The Seraphim Sequence: The Fifth Column 2 (44 page)

Jay and Nasira ran through the tunnel, passing under Concourses A, B and C. The last two were some distance apart and Jay had to stop at regular intervals to catch his breath. He was already sleep-deprived and tired from the operation so far.

‘Out of shape?’ Nasira said.

‘No,’ he panted. ‘Just. Need. A minute.’

Nasira waited impatiently. Although she had a flashlight mounted to her Glock, she was relying on his vision to detect any danger early on. Jay was cool with that. He wasn’t too keen on encountering another handful of Liberators.

‘I forgot how much of a pain in the ass you are,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ Jay said between gasps. ‘But I’m worth it.’

Nasira rolled her eyes and started running again. He chased her and, much to his relief, they made it to Concourse C without incident. He’d only needed to stop eight times. Nasira used the push lever to open the transit station doors. They stepped out onto the platform. Above them, a small Learjet hung from steel cables. Jay knew this was the worst point of entry: they were open to all three levels of balconies above.

Moving for the inactive escalator, they reached the ground floor. The train station roof was styled with strange rectangular stone formations, ferns and other plants. Entry to the control tower was on the third floor. They had to take several more escalators just to get there. The elevator was useless of course, so they needed to breach the stairwell.

Without DC’s key, Nasira had to pick the lock. It took her a few minutes but once she had all the pins set she opened the door and switched on her Glock’s mounted flashlight. Jay moved through and shut the door behind them. He went first, his vision bleeding into infrared. Nasira’s flashlight swept across the stairwell, blinding him.

‘Not … in my eyes,’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ Nasira said. ‘Not really.’

Jay climbed the stairs. By the time he reached the top he was ready to collapse. ‘Really need to start running again,’ he said.

‘You think?’

She pushed past him and carefully opened the door. Keeping herself pinned to the wall, she left it ajar for Jay’s barrel. He stayed in infrared, waiting for targets to present themselves. There were bodies on the floor, a soft yellow color, their limbs bluish. He recognized the sickly sweet odor of human blood.

Nasira crouched and turned away to cover the other side of the control tower. Jay let her cross underneath him, then he moved forward, checking the edge of his arc. They were both inside now, standing at opposite sides of the door. Nasira let the door close behind them.

‘They’ve been dead for some time,’ Jay said.

Nasira checked the pulse of every jaguar knight and traffic controller, in case someone was playing dead. But everyone’s eyes were open.

‘Gunshot trauma,’ she said. ‘Except for this one.’ She kicked a jaguar knight’s body over. His head was missing, and it was a clean cut. ‘Whatever that was, it was a very sharp blade.’

‘Yeah, that’s interesting,’ Jay said. ‘In an I-don’t-want-to-be-here sort of way.’

The 360-degree glass panels were decorated with gunfire holes. Some of the panes were splashed with blood that was already dripping downward and drying a dark crimson.

Nasira looked at him. He’d never seen her this unnerved before. ‘Liberators?’ she said.

It didn’t make sense, he thought. ‘How could they get up here? The door wasn’t breached.’

‘SWAT maybe. Snipers.’

Jay instinctively crouched, but a quick infrared survey of the taxi- and runways below yielded no sign of life. Beyond the concourses and maintenance buildings, there weren’t really many places to hide on a featureless five-mile-wide property.

‘Doesn’t explain the decapitated body,’ he said.

He took the opportunity to steal a SCAR 17S rifle from one of the fallen jaguar knights. Nasira did the same.

‘Whoever it was, they were definitely inside the control tower,’ she said.

‘Shocktroopers?’ Jay hated to say it, but it was the only possible explanation right now.

He hit his pressel switch. ‘Soph, you read?’

Nasira shook her head. ‘They’ll be under the surface.’

She picked up the cell DC had been using to speak to the SWAT negotiator. It was in two pieces. She picked out the SIM card, only to find it was cracked.

‘That’s not good,’ she said.

‘Let’s get back to the hotel,’ Jay said.

Together, they moved down the pitch-black stairwell. Nasira exited first, Jay a few paces behind, and Nasira walked right into the path of a Liberator. Jay’d missed it with his infrared vision.

‘Oh, fucking hell,’ she said.

Jay snapped back to normal vision. They were too far from the stairwell to dive back in for cover. He watched as Nasira aimed her SCAR rifle and opened fire, punching rounds into its underbelly of shiny weaponry.

The Liberator’s razor-sharp leg clamped down on her. She rolled to one side. The leg smashed the tiled floor and struck at her again. She rolled clear, away from the balcony that overlooked the train station. The Liberator twisted and opened fire, but the only sound was the clicking of parts no longer working properly. The EMP had fucked its loading mechanism.

‘Hey!’ Jay yelled, waving his rifle to get its attention.

Its operator must have heard him because the Liberator swiveled to face him. Jay fired at its sensors. Sparks danced across its armored surface as it strode toward him with large magnificent steps.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he said.

He scrambled to get clear but it was on him in seconds. One of its legs lashed out. He ducked under the leg and rolled under the robot itself. He considered aiming up into its belly but didn’t have time. As soon as the Liberator lifted another leg, he’d be sliced in half.

He kept moving, rolling out from under it and running for the balcony. He reached the glass balustrade and turned as the Liberator pounced on him, its foremost legs poised like spears. He ducked as the legs smashed through the glass, then slid under it again. It lost its footing and tumbled over the balustrade. He looked down to see it topple into the train station, colliding with the suspended Learjet and severing one of its cables. Jay took his SCAR in both hands and moved quickly toward the edge. The Liberator hit the train station floor on its side. From up here, it looked fragile, incapable of harming anything.

Directly below him, Nasira was pulling herself to her feet. She’d fallen into the garden arrangement, which wasn’t altogether a bad thing. She held her rifle in both hands and seemed injury-free.

‘Are you OK?’ Jay said.

‘Fuck me being OK. Shoot that rust-bucket!’

The Liberator was trying to get to its feet, two of its legs moving with surprising flexibility, and he remembered they could right themselves from almost any fallen position. He aimed at the eyelet holding the dangling Learjet by its remaining cable and fired a burst. He missed the steel cable. Nasira joined him, her rounds hitting home and tearing the eyelet from the wall. The Learjet fell on top of the Liberator, pinning it down.

‘That won’t hold for long,’ she said, jumping down from the garden onto the train platform.

She stood a safe distance away and emptied her magazine into the Liberator. It stopped wriggling. Jay jumped down onto the garden, then onto the platform beside her.

‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘Where there’s one motherfucker—’

‘There’s bound to be more,’ Jay said. ‘I know.’

***

A gust of wind howled through the access tunnel, chilling Damien’s arms. The tunnel was a two-lane road that could have been mistaken for any motorway tunnel in America, except it maintained a higher air pressure to stop the smoke and fumes from getting into the service tunnels it connected to. The walls were rocky earth, curving up to a ceiling lined with pipes of various sizes and shapes. The ceiling lights were dead, so everyone except Grace needed to use torches. Grace was ahead of the team, cloaked and scouting for possible threats with her infrared vision.

The tunnel curved slowly to the left and down until it reached the south blast door, placed at a right angle to the tunnel. Damien took Sophia’s daypack with all four EMP devices inside it, then he cuffed and blindfolded her. DC steered her with a hand on her shoulder, keeping her in the center of the team.

The blast door was open just as Denton had said it would be, which Damien was relieved about since it weighed 50,000 pounds and was designed to withstand a nuclear strike. Or at least a nearby nuclear strike.

As they moved through the open blast door, he was surprised to find only two Blue Berets standing guard.

‘Where’s security command?’ he snapped at the Blue Beret on his side. He already knew the location, but needed to sound like a Blue Beret detachment who wasn’t familiar with the base.

The guard hesitated. ‘Straight ahead, first left.’

He made no attempt to scan their RFID chips.

Damien turned to Grace. ‘Let’s move.’

Grace fell into step with him and he was conscious of the rest of his team falling into step behind. The Blue Beret at the blast door would be radioing their presence in to his XO at security command. That was fine, as long as he was convinced they were genuine.

They were inside the OpCenter now, an underground citadel of concrete, steel and the Seraphim super-array. The corridor looked no different from those at Desecheo Island or any of the numerous Fifth Column bases and installations he’d previously been stationed at. High ceilings, glossy white linoleum floors, banks of fluorescent lights and clusters of pipes weaving along the ceiling.

They passed the barracks on the right and a string of labs on the left. Security command was next up on the left. From the map, he knew the OpCenter was deceptively large. It had its own dining facility, hospital, dental surgery and pharmacy, two gyms, a sauna, a barber, bakery and its own self-contained shopping mall. It was also home to many sub-levels of R&D and military operations, all of which he wanted to steer very clear of.

Grace fell back into line and was replaced by Abraham. It was best to keep her face hidden just in case she was on a watch list along with Sophia.

Damien did the talking as they walked into security command. Three Blue Berets at the bank of computers, one of them an officer. Another two on his left, three on his right.

‘Are you in charge?’ Damien called out to the officer.

The man wore a golden oak leaf insignia on his shoulder and moved like a robot.

‘Major,’ he said, his ice blue eyes inspecting Damien’s prisoner with great interest. ‘And who do we have here?’

‘Sir, this is a high-priority target,’ Damien said. ‘Sophia.’

‘Remove the blindfold,’ the major said.

Abraham did as the major instructed.

‘Why, hello there,’ the major said, unsmiling.

Sophia kept her gaze below the major’s while Damien pretended to check her restraints. What he actually did was sever them with the blade she had concealed in her waistband.

‘Are you Sophia?’ the major asked.

‘Your deduction skills are very impressive,’ Sophia said.

‘We caught her impersonating a Blue Beret, sir,’ Damien said.

The major chuckled quietly. ‘I can’t believe she thought that would work.’

With one hand, he gripped her chin tightly and inspected both sides of her face. He extracted her covert earpiece and held it up for Damien to see.

‘Are you forgetting something, sergeant?’ the major said, pleased with himself.

‘We missed it, sir,’ Damien said.

‘This makes me wonder what else you missed,’ the major said.

DC flashed a humorless smile. ‘This.’ His tachi sword glinted in the air and cut the major’s throat.

Sophia had shut her eyes just in time as blood splashed over her face. Damien did the same. Blood burned when it got in your eyes and he didn’t particularly want to be blinded at this crucial point in the operation. Behind him, Denton was working fast. He placed the General’s silicon thumbprint on the door’s security panel. It slid shut.

Damien aimed his pistol and dropped the two Blue Berets at the computers. Grace took out the pair on his right. Damien shifted his aim, covering the room. By this time there were no Blue Berets left standing. And no one on their team was injured.

He turned to see Grace hand Sophia a Glock pistol. DC was standing over a dead Blue Beret, scarlet-slicked tachi blade in one hand, pistol in the other.

Sophia began firing off orders. ‘Clear the bodies. Now!’

Everyone got to work, sliding the bodies to the corners of the room, hiding them wherever they could. Some left crimson smears, but that couldn’t be helped.

‘Grace, lock down the barracks,’ Sophia said. ‘I don’t want any reinforcements joining the party.’

Without a word, Grace moved for the computers, her fingers attacking a keyboard.

Sophia took her backpack from Damien and joined her a moment later. Damien watched her unpack an EMP device but she didn’t arm it yet.

‘Denton, Chickenhead, get ready for the Seraphim super-array,’ she said. ‘Further down, on your right. This level.’

Denton nodded curtly. He stood by the door, Magpul in both hands. Chickenhead grabbed an EMP device, fingers trembling.

‘Abraham, you know your orders?’ Sophia said.

The colonel moved toward the door, his men at his side. ‘Ready and willing.’

She handed him an EMP device and then turned to Damien. ‘You and Grace need to hold this chamber, is that understood?’

‘Loud and clear,’ Damien said.

‘Close it once we move out,’ Sophia said. ‘And don’t open it again until we radio you or we knock four times.’

Their radios should work within the OpCenter, providing everyone was on the same level.

‘Barracks are sealed,’ Grace called out.

Good, Damien thought. That locked out the Blue Berets—all except any patrols.

Sophia set the timer, strapped on a Blue Beret helmet and moved for the door. Denton took the fourth EMP device.

‘Always handy to have a spare,’ he said.

Sophia didn’t argue. With his Magpul wedged under one arm, Denton pressed the silicon fingerprint to the door’s security panel. The door retracted. The corridor was clear outside.