“Who do I have to thank for this, Sir”
“There’s an Interpol Agent in the Tower, along with Malcolm and his boys. They’re hip deep in the brown stuff, Colonel, and getting deeper so you clean up your mess and get in there!”
“Yes Sir!”
“Go to it, Colonel. Genalde out.”
Pierson dropped the earpiece he’d been holding to his head and looked around, “Someone bring my computer god damn it!”
Stanley Marion grunted as he slammed the heavy axe into the flimsy door, splintering the half cindered wood at a stroke, and almost fell in through the opening when his swing kept on going without the resistance he’d been expecting.
Marion cursed as he grabbed onto the doorframe, kicking the splintered shards loose from around his feet, and peered through the smoke intently.
“Tom!” He hollered, his throat sore as he tried to make himself heard through the heavy insulation of his helmet and protective gear. “Tom!”
There was no indication of anyone in the room on the infrareds or to eyeball mark one, but he made a thorough circuit anyway as he checked around all the furniture and even under what looked to be a desk.
“Tom!”
He would not, by God, lose a man without doing everything in his power to save him. He couldn’t.
Marion paused at the shattered door, and uncharacteristically looked up at the smoldering ceiling as he spoke.
“God.Please lord, let me find him. I can’t walk out of here without him, and I sure don’t want to die.”
There are moments in life, if one is lucky, when a person gets a faint glimpse that there just may be something beyond the world as he knows it. Call it supernatural, call it God, call it anything you like.
For Stanley Marion that moment came when a whispered voice answered his quiet plea to the heavens, and nearly scared him into them.
“Mary” The whispered voice sounded in his ear. “Mary is that you”
Marion froze then, utterly shocked as his heart pounded in his ear and he looked up again, eyes rolling around as if he were going to see someone looking back down. It took a few moments for his mind to catch up to his heart, and he saw that the radio light was green, and there was a GPS locator blinking brightly on his helmet display.
“Tom! Tom, I’m coming! Hold on!”
“Stop yelling, Mary.I can hear you fine.”
Marion ignored the request and kept yelling as he kicked his way through some fallen debris, following the signal through the flames and smoke. He quickly realized that the location he was receiving wasn’t on the floor he was currently searching, but well below.
“Jesus, Tom, what the hell are you doing way down there!”
“I fell through the fucking floor, Mary, what did you think”
“Joey!” Marion called out, “Get me a line and plenty of water in here!”
The voice from outside was heaven sent, and Marion could have kissed the hairy bastard when he replied.
“We’re already coming in, Mary! This whole place is a goddamned warzone, I think we’ll be safer in the fuckin fire!”
“Watch out, we’ve got another group coming in.”
Major Malcolm nodded to the warning and glanced over to where Inspector Dougal was crouched in the corner. The police Inspector was shivering, cold, and miserable. She’d been soaked to the bone in the initial deluge and things had gotten a lot cooler around the solar power plant as the water from on high had drawn all the heat from the air. “Things are going to get hairy in a bit, Inspector.”
She nodded, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of my end.”
“You’ve done your end, Ma’am,” he told her, “leave this to us.”
She scowled at him, but he held up a hand, “Seriously Inspector. It’s better if you stay back here.”
She looked away from him, clearly unhappy with the `request’, but finally nodded after a moment. He nodded back, grateful for that acquiescence, and took up his XM-90 as he looked to the messenger.
“Alright, Trooper.let’s do this.”
The young SAS man, barely into his twenties Malcolm remembered, flashed him a grin and stepped out of the power relay room and into the artificial rain. He hadn’t gone more than a half dozen steps before the water had swallowed him up, and even the hardened SAS Major shivered at the thought of going back out in the cold just then.
Thoughts of that nature were fine, he reflected as he stepped over the threshold and into the rain, just so long as they didn’t affect actions. He shifted his rifle into an easier carry position and set out across the cavernous room after his man.
At that time, about two hundred yards away, another group of warriors were giving the chilling rain the evil eye as they walked slowly through the deluge, water running down their faces and into their eyes as they tried to blink it away.
“I can’t get a response from Jacob, Ryan.”
The man who had been, until that day, the Chief of Police for Tower City frowned. “That’s not right. Something must have happened.”
“You think we should go back”
Ryan Emmerson hesitated, considering the options, then shook his head. “Not until we clear the tower. We need to get this crap figured out, and besides.we’re already soaked.”
“You’re the boss.”
“Yeah.I’m the boss,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head. “Alright. Tell the rest of them to start in.Be careful, take it slow.”
“Will do.”
A moment later they started slowly forward, a few men at a time as they searched for an enemy they believed to be waiting.
Somewhere.
Within the enormous base of the tower, the water soaked concrete splashed lightly under foot as the two groups slowly approached one another, each looking through the lousy visibility for the other in a dance nearly as old as mankind. Sound, sight, sometimes even smell or something less obvious would tell the story, triggering the event both sides knew was coming.
In this case it was sound.
Specifically, it was the sudden chatter of a radio squawking to life after a tired and frustrated SAS trooper had forgotten to secure the little device to VOX control only when he’d determined, hours earlier, that the radios were out. A second of carelessness erupted into a pocket lifetime of regret when three terrorist assault rifles swiveled as one and erupted into the dark.
Major Malcolm hit the ground when the flash of gunfire erupted through the haze, splashing into an inch of water that quickly soaked through what few clothes he had left that weren’t clinging to his body like a second skin. His own radio, properly secured, erupted into chatter as the rest of his team followed his lead and hit the ground, most of them cursing under their breath.
“Johnny’s down!”
“Son of a!”
“Mutherfu.!”
Malcolm growled, snapping out automatically. “Belay that chatter!”
It was only after he gave the order that he realized that they had radios back.
Of all the lousy goddamned times!
He growled again, pushing his rifle out ahead of him, and located the flash of a rifle in the murky distance. “Watch your backs, don’t shoot each other.but take those bastards out.”
Then he opened fire, the first in a fusillade of return fire that erupted from the other members of the team arrayed around his position. Malcolm trusted his men, and his memory, to know where they were supposed to be as he struggled to target moving tangos through the sheets of water that were still cascading down around him.
In the back of his mind, some part of him noted the water from a distance and was amazed that the system had the reserves to keep up this kind of downpour for so long. Most of his mind, however, was well and truly focused on the present and the killing ground the central part of the solar tower had become.