto said.
“But we have to make the right move,” countered Cyrus. “This will be a team that they’ve sent. If they’re doing this much damage, it must be one of the Berserker squads.”
Otto nodded. “Then they won’t be there in person. Paris doesn’t have the balls for fieldwork, and Hecate is too smart. Even so, the Berserkers aren’t totally stupid. They’re smart enough to tear a hard drive out of a computer. We can’t allow the Twins to see what’s on those computers. I don’t trust that they’d let the Extinction Wave go forward.”
“I know they wouldn’t. They’re not truly gods,” Cyrus said with grief and regret in his voice. “We have no choice; we have to use the fail-safe…”
Otto stepped around the workstation and put his hand on Cyrus’s shoulder.
“Mr. Cyrus,” he said kindly. “My friend… Eighty-two is at the Hive.”
Cyrus’s eyes went wide for a moment and then he closed them as the reality of that drove nails of pain into his heart.
“No…”
Otto squeezed Cyrus’s shoulder and sat down. With a few keystrokes he called up the security command screen that would activate the Hive’s fail-safe system. He sent two sets of code numbers to Cyrus’s screen. One activated the fail-safe and the other simply detonated the communication centers and hardlines that connected the Hive to the Deck.
“It’s come down to this,” he said softly. “Either we let the Twins see what we’ve been doing and risk having them stop us-and they
Cyrus shook his head. He stared blindly at the screen, tears in his eyes.
“Eighty-two has my heart,” he said. “He has my soul.”
Otto said nothing.
“Please, God… give me a choice between the Twins and Eighty-two, but not this…”
“Were going to run out of time,” Otto said. “You have to make a choice.”
Cyrus wiped the tears from his eyes and sniffed. When he lifted his hands to place his fingers over the keyboard they felt like concrete blocks.
“Cyrus…,” murmured Otto.
Cyrus used the cursor to select one of the codes.
He closed his eyes, squeezing them against a fresh wave of tears.
And hit “Enter.”
Chapter Seventy-Eight
The Hive
Sunday, August 29, 3:38 P.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 22 minutes E.S.T.
It was a slaughterhouse. I went through another magazine with the Beretta before holstering it and switching to the M4. More guards crowded into the lobby from the far side, but they paused for a moment when they saw that the floor was littered with bodies. Some of them were people who had wisely dropped and covered their heads to stay out of the line of fire; the rest were dead. Bunny laid down some cover fire for me as I made a dash for a heavy counter on the far side of the lobby. I felt the wind and heard the buzz of a few close shots from guards who were crouched down behind a conversational grouping of couches and overstuffed chairs. I jumped into a diving roll and came up into a kneel, pivoted, and laid my shoulder against the side of a hardwood counter. Bunny was behind a Coke machine and Top had faded to the far side of the lobby and was shooting from behind a decorative column.
Echo Team formed three sides of a box, with the guards at the far corner. There were seven of them, and for a moment all we exchanged were wasted bullets. I had one fragmentation grenade left and a couple of flash bangs, but the lobby was half the size of a football field. To reach them I’d have to stand up and really put some shoulder into it, and I didn’t like my chances of being able to walk away from that. The remaining guards were dishearteningly good shots.
I tapped my earbud. “Who has a shot?”
Nobody did.
Bullets tore into the counter, knocking coffee cups into the air and splashing me with hot coffee and creamer. The coffee burned, but none of the bullets penetrated. I knocked on it. Steel in an oak sheath. I shoved my shoulder against the counter and was surprised when the heavy piece of furniture moved almost two inches. Not bolted down, and it must have little casters on it. Sweet.
“I’m trying something,” I said in the mike, “so make sure I have cover fire when I need it.” I threw my weight against the counter. It slid easily and moved four feet, the metal casters sounding like nails on a blackboard.
“Copy that, boss.”
The guards saw what I was doing and concentrated their fire at me, but to little effect. The steady bullet impacts slowed me, but I kept going, shoving the counter across the terrazzo floor. I kept praying to whichever god was on call that these guys didn’t have any genades.
“We got a runner, boss,” said Bunny and I peered around the edge to see one of the guards break from cover and race to the far wall. There was a series of pillars there and if he could get to them he could inch his way up on my blind side.
“Got him,” said Top, and the runner suddenly spun sideways and went down. With all of the other gunfire I never heard the shot.
I kept pushing the counter until I was thirty feet out. None of the other guards tried the same end-run stunt, but I could heard the squawk from walkie-talkies and I knew that they were calling up all the reinforcements they could. This was taking way too long,
“It’s fourth and long,” I growled. “Make some noise.”
My guys really poured on the gunfire and for a moment it forced the guards down behind their cover. A moment was all I needed. I pulled the pin on the frag grenade and risked it all as I rose to a half crouch and threw it. Then I flattened down just as the blast sent a shock wave that slammed the counter into me.
There was one last burst of gunfire as a guard, blind from shrapnel and flash burned, staggered out on wobbling legs and emptied his gun in the wrong direction. Top put him down and the lobby was ours.
“Move!” I yelled, and I scrambled out from behind the counter and made a dead run for the far end of the lobby. Bunny was behind me and Top came up slower, keeping a distance so he could work long-range visuals.
At the far end of the lobby we peered down a wide hall that curved around out of sight. Now that the thunder of the gunfire was over I realized that the alarm Klaxons had stopped. The lobby and hallway were eerily silent.
I tapped the command channel. “Cowboy to Dugout.”
There was no answer. Bunny tried it, same thing.
Top looked at his scanner. The little screen was a haze of white static.
“We’re being jammed.”
Two things happened in short sequence, and I didn’t like either one.
