BRAINRUSH 02 - The Enemy of My Enemy (36 page)

Snake.

Men shouted from below. A blister of automatic gunfire ripped a pattern in the wall just behind Tony. He charged like a bull toward a cape and rushed through the open door. 

He slid to a stop in the carpeted office.

“You’re too late,” the terrorist leader sneered, lifting his hand from the desktop keyboard.

The man stood with his back to the tinted window. Tony barely noticed him. His gaze was on the expressions of horror on the faces of his trussed-up family on the couch—and the muzzle of the AK-47 thrust deep into his wife’s left breast. The huge guard holding the weapon towered over the trio. His steely expression was a challenge. He stood three paces away.

Too far.

The gunfire below intensified. Becker and the rest of them would be charging hard. Footfalls on the roof told him that Ripper’s team had spanned the rooftops and would be pouring through the skylight at any moment. But none of that mattered. In fact, if even one of them popped a head through the door, his wife would die.

Tony’s muscles tightened into steel cables. He measured the distance to the man holding the gun. Then he slowly peeled his gaze from his pleading family and focused on the terrorist leader. “You’re—gonna—die—slow,” he growled.

“Perhaps,” the man said. “But I won’t be the only one.” He casually removed his glasses and folded them into the breast pocket of his lab coat. It was as if he was no longer interested in seeing what was about to happen. His expression softened; he’d accepted the inevitable.

Reaching forward, he swiveled the desktop monitor around so Tony could see it. The video image was an interior shot of a lab or assembly area. A wheeled cart in the center of the room supported a dozen bricks of plastic explosives. They were bundled around a high-pressure canister the size of a scuba tank. An organized jumble of wires surrounded the device. They led into a black box with an illuminated digital timer.

The clock was ticking.

45…44…

“Beck,” Tony said without hesitation. “Explosives. Chemical ordinance. Ground-floor clean room. Forty seconds and counting.”

The gunfire beneath them intensified. A shadow of concern flashed across the face of the man behind the desk. The man would be dead already, Tony thought, if the reflective coating on the large picture window behind him hadn’t made it impossible for Snake to see into the room.

But any second now…

The shatter of window glass was followed by the heels of Ripper’s boots. He swung into the office, sighted down the barrel of his MP5, and opened up on full auto. The terrorist leader was blown off his feet. His body twitched and jerked and then stilled.

Tony was already on the move. He bowled into the startled guard, swatted his rifle to one side, and landed an uppercut to the man’s chin that made him topple backward. But the guard was no stranger to violence. He converted his fall to a tumble and rose with a curved dagger in one hand. His eyes calculated the shortest path to Tony’s wife. The muted screams of Tony’s gagged children spurred him on.

Ignoring the knife, Tony freight-trained forward and tackled the man. The guard was a mass of hard muscle. They fell away from the children and landed hard on the floor. Wind blew from the guard’s lungs. But Tony’s bear-hug tackle had failed to contain the knife. It slashed across his back. Tony roared from the pain, but he refused to let go. He poured every ounce of his strength into his arms. His face was buried in the crook of the man’s thick neck and he welcomed the stench of him as he tightened his grip. Bones snapped, but still, another savage burn flashed dangerously close to Tony’s kidney. Pain watered his eyes and Tony felt the first chill of fear. His grip loosened. He sensed the guard’s arm cock back for a final thrust.

The guard’s head snapped backward, and his body went limp. His blood-smeared knife dropped to the carpet. One of Ripper’s combat knives was plunged to the hilt through his right eye. Ripper had thrown it from the opposite end of the room. He rushed forward and untied Tony’s family. Tony pushed himself up, wincing from his wounds. His back burned, and felt wet with blood.

“Pops!” Tyler shouted after he ripped the tape from his lips. He rushed to help his dad up.

“I’m okay,” Tony said breathlessly. “Help your mom and sister. We gotta get outta here fast!”

He glanced over at the LCD monitor. Only fifteen seconds left. They ran out the door. The gunfire downstairs had stopped, but the relative silence was interrupted by the deep-throated roar of an engine, followed by a squeal of tires.

Chapter 65

Torrance, California

A
blister of bullets shredded through the sheetrock above Becker’s head. He ducked behind a forklift and returned fire. “Stay low! Pick your shots,” he shouted to the two bangers behind him. The third was already down, a pool of blood spreading beneath his limp form. These kids are stupid-brave, he thought. With a little field training, they’d be right as rain, but right now the buggers were in way over their head. They crouched behind a row of fifty-gallon drums, and nodded to Becker as they rammed new magazines into their P9 submachine guns.

The terrorists had split into two groups. Half had holed up behind a pile of crates, directing its fire at Becker and his bangers. The other half focused its assault weapons on Papa and Street’s crew, who approached from outside the roll-up door. The tangos had AK-47s and they knew how to use them.

But something else had Becker worried. He slid the muzzle of his rifle in the slot between the back of the forklift seat and its fuel tank, and sighted through the scope. There, suspended from coat hooks on a wall behind the vans, were two strange-looking vests. He focused the lens and confirmed the worst.

Wires hidden in the folds.

“Mind your targets,” he said into the com-net. “Suicide vests on the back wall could blow us all to hell.” A chance detonation would kill indiscriminately, he thought. But for now the terrorists were trapped, good and sure. No place to go. As soon as Ripper’s blokes drop in from the catwalk—

“Beck,” Tony’s voice was urgent over the com-net
.
“Explosives. Chemical ordinance. Ground-floor clean room. Forty seconds and counting.”

Becker’s blood chilled. From the bangers’ worried expressions, he knew they’d heard it, too.

“You’ve got to cover me, mates,” he told them. “Give ’em the full tank, right-o?” 

Their eyes went wild. Toothy grins followed.

Becker set his rifle down and coiled into a crouch. The clean room occupied a space thirty feet away, midway between him and the enemy. But its semitransparent acrylic walls provided zero protection against a 7.62 slug from an AK.

Becker gave the signal. The two bangers popped their P90s over the top of the drums and opened up on full auto. The weapons sounded like twin chainsaws, spewing nine hundred rounds per minute at the tangos. Heads disappeared behind cover.

Becker bolted across the warehouse. He slid to a stop at the clean room door like a baseball player sliding into base. Staying low, he pushed through two sets of swinging doors and entered the room. Rows of waist-high cabinets and countertops on the opposite wall shielded his silhouette from view.

The positive-air filtration system was shut down, so it was warm in the space. But the deadly cargo on the cart in front of him made his skin tighten as if he’d just stepped into a freezer. There was enough C-4 in the room to obliterate the building and kill anyone standing within a hundred yards of its perimeter. And the chemical canister amidst the explosives…

Bloody hell.

Outside, additional gunfire erupted from directly overhead. That would be Ripper’s boys joining the fray. AK-47 fire answered in force. Men shouted. Some screamed in pain.

Becker crab-walked to the cart. The LED timer beside the apparatus read twenty-five seconds.

24…23…

He studied the device from every angle. One hand traced the mass of wires. The other slipped his hunting knife from its holster. Five precious beats passed. Then ten. His breathing slowed. The gunfire around him disappeared from his consciousness. He identified two—make that three—separate booby traps.

He’d need more time…

A tremor shook his hand when he realized it was no use. He hadn’t trembled since his aboriginal grandfather taught him how to dance with a rattler on his first walkabout. He shook his head. There was nothing he could do. Running was senseless.

The roar of an engine and a squeal of tires yanked his attention up. That’s when he noticed the thin veil of frosted mist emanating from a tank in the corner of the room.

**

Tommy’s Taco Truck

Lacey paced liked a caged leopard. “I can’t believe I’m stuck in a taco truck right now!”

“Jeez, Lace,” Marshall said as he shifted the joystick to change the angle of the overhead image. “You don’t want to be anywhere near that place. It ain’t a movie set.”

  The crackle of gunfire outside the van provided a grisly soundtrack to the images streaming on the screen. The smoke had cleared. Muzzle flashes jumped from the interior shadows of the warehouse door. Tracer rounds arced inward from the tree line in response. There were bodies on the pavement. One of them raised an arm as if asking for help.

“That’s it,” Lacey said. She grabbed a military-grade crossbow from the shelf and made for the door.

“What are going to do with that?!”

“I don’t know yet. But I sure as hell can’t sit here—”

Jake’s voice crackled through a loudspeaker at the front of the truck. “Marsh, you there?”

Lacey gasped.

Marshall switched frequencies on his console. Jake’s voice had come in over the truck’s built-in dispatch radio. “Sweet mother, Jake! Where the hell are you?”

“I’m on the way, pal. Coming in high and hot.”

“High and hot?”

“Stolen chopper. Five minutes out. Status?”

Lacey slid her cheek beside Marshall’s to get to the microphone. “It’s a war zone down here,” she said.

“Tony’s family?”

“They’re alive, but we don’t know if Tony—”

“Wait!” Marshall shouted. He flipped a switch and patched in the tail end of a message from the com-net: 

“Chemical ordinance. Ground-floor clean room. Forty seconds and counting.”

“Goddamn it!” Jake shouted.

“Look there!” Lacey pointed at the screen as a white van shot out of the warehouse.

“Crap!” Marshall shouted. “A van’s breaking away. No, make that two vans. Moving fast!”

“Marsh, I won’t get there in time. You gotta keep track of those vans!”

“I’m on it,” Lacey said, a plan already forming in her mind. With a roll of duct tape in one hand and the crossbow in the other, she launched herself out the rear door.

Chapter 66

Torrance, California

S
even seconds.

Becker shoved the bomb cart next to the frost-laden tank labeled
liquid nitrogen
in the corner of the clean room. Using his vest as a makeshift glove, he twisted the valve open at the top of the tank. There was a brief hiss and the attached coil of high-pressure cryogenic hose jumped to attention as it filled with the liquid refrigerant.

Becker grabbed the discharge wand. With a silent prayer, he squeezed the trigger, spraying the minus-three-hundred-twenty-degree liquid on the bomb. He started at the timing device and moved down the leads to the bricks of C-4. Metal and wire frosted over. A spider web of cracks and ice crystals formed on the plastic explosives. One of the zip ties cinching the C-4 to the chemical canister broke into hundreds of tiny pieces. Then another. The cracks and snaps sounded like someone wadding up a sheet of cellophane. The LED timer stopped at three seconds—just before the lens clouded over. Becker held his breath. His insides felt as cold as the refrigerant.

Two seconds…one…zero…
 

A moment later he felt a grin twitch at the corners of his mouth.

The brief moment of hope vanished when he noticed the remnant of a label on the central canister:
o-ethyl-methylphosphonothioate
.

Holy Mother!

Silhouettes passed outside the walls and he knew that Tony and his family had made it downstairs. Safe…as long as the device didn’t warm up faster than he hoped. He dropped the wand and used his knife to snap the remaining zip ties to free the cylinder of gas from its nest of explosives. He grabbed it.