Hansen flattened, pushing the team leader out of her crouch and hoping the three men had sense enough to obey without asking questions. There was a flash from the momentary hole in Solbarth’s protective bubble.
A ten-kilo war rocket arched down on a trail of thin smoke.
The missile skimmed the top of the police forcefield—which would have halted it harmlessly—and detonated in thunder on the pavement behind Hansen and his people.
The blast hurled the Commissioner’s car—was the driver clear?—onto its side. The pavement shattered. Howling shards of missile casing pocked facades for twenty meters in every direction. Bits that struck the inner face of the forcefield hissed and melted as their kinetic energy was transformed into heat.
Hansen’s ears rang. The men around him were all right, and his driver was getting out of the aircar with a dazed look on his face.
A rifle bullet whacked the hideout’s facade and ricocheted over Hansen’s head.
Hansen took a deep breath. “Top to all units,” he said in a voice that rattled like tin in his own ears. “Cease firing. All units cease firing. I am Commissioner Hansen, and this site is under the jurisdiction of Special—”
Three bullets smacked the villains’ forcefield where it bulged from one of the third-floor windows. The projectiles melted in showers of white sparks. The muzzle blasts of the rifles echoed down the corridor of building fronts like a burst of automatic fire.
“I say again, cease fire,” Hansen ordered. “Special Units personnel, enforce my orders by whatever—”
The left half of Hansen’s visor had cycled back to a view of Chief Holloway just as the fat man’s body rocked back under the recoil of his powerful rifle. Hansen fully expected one of his people to stitch the Chief’s ass with stun needles, but he hadn’t said that.
Actually, he hadn’t gotten the order completely out of his mouth before the back of Chief Holloway’s limousine geysered metal and plastic, then collapsed in flames. Somebody from Special Units had put a plasma round into the vehicle.
Well, Hansen’s personal motto was that no means were excessive if they got the job done. Holloway hurled the rifle away and curled up in a ball. His aide tried to shield the Chief’s body, but the disparity in size of the men made the attempt ludicrous.
The delicate flicker of stun needles hitting the villains’ forcefield stopped also.
Hansen stood up. A black spot in the center of a window spat plasma at him. He flinched as the bolt coruscated fifty centimeters from his face.
He drew his own pistol. “Pink Two,” he said, wishing he could remember the woman’s name. “Get ready to open the screen for me.”
“You’ll shoot, sir?” the team leader asked.
“For me, damn you!” Hansen shouted. “Me! Not a gun!”
He’d have to apologize later.
“Yessir.”
He’d been this scared before, so scared that his palms sweated and muscle tremors made the fine hairs on the surface of his skin crawl. Sure, he’d been this scared.
But he’d never been more scared.
“Now,” Hansen said very softly. He leaped forward as the forcefield collapsed momentarily to pass his body.
It was thirty meters to the front of the building. Hansen had covered half the distance in ten quick strides when a hole like Hell’s anus spun in the bulging forcefield above him.
The Commissioner’s pistol snapped two high-velocity projectiles through the opening before the villain within could fire. The mirror of the protective forcefield dulled momentarily as its inner face absorbed the plasma bolt triggered in a dying convulsion.
Hansen was doing this job because he wouldn’t order any of his people to do it, and because it had to be him anyway.
But nobody in Special Units was better qualified to handle it, either.
Motes of plastic drifted in the sunlight beneath 212 Kokori, bits snapped from the facade by stun needles and shrapnel from the villains’ own weaponry. They had one hell of an arsenal in there. This wasn’t a police action, it was a war . . . or at any rate, it’d degenerate into a war if Hansen’s try here failed.
Hansen looked back the way he’d come. Squat figures, mere shadows behind the polarized sheets of forcefields, waited with mechanical passivity.