Thermals

by Evan Currie

  “You’re terrorists, you don’t have any.” Anselm responded flatly, “According to the Munich Act of 2012, you do NOT have the right to remain silent. You do not have the right to an attorney. And you do not have the right to a phone call, so I’d put that radio down now if I were you, Jacob. Before I make you put it down.”

  Kalindon slowly set the transceiver and lifted his hand from it as the shotgun swung over in his direction, and Anselm nodded with a smile. “Very nice…”

  The Interpol agent produced a series of strips from his belt and nodded to one of the young men sitting behind a terminal, “You!”

  The man pointed to himself, a fearfully questioning look on his face.

  “Yes You,” Anselm scowled, “get up.”

  The man looked fearfully around, finally resting on Amir. The American born terrorist nodded, and the man slowly climbed to his feet.

  “Take these,” Anselm tossed the strips to him, “And put them on the others.”

  The man looked down, goggling at the restraint strips in his hands, then around at the others.

  “Hurry it up, we don’t have all day,” Anselm smiled thinly at Jacob and Abdallah. “I know at least eight countries that have cells held open just for one of you two. Should be fun to see who gets you first.”

  With only a little more prodding the man pulled a strip from the bundle and looked around, as if trying to decide where to start.

  “Jacob first.” Anselm ordered.

  The technician, helplessly caught in the middle looked over at Jacob Kalindon, his expression like that of a deer caught in the light of an onrushing train, but the big man just smirked and nodded.

  “Do it, Kevin.”

  Permission granted, the technician moved forward with the strip as Jacob turned around and placed his wrists together. Anselm kept the shotgun ready as his eyes roved the scene, watching each person in the room as closely as possible. He should have brought help, even an extra man or two, but any person with him was one less trying to rescue the hostages or prevent the release of the virus into the upper atmosphere.

  Twisted as it seemed, arresting Abdallah was secondary.

  It was, however, his mission in Tower City.

  The man, Kevin, Anselm presumed, approached Jacob hesitantly with the flexi-cuffs. He was obviously caught between fear of the shotgun in Anselm’s hands, and the fear of the man he was approaching. Fear, or respect. Kalindon had a reputation as a man who inspired others to follow him, and Anselm supposed that made his decision to follow Abdallah all the more striking.

  “S…sorry Director…”

  The man reached forward with the cuffs as Anselm watched, but Jacob seemed to have other plans. The big man twisted as soon as the younger man touched his wrist, pulling him around and then shoving him hard across the floor at Anselm.

  The Interpol agent reacted quickly, sidestepping the thrown man and clubbing him across the skull as he passed to ensure that he didn’t get up and cause trouble from behind as he brought the shotgun to bear on Jacob.

  Jacob was already coming across the room as he did though, so Anselm squeezed the trigger. The roar of the assault twelve gage was deafening in the small room, leaving a ringing sound in Gunnar’s ears even as the momentum of Kalindon continued to drive his heavy body right into the Interpol agent.

  They went down in a crumpled pile, the Daewoo shotgun clattering off across the floor as Anselm struggled to get his hands under the heavy body. He finally managed to throw off the dead weight of Jacob Kalindon’s corpse, the smell of blood assaulting Anselm’s nose even as it soaked into his clothing and covered his hands. He rolled clear, letting the body thump over, and came up with the tacky grips of his Fabrique Nationale Five-Seven Extended filling his fist.

  “Freeze!” He screamed as one of the men reached for an assault rifle propped against a table.

  When the man didn’t stop instantly, he pivoted and fired a single shot. The five point seven millimeter bullet snapped across the room, briefly connecting Anselm to his target, and bored right into the man’s shoulder. It’s lightweight tungsten tip cored through bone like an icepick through cardboard, bursting through the shoulder and into the chest cavity where it encountered soft tissue.

  The heavier slug of aluminum wrapped around the base of the bullet lost energy slower in that medium than the lighterweight tip, causing the slug to try to ‘pass’ the point and the bullet tumbled through the terrorists body cavity, dumping all of its energy in a split second. When it finally came to rest against his rib cage, the powerful bullet had cored a path from one side of his body to the other, and the terrorist simply slumped to the ground where he was and didn’t move again.

  “Down on the ground!” Anselm yelled, coming up to his feet and moving forward.

  He grabbed the flexi-cuff restraints from the desk where the man had set them and screamed at the remaining terrorist while his eyes roved the room.

  Abdallah!

  The man was gone!

  “Get down! Down on the ground! On your stomach, put your hands behind your back!” Anselm ordered, his voice booming as he tried to shaking the ringing of the shotgun out of his ears.

  The man complied, slumping to the ground and moved his hands behind his back while Anselm quickly tied them together with the nearly unbreakable plastic strips. When he was done with that, he went back and did the same to the man he’d clubbed with the shotgun, and then he quickly confirmed that Jacob and the other man were dead. They were.

  “Damn.” the Interpol agent whispered, looking over the equipment for a moment before hauling the single conscious man to his feet.

  “Which one controls the jamming and radar!? Which one!?”

  Anselm shook him a couple times, until the man pointed to a system, then he pushed the man into a chair and ordered him to stay point as he examined the system.

  “I’m no good with this crap…” He growled, drawing out the American Consulate issue portable from his pocket. He casually flipped it open and tapped on the highlighted ‘last contact’ name on the buddy list.

  “Agent,” Natalie Cyr’s face appeared only seconds later, telling Anselm that while her day may not be quite as bad as his, she wasn’t straying too far from her work either. “I’m glad to see that you’re alright.”

  “I’m in the control room,” He said without preamble, “I’ve got a lot of systems here, and I’m looking at the one that controls the jamming and radar systems. Have anyone that can help me shut this crap down?”

  “Of course,” She smiled confidently, “One moment.”

  *****

  Colonel Pierson growled as he had to duck low under a sporadic burst of automatic fire that raked his position.

  “God damn it, Son, get that son of a bitch!”

  “Yes Sir!”

  The Soldier he’d given the task too shifted control on the American made Objective Crew Served Weapon (OCSW) and gave the onboard systems a brief instant to calculate range to the target before opening fire.

  The twenty five millimeter weapon opened up with a staccato beat as the barrel jerked back with each shot to absorb recoil. Across the battlefield that had once been a school clouds of black smoke appeared in midair over the target, sending killing shrapnel behind the barricade that enemy gunner had been using.

  “I think I got him sir!,” The trooper shouted over the sound of fighting.

  “Good man, now do it again!”

  Pierson turned back to where one of his scouts had just returned, sliding in behind the hastily erected barrier in a move that would do a rugby player proud.

  “Talk to me Son.”

  “Three more groups, Sir…come around from the south!” The younger man panted.

  Pierson nodded, kicking three pebbles over to the young man and nodding to a rough scale model of the surrounding terrain he’d built with the help of the local fire fighters. “Show me.”

  “Here…here…and here, Sir.” The young man said, dropping the pebbles in place.r />
  “Alright, good. Go out and find me, Carson. He’s down that way,” Pierson pointed, “And tell him to get his people around to…”

  They were interrupted by a sound entirely unexpected in the furor of this battle.

  The Colonel’s radio chirped.

  For a moment no one moved, and it almost seemed like the furor of the gunfighting abated to near silence, as they all looked down at the radio. Then the moment was gone and the Colonel grabbed for the electronic device like it was mana from heaven.

  “Pierson here!” He growled into the system.

  “Colonel, this is Brigadier Genalde. I understand that you’re in a bit of a pinch?”

  “Damn Sir, good to hear your voice!” Pierson said, waving signals to his men, telling them to put their eyes and ears back on.

  The general chuckled at that, “Doubt that Colonel, but I do have some good news for you.”

  “If you mean the Jamming is down, I’d just figured it out, Sir,” Pierson said, grinning ear to ear.

  “More than that, Son. The Radar is down, and we’ve got a flight of American Comanche Recon/Assault Gunships heading your way. They’ll be there in about thirty minutes.”

  Pierson raised his eyebrow at that, but refrained from asking the obvious questions. Given the situation he was in, he didn’t care where the help came from. “I’ll take em, Sir!”

  “I thought you might,” Genalde replied with a hint of humor almost hidden by the tension in his voice.

  “Who do I have to thank for this, Sir?”

  “There’s an Interpol Agent in the Tower, along with Malcolm and his boys. They’re hip deep in the brown stuff, Colonel, and getting deeper so you clean up your mess and get in there!”

  “Yes Sir!”

  “Go to it, Colonel. Genalde out.”

  Pierson dropped the earpiece he’d been holding to his head and looked around, “Someone bring my computer god damn it!”

  *****

  Stanley Marion grunted as he slammed the heavy axe into the flimsy door, splintering the half cindered wood at a stroke, and almost fell in through the opening when his swing kept on going without the resistance he’d been expecting.

  Marion cursed as he grabbed onto the doorframe, kicking the splintered shards loose from around his feet, and peered through the smoke intently.

  “Tom!” He hollered, his throat sore as he tried to make himself heard through the heavy insulation of his helmet and protective gear. “Tom!”

  There was no indication of anyone in the room on the infrareds or to eyeball mark one, but he made a thorough circuit anyway as he checked around all the furniture and even under what looked to be a desk.

  “Tom!”

  He would not, by God, lose a man without doing everything in his power to save him. He couldn’t.

  Marion paused at the shattered door, and uncharacteristically looked up at the smoldering ceiling as he spoke.

  “God…Please lord, let me find him. I can’t walk out of here without him, and I sure don’t want to die.”

  There are moments in life, if one is lucky, when a person gets a faint glimpse that there just may be something beyond the world as he knows it. Call it supernatural, call it God, call it anything you like.

  For Stanley Marion that moment came when a whispered voice answered his quiet plea to the heavens, and nearly scared him into them.

  “Mary?” The whispered voice sounded in his ear. “Mary is that you?”

  Marion froze then, utterly shocked as his heart pounded in his ear and he looked up again, eyes rolling around as if he were going to see someone looking back down. It took a few moments for his mind to catch up to his heart, and he saw that the radio light was green, and there was a GPS locator blinking brightly on his helmet display.

  “Tom! Tom, I’m coming! Hold on!”

  “Stop yelling, Mary…I can hear you fine.”

  Marion ignored the request and kept yelling as he kicked his way through some fallen debris, following the signal through the flames and smoke. He quickly realized that the location he was receiving wasn’t on the floor he was currently searching, but well below.

  “Jesus, Tom, what the hell are you doing way down there!?”

  “I fell through the fucking floor, Mary, what did you think?”

  “Joey!” Marion called out, “Get me a line and plenty of water in here!”

  The voice from outside was heaven sent, and Marion could have kissed the hairy bastard when he replied.

  “We’re already coming in, Mary! This whole place is a goddamned warzone, I think we’ll be safer in the fuckin fire!”

  *****

  “Watch out, we’ve got another group coming in…”

  Major Malcolm nodded to the warning and glanced over to where Inspector Dougal was crouched in the corner. The police Inspector was shivering, cold, and miserable. She’d been soaked to the bone in the initial deluge and things had gotten a lot cooler around the solar power plant as the water from on high had drawn all the heat from the air. “Things are going to get hairy in a bit, Inspector.”

  She nodded, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of my end.”

  “You’ve done your end, Ma’am,” he told her, “leave this to us.”

  She scowled at him, but he held up a hand, “Seriously Inspector. It’s better if you stay back here.”

  She looked away from him, clearly unhappy with the ‘request’, but finally nodded after a moment. He nodded back, grateful for that acquiescence, and took up his XM-90 as he looked to the messenger.

  “Alright, Trooper…let’s do this.”

  The young SAS man, barely into his twenties Malcolm remembered, flashed him a grin and stepped out of the power relay room and into the artificial rain. He hadn’t gone more than a half dozen steps before the water had swallowed him up, and even the hardened SAS Major shivered at the thought of going back out in the cold just then.

  Thoughts of that nature were fine, he reflected as he stepped over the threshold and into the rain, just so long as they didn’t affect actions. He shifted his rifle into an easier carry position and set out across the cavernous room after his man.

  At that time, about two hundred yards away, another group of warriors were giving the chilling rain the evil eye as they walked slowly through the deluge, water running down their faces and into their eyes as they tried to blink it away.

  “I can’t get a response from Jacob, Ryan.”

  The man who had been, until that day, the Chief of Police for Tower City frowned. “That’s not right. Something must have happened.”

  “You think we should go back?”

  Ryan Emmerson hesitated, considering the options, then shook his head. “Not until we clear the tower. We need to get this crap figured out, and besides…we’re already soaked.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Yeah…I’m the boss,” Ryan muttered, shaking his head. “Alright. Tell the rest of them to start in…Be careful, take it slow…”

  “Will do.”

  A moment later they started slowly forward, a few men at a time as they searched for an enemy they believed to be waiting.

  Somewhere.

  Within the enormous base of the tower, the water soaked concrete splashed lightly under foot as the two groups slowly approached one another, each looking through the lousy visibility for the other in a dance nearly as old as mankind. Sound, sight, sometimes even smell or something less obvious would tell the story, triggering the event both sides knew was coming.

  In this case it was sound.

  Specifically, it was the sudden chatter of a radio squawking to life after a tired and frustrated SAS trooper had forgotten to secure the little device to VOX control only when he’d determined, hours earlier, that the radios were out. A second of carelessness erupted into a pocket lifetime of regret when three terrorist assault rifles swiveled as one and erupted into the dark.

  Major Malcolm hit the ground when the flash of gunfire erupted through the haze,
splashing into an inch of water that quickly soaked through what few clothes he had left that weren’t clinging to his body like a second skin. His own radio, properly secured, erupted into chatter as the rest of his team followed his lead and hit the ground, most of them cursing under their breath.

  “Johnny’s down!”

  “Son of a!”

  “Mutherfu…!”

  Malcolm growled, snapping out automatically. “Belay that chatter!”

  It was only after he gave the order that he realized that they had radios back.

  Of all the lousy goddamned times!

  He growled again, pushing his rifle out ahead of him, and located the flash of a rifle in the murky distance. “Watch your backs, don’t shoot each other…but take those bastards out.”

  Then he opened fire, the first in a fusillade of return fire that erupted from the other members of the team arrayed around his position. Malcolm trusted his men, and his memory, to know where they were supposed to be as he struggled to target moving tangos through the sheets of water that were still cascading down around him.

  In the back of his mind, some part of him noted the water from a distance and was amazed that the system had the reserves to keep up this kind of downpour for so long. Most of his mind, however, was well and truly focused on the present and the killing ground the central part of the solar tower had become.

  *****

  Anselm burst through the door, cracking the wood finish and splintering the framing as he hit it for the eighth time with the chair in his hands. He tossed the makeshift ram away as he reached through the door and fumbled with the lock on the other side.

  A manual deadbolt, locked solidly from the other side only.

  It clicked open with a twist of his fingers, and he kicked the door the rest of the way open. Behind him he left the bodies of Jacob Kalindon and an unnamed terrorist, and the secured forms of two others, one slumbering and one tied tightly to his chair.

  They’d be waiting for him when he got back.

  For now, he had another quarry, and this one was too important to give up.

  The Consulate portable was in his hand as he ran down the halls, one eye on the route, the other on the fan shaped screen that was currently linked to the American spy satellite currently aimed down at Tower City.