Got them right where we want em
Gradie stood over the boxes spilling out of the mutilated plastic pallet covering and checked his phone again. EP had gone back in the footage and taken images from when the pallet Cooper had slipped the coin in was assembled in the receiving bay at the POE and Gradie tried to match the blurry pixels to the boxes before him. The fact that he couldn’t see what boxes were in the pallets until he cut the semi-opaque plastic off would have been frustrating if not for the fact that every pallet he had cut open so far had boxes on it that looked very those-pixels-esqe anyway.
He felt two possibilities open to him, each standing off in the dusty darkness like the monsters of sleep paralysis; either he found the coin before the other side, whoever they were, attacked, and the gunfight burning in the back of his mind never even happened, or he would be digging though pallets in the middle of a gunfight, and it would all come down to him finding the coin before a bullet found him. Even if there was an afterlife, dying in a dusty pile of rejected appliances and other consumer products didn’t seem like the way to go, and a rising voice, screaming at him to drop his guns and run out the side door, was becoming more articulate by the second.
“How many pallets he got left?” Sam whispered, on the line.
“Eight,” EP answered, like announcing a death.
“Oh lord!”
Gradie didn’t tell them that it was more like nine, or eight and a half. Mostly out of spite. He didn’t know why he was on the main channel anyway. Just so he could hear them gossip about his speed? Why not come help him?
He kicked the remaining stacked boxes over, hoping they would be easier to dig through in a single layer.
“Stay quiet,” EP said.
“How am I supposed to do this quietly?” he whispered.
“Figure it out. This is the part where you show you have what it takes to be here. And don’t say another word unless your life is at stake.”
He cut open the next pallet and the sound slid through hundreds of thousands of square feet of dead space. EP’s drone, hovering above him, shone an IR illuminator on the boxes, and he tried to convince himself that this is what he had signed up for.
EP ran through the defense for the hundredth time. The explosive placements. The barrier pallets set up in front of most of the small entrance doors to funnel the attackers towards the others. The positioning of the team, which EP had dialed in to a degree of centimeters, with direction from Michael and Philip. The team’s targeting lasers had painted her map in various colors, with blind spots revealed in empty grey.
Her drones filled in the gaps. They were marked on the map like a starfield, programmed with predetermined evasive paths, loaded with explosives or lights, or just sensors and cameras. She did a quick sweep of the ones outside, stationary, hidden. Some parked on the beams at the underside of the nearby overpass. Some atop towering highway lights.
Her third eye moved out farther still, and detected the ripples of the oncoming attack. Multi-vehicle crashes. Police scanner chatter about sightings of “suspects in the main case”, and other signs the attackers were shooing law enforcement away from the area like flies, baiting them across the city. But beyond that, there was no sign of them. No unordinary traffic heading for the DC, no unexplainable sense of Hardworlders at work, not since the phone call. Just rumblings, like a distant thunder.
She returned her thoughts and scanning to the warehouse, now dark and still.
Lindsey and Philip were up on the catwalk, silent as the dust, with duffle bags full of sand and barrier pallets placed around them. Luke and Sam down on the floor, surrounded by cover, concealment, and ammo. The escape routes and fall-back positions were all planned out. They had drilled it verbally ten times. Everything that could be done had been done. Now was the time for controlling breathing and planning for the unpredictable.
But they had been waiting in silence for at least ten minutes and the tension was gone, slowly replaced by annoyance and sleeping limbs.
“Can you call them and see where they’re at? I’m worried,” Luke said, his voice breaking out like a bright screen in a movie theater.
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“Shut up!” Lindsey hissed, but her words were bouncing in laughter.
“I’m telling you, they only called so we would get spooked and cut our set up short,” Philip said. Michael had only given them ten minutes after the call to finish preparing, vetoing Philip's request to wait until EP spotted something.
“Which didn’t work,” Lindsey hissed. “We got all the gear out.” She had spent the full ten minutes driving around the warehouse planting charges.
“Yeah, but we could have spent more time setting up ped barriers for kill zones,” Philip said.
“With what?”
“What? All these pallets! Did you not notice we’re in a—”
“Vehicles on the access road,” EP said.
The warehouse got dead quiet again beside the shuffling sound of Gradie digging through boxes.
“A black SUV,” EP continued. “Probably armored, judging by the way it’s riding. Followed by a sedan. Got others coming from the west. Work Van, another SUV, two trucks…” EP bit off her words. It was a caravan, ten vehicles and counting, coalescing out of the mindless hum of the surrounding traffic into something sinister and focused. Once invisible on the three highways that circled the district of warehouses, now in the open, brazen, like fighter planes abandoning the cover of clouds.
“You sure it’s not the cleaning crew?” Luke whispered.
“Yeah, and you’re the stain,” Lindsey whispered. Luke laughed in his throat.
“They’re going dark,” EP said. On her drone feed, the headlights died as the cars approached the DC, as if an invisible force radiated from it and demanded darkness. A moment later the lights in the parking lot went off in dark disks of shadow. A drone on the roof caught the slight slaps of suppressed weapons on its audio feed as they skipped across the lot. EP switched to infrared and watched the vehicles approach in light blue, the cones of their IR illuminator headlights preceding them like sails. Other cars moved into the back lot and darkness conquered it methodically.
“Vehicles in both lots. No clear attack point yet,” EP advised them.
“Don’t fire until you can get a whole squad, but don’t let two squads link up,” Philip said. EP saw Lindsey shake her head in a section of her screen.
There were more cracks in the lot. EP saw two of her outside drone feeds go dark. “Shit.” She set the high flying one on evasive maneuvers and the feed started to roll around. These first minor moves always quickened her heart rate the worst. A pawn for a pawn. Once you were in it, you hardly noticed.
She caught movement on the feed of the front lot.
“Joey, they’re stacking up on the wall south of the main door. Got another squad going in the north office. Just broke the glass.”
“Back lot?” Lindsey whispered.
EP glanced at the west feed. “Just sitting in their cars right now.” In her peripherals, Luke made a hand signal in one frame, and the gunmen in the front lot shattered the doors in another.
“Joe’s got contact.”
Luke was set up on the ground floor, among a serpent coil of conveyor belts, his position reinforced with pallets of sandbags, the MG3 resting on its bipod, pointing towards the front door like a missile already in flight. He had aimed the weapon at the central metal detector with a laser sight when he first set up.
The men came in the front door over broken glass. Their active IR glowed like Christmas as they scanned corners and cleared the security office from the lobby. He could tell they were fodder. They had all the right moves, but something was lacking. They crossed the lobby in swift practiced steps that cut the distance into bits the way their rifles pie-sliced the room. Point man stepped square in front of the central metal detector, like a target moving into the crosshairs in an old arcade game, and Luke opened fire with a smile.
The scream of the MG3 bounced off every surface in the warehouse. It made the sheet metal roof sing its song, a solid roar, indivisible, each retort blended into the next. Shell casings and links poured onto the ground as the gun pushed into his shoulder, devoured the ammo belt, and threw fire at the lobby. Even with the flash suppressor, the muzzle flash blinded him during the bursts.
The rounds rang off the metal skeletons of the turnstiles in flechette sparks and cracked off the floor. Two of the IR lasers jerked down to the ground as the men holding them died. His ammo belts had their tracers replaced with standard rounds, so the bullets struck out unseen. At just under fifty yards, it didn’t matter.
Rounds zipped in from the parking lot and struck pallets and boxes around him. More like a whimper than a counter-attack. Luke had poured almost a hundred rounds through the lobby in about five seconds, and all he could see were bodies. Vehicles squealed through the lot to get out of his line of sight. He fired shorter bursts after them and rounds sparked off the lot. Someone out of sight was screaming into a radio.
“Can you tag that guy?” he said softly, between bursts. One of EP’s drones lit up a section of wall to the left of the turnstiles with an IR beam and he put a half-second burst into it. The voice stopped.
“They’re moving in the truck door office,” EP said. “Charge going off.” An explosion rocked the building, like some giant playing drums on the roof. The roar came through their earbuds as a moment of silence. The office windows shattered out onto the main floor. Sam swore and Luke chuckled as he felt the vibration at his back and in his boots.
“Got em. Whole squad,” EP said.
On her left monitor, an outside drone feed showed a plume of debris where the trucker entrance had been. The cars in the back lot stopped moving. Men got out next to a few of them and aimed at the building from cover. Weapons came out of trunks and doors.
Movement in another window drew a portion of her focus, which was fragmented across multiple screens, despite the tunnel-vision-tug of adrenaline.
A five-man squad had broken into the north-east office and now moved towards the door to the warehouse floor. One of them was listening to intel from a voice channel she hadn’t been able to get into.
“On your door Max,” EP told him.