by Dick Stivers
She emptied the clip into the small communications room. She spared one shot for the radio man. The rest of the bullets were used to perforate the carefully pressed fatigues.
16
July 14, 502 hours, Boston, Massachusetts
“I said close the damn thing down. Destroy it!” Jishin screamed into the telephone.
The voice on the other end squawked in protest.
“Did you or did you not send the orders for simultaneous attacks yesterday?” Jishin demanded.
“I do believe you. That’s why I’m telling you to wipe out that idiot computer. Someone’s gotten to it.”
She cut off the protests in midsentence. “It may be impossible, but it’s been done. I’ve arranged by telephone for your office, Salt Lake City, Houston and Seattle to hold simultaneous attacks later today. I spoke to each group leader myself. I also told them to ignore any orders that came via the computer link. So close it down. I’ll be there after the raids to see what went wrong.”
She slammed down the telephone and turned to the Japanese terrorist standing next to her. “The idiots think they must see something happen with their own eyes before it really happened. I think the long nose puts undue strain on the brain.”
The terrorist, who called himself Colonel Noh, laughed politely. “What is the target of our Boston team? We have ten professionals and lost only half the long-noses. We may as well expend the rest.”
“We may as well, indeed,” Jishin agreed. “Our target will not be synchronized. We’re going to fly to Atlanta. So our strike will be later.”
“Surely we have sufficient targets in the Boston area?”
“We have unfinished business in Atlanta,” she snapped. “No one there will be expecting another raid. Elwood Electronic Industries and that mongrel bitch that works for them will both go.”
*
July 14, 812 hours, Smyrna, Georgia
Deborah wandered into Ti’s lab to find her throwing punches and kicks at the window glass.
“What on earth are you doing?” Deborah asked.
Ti looked around and grinned, like a kid caught playing in a puddle. “Making sure this tempered glass is as strong as it’s supposed to be.”
“I thought when they fixed the place up, Mr. Brognola had bullet-proof glass put in?”
“I believe it will stop light automatic fire, but will it stop human beings?” Ti questioned.
She dragged a heavy table over to a position four feet from the window.
“Did you see the sign on the door?” she asked Deborah.
“Yeah. That’s why I came in. You’re out of your mind.”
“You’re just in time. Brace the table.”
“What?”
“The table. Keep it from moving away from the window.”
Deborah dutifully put her shoulder to the table, spread her feet and pushed against it. Ti stood with her back to the window and her hands on the edge of the table. Suddenly she kicked her feet up into the air and then straight back in a mule kick that hit the center of the windowpane with a resounding bang. The window did not break, but Deborah and the heavy table moved back eight inches. Ti landed lightly on her feet.
“I’m sold. It’s good glass.”
“God,” Deborah said, “to resist a kick like that, it’s good steel.”
Ti dusted her hands off. “Thank you. Now, you saw the sign on the door. I have to get ready for the meeting.”
“Yeah. Well, I’m going to attend the meeting too,” Devine said.
“But, it’s scientific personnel only. You saw the sign on the door.”
“Save it for someone who isn’t in the business. You’re the only scientific personnel left in this joint. That sign is nothing but an engraved invitation to the terrorists. I’ll hang around, thank you.”
Ti looked at the platinum blonde with a mixture of respect and affection.
“Sure?” Ti asked.
“Positive.”
“Then let’s start getting ready.”
“What makes you so sure that they’ll attack again today?”
“They turned their computer off at 5:06 this morning. But not before a telephone call from Jishin. I feel sure she’ll be coming back here.”
“Why?”
“It’s a matter of face. She lost a great deal of face here. In her mind, she won’t be able to regain her respect until she’s returned here and destroyed whatever caused the loss of face.”
“You?”
“Mostly, me,” Ti admitted.
“Where do we begin?”
“Gadgets left some plastic explosive behind. I want booby traps. I also want to keep this place looking as if it were in full use.”
“Let’s do it,” Deborah said.
*
July 14, 923 hours, Santa Clara, California
“What was that?” Babette asked.
Hal Brognola pulled the cigar from his mouth and whispered. “Someone picking the lock on the door.”
Babette quietly moved to the small desk and chair she had put into the office. She sat in the chair facing the door and pulled open the top drawer. She removed an Ingram Model 10, chambered a .45 round and put the weapon back, barrel forward in the open drawer.
Brognola moved against the wall to stand behind the door when it opened. He carefully placed the wooden chair in which he had been sitting so it would prevent the door from being slammed into him. He took out his VP 70Z and waited.
The lock on the door finally clicked back. The picker opened the door and stepped back.
“It’s open, Fred.”
“Then let’s see what’s in there.”
The one called Fred took three paces into the room and stopped cold. His partner who picked locks almost bumped into him.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Babette said calmly. “Couldn’t you have waited? The office opens at 9:30.”
The two men had stopped exactly between Babette and Brognola. The one known as Fred brought his hand from his pants pocket. The hand was wrapped around a Colt 1911 Al automatic. He pointed it at Babette.
“Just freeze,” he told her. “If that hand starts coming out of the drawer, I’ll blow your head off.”
Brognola tried to ease the door open. He was anxious to cross the doorway and get Babette out of the position where she was lined up with the two terrorists.
“Just what did you gentlemen want that meant you couldn’t wait for the office to open?” Babette stalled.
“We want to see if you have a computer that could be connected to ours in some way. We seem to be having trouble,” Fred answered. Then he spoke to his partner. “Orrie, go around the desk and take whatever she has her hand on in that drawer.”
When Orrie made his move, Brognola stepped rapidly to the side, forcing the door to slam. Orrie turned and leaped at him. Brognola fired a short burst. The 9mm parabellums entered through the chin and throat. They exited through the back of the head, spraying bits of brain on the ceiling.
The front of the cheap desk erupted as Babette squeezed the trigger on the Ingram. Forty-five caliber slugs flew through the desk. A line of them stitched the gunman’s groin, shoving him back across the room. He collapsed eight feet from where he had been standing. Babette removed the Model 10 from the drawer and finished the job with a single head shot.
The sound of shots erupted from somewhere else in the building.
“What’s happening?” Babette asked.
Brognola was already checking the hall outside. There was no activity yet.
“When Ti telephoned to tell us that the main computer had been shut down, I guessed this might happen,” Brognola admitted. “It’s a very small step from concluding that your computer has been tampered with to deciding that the tamperers must be somewhere close by. I was hoping they wouldn’t, but that was too much to hope for.”
“I’ve figured the rest out,” Babette said. “They’ve sent a small army to check out the building.”
“You got it. Gadgets s
ays you’re deadly with that thing.” He nodded at the Ingram.
“That’s right,” Babette said with a proud smile.
“If you’re game, I’d like to do more than escape. This group of terrorists is probably planning to attack an industrial site when they finish with us. If we have to shoot our way out anyway, I’d prefer not to leave enough of them to do any further damage.”
Babette shrugged. “Why not?”
Brognola clamped his cigar in his teeth and stuffed the jacket pockets of his impeccable gray suit with clips for both the Ingram and the Heckler & Koch automatic.
“There’s a bandolier in the case,” he told Babette. “I thought you might be short of pockets.”
“Then you were expecting this?” she asked.
“I thought it was a possibility. I suggest we go straight for their training center and work our way out.”
He picked up the telephone and put it back.
“They’re serious. The lines are dead.”
“The rope we used for returning the bodies is still in the corner. Why don’t we go down that way?”
“That’s what I call a surprise visit.”
Brognola swung the gymnast on the end of the rope. She gained the ledge and quickly refastened the rope to the pitons she had driven into the building before. Brognola tied off the rope at the top and then slid down to join Babette outside the window to the computer room. A quick kick removed the glass.
Babette did a forward roll into the room and came up with the Ingram cocked and ready. Brognola followed. There was no sign of the regular workers. Instead, two men and a woman stood using citizen-band radios. Each had an M-16 slung over a shoulder. The breaking glass caused them to turn, but they were too taken by surprise to do more than look.
“Put those radios down slowly,” Brognola told them.
The woman threw her radio at the big Fed and let the assault rifle slide from her shoulder into her hand. She was much too slow. Babette’s chatter gun spat a figure eight of 250-grain sizzlers that drove the three back over desks.
Babette was already running toward the door to the hall. She threw it open and leaned around the doorway. A group of about a dozen terrorists were pounding up the hall toward the sound of the firing. They already had their guns out.
Babette emptied the rest of her clip into the running horde, then jerked back inside just as bullets from the opposite direction chewed up the doorway.
Brognola stood and listened to the group charge from the other end of the hall. Babette moved clear of the fire zone as she quickly changed clips.
When he heard the footsteps slow down at the door, Brognola emptied his clip through the wall. He was rewarded with a chorus of screams.
“The training center is one floor down,” Babette yelled as she moved out the door.
Three short bursts finished the terrorists.
The third floor was in better order. The terrorists, organized by their instructors, were just setting off to help search the building. It had taken a while to convince them that destroying all they found was basically sound policy, but now they were psyched up and ready. Their first two identifiable enemies stepped through the door from the stairs and stood back to back in the busy hall.
It was a sight to make anyone pause: a senior executive, complete with cigar and three-piece gray suit, standing spread legged and firm, glowering over a vicious-looking machine pistol; standing straight behind him, a blonde wearing slacks, shirt and bandolier, looking equally efficient with her gun.
“Who are you?” someone asked.
“Justice,” Brognola growled.
The two Ingrams then explained his remark. Bodies were swept toward the far ends of the hall. The one or two terrorists who did manage to shoot succeeded only in cutting up the terrorists who were packed against them. There were four seconds of thunder and destruction. Then the sound of empty clips hitting the floor and new clips being slammed home could be heard in the hall.
Brognola then led the way to a door marked: Harassment Initiation Team — Members Only.
He threw open the door and found terrorists, each wearing a white giand white belt. They were obviously scared, raw recruits, all unarmed.
“Let’s let them go,” he said. He and Babette headed down the stairs.
They threw their Ingrams into the back seat of the car that Brognola had left waiting. Then they climbed in and sped away from the sound of approaching sirens.
“Want to come to Atlanta and share the reports on the rest of the operation?” the Fed asked.
“Damn right,” snapped the reply.
17
July 14, 940 hours, Seattle, Washington
Yakov Katzenelenbogen let the telephone ring twice before cutting into the line. It was about time, he thought — he had been wrapped around the telephone junction box for two hours. He had been starting to think that the terrorists were too depraved to notice that their toilets did not work.
“Yes,” Katz answered into the lineman’s mouthpiece.
“Comfort Plumbing?” a gruff man’s voice asked.
“Yes, sir. What can I do for you.”
“All our damn drains are backing up. We got no toilets working. How soon can you do something about it?”
“Where are you, sir?”
The goon gave him the address. “Okay,” Katz said, “I was just leaving to do an installation almost next door. I’ll be there real soon.”
“That’s terrific.”
Katz hung up.
He quickly unhooked his telephone-line patch and threw it into the large canvas tool bag he had. He tossed the bag into a rented van and sat down to wait. He was in sight of the building where the Seattle Harassment Initiation Team was getting its briefing. He had visited the building during the night. He had flitted throughout the terrorist lair, learning the layout and flushing crepe-de-chine bags of flax seed down all the toilets. The expanding flax would have clogged every drain in the place by now. Katz chuckled as he started the van.
*
Bert Bannon waited impatiently at the door of the old industrial building. The briefing on today’s raid had already begun and he had wanted to hear it. Instead, he had to keep an eye on the plumber. He sighed.
He was watching as a van stopped right at the door. An old man got out. Then Bert noticed the steel hook where the right hand should be. The guy swung a canvas bag of tools onto his shoulder. The bag looked like a relic from the Civil War. The bag was packed, yet he seemed to handle it easily enough.
“You from Comfort?” Bert asked as the old man came in the door.
“Yes. Where are the drains that are giving you trouble?”
“Every damn toilet in the place is plugged. We’re going ape.”
“Then let’s start at the top floor and work down.”
“Ahh… There’s a meeting going on up there. Why not start on the second floor?”
“And if we free the toilets on the second floor and then get a back-up when we unclog the top floor, who cleans up the mess?” the old man asked.
Bert did not like it. If the old geezer overheard too much, Bert would have to kill him. Still, that would be easier than cleaning up the second floor.
“Come on. I’ll stay with you,” Bert told the plumber.
Most of the top floor was open area. In one corner were the washrooms and in another was an office area. The partitions were old, sturdily built with two-by-four studs and board walls, carefully finished and stained dark. The many hanging fluorescent fixtures did little to dispel the gloom of the place.
A flip chart had been set up near one wall and about forty men sat on stacking chairs listening to a briefing.
“Commander Jishin has been on the telephone to me again this morning,” the man at the front was saying. “We all begin our strikes at eleven hundred hours, local time. So be sure you have this straight. We won’t be going over it again.”
Bert impatiently tugged the old man toward the washrooms. “Come on, this way.�
��
The plumber went into the men’s bathroom. Bert followed. He looked away in disgust. Several of the men had used the toilets and tried to flush them. The floor was wet.
“That’s your trouble,” the plumber said. His voice was suddenly authoritative.
“Huh?”
“Too much shit around here,” the old man said.
Suddenly the hook was a blur. The hard metal cracked into the temple. Bert Bannon slumped forward, his knees buckled and he collapsed. His last breaths were taken with his head immersed in an overflowing toilet.
*
Katz calmly went about his business. First he removed the sections of a tripod from his tool bag. When he had assembled the tripod, he carried it outside the washroom and placed it in a clear area about ten feet from the door.
The commander delivering the briefing was telling his troops, “We want lots of blood and lots of misery. You don’t make headlines by being neat and clean.”
Katz returned to the can. In a moment he came out lugging a pair of motorcycle batteries and leads.
There were a few whispers when some sort of Gatling gun was carried out and set on the tripod. An ammo belt was dragged after it, the first bullet already locked in the breech. Katz quickly connected the leads from the batteries to the electric motor on the gun that was designed primarily for helicopter use. The belt held standard 7.62 by 51mm NATO ammunition. The gun was capable of chewing up ten of those rounds each second and spitting them through one of the six rotating barrels at 2850 feet per second.
By the time the Phoenix Force leader grabbed the twin handles and began to swing the machine gun, the terrorists were beginning to suspect that all was not well. Mutters rose, attracting the attention of the speaker. He had time to glance in the direction of the distraction before the GE Minigun began delivering death. An entire row of heads received 150-grain goodbyes.
Some of the terrorists dived onto the floor while they fumbled for handguns. They were swept up with bullets. Others tried to outrun death, but failed. A few made it to the office. They could have saved the effort. The machine-gun fire did not seem to realize there was anything there. It swept through the two-by-four and wood partitions, leveling terrorists.
