“Un-ass the vehicle!” Harris shouted, kicking open his door. He looked past the bed of the pickup, through the wake of destruction they’d made through the former smoothie shop, and saw the IMP on the far side of the street, the Growler pulling up behind it. Harris caught the RPG launcher tossed to him from the man in the pickup bed and then flinched as the .50 atop the IMP opened up on them. The soldier climbing down from the pickup fell onto Harris and they both landed on the tile floor.
The first burst from the roof-mounted .50 went wide, thudding into the counter and walls. Harris and the two soldiers scrambled around the pickup and through the hole it had made in the inside wall. They found themselves in a short hallway and charged down it only to discover the formerly picturesque interior courtyard of the apartment building. There were raised concrete planters, most of the decorative perennials inside them grown wild. They ran across the courtyard, kicked in a door, and rushed through a small apartment that smelled of rotting food. Harris opened the apartment door, looked left and right down the hallway, then pointed. “Stairs!” His nose was broken, and all he could taste was blood.
The Boulevard had been a trendy, upscale apartment building, constructed not too long before the war, with retail spaces on the ground floor and five floors of studio, one-, and two-bedroom apartments above that. The three men pounded up the stairs, carrying their guns and gear. Third floor, fourth, fifth, then the sixth as they came around the corner. The stairs continued above them, heading for the roof. The door to the sixth-floor corridor was open, and there was someone standing there, gun in hand, an ugly look on his face.
“Who the fuck are you guys?” Weasel demanded.
“RoadRunner,” Harris panted. He staggered up the last flight of stairs and fell into the hallway. He looked up at Weasel. “You Quigley?”
Weasel frowned at him and his two companions. “Part of it, anyway. Grab that RPG, maybe we can put it where it will do some good, and we all won’t die here. Fuckers.” But then he smiled.
They followed Weasel down the hallway and where it turned right there was an open door on the left. As they passed they looked in, and Renny was there in a corner apartment. Beyond him, through the open window, stretched West Grand.
“Nobody’s exited the IMP yet,” Renny called out to them as they passed. “IMP’s still in the same place, Growler circled around somewhere west, lost sight of it.”
There had been some long discussions as to where Renny and his rifle should be situated. He would have the most targets of opportunity, with the best visibility, looking down West Grand Boulevard. To the east there wasn’t really a good spot to situate him. To the west, however, one spot stuck out to everyone looking at the map—the six-story apartment building on West Grand west of the Fisher Building parking garage. Located on its top floor on the southeast corner he would have an elevated position looking east down West Grand while still being able to keep an eye on the Lodge Freeway offramps, one of the routes it was suspected troops might take up from the Army base. It wasn’t perfect, but it seemed better than anything else and would have to do. The position wouldn’t exactly call for distance shooting, at least as Renny saw it—from his proposed perch to the intersection of West Grand and Cass Avenue, where they expected a lot of action to take place, was barely four hundred yards. Weasel and a young soldier from Flintstone named Carrells were providing security for the sniper.
Weasel kicked open a door halfway down the hall and moved across the apartment. West Grand Boulevard was right on the other side of it, six floors down. And on the far side of the street sat the IMP, half-hidden from view by the short boulevard trees. “Probably can’t decide whether or not to waste time with you or go to the rescue,” Weasel said. The radio had been busy with chatter, Tower taking out the IMP and Almighty calling down both ends of Skybox on the Tabs below. He pointed at the IMP. “Take that fucker out.” He ran back to the hallway. “Carrells!”
“Yeah?” The other soldier popped his head out of the apartment where Renny had set up.
“Cover that stairwell, call out if the Tabs show up on foot. There’s a Growler out there somewhere.” The young man didn’t bother responding, he just jogged off toward the stairwell Harris and his few remaining men had climbed. Weasel ran down the hallway in the other direction and pushed open the stairwell door to listen. He couldn’t hear anyone coming up the stairs, but he could hear the newcomers in the apartment nearby.
“Backblast area clear! Ears!” someone shouted, then the RPG fired.
“I can’t see, these fucking trees. That go over the slats? It’s not moving. Hit him again, just to make sure. You’ve only got one left.”
“There’s guys bailing out of the back! Fire! Fire!”
The roar of a second RPG being touched off shook the building, and Weasel heard the explosion outside. There was coughing inside the room, and the dust which filled it rolled out into the hallway.
“It’s dead, IMP’s dead, but we’ve got Tabs on foot, in the building and across the street. Don’t see the Growler. We’re out of rockets.”
Weasel was in the front stairwell which had a glass wall looking out on West Grand. It was very exposed, but he liked being able to see, and if the Tabs came up the back stairway they’d have to run by him to get at Renny or the other soldiers. The IMP was just out of view to the left.
He stared down the stairwell and flipped the selector on his MP5 to full auto. “Fucking finally,” he said quietly, with a smile. He hadn’t been happy at all, being stuck far from where he expected the action to take place. Even though sniper support and security was a serious responsibility, and Weasel’s MP5 was perfectly suited to close-in work, he was pretty sure he’d been stuck guarding the old man with the big gun specifically because he’d been pissed at the guy for taking the shot on the convoy and nearly getting them all killed. Whatever the reason, Weasel had just nodded and done what he’d been told, because the Captain was the Captain, and he hadn’t made a bad call yet.
Now, the chance for Renny to take a few shots and slip quietly from his perch were over, and Weasel couldn’t have been happier. This was the kind of shit he lived for. One-on-one with Tabs, inside a building, loaded down with more ammo and grenades than he’d ever had in this war? Thank you Jesus. He turned his head and shouted, “I need you guys to help secure these stairwells and help repel fucking boarders. Don’t worry about the elevators, they don’t work.”
“A tunnel?” Parker said dubiously, standing in the center of his operations center, which was a madhouse. His troops had entered the apartment building just south of the aircraft hangars a few minutes before, only to find it empty of terrorists. They’d found a handful of bodies in the attached parking garage, but that was it.
“Yes. They collapsed it behind them.”
“Where does it go? Sewers?”
Cooper responded. “That’d be my guess.” At least they knew how the tangos had breached the perimeter.
“I thought we demolished all of those,” Parker said. “Didn’t General Block do that early on?”
Cooper shrugged. “I know he bombed or collapsed certain sections of it. I don’t think you can render an entire city sewer system inaccessible.”
“Apparently fucking not.”
“Colonel, I’ve got word from the hangars,” Chamberlain called out.