“Domingo, Noonan says he can do this, but it’ll take time to do it right, and you guys’ll have to use your heads.”
“I’ll do the best I can, jefe, ” Chavez called back.
It was twenty minutes before Henriksen tried to raise Dawson and Berg, only to find that they were not answering. There was something bad happening out there, but he didn’t have a clue. Dawson was a former soldier, and Killgore an experienced and skilled hunter-and yet they’d fallen off the earth without a trace? What was happening here? There were soldiers out there, yes, but nobody was that good. He had little choice but to leave his people out there.
Patterson moved first, along with Scotty McTyler, heading west northwest for three hundred meters, then turning south, moving slowly and silently, blessing the surprisingly bare ground in the forest-the ground got little sunlight to allow grass to grow here. Steve Lincoln and George Tomlinson also moved as a team, steering around two bad-guy blips to their north, and maneuvering right behind them.
“We have our targets,” McTyler reported in his Scottish burr. On Noonan’s screen they appeared to be less than a hundred meters away, directly behind them.
“Take ’em down,” Clark ordered.
Both men were facing east, away from the Rainbow troopers, one sheltering behind a tree and the other lying on the ground.
The standing one was Mark Waterhouse. Patterson took careful aim and loosed his three-round burst. The impacts pushed him against the tree, and he dropped his rifle, which clattered to the ground. That caused the lying one to turn, and grip his own rifle tighter when he was hit, and the reflexive action of his hand held the trigger down, resulting in ten rounds fired on full-automatic into the forest.
“Oh, shit,” Patterson said over the radio. “That was mine. His rifle must’ve been set on rock-and-roll, Command.”
“What was that, what was that-who fired?” Henriksen called over the radio.
It only made things easier for Tomlinson and Lincoln. Both of their targets jumped up and looked to their left, bringing both into plain view. Both went down an instant later, and a few minutes after that the command voice on the enemy radio circuit called for another status check. It now came up eight names short.
By this time, Rainbow was more behind than in front of Henriksen’s people, steered into place by Noonan’s computer-tricorder rig.
“Can you get me on their radio?” Clark asked the FBI agent.
“Easy,” Noonan replied, flipping a switch and plugging a microphone in. “Here.”
“Hi, there,” Clark said over the CB frequency. “That’s eight of your people down.”
“Who is this?”
“Is your name Henriksen?” John asked next.
“Who the hell is this?” the voice demanded. “I’m the guy who’s killing your people. We’ve taken eight of them down. Looks like you have twenty-two more out here. Want I should kill some more?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“The name’s Clark, John Clark. Who are you?”
“William Henriksen!” the voice shouted back.
“Oh, okay, you’re the former Bureau guy. I suppose you saw Wil Gearing this morning. Anyway.” Clark paused. “I’m only going to say this once: Put your weapons down, walk into the open, and surrender, and we won’t shoot any more of you. Otherwise, we’ll take down every single one, Bill.”
There was a long silence. Clark wondered what the voice on the other end would do, but after a minute he did what John expected.
“Listen up, everybody, listen up. Pull back to the building right now! Everybody move back right now!”
“Rainbow, this is Six, expect movement back to the building complex right now. Weapons are free,” he added over the encrypted tactical radios.
The panic in Henriksen’s radio call turned out to be contagious. Immediately they heard the thrashing sound of people running in the woods, through bushes, taking direct if not quiet paths back toward the open to which many ran without thinking.
That made an easy shot for Homer Johnston. One green-clad man broke from the trees and ran down the grassy part next to the runway. The weapon he carried made him an enemy, and Johnston dispatched a single round that went between his shoulder blades. The man took one more stumbling step and went down. “Rifle Two-One, I got one north of the runway!” the sniper called in.
It was more direct for Chavez. Ding was sheltering behind a hardwood tree when he heard the noises coming his way from two people he’d been stalking alone. When he figured they were about fifty meters away, he stepped around the tree trunk, to see that they were heading the other way. Chavez sidestepped left and spotted one, and brought his MP-10 to his shoulder. The running man saw him and tried to bring up his rifle. He even managed to fire, but right into the ground, before taking a burst in the face and falling like a sack of beans. The man behind him skidded to a stop and looked at where Chavez was standing.
“Drop the fucking rifle!” Ding screamed at him, but the man either didn’t hear or didn’t listen. His rifle started coming up, too, but as with his companion, he never made it. “Chavez here, I just dropped two.” The excitement of the moment masked the shame of how easy it had been. This was pure murder.
It was like keeping score for Clark, like some sort of horrid gladiatorial game. The unknown blips on the screen of Noonan’s computer started disappearing as their hearts stopped and with them the electronic signals they generated. In another few minutes, he counted four of the thirty signals they’d originally tracked, and those were running back to the building.
“Christ, Bill, what happened out there?” Brightling demanded at the main entrance.
“They slaughtered us like fucking sheep, man. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“This is John Clark calling for William Henriksen,” the radio crackled.
“Yeah?”
“Okay, one last time, surrender right now, or else we come in after you.”
“Come and fucking get us!” Henriksen screamed in reply.
“Vega, start doing some windows,” Clark ordered in a calm voice.
“Roger that, Command,” Oso replied. He lifted the shoulder stock of his M-60 machine gun and started on the second floor. The weapon traced right to left, shattering glass as the line of tracers darted across the intervening distance into the building.
“Pierce and Loiselle, you and Connolly head northwest into the other buildings. Start taking stuff down.”
“Roger, Command,” Pierce replied.
The survivors from the forest party were trying to shoot back, mainly at empty air, but making noise in the lobby of the headquarters building. Carol Brightling was screaming now. The glass from the upstairs windows cascaded like a waterfall in front of their faces.
“Make them stop!” Carol cried loudly.
“Give me the radio,” Brightling said. Henriksen handed it to him.
“Cease firing. This is John Brightling,cease firing, everybody. That means you, too, Clark, okay?”
In a few seconds, it stopped, which proved harder for the Project people, since Rainbow had only one weapon tiring, and Oso stopped immediately on being ordered to.
“Brightling, this is Clark, can you hear me?” the radio in John’s hand crackled next.
“Yes, Clark, I hear you.”
“Bring all of your people into the open right now and unarmed,” the strange voice commanded. “And nobody will get shot. Bring all of your people out now, or we start playing really rough.”
“Don’t do it,” Bill Henriksen urged, seeing the futility of resistance, but fearing surrender more and preferring to die with a weapon in his hands.
“So they can kill us all right here and right now?” Carol asked. “What choice do we have?”
“Not much of one,” her husband observed. He walked to the reception desk and made a call over the building’s intercom system, calling everyone to the lobby. Then he lifted the portable radio. “Okay, okay, we’ll be coming out in a second. Give us a chance to get organized.”
“Okay, we’ll wait a little while,” Clark responded.
“This is a mistake, John,” Henriksen told his employer.
“This whole fucking thing’s been a mistake, Bill,” John observed, wondering where he’d gone wrong. As he watched, the black helicopter reappeared and landed about halfway down the runway, as close as the pilot was willing to come to hostile weapons.
Paddy Connolly was at the fuel dump. There was a huge aboveground fuel tank, labeled #2 Diesel, probably for the generator plant. There was nothing easier or more fun to blow up than a fuel tank, and with Pierce and Loiselle watching, the explosives expert set ten pounds of charges on the opposite side of the tank from the generator plant that it served. A good eighty thousand gallons, he thought, enough to keep those generators going for a very long time.
“Command, Connolly.”
“Connolly, Command,” Clark answered.
“I’m going to need more, everything I brought down,” he reported.