“Hello, lover,” Ryan called softly. “How are things on the other side?”
There was a harsh sputter of static, punctuated by the words “way outmaphurry.”
Her image blanked out, fading like a ghost caught in a mat-trans jump. In a moment it was replaced by a jumble of lines Ryan knew had to represent corridors and floors inside the installation.
“Anybody make any sense out of that?” Ryan asked.
“The floor she and Doc on,” Jak said. He reached out and tapped the monitor. “Stairwell here. She there.” A faded lemon dot stood out against the gray under his forefinger.
“Can you find it?” J.B. asked.
The albino nodded. “Sure.”
“Go,” Ryan said. “Things around here aren’t going to get any friendlier.”
An explosion slammed against the exterior of the building with enough force to tear loose inner sections of the wall near the blocked entrance. At the same time the group of attackers inside the complex surged up from the ground and charged the stairwell.
“J.B.,” Ryan called.
But the Armorer had already drifted into place on the other side of the entrance.
“HIT THE WALL one more time!” Burroughs ordered. He crouched on the other side of the FAV, taking shelter from the debris raining to the ground. The turret on the M-l Abrams shifted slightly. The first round from the main gun had caused it to twist slightly in the loose sand.
“Ready, sir,” the tank’s gunner called out.
“Ready, sir,” the tank commander relayed.
“Fire,” Burroughs ordered. He took a last look at the debris-choked entrance, knowing there was no way they could hope to penetrate the occluded mess. He hadn’t been expecting Cawdor to mine the doorway. His adversary was every bit as good as the reports had indicated. It was just too bad the man refused to see reason.
No matter how tough and seasoned Deathlands had made Ryan Cawdor, there was no way he was going to stand against real military men.
The major was counting on the edge that his unit had brought with them out of the installation after almost a hundred years. It was what was going to deliver a world to him, and he’d spent decades figuring out how to get it right. The casualties Ryan and his people had inflicted reduced Burroughs’s favorable odds, though. His men had been blooded and provided with training and discipline that combat men would never receive again. Unless he took the time to train them himself. And the patriotic fervor that drove most of his unit was irreplaceable. None of the recruits he’d be able to find would ever hold the same love for their country that he and his men did.
Project Calypso had given him all the time he figured he’d need to reclaim his country. Provided Cawdor and his team hadn’t discovered the project’s secrets during their exploration of the installation.
The tank’s main gun fired, and the shell was dead-on. Then Burroughs ordered his armor forward for the next phase of their assault. There were only two entrances into the building and his men covered them both. Cawdor and his group were going to die like rats.
“GREN,” RYAN WARNED, taking the explosive from his pouch.
“Go,” J.B. called back.
The one-eyed warrior pulled the pin and hooked the spherical explosive around the corner and out into the midst of their attackers. He fired at a man partially exposed behind a crooked slab of stone wall, but missed.
An instant later the gren blew, throwing out shrapnel and a brilliant burst of light.
Even though he’d turned his head and closed his eye, the flash imprinted against Ryan’s lid and removed some of his night vision. He blinked his eye, trying to clear it.
The second explosion sounded outside, tearing up the inside of the building even more. This time a hole opened up, as big as a man’s chest and shoulders.
“Going to be in here on us,” J.B. warned, thumbing fresh shells into the M-4000. “Uneven odds are going to get even worse.”
Before Ryan could respond, the buckled wall exploded inward, driven not by another 120 mm shell, but by raw tonnage of the rolling tank.