“Listen,” said Bug urgently, “the cracks in the structure are allowing the thermal scans to get a better picture of the sublevels. There are five big rooms, labs or machine shops or something. There are more than a hundred new thermal signatures. There are a lot of people down there.”
The screams and gunfire that spiraled out of the closest stairwell made it sound like a war zone.
“No shit,” I said again.
Pete Smith ran through shadows, moving from one parked car to the other, working his way around to a covering position on the back door.
He froze as one of the SUVs came rolling up and stopped outside, blocking the exit. Six heavily armed men piled out, each of them dressed in nondescript black. They left the engine running and closed on the door.
Peter could hear them talking in Russian, but he did not much understand the language, and it was too far away for his MindReader link to capture and translate it. So Smith edged forward, staying low and out of sight. One of the newcomers spoke to the others with a clear voice of authority. He caught a terse order given by the leader in a clear voice.
“Ubit’ vsekh.”
Kill them all.
“Well, boys,” murmured Pete to himself, “you called this play.”
He took a fragmentation grenade from a pouch on his belt, pulled the pin, counted, and threw. He had done this a thousand times playing Call of Duty. He’d done this in training countless times — M69 practice grenades in nonlethal drills; live ones on a throwing range. He’d tossed stun grenades on the job working SWAT in North Carolina.
This was the first time he had ever thrown a real grenade at real people.
He twisted down and back behind the vehicle. There was a thump. Two men shouted warnings at once. Too late. And then the blast. His grenade landed in the middle of the tight knot of soldiers. The man most distant from it was no more than six feet away. From the time the spoon was released there were five seconds before it exploded. The men tried to scatter.
The injury radius of the M67 is forty-nine feet. The fatality radius is sixteen feet. All of the men were too close for any chance at all. They were blown apart, lifted, scattered, flash-burned. Ruined.
When Smith leaned out and looked through the smoke, what he saw did not resemble anything that had ever been human. It was the first time in his life he had killed. He knew — even as he moved out of cover and ran for the door — that he had just been marked. He knew he had crossed a line for which there was no going back, no do-overs, no absolution. He was now, and always would be, a killer.
He could feel his heart shift inside his chest as he ran.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he ran through blood and stepped over torn legs and shredded skin. “I’m sorry.”
The blast had punched the door inward, half tearing it from the hinges. Smith raised his leg and kicked. Once, twice, three times, and then the hinges snapped and it canted in and then fell with a monstrous clang.
Smith paused for one moment, and almost looked down at the blood on the ground and at the parts around him. He almost made that mistake. He did not, though. That marked him, too; but in a different way.
Steve Duffy had a perfect elevated shooting position, from which he could see most of the parking lot and nearly all of the arriving hostiles. Nine of them lay still on the ground and the rest had scattered. Duffy’s rifle had a flash suppressor and a high-tech silencer to make tracking him difficult. And he could control the pigeon drones to emit flashes and digital recordings of gunshots from various points in the area. It was easy enough to time them so they flashed and banged as he pulled his trigger. That made the bad guys keep looking in the wrong direction. Duffy had suggested this to Doc Holliday and was delighted when she made it happen and implemented it for all field team snipers. There were rabbit drones that could do the same thing. In order to accommodate a speaker with enough fidelity for a loud bang, the drone had to be at least that big. Horseflies were too small.
All he had to do to trigger a distraction was tap a sensor with the little finger of his left hand, leaving the other fingers to steady his rifle and keeping his right hand completely free. Easy as pie.
Duffy believed himself to be a good man. Even-tempered, easy to get along with, generally happy. He held very little animosity in his soul, and did not even particularly hate the men who were pouring in to try and kill his colleagues. They were a problem to be solved. Angle and elevation, tactics and strategy, cause and effect. He was not a philosopher and tended not to brood. As he saw it, these guys put on targets when they put on their uniforms, and they made those targets glow in the dark when they rolled in here. Sucked to be them.
The newcomers had stayed outside since arriving, but now they raced for the doors, opening them and pouring inside.
“Oh, crap,” murmured Duffy. He triggered another drone and fired at just the right time. His bullet punched through the chest of one man in black and blew a hole the size of an apple out of his back. The shot had been placed slightly off center so as to spin the target. Duffy triggered another flash and bang at once but did not fire, letting the noise and light turn every eye that way. The men in black opened up on a patch of empty darkness.
Duffy called in to Echo Team to tell them that there were new hostiles in the building. “I don’t think they’re affected by that green crystal shit, guys. Heads up. I’ll see if I can thin the herd.”
Duffy killed another of them. And another. He triggered four drones at once and the men scattered, thinking there was a kill team in the bushes on the wrong side of the parking lot.
In his head the Queen song “Another One Bites the Dust” played over and over again on a continuous loop.
The Toybox had a cute name, but it was a monster.
Bunny and Tate shifted around to watch what happened. Hardened as Bunny was, what he saw chilled him to the bone.
Two of the soldiers in black — the ones Duffy warned them about — charged into the room, yelling in Russian for everyone to stand down and throw down their weapons. One of the wild scientists rushed at them with a knife in his raised fist, but the soldiers cut him down without hesitation. Then they opened fire on everyone else. More of the soldiers came into the room, guns ready. The room was dark and they never saw the fishing line strung across the passage between a row of desks and a file cabinet. It broke easily and there was a flash of tiny silver flechettes whipping through the air and then three soldiers went down, their faces slashed to red ruin. They landed hard and their screams stopped all at once. The flechettes were smeared with Botulinum toxin type H, the deadliest neurotoxin available. You do not get clumsy-fingered around that stuff. The soldiers were probably dead before they landed.
One Russian who’d seen them fall waved off a second man and they backpedaled and cut to their right to skirt the area… and ran straight into a spiderweb — an ultrathin filament that is nearly invisible even in good light. It wrapped around their torsos and the explosive chemicals in the woven strands combined and detonated, blowing one man in half and setting the other one’s clothes on fire. The modified thermite burned into his chest and groin and thighs, and what was left of him collapsed in a fiery heap, arteries exploding in geysers of red. It was ugly, but it was fast.
Five men in three seconds.
Bunny and Tate crabbed sideways to the end of a row of cabinets, then broke for the door. The soldiers spun toward their movement, but Tate twisted as he ran and hurled what looked like a string of popcorn behind him. The kernels exploded with a white light so intense that the soldiers screamed and staggered and blundered through more of the trip wires. Bunny grabbed Tate and shoved him through the door as fire and screams filled the room.