The Fate Of Nations: F.I.R.E. Team Alpha: Book One (35 page)

              Burgett’s missile struck the first automated gun turrets, causing several rounds of its twenty millimeter ammunition to explode in its magazine. The turret itself was blown away from the wall leaving a charred, jagged hole in the wall where it had been mounted.

              DeFontain’s missile struck the second turret. The shaped explosive warhead tore through the turret’s armor and burned into the corridor’s wall leaving bits of concrete and conduit falling in fragments to the floor. The corridor was now filled with thick, acrid smoke.

              “Brains, for Prowler,” Sains voice over the communications net. “I have a read on the other teams, they are entering the barracks now.”

              “Understood, Brains,” Carter replied.

              “Prowler, this is Pirate,” the voice of Mason Price said over the radio, identifying himself with his call sign. “I’m coming down with all assault elements.”

              “Confirmed,” Carter answered. “Check you fire,” Carter told his team. “The other teams are coming down.” Moments later Teams Bravo, Echo, and Foxtrot emerged from the stairwell.

              “Alright people,” Carter said. “We assault as planned. Let’s go!” Each team formed into a loose formation and charged down the tunnel.

                                         
Chapter 11

              The guard post at the end of the tunnel was quickly; overwhelmed by the assembled FIRE teams before they could raise an alarm. Announcements being broadcast over the Central Command’s public address system told Carter that the facility’s garrison was still responding to the attack on the barracks compound as though it was an attempt to assassinate Mancuso. Carter hoped it would be at least several minutes before the enemy realized that the real target was the Central Command itself.

              “Let’s get moving,“ Carter said. “Good luck and good hunting people.”

              The teams dispersed to assault their respective targets. Williams led McNamara and Nagura toward the security control room, while Carter, Burgett and DeFontain toward the facility’s main control room. The other three teams made their way upward toward the ground floor to continue the assault.

              Suddenly finding enemy soldiers inside a building they thought was secure, the guards the Alpha operators encountered died before they could comprehend the danger. Unarmed technicians and maintenance workers fled in terror as the invaders mowed down any opposition with ruthless efficiency. A frantic, desperate voice of a man was giving orders over the public address system; trying to move security forces to deal with a situation that he obviously did not yet fully understand.

              “Brains for all teams; all call signs,” Sains voice said overt the radio’s speaker.

              “Go for Prowler.” Carter said without breaking his pace.

              “Be advised,” Sains said. From their vantage point on the twelfth floor of the officer’s barracks, Sains and Roth could monitor what was transpiring in the area around the Central Command compound. “Renner and his unit have opened up on the compound with their mortars and we have firefights along the target’s entire perimeter.”

             
That’s it Renner,
Carter thought.
Make the bastards think their under attack by a division.

              “Understood,” Carter said, firing a one handed shot from his handgun the struck an enemy soldier in his chin and effectively decapitated him. “Advise on any arriving enemy reinforcements.”

              “Roger that,” Sains replied.

              Enemy troops were crowding into the corridors from every direction. Unsure of how many attackers were in the building or of their exact location; they simply ran toward the sounds of gunshots. Unarmed workers were trampling one another in frantic attempts to remove themselves from the deadly crossfire. Panicked screams melded with the alarm claxtons and gunfire until anyone without hearing protection was deaf or near deaf. The distinctive, acrid odor of gunpowder and explosives was thick in the air.

              Williams, McNamara, and Nagura shoved their way passed a trio of terrified maintenance workers as they fought through a squad of enemy guards; killing them without breaking stride. Opposition stiffened as they neared the security control room. The sleeping quarters and living area for much of the Central Command’s guard force were near security control room and the guards, despite their surprise, were responding to the blaring alarms and rushing to their respective stations and finding themselves confronted by the invading Alpha operators.

              The Alpha element fired on the move, overwhelming the defending guards with their inhuman speed and ruthless violence. In minutes they had killed dozens of enemy troops and stood in front of the ten foot blast doors that led to the security control room.

              While Nagura watched for more enemies, McNamara removed his pack and retrieved a thermos-sized canister of pure, pressurized oxygen. Next he extracted a thirty-six inch, insulation-wrapped hollow metal rod and screwed a threaded end into the oxygen canister. Lastly he removed another nozzle-tipped metal tube of equal length, attached to the end of the first tube, and opened the valve on the canister.

              “Light me!” he said.

              Williams pressed the button a small on small acetylene torch the size of a large cigar and touched it to the nozzle of the device McNamara held. Packed with rods of iron and magnesium that were being bathed in pressurized pure oxygen the nozzle-ended rod belched forth a steam of molten metal that cut cleanly through steel blast door.

              McNamara wielded the thermal lance like a hose; using the fiery stream to cut along the door’s threshold. In seconds the huge door fell into the security room, in shower of fragments and molten sparks. Before in had hit the ground Williams tossed a stun grenade through the freshly made hole. Nagura was in the control room a nano-second after the grenade’s detonation followed quickly by Williams and McNamara.

              Despite the debilitating effects of the grenade, the twelve guards manning the control room desperately sprayed fire toward the recently cut opening. Several rounds from an assault rifle stitched McNamara across his torso; forcing him back several feet and knocking him to his knees and, finally to fall face first to the floor.

              Nagura fired a burst into the chest of the soldier that had shot McNamara; the ultra-powerful rounds from her machine pistol easily piercing the soldier’s body armor and sending micro-explosive bullets to detonate deep within the man’s body. Nagura shot three more guards as they held down their rifle triggers and sprayed desperate fully automatic return fire; unable to effectively aim their weapons through the blinding haze and dizziness produced by the stun grenades.

              Williams engaged the guards to Nagura’s left; singling out an unusually large guard to be killed first. He put a single round into the man’s forehead reducing his head to bits of flesh and fragments of skull. Shooting on the move, Williams dove underneath a hail of bullets fired by another guard. He fired a burst as he fell; his shots found the guard’s chest and abdomen and slammed him backward to fall heavily to the floor. Williams shot the next guard from a prone position, rolled to his right, and killed next with another three shot burst to the chest.

              Having recovered, McNamara rose to his knees and dealt with the remaining enemies. Raking his sub-machine gun fire from left to right, he put two rounds into the chest each of the guards with a single squeeze of the trigger. He then shot each man in the head where they lay.

              “Are you alright?” Williams asked McNamara.

              “Yeah,” the Canadian replied, getting to his feet. “Nothing got through the vest. Stung like hell, though,” he added, moving toward the security consoles that controlled the doors and locks throughout the central command. “Let’s clear the way for Renner and the Boss.”

                                                               [][][]

              As Carter and his group neared the main control room the number of fleeing civilians diminished. Turning the corner into the corridor that led directly to the control room, Carter and his groups were greeted a volley of concentrated gunfire that drove them back around the corridor junction’s wall.

              “Gadget, see if you can get eyes on that threat,” Carter ordered.

              Burgett made adjustments to his rifle’s scope, took a knee, and moved his rifle around the corner. The image recorded by the scope was displayed not only on his own goggle display, but on Carter’s and DeFontain’s as well. Through the scope the Alpha operators could see that the several of the First Earth Guardsmen had collected a number of civilian workers and were using them as human shields. They were lined up in front of the enemy troops who were, in turn, in front of the doors to the control room.

              “Boss, we have to kill the control room technicians,” Defontain said. “But we cannot kill all of those people!”

              “Yeah, Boss,” Burgett agreed. “Those people are probably just cleaning ladies and janitors.”

              “Break out some flash-bangs,” Carter ordered. “We’ll treat this as a hostage rescue with a dynamic entry.” Burgett and Defontain each readied a stun grenade.

              “On three,” Carter ordered.

              Three seconds later Burgett and DeFontain tossed their grenades around the corner toward the cluster of guards and hostages. While Carter and his teammates were protected by their IBOS’ headphones and goggles, the blinding flash and incredibly loud crack of the detonations caused seconds of blindness and deafness for both the hostages and their captors. Their senses overwhelmed by sound and light, the First Earth Guardsmen lost control of their hostages; who were themselves stunned into inaction.

              Carter led Burgett and Defontain around the corner at a run. Each operator engaged the enemy troopers with precise single gunshots. In the following ten second, the three Team Alpha members had shot twelve enemy troops in their chests and heads; their shots missing the hostages by inches. The disorientation from the flash-bang grenades and the feeling of shots passing so near to them panicked the hostages into wild flight or screaming paralysis. Most of the hostages had been splattered with blood from the troopers who had been hit by the high explosive rounds from Team Alpha’s weapons. The walls and floors were plashed with blood and bits of flesh. Two of the fifteen hostages lay dead; killed by the guards in the seconds before they were cut down themselves.

              Carter hauled a hostage to his feet. “All of you get out of here!” he shouted, shoving the man down the corridor. “Go, go, go!” he added.

              Defontain and Burgett also began herding the still dazed survivors away from the control room doors. “Get as far away from here as you can!” Burgett yelled. “The killing’s not done yet!”

              After the hostages had departed, Burgett examined the ten foot by ten foot blast door that protected the main control room. “They must have a manual override for this door. Harvard and the others had all the other doors open for us.”

              “We planned for this,” Carter said. “Get to work. We’ll cover you.” Burgett began applying a line of incendiary charges along the doors frame.

              Carter and DeFontain each set a grenade for proximity detonation and placed it at the corridor junction twenty feet from the control room’s entrance. “Fast would be good, Gadget. I can hear reinforcements coming,” Carter said. “They’ll be on us in seconds!”

              Burgett had placed the last detonator in the line of charges he had attached to the door. “Ready,” he announced. “These charges are more powerful than what I usually use; so give them plenty of space and don’t look directly at them while they’re burning.”

              “Do it,” Carter ordered.

              An intense white light flickered steadily and a shower of sparks poured from the line of incendiaries and traveled ten feet down the hallway. The odor of burnt metal was thick in the air as the steel doors crashed to the floor. Burgett and Carter charged into the control room and took the guards within under fire as DeFontain guarded the hallway from the enemy reinforcements.

              The control room was cavernous. Thousands of optical crystal computer drives stretched to the ceiling eighty feet above and covered every inch of the one hundred ten foot length of the far wall. Computer consoles were present by the hundreds, arranged in rows at the room’s center beneath a supervisor’s podium that was suspended from the ceiling, and dozens of huge view screens lined the walls on either side of the doors. Catwalks lined and staircases led to five tiers of work stations that ringed the room and rose to the ceiling eighty feet above.

              Carter moved to the left as he entered the control room as the guards sprayed rifle-fire toward the threshold. Beginning with the guard furthest to his left, he killed six guards with precise shots from his pistol. His explosive warheads carved out grapefruit-sized cavities at the center of their bodies.

              Rifle fire came from one of the catwalks above. Carter rolled beneath the catwalk and out of the guard’s line of fire. He fired directly upward, his rounds passing through the catwalk and into the feet and legs of three guards. Two fell onto the catwalk. One was silent the other screaming in agony while trying to staunch the blood spurt from a stump that was once his left foot. The third tumbled from the catwalk almost directly in front of Carter. Carter stomped on the man’s head, crushing the skull against the concrete floor and smashing the brain.