“Yeah.” Gwen nodded, “We can take the Eliicas. They’ve got links to the central systems and.”
“They’re jammed, remember” Malcolm growled, “Better go get the data from the computers now before we go.”
“Uh.oh, yeah.”
“Go on!”
Gwen nodded quickly, then ran back inside.
Anselm shook his head, “This is going to get really complicated, Major.”
“Tell me about it, Interpol,” Malcolm shook his head. “Those helos are scattered all the hell too. It’s some mess.”
Someone snorted in the background, “Least we can find the fire. Just look for the smoke.”
A few smiled, but Malcolm and Anselm didn’t.
“Gwen did have a good point though,” Anselm offered, “The Eliica squad cars are damned fast, we should take them. They probably have a paddy wagon here that can maybe take some small arms fire too.”
“Right.” Malcolm nodded, “K, when the Inspector comes back, we’ll steal the cop cars.”
One of the men chuckled, “tell me, Major.how often have you wanted to say something like that”
“Shut up, Tavish.”
The rumble of thunder in the distance had faded finally, leaving Inspector `Pete’ looking around with a puzzled and concerned expression on his face.
“Hey, Mate, what the hell was that,” He asked, eyes turned to the sky across the other side of the facility. “That sound like explosions to you I think we’d better check that out.”
His deputy didn’t respond at all, so Pete rolled his eyes and turned around in irritation.
“Damn it, man, are you gonna be doing the silent treatment all.”
Pete trailed off as he found himself staring down the barrel of a pistol that was aimed right between his eyes.
He lifted his hands automatically, his eyes widening until the whites were gleaming against the black of his skin. “Holy crap, Mate! Don’t point that thing at me! And where the hell did you get a gun We didn’t issue pistols for deputies this time.”
The click of the hammer cocking back snapped the police Inspector out of his indignant outrage at the reckless brandishing of a firearm, alerting him that there was something a lot more dangerous going on than poor gun safety.
“Hey now.about that silent treatment crack, you know I was just.”
The crack of the pistol snapped heads around to look at them and a woman screamed in the background as the black skinned Police Inspector toppled to the ground and lay unmoving. The Deputy turned on those who were still there and began snarling orders.
“Into the facility! Move or I’ll shoot!”
Simon Eddings, Trooper in the Australian Army, crouched on the rooftop where he’d been sent by Colonel Pierson and brought the imager up to his face to get a better look at the tower where it cut the sky in half just a couple klicks away. The Imager was a marvel of optics and electronics, bringing him right up next to the immense construct, like he was hanging on the side of the tower himself, as well as providing him with range data and other priceless pieces of information.
Normally it would also automatically search and classify everything it recorded, scanning through military databases for profiles on known military equipment and such, however the low level jamming that was disrupting their communications was also completely screwing with the wireless networking capabilities of all his equipment. The net effect was to more than halve the effectiveness of his gear and force Eddings to use it all piecemeal rather than as a coherent system as it had been designed.
Luckily the majority of it had been designed with just such an eventuality in mind, and his training had also been geared toward adapting to the reduced effectiveness of being cut off from communication.
The Colonel had wanted him to find the radar installation that had guided the anti-aircraft guns, and Eddings had located it easily enough. The Phased Array Antennae were difficult to miss, located on the tower about three hundred and fifty to four hundred meters up its length, however there wasn’t a lot that he could do with the information at the moment.
A missile strike would take it out, but Eddings’ mind was filled with images of the tower, it’s structural integrity damaged, toppling in slow motion from its one kilometer high throne. The damage it would inflict on the facility around it was incalculable, and Eddings wasn’t certain that it would stop there.
He was about to draw back, return to the Colonel’s position, when movement on the ground some distance away brought him up short. Again the imager came into play, passing over the squad sized group of men who were working their way up the street toward the Blackhawk where it was parked in the middle of the street.
Eddings crawled back along the building, looking over the other side until he found one of his squad. He held up his closed fist, catching the man’s eye, then gestured toward the approaching squad and circled two fingers in the air before clenching his fist tight again.
The man below nodded, waving the flat of his hand down the road twice, then quickly turned to send a similar sequence of hand signals down a chain of soldiers to where ever the Colonel had setup shop.
Eddings, satisfied with the completion of his primary duty as well as his current orders, pulled his assault rifle up close and checked the magazine nervously before flicking the safety off and settling in to wait.
“Colonel, we’ve got a group of people approaching along the road from the South.”
Pierson looked up from his computer link, “Civilians or Tangos”
“Unknown. Could be either right now, the word came from Eddings, Sir, and his comms are out so we can’t see what he sees.”
“Alright, get people into position to mount an ambush, but I want confirmation before they open fire, son! Got me”
“Got you, Sir.”
“Make sure everyone gets me.”
“Yes Sir, no one engages without confirmation.”
Pierson nodded, shaking his head, “This could be a right nightmare, son.”
“Sir, no offense,” The soldier said grimly, “but from where I’m standing, it’s already a right nightmare.”
The Colonel snorted, but nodded. “Just so. Just so. Get Eddings back here as soon as it’s clear, I want to know if he found me my radar.”
“Yes Sir!”
Kaseem Omar grunted as the American built helicopter came into sight, sitting crookedly on the road ahead of them, but obviously still intact and in one piece. He shook his head and held up a hand, “Hold.”
His squad came to a stop with him, and he extended his hand, twitching his fingers in the air.
The commercial imager was dropped into his palm a moment later, and he gestured the men back off the streets while he himself slipped into a doorway. The imager, a nifty little device that was part digital camera, part computer, part binoculars, and part a thousand and one other things crammed into one molded plastic casing, brought him right up on the helicopter as he played it over the military vehicle without finding any sign of the soldiers who had crewed it.
It had hammered into the ground hard, he could tell, the crater in the pavement they’d just walked past was proof of that. Blackhawk helicopters were tough, though, and the men who flew them were normally quite skilled. The pilot of this one had to have been, to be sure. That or he was incredibly lucky, luckier than any man deserved to be.
It was empty, however, which wasn’t unusual. They would have been worried about mortar use, that was how soldiers thought.
Kaseem would have been happy to oblige their expectations, however once they’d dropped completely behind the buildings the radar system had lost its solid lock on them and they hadn’t been able to determine precisely where the helicopter had landed. They didn’t have enough ammunition to simply shell the entire city in order to get a few troops surviving from a handful of downed choppers.