Salih shouted it was him, and Jeffrey realized he drove a heavy forklift. The bags held halite and rock salt.
'For the sidewalks and roads and parking lot,' Salih said.
'I think they'll do.'
Bullets poured steadily out of the air duct now, in short but vicious bursts. Jeffrey realized the Germans had set up a light machine gun on the other side.
'Six and Three, Five. Six and Three, Five.'
'Five, go!'
'Shaj, Chief, there's no way we can make it through the air duct. The Germans have set up a static defense. We'll be cut to pieces.'
'Five, Three, if we make a direct assault through the interlock we'll be cut to pieces.'
'Maybe not,' Jeffrey said while he rigged wads of C4 as booby traps around his side of the air duct. 'Salih has something we can use as an armored car.' Ilse watched Jeffrey and Salih pull up with the forklift. Again she surveyed to the front. Their side of the heavy blast doors gaped open. The doors into the other half of the lab formed a solid obstacle. Bodies of Turks and Germans littered the deck between the sets of blast doors. The walls were marked with bullet impacts and gore, and debris smoldered even with the sprinklers going.
'They've had too much chance to set up on the other side,' Montgomery shouted. 'Every time we move in and close this side so we can open the other doors a crack, they pour in overwhelming fire.'
Behind them, one of Jeffrey's booby traps went off. SEAL One emptied a clip in the direction of the air duct, his weapon puff-puff-puffing as it recoiled heavily. A German assault rifle chattered back, and ricochets zinged past. Another blob of C4 detonated by the air duct.
'Get that forklift in there!' Clayton shouted, pointing to the interlock. 'Use the rock salt bags, the bodies, everything! Fortify a line, and then we've got to go for it!' Everybody went to work, building a makeshift slit trench across the space inside the interlock. Everyone took positions, laying out spare ammo clips and grenades and flares. Salih still drove the forklift, with a good supply of sandbags left on the pallet as a shield. Jeffrey with his twelve- gauge shotgun, and Ilse with her light MG, climbed onto the back of the electric-powered forklift, protected by the sandbags in front. Now the team had armored, mobile, heavy firepower.
Montgomery worked the interlock controls, and the blast doors closed behind them. At the last second he tossed a thermite grenade at the workings on the other side, to isolate the Germans trying to outflank the SEALs through the air duct. One way or another, there'd be no retreating now.
Montgomery pushed the button on the wall to open the other set of blast doors, into the other half of the lab. Nothing happened. 'They've locked us out!'
'Try the manual override!' Clayton snapped. 'They might not have fused the gears yet!' Montgomery yanked open the utility hatch built into the wall. He heaved, and undid the linkage for the main hydraulic mechanism. He grabbed the giant hand wheel. SEAL One helped, and they cranked the outer blast doors slowly open.
They took fire at once.
Jeffrey let off five buckshot rounds. Clayton opened fire, and the surviving SEALs, One and Eight and Nine, did, too. Turks also started shooting as they gained good lines of sight. Ilse climbed atop the heavy metal cage that protected the driver's seat of the forklift from falling cargo. She waited… a little longer… a little longer.. She poked her MG over the top of the sandbags on the forklift and held the trigger down. A belt with a hundred rounds worked through her weapon rapidly. Hot spent shell casings flew everywhere, and her barrel smoked. From her vantage point well off the floor she pulverized the guards and furniture to her front. She changed belts.
'Go, go, go!' she screamed. She felt Salih floor the accelerator. Salih charged. She pressed the trigger again, and swept her flaming muzzle back and forth. Beside her Jeffrey's shotgun boomed and boomed. The rest of Clayton's company maintained a base of fire from the sandbags in the interlock.
The Germans broke and ran. One guard glanced back — it was the woman who'd challenged Ilse before. Ilse cut her in half with MG fire.
'Achtung, achtung!' came over the public address. 'All lab staff evacuate the installation. All lab staff evacuate the installation.'
Use recognized the voice. It was the head of Internal Security.
Salih's improvised armored car sped down the main corridor on the upper level. Clayton, with SEAL Nine, followed on foot to one side, leading the rest of the team. Jeffrey stayed with the main force on the upper level. Ilse and Montgomery took Three Platoon to the deck below. More Turks emerged from hiding, and joined the fight. Four — Jeffrey's — and Six — Clayton's — Platoons both kept advancing. The Germans kept falling back.
The forklift, with Jeffrey riding shotgun, sped round another corner. In front of them was a second line of German defense. Desks, refrigerators, massive piles of thick tech manuals, formed an impenetrable barrier. There were no stairwells beyond this barricade protecting the main entrance/exit interlock: There was no way to outflank. The Germans opened concentrated fire — their withdrawal had been a trap. Salih and Jeffrey pulled back in the forklift. The sandbags at the front were riddled. Bullets punched through and nicked Salih in the arm and smashed the forklift's battery compartment. On momentum, one-handed, Salih steered around the corner in reverse. He and Jeffrey bailed out. Jeffrey stumbled over yet another dead German guard.
'Six, Five!' Jeffrey shouted. 'I see different insignia! We're meeting reinforcements!' More naval infantry had come into the lab, to engage the SEALs as forward as possible. Clayton, somewhere to Jeffrey's left, didn't answer. 'Six, Five. We can't advance!' Still nothing. Jeffrey realized the guards were expendable, even if a nuclear demolition killed them all. It was far more important to keep Clayton's team from escaping with the missile and anything from the computer center, and let the remaining lab staff get away.
'Five, Nine,' Jeffrey heard. 'We're pinned down bad! Lieutenant Clayton's hit!' SIMULTANEOUSLY, ONE LEVEL BELOW.
The computer center, a dead end in the floor plan, was heavily defended.
'We can't get in without damaging the disk drives!' Ilse said.
'We have to flush the Germans somehow,' Montgomery said.
'The fire suppression system for the mainframe. I saw it. It's poison gas!' It worked by blocking oxidation — fires stopped burning, men stopped breathing.
Ilse and Montgomery and SEAL Eight pulled on their dive masks and put their Draeger regulators in their mouths.
A handful of Turks grabbed breather packs from cabinets of fire-fighting gear. The others held back at a safe distance, based on Ilse's instructions.
'Move it!' Montgomery yelled to his assault team. Ilse and the men advanced, firing on the run, mowing down the guards who tried to protect the way into the computer center. SEAL Eight blew in the door with a deftly handled miniature satchel charge.
'Watch it!' Montgomery snapped. 'Don't damage the disk drives.'
'The emergency handle!' Ilse shouted. 'There!' SEAL Eight broke cover and reached for the big red handle for the gas. German fire hit him in the arms and legs. He grunted and clenched his teeth. He lunged again and grabbed the handle. As more bullets pounded into him he pulled the handle hard. An alarm bell sounded and the invisible gas hissed. The guards tried to don their gas masks, but the masks did them no good: They asphyxiated. Other guards broke cover to reach the respirators stored in the computer center for just this reason. Ilse and Montgomery cut them down. The Turks in air packs moved in to mop up. Montgomery checked SEAL Eight. He shook his head.
Ilse ran to the main memory storage units. These were big white cabinets with seethrough doors, ranged in a circle so their fiber-optic interconnections would be as short as possible, and processor speed consequently high.
The superdensity disk drives themselves looked like stacks of platters, like old-fashioned records on a record-player changer; each drive wore a big number. Crude, but a way to prevent clandestine pilferage. Near the storage units were spare carrying cases, also numbered, locked inside another see-through cabinet. Montgomery broke open the doors of the floor-to-ceiling units. Alarms sounded immediately.
They had no idea which drives held what. Ilse and Montgomery took them all. They loaded the magnetic drives into the carrying cases.
They and the Turks with respirators lugged them out of the computer center and linked up with the rest of Three Platoon.
Ilse knew this was a desperate measure.' The disks were fragile, and not saltwater proof, and unshielded on
