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Resolutely, O'Dae turned his eyes away. Whoever he was, he definitely wasn't one of the blackcollars. "What are you all standing around here for?" he snapped at the rest of the squad grouped around him. "Let's get back to business."
They stepped back into the hall and continued on their cautious way. Behind them, barely audible through their armor, came a noise, and O'Dae turned around as a stretcher team emerged from the elevator and moved to the first of the crumpled bodies. "One in here, too," he called to them, pointing toward the room he'd just left. Their officer waved in acknowledgment, and O'Dae turned away with an odd feeling of relief. Hunting escaped prisoners could be highly unpleasant duty, especially if there was shooting to be done, but he would take it over stretcher carrying any day of the month. At least with prisoner hunting it was the enemy who usually got hurt, not his fellow Security men.
And some of the enemy were going to be hurt tonight. O'Dae was going to make damn sure of that.
Gripping his laser tighter, he hurried to catch up with his men as, behind him, the second wave of commandos arrived.
Chapter 28
Galway's head had fallen forward in such a way that the door was out of his sight, and his first clue that the rescuers were at hand was the tingle of a needle in his arm as paral-drug antidote was injected. "We'll have you out of here in a minute, sir," someone murmured in his ear. "Please be as quiet as possible—we think the blackcollars are holed up in the safe room across the hall, and we don't want them to know we're here until we're ready to blow them out of there."
"Ungh," Galway grunted in acknowledgment. Making noise wasn't likely to be a problem for at least a few more minutes; his tongue still felt like a long-dead animal.
Qui
"Damn them—damn that Pittman, especially. Who's that—Major O'Dae? What's the situation, Major?"
"Not too bad, sir—I think they've outsmarted themselves." The major whispered a quick summary of events both inside and outside the Security building. Galway listened with half an ear, most of his attention on getting his muscles going again after nearly a half hour of paralysis. Still, if the major was reading things correctly, the situation did indeed seem to be under control at the moment.
A circumstance that struck him as suspiciously odd.
"...we've taken fifteen injured men downstairs to the infirmary already—mostly head wounds, I gather, from what I could see of the bloodstains. Haven't had a report from down there lately, but most of the casualties apparently had good heartbeats, so my guess is they're doing all right—"
"Yes, fine," Qui
"Never mind the wounded for now. You're sure the blackcollars are in the safe room?"
"We've been over the entire floor, General," O'Dae assured him. "There's nowhere else they could be."
"Could they have disguised themselves as Security men and gone down with your litter teams?"
Galway asked, forcing the words out past his still-wooden tongue.
"No, sir," O'Dae said, sounding both confident and a little indignant. "No one but the injured have left the floor—we've made damn sure of that."
"Then perhaps—"
"And they were injured, all of them," O'Dae added, "unless you're suggesting the blackcollars cracked their own skulls for blood to dab themselves with."
"You did have medics up here making sure it was real blood, then?" Galway persisted, something in him unwilling to let go of it.
"I'm sure they did," Qui
Major—how do you intend to blast the bastards out?"
"Uh... I've got two heavy laser ca
"Make sure about what?" Qui
"Well... yes, sir. But if they could somehow have smuggled in fake blood... couldn't they have had disguise kits, too?"
"Oh, hell," Galway muttered as an unpleasant tremor twisted his gut. "General... the whole setup for our ambush came from Pittman."
"Hell!" Qui
"Sir—?"
"Do it, damn you," Qui
O'Dae gulped and spoke urgently into his mike, a look of incomprehension on his face.
He was too late. By the time the guard team reached the infirmary all they found was a handful of wounded Security men and unconscious medics... and from the exit the guards were ominously silent, as well.
—
The general alarm came through on the Security van's radio five minutes into their mad drive toward the fence and freedom. "Great," Caine muttered.
"They had to catch on eventually," Lathe said from behind the wheel. "Frankly, I didn't think we'd get even this much of a head start. I guess the limpet mines Mordecai planted rattled them more than we expected."
Caine looked at him, wincing in spite of himself at the comsquare's horrible "head wound" and the
"blood" coating his face. "I suppose I should be grateful that you told at least some of us about this one," he gritted, putting as much sarcasm into the words as he could. "It's an improvement over Argent, anyway."
Lathe sighed, rubbing ineffectively at the makeup on his face. "I'm sorry, but it had to be done this way."
"Why? Because I couldn't be trusted to react properly when Pittman betrayed us? What about the rest of you? You ought to have been as angry as I was."
"Perhaps. But since Pittman was your teammate, you and the others would naturally have been expected to react the most strongly. You, particularly, were the one Galway was watching closest—I don't know whether you noticed that." The comsquare shrugged fractionally. "Besides which, Pittman had to be able to say in complete honesty that you didn't suspect him when he made his phone calls. They were almost certainly analyzing his voiceprint patterns, and any lies would have been picked up on immediately."
Caine turned away and glowered out the windshield. Once more Lathe had played fast and loose with both the game and his own allies... and once more the fact that logic was on his side didn't help a damn.
Lathe turned a corner, and a few blocks ahead Caine saw the fence at Athena's perimeter. "I hope you have some way to get through the Security troops they're bound to have at the gate up there," he said tartly. "It'd be a shame to waste a perfectly good double agent getting into a place you can't get out of."
"I've got a plan," Lathe said evenly.
"One that takes the lasers up on Green Mountain into account?"
"If you'll notice," Skyler's voice came from the crowded compartment behind him, "we've been taking a route that gives us minimum exposure to those lasers."
"Which probably wasn't necessary," Lathe added. "I doubt the lasers can be set to shoot at ground targets inside the fence—too much danger of misfires or enemy mischief. But there was no point in taking chances."
"What about when we hit the fence proper?" A
"We're not going to try and bluff our way past the guards, are we?"