Red Ice

by Craig Reed Jr

  A man in a suit with an engraved name tag hurried over. “I’m the day manager, Fredrick Langston. What’s going on?”

  “You have terrorists here attempting to either kill or kidnap a Special Assistant to the President. I need the people on the ground floor to evacuate and everyone else to stay in their rooms and lock their doors.” Distant gunfire rattled as Tanner spoke the last three words.

  “Of course.” The man pulled out a walkie-talkie and hit the push-to-talk button, relaying Tanner’s instructions to his staff.

  Langston began to repeat the announcement as Tanner and the others raced for an elevator. One look was enough for Tanner to see they weren’t going up that way. He turned to Langston, who had followed them. “Any other elevator we can use?”

  “There’s a service elevator for the banquet rooms, but that only goes up to the fourth floor. It’s around the corner, near the storage rooms.”

  “No good. We’ll have to do this the hard way. He tapped his radio. “Six, this is Prime. We’re on the ground floor. Where are you?”

  “We’re on the way down, east stairwell, just reached the twelfth floor. We have at least two Tangos above us in pursuit, but there’s no telling where the rest are.”

  “Copy. We’re on our way.” Tanner addressed Langston. “Call the police and tell them east staircase!”

  #

  Danielle exchanged her nearly empty magazine for a full one. “Tanner’s in the building. Ground floor!”

  “Might as well be on Venus for all the good it does us,” Halverstaff said.

  “Morton,” Casey said in a resigned tone.

  “What?”

  “Shut up.”

  They made it to the eleventh floor without incident. Danielle caught glimpses of the men above her when they leaned out for a quick glimpse or an even quicker burst of gunfire. What they weren’t doing was getting closer.

  They started down the stairs to the tenth floor. “DuPree!” Danielle called out, her attention on the stairs above them. “I think we’re being herded!”

  The young Secret Service agent stopped and bit her lip. “We keep going,” she said. “If your team’s coming, the farther down we are, the closer we’ll be to them.”

  There was a loud boom from below that echoed through the staircase. Danielle’s radio came alive. “Prime to Six. We’re in the stairwell. “Your location?”

  “Coming up on tenth. We are missing a lot of Tangos. Suspect they may be trying to cut us off from below.”

  “Understood. We’re coming up now. Prime out.”

  “Tanner’s in the stairwell,” Danielle called out to the others. “He’s on his way up.”

  They reached the tenth floor and continued down. Danielle fired at their pursuers, her unease growing with every passing second. Where was the rest of the enemy?

  As if answering her mental question, the sound of another door opened below, this one closer, but the echo made it hard to estimate which floor. It closed with a bang and DuPree fired down the stairwell. “Enemy on the sixth floor!”

  “Six to Prime. We have Tangos on the sixth floor landing.”

  #

  With Tanner in the lead, the three OUTCASTs had reached the second floor landing when they heard a door somewhere above them open violently, then someone shooting down at them. The team stopped and hugged the wall to stay out of sight.

  Tanner raised his MP5 so that it pointed up into the stairwell. “Copy. We’re four floors below them. We’ll close and engage.”

  He motioned Naomi and Liam past him and they ran up the next flight of stairs. Naomi stopped at the next landing, stopped and raised her MP5 so that she covered the landings and stairwell above. Liam continued on to the third floor. As soon as he was out of Tanner’s sight, the OUTCAST leader charged up the stairs, past Naomi and up the next flight of stairs. Liam was on the third floor landing, doing the same thing as Naomi. As Tanner raced past him and started up the stairs leading to the fourth floor, Liam fired a short burst up the stairwell. Tanner heard the bullets striking the railing three floors above him, but kept charging up the stairs.

  He reached the next landing, between the third and fourth floors just as a man leaned over three landings above and fired. Tanner backpedaled as the swarm of slugs slammed into the railing and the concrete floor around it. Somewhere above, he could more gunfire, but couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  Tanner stepped to the left and fired up at the enemy. The Triad gunman grunted and pulled back, discouraged. Naomi passed behind Tanner and raced up the stairs to the fourth floor. “Liam!” Tanner shouted, “Move!”

  The ex-SEAL sprinted up the stairs, sliding a shell into the M-203PI under the MP5’s barrel. “Go!” He pointed the grenade launcher up the stairs and pulled the trigger. The shell rocketed out of the barrel with a poomf. It raced up three floors, struck underneath the landing above where the gunmen were and dropped to the ground, spewing thick blue smoke. Before Tanner could say anything, Liam shoved a gas mask into his chest. “Take this!” He was already wearing one around his neck.

  Tanner slipped the gas mask on, then took the stairs three at a time, ran past Naomi and continued up. Liam was a few steps behind, slowing only long enough to toss Naomi another gas mask from his satchel, eject the old shell from the M-203 and slip in a new one. Naomi put on her gas mask and followed them.

  #

  “Dragon Two to Dragon Leader. Armed intruders below us.”

  Seonwoo scowled. He stood in the eighth floor hallway with Yuh. “Kill them.”

  “We are trying! The enemy is—” Gunfire drowned out Yoon’s words.

  “Dragon Two! Are you there?”

  “S-still here, Dragon… .Leader. I am wounded, but I can still fight.”

  Seonwoo considered the facts and made a decision. “All Dragons, this is Dragon Leader. Kill the target and anyone with him. Dragon Two, keep those intruders from getting past you. Dragon Seven, press them. Leader, out.”

  He looked back at Yuh. “We’re moving.”

  “Yes sir.”

  They ran down the hallway to the stairway entrance. They heard the gunfire echoing while they closed in on the door. A door ahead of them opened and a man stepped out. Before he could say anything, Seonwoo fired his Uzi from the hip, ripping the man from stomach to throat from a distance of twenty feet. As the bloody figure slumped to the hallway floor, Seonwoo and Yuh ran past him, reaching the stairwell door. After a glance though the window to make sure it was clear, the two charged out onto the landing.

  Below them, Seonwoo saw blueish smoke hiding the stairwell below the eighth floor. He felt his throat begin to burn. “Dragon Two! What is happening?”

  No answer.

  Seonwoo stifled a curse and snarled at Yuh. “Up the stairs!”

  “But Sergeant Yoon and—”

  “Dead or almost. Now move.”

  #

  “Smoke below!”

  Danielle glanced down and saw the smoke filling the stairwell wafting up the shaft. “It’s my people!”

  They were between the ninth and tenth floors, DuPree on the landing between floors, Casey and Halverstaff on the stairs and Danielle on the tenth floor landing. The sporadic gun battle had worn away both their nerves and their ammunition.

  DuPree saw two armed men racing up the stairs from the eighth and opened fire, sending a dozen 4.7mm rounds downrange. Some struck the railing, but the rest hit the trailing man in the leg, hip, chest, and arm. The combatant stumbled sideways, smashed into the wall and buckled at the knees.

  “We need to get out of here!” Halverstaff screamed. He turned and ran back up the stairs, bumping into Danielle and knocking her off balance. She stumbled to her left just as gunfire from above struck the floor where she had been standing. The aide screamed as bullets smashed into his left leg and arm, spinning him around in a pirouette as he went down.

  Danielle regained her balance in time see three gunmen race across the landing between the eleventh and twelfth
floors, firing over the rail in her direction as they ran.

  “They’re charging us!” she shouted as she ducked and stepped back under the cover of the landing.

  DuPree was forced back from the railing as the man she had just wounded opened fire, despite the amount of blood he was losing. She yelped as hot steel struck her gun hand, and the P-90 fell from her hands.

  On the landing above, Danielle changed magazines, pulled the MP5’s bolt back and moved to her right, standing in front of the staircase going up. She heard the men on the landing above, heading for the stairs that would take them down to the next landing and the staircase she stood in front of.

  As soon as she saw the legs on the stairs, she opened fire with her MP5 on full auto. Sparks flew as the steel railing was pummeled by a number of bullets. Enough of them ripped into the enemy’s legs to take them down, sending both men tumbling to the landing, twenty feet from Danielle.

  The third North Korean dropped from the landing above onto Danielle’s landing. The soldier landed off-balance, his hand slamming into the rail. His Skorpion machine pistol flew out of his hand and disappeared over the rail.

  She swung her MP5 around and pulled the trigger, but the “click” of the hammer falling on an empty chamber sent a sharp adrenaline jolt through her system.

  Her intended target went for the pistol in his belt. Danielle hurled the MP5 at him and the spinning machine gun struck the gunman in the arm with an audible crack. The man’s eyes to “widened in pain as his pistol went flying out of his hand. His expression morphed into to hardened determination as he pulled a dagger from a belt sheath.

  Danielle was scared shitless. Fear. She had her SOCOM on her hip, but the knife-wielder was only seven feet away and he would be on her before she could draw and fire.

  Her hand went for her pistol anyway.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  By the time they reached the fifth floor, the trio of OUTCASTs couldn’t see anything due to of the smoke. They slowed to a crawl, staying low as they moved up the stairs to the landing between the fifth and sixth floors. Without the masks, the smoke would have burned their lungs, as some of the chemicals that made up the smoke — Zinc chloride and chlorosulfuric acid — were toxic to humans.

  With visibility reduced to only a couple of feet, they listened hard for the enemy as they moved forward, keeping the wall on their right as the team advanced.

  When Tanner felt the corner where the two walls met, he heard shuffling, coughing and gasping. He aimed the MP5 in the direction of the noise and opened fire, moving the German-made weapon back and forth to widen the bullet sweep. Liam followed with a shorter volley of his own, as did Naomi. They heard a grunt and at least two people crashing down the stairs.

  Tanner slid his feet across the landing floor until he felt a body with his feet. He pointed the MP5 down and knelt. The body was Asian, and from the bloody chest and unblinking eyes, he was dead. A MAC-10 was clutched in his dead hands. Still, Tanner pulled the weapon from the slack fingers, tossed it across the landing, and pressed his fingers to the man’s neck. There was no pulse. He stood and pressed forward again. “One down,” he said softly.

  He saw another pair of legs and went to the head, kicking away a Skorpion machine pistol as he did so. He checked for the second Asian’s pulse. “Two down.”

  Stepping past the body and starting up the stairs, the smoke was beginning to thin out, but was still a hazard. He heard coughing ahead of him. Near the rail and the top of the stairs, he took two more steps up and the smoke thinned just as a red-eyed man leapt at him from the landing above.

  #

  The knife-wielding fanatic took a step forward, but a hand gripped his other leg by the ankle and yanked. Danielle’s hand grabbed her pistol and pulled it clear of the holster. She saw Halverstaff, face twisted up in pain, but with an expression of determination, pull hard on the North Korean’s leg with his good hand. The commando hissed something and stomped down on Halverstaff’s wrist with his free leg; there was a sickening crunch as the wrist shattered under the blow.

  But it gave Danielle the precious seconds she needed. She brought the pistol up and fired twice. Both .45 slugs slammed into the man’s chest with audible thuds. The man staggered and blood spread across his shirt. Still, he didn’t go down.

  She adjusted her aim upward and fired twice more. This time, both rounds slammed into the attacker’s face, one in the mouth, the second right above the nose, both exploding out the back of his head. The nearly headless man collapsed instantly, knife still tightly gripped in his fist.

  Danielle heard scraping from the landing above her and saw movement from the two men she had wounded in the legs. She turned and bolted up the stairs, taking them three at a time. She reached the landing just as one of the opponents, leaving a blood trail from his crawl, grabbed the MAC-10. Before he could swing the blocky submachine gun, Danielle fired twice, both slugs erasing most of the man’s face and dropping him hard. She swung her pistol toward the second foe, but from the way the man’s head was twisted, he was already dead from a broken neck.

  She looked up, seeking another target, but there was nothing. She heard gunfire from below and launched herself down the stairs, her hand reaching for a fresh magazine for her pistol.

  #

  Seonwoo emptied a full magazine up the stairs, grinning with vicious pleasure as his target, the pesky woman, scrambled to safety. When the Uzi ran dry, he reached for a fresh magazine, only to find he hadn’t any left for the Israeli-made submachine gun. He dropped the now useless weapon, pulled out his Baek Du San and started up the stairs.

  He reached the landing and kicked a strange-looking weapon into the corner. The woman, a short-haired redhead, was crawling up the stairs to the next landing. He stayed close to the railing and raised his pistol, but before he could fire, someone yelled, “Hey, asshole!”

  The shout came from the stairs to Seonwoo’s right. He spun as three bullets struck him in the torso. His knees buckled, but he stayed up, eyes blazing with rage when he saw the shooter was John Casey, his target. He muttered a curse and raised his pistol, only to die when DuPree fired her own SIG Sauer P229 three times, each round finding its target in Seonwoo’s neck and head. The North Korean captain fell over the rail and dropped into the wispy smoke. He was dead before he hit the bottom of the stairwell.

  #

  If Tanner had been standing with both feet on the same stair, the charge would have knocked him down the stairs and possibly killed or crippled the OUTCAST leader.

  Instead, his left foot was two steps higher than his right, giving Tanner a strong base with which to put his weight forward. So when the North Korean commando slammed into him, it was the commando who was off-balance. A knife appeared in the soldier’s hand and he slashed at Tanner, the blade bright in the still-smoky stairwell.

  Tanner smashed the MP5’s barrel into the knifeman’s forearm, then fired off a burst into the man’s chest. The assailant writhed in pain, but managed to grab the MP5’s barrel with his free hand while thrusting at Tanner with the knife.

  Two shots distorted the man’s face before exploding out the back of his head. The attacker dropped to the stairs like a puppet with cut strings. Tanner turned to see Liam reholster his pistol. He nodded to him and then moved up the stairs to the next landing, just as a shadowy figure fell past them beyond the rail and disappeared into the swirling smoke.

  “Prime to Six! Who just fell down the stairs?”

  “A Tango, Prime. We have one critically injured team member up here — Casey’s aide — and the Secret Service agent with us has a wounded hand.”

  From somewhere below, doors opened and the clamoring of boots echoed up the stairwell. Tanner looked down and saw that the smoke had dissipated enough to see armed police officers racing up the stairs, as well as a body sprawled at the bottom of the stairwell.

  “Police are here,” Tanner radioed.

  “Casey says to get up here. He says it’s easier to explain to
the police if we’re all together.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  It was after 2pm when Tanner and Liam walked into the incident command center. The center was in one of the hotel’s smaller ballrooms, guarded by several SFPD SWAT and police officers in riot gear. The pair made their way through the personnel, tables, and equipment to a small table in the back of the room. Casey sat in a chair with DuPree standing behind him, her hand bandaged, but holding Danielle’s P-90, and still trying to look alert. Naomi and Danielle sat at the table with Casey, both women looking drained.

  “Well?” Casey asked as Tanner and Liam sat down.

  “The protection team was nearly wiped out,” Tanner said. “Only two survivors, both of them wounded. We’ve counted ten Tango corpses, two in the suite and eight in the stairwell. One innocent bystander is dead, and the police are sweeping the building floor by floor with their SWAT teams, making sure no more Tangos are hiding. We checked the attackers’ bodies, and I’m certain they’re all North Koreans.”

  “I think we have Rhee’s attention,” Casey said.

  “What about Halverstaff?” Tanner asked, concern etching his face even though he knew the young man was not well-liked.

  Casey exhaled. “In the hospital. Multiple bullet wounds, broken arm, leg and his other wrist is broken, but it looks like he’ll live.” His chuckle was short and almost amused. “He told me before he was wheeled into surgery that he resigning as my aide.”

  “Can’t say as I blame him. So what’s the latest out there?” Liam asked.

  Casey leaned back in his chair. “The acting mayor has declared a state of emergency and requested state and federal assistance. He’s also enacted a dawn to dusk curfew for the city. The National Guard has been activated and there’s a Marine battalion en route from Twenty-Nine Palms. Both Oakland and San Jose are sending first responders to help. I’ve talked to the president and he’s already set things in motion at the federal level.”