“It’ll take me a while to get it,” I told him.
“I ain’t going anywhere.”
I trotted back through the maze of hallways, retracing my route. As I reached the stairwell door I realized I hadn’t had to step over the two Tangos I’d killed earlier. I knew they hadn’t crawled away; a slice of imported Swiss has fewer holes than they had. But I wasn’t sure if I’d taken a different way back—or if someone had pulled the bodies out of the hallway.
I had almost reached the hall near the stairs when I remembered the gas. It took another ten minutes to back out and go around to the stairwell near the elevators, and then to climb back up to the main casino level. I heard a quick series of explosions in the distance and figured it was Danny and the rest of the boys trying to get into the dock area.
I was wrong, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.
As I reached the flight of stairs leading back to the main casino level, I heard footsteps above. Thinking it was Trace, Hulk, and the Delta team coming down, I yelled up that I was there. Three or four light bursts answered me. The gunfire had been unaimed and probably reckless, but it did a lot to accelerate my progress. I paused for a second at the door, pausing to listen. I wouldn’t have heard anything softer than a jet engine inside. Not only was the door fairly thick, but the machines inside were still blazing away on backup power, filling the air with a kind of manic moan. I rolled out quickly and jumped to my feet, running back toward the two men and the Ethernet cable.
These corpses were where I’d left them. And as I’d told Shunt, the wall where the plugs were supposed to go was shot to shit. I hunted around for a few seconds on my hands and knees, looking to see if there was another access panel nearby. Finally I got Shunt back on the radio and told him it was time to turn Dickie into an honorary computer dweeb.
“I have a theory, Dude. Wanna hear it?”
“If it’s relevant.”
“I think that’s, like, a bridge to connect one part of the network with another. Like, one side maybe has a bomb and the other side has the, like, control for it.”
“Which is which?”
“We have to, like, find out.”
“Cool, Shunt. Let’s just fucking go for it, all right?”
“First make sure we can connect the line into the Jitters,” he said.
“How do I do that?”
“Stick it in, Dude.”
Excellent advice, applicable to all sorts of situations. In this case, the RJ-45 male connector snapped right into the female connection with a nice sharp click. Shunt then had me amputate the head off the other end and pry the cable into its component parts. I was left with eight thin wires that looked a lot like you’d find connecting telephones together. I’d done such a good job splattering the Ethernet connection that I had to rip up the wall above it to find the wires. While I hacked at it with my knife, the doorway to the nearest stairwell smacked open.
If the stairs hadn’t been around a corner from me, the coroner would have tied a small tag on my toe that read “acute lead poisoning” and sent my organs over to the Betty Ford Clinic to be dried out before being sold for scientific experiments. By the time I had grabbed my gun and rolled into a defensive position, the bastard who’d come out of the stairwell had gotten enough of an angle through the room to fire. He had some sort of shotgun; now I know how Bambi’s mother felt. He was also wearing a gas mask and wasn’t that good a shot, though he was quick; it couldn’t have taken me more than a millisecond to squeeze the trigger and return fire but he’d already managed to duck out of the way.
“Dick?” asked Shunt in the earpiece.
“Gotta take care of something first,” I told him. I’d taken off the bulletproof vest to get the radio out and left it on the floor. There was no going back for it.
Bambi Killer pumped another wad in my general direction, just to let me know he still cared. I tracked to my left, trying to be quiet and circle around to get at him from behind. But the glass and debris on the floor made it difficult to be completely quiet, and before I got very far he sent another shell in my direction. I held up my MP5 and squeezed off a few rounds. As I fired, I threw myself across the open aisle, rolling across the thick red band of carpet that the Vegas casinos use to designate the area where kids have to stay when they move through the gambling areas. Bambi Killer didn’t care for rug rats, so he sent another shell in my general direction—and I mean general, because none of the pellets came within six or seven feet, at least.
His aim might have been getting worse rather than better, but you have to respect a shotgun at close range or the undertaker’ll be pulling pellets from your pimples for weeks to get you ready for the casket. So I made a circuit around the room on my hands and knees, staying as well-covered as I could. It must’ve taken me a good ninety seconds to get around to a spot behind him and work my way forward. In the meantime, he’d taken two more shots, both in the direction of the dead men. I guess he figured they were targets he could actually see; why waste bullets on one he couldn’t?
I eased forward on my belly, waiting for him to stand or move out from behind the machines so I’d have a shot. As I did, I saw the door to the stairwell creeping open. I pushed back, swinging my gun around, my finger edgy on the trigger. A foot appeared, then the barrel of a gun; I brought mine to bear and nearly wiped out Hulk, who’d come down with Trace.
“Duck!” I yelled.
I think he did, though I was too busy swiveling around and tattooing my name on Bambi Killer’s forehead to watch. The gun dropped from his hand without him getting another shot off.
“You almost missed him,” said Trace, catching up with us after I kicked the shotgun away. It was a Remington 11-87, the tactical gun with a fourteen-inch barrel used by a lot of police departments. Maybe he’d had such bad luck aiming it because of the kick, which can be a tad heavier than other shotguns. Bambi Killer was a sawed-off runt of a pipsqueak, barely five-three. If you’d caught him fishing you wouldn’t have thrown him back—you’d have brought him home, fattened him up in the bathtub for a few weeks, then thrown him back.
“How are five bullet holes in his forehead almost missing him?” I asked Trace, running back to my wiring project.
“If he’d’ve ducked, you would have just given him a haircut.”
“He did duck,” I told her. “It’s not my fault he’s a runt.”
She filled me in on the progress upstairs and in the stairwell, where the Delta shooters had taken out two Tangos dressed in hotel livery. Two other bad guys had surrendered—one had blown himself up as he did.
“They used gas down there,” I said.
“Tear gas. We haven’t found any mustard gas here. It was all across the way in the container trucks.”
“You haven’t found it yet,” I told her. “Don’t get cocky.”
“Listen to who the fuck is talking.”
“They’re going to try to get into the power room downstairs,” said Hulk. “Then they’ll come reinforce us.”
I told Trace to warn the Delta team that there was someone else roaming in the basement. While she talked to them and Hulk went on a recon, I fished out the wire I’d been hunting for earlier. Shunt talked me through the operation, which consisted of matching up the wires color for color. Finally, something I’d learned in high school paid off.
I had to hit a combination of keys on the Jitters unit. When nothing happened on Shunt’s end, I applied the other lesson I’d learned in high school—I gave the unit a good sharp smack on the side.
“Kick ass,” yelped Shunt.
“Now what?”
“Now I rock, Dude.”
Before I could quiz Shunt on the technical details, Hulk came back and told me he’d heard somebody pounding on the walls or door at the far end of the hallway. Trace joined us and we moved across the room quickly, covering each other as we ran up a flight of shallow steps through an interior garden flanked by pools. The hallway on the other side led to a mall of small sho
ps selling overpriced goods that no one really needs. I’m surprised Trace’s Y chromosome hadn’t kicked in with all the fancy store windows nearby.
The hall where Hulk had heard the noises from the offices sat to the right; the mall branched to the left and then divided again. I was about to suggest we split up when something flitted around the corner at the far end of the hall with the offices.
Something small and round. Curiously shaped like a grenade.
We threw ourselves into reverse, managing to turn the corner as the grenade exploded.
As we made our way back up the corridor, I sent Trace on a flanking maneuver while Hulk and I took the direct approach. Three-quarters of the way down the hall Hulk pointed to a door with a sign marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. We could hear the sound of someone pounding on the wall inside with a frantic voice half sobbing as it asked to be rescued. Dickie wasn’t born yesterday; there was no way I was going into that room, given that we had no way of knowing who was what. Not that leaving them here was a particularly safe move. I passed the location on to Doc, so he could send a Delta team to check it. Then Hulk and I continued forward.
At the end of the hall we faced a right-left decision. The area to the right held more offices; there were shops on the left as the hallway led back toward the mall area. I let Hulk go toward the mall while I checked the offices. These were empty, their doors open on the hall. All four offices were quiet, without even the hum of computers to break the silence.
By the time I caught up with Hulk, he’d cornered a clerk in the smoke shop where the clerk had been hiding under the Partagas cigars. The kid—he looked like he’d been shaving for maybe a month—had an employee tag and a wet spot in his pants. Of the two, the latter was considerably more convincing.
“Did they go to the security room?” Hulk asked him.
The kid stuttered something and shook his head.
“Where did they go?” Hulk asked.
More stutters and a whole lot of shakin’, but the kid could have been talking in Martian for all we could decipher. Hulk’s cheeks bulged out and he blew a long sigh from his mouth. Patience and understanding were clearly not in his character, but he took his best shot, reassuring the kid that we meant him no harm and wanted to help him. His face tinged red with the effort, and I’m not sure that it didn’t make the kid even more scared. But finally the youth’s stutters smoothed out and he said he’d seen the store employees and some of the guests herded through the mall around the time the parade started. The direction led to one of the auditoriums.
“Show us,” I told him. I took his arm and tugged as gently as I could manage, which probably wasn’t very. He shook like an outhouse in a windstorm, but he managed to lead us out into the hallway and down past some of the shops. Gunfire and explosions were rocking other parts of the hotel. Doc told us that the Delta teams had run into some terrorists downstairs and up in the hotel proper. The evacuation effort had stalled.
“Shunt, how are you doing with your hack job?” I asked as we made our way down the hallway.
“It’s not really hacking, Dick.”
“Shunt, is that computer system rigged into the bomb or not?”
“Yes and no.”
We’d reached the box office area in front of the auditorium. There were definitely people inside; we could hear them banging and yelling.
“Straight answers, Shunt.”
“They’re not networked into the bomb, but they have some code for, like, uh, I’d call it a ‘dashboard’ to control it.”
“Can you hack it?”
“I told you, it’s not online. I think you might have stopped them before they got it connected. You got me connected to the control side. I don’t have the bomb. But I think I can disable the control.”
“So the bomb’ll be defused if you do that?”
“Just, like, the control,” said Shunt. “I think, like, I got it! Yeah.”
“Hey, Dick, I wouldn’t trust this computer shit,” said Doc, breaking in. “They’d have a backup.”
I didn’t disagree. The problem was, without knowing where the bomb was physically located, we had no idea where the backup was likely to be located or how it would be rigged, let alone how to defuse it. Shunt threw out some ideas about looking for computer terminals and more wires; those weren’t horrible ideas, except for the fact that there had to be hundreds of computers scattered through the place.
“Maybe the wire is the key,” I said. “Shunt, where would it go?”
“Could go anywhere, Dude.”
“Doc, look on your schematic and see if you can figure out where it might be,” I told him.
In the meantime, it occurred to me that at least one of the bad actors would be sitting at a computer someplace in the building, ready to press the doom-on-us key when the connection was made. Presumably, he’d have the backup or know how to get it. So the next logical thing to do was find him.
“Shunt, can you figure out where the computers are that are working?” I asked. “That might tell us where the enemy is.”
“Uh, not easily. Uh, like, I’d need a pretty detailed plan showing computer tags. If you had, like, a net administrator’s chart of where he put everything, the physical units and stuff—”
“Doc, can you get that?”
“If it’s available, sure.”
The security room lay beyond the auditorium in another bunker. The response teams had the exterior door covered, but getting in would not be easy—it had been designed to withstand an attack by a bomb similar in size to the one that rocked the Beirut airport barracks and killed our Marines, sailors, and soldiers back in 1983.
Rest in Peace, brothers.
I left Doc and Shunt to work on that themselves while Hulk and I checked out the auditorium. Hulk was a half stride from the steps down to the doors when I grabbed him, stopping him just before he entered the beam of the electronic eye guarding the short flight down.
“They rigged a bomb,” I said, pointing to the sensor. It was hooked into a wire that ran to a stack of brown boxes near the door.
The eye was the only sensor I could see. It looked like it had been intended only to take out the careless and slow down the careful. Of which I was neither.
“Down!” I yelled to Hulk, grabbing the kid and pushing him to the floor as a Degtyarev RPD machine gun began raking the lobby.
Machine-gun fire at very close range definitely discourages daydreaming. Something about a stream of lead smashing through the air a few inches from you concentrates your thoughts rather effectively. You don’t worry about car payments or the last time you screwed your girlfriend, let alone your wife. You either return fire or you get the hell out of there, or both.
The ambush had been well-prepared, and if it had kicked off thirty seconds earlier, we would have been fried. The most logical place to go was the well in front of the auditorium entrance, which of course was booby-trapped. The next most logical place was back the way we had come, but the machine gun had been set up to make that impossible. The least logical direction to go in was straight ahead.
So, naturally, that was the way I went.
The RPD is typically fired from a V-shaped bipod at the front, which helps stabilize the weapon when fired from a prone position. The design is simple and effective; you’re talking about two short pieces of metal that are light and sturdy. The one weakness—which in most combat conditions would not be a weakness at all—is the difficulty of lowering the point of the barrel past a certain point to fire at very close range—say, six or seven feet in front of you. The shooter has to raise his body or at least his shoulder to narrow the angle. Not impossible, certainly, but not intuitive and not necessarily easy when you’re already firing at very close range.
I’m not saying I thought of all of this as we were being fired on. I didn’t think at all; I just did what comes naturally, and what had been pounded into my sorry ass back in the prehistoric cave-hunting days by people like Ev Barrett, seadaddy and chief par excellence. C
all it a character flaw—when under attack, I counterattack. Always.
I managed to crawl and scramble to the side of the display case. If this had been Vietnam—which, obviously, Shadow had gotten her inspiration from—the sucker in the case would have been dead meat. I would have slipped an MK3A2* concussion grenade through the hole they’d cut in the glass for the gun and waited for the thud.
But this wasn’t Vietnam, I didn’t have a grenade, and the bullets were coming hot and heavy. I blasted my MP5 blind through the slit, emptying a clip on the bastard without any effect. Bullets continued to pour out of the ancient weapon, chewing everything in the lobby except for me, the kid who was frozen in place, and Hulk, who has a bigger butt than I do and had a harder time squeezing it low enough to avoid getting it shot off. By the time he managed to scoot up on the other side of the case, I’d already emptied my clip and reloaded.
The bullets stopped just as Hulk lifted his gun to add to the spray. I yelled to him to stay down.
He never heard me—my warning was drowned out by the sound of the booby-trapped machine-gun nest exploding.
*The MK3A2 is used in close-quarters combat because the effect of its blast is confined to a small area, unlike a fragmentation grenade (say, the M61), which does most of its damage by showering shrapnel all over the place. You still want to get out of the way.
Chapter
22
Claymore mines make a distinctive sound right before they go boom. Not that many people can tell you about it, though, because most times you hear it, the next thing you hear is a choir of angels singing. If the ball bearings packed into the sucker don’t kill you, the people who planted it usually will, since one of the best uses of the mine is to open an ambush.
Click, oops, boom. Or maybe more like ccc-luck-k, oops, boom.
Kkkkukkkck, oops, whaboooom!
The structure of the display area where the gun had been set up saved my ass. Steel frames had been used to hold the corner together there and they caught most of the explosive force and the shrapnel that headed in my direction. Some of the glass and other crap blown out by the mine rebounded crazily and cut the side of my face and hit my arm, but otherwise the little bent grenade with its cute “front toward enemy” script on the body missed me.
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