"We need to peel the blankets back from over those f.u.c.kers' heads, give our guys downstairs a better fix on where they're shooting from," he said above the roar of the blades.

Graham gave him a look. "If we go any lower, it'll be hard to avoid the ground fire."

Winter made a face that said he knew.

Graham shrugged.

"Okay," he said. Then: "Here's how I want it done."

How Graham wanted it done was for his chopper and one of the others at the scene to pull in tight over the invaders and provide closeups of their positions, while the third aircraft continued making pa.s.ses from a greater height, beaming down wide-angle images. The picture-in-picture options on the QR cars' monitors would enable all three video feeds to be seen simultaneously, giving the chase squads a composite view of the fire zone.

It was, as Graham and Winter had acknowledged, a risky plan. Submachine guns burst up at the two Skyhawks the instant they dropped in alt.i.tude. Steeling himself, Graham slipped between two huge earthmoving vehicles where some of the invaders had taken cover. Bullets sprayed his fuselage as he swept over them, rattling against it like gravel.

Graham steadied the bird and hovered. To his right, he saw the second descending Skyhawk come under heavy fire. Never a religious man, he was surprised to find himself muttering a silent prayer on behalf of its crew.

His fingers moist around the sticks, Graham hung over the attackers for several more seconds, his camera transmitting its information to the mobile receivers. Then he throttled into high gear and leapfrogged off toward another group of invaders, hoping he'd given the ground units what they needed.

The guard was sprawled on his stomach, his face turned sideways so one cheek was in the dirt. His name tag read BRYCE. He had been stabbed from behind, the knife driven in below the shoulder blades and then upward and across into the soft organs. There were tiny bubbles of blood and saliva in the comer of his mouth, and they glistened in the revealing output of Thibodeau's flashlight.

Thibodeau knelt beside him and touched the pulse points on his wrist and neck, but felt nothing. Dead. Like the two other guards he had discovered around the corner of the building. In their case a gun, or guns, had been used. Probably, Thibodeau thought, the shots had attracted Bryce's attention. His position suggested he had been rounding the side of the building to investigate when his killer came up and sank the knife into his back.

Thibodeau turned his flash onto the warehouse's loading dock, and was not surprised to find its door half raised. Countless dollars had been spent on providing security for the installation--the 'hogs alone cost hundreds of thousands--but their placement had been largely intended to detect outside intruders, and in any event, no system was without gaps. While this section of the warehouse complex held important spare parts for the ISS's laboratory racks, it was not among the handful of restricted storage or R&D areas. The level of security clearance needed to gain access was minimal. An employee swipe card taken off one of the dead guards would have been all it took.

Rising from the body, Thibodeau stepped over to the partially open door. He would need to call for a.s.sistance, but it would take at least five minutes for the nearest men to arrive, possibly as long as ten. If he waited, what sort of damage might the intruders do in the meantime?

Hesitant, a sick taste in his mouth, Thibodeau glanced again at the corpse on the ground. Bryce. He had a smooth, clean-shaven face and hair the color of wheat, and was maybe twenty-five years old. Barely more than a kid. He'd been new on the job and Thibodeau hadn't known him too well. Never would now.

Thibodeau stood there outside the warehouse entrance and looked at him. The foam of oxygenated blood on his lips was the kind that came brewing up from the lungs with a deep stab wound. His scrubbed features were still contorted with the agony of his final moments. The killer had been savage and pitiless.

Frowning unconsciously, Thibodeau shined his flashlight through the partially open door, pushed it further up, and stepped into the darkened s.p.a.ce beyond.

"We've got ten, twelve of them behind that big half-track crane on the near left, about half as many using the 'dozers for cover, a couple more--"

Momentarily releasing the "talk" b.u.t.ton of his radio, Carlysle held his breath as a stream of ammunition babbled noisily in his direction, striking the outer flank of his car. Thus far his plan was working, the chase squads' aerial support providing a visual lock on their opponents' positions. Those chopper pilots, opening themselves up to direct fire, putting their lives in jeopardy... if he hadn't been busy trying to keep his own skin from acquiring any unwanted holes, he'd have been singing their praises to the sun, moon, and stars. But maybe there would be a chance to express his grat.i.tude later.

He lifted the radio back up to his mouth, taking advantage of a lull in the fire to get his orders out.

"--a couple more scattered behind that mound of dug-up soil over to the left. The rest are still cl.u.s.tered between the jeeps," he shouted. "My squad's the shortest distance from that crane, and I think we can swing around back of it pretty quick. I'm going to need Squads Two and Three to go up on the bulldozers. Stick to the right of the road..."

Less than thirty seconds later, his instructions completed, Carlysle signed off and led his team from the protection of their chase car, running hard toward his self-a.s.signed target.

Thibodeau hastened through the dimness of the corridor, rifle across his chest, eyes moving alertly from side to side. His old jungle recon instincts had kicked in like voltage, heightening every sense.

Seconds ago he had called for backup, sending the message out wide so it would be squawked by his ground patrols as well as Cody's team in the monitoring station. Then he'd moved on ahead without waiting for a reply. It might be somebody would be available to help, it might be they wouldn't, but there was no way he could wait around to find out.

He'd made his need clear; the rest was out of his hands.

He turned a bend in the corridor, another, a third, and then stopped abruptly where it forked off in opposite directions. There was still no sign of the men he was trailing. But the path he'd followed had been the only one running from the loading dock. Up until this point. The hallway on the right would take him onto the main floor of the storage bay, the one on his left to a freight elevator that, as he recalled, rose to a catwalk that spanned the bay about halfway up toward its ceiling.

Which would the invaders have taken? A little while back he'd have figured it was fifty-fifty they'd have gone either way. But the evidence was that they had not stumbled upon this place by chance, that they'd known in advance how to gain access and had a specific goal in mind. And if they were familiar with the building's layout, it stood to reason they would head straight for the storage bay, where ISS elements were actually kept and maintained.

Okay, then, he thought. Odds were they had gone down the right-hand corridor. But did that mean he ought to do the same? He was one against several... exactly how many he didn't know. It would be suicidal to plunge headlong into the thick of things. The principles of engagement ought to be the same here as in any battle. While they had numbers in their favor, the edge would go to whoever held the high ground.

Thibodeau stood there another second or two, feeling constricted in the narrow sterility of the corridor. Then he hefted his weapon, his mind made up.

Turning left, he rushed toward the elevator.

Carlysle had approached the mobile crane from its left side and gotten within about three yards of it, the rest of the squad close at his heels, when he thrust his hand out and signaled them to stop behind a pile of bulldozed earth and pebbles. He wanted to take one last look at the invaders before commencing his attack.

The high-intensity lights from the choppers showed a half-dozen of them spread out behind the crawler's ringer, a sort of metal ap.r.o.n used to balance its weight when the boom was telescoped upward. This huge configuration was like a circular wall that gave the invaders excellent cover--but the flip side was that it also impeded their field of view and hampered their ability to follow the chase squad's movements. Even the electronic imaging devices on their weapons were of little use unless the guns were pointed directly over or around the ringer's edge. The instant one of them lowered his weapon he was blind, whereas the chase squads had their helicopters in continuous radio contact, reporting on the raiding party's positions, tracking them minute by minute.

Carlysle had made the most of the opposition's handicap, leading his team across exposed stretches of ground in short, rapid sprints. But their job was to take the invaders, and to accomplish that they would have to break from hiding and open themselves up to fire. There was no way to avoid it.

Now he waved his hand briskly in the air to get his men moving again. They raised their weapons and b.u.t.tonhooked around to where the invaders were huddled behind the ringer.

By the time the invaders realized they were under attack Carlysle's men were almost on top of them, dashing up from behind, their VVRS rifles chattering in their hands. Two of the invaders went down instantly, surprised expressions on their faces. Then the remaining four returned fire with their own guns. Carlysle saw Newell fall to his right, his leg covered in blood. Pivoting toward the shooter, he squeezed a burst from his weapon that knocked him backward off his feet. Another invader swung his rifle up at Carlysle in retaliation, but was. .h.i.t by one of Carlysle's men before he could trigger a shot. Moaning and clutching his b.l.o.o.d.y middle, he rolled onto his side and drew himself into a tight ball.

The remaining two tried making a run for it. Carlysle swung his weapon in their direction and tilted its muzzle toward the ground and fired a short burst at their heels.

"Hold it!" he shouted in Spanish. That was a tongue they were certain to understand regardless of where on the continent they were from, the lingua franca lingua franca all regional Sword ops were instructed to use when addressing an unidentified hostile. "Both of you, drop your guns and get down on your bellies!" all regional Sword ops were instructed to use when addressing an unidentified hostile. "Both of you, drop your guns and get down on your bellies!"

They stopped running but stayed on their feet, holding onto the rifles.

Carlysle fired into the ground behind them again, spraying up dirt.

"On your bellies, you sons of b.i.t.c.hes!" he said. "Now!"

This time they listened and went down, hands behind their helmets. A moment later Carlysle and his men kicked their guns aside, twisted their arms behind their backs, and got them flex-cuffed.

Carlysle ran over to Newell and crouched to check out his leg wound.

"Lay still," he said. "You'll be okay."

Newell looked up at him, managed a nod.

Carlysle took a breath.

It felt as if it was the first one he'd had in a while.

The payload storage bay was an enormous s.p.a.ce enclosing three elevated work platforms of sizable dimensions, as well as an interconnected a.s.sembly of catwalks, bridge cranes, and other types of metal rigging designed to ease the movement and transfer of equipment between these platforms. Rows of large office windows looked down upon the vaulting room on two sides. A beehive of corridors, elevator shafts, tunnels, and stairwells not only linked it to the rest of the warehouse and manufacturing complex, but also to different buildings within the ISS compound.

After eliminating the guards outside the warehouse--stealing up on them had been simplicity itself--Yellow Team had entered through its loading dock, raced through several winding pa.s.sageways, and finally pushed through a set of double doors that gave into the storage bay, where the team's designated leader, Heitor, planned to drop their satchel charges. Each of the two black canvas bags contained fifteen pounds of TNT, enough high explosive to bring down the steel beam supports underneath the work platforms, the s.p.a.ce station hardware on top of them, and quite possibly the walls of the room around them.

It was much more than the saboteurs had thought they would be able to accomplish. Surely not even Kuhl had expected them to get this far into the compound, Heitor mused.

Now he hastened to one of the platforms, slipped a satchel charge off his shoulder, and placed it at the foot of a tall support post. Both timer pencils he was using had been preset to a ten-minute delay, an acceptable opening in which to get out before the blast. Silent and vigilant, their weapons held ready across their bodies, his teammates stood watch behind him in the central aisle. The vast room around them was dark except for the few widely s.p.a.ced fluorescents normally left on after the close of daily operations.

Crouching at the foot of the support, Heitor removed the timer pin to initiate the detonation sequence. Then he quickly went to the next platform and dropped his other charge.

It was just as he pulled the second pin that Thibodeau stepped from an elevator onto one of the flying catwalks and, looking out over the expansive floor of the storage bay, was shocked to discover what was happening below.

"Thibodeau's backup is on the way," Delure said. "I pulled four men from the office complex, another six off other details."

"How long before they reach him?" Cody asked from his station.

"Could be as long as ten minutes for some of them."

"Not good enough," Cody said. He produced a harsh sigh and turned to Jezoirski. "What about Felix? How fast can we bring him to Thibodeau?"

"Give me a sec to call up a floor plan of the building." Jezoirski tapped his keyboard, scanned the screen in front of him. " 'Hog's in the Level 5 propulsion lab--"

"How fast?" fast?"

Jezoirski studied the schematic, then lifted his face. "There's a connecting walkway between the research and warehouse complexes. We can move him straight along this corridor right here to the elevator, then down three levels to the walkway," he said, plotting a course across the screen with his finger. "From there it might need a minute, maybe a minute and a half to reach the warehouse, another couple to get down to the payload storage bay."

"That's at least six minutes."

Jezoirski nodded. "Best we can do."

"Suppose we'll have to live with it then," Cody said. Sweat glistened in the furrow above his lip. "All right, let's hurry up and get the 'hog rolling."

The earthmovers were parked near a ditch they had scooped out of the ground, and had offered solid cover to the invaders until the helicopters marked their positions. As they came under intense fire from a chase squad now, the group of invaders scurried down into the ditch, where they pressed up against its sides and began shooting over its stony rim.

The Skyhawks stuck to them like the predatory birds that were their namesakes, one nailing the tracked vehicles with its SX-5 searchlight, the other shining its light directly into the trench.

"Nest's ready to be cleaned out," the chopper pilot above the ditch radioed the ground team.

"Roger, we're on it," its leader replied.

He turned the barrel vents of his rifle to their closed setting and ordered his squad to move.

The chopper pilot stayed on the horn to guide their advance, and continue reporting on the position of the invaders. As he hovered over the bowl-shaped ditch, the incandescent brilliance and swirling gun smoke inside it gave the eerie illusion that he was peering down into a lava pit filled with almost a dozen trapped human beings.

But the situation below was such that the distance between illusion and reality rapidly closed. The chase squad attacked in a flanking rush, looping around the dozers and front-end loaders to hose the ditch with their guns. Although return fire was heavy, they had the cold confidence of men who had stolen the offensive and gained a maneuverability their opposition had lost. Surrounded, their FAMAS weapons' targeting systems overloaded by the unsparing glare of the searchlights, the invaders had in fact run themselves into a trap.

One of them tumbled down the side of the trench, soil and pebbles spitting up around him. A second rose to trigger an explosive round, but was slammed off his feet by a blaze of fire.

A third sprang up and looked briefly as if he might attempt a suicidal charge over the rim ... but then he backed off, tossed his weapon aside, and dropped facedown onto the bottom of the ditch in surrender, his hands stretched above his head.

The chopper pilot watched another invader follow suit and disarm, then another, then the rest seemingly all at once. A moment later the chase squad's leader gave the hand signal to suspend fire, followed by a thumbs-up to the pilot.

He smiled and returned the gesture. His searchlight would make it impossible for those on the ground to see it, but what the h.e.l.l.

Disengaging his auto-hover control, he skipped off to another spot where he might be needed, the other chopper close behind.

Thibodeau would never know what caught the attention of the invader standing lookout on the warehouse floor--the slight movement of his fingers when he raised the gas pressure in his rifle barrel, the click of the hand guard as it locked into its new setting, or maybe something else completely.

In the end the only thing that mattered was the invader's bullet, and the damage it did to him.

For Thibodeau, it all happened in what his combat buddies used to call slow time. slow time. There was the surprising realization that he'd been spotted as the invader's weapon angled up in his direction. There was a spark of alarm inside him, cold and bright, like winter sunlight glinting off ice. Then he felt his reflexes kick in, felt himself reacting, and was sure his reaction was quick enough... should have been quick enough anyway. But as he ducked down below the rail the very air seemed to gain thickness and density, to There was the surprising realization that he'd been spotted as the invader's weapon angled up in his direction. There was a spark of alarm inside him, cold and bright, like winter sunlight glinting off ice. Then he felt his reflexes kick in, felt himself reacting, and was sure his reaction was quick enough... should have been quick enough anyway. But as he ducked down below the rail the very air seemed to gain thickness and density, to resist resist him. It was as if he was sinking through jelly. him. It was as if he was sinking through jelly.

And then there was a loud crack from below, and something walloped him on the right side, and he felt heat spread through his stomach and went crumpling onto the floor of the catwalk as time resumed its normal speed like a train jolting from the station.

Thibodeau tried to get up, but his body was all deadweight, somehow apart from him. He lay half on his belly, looked down at himself, and saw that his vest hadn't been penetrated, that the hit was nothing but a fluke, the trajectory of the bullet having carried it up into the s.p.a.ce between the bottom of the vest and his stomach, some G.o.dd.a.m.ned nasty bit of gris-gris. And now here he was, blood draining out of him to the floor's treaded runner, filling the s.p.a.ces between the treads, flowing down along them in thin scarlet streams--when had he ever stepped on Satan's tail to earn this one?

He heard the crash of footfalls, managed to lift his cheek off the floor so he could see more than the blood and the railing in front of him.

The man who'd shot him was clambering up the metal risers to the catwalk, a second invader right behind him. The two of them coming to finish him off.