Now he hastened to one of the platforms, slipped a satchel charge off his shoulder, and placed it at the foot of a tall support post. Both timer pencils he was using had been preset to a ten-minute delay, an acceptable opening in which to get out before the blast. Silent and vigilant, their weapons held ready across their bodies, his teammates stood watch behind him in the central aisle. The vast room around them was dark except for the few widely spaced fluorescents normally left on after the close of daily operations.
Crouching at the foot of the support, Heitor removed the timer pin to initiate the detonation sequence. Then he quickly went to the next platform and dropped his other charge.
It was just as he pulled the second pin that Thibodeau stepped from an elevator onto one of the flying catwalks and, looking out over the expansive floor of the storage bay, was shocked to discover what was happening below.
“Thibodeau’s backup is on the way,” Delure said. “I pulled four men from the office complex, another six off other details.”
“How long before they reach him?” Cody asked from his station.
“Could be as long as ten minutes for some of them.”
“Not good enough,” Cody said. He produced a harsh sigh and turned to Jezoirski. “What about Felix? How fast can we bring him to Thibodeau?”
“Give me a sec to call up a floor plan of the building.” Jezoirski tapped his keyboard, scanned the screen in front of him. “ ’Hog’s in the Level 5 propulsion lab—”
“How fast?”
Jezoirski studied the schematic, then lifted his face. “There’s a connecting walkway between the research and warehouse complexes. We can move him straight along this corridor right here to the elevator, then down three levels to the walkway,” he said, plotting a course across the screen with his finger. “From there it might need a minute, maybe a minute and a half to reach the warehouse, another couple to get down to the payload storage bay.”
“That’s at least six minutes.”
Jezoirski nodded. “Best we can do.”
“Suppose we’ll have to live with it then,” Cody said. Sweat glistened in the furrow above his lip. “All right, let’s hurry up and get the ’hog rolling.”
The earthmovers were parked near a ditch they had scooped out of the ground, and had offered solid cover to the invaders until the helicopters marked their positions. As they came under intense fire from a chase squad now, the group of invaders scurried down into the ditch, where they pressed up against its sides and began shooting over its stony rim.
The Skyhawks stuck to them like the predatory birds that were their namesakes, one nailing the tracked vehicles with its SX-5 searchlight, the other shining its light directly into the trench.
“Nest’s ready to be cleaned out,” the chopper pilot above the ditch radioed the ground team.
“Roger, we’re on it,” its leader replied.
He turned the barrel vents of his rifle to their closed setting and ordered his squad to move.
The chopper pilot stayed on the horn to guide their advance, and continue reporting on the position of the invaders. As he hovered over the bowl-shaped ditch, the incandescent brilliance and swirling gun smoke inside it gave the eerie illusion that he was peering down into a lava pit filled with almost a dozen trapped human beings.
But the situation below was such that the distance between illusion and reality rapidly closed. The chase squad attacked in a flanking rush, looping around the dozers and front-end loaders to hose the ditch with their guns. Although return fire was heavy, they had the cold confidence of men who had stolen the offensive and gained a maneuverability their opposition had lost. Surrounded, their FAMAS weapons’ targeting systems overloaded by the unsparing glare of the searchlights, the invaders had in fact run themselves into a trap.
One of them tumbled down the side of the trench, soil and pebbles spitting up around him. A second rose to trigger an explosive round, but was slammed off his feet by a blaze of fire.
A third sprang up and looked briefly as if he might attempt a suicidal charge over the rim… but then he backed off, tossed his weapon aside, and dropped facedown onto the bottom of the ditch in surrender, his hands stretched above his head.
The chopper pilot watched another invader follow suit and disarm, then another, then the rest seemingly all at once. A moment later the chase squad’s leader gave the hand signal to suspend fire, followed by a thumbs-up to the pilot.
He smiled and returned the gesture. His searchlight would make it impossible for those on the ground to see it, but what the hell.
Disengaging his auto-hover control, he skipped off to another spot where he might be needed, the other chopper close behind.
Thibodeau would never know what caught the attention of the invader standing lookout on the warehouse floor — the slight movement of his fingers when he raised the gas pressure in his rifle barrel, the click of the hand guard as it locked into its new setting, or maybe something else completely.
In the end the only thing that mattered was the invader’s bullet, and the damage it did to him.
For Thibodeau, it all happened in what his combat buddies used to call slow time. There was the surprising realization that he’d been spotted as the invader’s weapon angled up in his direction. There was a spark of alarm inside him, cold and bright, like winter sunlight glinting off ice. Then he felt his reflexes kick in, felt himself reacting, and was sure his reaction was quick enough… should have been quick enough anyway. But as he ducked down below the rail the very air seemed to gain thickness and density, to resist him. It was as if he was sinking through jelly.
And then there was a loud crack from below, and something walloped him on the right side, and he felt heat spread through his stomach and went crumpling onto the floor of the catwalk as time resumed its normal speed like a train jolting from the station.
Thibodeau tried to get up, but his body was all deadweight, somehow apart from him. He lay half on his belly, looked down at himself, and saw that his vest hadn’t been penetrated, that the hit was nothing but a fluke, the trajectory of the bullet having carried it up into the space between the bottom of the vest and his stomach, some goddamned nasty bit of gris-gris. And now here he was, blood draining out of him to the floor’s treaded runner, filling the spaces between the treads, flowing down along them in thin scarlet streams — when had he ever stepped on Satan’s tail to earn this one?
He heard the crash of footfalls, managed to lift his cheek off the floor so he could see more than the blood and the railing in front of him.
The man who’d shot him was clambering up the metal risers to the catwalk, a second invader right behind him. The two of them coming to finish him off.
Furiously wishing to God that he knew where he’d dropped his rifle, Thibodeau turned his head downward and saw to his amazement that was it still in his right hand, his fingers clutched around the grip, its barrel jacket pressed almost vertically against his side.
He dropped his cheek to the floor again, dropped it into a pool of his own blood, no longer able to keep it up. He was funneling all his willpower into getting the hand to move. He told it to move, begged it to move, and when it failed to respond silently began cursing it, demanding that it quit giving him bullshit, insisting angrily that it could fuck with him later on, could fall right off his shoulder if that was how it had to be, but that right now it was going to obey him and raise the goddamned rifle.
Thibodeau heard himself take a racking breath. He could see the invaders in their black helmets and uniforms, getting closer, pounding up the stairs.