CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Dusk had faded to full night when Orozco finally heard the distant sound of minigun fire.
He stood up from the fountain rim where he and Wadleigh’s fire team had been sitting and crossed to the archway. The Terminator fire was coming in short bursts, he noted grimly, the rhythm that would typically be used to clean out a house after a successful breach. So far he hadn’t heard any answering fire, but maybe that was just being swallowed up by the louder sounds of the miniguns.
Or maybe all the victims were dying before they had a chance to shoot back.
There was a movement at the corner of his eye, and he turned to see Grimaldi come up beside him.
“So it’s started,” the chief said quietly.
Orozco nodded. “So it would seem.”
“Yes.” Grimaldi paused as another burst of minigun fire split the night, this group coming from a different direction. “So you were right.”
“Yes,” Orozco said flatly. “I was.”
“So that’s it,” Grimaldi said, an agonized ache in his voice. “We’re all dead. Because of me.”
Orozco looked at him. The chief was staring out the archway, his face drawn, his eyes wet with tears of regret or anger or frustration. And for a long moment Orozco wanted to tell the other that, yes, this was all his fault.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t kick a man who was watching his world-view crumbling right in front of him. “We’re not dead yet,” he said instead. “If you’re finally ready to help, you could go check on the fire teams on the balcony. Make sure they’re ready.”
Visibly, Grimaldi pulled himself back together. “Yes, I can do that,” he said. “Do you want me to go look at the loading dock area, too?”
“Sure,” Orozco said. There wasn’t much to do back there that hadn’t already been done, but he could understand Grimaldi’s sudden burning desire to do something. “Then come back here and I’ll set you up with one of the flanks. Any more of your allies sitting it out?”
Grimaldi winced at the word allies. “Probably,” he admitted. “I don’t know how good most of them will be in a fight, though.”
“Trust me, there’ll be plenty of work for them to do,” Orozco assured him. “We need people to carry ammo, patrol the inside perimeter, carry messages, move and assist the wounded, build and repair barricades and fire stations, and eventually move the dead.”
A muscle in Grimaldi’s cheek twitched. “You want all the children here, too?”
“Anyone who can help, yes,” Orozco said. “No one gets a free pass tonight.”
“I understand,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll go get them.”
He moved away.
Orozco watched him go, then turned back to the darkened street outside the archway. Listening hard to the minigun fire, he tried to estimate the position of each of the groups of Terminators. And to estimate when one of those groups would arrive at the Ashes.
Full night had fallen, and the team was indeed ready, when Connor finally heard the distant sound of mini-gun fire.
“That’s it, people,” he said. “Time to move.”
The other men and women in the room didn’t need to be told twice. Already they were grabbing their packs and guns and doing their final weapons checks.
“One minute,” Connor said.
Sixty seconds later, they were ready. He cracked the door and took a careful look outside. All seemed clear.
“Remember: radio silence if at all possible,” he said. “David?”
David nodded, and he and his demolition squad slipped past, disappearing into the night as they headed out toward the access shaft where they would enter the tunnel that ran alongside the Skynet warehouse. Tunney was next, his squad slated to follow David’s group as rearguard until they split off to approach the staging area from the west.
The newcomers were with the latter group, Callahan and the Iliakis and young Zac. They had wanted to go with Barnes’ squad, but Connor had judged Tunney’s to be the one where they would be in the least danger, as well as where their inexperience was least likely to get someone else killed.
Ideally, of course, he would have preferred to leave them here with Kate in the relative safety of the temp base. But they’d made it clear that they were going to go out there, either with Connor’s people or by themselves. Better they at least go with someone who could look out for them.
The Iliakis were the last of the squad out the door, and Connor felt a twinge of guilt as he watched them go. Carol had quietly insisted on going into danger with her husband, exactly as Kate had wanted to do with her husband.
Only in her case, Connor had said no.
And then it was Connor’s turn. He gave Kate a silent nod good-bye, got one in return, and led his team out into the night. Distantly, he wondered if Kate was thinking about the Iliakis, too.
The gunfire had slackened somewhat, he noted as he and his four teammates moved quickly but cautiously through the deserted streets on their way to the staging area’s southern edge. The Terminators must have finished off one of their targets and were in the process of moving on to the next one.
Fortunately, the recruitment tours they’d made of the neighborhood had marked most of the inhabited buildings, where the Terminators were going to be gathering. Hopefully, the routes Connor and Tunney had mapped out would get them all where they needed to be with a minimal chance of running into trouble along the way.
“Shh-shh!” Someone behind Connor hissed a warning.
Instantly, Connor dropped into a crouch, the rest of the squad doing likewise. Minimal, the thought flashed through his mind, doesn’t mean zero.
Half a block to their right, striding away from them down the street, were a pair of T-600s.
Connor eased his hand away from his rifle and onto one of the blast grenades at his belt. The Terminators were facing away from his squad, their attention clearly elsewhere. But that didn’t mean they might not suddenly decide to look behind them.
Especially given that Skynet’s spotters were already in the air. The HKs drifting over the city were playing it cool, running with spotlights off and minimal turbo-fans. But Connor could hear their rumble as they watched for any refugees who might try to slip past its ground forces.
But like the T-600s themselves, the HKs were evidently focusing for the moment on their own map of targeted buildings, leaving the neighborhood’s uninhabited areas alone. The two T-600s came to the end of the block, turned the corner, and vanished from sight.
Still watching the corner, Connor rose from his crouch.
“Damn, that was close,” Tony Tantillo muttered. “Where’s our air support, anyway?”
“It’ll be here,” Connor assured him.
Somewhere down the street, from the vicinity of the Moldavia, the miniguns opened up again.
All those children, Kate had said earlier, troubled by the thought of leaving them to die. All those children….
But it was out of Connor’s hands now. Signaling to his team to follow, he continued on into the night.
Yoshi was strapping into his A-10 when Blair finally made it to the hangar.
“Come on, come on—the call came three minutes ago,” Yoshi called impatiently. “What’s the holdup?”
“Ninety seconds,” Blair promised as she sprinted toward her own fighter. “Wince? Yo—
Wince?”
“Right here,” the old man said, popping into view around her plane’s nose. “You’re all set. I think.”