They all paused as they heard static erupt from their radios. Brooke cocked her head, listening intently, and just a few seconds later heard a double click.
“That’s Robbie, he’s on the way. They’re on the way!” she said, a little too loudly. She nodded at the plywood sheets. “Pull those fucking things off.”
By the time Sylvester’s young runner arrived from the tunnel mouth the plywood sheets were on the floor. One of the men helped him into his backpack, then the squad was surging into the walkway. They jogged over Lothrop Street, nothing moving and nobody visible on the street beneath them, and stacked up on the far side. Rico had stayed behind and disappeared from view.
The squad stacked up on the sheets of plywood, and with two kicks each they went down. Brooke figured they wouldn’t have to go looking for the Tabs, and she was right—not fifty feet into the New Center One building they were spotted by a woman, and she screamed. It was followed up with more screams, shouts, people running, falling down.
The building was constructed like a number 8, with two open atriums divided by walkways on each floor. There were more shouts, then gunfire off to her left. She jerked her head around and saw a soldier on the far side of the atrium, on the same floor, staring at them in shock. He shot again, then went down under a barrage of return fire.
“All the way across!” Brooke shouted. She waved her men on and kept her carbine pointed over the railing at the lobby one floor down. A soldier came running into the lobby from a hallway, responding to the gunfire. Brooke saw his camouflage clad legs first, and by the time he’d moved into the lobby far enough to spot her and the squad she was firing, aiming at his unarmored thighs as they were the biggest target. He went down, screaming. From the immediate and voluminous outpouring of blood she could tell she’d hit his femoral artery. She left him to bleed out in front of a giant steel sculpture of a bicycle or farm implement or something, Brooke wasn’t sure.
She followed the squad across the building, all of their rifles up and ready, scanning their surroundings, and they instinctively ducked as they took incoming rounds. The two dogsoldiers in the lead dove to the floor, and the two behind them, disregarding all safety, leaned over the railing and hammered bullets at the two soldiers down below. The Tabs had taken cover—but poorly—behind the corner of a bakery sticking out into the lobby, and after firing ducked behind the wall. The dogsoldiers fired blindly into the wall, which was more decorative than anything else, and the two soldiers fell in a bloody heap.
“Anyone else? You guys see anyone else?” Brooke shouted, spinning in a circle, rifle up. The building still echoed with screams, and people ran here and there, but indoors the camouflage uniforms of the Tabs made them stick out, and for the moment Sylvester seemed free of enemy combatants. “You okay?” she asked Robbie. The side of the young man’s neck was bloody.
“Yeah, it’s just a scratch I think,” he said, touching it.
“Then let’s go. Everybody haul ass,” she yelled, pointing. “You four, head for the hotel.” Sylvester split up—half the squad including one of Morris’ loaners headed for the walkway leading to the adjacent St. Regis hotel, and the other half made for a stairwell.
She grabbed Robbie by the shoulder and had him cover their rear as they advanced up the stairs all the way to the top floor of the building. It took them a while under their loads, and by the time they reached it they were all panting heavily.
They stood in the eighth-floor hallway. Through the open door to her right was a small meeting room, and outside its windows she could see both the Fisher Building and the west end of Cadillac Place. She heard four clicks on her radio, that meant that the rest of the squad had made it to their spot on the top floor of the hotel, at the east corner.
Her radio jumped to life. “Nakatomi, Nakatomi, this is SkyBox. Your front door is clear, at least for right now.” She recognized Barker’s voice.
She grabbed her radio. “Nakatomi, Nakatomi, this is Cambridge,” she said, still breathing hard from trudging up six flights of stairs carrying close to seventy-five pounds of gear. “We are in position east and west. Go do your thing. Shit!” She’d spotted the glass-walled elevator on the far side of the atrium rising into view. Three soldiers were inside it.
Brooke and the three men with her opened up on them, killing one man before he could get out of the small car. Another went down and crawled out of sight. The third found some cover and popped out to fire at them. The third time he popped out from cover in the exact same place he was hit in the face and neck and went down.
She signaled and two of her men moved forward, around the curving walkway, to check to make sure all three soldiers were dead. After a few seconds they signaled all clear.
“I don’t want that fucking happening again,” Brooke spat, her ears ringing from the gunfire. She was unimpressed with the Tabs’ tactics, it was like they didn’t know how to fight if they weren’t buttoned-up in armor. “I want somebody out here, eyes, watching our backs. I want to know if the Tabs are coming before they actually get here.” She pointed. “Robbie.”
“You got it.”
She grabbed the radio. “Nakatomi, Cambridge. Sorry for the interruption. We are in position.” She and the remaining two squad members moved into the nearby meeting room. It was at the southwest corner of the building, and she had a great view. The Growler in front of the Fisher Building was smoking, and a camouflage uniform-clad body was just visible on the ground behind the second Growler parked in front of Cadillac Place.
“Nakatomi reads you,” Ed’s steady voice responded. “Heading up.”
“SkyBox, Cambridge East,” Brooke heard over the radio, the tense voice coming from one of her men positioned at the far end of the hotel. “You’ve got a squad of Tabs on foot heading to your building from the east. Five, maybe six, ETA about ten seconds.”
Brooke peered to the left out her windows, but didn’t have eyes on the call out. Maybe the pedestrian walkway six stories below her, running from the east end of New Center One to the central tower of the Cadillac Place, was blocking her view of the soldiers.
“SkyBox copies.”
Barker quickly gestured to the men around him but they’d heard the exchange on their radios. The building was so big it had several lobbies connected by a wide hallway, the floors gray marble which had seen better times. Long-defunct stores lined the hallway, which had an arched roof and gold-leaf detailing. They’d studied the floor plans of the building and knew the Tabs had several routes they could take into and through the building to get to their position, but the simplest and quickest was the hallway running from one side of the building to the other between Cass and 2nd Avenue.
The Tabs weren’t yet in sight. Some of the men took up defensive positions in the lobby and in the doorways lining the hallway, facing east. Others moved toward the alternate avenues of approach and covered them. Lydia had just come upstairs and Chan waved her back down.
“If they come this way, wait for me to fire,” Hannibal hissed, hiding behind a column to peer down the hallway. He could see daylight at the far end.
There had been a long enough lull in the shooting that several of the building occupants stuck their heads out of doorways where they’d been hiding. As soon as they saw the guerrillas they darted back out of sight, one woman with a terrified scream that made Hannibal roll his eyes, but at the scream he saw movement at the far end of the hall. He pulled back behind the marble column and signaled for the men to stay hidden.