simulated blood did not equal loss of life, no matter how true its shade of red.
Pressed against Earthglow’s windowless back wall, Ricci watched Rosander nose his telescoping probe around its corner with a powerful sense of deja vu. Still, he was acutely aware that Cape Green had been little more than a stage set: Africa one day, Balkan Europe the next, Motor City if you wanted it to be. The here and now was what it was, and it never would be anything else, he thought. And this time the men who fell under his watch would not rise to joke, complain, or be chastised about it afterward.
“Picture any clearer on your HUD?” Rosander asked. He fingered a rocker switch on the probe’s pistol grip handle to adjust its nonvisible IR illumination level. “I’ve maxed the output, can’t get better res past about ten yards in this darkness.”
“It’ll do.” The image superimposed on Ricci’s field of view by his visor display showed a pair of guards in hooded parkas, goggles, and wool scarves taking relaxed strides along their patrol of the building’s north side. Their shoulder-slung FN P90 assault weapons fired the same ammunition as his Five-Seven pistol: small rounds, big punch. “Get rid of the sound, though. I don’t need to hear their horseshit about boffing townie high school girls.”
Rosander pressed another switch to cut his rod’s surveillance mike.
“These guys go down fast and quiet,” Ricci said. The comlink’s acoustical gain was set to output his whisper as a normal speaking voice to his team members. “Can’t let them get off a shot. Rather we don’t have to, either.”
He reached into his belt pouch for the DMSO, looked quickly over his shoulder, then gestured for Seybold to produce his canister.
“On my signal,” he said, raising his fist.
Seybold nodded to him, and they edged up beside Rosander.
They waited. The guards appeared to be in no hurry to complete their rounds. Just a couple of gun-toting chums on a leisurely stroll through the meat-locker cold of night in the Canadian Shield.
After what seemed an age, they approached the corner of the wall.
Ricci’s arm came up like a semaphore.
Seybold moved with him at once. They rounded the corner and got right in the guards’ faces with their canisters, knowing the high-pressure spurts of fluid would not disperse in the wind at close range and that the permeable fabric scarves wrapped around their mouths would do nothing to stop the sedative from acting instantaneously.
Silently and painlessly kayoed, the guards hit the ground unconscious and then were flex-cuffed and dragged into the shadows at the base of the hill. They would be out for hours.
Ricci turned to his men.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s hit the gatehouse.”
Pokey Oskaboose’s guidance had been a blessing for more reasons than his familiarity with the physical terrain. He had also imparted a critical tip about area transport during the mission’s planning stage: Pretty well everything that made its way to and from the rest of the world was conveyed three times weekly via Toronto on the wilderness train. A single train. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Like other outposts located many miles from the nearest railway depot, Earthglow would need to connect with the station by truck over the Trans Canada Highway. There was simply no other practical means.
Of course, Oskaboose hadn’t known the facility’s specific shipping and receiving schedules. But that hadn’t been necessary. These were the boonies, last stop on the civilization express. Conduct the insertion in the long, murky period that bridged Thursday and Friday — say at two, three, four o’clock in the morning — and you could safely assume that the delivery gate would be manned by a skeleton crew. Warm bodies, if the expression was applicable here at world’s end. You could also figure they would go on shift expecting to do little more than gulp coffee and pick their noses. Because not for a million bucks would a driver try rolling his wagon over the frosted local roads at such an hour, especially the black, winding spools of blacktop off the main highway, where painted lanes were nonexistent, and you had to sort of guess whether you were in danger of getting smacked by opposing traffic. Well, maybe for a million bucks, Oskaboose had reconsidered. But far as he knew, nobody had gotten offered that amount yet.
It was now a few ticks of the minute hand short of three A.M., and Ricci was thinking that Oskaboose’s skinny had been worth a fortune and more.
The gatehouse was nothing fancy. A lighted, heated modular steel booth designed for a small handful of personnel, it could have been lifted from where it stood and dropped at the entry to any commercial building anyplace, maybe a factory that manufactured fountain pens, or fan belts, or soda bottles, or zippers for ladies’ skirts. It was hard for Ricci to imagine it as a breeding farm for a killer germ of a type never before known to man. Hard for him, sometimes, to remember that the shape of evil could be so drummingly bland and commonplace. The devil as the guy next door.
Hugging the north wall of Earthglow about a hundred feet from the gatehouse, his men drawn up behind him, Ricci could see three guards through the plate glass windows of the booth. Two were seated behind a control panel with a bank of video monitors on it, talking, neither of them apparently paying attention to the screens. A third was dozing on a chair behind a desk or counter, legs stretched, arms folded, head tucked to his chest.
Ricci thought a minute. The door was on his side of the booth, a magnetic swipe card reader on the frame. It would automatically lock when closed, but these pre-fab housings weren’t designed to store the crown jewels. He was sure one good kick would take care of it.
He called four men over to him. Grillo, Barnes, Carlysle, and Newell. The rest would stay put. This would have to be perfectly coordinated, and he wanted experience with him.
His instructions took seconds:
Ricci shuffled forward in a squat, the others close behind him, all of them sticking to the shadows along the main building’s wall. At the edge of the wall he signaled a halt. There were ten yards of open ground to the gatehouse. Dark yards. His group would be fine if they stayed low. He gave his command, and they made the stealthy dash.
Out of sight beneath the windows now, pulse racing, epinephrine flooding his system, its taste filling his mouth like he’d bitten into an allergy pill, Ricci waited for his men to hastily take their positions, Grillo and Barnes to the right of the door, gripping their VVRS guns, Newell right behind him on the left side, Carlysle crouched back in the darkness facing the door, ready for the kick.
Three fingers of one hand raised, Ricci drew his expandable ASP baton from its belt scabbard with the other and counted off. Vocally and manually. One finger went down.
“… two,
In a heartbeat, Carlysle sprang erect and took two giant steps forward, his leg thrusting up and out. The sole of his boot hit the door under the handle, and it banged inward.
Ricci rushed into the gatehouse, clenching the tactical baton’s foam grip, thumbing the release stud to extend its tubular-steel segments. The guards seated side by side at the control panel twisted around toward the entrance, agape with stunned surprise. Peripherally aware of his own men moving in around him, Ricci saw assault rifles slung over the guards’ chair backs: a P-90 for Mr. Left, and an H&K for Mr. Right.
Mr. Right was quickest on the uptake, snatching for his weapon. Ricci went at him with the baton, smashed a blow to the back of his wristbone, and with a continuous movement slid it under his forearm, grabbed hold of the tip so he was holding both ends, and crossed it, applying strong pressure. The ulna snapped like brittle wood. Mr. Right flopped around on his chair and started to scream. Ricci pulled the baton free of his arm and then brought it up and struck his neck sideways at the pressure point below the ear. He made a noise like water sucking down a partially clogged drain and hit the floor motionless, the clouted arm bent at several unnatural angles.
Ricci pivoted toward Mr. Left, the baton arcing in front of him, but his hands were raised in the air, his firearm already taken, Grillo and Barnes jamming their guns into his ribs. Carlysle and Newell had their weapons trained on the guy who’d been caught napping.
Ricci stood between the two captive guards, looked from one to another, then gestured at the control panel.
“Which of you gamers wants to let us in the freight door?” he asked.
