The pepper fog boiled out in a long white cloud that enveloped the unfortunate guards. Unlike Mace or even commercial five-percent pepper spray, whose effects a man might shrug off, pepper fog was impossible to ignore. It got into your breathing passages and eyes, and you couldn’t stop your body’s reaction. Your eyes swelled shut and you dropped to the ground, trying to find air you could breathe. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, you weren’t going to be doing much of anything except wishing you’d never been born.
Howard had gone through the training, he’d eaten the fog, and he knew how those guards felt.
The military stuff was designed to spew hard and settle out fast, but you wanted to wait a few seconds before you ran through the area you’d just fogged, and you wanted your goggles or spook eyes down when you did it.
“Go, go!” The point men moved in to disarm the squirming guards, while two more troopers offered cover.
Howard and Winthrop headed for the door with the other six team members.
He remembered to hold his breath. Two of Beta peeled off to cover their flanks, while two more ran into the building through the open front door, Howard and Winthrop right behind them, handguns drawn.
Nobody in the hall to stop them, Howard saw.
The main staircase was just ahead.
“Third floor! Go, go!” With Winthrop next to him, Howard ran for the stairs.
1:31 a.m.
Platt was in the kitchen, scraping what smelled and looked like fermented mayonnaise off his arm, when things went wonky. He saw a bright light strobe the window next to the back door, and heard an explosion in the distance that rattled the hanging pots and pans.
What the hell was that”!
He didn’t have time to worry about it, though. A guard ran into the kitchen, spotted Platt, and raised his assault rifle to pot him.
Platt already had the Browning nine in his hand. He indexed the guard and shot him twice–pop! pop!– right in the center of mass. Wasn’t too loud-The guard stopped, looked down at his chest as if he was annoyed, then went back to swinging his AK around at Platt.
Man! Platt put the next two into the guard’s face. The guy dropped like a boneless chicken. That ended that.
Goddamn pansy nine-millimeter! You couldn’t get a decent.45 or.357 in these foreign countries–they restricted you to small-caliber if you were a civilian!
Platt scooted across the kitchen and opened the door to the electric dumbwaiter. The tiny elevator was going to be a tight fit.
He hit the button for the third floor, then squeezed himself into the little box and let the door shut.
The dumbwaiter groaned, not having been designed for this much weight, but it rose. He heard somebody else make it into the kitchen and start yelling in oogaboog as the dumbwaiter lifted, but by then they didn’t know where he was.
1:33 a.m.
Apparently the residents knew enough to stay in their rooms.
Nobody tried to stop them as they went down the hall on the third floor.
Winthrop was glad. The HandK pistol in her hand didn’t offer the comfort she thought it would. It felt like an alien device, despite her training, too barrel-heavy because of the silencer, the grip sweaty.
She didn’t particularly want to shoot anybody, though she thought she could if she had to.
“Third door on the left,” the colonel said.
The two Beta Team troopers split, one going past the door, the other stopping on the near side.
They turned so they were facing away from each other, covering both ends of the hall.
Howard reached the door and tried the knob.
Locked. He nodded at her, pointed at the room.
“I’ll get the door, you go in.” She nodded in return, said, “Okay,” through dry lips.
Howard raised his foot and kicked the door open.
Winthrop dived in and rolled, just as she had done in VR so many times, and came up on one knee, the pistol pointed in front of her.
Thomas Hughes, dressed in white silk pajamas, sat up in bed, where he had obviously been sleeping until that moment.
“Who the hell are you? What do you want?” The colonel stepped in behind Winthrop.
“Mr. Hughes,” he said. He smiled.
“Commander Alexander Michaels at Net Force would like to have a word with you.” “I don’t think so,” somebody said.
Winthrop snapped her gaze to the glass door leading out to the balcony.
A tall, dark, and muscular man stood there, holding an odd-looking device in one hand. She swung her pistol around to cover him.
“I wouldn’t do that, darling”,” the man said.
Winthrop recognized him now that she heard the corn pone in his voice.
“Platt!” “You look much better in person than you do in VR, honey.
How about you put those guns down?” “How about I just shoot you instead?” Winthrop said.
“Bad idea. Ask your jig friend there why.” She glanced at the colonel.
“He’s holding some kind of a grenade,” Howard said.
“Yep, a gen-u-wine World War Two potato masher. Shoot me and I drop it, and even if your armor stops most of it, you still probably get stung pretty good. Maybe a piece gets through and punches a hole in an artery and you bleed out.
And old Tommy boy here, well, he surely gets turned into hamburger.” “I don’t think so,” Howard said.
“I think if I shoot you, both you and that grenade will fall off that balcony behind you.” “Ah,” Platt said.
“But then I would die, and you don’t want that, now, do you?” “Why not?” Damn, Winthrop thought. She knew Platt was right. And so did Colonel Howard.
She’d heard Commander Michaels telling him all about the dead-man switches. But she also knew that the colonel didn’t necessarily want Platt to know they knew… or that, even now, Jay Gridley was working furiously to defuse the things.
God dammit, Gridley, she thought. Hurry up.
“I’m surprised you haven’t found my little surprises yet, boy,” Platt said, “but then maybe you Net Force folks aren’t as good as ole Tommy-boy here thought. Let’s just say that if I don’t make it back to my ride out of here–and the little ole computer with its satellite uplink–by a certain time, well, things will happen that will make those last assaults on the net look like kid’s stuff.” “What do you want?” Howard said.
“Well, we need to come to some kind of. arrangement,” Platt said.
He smiled.
Chapter 40 Wednesday, January 19th, 2:05 a.m.
Bissau, Guinea-Bissau
At the helicopters, the pilots were relaxed, laughing and joking.
Michaels and Toni weren’t so animated. They stood a short ways off, swatting at the bugs that swirled around them.
The bug dope was enough to keep the insects from landing, most of them, but not enough to keep them from buzzing close enough to be annoying.
Michaels was beginning to get worried. The others were supposed to be back by now.
Even as he thought this, the sound of a truck motor reached them.
Two of the pilots moved away from the copters, assault weapons held at the ready.
The truck rounded a curve a couple hundred yards out, and as soon as it did, it blinked its lights off and then on again.
“It’s them,” Toni said.
Michaels felt himself relax a little.
The truck pulled to a stop ten feet away from where Michaels stood, and Sergeant Fernandez stepped out. He frowned.
“Beta Team is not back.” It was not a question.
“We thought they were supposed to meet you, and you’d all come back together,” Toni said.
“That’s how it was supposed to go. We waited until 0150 hours as planned. The deal was, if for some reason they ran long, they’d meet us back at the Hueys by 0200. I don’t like this. The colonel is never late. I think we have to give him a call.” “We’re not supposed to break radio silence except in an emergency,” Michaels said.
“Sir, we’re supposed to lift in twenty-five minutes,” Fernandez said.
“It’s an emergency.” Michaels nodded.
“Yeah.” 2:06 a.m.
Howard felt the comm vibrate soundlessly against his left hip.
That would be Julio calling. But he couldn’t answer him right now.
Their suits’ long-range broadcast radio had been put on standby, to make sure nobody who might be listening for such things picked up stray signals. LO SIR was up, and GPS transponders were on, but that wouldn’t be much help– they knew where he was, just not why he was still there.
Howard had his pistol trained on Platt, as did Winthrop. Platt, meanwhile, waved the grenade back and forth as if it was a spinning reel and he was fly-fishing for bass in a pond.
“Thing is. Colonel, we can’t hang around here all night in this Mexican standoff,” Platt said.