Razor's Edge d-3

by Dale Brown

  “Three, two—” Bison pushed the detonator at two; as the shock of rocks and shrapnel passed overhead, he bolted forward to leap through the eight-by-ten-foot hole his charges had made in the wall. Floyd followed; they rolled through the jagged gap, MP-5s blazing. Danny and the Marines followed a few seconds behind, Gunny and the corporal watching the flanks as Danny moved inside.

  Then everything slowed down.

  The building was dark and quiet. Egg and Floyd were on Danny’s right and left, respectively, crouching as they scoped out the layout. Two thick tubes covered in white and looking like large pieces of a city sewer system ran the length of the hangar on the left. Black bands extended around several sections, and in three or four places thick hoses like lines from a massive dry vac hung down to the floor, where they met metal boots. The base of the mirror system stood about twenty feet away, surrounded by metal scaffolding and bracing pieces not unlike a child’s Erector set. Beyond it stood a collection of devices stacked on metal tables; from his angle in the unilluminated shed it looked like a collection of table saws and TVs.

  “People at the far end,” hissed Egg over the com link.

  “Scientists or what?” asked Danny.

  “Unknown.”

  Probably just technical people or they’d be shooting, Danny reasoned. “How are we outside?”

  “Activity at the barracks,” said Liu. “Powder’s got them pinned down.”

  “All right. Marines up. They’ll cover us.” He waved the Marines in, directing them left and right, where they would take over from his men.

  “Are you ready, Captain?” said a high-pitched, tinny voice in his headset.

  “Thought you’d never get here, Doc,” Danny told Ray Rubeo.

  “Remember, please, that I am not where you are.”

  “Hard to forget.”

  “Please scan the area with the hand camera,” Rubeo told him. “The images captured from your so-called smart helmet are practically worthless.”

  “Just a minute.” Danny had unhooked the small rucksack from his back and opened it on the floor. He picked up the small camera — it shot high-resolution still pictures in rapid succession, transmitting them back to Dreamland — and plugged the thick wire connector into his helmet.

  Then he held up the camera as he rose tentatively. Egg and Pretty Boy meanwhile had removed their torches and were making their way with the Marines toward the Erector set.

  “Humph,” growled Rubeo.

  “Well?”

  “Please hold.”

  “Hold?”

  Rubeo spoke to someone in the background, then came back on the line. “The control area. Can you get some pictures of it? And then the accelerators — the double-tube arrangement seems unique.”

  “I’m going to have to go forward,” said Danny, starting to do so.

  “Don’t get shot,” said Dog.

  “Agreed,” said Danny.

  “There are people in there with you?” Dog asked.

  “We believe there are, Colonel. But I haven’t seen them.”

  “Two guys, far corner,” said Egg. “They’re squatting down like they’re hiding. Gunny’s got them covered. No weapons we can see.”

  “Leave ’em for now,” said Danny. He had reached the scaffolding. He put one strap of the ruck over his shoulder and then began climbing gingerly. A pair of what looked like long, flexible drain pipes rose from a pair of cylindri-cal containers on his right. Three small control panels sat beyond them, a monitoring or control station of some sort.

  “You want me to plug the sniffer into one of those pipes?” he asked Rubeo.

  “Just feed us pictures for now, please,” said Rubeo.

  “Pan as much of the facility as you can. We’ll tell you the next move when — Captain, please check the settings. You just changed the resolution.”

  Danny reset the camera, trying not to let the scientist’s tone annoy him.

  “Better?”

  “Much. Your men are at the chemical bag, not the mirror. Tell them not to touch anything until we’ve finished photographing it. This isn’t a toy store.”

  “No shit, Doc. You’re going to have to lighten up,” said Danny. “Bison, Pretty Boy, what’s going on?”

  “Guy here,” said Bison. “Dead. Flighthawk must’ve nailed him on the way in. Two more bodies over there.”

  “Come back and get ready to take out part of the mirror, okay? The ragheads aren’t going to leave us alone forever.”

  As if in answer, the ground shook with a heavy explosion.

  “All right, Captain. Now, take your chemical sniffer and begin getting samples,” said Rubeo. “You’ll want to move to the tube monitoring station. The others can dis-mantle the mirror at the director assembly. We only need a cross section.”

  “What’s the monitoring station?” Danny asked.

  “The stations are directly ahead of you with the control panels. Slit open one of the collector tubes and run the sampler.”

  “Which one?”

  “Any one. This is very much a work in progress. We’ll look for the disk arrays while you’re doing that. Those will be our next target.”

  The ground rumbled again. Danny had to climb up and over one of the equipment benches. As he did, Rubeo told him to stop and take more pictures. Balancing on a long steel pipe, Danny curled one arm around a flexible tube that ran to the ceiling as he panned with the camera. The tube bounced violently as a pair of fresh explosions shook the ground outside.

  “Hey, listen, Doc, things are getting exciting here. You better move us along the priority list.”

  Rubeo sighed. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Do we have the mirror section from the director yet?”

  “This fucker is bolted in about twenty places,” said Bison. “It’s huge.”

  “We need only a cross section,” replied Rubeo. “Two people should be able to carry a piece away from the building.”

  “You think it’s so fucking easy, you do it,” replied Bison.

  “Relax, Sergeant,” sighed the scientist. “We’re all in this together.”

  “Yeah, well, some of us are more in it than others.”

  “What’s going on outside, Nurse?” Danny asked Liu.

  “Two BMPs came up. Flighthawk just popped ’em.”

  “I see some vehicles starting south now,” said Fernan-dez. “Uh, tank I think.”

  “Captain?” said Rubeo. “Are you still with us?”

  “I’m going to take my samples, then we’re blowing the whole thing up.”

  “It would be useful if you could remove the small computer units at the base of the platform first,” said Rubeo. “That Sun workstation especially. There is a disk array near it. Take that as well. The units will slide out.”

  “If we have time,” said Danny.

  One of the Marines shouted. Danny threw himself down as a flare shot to the top of the building and the interior lit.

  “There’s a tunnel,” said Bison. “A dozen ragheads!

  More!”

  After that all Danny could hear was machine-gun fire.

  * * *

  Powder blasted away in the Hind, spitting 12.7 bullets everywhere but at the truck he was aiming at. Part of the problem was Egg, who kept flinging the helicopter left and right.

  “We’ll be an easy target. Get the pickup in front and the rest will be trapped.”

  “Well, I would if you’d hold steady for a second. This isn’t the easiest gun in the world to aim.”

  “It’s a fucking Ma Deuce.”

  “It’s a Russian Ma Deuce. Big difference,” said Powder, once again pressing the trigger and once again missing.

  “Tanks,” said Egg.

  The helicopter bolted forward. Powder put his other hand on the gun handle, still pressing the trigger. The stream of bullets swam over and past the pickup, through the animal pen where the flak dealers had been, and toward the barbed-wire fences on the south perimeter. A pair of medium tanks — possibly T-
54s or even American M48s — were rumbling along the roadway parallel to the fences.

  “You’re wasting ammo and you’re going to burn out the barrel,” said Egg.

  “Yeah, no shit,” said Powder, though he kept firing.

  “Stand back and let the Flighthawk hit them.”

  “You’re the one flying the damn thing.” Powder finally let up on the trigger.

  The helicopter continued moving forward. Powder could see one or two people on the ground but they were moving too quickly for him to aim. As they banked and came north, the small robot plane swooped nearly straight down on the lead tank. The U/MF’s mouth frothed and the aircraft seemed to stutter in the air, skipping along and disappearing in the billowing cloud. The tank kept going.

  “Shit,” said Powder. “He hit the motherfucker too.”

  The U/MF’s cannon fired shells nearly twice as large as the ones in the Hind’s mouth, but Powder unleashed his weapon anyway. He got about six or seven into the vehicle with no apparent effect before the gun clicked empty.

  “We’re empty,” he told Egg.

  “I told you not to waste your fuckin’ bullets.”

  “Maybe we should ram it.”

  “Just hang on,” said Egg, throwing open the throttle.

  Chapter 116

  Aboard Raven, over Iran 1820

  “You’re going to have to hit the tank with one of the JSOWs,” Zen told Alou. “My bullets bounced off the turret.”

  “We’re down to three missiles, Zen. We have to make sure we can take out the laser.”

  “If we don’t stop the tanks, they’ll reach Whiplash.

  They’re firing.”

  Zen poked the nose of the Flighthawk around as the tank recoiled from its shot. The shell from the 105mm gun, which had been retrofitted to the upgraded M48, sailed well over the laser building. As the gun started to lower for another shot, Zen dropped Hawk One down for a low-level run, hoping his bullets might find a soft spot at the tank’s rear. He gave his trigger two quick squeezes and broke right as the tank fired again. Recovering, he spotted a small cement structure that looked like a tunnel entrance at the edge of the barbed wire. Ducking around to get a better view, he saw several troops running toward it.

  “Targeting lead tank,” said Alou.

  “Hold on, hold on,” said Zen. “We got some sort of underground entrance, bunker or something. May lead to the laser. Men inside,” he said, unleashing thirty or forty rounds before swooping away. He could see another knot of men coming from the shadow of one of the buildings.

  He tucked his wing and dove back immediately, but they’d made the tunnel before he could get a shot.

  “All right, stand clear,” said Alou.

  Two JSOWs popped out from the Megafortress’s belly and nosed toward the tank and the tunnel entrance. Their rear steering fins made minor mid-course corrections about a third of the way home; two seconds later their warheads detonated precisely on their targets, stopping the Iranian counterattack cold.

  “Whiplash, we have one lollipop left,” Alou said over the shared circuit. “Time to saddle up.”

  Chapter 117

  In Iran

  1830

  When the missile hit the entrance to the tunnel, the concussion blew into the building with enough force to knock over a good part of the laser gear, including the director assembly. But it also killed or dazed most of the Iranians near the entrance, who, unlike Whiplash, hadn’t been forewarned. The Marines took care of the rest, spraying their SAWs from a platform on the left side of the building. The metal walls reverberated with the loud rattle of light machine guns, the roar several times louder than a case of firecrackers going off in a garbage can.

  The acrid smell of the flare, still burning on the ground, stung Danny’s nostrils as he made his way down from the platform toward Bison and Pretty Boy, who were wedged down behind some equipment on the right side of the building.

  “Two more guys, back behind that row of cabinets,” said Bison, pointing.

  “Flash-bang,” said Danny. “You go left, I’ll go right.”

  Bison ducked and began moving. Danny took one of the grenades in his hand, tucking his thumb beneath the tape he’d safed the pin with. As he got ready to toss it, Bison shouted a warning and began firing. Danny pitched the grenade over the barrier, then dove to the floor. The loud pop was almost lost in the roar of gunfire. Crawling, Danny managed to reach the end of the row, then hesitated, not sure exactly where Bison was and not wanting to get caught by his cross fire.

  “Bison, where are you?”

  “Pinned down,” said the sergeant.

  “Stay there,” said Danny. He pitched another grenade over the top of the cabinet and threw himself around the corner a millisecond after it popped. There were bodies everywhere, at least a dozen of them. Two Iranians with heavy weapons were crouched at the far end of the row; Danny’s bullets caught them chest high as they began to turn toward him. He ran through his clip, then jerked back behind the row of metal as someone behind them popped up and returned fire.

  “There’s a million of these fuckers,” said Bison.

  “Just seems that way,” shouted Gunny, who’d come down and around to cover them. “Advance. I got your ass.”

  Danny rammed home a new clip. When the Iranians’

  bullets stopped hitting the wall near his head, he threw himself around the barrier again, once more emptying his weapon before ducking back. But this time as he reloaded there was no answering fire.

  “Secure,” said Bison.

  “Let’s grab that shit and get the hell out of here,” said Danny, scanning the pile of dead before retreating.

  The smoke was so thick in the building that even with his low-light mode on he could see only a few yards ahead. When the Marine corporal rose in front of him, Danny cringed for a second, not sure who it was. Then he recognized him.

  “This comes with us,” he told the Marine, pointing to the disk array. A stack of drives sat on top of each other in a plastic cabinet about five feet high. “Grab whatever you can. Just tear it out and get it into the helo. Go.”

  The Marine began prying out the disk units with his knife, sliding them out past the flimsy locks that secured them. Danny climbed back onto the platform and retrieved his gas analyzer. He took out his knife and cut open a hole in one of the plastic tubes.

  “Put the sensor right on the interior of the tube,” said Rubeo in his headset.

  “Hey, Doc, I thought you’d gone for coffee.”

  “Hardly. This is probably an exhaust manifold, Captain.

  Not optimum. Move to the last pipe in the second row.”

  “We’re tight on time.”

  “I understand that.”

  Danny walked to the edge of the platform. His knife made it through the inside layer of plastic, but there was another plastic pipe inside that the point could reach but not quite cut.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Very good,” said Rubeo. “Open the pipe.”

  “How?”

  Rubeo didn’t answer. Danny took his pistol and fired through.

  “That was expedient,” said the scientist. “Please take your sample now.”

  Danny pushed the modified sniffer probe into the hole.

  As he stood there he could see the Marine corporal running toward the hole in the wall with an armload of gear.

  “Enough,” said Rubeo. “Now we would like a measure on the reaction chambers, the large tube structures directly behind you. Do not fire at those,” added the scientist. “While puncturing the inner piping is unlikely, if you did succeed, the concentration of chemicals could be quite sufficient to kill you and the rest of your team.”

  Danny took the ruler from his pocket — a laser unit not unlike those used on some construction sites. He made his way to the end of the tube and shot the beam down to the other end, then struggled to get a good read as the numbers kept jumping on the screen.

  “Close enough,” said Rubeo.
The handheld ruler didn’t have a transmit mode, but Danny realized that Rubeo had read it through his helmet inputs. “Now, one of those junction boxes would be very useful. Do you see it beneath the third band?”

  “Why don’t I just take the whole damn chamber?”

  “That would be infinitely preferable,” said Rubeo. “An admirable solution.”

  Danny had to pick his way over two piles of debris to get to the box; as he climbed off the second he realized there was a boot sticking out. He bent down and saw that the pant leg above the boot was tan.

  The boot moved slightly. He heard, or thought he heard, a groan from the pile.

  Not one of my guys, he thought. Still, he found himself fighting an urge to stop and help the man.

  “Do not damage the circuitry if possible,” said Rubeo as Danny pried the cover of the box off with his knife. The last two screws shot away and the metal cover fell away.

  “Looks like a bunch of wires.”

  “Yes,” said the scientist.

  “You sure you want them?”

  “Do you want me to explain how the probable current can be determined from the size and composition of the wires, and what other suppositions could be made — or should I skip to the math involved in determining the propagation of electromagnetic waves?”

  “Fuck you, Doc,” said Danny, hacking at the thick set of wires.

  Chapter 118

  Dreamland Command Center

  0742

  “Much more primitive than razor,” said Rubeo, turning away from the console.

  “In the matter of size, yes,” said Matterhorn, one of the laser experts.

  “In everything.”

  “I disagree,” answered Matterhorn. “The size of the mirror array and the lack of mobility in the aiming structure indicates to me that they’ve found a way to target it by focusing individual frames at the reflective site.

  They’ve obviously gone operational too soon, but that undoubtedly was a political decision.”

  “Piffle,” said Rubeo. “Razor is several times more powerful.”

  Dog took a step away from them, turning his attention back to the image from Dreamland’s miniature KH satellite. The high-resolution optics on the satellite could not be sent as video, but in rapid burst mode it updated every twenty seconds. The effect was something like watching dancers move across a strobe-lit stage.