Ryan took the point, since he was the most familiar with the layout. They moved alertly between the twisting columns of acrid smoke. All of them repressed coughs and sneezes and frequently wiped their stinging eyes. However, Ryan saw the devastation wasn’t quite as total as he had initially figured. Only a few of the buildings in the sprawling compound were completely consumed by fire, though almost all of them were soot blackened with windows shattered by the explosive charges set by Mildred and J.B.
The vapors suddenly cleared, diminishing to a misty pall. Ryan saw the rambling, flat-roofed concrete-block building that housed the mat-trans unit beneath it. It appeared intact, and he breathed a sigh of relief. On the far side of it lay the submarine pens, where the undersea craft of the predark Navy had once been berthed.
Motioning the people behind him to stop, Ryan went to one knee, taking a slow, visual recce of the structure and the surrounding area. He considered circling the building, approaching it from a concrete slipway that ran from the rear down to the sea. However, he saw no signs of movement anywhere. He hoped the sec men on the launch were the last to have fled the base.
Standing, he gestured for his companions to come forward.
“Standard deployment,” he said to them quietly. “We’re going in by the front door. Triple red.”
The seven people fanned out in a half circle as they moved toward the front of the building. Krysty’s green eyes blazed, her hair tightly knotted at her nape.
Mildred held her ZKR 551 in a two-fisted grip, the barrel as steady as stone. Next to her, J.B. crouched to make himself a smaller target, the Uzi braced at his hip, finger on the trigger.
Doc stood sideways like an eighteenth-century dandy practicing the code duello, the Le Mat at the end of his extended arm.
Dean and Jak held their blasters in both hands, barrels pointing up.
As Ryan expected, the chrome-and-glass-paneled door was unlocked. The building had been an administrative center before the nukecaust and therefore didn’t possess the security measures of high-clearance areas.
As he shouldered open the door, the fluorescent tubes glowing on the ceiling showed him that the reception room and the corridor beyond were deserted. He moved in fast, shifting the barrel of the scattergun back and forth. The others came in behind him.
Stealthily, the companions crept along the corridor, but not as quietly as Ryan would have liked. Doc kept trying to stifle a smoke-induced coughing fit and was doing a poor job of it.
Most of the doors lining either side of the long hallway were open. Glancing into the first four offices, Ryan saw they were jumbled, ransacked. Evidently, Poseidon’s sec men had looted everything of value from the building before leaving. A fear that their remaining blasters and other possessions had been boosted gnawed at him.
They followed the corridor along two turns, first to the left, then to the right, before it dead-ended at the set of double doors Ryan wanted. They hung open, and the big room beyond was full of desks and chairs. A bank of monitor screens was still linked to the security vid net, and they flickered with images. Ryan swept a glance over them, saw they showed essentially the same smoke-clouded pix from different perspectives and turned away.
“Hey, Dad,” Dean called. “Look at this.”
Turning, Ryan saw his son standing before a tall row of six gray lockers, the hasps secured by round combination locks.
Fingering a lock, Dean said, “They’re not rusty. People here must have been using them.”
Ryan joined him, tugged on a lock experimentally and declared, “Our blasters might be inside of them. We’ll have to shoot off the locks. Mildred?”
The woman stepped forward, hefting her revolver. “Precision is my middle name. Everybody take cover.”
As her friends hunkered down behind desks, Mildred dragged a table over the end of the locker row, arranging it so she would have a parallel angle of fire. Half lying across the tabletop, she brought the lock on the far end into target acquisition and squeezed the ZKR’s trigger.