Carson finally moved when the helmeted man was only sixty feet away.
Scrambling on his hands and knees, he pulled the bags with him, desperate now to reach the end of the shelf tier and the fire door before the helmeted man got there and threw one of those things at him.
Keeping low, he pushed backward to open the fire door with his feet, even as one of the incendiaries clattered up against the back wall in the next lane down to his right and then exploded in a blinding wash of incredible light, producing a wave of heat that singed his cheek as he rolled through the fire door into the alley behind the building. He kicked the door shut just in time. As he got to his feet, there was that terrifying whoomp behind the door and then the cracks around the door turned arc-light white, and the door vibrated as if the Devil himself was behind it and badly wanted out.
He dragged himself and the bags across the alley to the fence, staying low, skinning his knees on the concrete; then he got up and started trotting down the alley toward the nearest cut in the fence, which was behind the derail building. As he ran, he felt, rather than saw, that each of the warehouses was being racked by internal explosions, the gable vent screens of each building now etched in bright white light as the old steel shook and rumbled from the, sudden release of energy inside. Glowing white clouds of smoke were starting to pump out of ridgeline ventilator cowlings.
When he got to the cut in the fence, he dropped the two bags and then began to pull apart the chain link. But then he stopped. He was right behind the demil building, which apparently had not been fired yet.
There were clear sounds of shouting and vehicles on the other side of the demil building, but no one had come around back. He could just see the snout of the semi where he’d hidden the cylinder, maybe forty feet away. There was a loud roar as warehouse three’s roof lifted off, releasing a huge bolus of yellow-and-red flame into the night sky.
Christ, he thought. I was just in there.
He made his decision. Leaving the bags, he sprinted down the back wall of the demil building, reaching the truck in a few seconds. He climbed up two steps to reach the outside toolbox and cracked it open. There was pandemonium going on around the corner out on the tarmac, a cacophony of shouting men, vehicle engines, and the, rising rumble of a major fire.
Incendiaries exploded inside i the demil building, sending a sheet of flame into the alley as the rear fire door opened momentarily.
The cylinder was right where he had left it. He grabbed it and ran back to the fence, barely avoiding the sheets of white flame howling out around the deformed fire door, only to find that the two sides of the cut fencing had sprung back together again. He pushed the cylinder through the cut in the fence, then started to struggle with the obstinate fencing.
“You!” thundered a voice from behind him “Halt! Freeze!”
He looked over his shoulder and was stunned to see two uniformed men pointing shotguns a{ him from the corner of the demil building.
Soldiers! As he stared in shock, the demil building’s back wall began to shake like a single sheet of steel, and then the back edge of the roof opened like a loose sail and belched out a sheet of flame from one end of the building to the other. Some of the roof truss ends were snapped off and there was a sudden rain of hot steel and rivets clanging all along the alley. The two men jumped back around the corner of the building to avoid the hail of hot shrapnel, at which point Carson threw his whole body through the opening and then turned to grab the bags, but the damned fence wire had sprung back again. He grabbed the cylinder, but the bags jammed in the wire when he tried to pull them through. A great sucking sound from the demil building just then caused him to look up, and he saw that the whole back wall was bulging toward him, about to come crashing down into the alley. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the two soldiers again, still pointing their guns at him, but he wasn’t waiting for them anymore.
He turned to jump down into the bushes, even as the demil building collapsed along its full length in a horrific crash. Something lashed the skin of his back as he bolted through the high weeds, which he realized were now on fire behind him. He raced along the path to the truck, pursued by the crackling and snapping sounds of a brush fire.
He got to the truck, opened the door, threw in the cylinder, and climbed in. He was barely able to get it started and get out of there before the roaring brush fire was up on him. Yelling in fear, he flattened the accelerator and drove blind, careening through the smoke and flames until he shot out onto the gravel road that ran along the back perimeter fence of Fort Gillem. Behind him, the whole world appeared to be on fire.
Carrothers had staged the Anniston team out on the abandoned runway about five hundred yards from the darkened shapes of the DRMO. The trucks. were parked in military order, in line abreast. The Suburbans were parked in front of the trucks. A six-man perimeter of Anniston military police was stationed out in the darkness along the edges of the runway. Carrothers stood by the right-front fender of one of the Suburbans. It was a clear, dark night, with little wind, which was fortunate. The lights of Atlanta to the northeast suffused the night sky with a faintly orange glow.
He had ordered everyone into MOPP gear, including himself, but he’d relaxed head hoods until the operation got under way. The protection suit wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t comfortable, either, and he was already itching. He didn’t really believe there was any risk from the cylinder, but he wanted his people to remember why they were there and why they were going to destroy a government facility in the middle of the night.
When the Special Forces team radioed in the code word indicating they were in position along the side walls of the first two buildings and that the DRMO appeared to be clear of personnel, he had given the “go”
order himself. The lead Suburban had moved out quietly to the airfield end of the DRMO complex to the team-extraction position.
Nothing happened for a minute, and then the sound of chain saws erupted at the far end of the DRMO, sending their characteristic buzzing howl into the quiet night air for about twenty seconds before going quiet.
Another sixty seconds of silence, and then he thought he heard the first incendiaries igniting in a series of dull thumps. The first signs of fire became visible a minute or so after that, starting at the far end and working toward his trucks. He gave the order to complete dressing out, pulled on the rest of his hood assembly, and then got into his Suburban. The fires were going pretty well by now, with one building really burning and a lot of multicolored white smoke climbing into the sky. He nodded at the driver and they pulled out, — heading down the runway toward the DRMO complex. As they arrived, he could see several figures converging on the extraction vehicle, getting in, and then that Suburban was accelerating off to his right, — away from the DRMO.
Good, the team’s out. He looked behind him as the rest of the Suburbans fanned out along the DRMO fence on the airfield side to set up the exclusion perimeter. The big semis were still back where he’d parked them. The sweep teams wouldn’t come in until the buildings had all gone down. He wondered what the troops were thinking. He had given everyone a quick brief as to why the Army was having to do this, that foreign terrorists might have hidden a chemical weapon in the complex and could be planning to move it to then-target area tonight. The DRMO was too hard to search; therefore, the decision to destroy it had been made.