by Evan Currie
She nodded, tapping in a series of commands. After a moment a red light began to flash, and then an alarm sounded in the distance. She killed it with a stroke of her finger, then nodded, “Alright. The computer now thinks that there is a fire burning about three quarters of the way up the tower…The sprinklers should be activating anytime now.”
Malcolm nodded, “How long until we know if it works?”
She hesitated, and then shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
“Understood,” He replied grimly, “Alright. Move. My turn.”
*****
One kilometer over the desert, one kilometer over the factions locked in varying degrees of battle, an automated system roused itself from a long slumber. Installed as a nod to bureaucratic regulations rather than out of any true need, the powerful pumps whirred to life on command from the computers and began to force water through their pipes.
The spray erupted out from the top first, having waited for full pressure to be achieved before opening the nozzles, and hundreds of gallons of cold water filled the warm rising air of the tower. The heat of the air caused some of the water to evaporate quickly, cooling the air quickly and saturating it with moisture.
Above the tower, outside, a cloud of mist began to form almost immediately, much to the confusion of the terrorists stationed on the observation ring, the cool, clammy mist rolling in on them from above as the momentum of the tower pushed the cooling air up and out. They looked around, trying to locate the source of the mist, but were soon enveloped in it and lost in the clammy grip of the artificial cloud, unable to see more than a few feet around them.
Then the mist seemed to pause, no longer thickening around them and even starting to blow away in places.
Inside the tower the rising plume of air slowly came to a halt, reaching a moment of equilibrium as the weight of the cold, moist air sitting on top held in the warm dryer air below.
And then the equilibrium broke, and the cold air began to fall.
The mist that crowned the tower shuddered unnaturally for a moment, and then was sucked back into the maw that had birthed it, leaving the men standing on the observation ring even more confused and lost than when they couldn’t see.
*****
The warm wind was at its apex here, where Sergeant Teal led his squad, the huge inner section of the tower open like an enormous amphitheater. The wind made them sweat, and sucked up the moisture from their faces and open skin greedily as they moved, but the SAS men ignored it. They moved quickly to where the schematics they had told them their target was located.
“Got it Sarge.”
Teal nodded, watching as one of the men pulled open the access panel to where the large pumps were already purring with a powerful sound. “Sounds like they got ’em kick started.”
“For sure,” The man said, looking around curiously. “How long do you figure it’ll take?”
“Don’t know…” Teal looked up, trying to see the actions he knew were taking place above him, but all he could see were the constantly turning blades of the tower’s multiple wind mills.
They quickly set themselves up, unpacking a pair of heavier weapons that they had shared the job of humping to this very spot, and setup defensive placements while they waited. After a few minutes a shudder seemed to pass through all of them, and they looked around nervously.
“You feel that, Sarge?”
“Yeah…” Teal whispered, “What was it?”
“Dunno…”
Teal shook it off, wondering if the sudden chill was his imagination or not, only to have his question answered when the water struck. It was light, at first, a few droplets against the wind, spattering their faces and lifting the oppressive heat from them. Then the droplets became honest rain, striking down like a summer storm around their position. The wind was still blowing upward, though, so the balance was refreshing for the soldiers.
When the wind began to calm out, an oppressive weight rested on them and the men looked around a little nervously. It felt like the weight before a thunder storm broke right over your position, the heavy feel of the clouds above them pushing them down into the ground with a tangible force.
The weight broke after several minutes, with a suddenness that left them breathless. With it came the cascading water from above, and the sudden drop of mist landing on them like a bomb from above. It hit the floor of the tower and spread out in all directions like a living thing, cutting visibility down to almost nothing.
And, finally, just as quickly as the mist enveloped them, it was blown away by a chill wind from above and the soldiers began to shiver in their desert fatigues, soaking through to the skin in short order as they finished setting up their position.
“This is the damndest weather I’ve ever seen,” one of them joked half heartedly.
Teal and the others could only nod in agreement as the cool wind and cold rain crashed down around them inside the four hundred meter diameter chamber they now had to hold and defend.
*****
Abdallah Amir was reading a report sent up from the teams he had watching the ‘hostages’ below when it happened.
The lights flickered, almost imperceptibly, and then the computer displays around him and his men jumped. The moment was brief, but it cast shadows and light around in a distracting manner that brought him up short. He looked up, frowning, “What was that?”
“We’re not certain, Amir.”
Abdallah scowled, pushing himself to his feet, and walked around the desk that made up the centerpiece of the back wall of their converted command center. He walked over to the closest man, standing watch over the radar display, and looked over his shoulder.
“What was that?” he ground out again, punctuating each word with a rap of his knuckles on the back of the man’s head.
The technician winced, but didn’t move. He stared straight ahead at his display and took a few seconds before replying, “It was a power fluctuation, Amir.”
“Are we not protected against such?”
“Here, yes Sir. The fluctuation was at the phased array radar equipment.”
Abdallah’s eyes widened, “Is it working?”
“Yes Amir,” The technician said quickly, “Perfectly.”
“Good…” Abdallahe turned away, something nagging at him. He looked over to another man, this one was one of the Engineers hired to maintain the tower’s power generation systems. He wasn’t someone that Amir was inclined to trust, because the weasely little man wasn’t here for a cause, he was here because Abdallah had paid him. Paid him well and generously, in Abdallah’s opinion, for very little gain other than having one more man on the inside when the time came.
Unless he read the man poorly, Abdallah was quite sure that the mercenary bastard was somewhat taken aback by the events that were unfolding, but he didn’t give a damn.
“You!,” Abdallah snapped, pointing to the man, “Parker.”
“Y…yes, A- Amir?”
“What caused the power fluctuation?”
The man was sweating. Abdallah frowned, then paused as he realized that the local air conditioning wasn’t operating. It wasn’t nearly hot enough for the man to be sweating, but Abdallah could have sworn that they had the Air Conditioning blowing full out to cool the electronics.
Something was not right, and somehow this paid weasel of a man knew what it was.
“Speak!”
The man flinched away, but began to stammer out a response.
“I…it was the switch to stored power…A…Amir.”
“Stored power?” Abdallah blinked in confusion, “Why?”
“I don’t know, I…I swear! The generators have stopped providing power…”
“Are they malfunctioning!? I was told that the facility is in full repair…”
“They can’t be!” The man held up his hands defensively, “There are thirty-eight separate turbines in use in the tower…they cannot all have gone down. It must be a junction error…”
“What is the power status
!?” Abdallah demanded, stepping over quickly to stare at the display that showed the station’s output.
“We have reserves to help balance our nightly power drop,” Parker said, falling back into the familiarity of his systems, “We can put out eighty megatwatts from them…But A…Amir…”
“Yes, what is it??”
“The Phased Array Radar systems take up over fifteen megawatts alone…” The man stammered, “Enough to power hundreds… thousands of homes…They’ll drain our reserves quickly.”
Abdallah stared at the man in neat apoplexy.
“Are you…Do you have the sheer GALL to inform me that we are running out of electricity while we stand here under a Two Hundred Megawatt power production facility!? Do you actually have the gall to tell me that!?”
Abdallah raged at the idiocy of it, barely holding back from striking the man, then turned to look at the others.
“This could be sabotage or the prelude to an assault…Alert our security forces,” He said evenly, reaching behind him to grab Parker by the shoulder and draw him close with a painful grip, “And you…Fix this.”
Parker nodded.
“Do you hear me!? Fix this!” Abdallah yelled, shoving the man from his chair.
The international terrorist crossed the room quickly, coming to his central desk and pausing for a moment. When he looked up, his face was calm again. “Jacob…”
“Yes, Amir,” The Director of the power facility said instantly, stepping forward calmly.
“Have them begin releasing the virus,” Abdallah said, “Immediately.”
“Yes Amir.”
*****
Lieutenant Green held up his hand, edge on to where he could see Sergeant Singer resting his long rifle against the edge of a concrete basin. The terrorists were still in the clear, those they could seem only wearing partial protective gear and obviously not overly concerned about the fact that their heads were open to the air.
He counted down silently, letting his men move into position, giving them every second of the few minutes they had allotted to allow room for error due to their lack of communication. The numbers fell steadily, however, and soon the moment had come. When his watch clicked over to the top of the hour, Greene clenched his fist, then dropped his hand to the P-90M that hung loose on his harness.
The first shot rang out from Singer’s rifle, launching the first round in the attack into the midst of the terrorists with the precision of the trained Sniper. The 7.62mm round chopped down one man as he was talking on a radio, drilling through the soft tissue of the terrorist’s throat and dropping him in place like a doll with his string’s cut.
Another shot rang out from across the way, Corporal Mayer’s shot dropping another man in an instant before the confused response of the terrorists could begin.
Then things turned quickly into a massed frenzy as the terrorists scrambled for cover, trying to locate their attackers in the confusion of screaming that had erupted from the hostages when the first shot rang out.
Greene swung his P90 up to his shoulder as he moved around the corner with Corporal Sasha Holter following right on his back. The built in optical sights on the submachine gun lined up almost of their own accord on the closest target, and Greene squeezed the reactive trigger just slightly, sending one 4.7mm round into the man.
He went down, hitting the ground hard, but neither Greene nor Holter quite forgot him as they moved through. When the figure on the ground twitched, then jerked back up to a sitting position, Holter dipped the barrel of her weapon and squeezed the trigger all the way down, triggering the P90’s auto fire mode, and chewed the man’s chest to hamburger.
“Dopers.” Greene heard her curse. “I hate dopers.”
Greene couldn’t have agreed more, but didn’t have time to think about it. The members of the group that were high on the so called ‘Faith Drugs’ were dead already, whether they knew it or not. Dopers like the one Holter had emptied twenty rounds into were very much the nightmare of Counter Terrorist Operatives the world over. They made unpredictable enemies, and often stayed in fighting form through wounds that would inevitably kill them, and would certainly have disabled any normal human.
For now, though, they couldn’t worry too much about even the dopers. First they had to secure the virus, and to do that they had to find it.
“Find me one of them with clear eyes, Sash,” He ordered after a moment. “We need answers.”
Sasha grimaced, “Give me a hard one why don’t you, L.T.?”
They stepped over the body of the terrorist, the crackle of radio traffic catching their ear. Green stopped and knelt down as the crackle continued again, and a voice snapped out of the small device.
“Deploy the Virus! Do you hear me!? Deploy the virus!”
Green and Holter exchanged grim looks.
“Move it, Holter. We’re running out of time.” Green said softly as he clipped the captured radio to his assault vest and moved on himself.
*****
The long barrel of the Model 98 protruded from the leafy green of the strawberry plants, the prone man behind it resting his cheek on the padded butt of the rifle as he idly centered his crosshairs on first one target, then another.
Trooper Mackenzie mentally targeted each of the armed men in his range, picturing them all together in his mind, then one at a time as he watched the clock count down. The Sniper pictured each man in turn, even before he moved the powerful imager on his rifle to the next target, staying one thought ahead of his actions.
He saw his first man in his mind’s eye as the timer counted down to the moment of action, knowing that Given’s was doing the same thing only a few dozen feet away from him. Mac’s man was yelling something as the numbers fell, screaming so loud and so hard that he could see spittle flying from the dark lips of the terrorist.
With ten seconds left on the clock, Mac took a breath and slid a live round into the chamber of his gun. The satisfying click rang through him as he locked the bolt down and clicked off the safety of his weapon.
“Sniper one, live.” He murmured softly, speaking from rote even through his radio wasn’t working to communicate his words to the squad.
He let half the breath out slowly, then stopped and watched the armed man about eight hundred meters away through his scope while he imagined each step in advance in the back of his mind.
“Taking the shot…”
His finger curled lightly around the trigger of the Model 98, tightening as he froze in place. The only thing that moved on his body then was his finger as it slowly drew the trigger in to the edge of its firing point, riding that delicate line until the last second ticked away.
The sound of the shot roared over his head as the rifle slammed back into Mackenzie’s shoulder, and he worked the bolt quickly in a practiced motion. He didn’t even hear it as his mind focused on what he was going to be doing in another few seconds. The second man was already in his scope, as the rifle vibrated with the power of its last shot, and Trooper Mackenzie of the Australian SAS wrapped his finger around the trigger again.
In the back of his mind he heard the second roar come from Givens position, the sound washing over him and being filed away. In his peripheral vision he could see the other four members of the team moving in up ahead, while the terrorists and hostages began to blur in the general chaotic confusion resulting from his shots.
Then his rifle roared again, and Mackenzie was moving to the next target on his mental list.
*****
“The power disruption must be coming from the central circuits, we’ve traced all the other systems.” Saman Sol, electrical engineer trained at CalState said to the other members of the group as they moved through the facility toward the central tower.
“You’d better find it soon,” One of the guards ordered to accompany him growled. “Or Amir will have your hide, and ours as well.”
Saman nodded grimly, ignoring the half grumbled threats that came from some of the others.
&nb
sp; Knuckle draggers.
He had no respect for the fools who had to resort to such crude forms of violence to get their points across. Gun wielding fools of their sort were idealized in too many places already, including the so called terrorist subculture that Saman belonged to. Those fools weren’t the ones who got things done, it was his type.
“Just through here,” He said aloud, leading them through the last of the black heat sinks that drew warmth in from the surroundings and stored it in power ‘cells’ filled with water. At night that heat would function in reverse, powering the turbines in the absence of the sun, and stabalizing the Tower’s power output.
“What’s that noise?”
Saman frowned, “Noise?”
Then he heard it too and paused in midstep.
“It sounds like…thunder?” He said, confused.
“Too steady…more like water falling.”
Saman shook his head, “That’s impossible. Condensation is channeled along the inside of the tower, water is reclaimed silently.”
The guard shrugged, hefting his Chinese made assault rifle. “Whatever. It’s coming from the tower, though.”
“Come on,” Saman growled, breaking into a run.
The ‘security’ people hurried to catch up to him as he burst through the last of the heat ‘cells’ and into the cone shaped base of the tower. Huge concrete sections marked the change, but it was the sound that was out of place. It kept growing louder as they approached.
Saman skidded to a stop as he ran out into the central cavern that made up the base of the tower, and was promptly drenched in near freezing water. He stared up, his glasses covered instantly in the water and couldn’t see more than a dozen feet above him. He ripped them off, but still the visibility was such that none of them could see more than a few dozen feet in any direction as they tried to move through the four hundred foot diameter room.
“What the hell is going on, Saman!?”
“I…I don’t know…” The self-professed ‘thinker’ admitted, “This is meteorologically impossible…”
“Apparently not. Is this what’s screwed up the power?”
“Huh? What?” Saman blinked, surprised, then immediately noted that the air was going the wrong direction.
