“You hope…”
Ryan gave a small shrug. “Mebbe. Just keep triple red and shoot on sight. They won’t be expecting that.”
Gloria spared him a glance, smiling with that lopsided grin he was getting used to. “You hope…” she said with a dry humor.
“Wish they start,” Jak added from just behind. “Getting itchy.”
As if on cue, the first attack began, and from directly in front of them.
Emerging into the open forum in front of the building that lay at the center of the complex, it was clearly visible that this was indeed a replica of the Pentagon. The building had the classic squared design to its facade, leading off to diagonal walls that took it around in a five-sided shape. The open area of concrete, designed specifically for clearing a no-man’s-land space all around, stretched away from them on all sides, curving around the diagonal walls and forming a circular shape where the decorative walls in front of the last line of buildings were shaped away from the line of the blocks.
It was a hell of a large space in which to be chilled.
The Pentagon look-alike in front of them had few windows on the airless facade, and those that there were had long since been blown out. But they expected the building to be empty aboveground. At a signal from their leader, some of the Gate warriors raised their handblasters to cover the windows above ground level, in case a few sec men fired from above.
It was what Ryan or Gloria would have done. The building provided cover, and the height gave a wider angle of fire. But whoever was in command of the Illuminated Ones’ sec force either hadn’t thought of such an option, or had a plan that precluded this move, for the windows were as lifeless as they had been since the nukecaust.
On the ground level, the Gate and Ryan’s people found that they had emerged at the front of the building. If they had been given pause to consider, it would have been an obvious move—bring them into the open right in front of the main entrance to the building. It revealed something about the mindset of whoever was in charge of the sec attack.
And yet, although things were about to happen too fast for rational and conscious thought, the sight of the front entrance triggered survival and combat instincts in Ryan and Gloria—and their respective forces—that had been honed in long years of battle.
The front of the building consisted of a series of false windows along the length of the wall at ground level. They were shaped into the facade like the windows on the upper levels, but were bricked in with decorative stonework that had eroded and faded into a series of seemingly random shapes. A main entrance arch framed iron double doors that were much more primitive than those on the original Pentagon building. Like everything else on this copy, it was a rough sketch with the emphasis on solid security rather than on accuracy. So the double doors had no subtlety, but were solid enough to withstand even the most hardened firefight. Set along the wall at regular intervals were four other sets of doors, flush to the wall with no arch or buttress to shelter them from the elements. The hinges to the doors were protected by being laid back behind the main shell of the door, indicating that they had to open outward.
So, it was obvious from the lack of sec force on the upper levels, and from the fact that they had been brought out to the front of the building, that this was where the attack would stem from—an assumption that was proved correct as the large double doors began to swing open with a speed that indicated a regular maintenance.
“Dark night,” J.B. shouted. “Five fronts—get them covered.”
The Armorer had been watching the other sets of doors while Ryan’s and Gloria’s attention had been focused on the double set. He had seen the four doors begin to open as one, and he was in motion before the first thought in his head had finished forming into his shouted warning.