The Armorer nodded and disappeared. Krysty moved outside, the detonator in her hand. “Here, lover. You decide when to blow it.” She tossed it in his direction.
Ryan caught the device easily and gave her a wolfish smile. “Get them tucked in and ready. This is going to cut it thin.”
Krysty gave him a fearful stare. “I’ll be waiting for you, lover,” she said, then disappeared.
The one-eyed man waited, giving them a three count. He wrapped his left arm around his face to block some of the smoke, breathing through the material sandwiched in the crook of his elbow. The heat pressed against him as he squinted through the uneven brightness.
The soldiers came through the flames in a broken line, moving with their rifles in front of them.
Taking careful aim Ryan managed to shoot one of them through the head before return fire drove him to ground.
He went through the door at a run, wondering if there was a way to shut it and maybe buy them some more time.
The instant after he’d passed through, though, the door wheeled smoothly and slammed shut. Krysty was staying on her toes, reminding him of only one of the reasons he loved her. The light went away, except for the rectangle at the other end of the tunnel. His feet slid through the greasy liquid covering the floor. Voices came from the room behind him. He tried to hurry as fast as he could, but the door wrenched open behind him before he covered a third of the distance.
Ryan’s footing was the first thing to go as he twisted to confront whoever might be coming through the tunnel after him. Shifting smoke with ember-covered debris confused his vision as the sonic waves pounded him. He struck the ground hard, all wrong, and a numbness spread down his left arm, allowing the detonator to squirt out of his grip.
The first man through the door took shape before him as he brought up the SIG-Sauer.
Chapter Seven
“Get a flamethrower up here,” Burroughs ordered as he waved the first team into motion.
“Yes, sir.”
The major gazed down the secret passage. “McMillan,” he yelled. His ears were still ringing from the detonations in the enclosed spaces.
“Sir,” his second-in-command replied.
“Where the hell are we?”
One of the men brought up the flamethrower.
“Private offices, Major,” McMillan answered. “Colonel named Henry Walker.”
“What was he in charge of?”
“The Intel we dug out of the computers listed him as a liaison officer for appropriations. Scuttlebutt, however, suggested that he was linked heavy with the CIA or NSA.”
The man now clad in the flamethrower gear made another attempt on the passageway. This time he held a bulletproof riot shield in front of himself, as well.
“Where the hell does that passage go?” Burroughs demanded.
“Don’t know, sir,” McMillan responded. “There’s nothing on it as far as I know, and I’ve been over every square inch of blueprints that were to be had in this installation.”
Burroughs knew the man had been given plenty of time to know the entire complex. During the first couple of decades, they’d had to fight hard, room by room sometimes, to acquire dominance in the building. Some of the scientists hadn’t been inclined to share their wisdom and research, though, and had forcibly been shown the error of their ways. Some he’d bribed with the fruits of Project Calypso. A few of them he’d had to kill later anyway. Creative minds had genetic problems with discipline and authority.
Those had been the dark times, filled with hate, fear and loathing, emotions that Burroughs hadn’t experienced so intimately before. But they had all forged him into the fighting machine he was a century later. He’d learned to conquer. It was a natural progression from giving protection. The U.S. military had been well aware of that in the latter 1990s as they worked on UN peacekeeping missions throughout the world.
A whoosh of escaping gases, followed by the smell of burning fuel-air mixture, bled into the room. “I got him, Major!” the man with the flamethrower yelled in triumph. “Burned his ass for him!”
Burroughs moved toward the door, watching the twisting shadows as another belch of fiery spray hosed the tunnel. He knew nothing human could survive.
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