weapon, spraying the ’hog with a short burst of automatic fire. But he’d been unable to recover from his surprise in time to position himself for his shots, and only one or two nicked Felix’s carrier, the rest going completely astray, ricocheting off the wall and catwalk.
He did not get a chance to unleash another volley. The hog’s gripper claw shot out just as he was taking aim, snatched his leg below the knee, and clamped down with several hundred pounds of force.
His trouser leg suddenly wet with blood, the invader screamed and tried to twist away, but Felix’s hold was unyielding. Screaming in pain, his rifle clattering from his hands, he bent and wrapped his fingers around the robotic arm, struggling in vain to tear it loose.
Watching blearily from inches away, Thibodeau saw him sink onto one knee, then heard the bones of his opposite leg splinter with a sickening crunch under the relentless pressure of the gripper claw. His screams growing in shrillness, the invader continued to pull at the arm as the robot resumed its advance, shoving him implacably backward, out of reach of his fallen weapon.
His field of vision contracting to a small, fuzzy circle, he lay there motionless, the side of his face against the floor. He was vaguely aware of footsteps far below him, a lot of them. Someone shouted — first in Spanish, then English. He heard a fusillade of gunfire.
Before he even had time to wonder what any of it meant, Thibodeau’s eyes rolled back under their lids, and he ceased to be aware of anything at all.
As the Sword ops bolted into the payload storage bay, they heard two reverberating shotgun blasts over their heads, and then saw a man in a black cammo suit fall from one of the catwalks, screaming and flailing as he dropped to the floor to their left, slamming down with a hard thud, then neither screaming nor moving anymore. An instant later there was a chop of automatic fire in the air high above them. Looking up, they spotted another dark form on the catwalk, this one suddenly folding to his knees as a hedgehog launched at him across the catwalk, its gripper arm rapidly whipping out to snatch him like the foreleg of a preying mantis. Several of the ops saw a third man sprawled on the catwalk behind the ’hog, and noticing his Sword uniform, realized instantly it must be Thibodeau.
But before they could react to this sight, a third figure in black sprang from a crouch below a towering work platform up ahead, leaving an object behind on the floor near one of its supports. All of them were experienced enough to know it was a satchel charge — and they could see two more in plain view below other platforms.
“Stay right where you are!” one of the ops shouted, raising his weapon.
The man wasn’t inclined to listen to his warning, regardless of the language. He raised his gun and swung it toward the group of Sword ops.
The response from the Sword op who had called out to him was immediate and conclusive. Bullets spurted from his gun, cutting the invader down before he could fire a single round.
Lowering his barrel, the op sprinted past the invader to the platform support, knelt over the satchel charge, and rapidly assessed its threat. He was no demolitions expert, but it looked like it was on a simple timer pencil and fuze configuration… although looks could be deceptive. There could, he knew, be internal wiring that would detonate the explosives if he tried yanking out the fuze, or other types of booby traps totally unfamiliar to him. Yet the timer’s pin was nowhere in sight, and it only had a couple of minutes left on it, leaving him with no chance to move the bomb or call for help—
He hesitated briefly, feeling his body tighten. Then, gritting his teeth, he pinched the fuze between his thumb and forefinger and gave it a hard pull.
A moment later he took a deep breath, and then another, thanking God that the bomb hadn’t gone off in his hands, that he and everyone around him were still there, still there and not blown to bits.
Which did not yet mean they were in the clear, he quickly reminded himself.
“This one’s out of commission, we better get on to the others!” he shouted. “Let’s hurry!”
Back in the driver’s seat of his chase car, Carlysle looked out his windshield at the fleeing group of invaders and swore aloud. Less than a minute ago, their jeep had sped through the gap in the perimeter fence and he had followed on their tail.
The problem was that he wasn’t at all certain he ought to be doing that.
He tried to think it through even while gunning his engine, pushing to close the distance between them.
Having sent Newell for medical treatment and dispatched their prisoners to a holding area with one of the other units, his squad had been returning to their car when they saw the invaders hasten back into their own vehicle, pull it around in a screeching circle, and whip toward the fence. As the men who by chance were closest to them, Carlysle’s team had launched off in pursuit… but the jeep had been passing through the fence before Carlysle even got behind the wheel, giving it a good head start.
What troubled him was a simple question of authority. UpLink’s host government had sanctioned the emplacement of an independent security force on the ISS compound, period. It was not prepared to have that force move about at will, engaging in what amounted to a small war. Carlysle was sensitive to that, and because he was a disciplined professional, could not close his eyes to the boundaries of his license to operate. If there had been no prisoners taken on the compound to hopefully yield information about the motives and objectives behind their raid, he might have been inclined to push those bounds and carry on the pursuit, calling in the Skyhawks for aerial support. But there were, and it was hard to justify going forward knowing the repercussions that might be expected as a consequence.
He gripped the wheel, his eyes on the taillights ahead of him. Stop or go, what was it going to be? With Thibodeau not answering his radio, the decision was his to make.
Producing another string of curses, he shifted his foot to his brake pedal and eased it down. The chase car lurched to a halt over the bumpy road.
“Never mind that bunch, we’re going back,” he said to the man beside him. “There’s a whole lot of pieces that need picking up at the facility, and nobody but us to do it.”
Its engine throbbing, Kuhl’s jeep shot through the gap in the fence at full horsepower, reversing the path it had taken into the compound.
Kuhl turned in the front passenger seat and saw the twin points of headlights in the darkness behind him. But they were a good distance away, and that distance seemed to be growing. Still, he wanted to keep his eyes on them.
The jeep plunged ahead into the jungle, bouncing over the road, vines and branches lashing its windshield, leaving behind long, drippy swipes of moisture. Soon the unbroken tunnel of vegetation around it was screening out the sky.
Kuhl watched the headlights steadily, convinced they were indeed becoming further off. Why might that be so? he asked himself. Certainly their position beside the jeep had given Kuhl and his three companions a jump on the security teams, who had dispersed from their own vehicles during the firefight. But that only accounted for his head start, not the absence of any concerted and determined pursuit. And what of the helicopters? Why hadn’t they been sent after him?
A faint smile touched his lips. Even flight had its lessons, and it struck him that he’d just gained another bit of understanding about UpLink’s vulnerabilities, limitations, and the dynamics of its relationship with the Brazilians.
It was knowledge he would have to carefully digest along with the rest of what he’d learned tonight.
Knowledge that was bound to be very useful as the next phase of the game commenced.
FIVE
The bald eagle launched from the tall trees downhill to their right, soaring above the old pilings at the marshy
