There was an explosion directly behind them, and their car was hurled twenty feet further forwards before it landed, regained traction, and accelerated off.
Jack turned in his seat again and gasped. The tank had driven straight through the line of trees, destroying them, and had loosed off another shell, obliterating the small hillock they had just driven over.
‘I think you’re going to have to drive faster,’ Jack said.
Alyssa just nodded and floored the pedal. There was another row of trees on the left and she yanked the wheel that way, breaking out on to a wide path with the trees providing a barrier between them and the tank.
Alyssa and Jack both let out involuntary screams as another explosion rocked the air. The rear passenger window smashed and they both turned, and saw a tree branch jammed across the back seat. The row of trees was now just a jumble of smouldering vegetation.
They had now almost reached the far side of the park. But what would they find on the other side? Probably more police officers and army soldiers, Alyssa thought bitterly, before she cut the thought off. There was no use in thinking like that. They would keep going until they were stopped.
Santana had put local resources of armed riot police and state troopers at every exit to the park. He was receiving real-time surveillance drone footage and had positioned himself at the most likely exit. He now waited – with his own men, three cars, two vans and twelve state troopers – as the taxi drew near.
He wondered if the tank would be able to get another shot off before the cab left the park. If it did, that would be great – Santana would see the cab and its occupants destroyed before his very eyes – and if not, then Santana would just have to do it himself.
‘We’re not going to make it,’ Jack breathed. He could see the exit block ahead, and behind them the tank was tracking its barrel to aim at them again.
‘Just keep watching that tank,’ Alyssa said, ‘and let me worry about the roadblock. Watch the front end, and shout loud when it lifts.’
‘What?’ Jack asked in confusion.
‘Just do it!’ Alyssa yelled, struggling to keep the car straight on the gravel path.
The park exit was just a quarter of a mile away, a ten-foot-wide open gate in the middle of an eight-foot-high steel fence.
‘It’s on the path!’ Jack cried out next to her. He knew that once its position was stabilized, the tank would fire on them again.
Alyssa ignored him.
‘Are you going to ram them?’ Jack asked. ‘There’s no way this little thing can break past all of them. What are you doing?’
‘Shut up, Jack,’ Alyssa snapped. ‘Just tell me when that front end lifts!’
They were so close now, just a hundred yards away.
‘Now!’ Jack yelled.
Instantly, she jerked the wheel to the right, careening off the path on to the trimmed entrance lawns. The tank’s 120mm shell streaked past them and through the open gateway, obliterating the waiting police vehicles. The air around them was filled with flame and heat but Alyssa kept her mind focused and her hands gripped tight to the wheel.
Jack turned from the scene of devastation outside the park exit to look where the cab was headed. He barely had time to close his eyes before the taxi hit the steel fence at sixty miles per hour.
As soon as Santana had seen the taxi swerve right, he had leapt to one side himself; he had seen this happen before.
And then all hell was let loose as the tank’s high-explosive shell hit the lead van head-on, destroying it totally, bits of metal shearing across space into the other vehicles, flames bursting across the open space and igniting the fuel that spilled out from damaged engines until the whole damn area was on fire.
He watched helplessly as state troopers rushed to carry the injured to safety, straining his eyes through the twenty-foot high flames to see what had happened to the taxi.
The impact knocked Alyssa’s breath right out of her, but the robust cab managed to smash through the steel fence with an almighty crash, the speed of the vehicle dropping from sixty to thirty miles per hour as she bumped on to the northern parkway.
The front end of the cab was crushed, a steel railing embedded in the engine, but it was still moving. Alyssa pulled the wheel to the right to straighten the car but it didn’t respond. She tried to turn again, harder, but the cab wouldn’t turn with her. The wheels were locked in place from the impact.
Ahead, the concrete bulk of a skyscraper loomed. She tried to let up on the accelerator, switched her foot to the brake, but it was no good; the yellow cab was still travelling at twenty miles per hour when it hit the building head on.
Santana watched as the taxi hit the one-hundred storey skyscraper. Yes. Then he saw the tank appear at the edge of the park, its turret-mounted gun aimed at the stricken taxi.
He counted the seconds until the gun sounded its ferocious sonic boom once more, almost giving a little hop as it did so. The taxi disintegrated; the roof popped off and the doors exploded outwards while the rest of the chassis collapsed inwards in a fiery, smoking ruin.
Santana let out a sigh of satisfaction.
It was over.
19
SECRETARY OF STATE John Jeffries strode out of another emergency cabinet meeting, keen to get back to his office to check up on the current situation.
The meetings had been coming thick and fast over the past few days. Decisions had to be made about the involvement of the armed forces in city security, disaster prevention and recovery, emergency protocols activated to ensure uninterrupted chain of command, protection of the national infrastructure prioritized; the list was endless. Endless, and endlessly tiresome.
Jeffries was not overly concerned, for he knew the truth – there were not going to be any more disasters. Not in their home territory, at least. Jeffries knew that the cabinet was worrying without need – it was their own country that now controlled the ability to create disaster. They had nothing to fear.
There was the civil unrest, of course. But the military would easily be able to control that problem if local police could not.
The only fly in the ointment now was this pair of characters on the run from Colonel Anderson. Jack Murray, a computer technician at HIRP, and Alyssa Durham, an investigative journalist, which was a much more terrifying prospect.
General Tomkin, through Anderson, had already ordered the targets to be executed on sight, and Jeffries had spent the meeting biting his fingernails in anticipation. He didn’t want to risk communicating with Tomkin or Anderson via his cellphone, and knew he would have to wait until he could use the secure landline back in his office. As the meeting dragged on, he could feel his ulcer starting to burn his stomach.
But now he was out. He walked purposefully down the stately corridors of the Senate building, and two minutes later he passed his secretary in the outer office and pushed through into his inner sanctum without a word.
He sat down at his desk and dialled Tomkins’ secure line. It was picked up after just two rings.
‘John,’ the voice on the other end of the line said. ‘I thought I’d be hearing from you earlier.’
‘I’ve been stuck in a damn meeting all morning,’ Jeffries fumed. ‘Status report?’
‘The news is both good and bad,’ Tomkin said cagily.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that Murray and Durham are still alive, but we have them contained.’
‘Contained how?’
Tomkin gave a brief breakdown of how the pair had escaped, without revealing too much about how one of the army’s tanks had all but destroyed part of the city. ‘It seems they were able to make it out of the cab before the shell hit and entered the foyer of the Landers Building through one of the shattered windows.’
‘And where are they now?’ Jeffries demanded.
There was a pause, almost as if Tomkin was checking real-time surveillance – which Jeffries presumed he was – and then he spoke. ‘They’re on the fifteenth floor, running up
the stairwell.’
‘What assets do we have there?’
‘We have thirty armed police officers in the lifts and on the stairs getting after them right now, and we also have a full SWAT team en route. We have snipers placed in the park and buildings opposite to take them out if they appear in the windows, and we have a special ops team coming in via chopper to land on the roof and enter the building from above. They’re not going to escape,’ Tomkin said confidently.
‘This Durham,’ Jeffries said, ‘this journalist. Can we be sure she can’t get her story out before she’s caught?’
‘We’re monitoring all communications into and out of her offices, and also the private cell of James Rushton, her editor. We’ve also cut all communications links to the Landers Building, and to that entire city block. Even when she’s finally cornered and tries to get the message out, she won’t be able to do anything.’
‘And Rushton?’ Jeffries asked next. ‘What does he know?’
‘We’re unsure,’ Tomkin answered. ‘We assume that she infiltrated the HIRP base with Rushton’s knowledge and consent, and obviously he might be suspicious that he hasn’t heard from her since, but we think it’s better to leave him hanging, see what we can learn from him.’
‘Are you evacuating the Landers Building?’
‘No. At the moment we have the pair confined to the stairwells. We’ve locked the access doors through the building’s security mainframe, so they’re trapped. If we evacuate, we’ll have those same stairwells clogged with about two thousand people, and our targets could well escape in the confusion.’
‘OK. As you say, it’s good and bad. I can live with that. Just don’t let it get any worse.’
Jeffries ended the call and sank back into his leather chair, holding his stomach. He reached for his medication, wondering when the stress would ever end.
20
ALYSSA WAS BREATHING hard now, Jack still behind her as they sprinted up the stairwell.
In her prime, running up the stairs all the way to the top would have been just a good morning’s workout to her. Now, however, she felt as if her heart was about to leap out of her chest, and her legs were on fire, lactic acid building up in her thighs to excruciating levels.
Still, she was doing better than Jack, who really seemed to be struggling. He was naturally fit and athletic, without the excess fat people often accumulated from too much time spent behind a desk, but he obviously didn’t get out and exercise too often.
They were both somewhat the worse for wear from the impact with the building. Twenty miles per hour wasn’t exactly a high-speed crash, but it had been enough to loosen a few fillings. Alyssa had smashed her head against the steering wheel, and it was bleeding profusely. She wondered if she was concussed, as she was starting to feel dizzy. Jack had damaged his legs, jamming them up against the dashboard as the cab hit the wall. The injury to his shins and knees would do nothing to help his chances of escape.
They reached the twenty-fourth floor. ‘How about . . . that one?’ Jack wheezed behind her.
She reached for the handles of the big double doors and pulled, but the result was the same as it had been on every other floor. ‘Locked,’ she called down to him. ‘Let’s keep going.’
She waited for him at the landing, then took his arm to help him onwards. She could tell he wanted to refuse her help, but the pain in his lungs and chest gave him no choice.
The twenty-fourth floor. Only seventy-six left. Not that it seemed likely they would ever get to the top floor; Alyssa could hear the heavy boots and shouts of the men below her – armed, and no doubt ordered to kill them on sight. And she was under no illusions about finding any of the remaining doors above them open; it was obvious that the building’s security system had locked it down tight. The only way they would open now would be when more police officers or soldiers – who were undoubtedly racing ahead of them in the fast elevators – entered the stairwell from above, trapping them finally and fatally.
But it was not in Alyssa’s nature to give up; she would not surrender, not while there was breath left in her. She’d tried to call James Rushton both at the office and on his cellphone, but her own phone was dead. She realized that all communications must have been cut off, and she would be unable to contact anyone. There were probably snipers observing the building, but at least there were few windows in this service stairwell; they crouched low every time they passed one, and Alyssa wasn’t sure how much longer Jack would be able to keep it up.
On the twelfth floor of the Landers Building’s eastern service stairwell, Santana led the troops ever upwards.
Murray and Durham had a head start on them due to the length of time it had taken his people to realize that they weren’t in the vehicle, but the fugitives didn’t have the training he had, he was racing up the stairs two at a time, and they would have been shaken and bruised at the very least from the crash.
According to the latest updates, the SWAT team was still fifteen minutes out, whilst the special ops team that was going to secure the roof was due in ten. Santana hoped he would need neither.
He was leading one section of men up behind the targets, whilst two other sections made their way up in the high-speed elevators. According to the heat sensors that were monitoring the movements of Murray and Durham, they were now on the thirty-second floor. The other two sections were in the elevators on the far side of the building. Having quickly calculated the size of the building, how long it would take for the teams to cross it, how fast the targets were running, and how fast the elevators were travelling, Santana got on to his radio and spoke directly to the section leaders.
‘Exit the elevators on the sixtieth floor,’ he told them, ‘then start sweeping your way down the stairwell. Execute on sight.’
He listened to the dual affirmation, then concentrated on upping his speed. He hoped he would get to them before the others.
Jack paused halfway up one of the flights of concrete stairs, out of breath and panting raggedly. He collapsed in Alyssa’s arms, and she took his weight as he sagged, propping him up against a wall.
‘I’m . . . I’m sorry,’ he panted. ‘I don’t know if I can . . . go on.’ Alyssa studied him. He could go on, she was sure. Was he just giving up?
Then she realized. Jack was giving up for her, he felt he was holding her back. He thought she would have a better chance without him.
‘You can make it,’ she told him. ‘And I don’t want to make it without you.’ She didn’t tell him that she didn’t know what she meant by ‘making it’. Her plan, if it could be called that, was essentially to keep heading upwards, but nothing more than that.
Jack looked completely done in, but then something sparked in his eyes. ‘What if. . .’ He was suddenly focused, his mind switched back on. ‘Let’s get up to the next door,’ he said urgently, pulling forwards.
They came to the next landing, with another set of locked double doors. Alyssa checked the number. The forty-eighth floor. Nearly halfway up.
Jack started to feel around the edge of the door frame.
‘What are you doing?’ Alyssa asked.
‘Trying to find a control panel,’ Jack said. ‘It just occurred to me, the doors must have them, for manual override in case of an emergency.’
His fingers found the panel, which was hard to see in the reflected white paint on the surrounding wall. He pulled with his fingers, but the panel wouldn’t move. He drew back his fist and punched through the wooden cover. He clawed away the broken wood to reveal a computerized control panel underneath. He tried inputting some codes but they were rejected instantly. ‘Damn,’ he breathed. ‘They’ve really got it locked down.’
‘What’s the plan if you manage to get through?’ Alyssa asked.
Jack continued to play with the controls as he spoke. ‘Our only purpose now is to get this information out, right?’
‘Yeah, I guess that’s right,’ Alyssa agreed. The sound of boots on the stairs below was getting louder.
‘Well, we’re going to get out of this death trap and try and access some computer systems. They may have shut everything down, but I might be able to override their programs.’
Watching Jack’s hands work steadily, Alyssa’s attention was suddenly caught by a noise from above – more boots on the stairs, heading downwards.
‘Whatever you’re doing,’ she urged, ‘do it faster.’
21
‘THEY’VE WHAT?’ SANTANA asked, not yet out of breath but starting to feel the first faint signs of fatigue.
‘They’ve exited the stairwell,’ Anderson’s voice came back over the radio. ‘Murray must have overridden the system somehow.’
‘Which floor?’
‘Forty-eighth.’
Santana looked ahead to the next landing, checked the number. ‘We’re there,’ he said, holding up a gloved fist to slow the men behind him. Shouldering his rifle, he approached the door cautiously.
His head snapped up at the sound of boots above him, and he saw the other team hurrying down the stairwell, their own weapons up and aimed.
Santana signalled them to stop.
‘Do we have their location?’ he asked next.
‘Negative,’ Anderson replied. ‘This is an office level, approximately thirty separate rooms and over a hundred people.’
Santana said no more and reached for the door handle, the index finger of the other straightened next to his trigger guard, ready to move at any second.
He pulled the handle.
‘It’s locked!’ he said through the radio to Anderson. ‘The damned thing’s locked!’
Anderson cursed. How had Murray done it? They had been pinned, trapped, with no possibility of escape; and now Murray and Durham were free to roam the building, and the state troops were locked in the stairwell!
Anderson immediately got through to the building’s security control room. ‘Get those doors open!’ he bellowed. ‘Right now!’
Extinction Page 17
