He squeezed the trigger but the rounds ricocheted off alongside splinters of the concrete wall, Durham already safe behind the abutment.
What was she going to do? Hide there forever? Climb to the roof and join Murray and Stevens? The special ops team should have arrived by now but they had hit a delay due to air restrictions over the city and were circling two miles out whist paperwork was sorted.
Santana thought for a moment, then pulled his head back in and ordered men to guard the window while he went further down the wall to another window, to check if the target could be seen from the other side of the abutment.
As he moved down the wall, he called over to the men working at the door to the rooftop elevator. ‘How you doing over there?’
One of the men shook his head. ‘It’s not responding,’ he called back. ‘They must have jammed the doors open up on the roof.’
Cursing, Santana got on the radio and verified the estimated arrival time of the special ops team. The clearance to fly over the city had still not been granted but Anderson was working hard to get it approved.
Santana stuck his head out of the next window but all he could see on this side was another abutment, which meant that she had managed to find a channel between two abutments and was now covered on both sides.
He wouldn’t normally have considered it, but he’d seen the Durham woman putting a radio in her belt as she ran for the window. With that, she might be able to contact the outside world, which Anderson had explained was completely unacceptable.
He called the SWAT officers and his own men into the centre of the room and explained the situation to them; they were going to have to follow Alyssa Durham out onto the building’s exterior.
A plan was quickly agreed upon, and the well-equipped SWAT team began to unravel their rappelling ropes, ready to finish their mission once and for all.
24
WHEN THE BULLETS had come, Alyssa had almost lost her precarious grip on the concrete blocks, at one stage only holding on with two fingers of one hand as she dangled perilously above the cloud-shrouded abyss below. But she had managed to hold on and haul herself back onto the building’s façade.
Her cheek and arm had been cut and torn by concrete chips which had been shot loose from the high-powered rounds, but that only served to increase her focus as she started once again to climb.
Slowly, painfully, Alyssa climbed up the channel between the wide concrete abutments. It should protect her from rifle fire all the way to the top. But what would she find up there? The assault team waiting for her? She had no way of knowing. She hoped Jack and Stevens had kept the presence of mind to block off the elevator doors once they’d hit the roof; if not, then there would surely be a less than friendly welcoming party once she made it up there herself.
When she got to the roof, she figured she’d use the radio to make an emergency distress call. She knew that news agencies routinely scanned the radio waves for such things, and she hoped that hers would be picked up. At the very least, the presence of the media would make it less likely that they would all be shot out of hand.
As her fingers continued to work against the wide edges of the building’s huge block-work, pulling herself as close in as possible to avoid the worst of the buffeting winds, a new sound drifted up to her. The sound of men shouting.
She paused momentarily, trying to identify the words, but she could not. She recognized the tone though; they weren’t shouts of shock or anger, but the shouts of orders being transmitted across open space. She knew instinctively what it meant; they were coming out after her.
‘This is an emergency distress call; I repeat, this is an emergency distress call.’
Anderson looked up as he heard the words coming over the radio network. Who the hell was that? He paused. Alyssa Durham? He shook his head. It couldn’t be. But the message continued, and he knew it was her.
‘Anyone who is on this channel, please listen!’ She sounded scared, desperate, and Anderson knew this would also make her dangerous. Damn it!
‘My name is Alyssa Durham, and I am heading towards the roof of the Landers Building. Police officers and soldiers are trying to kill me, and they are also trying to kill Jack Murray of the High-frequency Ionospheric Research Project, and Ray Stevens of York Investments.’
Anderson started to pace the enclosed confines of the aircraft, his pulse rate rising. He turned to his communications operator. ‘Is there anything we can do to block this?’ he asked in exasperation.
The operator shook his head. ‘These channels are always open, it would take hours to get them blocked.’
Still with one ear to the message, he dialled the number for General Tomkin.
‘We have uncovered a government plot to use HIRP research as a weapon to—’ the message continued, even as Tomkin answered his secure phone.
‘Colonel Anderson, what’s the situation there?’ came the gruff voice.
But Anderson didn’t answer, all his attention focused now on the radio message. He heard Alyssa Durham’s breath catch in her throat, in shock, no words coming now; and then there was a piercing shriek coming through the equipment, and he realized that Alyssa Durham was screaming.
Aboard the special ops chopper, Major Dan Edwards smiled. Finally.
The word had just come through from the state aviation office that they had at last been cleared to fly over the city.
The pilot eased the helicopter out of its circular holding pattern, aiming the nose across the city to the Landers Building just five miles ahead of them.
Edwards nodded to his team. ‘OK, men, let’s lock and load. We have three high-level targets, and it’s up to us to take them out.’ He racked the slide on his personal weapon, putting a round into the chamber. ‘You know the score. No prisoners.’
The radio fell out of Alyssa’s hand as she screamed, grasping onto the ledge above her with both hands and pulling her legs up just instants before the concrete façade below was ripped to pieces by high-velocity rounds.
Without looking back, she pulled herself all the way up onto the next block, instinctively pushing her body further into the left-hand abutment to shield her from the bullets. There was a pause then, and she assumed the men were edging further out onto the building. Without a moment’s hesitation, she used the opportunity to climb even further upwards, hoping the thick cloud might obscure their aim; although she knew deep-down that if they reached the channel, they couldn’t possibly miss.
Santana edged along the window ledge, cursing himself for shooting prematurely, before he definitely had a target.
He looked back at the seven armed men behind him, all joined by the rappelling rope, which in turn was anchored to a table and six other men back in the executive lounge, and nodded at them.
Cautiously, careful not to look down, Santana edged his toes and fingers along the ledge, a slow and painful process that nevertheless brought him closer and closer to his quarry. She wasn’t going to escape this time, he was damned certain of that.
But his mind rebelled at what he was asking his body to do. His conscious mind told him that he was well secured, and even if he fell, he wouldn’t die; but the instinctive side, the part of his inner nature that could never be fully controlled, was horrified by the height of the building, the sheer surface, the fact that they were in the clouds! What had he been thinking?
But, despite the reservations of his subconscious, he drove himself onwards step by step, easing across the surface of the huge skyscraper one hundred storeys above the city streets.
He was close now; so close. Just three more painful, tortuous sideways steps and then he would be there in the channel, and then it would be all over.
Two feet now, and he eased his assault rifle forwards on its sling, ready to aim it upwards the instant he leaned around the corner. He looked back to his men, lined up along the ledge, ready to back him up. He edged the final foot to the corner and nodded to them.
Turning back to the edge of the left-hand
abutment, he slowly breathed out, trying to calm and centre himself. He wasn’t going to waste any shots this time; each one would count.
And then he was stepping out off the ledge, easing himself around the large concrete post that was providing his target with her protection. One step, two steps, and then he was there, in the channel.
He looked up, raising his weapon skyward as he did so.
And then his eyes went wide with shock; he never had the chance to scream.
Alyssa had looked down, saw the man’s hands reaching around the concrete abutment twenty feet below. She knew that as soon as he was in the channel, her chances were zero.
At least she’d managed to send something out over the radio; maybe it would be picked up by someone. There really wasn’t anything left to do, and so she decided to take her life in her own hands and not wait to die at the gun of some faceless government thug.
She waited until she saw the man’s head and shoulders swing around the concrete pillar, and then let go her grip of the building. Hands, feet, body; she simply let go of everything and plummeted towards the earth.
Santana took the full impact of Alyssa’s fast-moving weight after her twenty-foot fall, her boots planting themselves firmly into his face on her way down.
The savage impact knocked Santana clear off the wall, his own momentum stripping his team-mates from the wall’s concrete surface after him.
As the men fell into the abyss one by one, already the commands for full brace were being given back in the office, the knots attaching the rope to the table checked quickly as the six officers prepared to take the strain.
Even with preparation, the weight of eight armed men falling to the earth was enough to pull both the desk and the other officers inexorably towards the open window. But then the men got their grip right, the desk hit the window and stayed tight on the frame, and the eight falling men came to sudden, back-breaking halt in a wild, swinging line down the face of the building, fourteen hundred feet above the earth.
Alyssa filled with satisfaction as she felt her boots hit the man on her way down, glad as his grip was ripped from the wall.
The impact with the man’s head served to slow her own fall sufficiently, enabling her to grasp the nearest concrete block with the strong, vice-like fingers of one hand.
Although the soldier had broken her fall, the shock of saving herself with one arm threatened to dislocate her shoulder, and she winced in pain as she swung out over the clouds, trying to numb the pain.
She tried to calm her breath as she watched the momentum of the first man pull all the others away from the wall, and although she was pleased they were no longer a threat, she was also happy that they hadn’t fallen to their deaths but were still secured by the rope; she wouldn’t want all their deaths on her conscience, despite the fact that they were trying to kill her.
She reached up and gripped with her other hand too, then pulled herself higher to get purchase with her feet, her toes straining for grip through the thin leather of her shoes.
She looked down the façade of the building at the soldiers all spread out like ants on a spider’s web, then gasped in horror as the man at the bottom pulled out a pistol from a belt holster and started firing.
Santana had blacked out momentarily when the woman had hit him during her suicidal plunge, although now he had regained consciousness he realized it hadn’t been suicidal at all, but was instead a carefully calculated risk. And one that had paid off too, he noticed in rising anger as he saw the woman clinging to the concrete blocks above him.
His adrenalin making his heart feel as if it was on fire, Santana didn’t even have time to consider himself lucky that the rappelling rope had held, didn’t allow himself to wait until the rope and seven other men had stopped their pendulum-like swing from one side of the building to the other.
Instead, filled now with a murderous anger the likes of which he had never before felt in his life, he processed the fact that he had lost his rifle in the fall and immediately reached for the hand-gun at his waist. Still swinging upside down, battered and dazed, he pulled it free and started firing wildly.
The first two shots hit one of the men above him, the next three threatening the crew on the rope behind the window; but Santana paid this scant regard as he aimed again, fuelled by bitter rage.
As he loosed off round after round, he heard orders being shouted from the window to the men above him on the rope, but he paid them no attention, focused purely on shooting Alyssa Durham to death.
But then he felt the rope pull, jerking his body to the side, and he finally looked up to see the man above him sawing through the rope with his combat knife.
He understood instantly what was happening; he was being cut loose, his actions endangering all the men on the rope. He was being sacrificed to save everyone else.
He gestured with his hands, eyes wide and pleading, offering to put the gun away; but it was too late, the rope was already cut, and Major Rafael Santana’s last words consisted of a single, piercing scream that could be heard all over the city as he plunged fourteen hundred feet to his death.
Dan Edwards ordered his men to check and re-check their equipment, despite the fact that he knew he didn’t have to. The men in his crew were professional through and through, and didn’t have to be told anything.
The chopper was sailing through the clouds on a direct line with the roof of the Landers Building, which was only two miles away now although they still couldn’t see it in these conditions.
The latest news was that two of the targets – the two men, Jack Murray and Ray Stevens – were on the roof, whilst Alyssa Durham, the lone female target, was climbing up the exterior of the building, approximately one more storey from the top.
An attempt to kill her outside the building had evidently gone completely haywire, resulting in the death of the field commander, and Edwards thought again that the men should have just been patient and waited until the real professionals were on the scene to handle things. Special operations forces weren’t given the label ‘special’ for nothing.
When all other options failed, Edwards and his men could be relied upon to get the job done.
‘What the hell’s going on down there?’ Jack asked Stevens, heading towards the roof edge.
‘Hey, I’d get back from there if I were you,’ Stevens yelled over to him. He’d heard the gunfire too, but there was no way he was going to the edge of a one hundred and two storey building to see what it was. So long as nobody was shooting at him, he was happy.
The gunfire stopped then, and another sound started to emerge through the thick, dense cloud. ‘Hey Jack, wait!’ Stevens called again with renewed urgency. ‘Stop!’ he called, even louder, and Jack paused and looked round at the banker.
‘What?’ he asked irritably, keen to see what was happening, aware that any sound was a possible indication that Alyssa might still be alive.
‘Do you hear it?’ Stevens asked.
‘Do I hear what?’ Jack responded, but then grew silent as he began to perceive the noise Stevens had heard. What was it? A slow, steady, mechanical beat. Rotor blades. ‘A helicopter!’ Jack said in panic. ‘They’re sending a damned gunship after us!’
Just fifteen feet below the roof parapet, Alyssa continued to climb steadily, trying her best to ignore the searing pain in her shoulder. Once, she reminded herself, she’d had to make a four hundred-foot vertical descent with a badly broken collarbone. It had been hard, but she’d made it. She always made it. She cut the pain from her mind completely, as she concentrated on making the next foot of height up the building. She would make this too.
The men on the rope below had ceased to bother her, far more interested now in saving themselves, and Alyssa was able to concentrate more fully on her climbing. But then another noise intruded on her, and it was only seconds before she realized what it was. A helicopter.
She looked up at the roof edge above her, just scant feet away, and cursed her bad luck. So near. B
ut she understood that the chopper would be on them within minutes, and they wouldn’t stand a chance.
But, she told herself, if she made it to the roof, at least she could spend her final moments in Jack’s arms. And, with renewed vigour and purpose, she continued to climb.
Jack and Stevens were crouched behind an air-conditioning duct. It wasn’t much of a hiding place but at least it gave them some shelter from the wind. They had wedged the elevator doors open with a long piece of broken metal antenna which they had worked into the sliders on either side. The doors showed no signs of moving.
Jack was staring morosely across the expanse of the rooftop when he thought he saw a hand clawing at the edge. He stared, disbelieving, but it was definitely a hand. He’d raced towards the edge and saw another hand appear, and then Alyssa’s exhausted, beautiful face as she pulled herself up and over the parapet.
And suddenly he was there with her, pulling her up the rest of the way, arms tight around her, kissing her cold cheeks, her lips.
‘Alyssa,’ he breathed. ‘I thought you were gone.’ He embraced her tightly, and she hugged him back, her body still strong despite what she had been through.
And then they both turned towards the sound of a helicopter, hovering just ten feet over the roof on the far side of the building.
‘What the hell are they doing here?’ Edwards exclaimed in fury. WBN News? Who had given them permission to fly?
But dammit, there they were, hovering right over his targets, their cameras on live, broadcasting the scene to the whole damned world.
Edwards’ own chopper was still one mile out, and he got on the radio immediately to Colonel Anderson. He was going to need new orders.
Anderson couldn’t believe what was going on.
Getting permission for the special ops team to fly over the city had stretched his patience to the limit, and it was now clear that it was the mayor’s office that had been the real cause of the hold-up. It seemed that Stevens really was a good friend of the mayor and he was unhappy about how the situation was developing.
Extinction Page 19
