Saxon turned to the window in time to see a man on the roof of the Rostov looking up at them, raising a handheld to his ear; in the next second the man jerked violently backward as if pulled by an invisible wire, a jet of red spurting from his chest. As the helo descended, he spotted the other guards on the roof, collapsing in puffs of pink mist.
The helo fell into a hover ten meters up, and the rest of the Tyrants deployed, Barrett and Hermann leading, then Namir and Saxon, with
Federova last.
Saxon tensed; he was used to fast-roping, but his new high-fall aug-part of the "recruitment package"-meant he could drop straight into the thick without a descender cord. The whole thing was counterintuitive, but it worked. He jumped, and a moment before he landed, a brief pulse of electromagnetic energy flared around him, cushioning his fall. He landed squarely, the crackle of the effect generated by the augmentation taking the shock and bleeding it off to nothing.
Federova put down a heartbeat later, cat-falling with little more than a crunch of gravel. She had her hair back behind an Alice band studded with data loops, but no hood. Federova saw him looking and gazed back, languid and unconcerned.
With a gust of downwash, the helo powered into the sky. He looked away, scanning the rooftop. The Rostov was a shallow, three-lobed tower that had been thrown up in the boom years of the early 2010s, but never completed. There were whole floors of the building that were locked off, still unfinished over a decade later.
"Blue, Green," said Namir, using Barrett and Hermann's call signs. "Secure the roof. Check for stragglers." He glanced at Saxon. "Gray, with me."
"Roof is clear" Hardesty said, from his firing nest across the square. He didn't like the suggestion that he'd missed someone.
Low and quick, Saxon followed the Tyrant commander toward the boxy service shack in the middle of the roof. He passed the corpse of the man the sniper had shot in the chest, and scanned the body. The dead man had a look of frozen surprise on his face, a foam of red froth on his lips. Hardesty's bullet had punctured the heart, the exit wound ripping open the guard's back.
The man's face triggered a connection to the mission data Saxon had shunted to a temporary memory store in his implanted neural hub; the modified wet-drive was another "bonus" from the Tyrants. He blinked up an image from an arrest record. The man lying in the pool of crimson was immediately identified as Oleg Pushkin, a minor enforcer with the main Moscow crime syndicate, the Solntsevskaya Bratva. "This guy's a mob hitter," Saxon murmured.
"They all are," Namir replied. "Keep up."
Barrett was at the service shack as they reached it. Air-conditioning equipment, heat exchangers, and cable gear for the Rostov's elevator banks hummed inside.
Namir nodded at a secured maintenance hatch on the side of the shack. "Open it."
Hermann leaned close and used a digital lockpick to neutralize the security latches; when he was done, Barrett stepped in and curled his fingers around the lip of the hatch with a grimace. The bunches of myomer muscles in his arms stiffened, gathered-and then with a low howl of tortured metal the hatch came away, shearing the bolt heads clean off.
As Namir peered inside, Saxon glanced over his shoulder and his brow furrowed in confusion. "Where's… Red?" There was no sign of Federova anywhere on the rooftop. She had been only a few steps behind him.
Barrett chuckled. "She's around."
"Green," said Namir. "Deny their communications."
"Complying." Hermann nodded, drawing a thick, disc-shaped object from his backpack. It resembled a land mine. Acting quickly, the German set it on the ground and flicked a yellow-and-black-striped activation switch. A flicker of interference momentarily stuttered across Saxon's cyberoptics.
"Target comms are dead," reported Barrett, cocking his head like a dog hearing a whistle. "Ready."
"Insertion," said Namir. "Go!"
One after another, they threaded in through the torn-out hatch and into the mass of machinery crowding the interior of the service shack.
Inside, a triangular cluster of running gear fell away into a series of shafts that ran the length of the Rostov, down to the basement parking levels sixteen stories below. Saxon toggled his optics to low-light mode and the space became visible in shades of green and white. The shapes of elevator cars were visible, most of them static, others gently rising or descending.
Namir and Saxon took point, working their way down past the slowly turning drums of support cables and the rumbling lift gears. According to their information, Kontarsky and his people were on floor thirteen; outside, the pilot of the helo was watching the windows of the apartments on the thirteenth floor, scanning through the vision-opaque glass with a thermographic sensor, watching the body-heat traces of the minister and his staff. At this time of day, most of them were asleep; only the guards were supposed to be awake. They had to take care, though; their intel wasn't clear on how many, if any, civilians were in the building. Collateral damage was to be kept to an absolute minimum.
Securing nylon cords to the cable frames, the two of them fast-roped down in silence, pausing at each level to sweep for magnetic anomaly detectors or beam sensors. Saxon watched Namir work with speed and delicacy, rendering security systems inert with the skill of a veteran.
The central lift of a three-block cluster was locked in place at the thirteenth. The plan was to enter through its roof and fan out along the three radial corridors-Namir, Hermann, and Saxon taking one each, Barrett holding the core as backup.
"Prep for breach" Namir sub vocalized. Saxon lowered himself to the top of the elevator car, disconnected his tether, and drew out a pressurized canister of det-foam. Dialing the nozzle to narrow feed, he put marble-size blobs of the khaki-toned chemical in the corners of the car's roof, then thumbed a set of slaved microdetonators into the congealing foam.
As he finished, he felt the elevator move slightly beneath him and heard voices. Three men, speaking in Russian. Through an air vent, he could see a sliver of what was going on.
"Shto sluchios?" said one of them. He was tapping the radio headset at his ear, frowning.
Another man, out of Saxon's sight line, spat in irritation and followed his cohort into the lift. They were leaving their posts; Hermann's trick with the communications blackout had spooked them.
Then the man with the radio gave a slow, owlish blink; Saxon recognized the action. He had implanted optics-he was changing vision modes.
The guard looked up, and for a fraction of a second Saxon saw a bluish glitter in his right eye. The tell gave away exactly what kind of optic the guard was using; a terahertz lens that could see right through light cover. In the next few seconds, everything happened with bullet-fast rapidity. The guard swore explosively and slammed his fist into the control pad, sending the elevator into an express plunge to the lobby. The other men in the car dragged their guns up, but they were armed with cut-down assault rifles and inside the close confines of the elevator, the size of the guns made them unwieldy.
Saxon held tight to the car's frame and felt his stomach turn over as the lift dropped away; in the next breath the guards would have a bead on him. A spray of blind fire, and he would be ripped to shreds.
He cursed and did the only thing he could, tapping the detonator key on the control bracelet around his wrist. The blobs of det-foam combusted with sharp, smoky reports and the roof of the elevator car collapsed inward, Saxon falling with it. The noise deafened him.
The confined space became chaotic. The guards cursed and struggled to deflect the debris, lashing out. Saxon had no time to draw a weapon; it was like fighting inside a coffin, with no room to maneuver; nothing to do but strike fast and give no quarter.
He punched the man with the t-wave optic into the wall and the guard's rifle snarled, discharging a three-round burst into the door. Then, spinning in place, Saxon drove the armor-plated pad on his elbow into the rib cage of the second guard. He shoved him into a thinscreen along the back wall and it fractured, webbing with cracks.