"Listen up, everybody, listen up. Pull back to the building right now! Everybody move back right now!"
"Rainbow, this is Six, expect movement back to the building complex right now. Weapons are free," he added over the encrypted tactical radios.
The panic in Henriksen's radio call turned out to be contagious. Immediately they heard the thrashing sound of people running in the woods, through bushes, taking direct if not quiet paths back toward the open to which many ran without thinking.
That made an easy shot for Homer Johnston. One green-clad man broke from the trees and ran down the grassy part next to the runway. The weapon he carried made him an enemy, and Johnston dispatched a single round that went between his shoulder blades. The man took one more stumbling step and went down. "Rifle Two-One, I got one north of the runway!" the sniper called in.
It was more direct for Chavez. Ding was sheltering behind a hardwood tree when he heard the noises coming his way from two people he'd been stalking alone. When he figured they were about fifty meters away, he stepped around the tree trunk, to see that they were heading the other way. Chavez sidestepped left and spotted one, and brought his MP-10 to his shoulder. The running man saw him and tried to bring up his rifle. He even managed to fire, but right into the ground, before taking a burst in the face and falling like a sack of beans. The man behind him skidded to a stop and looked at where Chavez was standing.
"Drop the fucking rifle!" Ding screamed at him, but the man either didn't hear or didn't listen. His rifle started coming up, too, but as with his companion, he never made it. "Chavez here, I just dropped two." The excitement of the moment masked the shame of how easy it had been. This was pure murder.
It was like keeping score for Clark, like some sort of horrid gladiatorial game. The unknown blips on the screen of Noonan's computer started disappearing as their hearts stopped and with them the electronic signals they generated. In another few minutes, he counted four of the thirty signals they'd originally tracked, and those were running back to the building.
"Christ, Bill, what happened out there?" Brightling demanded at the main entrance.
"They slaughtered us like fucking sheep, man. I don't know. I don't know."
"This is John Clark calling for William Henriksen," the radio crackled.
"Yeah?"
"Okay, one last time, surrender right now, or else we come in after you."
"Come and fucking get us!" Henriksen screamed in reply.
"Vega, start doing some windows," Clark ordered in a calm voice.
"Roger that, Command," Oso replied. He lifted the shoulder stock of his M-60 machine gun and started on the second floor. The weapon traced right to left, shattering glass as the line of tracers darted across the intervening distance into the building.
"Pierce and Loiselle, you and Connolly head northwest into the other buildings. Start taking stuff down."
"Roger, Command," Pierce replied.
The survivors from the forest party were trying to shoot back, mainly at empty air, but making noise in the lobby of the headquarters building. Carol Brightling was screaming now. The glass from the upstairs windows cascaded like a waterfall in front of their faces.
"Make them stop!" Carol cried loudly.
"Give me the radio," Brightling said. Henriksen handed it to him.
"Cease firing. This is John Brightling,cease firing, everybody. That means you, too, Clark, okay?"
In a few seconds, it stopped, which proved harder for the Project people, since Rainbow had only one weapon tiring, and Oso stopped immediately on being ordered to.
"Brightling, this is Clark, can you hear me?" the radio in John's hand crackled next.
"Yes, Clark, I hear you."
"Bring all of your people into the open right now and unarmed," the strange voice commanded. "And nobody will get shot. Bring all of your people out now, or we start playing really rough."
"Don't do it," Bill Henriksen urged, seeing the futility of resistance, but fearing surrender more and preferring to die with a weapon in his hands.
"So they can kill us all right here and right now?" Carol asked. "What choice do we have?"
"Not much of one," her husband observed. He walked to the reception desk and made a call over the building's intercom system, calling everyone to the lobby. Then he lifted the portable radio. "Okay, okay, we'll be coming out in a second. Give us a chance to get organized."
"Okay, we'll wait a little while," Clark responded.
"This is a mistake, John," Henriksen told his employer.
"This whole fucking thing's been a mistake, Bill," John observed, wondering where he'd gone wrong. As he watched, the black helicopter reappeared and landed about halfway down the runway, as close as the pilot was willing to come to hostile weapons.
Paddy Connolly was at the fuel dump. There was a huge aboveground fuel tank, labeled #2 Diesel, probably for the generator plant. There was nothing easier or more fun to blow up than a fuel tank, and with Pierce and Loiselle watching, the explosives expert set ten pounds of charges on the opposite side of the tank from the generator plant that it served. A good eighty thousand gallons, he thought, enough to keep those generators going for a very long time.
"Command, Connolly."
"Connolly, Command," Clark answered.
"I'm going to need more, everything I brought down," he reported.
"It's on the chopper, Paddy. Stand by."
"Roger."John had advanced to the edge of the treeline, a scant three hundred yards from the building. Just beyond him, Vega was still on his heavy machine gun, and the rest of his troops were close by, except for Connolly and the two shooters with him. The elation was already gone. It had been a grim day. Success or not, there is little joy in the taking of life, and this day's work had been as close to pure murder as anything the men had ever experienced.
"Coming out," Chavez said, his binoculars to his eyes. He did a fast count. "I see twenty-six of 'em."
"About right," Clark said. "Gimme," he said next, taking the glasses from Domingo to see if he could recognize any faces. Surprisingly, the first face he could put a name on was the only woman he saw, Carol Brightling, presidential science advisor. The man next to her would be her former husband, John Brightling, Clark surmised. They walked out, away from the building onto the ramp that aircraft used to turn around on. "Keep coming straight out away from the building," he told them over the radio. And they did what he told them, John saw, somewhat to his surprise.
"Okay, Ding, take a team and check the building out. Move, boy, but be careful."
"You bet, Mr. C." Chavez waved for his people to follow him at a run for the building."
Using the binoculars again, Clark could see no one carrying weapons, and decided that it was safe for him to walk out with five Team-1 troops as an escort. The walk took five minutes or so, and then he saw John Brightling face-to-face.
"I guess this is your place, eh?"
"Until you destroyed it."
"The guys at Fort Detrick checked out the canister that Mr. Gearing there tried to use in Sydney, Dr. Brightling. If you're looking for sympathy from me, pal, you've called the wrong number."
"So, what are you going to do?" Just as he finished the question, the helicopter lifted off and headed for the power-plant building, delivering the rest of Connolly's explosives, Clark figured.
"I've thought about that."
"You killed our people!" Carol Brightling snarled, as though it meant something.
"The ones who were carrying weapons in a combat zone, yeah, and I imagine they would have shot at my people if they'd had a chance-but we don't give freebies."
"Those were good people, people-"
"People who were willing to kill their fellow man-and for what?" John asked.
"To save the world!" Carol Brightling snapped back.