Griff nodded. “Agreed.”
Cade powered on the monitor. Forcing the camera lens under the door, he said, “Let’s see if anyone’s stirring.”
The monitor remained mostly dark as Cade panned the micro camera lens right to left. On the far end of the sweep, bathed in flickering tones of yellow and orange and red, was a metal rollup door large enough to drive a train engine through.
Commenting on the image he was seeing on the screen, Griff said, “Looks like our grunts are dining by candlelight. How romantic.”
Reeling the lens back in, Cade stood up and stuffed the device into a pocket. From the other pocket, he retrieved his trusty SouthOrd lock pick gun.
In seconds, the lock was thwarted and Cade and Griff were standing in the turbine room. From somewhere off to their right came the tinny twang of what Cade guessed to be Chinese pop music.
On their left was the rollup door they’d seen on the LCD screen. Dead ahead was the brown-bag-lunch area. The rectangular room was thirty feet across and branched off to the right. Blueprints suggested about forty feet separated the open end from the room’s rear wall.
More than a dozen folding cafeteria tables crowded the room. Behind the tables, pushed up against a wall, was a row of darkened vending machines. Next came a garbage can and pair of receptacles for recyclables. On the floor beside the recycling station was a box labeled LOST AND FOUND, overflowing with kid-sized coats and sweatshirts.
Save for the overpowering stench of fish cooking, the snippet of the room visible to Cade was exactly how he remembered it.
As the music slowly faded out, Cade detected the crinkling of plastic and a low murmur of voices speaking in Mandarin.
After getting Griff’s attention, Cade tapped his headset. Then, with one gloved hand pantomiming a mouth opening and closing, he made a hand gesture that meant around the corner.
Griff mouthed, “I hear it,” then used hand signals to indicate he would go wide and take the left half of the room.
Nodding, Cade mouthed, “I’m taking one alive.”
MP7 tucked tight to his shoulder, Griff said, “Copy that.”
Letting Griff get a two-stride head start, Cade moved swiftly and quietly toward the right-hand-side of the wide-open entry. Reaching the wall, with Griff in his left peripheral and just beginning to make his turn to the right, Cade flowed around the corner, MP7 aimed at the center of the long room, muzzle commencing a methodical left-to-right sweep.
Five Chicom soldiers were indeed enjoying a late dinner. Four were seated face-to-face at one of the tables, the rear wall to the room just a few feet behind them. One was smoking what looked to be a hand-rolled cigarette. The others held spoons and were eating out of plastic bowls.
A green Coleman camp stove was set up on a nearby table. Tendrils of steam lifted from a large soup pot sitting on the stove.
On the table beside the stove was a tray bristling with a half-dozen candles. The flickering, sallow light lent an eerie horror-flick feel to the entire scene.
The unlucky soldier in the room, a bullpup-style rifle slung over one shoulder, was up and making his way toward the garbage can. He was Griff’s immediate concern.
The other four were Cade’s problem.
Chapter 75
As time slowed to a crawl, Cade heard the Chinese pop music resume playing. In the next beat, a halo of red was blooming about the standing soldier’s head. Shot twice in the face by Griff, the soldier collapsed to the floor.
The four soldiers in Cade’s cone were caught completely unaware. Downrange from their dead comrade, they were all hit in the face by aerated detritus.
Seated, Cade’s targets were at a supreme disadvantage—and they knew it.
In Mandarin, Cade said, “Surrender! Hands up!”
Three sets of hands dropped what they’d been holding and shot for the sky.
The soldier who’d been smoking—the one whose free hand made a slow creep toward the sidearm on his hip—earned himself one round to the chest and one to the face. A modified Mozambique courtesy of Captain Cade Grayson.
The hero wannabe was a bloody mess when he slumped sideways and slithered under the table.
Finger pressed vertical to his lips, Cade stared death at the three remaining soldiers.
Far away, the twangy pop music played on. More importantly, there were no shouts of alarm or call to arms echoing throughout the museum.
It was all the proof Cade needed that the subsonic rounds fired from the suppressed MP7s had gone undetected.
Before the trio of soldiers could recover from the initial shock of being splashed with blood and brain tissue, Cade had rushed forward and disarmed them.
Taking a wad of napkins from a holder, Griff gagged the three soldiers. While he trussed them with nylon flex cuffs, Cade was dumping the mags from their weapons and clearing the chambers of live rounds.
As Griff stashed the rifles and pistols behind the vending machines, Cade dumped the ammo and mags into the garbage can.
Choosing one of the soldiers—a teen, judging by the wisps of facial hair trying to pass themselves off as a beard—Cade yanked him to his feet. Speaking in halting Mandarin, Cade asked the kid who was upstairs and what they were doing.
Replying in Mandarin, the kid said, “General Sun Jinlong and Major Li Fan … and a whore or two.”
“Is there a third man?” Cade asked. “An American prisoner?”
The kid’s jaw went rigid and his eyes narrowed. It looked as if he was weighing his response very carefully.
Without saying a word, Cade dropped a knee on the back of one of the other soldiers, drew his Gerber, and proceed to saw through the man’s pinky finger.
The kid watched the gagged man grimace and squirm and thrash about. A few seconds was all the kid could handle before, in rapid-fire Mandarin (almost too fast for Cade to fully grasp) the kid spilled his guts.
Cade understood enough to think the kid knew of what he spoke. Satisfied, Cade rose and made a show of tossing the severed finger into the soup pot. Flipping the NVGs away from his face, he looked the kid in the eye, saying, “Are you being truthful?”
The kid nodded emphatically.
Detecting none of the usual micro expressions linked with deception, Cade gagged the kid and made him sit on the floor with his comrades.
After extinguishing the candles, Griff looked to Cade. “You know,” he said in a low voice, “we can’t leave them here.”
In English, Cade said, “We can’t take them with us.”
Matter-of-factly, Griff said, “Sucks to be them.”
Cade swiveled the NVGs back in place. Switching to Mandarin, he said, “Look at the wall.” As soon as the three Chicom soldiers complied with the order, Cade stepped around the end of the table, shouldered his MP7, and shot all three men dead.
If Griff was surprised at all, he didn’t let on. He simply went about swapping mags and charging his weapon.
All business, while changing his mags out, Cade said, “Science Playground. We’ll take the main stairs to the second level.”
They retraced their steps to the turbine hall. Seeing nothing moving in the hall, they padded past the steam turbine, wove a serpentine pattern through several standalone science exhibits, then set a course for the southeast corner of the building, the music growing louder the closer they got.
Speaking quietly on the move, Cade tried Cross again.
At once Cross responded. “Anvil Actual?” A pause. Then finally, “Overwatch One here. Good solid copy! Damn, Anvil Actual … we thought we lost you.”
Five hundred yards southeast of OMSI’s fenced in parking lot, Cross was prone in the southbound lane of the viaduct. Thanks to the high-powered Leupold scope atop the MSR, he had a commanding view of OMSI’s east-facing elevation, the entire parking lot, the centrally located holding pen, a mostly empty motor pool, the pair of single-wide trailers that Feather insisted were home to fifteen to thirty Chicom soldiers, and the tops of the mobile missile launch
er and its command apparatus.
Sounding a lot like the little girl from Poltergeist, Griff said, “We’re back.”
Ignoring Griff’s quip, Cade said, “Structural anomaly knocked us off the air. Give me a SITREP.”
Cross said, “I have eyes on the pen. The prisoners are agitated about something. They’re pacing back and forth. Constantly checking the main gate. After the general picked his girl for the night, he made some kind of speech to the rest of them. It’s got to be something he said.”
Cade said, “Only one … girl?”
“She may be a teen,” Cross replied.
“Overwatch Two?”
“I have eyes on Nat,” Cross said. “He’s good to go.”
To show he was listening in, Nat broke squelch one time.
Cade said, “Jedi Flight?”
Cross said, “On schedule.”
Cade shot a glance at his watch. Still eight minutes out. He asked: “The barracks?”
“Just after I got set up here, two tangos used the porta-john. It’s been quiet since.”
“Copy that,” Cade said. “Moving on the HVTs. Anvil out.”
Truth was, before they ranged any deeper into the museum, there was the officer cadre to take care of. Feather’s source had them billeting in the Kendall Planetarium, a domed building on the northeast end of the building.
Emerging from the Turbine Hall, they found themselves in a glass-enclosed atrium. It was maybe fifty or sixty feet from the marble floor to the enormous glass pyramid rising up over the rest of the roof.
Situated directly underneath the pyramid roof was a horseshoe-shaped desk. Behind the desk was a sign displaying the prices for admission and what movies had been showing in the theater on that Saturday in July.
Diagonal from the desk were two banks of doors, eight total. Four served a walkway coming in from the east parking lot. The other four faced the north parking lot. All of the doors were shored up inside and out with half-inch-thick sheets of plywood.
Whether the OMSI staff did this early on, or the current squatters did the shoring, Cade hadn’t a clue.
Three separate wings branched off the main lobby. Straight ahead, a fifteen-foot-wide passage spilled out at the box office and snack bar serving the Omnimax-domed theater. To the right, partially shielded by the front desk, was a run of stairs going up to the second floor, where the music was currently coming from. The steps numbered about fifty and were separated by three different landings. To the right of the stairs—an ADA requirement, Cade guessed—was a stalled-out escalator.
Left of Cade and Griff was another carpeted hall. At the mouth of the hall was Guest Services—a small cubby fronted by a velvet rope maze.
Beyond Guest Services, at the end of a narrow, fifty-foot-long hall, was the planetarium lobby.
Awash in dim light thrown from a gas-burning lantern was a single guard. He sat on a folding chair, head buried in some kind of electronic device.
Cade quietly heel-and-toed it off the marble floor. With the MP7 tucked in tight to his shoulder and low-wear carpet helping to silence his footfalls, Cade slipped past the Guest Services desk. Hugging the left-side wall, with Griff close on his back and periodically checking their six, Cade picked up his pace.
With the lantern’s soft hiss covering any sound of their advance the carpet wasn’t already absorbing, Cade angled away from the wall. Keeping the EOTech’s red holographic pip pegged squarely on the guard’s temple, he cleared his throat. Then, speaking in Mandarin, he whispered, “Quiet … or you die.”
The guard’s body went rigid as he looked up from the device in his hands.
Cade had cut the angle wide and was now aiming the MP7 at the center of the man’s face. He sure was glad he wasn’t on the other end of this encounter. Facing two black-clad figures with suppressed weapons and tubes sprouting from their faces was bad enough. Doing so while brandishing a Gameboy instead of a weapon had to be demoralizing as hell.
Not my monkey, not my circus, thought Cade. Indicating the planetarium with a nod of his head, he asked, “How many officers?”
The soldier’s brow crinkled. Then, eyes narrowing and lips beginning to part, he went to stand.
Cade pressed the trigger twice.
No Mozambique this time. He’d opted for two to the face. The first subsonic round smacked the guard in the mouth, shredding lips and shattering most of his front teeth on the way in. Though the suppressor helped keep muzzle climb to a minimum, Cade had pulled his aim up a degree or two for the follow-on shot.
Since the guard’s head was already hinged back from the initial bullet strike, the second round entered his nose at an upward angle.
Theoretically, lacking the punch of the M4’s 5.56 round, both chunks of lead fired from the MP7 had entered the man’s cranium, banged around scrambling brain matter, and remained there.
The evidence supported this. Save for the pair of gory, gaping entry wounds that used to be natural orifices, the rest of the skull remained intact.
Though the guard’s shorts were probably soiled, the wall behind his slumped head was clean.
Cade looked around quickly. The doors and glass in the planetarium hall had received the same plywood treatment and were no doubt locked down tight. At the end of the hall, past the planetarium’s exit doors, was a coat check area.
With Griff’s help, Cade hauled the corpse the twenty feet to the coat check cubby and stuffed it inside.
Back at the planetarium entry, Cade tried the door.
Unlocked.
Which is what he’d expected, considering the guard placement.
Cade took out the snake cam, powered it on, and stuffed it under the door. On the LCD screen, he could only make out the circular room’s back wall, a few rows of backward-canted chairs, and faint light emanating from a couple of different unseen sources.
After a brief huddle, acting on Griff’s suggestion, they tackled the planetarium entry just as they had the brown-bag area.
Chapter 76
Stealth. Speed. Surprise. Violence of action. All friends of the assaulter.
With the generator humming outside likely used solely to power the HQ-9, lights out was dictated by Mother Nature. And Mother Nature had a way of resetting a man’s internal clock fairly quickly.
Acting on the assumption that most of the officers would already be asleep, or well on their way, the Pale Riders walked through the planetarium doors as if they owned the place.
In the lead this time, Griff swept to the left, aiming his MP7 down each row of theater seats he passed by.
One Chinese officer sat bolt upright from a cot arranged in the gap between aisles. Griff pumped two rounds into his head from five feet away. Moving on, he killed two more men who appeared to be playing possum on cots of their own.
As the soft coughs from Griff’s weapon drifted across the planetarium, Cade was having a hard time finding tangos to kill. One of the light sources he had spotted on the snake cam screen was being held by a startled officer. The man was in pajamas and on his stomach atop a sleeping bag. He had been thumbing eagerly through a worn Playboy when Cade stepped on his neck and shot him behind the ear.
The second light source was a Petzl headlamp dangling from the muzzle of a rifle propped against an empty cot. On the cot was an open book: John Muir’s travelogue The American Wilderness.
Cade grabbed the pillow and touched it to his cheek. Still warm.
Three more suppressed gunshots carried across the oval room. In his headset, Cade heard Griff declare his sector, “Clear.”
Replying, Cade said, “We have a squirter. I’ll try and flush him to you.”
Walking in a combat crouch, Cade made his way to the row of high-backed seats running along the planetarium’s outer wall. From there he struck off counterclockwise in Griff’s direction.
“Got him,” said Griff.
About the time Cade heard Griff in his ear, he, too, saw the squirter’s head and a hand clutching a pistol crest a chair b
ack at his ten o’clock. “He’s armed and coming your way.”
Griff said, “Roger that.”
Seeing the lick of flame lance from the other operator’s weapon, Cade said, “Clear?”
“Affirmative. Tango down,” confirmed Griff.
Cade acknowledged his side was clear, then beat feet toward the exit, first and foremost on his mind: how little time they had left to secure the HVTs and destroy the HQ-9.
With Griff taking point, they exited the planetarium hall the way they’d come in.
Leaving the Membership Services desk behind, they hustled through the lobby and made their way to the bottom of the stairs, where they halted for a look and listen.
Down on one knee in front of the unmoving escalator, Cade trained his weapon at the open space above them and reconciled the floorplan in his head with what was before him.
Keeping his weapon aimed at the top of the stairs, the most likely place for one of the enemy to suddenly show his face, Griff said, “Up, left, then straight ahead?”
Cade said, “Affirmative. Cover me,” and started up the dead escalator.
While much steeper than the stairs to its left, the viewing angle from the escalator was far superior.
Engaging the enemy from low ground always put one at a disadvantage. Doing so on a ninety-degree plane would likely get one or both of them killed.
For the fourth time since they’d first heard the music, it came to an end. The silence enveloping the place was palpable. Thankfully, in keeping with the previous pauses, this one lasted only a few seconds.
As soon as the music continued on its endless loop, Cade was on the move up the escalator, MP7 tucked in tight, eyes on a constant sweep. As he rotated his upper body left to keep the high ground in his sights, Griff covered the top of the escalator for him.
Nearing the escalator’s apex, his head close to breaking the plane between floors, Cade swung his weapon forward and kept its business end trained down the narrow stainless-steel chute where an enemy was most likely to appear.
Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse (Book 14): Home Page 40
