Gang pointed at the smaller gun which was much more sophisticated than the shotgun. It had a red-dot sight on top of the barrel, and a short magazine. ‘This is a Heckler and Koch MP7 A2 personal defense weapon with a twenty round magazine. It has a high rate of fire like the MAC-10s that the Hu Shizu used in the Noodle House, but it is a far more accurate and reliable weapon. It is also loaded with high performance rounds optimized to deal with human body armor.
Anton studied the guns and asked, ‘which is best against vampires?’
‘Neither, the plan is to be out of here before the vampires arrive. In a pinch, you can use either, but you need to be up close, and it is best that you shoot them from behind, or else they will dodge. In fact, with all the weapons that I have shown you, it is always best to shoot a vampire from behind and up close.’
Gang frowned, ‘except of course the grenades, you need some distance there.’
Anton smiled wryly, ‘makes sense.’
Gang scratched his ear, ‘except for the silver flechettes, you can use those up close as there is no explosion.’
‘There are a lot of exceptions?’
Gang nodded, shrugging his shoulders, ‘what can I say - they’re vampires - fighting them is a difficult business.’
Anton nodded, ‘clearly, but what is your best advice?’
‘The trick is getting yourself in the right position to attack them. What makes that so difficult is that their senses are extraordinary; however, they can be hazed by sensory clutter. Too much noise, odd smells, and lots of smoke can temporarily throw them off and give you a chance to make an effective attack. Just what the interior of this warehouse will be like tonight.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Gang grinned, ‘I will show you shortly.’
‘If the environment is full of clutter, won’t we be affected just the same?’
‘We have less sensory power to lose, it will level the playing field.’
‘Okay, how do I use these guns?’
Gang proceeded to give Anton a five-minute lesson in how to hold, point, fire, reload and flick the safety switch on both weapons.
‘Don’t worry about learning to shoot straight, use your Ramp awareness and focus on pointing the weapon exactly where you are looking and accuracy will look after itself. We will place ammunition reloads at precise locations so that you can move from one position to the next without running out of ammo. Our speed will act as a force multiplier. Anton, this is the key to survival, rely on your speed and the natural cover within the warehouse. Once combat starts, keep moving, and never stand still.’
Gang looked at his wristwatch, ‘it’s nearly six hours to sunset. That’s when the Order will arrive.’
‘And the vampires too?’
Gang nodded, ‘most likely.’
Anton felt a mixture of fear and excitement as he chambered a round into the automatic shotgun. The weapon made a satisfying click as it became armed. It felt completely natural in his hands as if it had been made for him. He trained the weapon on a far corner of the warehouse and sighted along the barrel.
Anton felt a shiver run up his spine and he turned to Gang, ‘who’s gun is this?’
‘It was your grandfather’s, one of his favorites,’ Gang said, lugging a large box from the container labeled “Warning: Pyrotechnics: Keep away from flame.”
‘Anton, help me with these tricks, we have some preparations to make before our guests arrive.’
Fireworks?
‘Sure,’ Anton said as he moved to help Gang unload the box.
Anton smiled grimly as he worked with Gang to set a range of traps around the warehouse.
Time for some payback.
* * *
The mid-afternoon summer sun beat down upon the city of Boston.
James assembled the troop and squad leaders under the shade of the trees near the carpark entrance. He wore a discrete headset that used his Shadowstone smartphone to link with his laptop, the Panopticon, and the communication links of the assembled combat leaders. Beside him, Louise Wesson stood, wearing her own combat gear and her “game on” face partially hidden behind her mirrored sunglasses.
The eight Red-1 and Blue-5 combat leaders all wore full matt black combat armor with tactical helmets that provided an extensive suite of sensors and communications links. They carried their weapons easily and were alert, relaxed and ready for action. The Green-4 squad leaders remained at their post on the dock, and were networked in by the tactical comm links.
James stood in front of the group and addressed his men.
‘This cordon has to be airtight, I don’t want anyone or anything crossing it until this mission is done. Our task is to ensure that the three Order of Thoth operatives in that warehouse stay there until General Armitage arrives tonight with her own Special Forces to deal with them.’
‘Sir?’ One of the squad leaders asked.
‘Yes?’
‘I think we are attracting some unwanted attention,’ the squad leader said with a nod toward the street where small huddles of people stood watching the proceedings.
James glanced around, snorted derisively, looked at his watch, and said, ‘The BPD will be providing an outer perimeter, they should be here in five minutes. Our cover is that this is a counter-terrorism exercise. They will play ball and keep the locals from getting in the way.’
James turned to Louise, ‘Wesson, what’s the status on the RHIB, their not showing up on my network comms.’
‘It’s on station, a hundred yards off the dock.’
‘What’s on it?’
‘A single squad from Indigo-6. The RHIB itself is a thirty-six footer, with a fore mounted Mk-19 Grenade Launcher, a rear mounted M2 .50 caliber heavy machine gun, and a quad mount FIM-92 Block II Stinger surface to air missile system amidships.’
‘You could start a war with that. Make sure they keep moving up and down the river and they keep a lookout for anything that could assist a river exfiltration. These Order operatives didn’t choose this site by accident. Make sure that your men have their heads on a swivel, and get them connected to my comms link.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
James faced his men and continued, ‘I need two snipers and an electrical power expert. We need to take out all their external CCTV cameras and cut the power to the warehouse, who is available?’
The squad leaders responded quickly, issuing commands across secured links and five men dropped out of the cordon.
Two men in pairs took up positions on either side of the warehouse, and in less than twenty seconds, eight single shots had been fired and eight CCTV cameras had been turned into mangled lumps of sputtering power cables and twisted metal.
The fifth man ran to the Blue-5 Nightfalcon, extracting a kit from the helicopter, he went to a nearby electrical power distribution pole. Scaling it with a special climbing rig, he selected and cut some key wires. Turning, he gave James a thumbs up, before descending to the ground and returning to his position in the cordon.
James consulted the Panopticon satellite view of the warehouse, switching on a specialized filter to examine what he expected to be a dead zone of zero electrical activity. He heard a diesel engine come online. A soft thrumming from a hundred and fifty yards in front of him. He frowned, looking down at his screen. The warehouse was a spaghetti maze of electrical cables - all alive. He switched filters, there was a plume of hot exhaust escaping a three-inch pipe jutting out of the roof midway along the right side of the warehouse.
James grinned wryly, ‘damn. Well okay, you have a backup generator but not for long.’
James signaled one of the Red-1 squad leaders, gave him some quick instructions, and a minute later the Red-1 Nightfalcon was lifting off from the car park.
James noted that half a dozen BPD cruisers and vans had shown up on Bedford Street, more than twenty police officers were setting up temporary roadblocks and police line tape to keep the public away.
He sighed, they will certainly get a
show, I will need a PSYOPS crew to come in and spin this operation for general consumption.
James watched the Nightfalcon take up a position facing the right side wall, a hundred and twenty yards away from the warehouse. He slaved the helicopters combat system to his own laptop and fed in the Panopticon supplied location of the diesel generator. It sat on the ground level of the warehouse, butting up against the wall. The Panopticon specs for the building indicated that the walls were three feet of steel-reinforced stone masonry.
The helicopter veered slightly to the left, settling about ten yards off the ground, its nose down at a slight angle. The men in the cordon backed away and gave the helicopter plenty of space.
James smiled, giving the order to fire.
Showtime!
Beneath the cockpit of the Nightfalcon, two multi-barreled heavy machine guns opened fire with the unique sound that Gatling guns make, like a thickly woven mat being torn in half overlaid with an electric whirr; the sound started and didn’t stop.
Gray smoke streamed from the mouths of the guns, swirling away in the wash from the helicopter’s rotor blades. Spent casings dropped like confetti from beneath the spinning machine gun barrels. The bullets flashed into a mark two yards in diameter at the base of the wall, every fifth round a bright tracer, the rest were depleted uranium penetrators.
The stone masonry of the wall started to ablate and flake away, disintegrating before the barrage of the twin guns. Giant sparks flew as thick reinforcing steel cables wilted under the titanic hammer of the heavy fire. Grit and dust spewed from the hole in a billowing cloud. Suddenly the bullets were through and the diesel generator exploded in a ball of flame that shot out through the gaping hole in the wall.
The guns fell silent. Veering to the left, the Nightfalcon made its way back to its original landing spot in the car park.
James heard cheers from the onlookers who were crowding the police line, and waving American flags. He momentarily considered the idea of simply letting them stay and get their minds blown away by what would go down this night, then thought better of it.
‘Wesson, get those BPD clowns to clear the street and the houses back to the end of the side streets. I want a clear perimeter out to a mile until this is done.’
‘Yes, Sir. On it,’ Louise replied, jogging off toward the police line and the BPD Officer in Charge.
James returned to his laptop, the Panopticon satellite feed with an infra-red filter showed a sizable fire raging against the right wall; as he watched, the fire started to die, first slowly, and then quickly.
‘A fire suppressant?’ James murmured.
These guys have a lot of tricks.
As the fire died, three faint human contacts came back into view, spread out on the far side of the warehouse.
Well, now you’re blind and when night comes you will be sitting in the dark. Let’s see what you do while we wait for General Armitage to arrive.
* * *
Anton, Gang, and Li regrouped in the middle of the warehouse.
The air was tinged with acrid smoke, but the quick response of the fire suppressant system around the diesel generator had prevented the warehouse from becoming a smoke filled death trap.
Gang gripped both their shoulders and said, ‘their strategy is clear, they want to make us powerless and keep us here until sunset; when no doubt the vampires will arrive in force.’
He glanced at his watch and thought for a moment, ‘sunset is about twenty minutes past eight which means that we have five and a half hours before they arrive.’
‘With the power out, we are not going to be able to use our crane traps,’ Anton said.
‘And once it gets dark, it’s really going to be to the vampires’ advantage rather than ours, it would be much better to have lights,’ Li remarked.
‘Is there any way that we can fix it,’ Anton asked.
Gang frowned, ‘not that I know of.’
Li grinned broadly, ‘Father! The fire suppressant system was operating while the generator was on fire and the main power lines had been cut. What’s its power source?’
‘I’m not sure, let’s look.’
The three of them moved through the maze, coming to the right side wall where the diesel generator lay in ruins. They carefully moved around to make sure that they were not presenting any opportunities for a sniper to get a shot through the gaping hole in the wall where the diesel generator had stood. They reached the wall to the left of the ruined generator. There was an array of eight silvery-grey rectangular cabinets along the wall. Each one was about eight feet high, three feet wide and about two feet deep. Heavy cables ran above them and connected at the top of each cabinet. Anton looked down the wall toward the dock, the cables ran the distance of the wall and there was another array ten yards further along.
‘I think that this equipment runs the distance of this wall.’
‘That would be a lot of battery power,’ Li said.
‘Anton, this is typical of your grandfather - he believed in defense in depth,’ Gang said.
‘We need to be able to test this without letting them know that we still have power,’ Anton said.
‘Speaking of which,’ Li said, pressing a red button near the array. ‘Now they are all disconnected. They will hold their power, and not show up on some Shadowstone operative’s fancy surveillance system. But testing this without giving the game away will take time, I’ll have to inspect the power cables, and I can run micro-currents through the system to see that the circuits are still complete.’
‘Good girl,’ Gang said with a grin. ‘You start on that. Anton and I will continue with preparing the traps, tricks and general mayhem for our guests.’
As Li left to collect the equipment she needed, Gang pulled Anton aside, whispering, ‘I think that we should make a call, this phone of mine is not so dumb. Francis was able to send me an app, which I installed, it provides an encrypted text capability beyond the capacity of Shadowstone to decipher.’
‘Excellent.’
Gang sent a text message using the secure app, which read, “We are at the Boston Warehouse and Shadowstone are here. Gang.”
About twenty seconds later a reply came back which read, “We have seen it. They have you surrounded. We have a long way to come, we will be there after sunset. I will text details before we arrive. F.”
Anton read the message over Gang’s shoulder, remarking sarcastically, ‘so, they will arrive with the vampires - wonderful.’
Gang shrugged his shoulders, ‘well …’
Anton continued, ‘does the Order have a problem with daylight operations?’
‘Everyone has a secret to keep. We are the same as the vampires in that respect.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better for us to simply out the truth about the vampires?’
‘Do you think that you would be believed?’
Anton’s shoulders slumped, then he straightened, ‘there must be a way to convince people of what is going on.’
‘The vampires own, through proxies, the media. The truth would be squashed, and the Order would be painted as Nazi loving, death worshiping, satanic pedophiles out to drown the world in blood. Everyone would be turned against us, and we can’t fight everyone.’
‘Then why haven’t the vampires tried that?’
‘They have, are you aware of the witch craze in Europe and North America from the 15th through to the 18th century.’
‘Yes.’
‘A lot of innocent people, including some members of the Order, were murdered by the authorities of the day. The whole thing was instigated by the vampires. It was a great cover; they could go into a village pretending to be witch finders, kill any Order members in the village, and then depopulate it to hide what had actually happened. The local authorities would then thank them for it.’
‘Why don’t they try the same tactic now?’
‘Society has moved on, fewer people would believe it. I personally think that Crane is simply weighing the risks. A pub
lic campaign against the Order risks his own exposure, so he has more to lose than to gain by such a strategy. So both camps live in the shadows and fight our battles in secret.’
Anton nodded, ‘it’s a pretty messed up world we are living in.’
‘That it is.’
Gang continued, ‘time’s getting on Anton, let’s get these fireworks in place on the maintenance walkways. I also have some claymores to set up around that hole in the wall and throughout the maze, and we still have to set up our ammunition reloads so that they are easy to pick up.’
Anton smiled, ‘you’re right, we can solve these problems another time.’
The two men set to work as the afternoon wore on.
* * *
Anton lined up the modified M18 claymore mine next to the base of a container and spooled out a net of thin electrical fibers in front of it.
The net stretched forward from the bottom of the mine, blending in with the concrete floor of the warehouse. The tripwire net created an area ten feet wide and twelve feet deep in front of the claymore where anyone making a single step would fire the mine on a three second “Sneaker” delay - designed to allow more than one person to enter the area of deadliest effect. Anton circled around the net, reached down and flicked an arming switch on the mine.
He took a step back from the armed mine, it covered a square forty yards on a side surrounded by stacked containers. There were two other entrances into the trap that would funnel anyone entering the square toward where Anton stood. This was the last of twenty mines that he had positioned in accordance with a map provided by Gang.
He stood between two containers, a ten-foot wide gap in the maze wall. He prepared himself, ramped, making a vertical leap that brought his feet to the top of the first container. He immediately pushed off again, landing in a crouch on top of the opposite pair of containers. In two vertical leaps, he had ascended nearly twenty feet.
He rose up, adjusting the fit of the automatic shotgun that he carried diagonally across his back, next to the scabbard for the Blue Dragon sword. At his hip, he wore a holster for the H&K MP7 A2 submachine gun.
A Subtle Agency Page 20