by James Tarr
“Let’s hope the Tabs clear the building one floor at a time up to the roof before they head through the tunnel,” Chan said.
“After the beating we just gave them they should be moving slow and careful, but who knows?” Barker replied. He nodded after Lydia who passed them heading down the stairs. She smelled of smoke and blood. “Go, I’ll be rear security.” He grabbed his radio. “All squads, SkyBox is abandoning ship, heading to Nakatomi. Repeat, SkyBox en route to Nakatomi underground. Don’t shoot us.”
“They’re not stupid. They’re going to hide out there and wait for their reinforcements,” Hannibal said, peering out the north entrance of the Fisher Building. Whatever Tabs were left after the IMP had been taken out and Quigley chewed them up had found good cover to hide behind. They weren’t moving on Nakatomi, but they weren’t leaving, either.
“Yeah,” Ed muttered.
The radio lit up with chatter between the IED team south of their position and Almighty, then Morris gave them an update on the enemy. “Almighty to all squads, be advised enemy ground units three hundred meters east our position, approaching on foot while armor is in overwatch. Repeat, enemy dismounts numbering approximately eighty, three hundred meters east our position and approaching our location and SkyBox under cover of armor. Large enemy armor column also now at West Grand and the Lodge Freeway near Quigley. Repeat, large enemy armor presence just west of Quigley. They do not seem to be approaching as yet, have assumed a defensive position.” There was a pause, then the Lieutenant Colonel said, “You’ve all done a hell of a job, but I’m calling it. Virginia, Virginia, Virginia. Good luck, and God speed. Almighty is displacing. Over and out.”
“Time to go,” Hannibal said. He looked at Ed. “I can’t believe this worked as well as it did. Not that we did much of anything other than distract them.”
Ed shrugged. “Suckering them in was the important part.
Barker’s voice popped over the radio. “All squads, SkyBox is abandoning ship, heading to Nakatomi. Repeat, SkyBox en route to Nakatomi underground. Don’t shoot us.”
Hannibal smiled. “Excellent.” He grabbed his radio. “Nakatomi, time to go. Make your way back to the tunnel.” He checked his watch. “You have ten minutes, that is one-zero minutes, then we are blowing the end and you’ve got to find your own way home.” That had been the agreed-upon plan.
The radio clicked to life again. “Quigley to all squads, do not wait for us. Repeat, do not wait. We’re currently blocked from our exfil route. Good luck, it’s been fun.” Ed recognized the voice of Harris, who’d driven up from the aircraft hangar attack.
“What do they have, a hundred feet to cover to the sewer opening?” Hannibal asked. “If that?” Instead of crawling three hundred yards through the narrow pipe with everyone else, Weasel, Renny, and Carrells had exited the large trunk line, crawling up a short dirt ramp to find themselves north of the apartment building, just off the service drive of the Lodge. The opening was concealed by a bush, and had worked just fine for them in the dark when no satellites were overhead.
“Yeah, but it’s open, it’s daylight, it would be running toward the Tab column, and plus they’ve got soldiers inside their building between them and the ground floor. Even if they make it to the sewer, the Tabs will see their bolt hole and come into the sewers after them. Shit, they’ll be right on top of us right where we’re coming out of the narrow pipe, and there’s no cover down there. Quigley can’t get out, not that way, not when there’s anyone around to spot them, unless they want to kill us all.”
“Shit.”
“Nakatomi Tower to Ground, switch over to alternate.”
Ed changed the frequency on his radio. “Yeah George, go.”
“If we move over to the parking garage we’ll be a lot closer to that armor element by Quigley. I’ve still got a few grenades, and we’ve got two Spikes.”
Ed tried to pull the map of the area up in his head. “You’ll still be stretching it, that’s a Hail Mary for a Spike.”
“Well, from the parking garage to their apartment building is maybe a hundred yards, and I think their building will block us from view of the Tabs, as they’re on the far side.”
“You want to run it?” Ed asked. Hannibal, listening in, blinked his eyes at that.
Ed could almost hear George’s shrug. “Or you could run it while we cover. You’ve got Spikes left, right?”
“It’s a wide-open parking lot? Between the two buildings?”
“And a street,” George agreed.
“He can’t be serious,” Hannibal said in disbelief.
“You go,” Ed told Hannibal.
“What?”
“Tunnel. Head to the tunnel with your people. We’ll figure this out, but you need to get everybody else out of here.”
“Seriously?”
“They’re my guys, I’m not leaving them.”
“I get that, but…fuck. Shit. Dammit.” He sighed. “Go with God.” He slapped Ed on the shoulder. “Flintstone, on me!” he called out loudly, his voice echoing around the marble lobby, striding toward his men. He pointed at Brooke, who was on her back on the floor. His men had been working on her. “Can she travel?”
His medic turned to him, and Hannibal knew what he was going to say before the words came. “She’s dead.”
“Shit.” He pointed at Robbie, who was blinking and blank-faced and splashed with her blood. “This is not on you. You did your best. Nobody could have done better, and with all that blood there was no way to know she was gut-shot. But grieve later, we’ve got to go now. Flintstone! We’re heading down, NOW!”
“Theodore!” Ed waved. Jason, Early, and Morris’ loaner Sergeant Sarah Weaver were the only members of Theodore still in the lobby. “Over here.” He grabbed his radio. “Stand by,” he told George. He flipped back to the main frequency. “Almighty, do you copy? Almighty, do you copy, over?”
“Go for Almighty.” Morris sounded like he was moving fast.
“Do you still have eyes in the sky? Over.”
“Roger that.”
“This is Nakatomi Ground. I need to rendezvous with you and get that controller, I need those eyes.”
“Currently departing SkyBox, be there presently. Over.”
The three members of Theodore jogged across the huge echoing lobby, turning their heads to watch the rest of the dogsoldiers heading for the stairs down to the lower level. Ed eyed the trio. Relatively fresh, having only fired a few magazines at Tabs and their vehicles. And, and perhaps most importantly, between the three of them they had four Spikes.
“’Sup, Cap’n?” Early drawled. Jason looked back and forth between them.
“You want the good news or the bad news?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
At some point early in the anarchy a vehicle had crashed into the concrete wall enclosing the ground level of the Fisher Building parking garage. The vehicle was gone, but the rupture in the wall remained, and it was wide enough to admit a person. George slipped through it, having studied the open parking lot on the far side for a bit.
Per one of Almighty’s drones the freshly-arrived armor convoy was staged on the far side of the Lodge Freeway from one side of West Grand Boulevard to the other, but from his position on the ground the only Tab vehicle George could see was the IMP on West Grand in front of the apartment building. Weasel had indicated it was disabled by an RPG, and it certainly seemed inert, but Weasel had let them know there’d been Tabs on foot near the vehicle giving them harassing fire recently. George could only hope the soldiers had moved west to join up with the column when it had arrived.
“Fifty-foot intervals,” he said quietly, then moved away from the garage as fast as he could under his gear.
If the parking lot he was cutting across had been littered with vehicles that would have been something, a little cover, provided some security either real or perceived, but there were only a few abandoned and desiccated hulks in the lot and they were nowhere near the path he had to travel.
The asphalt lot was wide open, and (as usual) he feared the worst…but he crossed it without incident, hopped the curbstones, jogged across the narrow street, and reached the cover of the far apartment building without receiving incoming fire. He stepped through an empty floor-to-ceiling window frame into what had been a bank lobby.
George cleared his surroundings then turned and covered the approach of the rest of the squad; Jason, followed by Early, Sarah, Mark, Quentin, then Ed. Kelly had peeled off from George’s group to rejoin Flintstone, not wanting to join in on their “Fucking stupid-ass suicide mission,” as he called it.
They moved into the building silently, not sure how close any Tabs might be, and took up defensive positions. When Ed was halfway across the lot something caught George's eye. He squinted and saw a moving dot high in the air north of the Fisher Building. A drone, and not one belonging to Almighty.
Someone to the south on the ground opened up on full-auto when Quentin and Ed were still in the open, but didn’t hit anything but pavement and parked cars. It was an M5, George’s seasoned ears told him, and they were tough to control on semi-, much less full-auto. Still, both men sprinted all out, then checked themselves for hits after they made it into the building.
“Quigley, Theodore’s in your building, on the east side,” Ed said quietly into his radio, still panting. “You want to talk us into your position? We just took some fire from south of the building.”
There was a long pause. “Seriously?” Weasel sounded incredulous. “You were supposed to bail.”
“We’re not heading into the tunnels with all these Spikes,” Ed said firmly. “Not when there’s something to shoot them at right here. You’ve got Tabs in the building?”
“Yeah, yeah. Maybe. Not sure where, now. Watch your ass. We’re all up on six. There’s a stairwell at the northeast corner, take that up. Morons. Over.” Despite his casual insult he sounded delighted they were there.
Jason was behind Ed and Early as the squad moved slowly and quietly into the building, down a hallway, and began climbing the stairwell. The day before, after Morris’ briefing, Jason had been charged with adrenaline; it seemed he had joined the war effort at just the right time. Here he was with less than a week under his belt and he’d be involved in the largest offensive in the city since the start of the war. But…ever since that afternoon briefing his life has been nothing but a mixture of boredom and misery. Or misery and exhaustion.
The trek to get to the skyscraper codenamed Nakatomi under eighty pounds of gear had been the most horrific thing he'd ever done in his life, especially crawling the last 300 yards through a narrow pipe, which if anyone had asked he would have guessed at half a mile or a mile in length, it had seemed so long and painful on his hands and knees. Then he’d been with the group which had staked out the lobby. The few Army soldiers stationed inside it had been gunned down by the running men ahead of him so quickly he hadn't seen them fall, and then… Nothing. Nothing until the enemy armor showed up across the street and he, like everyone else with him, shot at it, not with any hope of doing damage, but rather as a distraction. The IMP grenading the north entrance had been exciting and loud but not dangerous to him at all. In fact, it all still seemed a bit surreal to him. He’d been more scared during the ambush of the Army patrol, which now seemed like it had happened weeks ago. Now they were in yet another building, but at least he hadn’t had to crawl through a tunnel to get there.
The fifth- and sixth-floor landings were covered with Tab bodies, and the air was thick with the smell of blood. Weasel met them on the sixth floor, beaming. “You guys are fucking nuts, I love it. Come on up.” His face and webgear were splashed with generous amounts of dried blood, none of which seemed to belong to him.
“It’s your house, were do you need us?” Ed asked.
“There’s four stairwells, one on each corner, plus a fancy one on the front—the south side. We don’t really have enough bodies to cover them all, so I’d like one guy here…”
“Quentin,” Ed said.
“Got it,” Quentin said, posting himself at the top of the stairs as Weasel led the squad down the hallway and turned a corner.
“’Nother guy here,” Weasel said, pointing at a stairwell door.
“Early.”
“Yeah boss, on it.”
Weasel pointed at a nearby open doorway. “Renny was in there, but then we went up on the roof for a bit. Dude can fucking shoot, I’ll give him that. Now we’re all hunkering down inside, you’ll see why. C’mon.” He led the way west down the long side of the building.
“Most of the apartments seemed empty, but any people still here have to be long gone now after all the shooting,” Weasel said. He gestured to their left, where closed doors lined the hallway. “Those open onto the south-side apartments, which look out onto West Grand. Killed an IMP out there with an RPG, but we’re all out of ammo for it. Got a few Tabs on foot out there still, somewhere.”
“One of them fired at us running over. How many doggies you have here?” George asked him.
“Left, after the Tabs pushed in and up the stairs? Me, Old Man Quigley, and two of the guys from RoadRunner. That’s it. We lost two, but we made ‘em pay. You think that stairwell you came up is bad with bodies, you should see the northwest one, got blood running down four floors like a horror movie. Assholes.” He flashed a mean grin and gestured to the left. “Got a fancy open staircase here, lots of glass. No way to cover it without exposing yourself to the street outside, so we’ve got it trip-wired with grenades on the second-floor landing. Better to dart across than drag ass.”
The building was a giant rectangle, and the west and east side corridors were shorter. Around the corner to the hallway accessing the west-facing apartments the squad reunited with Renny, as well as Harris and one of his men. All of them were crouched in the hallway, away from a nearby open doorway. Renny gave the men of Theodore a nod.
“Appreciate the moral support, but I’m not sure what else you’re going to be able to do here,” Harris said. Although the sight of all the slung Spikes lifted his spirits.
“Take a look,” Weasel told Ed, nodding at the open doorway.
“Carefully,” Renny added, his big rifle resting on its butt beside him.
Ed slid up to the open doorway and edged his eye past the frame. Beyond was a small but nicely appointed studio apartment. Against the left wall were cabinets above and below a stove and dishwasher. To the right was an open-air bedroom. Directly across from the door was the double window.
“Jesus,” Ed breathed. The drone’s video feed hadn’t really done the scene justice. He pulled back, grabbed his binoculars, then held them vertically and peeked past the doorframe again, looking through just one lens. He looked back and forth a bit, ducked down to cross to the other side of the open doorway, then looked some more from that angle. “Take a look,” he told George, handing him the binos.
The west side of the apartment building was just over one hundred yards from the near service drive of the Lodge Freeway. The far service drive was perhaps an additional seventy-five yards further away.
The Tab forces were arrayed along the far service drive as if it was the parking lot after a rock concert, with most of the vehicles turned to face toward the threat. Two Toads, two IMPs, and what had to be ten Growlers. A few Growlers were positioned a quarter-mile north, and one was equidistant south, but the majority of the vehicles were spread across West Grand in a skirmish line.
The Tabs were all buttoned up inside their vehicles. They seemed to be waiting for some signal before proceeding. Maybe they’d been instructed to stand back until the other forces approaching from the south could gather some intelligence on the dogsoldiers still in the area.
Ed frowned. The Tabs had to know there were dogsoldiers in the apartment building not too far from their front, heck there was a disabled IMP on West Grand right in front of it, but they seemed unconcerned. Maybe they thought their numbers provided some measure of protection. Maybe they suspec
ted the dog soldiers were all out of armor-piercing weapons.
Ed pulled back and studied the squad filling the hallway before him. He counted. “Six Spikes left, total?” He looked at George.
“And I’ve got eight AP rounds for this thing,” George said, hefting the six-shot grenade launcher.
“They won’t do shit against a Toad,” Ed told him. He chewed his lip. “As for the Spikes, yeah we’re up six floors, but they’re way out there. I’m worried that we won’t have enough of a down angle to penetrate the armor, if we do manage to hit what we’re aiming at.”
“You can get up on the roof for a little more height, but you’re exposed as shit up there,” Weasel said helpfully.
George scratched his head. “We have to assume as soon as we try anything they’re going to blow the shit out of this entire building.”
“Sarah, you back up?”
She had the controller and viewscreen for Almighty’s drones, but had packed it away for the move across the open parking lot. She’d pulled it out of her pack as soon as they’d reached the sixth floor. “Yeah,” she said distractedly. The drone was one thousand feet up, directly over their building. “There’s a Growler on the north side here, parked close, but I don’t see any movement.” She and Ed had met up with her commanding officer as Morris and Conrad had come jogging into the Concourse beneath the Fisher Building. He’d left it up to her whether she would escape with him into the sewer tunnels or join with Ed and the others on their more-than-risky mission to back up Quigley and inflict additional damage on the Tabs. It hadn’t been a hard decision for her.
“I think that belonged to the dead guys in the stairwell,” Weasel said. “Came with the IMP we killed.”
“Tabs have a drone up as well in the area,” Ed told them. “I don’t feel like pulling out the satellite window sheet at the moment, so let’s just assume they’ve got satellite coverage as well.”