“Two of you!” Ed shouted to the group of his men guarding the south entrance. He pointed north across the lobby. “Go back them up!”
Early grabbed Jason. “Come on, Junior, time to nut up.” They ran across the long lobby as the remaining soldiers near the north end began firing.
“IMP’s across a parking lot, couple hundred yards away. Grenade launcher,” they all heard over the radio. “We need rockets or those AT grenades over here!” Another grenade exploded, just outside the entrance on the sidewalk, and gravel shrapnel zinged through the lobby, rattling off the walls.
George ran through the hallways, listening to the call-outs on the radio. The ground floor of the building was getting pounded by the IMP with its grenade launcher. He and his crew had just moved down to the sixth-floor of the thirty-story tower when the attack started, but running to the north side of the tower showed him his view was blocked north by additional sections of the building that were twelve and fifteen stories tall. They’d had to head east to a connecting hallway and then run north through the other sections of the building. Insanely there were still a few workers in their offices, hunkered down, at least until they saw the dogsoldiers. Then they ran for the stairs, some of them screaming.
“Here!” George said, skidding to a stop. He stuck his head around the door frame and looked into the office. There were windows on the far wall, looking north. Finally. “Stay here, out of sight,” he said to Mark, Quentin, and Kelly.
George dropped to his knees and crawled across the office floor, covered with a nice Persian-style rug, then stood up behind a two-foot-wide section of concrete between windows. He edged his eye out and looked, then pulled back and grabbed his radio.
“Tower to all squads. IMP is two streets north of the building. Still buttoned up, don’t see anyone on foot, just the roof gunner. Growler with it, behind cover.” He’d almost missed the Growler, but spotted its nose edged out past the corner of a building near the IMP. He suspected the Tabs who had been in it were spread out behind the building. He looked down at his six-shot grenade launcher, realizing he’d yet to reload it. “Will be engaging in one mike. Over.” He took another peek. How far was that, about one hundred and fifty yards? Maybe a little less.
George cracked open the Milkor and began reloading it as he issued orders. “Kelly, you’ve got the only other grenade launcher, move down a couple offices so one grenade can’t take us both out. Mark, you pick another office for your SAW, and focus your fire on the roof gunner, that Mk19 is the only real threat right now.”
“Roger that.” Mark’s right leg below the knee was slick with blood, and it was soaking into his boot, but they had no time to attend to the cut.
“Quentin, I want you here. On my signal, you blow out this window, then you get on the roof gunner too. Thank God they never upgraded those things for remote use.”
He finished dumping out the empty hulls and loading the cylinder with fresh armor-piercing grenades, then closed it and adjusted the optic for 150 yards. “Stand by!” he called out, loud enough for Mark and Kelly to hear. Then he took a deep breath, nodded to Quentin, and said, “Go!”
Quentin shouldered his rifle and blew out the window next to George, who turned his head to avoid getting any glass in his face. Before all the shards had even hit the floor George was spinning, putting the stock of the stubby grenade launcher against his shoulder. He leaned his left forearm against the window frame to steady his aim, put the reticle on the center of the IMP, and fired his first shot. He heard Mark open up with the SAW and heard the giant crashing chime of breaking glass.
The first grenade went high, passing over the IMP and detonating inside some decorative shrubs grown wild. George mentally swore, but he’d specifically waited to see where the first one hit before firing a second time. As the IMP jerked forward to evade, and the roof gunner spun his grenade launcher toward the threat, George aimed lower and toward the front of the moving vehicle. He fired again and again until his launcher was empty.
The explosion on the roof of the IMP from his second-to-last grenade was huge—he’d hit the belt of grenades feeding the Mk19, and the entire box had blown skyward. “IMP is down! IMP is down!” he shouted over the sound of Quentin firing right next to him. “Tabs on foot to the north.”
“Weasel!”
Weasel turned from where he was guarding the stairwell. They knew there were Tab soldiers in and around the building, but so far they hadn’t tried assaulting up the stairs. “Yeah?”
Renny was in the doorway of the corner apartment. “I can’t see any of that from here, but I think if I get up to the roof and go to the northeast corner I can do some good.” They’d all been listening to the firefight on the radio.
Weasel nodded. “On me!” He ran down the hall past the old man and toward the other stairwell, the one with roof access. “Carrells, you got anything?”
The young man was posted on the sixth-floor landing. He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“We’re heading up.”
They rushed by him. The stairwell accessing the roof was near the northeast corner. Renny followed Weasel out the door onto the gray roof and looked around, then saw his spot.
“You’re my spotter,” he told Weasel, handing him the Gen 3 Ventus. The Trijicon optic was a combination range-finder and wind reader, but it also had a 10X optical magnification, and Weasel could use them as binoculars.
Renny hooked to the right and dropped prone near the edge of the roof. The end of his rifle barrel was two feet from the roof edge. “There, you see ‘em?” Renny said, pointing, then flipped the legs of his bipod open. For under the rifle’s butt he had a black sock filled with plastic pellets—almost as good as a sandbag, but one-quarter of the weight. He’d grabbed nothing but the rifle, the sock, and extra ammo, one plastic box the size of a paperback book stuffed with twenty additional rounds.
He could hear the gunfire echoing around the city, but what caught Weasel’s eye was the narrow column of black smoke. Following it down he spotted the IMP on a residential street several hundred yards north of the Fisher Building. His eyes were good, but still he had to squint to make out the figures crouching behind it. He knelt on the roof behind Renny. He lifted the fancy Star Wars binos or whatever they were to his eyes. “How far is that?”
“Two-hundred fifty, maybe. You tell me, hit the button on the top, close right, while you’re looking through them at the IMP.”
Weasel peered at the top of the gadget, found the button marked RANGE. Then he put his finger on it, looked through the lenses again at the vehicle, and pressed the button. “Two twenty-seven,” he read. Renny grunted.
In his former spot inside the apartment, the hulk of the Fisher Building parking garage had blocked his view of anything north of Nakatomi. Moving to the northeast corner of his building had done the trick. He still couldn’t see the area immediately north of the Fisher Building, but that didn’t matter since the Tabs were two streets away. He had rubber plugs half inserted in his ears and shoved them the rest of the way in, then settled behind the rifle. He was zeroed at two hundred yards; at 227 his bullets would hit maybe an inch low, which was more or less margin of error for him at that distance, under field conditions. “Ears,” he said quietly, trying to settle his heartbeat and his breathing. He cranked the magnification up to about 15X, which gave him a good balance between zoom and field of view.
He flicked off the safety and squeezed the bag under the butt to raise it. He watched the center of the reticle drop right to where it needed to be, then it rose and fell slightly with his breathing. There were at least two Tabs behind the disabled IMP, firing intermittently at the Fisher Building. Bursts of suppressive fire from Mark’s SAW kept them there.