Ken Goddard - Prey

The second bullet that slammed his back into the wall was unnecessary. The ICER team member, who could never quite control his temper when he tried to outwit Clarence MacDonald's simulators, was dead before his knees hit the floor.

When Dwight Stoner hobbled into the lower-level conference room, he saw Mike Takahara trying to push himself up on his hands and knees, coughing out blood in the process. As he moved to the doorway of the command-and- control center, Stoner saw the sprawled bodies of Clarence MacDonald, who was starting to moan and move around a little, and Morito Asai, who wasn't doing either, and a man in a wheelchair working frantically at the keyboard of the control console.

Roy Parker didn't see or hear Dwight Stoner coming until the agent's huge body suddenly filled the doorway and blocked out the incoming light from the adjoining conference room. Parker turned to look and then drew back in shock as he saw the huge form pointing the barrel of the 12-gauge pump shotgun directly at his head.

"Move away from that desk," Stoner ordered in a cold, deep, and unfeeling voice.

"It wasn't me, buddy. I didn't shoot any of them," Parker said carefully, trying to keep his voice steady as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the red numerals on the control board change from thirty-three to thirty-two.

"Shut up and keep your hands in the air," Stoner ordered.

"I'm carrying a Beretta nine-millimeter in a shoulder holster, right-hand draw, under my jacket," Parker said quietly as Stoner moved slowly around to his back. "It's clean. It hasn't been fired." Then Parker took a deep breath as he felt the shotgun barrel against the base of his skull.

"Look at the blood splatters on that wall," Parker continued in a voice as steady as he could manage. "No nine-mil in the world could do that. That's Saltmann. He carries a forty-four mag with hot loads. Like a fucking freight train when they hit."

The barrel of the shotgun dug deeper into Parker's neck, and he immediately realized that he had said the wrong thing.

"Hey, no, wait a minute!" Parker whispered frantically. "You gotta listen. They wired this place to blow, and it's-"

"It's okay, man. He's not the shooter," Mike Takahara gasped in a pain-filled voice, holding his right arm tight against his severely broken rib cage as he slowly reached into Roy Parker's jacket with his left hand and pulled out the loaded and locked 9mm pistol. "Big curly-haired bastard wearing an FBI raid jacket."

"That's Saltmann," Parker nodded, nervously aware that the barrel of the shotgun was still pressed tight against his neck. "He's the cutter on this deal. He's supposed to shut the whole operation down and blow the place if something goes wrong."

"Keep talking," Mike Takahara directed in a painful whisper. He stuck the 9mm Beretta in the back of his belt, brought Parker's hands down, one at a time, and handcuffed them through the left wheel of the wheelchair. Then he wiped the blood from his mouth and tried not to cough or breathe any more than he had to as he placed his shaky left hand on the console for support. He tried to blink his eyes clear enough to see how the control board had been designed.

"The guys on top wanted to make sure they didn't end up with another Watergate or an Iran-Contra deal blowing up in their face," Parker went on carefully, sensing that the two agents were beyond the point of caring about rules and regulations. "So they put Saltmann, Arty, Corrie, and me in as a safety valve. Something goes wrong, we're supposed to make the whole thing go away."

In the background, Command Sergeant Major Clarence MacDonald clutched both forearms to his chest in the area where the hot-loaded. 44 Magnum expanding round had mushroomed against his Kevlar vest, breaking several of his ribs and causing massive bruising all the way to the pericardial covering of his heart. He tried to bring himself up to a sitting position.

"That what happened to the little guy in the doorway, and to the broad out there on the floor?" Stoner growled.

"Yeah. We're supposed to take everybody out so they don't get any ideas about talking," Parker nodded. "Only, Arty and Corrie are dead, and I'm pretty much out of it, so Saltmann's on his own."

"So who takes you guys out?" Mike Takahara asked in almost a whisper as he motioned for Stoner to drag the wheelchair out of the way. Then he sat down gratefully in the console chair and used his left hand to call up the menu on the screen.

"Yeah, we talked about that," Parker said nervously as he felt the shotgun barrel dig into the back of his neck again. "We've got FBI and DEA credentials that're supposed to look good enough to let us talk our way out, but we figured-"

Then the red numerals on the console board changed from a thirty-two to a thirty-one, and Parker started to panic.

"For Christ's sake, man," he pleaded, "we've gotta shut this damn thing down. It's gonna blow in thirty-one minutes, and I can't do a goddamn thing to stop it."

Mike Takahara had already discovered that "Security/ Destruction" was locked out of the menu. He tried to go in through the operating system and found himself blocked there also.

"What's your access code?" Takahara whispered.

"'Sunshine,' but it won't do you any good," Parker said. "I already tried. It doesn't work."

Mike Takahara tried a series of machine language instructions that should have given him access to the back door of the processing chip, but they didn't.

The red numerals changed from thirty-one to twenty-nine.

"How's it wired?" Mike Takahara finally asked.

"It's a dual system," Parker said. "First series of explosions takes out the internal cross-support walls, and probably kills everybody inside. The second series goes off fifteen seconds later and basically blows the two main side walls into each other like a couple of fucking bricks."

Dwight Stoner muttered something under his breath, but Takahara ignored it.

"What's the explosive?" he asked.

"They said C-Four, but I don't know," Parker said. "They never showed any of it to me."

"Come on, Snoopy, how long's it gonna take you to break into this thing?" Dwight Stoner demanded uneasily as he listened to the sound of automatic gunfire in the distance.

"The long, safe way, probably a couple of hours," Takahara whispered, wincing as he readjusted himself in the chair.

"For Christ's sake, we haven't got a couple of hours!" Roy Parker exploded, and then froze as the shotgun barrel pushed harder against his neck. "Come on, man," he pleaded quietly. "We can't get out of here, because the goddamned doors are blocked off. Do it the fucking short way."

"Right," Mike Takahara nodded, groaning in pain as he reached around behind his back and drew out Parker's 9mm Beretta. Then, before Dwight Stoner could say or do anything to stop him, the technical agent fired five 9mm pistol rounds pointblank into the main processing unit of the command-and-control computer.

The handcuffed counterterrorist looked on in horror as every light on the command-and-control console seemed to increase in intensity and the red numeral display went haywire. Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, the console board went dead, the red numerals blinked out, the pulsating alarm was suddenly silent, and the red warning lights stopped flashing.

As Roy Parker and Dwight Stoner turned to stare at Mike Takahara with expressions that ranged from absolute horror to stunned disbelief, the technical agent looked up at the two men and said with the smallest shrug possible, "I cheat."

Shaking his head and muttering another heartfelt curse, Stoner hobbled over to where Sergeant Clarence MacDonald had managed to pull himself up into a sitting position. Judging from the stunned expression on the combat instructor's face, Stoner figured that MacDonald was alert enough to realize what Mike Takahara had done.