One of the commandos felt bullets ricochet off his armor and instinctively dropped down and tried to take cover. "Don't try to cover from small-arms fire unless your power drops below twenty percent," Hal Briggs radioed over their secure commlink. "And don't waste projectiles on infantry, or doors and walls your sensors can see through. We do different tactics here, gents: You work alone, you work quickly, and you let the armor defend you and feed you information. Follow the position signals, check every room. Let's move out."
"I'm getting a power-level warning," one of the commandos said. "It's reading twenty percent already."
"You have a bad power pack," Briggs said. "Withdraw, change packs, follow us down once it checks out. Move out." The one commando went back inside the MV-22, where technicians in protective armor quickly helped the commando out of his exoskeleton. Meanwhile, the other Tin Man commandos split up into two groups and dropped through the holes in the roof to the floors below.
Hal Briggs led the first group of four. Holding his rail gun on his left hip, anchored to his exoskeleton, he walked quickly without running through the corridors of the Libyan Presidential Palace; the others split up, taking different corridors. Terrified workers and other persons, presumably relatives or other staffers, ran past him, some running headlong into him. He ignored everyone he didn't recognize. Hal used his ultrawide bandwidth sensor to peer through walls and doors, and anytime he saw someone inside, he kicked the door open to see who it was. But he kept on moving, sometimes simply walking right through a wall or door to get inside an adjacent room.
"It's hard to take stairs with this exoskeleton," one of the commandos radioed.
"Don't bother with stairs," Hal responded. When he reached the end of the hallway, he simply turned, tossed an explosive charge onto the floor, blew a hole in the floor, and jumped through.
Once they finished the top floor, the other floors went more quickly. On the ground floor, Hal had to contend with massed Republican Guard soldiers, now with heavier machine guns and grenade launchers. The battle armor's electric shock system took care of any close-in security he encountered; he had to fire one hypersonic projectile at the security booth just inside the front palace entry, where Republican Guards had set up a twenty-millimeter Gatling gun. One Tin Man had to jet-jump outside and retreat back to the roof after taking nearly two thousand rounds from the cannon before Briggs put it out of commission. Briggs left one Tin Man on the ground floor to watch for any heavy security responses, while the rest started down to the subfloors.
The entire search of the above-ground floors took them less than two minutes.
Now that the assault was on, they moved faster through the subfloors, following the location signal. They came across interrogation rooms, zapped anyone inside carrying weapons, and released all others. Chris Wohl found an infirmary, and next door was a makeshift autopsy room and morgue. "I found two of our guys in the morgue," Chris radioed. "Looks like both of them have been tortured to death." His voice started to tremble with rage. "I'm going to kill someone for this." He zipped both corpses into their black body bags and carried them to the roof.
"I found survivors," another of the commandos reported. "I'm bringing them out." Within minutes, eleven more Night Stalkers were on board the Pave Hammer tilt-rotor, all of them injured from torture and near-starvation but all still alive.
Briggs and two other commandos had just moveH to the bottom subfloor when Briggs heard one of the lookouts say, "We've got trouble, One. Heavy armor on the way in. We're engaging, but we're running out of time."
"We'll be finished searching the building in three minutes," Briggs responded.
"No good, sir," Chris Wohl interjected. "We're going to be surrounded in one minute. The Pave Hammer is too vulnerable. Make your way upstairs."
"We can't leave without Patrick and Wendy."
"Sir, we'll be walking out of Libya if we're not airborne in sixty seconds."
"Then get airborne."
"Negative, sir. Everyone gets on board. I've stopped picking up life signs from the general."
"That's an order, Master Sergeant." Briggs sent the last two commandos upstairs to get on the MV-22. 'Two more on the way. I'm staying until I find the McLanahans."
Briggs hurried toward the source of the location signal-and he was horrified at what he found. There, a desktop was covered with blood-and moments later he found Patrick's microtransceiver, tossed into a corner.
"I found the transceiver-minus the general," Briggs reported solemnly. He did another sweep of the area-no sign of him. "I'm coming up."
Ivana Vasilyeva waited until the loud, rhythmic beat of the heavy rotors far above her subsided, then crawled out of her hiding place in the steel-lined weapons locker in an isolated corner of the room. She checked that her submachine gun was cocked and ready, then carefully searched the hallway outside the small armory. All clear. She then returned to the locker and grabbed a woman by the back of her neck, pinning her left arm behind her to steer her out of the room.
"Well, that wasn't much of an assault," Vasilyeva said to the woman in English. "It appears your friends have left already, before their work was done."
"They'll be back," Wendy McLanahan said. "Count on it."
"But we will be long gone by then, Dr. McLanahan,"
Vasilyeva said. "I am sorry we did not meet up with your husband. But I do not think he would like how you have been keeping yourself." Wendy's face was badly beaten; one eye was swollen shut and bleeding; her nose was broken in several places-and she had trouble breathing because of cracked ribs, a partially deflated lung, and a torn abdominal diaphragm. Blood had been oozing out of several orifices and wounds for many days, making her look pale and ethereal.
"I think he'll understand. Besides, I'll get better-you and your friends will just get dead."
"You'll be alive long enough for us to lure your husband to us, and then you'll both be dead, at Comrade Kazakov's hands."
"Pavel Kazakov." Wendy chuckled. 'The only thing worse than being his whore or his drug pusher is his assassin."
Vasilyeva twisted Wendy's arm higher up her back, causing her to cry out in pain. "Pain must be something you enjoy, Dr. McLanahan."
"Am I turning you on, bitch?"
"Shut up and move," Vasilyeva said. "We have a boat waiting for us in the harbor. A short ride to Zuwarah, a plane ride across the Sahara to Algeria, and then another private jet to meet Comrade Kazakov. Then we set a trap for your-"
They heard a loud scream behind them. Vasilyeva turned just as a body came flying at her, pinning himself against her submachine gun and pulling it out of her hands. The gun went spinning across the hallway. Wendy twisted away. Vasilyeva struggled to her feet, madly searching for her weapon-and then saw him. "There… you… are, General McLanahan," she cooed softly.
Patrick stood between her and the weapon. He still wore the handcuffs, waist chain, and manacles; his left shoulder was an ugly mass of blood from where Zuwayy's men had roughly cut the microtransceiver out of his body. He backed up, looking for the weapon with his feet in the semidarkness of the hallway.
"Wendy?"
"Patrick!" she cried.
"Get out of here," he said. "Go back. Get away from here."
Vasilyeva reached back, grabbed Wendy by the hair, and pulled her up to her feet. "Is this who you came for, General? I would not have wasted my time." Patrick quickly searched for the gun around his feet. Vasilyeva pulled Wendy to her, wrapped her left arm around Wendy's neck, and applied pressure with her right hand. "Do not move, or I will snap her neck," Vasilyeva warned.