Prey (53 page)

"What's the matter with you? Hurry up and close those doors!" Lisa Abercombie yelled when nothing happened. The technician began to tug frantically on the individual levers.

"I can't! They're stuck. Somebody must have locked them open!"

"What?"
Abercombie screamed as she watched the second and third stretcher being unloaded.

"Call MacDonald," Asai advised. "He will know what to do."

"Sergeant MacDonald, call the command-and-control room immediately," the technician spoke hurriedly into the intercom mike. "Repeat. Sergeant Clarence MacDonald. Call the command-and-control room
immediately."

Abercombie and the technician waited expectantly, but there was no answer.

"For Christ's sake, I'm going to the training area to get Maas," Lisa Abercombie snarled, and then started for the door when the first shots rang out in the underground training facility.

The first stretcher team was waved through by Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald and Master Gunnery Sergeant Gary Brickard, both dressed in full combat gear and armed with M-16 assault rifles.

As soon as they were inside, Paxton rolled off the stretcher. The carriers, both officers of the Louisiana Department of Fish and Game, let the stretcher drop. All three men, armed with shoulder-holstered pistols and wearing Kevlar vests under their fire-fighting jackets, took up defensive positions. Günter Aben took one look and cut loose with a stream of 9mm submachine gun bullets that caught one of the Louisiana officers across the chest and throat. Aben immediately twisted away then and disappeared as a burst of 5.56mm ball ammo from MacDonald's M-16 and three evenly spaced hollow-point rounds from Paxton's SIG-Sauer shredded wood and plasterboard around his head.

The second stretcher team, consisting of Lightstone and Takahara as the bearers of a stretcher loaded with assault rifles, shotguns, stun grenades, ammo pouches, and first-aid gear, hit the floor to avoid the first flurry of gunshots. They disappeared then down the sloping helipad access tunnel, followed by MacDonald and Brickard and the Louisiana sergeant as the third stretcher team—consisting of the four remaining Louisiana officers and Stoner—moved into defensive positions and immediately went to the aid of the injured officer.

By the time they got to the end of the tunnel and were positioned to cover the swinging access doors to the conference room and the stairwell, MacDonald was already forming a plan.

As Brickard, Lightstone, Takahara, the Louisiana sergeant, and three of his officers crouched against the angled walls, their weapons out and ready, watching for the first sign of movement at either of the doors, MacDonald nodded at Lightstone.

"I'm Clarence MacDonald," the veteran combat soldier said, and then motioned with his head. "The gunny over there is Gary Brickard. You Lightstone?"

"Yeah," Lightstone nodded as he continued to scan the opposite corridor.

"Anybody else on the way?"

"Eventually there'll probably be a couple hundred FBI agents surrounding the park," Lightstone replied, "but right now, we're it. How many of them are there?"

"Seven," MacDonald said, "and they're all damn good."

"Which one's the white-haired asshole with the rhino-skin boots?" Lightstone asked.

"That's Maas," Brickard said. "He's the one you
really
gotta watch out for," the gunny sergeant advised. "Man's got reflexes like a cat. You see him, you better put him down fast."

"What about Chareaux?" the Louisiana sergeant asked quickly.

"They brought him in about a half hour ago on the end of a chain," MacDonald said, "beat to shit, and now they're hauling him around like a goddamn dog."

"We want him alive," the Louisiana sergeant said.

"Fine with me," MacDonald shrugged. "Okay, here's what we'll—"

At that moment, a pair of crashing gunshots rang out, followed by the sound of a loud, pulsing alarm that echoed through the huge underground facility.

The volley of gunfire in the distant corridor sent Lisa Abercombie running back into the command-and-control room, where she found Dr. Morito Asai trying to follow the movements of the invading law-enforcement officers on a bank of monitors as he spoke into his headset microphone. The communications technician had long since disappeared.

"Who are they?" Abercombie demanded as she closed and locked the glass-paneled door behind her.

"I don't know yet." Asai shook his head as he continued to adjust one of the security cameras.

"Look, there!" he said, pointing to the main screen.

"Who . . . wait a minute!" Lisa Abercombie's eyes bulged. "That's Paxton! He's supposed to be dead!"

"And Agent Stoner, too," Asai said as he switched over to the outside helipad camera. He focused on the huge agent who was guarding the entry into the facility.

"And Takahara, and . . . oh, my God, Lightner, he's here!" Lisa Abercombie whispered as Asai focused security camera number twelve on his easily recognizable face.

"Yes, definitely him," Asai smiled as he hit a button with his foot and spoke into his headset microphone.

"Maas, I can see eight intruders outside the lower-level stairwell. One of them is Lightner."

"Ah,
gut!"
The German assault-group leader's voice echoed over the speakers.

Then Asai and Abercombie whirled around with a start, Asai going for his shoulder-holstered semiautomatic pistol pistol, as Paul Saltmann entered the control room with a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver in his muscular hand.

"Christ! You scared the shit out of me," Lisa Abercombie gasped as she glared at her intelligence specialist. "What the hell is going on out there?"

"Looks to me like MacDonald and Brickard changed sides," Saltmann said as he glanced over at one of the monitors and saw the two combat-uniformed soldiers. "How many of them are there?"

"Not so many," Asai shrugged as he took his hand away from the grip of the small automatic. "Maybe ten at the most."

Saltmann smiled and shook his curly head sadly. "Those poor bastards. Maas can handle that many by him—Oh, shit!" The intelligence specialist blinked, his eyes widening in surprise as he stared at one of the far monitors.

"What's the matter?" Abercombie demanded, and then stared in horror at the row of camera monitors that showed the expanse of land surrounding the facility. Each of the six small screens showed at least two assault-type helicopters landing and unloading armed combatants.

Saltmann shook his head and turned to Asai. "Can you tell who they are?"

Dr. Morito Asai made several rapid adjustments to the control panel. The camera lenses zoomed in until all three of them could easily read the lettering on the raid jackets and the sides of the helicopters.

"FBI and U.S. Army," Lisa Abercombie whispered. "My God, what are we going to do?"

Dr. Morito Asai turned to look at Abercombie, and she realized that he was waiting for her to make a decision.

It occurred to her then that she might have a chance, after all, if she could tell her story to the right
people ...
to someone who would appreciate the significance of what they had tried to do and the magnitude of the risks that were necessarily involved.

Someone who would understand.

"Tell Maas that we must surrender immediately. There are too many of them for us to fight," she said to the Japanese team leader, who nodded solemnly and turned back to his control board.

Paul Saltmann raised the .44 Magnum and triggered off a high-velocity round that blew Dr. Morito Asai out of the console chair like a rag doll. The concussion sent Lisa Abercombie staggering back against the glass wall in shock, her hands clenched tightly over her ears.

"Why did you do that?" she shrieked, deafened by the explosive force of the contained gunshot, unable to hear the words even as she screamed them.

"Sorry, folks, but we are
not
going to surrender," Saltmann said evenly. He shifted the aim point of the powerful handgun in his two-handed grip and fired a second expanding .44 bullet. The creator of ICER, hit square in the chest, was flung backward through the shattering glass wall.

Paul Saltmann checked to make sure that no one else was around, moved up to the control board and called up the menu on the computer screen. He selected "Security," typed in his password, and selected "Destruction," typed in a second password, checked his watch, typed in the numerals 45, selected "Activate," and then "Confirm."

Then, after working through a similar set of commands to cancel all other passwords out of the system, Paul Saltmann ran out into the tunnel corridor leading to the ICER team's quarters while red warning lights began to blink overhead and a blaring alarm began to pulse and echo through the building.

No one had bothered to tell Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald that the engineers who created the Whitehorse Cabin training facility had incorporated an interesting twist into the design of the lower-level command-and-control center: namely, the destruct sequence overrode the manual settings and automatically closed the five exterior emergency doors that provided access to the secured facility.

Dwight Stoner discovered this when a heavy concrete door suddenly started to roll across the twelve-foot opening. The crippled agent took one last look at the rapidly approaching helicopters, shrugged, and barely managed to jump inside the access tunnel before the leading edge of the six-inch-thick panel slammed into the locking mechanism on the opposite side, effectively sealing off the facility from outsiders.

Shaking his head and mumbling to himself, Dwight Stoner grabbed his crutch in one hand, a twelve-gauge shotgun in the other, and began hobbling down the sloping corridor toward the sound of distant gunfire, barely audible over the pulsing alarm.

The stairwell leading to the upper level of the training facility had become a free-fire battle zone.

As the agents, state wildlife officers, and military instructors moved up the stairs to the upper level behind the concussive blasts of flash grenades and directed gunfire, and the ICER counterterrorists continued to retreat, both sides shot out lights to conceal their position and their intended movements. As a result, most of the available light in the smoke-filled stairwell and upper-level hallways came from red emergency lights pulsing in a synchronous rhythm with the echoing alarm.

And thanks to the frenzied antics of Günter Aben and Carine Mueller, who delayed the raid team's advance with bursts of 9mm submachine gun fire, the bullet-pocked stairs and hallways were now slippery with blood and expended brass casings.

Of the ten men who had begun the raid from the deceptive landing of the white-painted helicopter, two Louisiana officers were dead and four others—Brickard, Lightstone, Paxton, and the Louisiana sergeant—had been wounded.

On the ICER team side, Carine Mueller was now bleeding from the nose—the result of being too close to the stairwell door when a flash grenade went off—and limping from a ricocheting chunk of buckshot in her upper thigh. Günter Aben had sustained at least four or five minor wounds, which hadn't slowed him down at all. He continued to dive and twist and roll from one barricade to another, sending three- and four-round bursts of 9mm ball ammo at anything that moved in the reddish-streaked darkness.

Farther back in the forestlike Hogan's Alley, Gerd Maas worked with cool, calm, and deliberate movements to set the stage for his latest, and possibly his most exhilarating, brush with death. He ignored the curses and screams of Alex Chareaux as Kimiko Osan guarded her assault group leader's back with careful sweeps of her laser-aimed Colt Commando submachine gun.

When Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald and Special Agent Mike Takahara burst into the lower-level command-and-control room, they first spotted the bloody, lifeless body of Dr. Morito Asai, then looked out through the broken glass and discovered Lisa Abercombie, equally dead.

Both men looked up when the curly-haired man in the distinctive blue FBI raid jacket stepped into the room. MacDonald tried to bring his M-16 up in time, but the .44 round caught him high in the chest and slammed him backward into one of the steel pillars just as the second .44 slug mushroomed into Mike Takahara's solar plexus and sent the shocked technical agent stumbling backward through the broken glass wall and atop the sprawled body of Lisa Abercombie.

Then, humming contentedly to himself, Paul Saltmann checked his watch, glanced at the flashing red numerals on the control board that had changed from forty-five to thirty-six, and walked through the destruction he'd caused toward the lower-level conference room and stairwell.

As he did so, Saltmann was unaware that wheelchair- bound Roy Parker, blocked from escape by the six-inch- thick emergency doors, was rapidly working himself toward the command-and-control center from the opposite direction.

It was Lightstone who picked up on the pattern first, noting that as the returning ICER members worked their way back into the first of the Hogan's Alleys, designed to look like two floors and the open plaza of an indoor shopping center, Carine Mueller had started to conserve her energy by waiting for the explosion of the flash grenade and then running immediately to the position vacated by Günter Aben, invariably using the cover of her previous position to protect herself from the raid team's directed gunfire.