Dick Stivers: Deathbites

In the moment that Jishin hesitated, the decision slipped through her fingers.

Two men in combat fatigues burst through the doorway. One turned back to cover their tails while the other faced the room, bringing his automatic weapon to bear on the two startled terrorists with the M-16s. Jishin felt a momentary pang of envy that someone opposing her should be able to command such fine warriors.

Jishin had the SCK in firing position. She was already targeted on the intruder.

As Jishin squeezed the trigger to cut up the interlopers with 9mm parabellums, she was jolted forward, causing the deadly blast to chew up flooring. The wooden stool, which Lao had been sitting on when Jishin broke into the lab, bounced off her back and clattered around her feet.

The two terrorists with the M-16s brought them up with well-trained precision. Well-trained precision was too slow. Blancanales already had a figure eight of .223 tumblers chewing into them and throwing them onto their backs. Dying fingers sent sporadic bursts into the ceiling.

Gadgets's Uzi sent another batch of death chattering up the hallway, teaching caution to the terrorist reinforcement.

Throwing the stool had taken Lao's attention off Nogi. In spite of the pain he was suffering, he got off the floor and hit her with a quick ax-hand across the upper vertebrae. It was not sufficient to kill the small woman, but it rendered her almost unconscious. Nogi held her for a shield against Politician's firepower.

When Jishin recovered her balance, she snatched up the stool and heaved it backward through the lab's window.

Pol noticed her maneuvers peripherally, but he was also absorbing the drama between Nogi and Lao. The problem of getting the small research scientist away from the two karateka was not an easy one. He decided to eliminate the terrorist in the open first. As he brought the M-203 to bear on Jishin, she dropped the empty SCK and made a head-first dive out the window. He swung the weapon back on the male.

The man was a wily fighter. Although he was larger than his semiconscious victim, he kept dodging and weaving behind her, never offering a clear target for as much as a half second. As he did so, he edged toward the broken window.

Politician let go of his weapon and made his own headfirst dive across a laboratory table. Nogi had the choice of abandoning his hostage, or finding himself in a melee with an aikido expert and a warrior of unknown abilities.

Nogi shoved his hostage into Politician's flight path, and joined his leader in trying to earn his wings from a first-floor window.

Politician could not change the course of his headfirst dive. He could only sweep Lao to him and roll so that he landed on his back with the woman on top of him. She was small, but she was an incredibly compact bundle of human being. The impact knocked the wind out of Politician.

Lao had been surprised to see the savvy, white-haired warrior react with such total disregard for his own safety. She lay sprawled on top of Politician, collecting her wits.

Gadgets fired his Uzi.

"They're pushing a steel bench up the hall ahead of them," he called to Pol.

As Politician and Gadgets vanished along their newly created cross corridor, Lyons waited until a terrorist looked around the corner and then opened the goon's head with a choice selection of double-ought and number-two lead balls. With the terrorists at the head of the hall taken care of, Lyons walked to the back wall of the office and put his fist through it.

It took only seconds to punch and kick an opening through the plasterboard into the adjacent office. Two karate front kicks took one of the two-by-four studs out of his way. He stepped through and opened a door to the first corridor.

The corridor served the rarified and protected areas where the company computer worked. Several technicians were being forced at gunpoint to make the computer disgorge information for the benefit of terrorists who would rather destroy than build.

Lyons's right hand went to his hip and came back filled with Colt Python. He stood in the doorway to the computer room and let the Python sting each head whose body held a gun. Four terrorists had their tapes erased in three seconds. Only the last reacted swiftly enough to get a shot off — it went harmlessly into the ceiling.

The bewildered technicians stood motionless, staring at head-smashed terrorists. Lyons stood looking at the ceiling, where the blast from the dying terrorist's gun had removed an acoustic tile. There was a four-foot crawl space above the tiles. Before the computer technicians could recover their wits, the large blond man who had just exterminated their captors leaped onto a high-speed tape-drive cabinet. From there he pushed a couple of sound tiles out of the way and disappeared into the ceiling. He said nothing to them.

When Lyons reached an end wall, he carefully removed a ceiling tile and looked down. He was over the cross corridor. Twenty feet along, four terrorists were peering down the second hallway.

Lyons pulled a frag from his web belt, held it to the count of three and tossed it into the midst of the four.

"What's..." began one man as the grenade fell past his eyes. That was as far as any of them got.

Lyons leaped from the crawl space and advanced toward the third corridor, Atchisson in debating position.

When Gadgets announced that the terrorists were coming up the hall behind a shield, Lao rolled off Pol and the Able Team warrior leaped to his feet.

Lao Ti had given herself up for dead the moment Jishin had broken into the laboratory. As all effective warriors must do, she considered each second of life a postponement of the inevitable. Now these two strange fighters had bought her an entirely new existence. Suddenly life seemed to sparkle as it never had before. Although for twenty-eight of her thirty-two years she had been trained in the warriors' way, never before had her life been so close to being over. The new life was a gloriously bright and profound thing. She savored it deeply.

Blancanales was too preoccupied with the sounds of gunfire and the advancing enemy to really appreciate the situation, but he was very aware of what was happening in Lao's mind. It was an experience he had felt after many close encounters with death, but it was a feeling that was impossible to share.

As Pol dashed to retrieve the M-203, he introduced himself and Gadgets.

Politician snatched up the M-203 and shoved a frag into the launcher as he ran for the doorway. He peered out at the steel bench, slowly advancing the length of the hall. It was less than twenty feet from the broken door to the lab.

Pol aimed carefully and shot the grenade over the top of the bench. It went too far and did only minor damage to the terrorists.

"Get ready to crouch and run," Pol told Gadgets.

Politician plucked an HE with a contact detonator from his bandolier. He shot the charge straight into the side of the steel table. Pol, Gadgets and Lao ducked, opened their mouths and covered their ears against the shock wave that bounced back down the hall. As soon as the shock wave hit them, they were up and running down the hall toward the steel workbench.

Gadgets, who was in the lead, suddenly yelled.

"Hit dirt!"

The three of them dropped as the recognizable booming of the Atchisson Assault 12 filled the air with noise and a hail of death. When the booming stopped, Gadgets and Pol shouted and then popped over the top of the steel barrier, ready to finish off any surviving terrorists. There were none.

In the silence after the shooting, they could hear the sound of a siren outside.

Lao, Gadgets and Politician joined Lyons in the cross corridor.

Lyons dug an id wallet out of a pocket.