Unless he read the man poorly, Abdallah was quite sure that the mercenary bastard was somewhat taken aback by the events that were unfolding, but he didn’t give a damn.
“You!” Abdallah snapped, pointing to the man, “Parker.”
“Y.yes, A-Amir”
“What caused the power fluctuation”
The man was sweating. Abdallah frowned, then paused as he realized that the local air conditioning wasn’t operating. It wasn’t nearly hot enough for the man to be sweating, but Abdallah could have sworn that they had the Air Conditioning blowing full out to cool the electronics.
Something was not right, and somehow this paid weasel of a man knew what it was.
“Speak!”
The man flinched away, but began to stammer out a response.
“I.it was the switch to stored power.A.Amir.”
“Stored power” Abdallah blinked in confusion, “Why”
“I don’t know, I.I swear! The generators have stopped providing power.”
“Are they malfunctioning! I was told that the facility is in full repair.”
“They can’t be!” The man held up his hands defensively, “There are thirty-eight separate turbines in use in the tower.they cannot all have gone down. It must be a junction error.”
“What is the power status!” Abdallah demanded, stepping over quickly to stare at the display that showed the station’s output.
“We have reserves to help balance our nightly power drop,” Parker said, falling back into the familiarity of his systems, “We can put out eighty megatwatts from them.But A.Amir.”
“Yes, what is it”
“The Phased Array Radar systems take up over fifteen megawatts alone.” The man stammered, “Enough to power hundreds. thousands of homes.They’ll drain our reserves quickly.”
Abdallah stared at the man in neat apoplexy.
“Are you.Do you have the sheer GALL to inform me that we are running out of electricity while we stand here under a Two Hundred Megawatt power production facility! Do you actually have the gall to tell me that!”
Abdallah raged at the idiocy of it, barely holding back from striking the man, then turned to look at the others.
“This could be sabotage or the prelude to an assault.Alert our security forces,” He said evenly, reaching behind him to grab Parker by the shoulder and draw him close with a painful grip, “And you.Fix this.”
Parker nodded.
“Do you hear me! Fix this!” Abdallah yelled, shoving the man from his chair.
The international terrorist crossed the room quickly, coming to his central desk and pausing for a moment. When he looked up, his face was calm again. “Jacob.”
“Yes, Amir,” The Director of the power facility said instantly, stepping forward calmly.
“Have them begin releasing the virus,” Abdallah said, “Immediately.”
“Yes Amir.”
Lieutenant Green held up his hand, edge on to where he could see Sergeant Singer resting his long rifle against the edge of a concrete basin. The terrorists were still in the clear, those they could seem only wearing partial protective gear and obviously not overly concerned about the fact that their heads were open to the air.
He counted down silently, letting his men move into position, giving them every second of the few minutes they had allotted to allow room for error due to their lack of communication. The numbers fell steadily, however, and soon the moment had come. When his watch clicked over to the top of the hour, Greene clenched his fist, then dropped his hand to the P-90M that hung loose on his harness.
The first shot rang out from Singer’s rifle, launching the first round in the attack into the midst of the terrorists with the precision of the trained Sniper. The 7.62mm round chopped down one man as he was talking on a radio, drilling through the soft tissue of the terrorist’s throat and dropping him in place like a doll with his string’s cut.
Another shot rang out from across the way, Corporal Mayer’s shot dropping another man in an instant before the confused response of the terrorists could begin.
Then things turned quickly into a massed frenzy as the terrorists scrambled for cover, trying to locate their attackers in the confusion of screaming that had erupted from the hostages when the first shot rang out.
Greene swung his P90 up to his shoulder as he moved around the corner with Corporal Sasha Holter following right on his back. The built in optical sights on the submachine gun lined up almost of their own accord on the closest target, and Greene squeezed the reactive trigger just slightly, sending one 4.7mm round into the man.
He went down, hitting the ground hard, but neither Greene nor Holter quite forgot him as they moved through. When the figure on the ground twitched, then jerked back up to a sitting position, Holter dipped the barrel of her weapon and squeezed the trigger all the way down, triggering the P90’s auto fire mode, and chewed the man’s chest to hamburger.
“Dopers.” Greene heard her curse. “I hate dopers.”
Greene couldn’t have agreed more, but didn’t have time to think about it. The members of the group that were high on the so called `Faith Drugs’ were dead already, whether they knew it or not. Dopers like the one Holter had emptied twenty rounds into were very much the nightmare of Counter Terrorist Operatives the world over. They made unpredictable enemies, and often stayed in fighting form through wounds that would inevitably kill them, and would certainly have disabled any normal human.
For now, though, they couldn’t worry too much about even the dopers. First they had to secure the virus, and to do that they had to find it.
“Find me one of them with clear eyes, Sash,” He ordered after a moment. “We need answers.”
Sasha grimaced, “Give me a hard one why don’t you, L.T.”
They stepped over the body of the terrorist, the crackle of radio traffic catching their ear. Green stopped and knelt down as the crackle continued again, and a voice snapped out of the small device.
“Deploy the Virus! Do you hear me! Deploy the virus!”
Green and Holter exchanged grim looks.
“Move it, Holter. We’re running out of time.” Green said softly as he clipped the captured radio to his assault vest and moved on himself.
The long barrel of the Model 98 protruded from the leafy green of the strawberry plants, the prone man behind it resting his cheek on the padded butt of the rifle as he idly centered his crosshairs on first one target, then another.
Trooper Mackenzie mentally targeted each of the armed men in his range, picturing them all together in his mind, then one at a time as he watched the clock count down. The Sniper pictured each man in turn, even before he moved the powerful imager on his rifle to the next target, staying one thought ahead of his actions.
He saw his first man in his mind’s eye as the timer counted down to the moment of action, knowing that Given’s was doing the same thing only a few dozen feet away from him. Mac’s man was yelling something as the numbers fell, screaming so loud and so hard that he could see spittle flying from the dark lips of the terrorist.
With ten seconds left on the clock, Mac took a breath and slid a live round into the chamber of his gun. The satisfying click rang through him as he locked the bolt down and clicked off the safety of his weapon.
“Sniper one, live.” He murmured softly, speaking from rote even through his radio wasn’t working to communicate his words to the squad.
He let half the breath out slowly, then stopped and watched the armed man about eight hundred meters away through his scope while he imagined each step in advance in the back of his mind.
“Taking the shot.”
His finger curled lightly around the trigger of the Model 98, tightening as he froze in place. The only thing that moved on his body then was his finger as it slowly drew the trigger in to the edge of its firing point, riding that delicate line until the last second ticked away.