Dark Dragons (46 page)

Never mind.

*

Towsley saluted the guard posted at the desk in the
vestibule and stepped into the vast, airy hangar.  The air here was
thankfully cool on his sweaty face.  Taking a quick look, he spotted a
second guard standing next to one of the Dragonstars impassively watching the
engineers gathered around the machine.  A third was smoking a cigarette
about two hundred feet away, gabbing with the crane operator in the control
box.  Count three guards.

*

“Tony, I got this.”  Darren slipped his foot through
the door and kept it open.  Several storage crates, wooden pallets of food
and ammunition, and fifty-five-gallon drums of diesel were stacked against the
wall next to them.  Lots of Humvees and what looked like armored personnel
carriers, too.  Through a gap in the crates he spotted his Dragonstar with
the access doors still open.  To the left he could see the far corner of
the building which housed the electronics lab beyond a tall row of metal racks
loaded with pallets of stuff.

“I can’t see the guards, but they have to be out there
somewhere.  Looks like there’s a clear path through the crates all the way
to the lab.  So sorry, Geils, but you’re staying here.”

“What?”
Geils spat. “Towsley told you guys to take me
with you.”

“You’re the one who got us caught, ass wipe.  We’re not
going to let you screw anything else up.”

“You can’t leave me here.  I wanna go home.”

“Shut up Geils, or I’ll let Nate do what he said he would do
to you in the ravine behind my house.”

Geils looked at Nate and received a wink.

*

Towsley passed the engineers, giving them a curt nod, and
saluted the guard there.  Instead of using the main door to the
electronics lab, he walked around the building and opened the side entrance
with his ID card.  Towsley stepped inside and down the short hall to the
computer terminal desk in the vestibule.

Crap
.  For whatever reason, the Response Team
had posted a guard at the desk.

Towsley quickly saluted.  Make that four guards.

*

Darren felt the life nearly go out of him when one of the
guards appeared right in front of the door.  His first reaction was to
pull the tip of his foot from the doorway, but Weinholt had told them not to do
that.  The man had his back to the door, maybe fifteen feet away,
carefully looking around and peeking through the spaces of the 5-ton truck in
front of him.  Slowly, he turned and faced the cracked reactor room door.

*

“Why are you here, sergeant?” Towsley asked as nonchalantly
as he could.

“General Taggart has ordered all auxiliary posts
manned.  We’re at war now.  It’s a crazy reg if you ask me.”

Towsley’s eyes went to the computer terminal at the
desk.  Christ, he was so close to the touch-screen

“Can I ask why
you’re
here, colonel?”

He felt a single bead of hot sweat twist out of his hair,
past his ear, down his neck.

“Colonel?  You look sick.”

A great surge of electricity suddenly galvanized him,
stirring him into a state of potential rage.  Towsley shoved the end of his
9mm Beretta into the startled guard’s face, afraid of what he could do, what
might happen.

*

The guard apparently didn’t notice the door ajar, or he did
but just thought nothing of it.  Besides, Darren figured, he seemed more
concentrated on something else.  The guy was still peeking around, making
sure he couldn’t be seen, until he revealed a tall plastic drinking cup and
promptly relieved himself in it.  A long half-minute later, he set the
glass down next to the truck’s tire and zipped himself.

*

“Back up,” Towsley ordered, false calm in his voice.

It took two or three seconds for the guard to realize what
was happening before he did as directed.  He stood up and backed himself
against the wall.  Towsley went around the desk and collected the guy’s
radio and 9mm sidearm.  “Over to the other side of the vestibule. 
Go!”

Towsley inserted his PI card into the appropriate slot next
to the touch-screen.  On the corner of his eye, he could see the guard
slowly sliding away against the wall.

“I didn’t tell you to move, sergeant,” he said.

The guard had a new look on his face.  Defiance. 
Anger.  He was still backing away toward the short hall with the emergency
exit.  Towsley aimed the Beretta.  Still, the guard didn’t stop,
probably thinking,
You don’t have the guts
, or some other foolishly
defiant belief.

“Sergeant, can you see the desperate, shit-happens look
in my eyes?”
Towsley shouted.

The guard took another step.  And stopped.

“Now, back up to where you were.”  Towsley returned to the
touch-screen, accessed the circuit schematics to the entire base, and pressed
HANGAR.
  On the bottom box, he selected
LIGHTING.

BANK ONE - (ON) ( OFF).

He touched
OFF.

BANK TWO - (ON) (OFF).

*

Darren watched the second row of brilliant sodium lights go
out.  “There they go.”  He pulled the Beretta out of his blue jeans
and clicked off the safety.

“Whoa, where’d you get that?” Jorge asked.

Everyone in the hangar looked up at the ceiling.  One
of the guards removed the hand-held radio from his belt.  The third and
final row of lights flickered out.

“Let’s go, let’s go.”

Everyone stormed out of the door, into the hangar. 
Through the tall crates, Darren spotted the red emergency light above the side
door to the electronics lab, fifty feet to his left.

He heard the guard far off on his right say into his radio,
“We just had a shut down in the hangar.  Tell Circuits to get on the
ball.”

Thirty feet.

Someone behind him stumbled, murmured a curse.  Darren
kept running.

Twenty feet.

“Hey, Jim!” the guard on the other side of the hangar called
out.  “Can you see well enough to make it over to the electronics
lab?  Circuit Room says the cut-off was accessed from there!”

Ten feet.

“Who shut it off, and why?”

“I wasn’t told!  Go check it!”

*

The touch-screen suddenly went blank, replaced by a center
box which read
SECURITY OVERRIDE - PLCR433V3.
 
Someone in the Circuit Room with higher clearance than Towsley’s had just cut
him off.  The lights would be coming back.

*

Just as Darren reached the front door into the lab, the
darkness around them disappeared.  “Go!” he screamed, holding the door
open.  “Go!”

“Hey!”  A guard not more than twenty feet away, blind
just a second ago, drew his sidearm.  “Halt!”

Towsley appeared from the hallway and shoved another guard
he’d been holding out into the hangar.

“Colonel, what are you doing here?” Darren asked.

He pushed Darren inside and locked the door with his PI
card.  “Third door on the left!  Go!”

Their combat armor suits were still spread out on the low
stainless steel table, clumped in four separate piles under rows of fluorescent
lamps and other bizarre testing instruments.  Darren tossed Weinholt’s
Beretta on the table with a smile, knowing that the gun had just been her
crafty excuse to get him alone.  He could still taste spearmint on his
lips.

He gave the individual modules of his suit a quick once over
to see if they had been taken apart or altered in anyway, but nothing appeared
to be meddled with.  Darren laid his sub-suit on the table in front of him
and began to remove his clothes.

Towsley had his ear pressed to the door.  “I think they
have the service exit open.  You boys have to hurry.”  He reached
over for a chair and jammed it under the door knob.

The door suddenly thumped, and Towsley backed off.

“Colonel Towsley, open the door,” came a muffled plea behind
the door.

“Where’s Geils?” Towsley asked.

“We left him in the reactor room,” Darren replied.

“I told you I didn’t want him left here!”

“Screw him!” Darren growled back. “You deal with him, colonel. 
We don’t have the time or space to babysit him.”

The guys were finally in their sub-suits and began locking
the armor modules together.  The door thudded again, harder this time.

“What do we do with our clothes?” Tony said.

“Leave ’em,” Darren said, putting his helmet on.  All
of the components appeared to be working properly: gauss gun, pulse rifle,
hoist-cable, first aid, IFS, surveillance sensors, everything.  Nothing
had been tampered with.  He popped the rifle off his back-holster with a
thought-command and switched it on.  “Set your rifles on low and go for
the knees.”

That’s when the guards outside opened fire and began to
punch a Swiss cheese design into the door.  Towsley spun away to his left
from the disintegrating door.  Someone kicked it in, and two guards rushed
in like a pair of brazen cowboys stupid enough to believe they could take on
the whole saloon.  The guys lifted their pulse rifles and fired over the
guards’ heads.  The two startled soldiers ducked and ran back for the door.

“C’mon!” Darren shouted over the comm.  The guys rushed
the door and sprayed the entrance with laser fire, pushing the guards there
back down the corridor.

Darren stepped out into the hallway into a hail of harmless,
armor-piercing fire where six guards had lined up against the wall, and swept
his blazing weapon in a straight line, walking the laser pulses across their
legs.  All six went down screaming, their submachine guns spitting fire
blindly.

Darren tuned the rifle back to high-power and squeezed off a
single shot that blew the door to the vestibule off its hinges.  Five of
the guards on the other side went flying backward in a hail of splinters. 
Beyond that, he spotted through the lab’s front door at least ten Response Team
soldiers with a Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicle taking up fire positions in
the hangar.  There were certainly more beyond his line of sight.

*

The congregation of civilians and officers milling about in
the office wing had moved down to the Combat Operations Center to observe the
melee down in the hangar unfold on the front hi-def screens.  Taggart was
sitting in The Throne with his headset on.

The four shitheads appeared to have hesitated in the
electronics laboratory.  They hadn’t come out since the firefight began
almost five minutes ago.  Perhaps their resolve had deflated because of
the increasing number of Response Team personnel now gathering in the hangar
with a pair of 8-wheeled Stryker ICV’s.  Stalemate.

“Major Forrester,” Taggart said into his microphone.

“Yes, sir?”

“I don’t want the enemy to escape.  Do you
understand?  And if you see Colonel Towsley and Major Weinholt, I want
them arrested.”

“Arrest the colonel and the major?”

“Towsley assaulted one of your guards and a U.S.
Senator.  That’s affirmative, Forrester.”

*

Darren confidently strolled toward the entrance and sent one
of his RCS scouts hovering out the door to get a look at the hangar. 
“They’re all waiting for us to pop our heads out,” he said, examining the tiny
screen on his visor shield.  “Jesus, they’re armed for a rock
concert.  Fifty-cal on the Strykers, assault rifles, grenade launchers, a
squad with AT4 anti-tank launchers.  They even got a technical——goddamn
Chevy truck with a Gatling cannon in the back . . . are you kidding me?”

“We’re not going to kill any of them are we?” Nate asked.

Darren didn’t answer.

“Darren?” Tony asked.

He instructed his suit computer to build a battle map of the
hangar and calculate zones of fire.  “If they don’t back off, we just
might.”

“They’re people out there, yo,” Nate said.  “We can’t
kill ’em.  Our enemy is outside wiping out our military!”

Darren checked the battery to his rifle.  “If they back
off, we won’t have to.”

“You know they’re not going to back off.”

“Then we’ll have to kill them!”

A small tracked vehicle no bigger than a large dog appeared
at the entrance to the electronics lab and pointed a camera in their
direction.  It had a telephone.  A speaker under the tripod
crackled.  “My name is Major Forrester, and I’d like to——”

Darren promptly pumped a narrow blast from his pulse rifle
into the vehicle.  Negotiations over.  He let out a slow breath and
sent a thought-command to his comm.  He scanned through all the closest
radio frequencies until he found the one the guards were using, and opened the
channel.  “Hello, hello, hello,” he said.  “The bogeymen are
here.  I suggest everyone back off and let us through, and nobody will get
their heads blown off.”

“Listen, you little cocksucker,” Taggart growled. 
“This is going to end right now, so put your guns in the dirt.  You are
not going to get out of here.  Like I told you.”

“What is wrong with you?” Darren shouted.  “We’re not
the enemy!  Tell your guards to clear out of the hangar and let us get to
our fighters, or I swear to God we’re going to cack everyone out there!”

“You are not on our side!”

Darren closed the channel and looked to his bros. 
“Remember the last scene in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
? 
We’re going out with guns blazing like Redford and Newman.  Make sure your
pulse rifles are on high.”

“This shit ain’t workin’, Darren,” Nate said.  “There’s
gotta be another way.”’

“There isn’t another way.  Set your rifles on high
power.”  Darren opened the channel again.  “Taggart, I’m telling you
one last time.  Call off your Praetorians.”

No reply.

“Taggart?”

“I heard you,” came the placid response.

He used a calmer voice.  “Please, I am begging
you.  Let us go.  We’re not going to hurt anyone.  Just call off
the troops.”