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“Negative. We will wait for Antonio to report what they find, but be ready.”
•••
The three CIA teams who’d hit the SIGINT building just minutes before found themselves heavily engaged in a wide stairwell, being targeted from below by both two-legged and four-legged robots.
After being stuck here for almost a minute, Larry Repult scooted on his kneepads to the railing, doing his best to remain just out of the line of fire, and he pulled a pin on a frag grenade. Two of his other teammates did the same, and they dropped them over the railing simultaneously.
After the frags clanked down a few turns in the stairwell, they exploded, a cloud of gray smoke rose from the stairs, and then the firing stopped. Quebec Two stood tentatively and looked over the side, then yanked his head back as gunfire chased him to cover.
He knelt back down and spoke into his headset. “Two-legged robots with P90 rifles.”
“Any human security?”
Two shook his head. “I saw blood on the stairs, didn’t see any dudes.”
Repult’s gloved hand ran through his beard while he thought. Finally, he tried to reach Travers again. “Mike One for Victor One, over?” Still nothing. He turned to Mike Six. “To hell with it, drop some C-4.”
Mike Six crawled up next to his TL and set a blasting cap in a coffee-mug-sized block of C-4.
Repult yelled down the stairwell. “Victor? Victor? If you’re down there, I need you to sound the fuck off!”
There was no response, and then after a nod from Mike One, Mike Six set the time fuse, then shouted, “Fire in the hole!”
The sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs told everyone up here that the two-legged bots had again begun ascending.
Mike Six dropped the C-4 and detonated it almost instantly.
The sound and resulting shock wave was easily three to five times that of the triple grenade toss seconds earlier, and most of the Ground Branch officers were knocked off their feet.
The smoke hadn’t even cleared before Mike One rose and shouted into his mic. “We’re moving! Clear by fire!”
The men descended, the first pair in the stack firing their M250s in short bursts as they went since they couldn’t see much through the smoke.
They’d made it down one flight of stairs when the trailing operator, Zulu Three, called out over the net, “Contact rear! I’m hearing movement above at the landing we just left.”
Repult said, “That’s gonna be the Cuban army. So much for them staying out of the building. Everyone keep moving, only engage if you have to.”
The men continued down as fast as they could in the smoke, passing the wrecked-out hulks of bipedal and quadrupedal bots on the stairs, putting bullets in the killing machines just to be sure.
•••
Thirty meters below and to the west of Alpha Mike, Bravo Zulu, and Papa Quebec, Chris Travers had led Victor and the now four tagalongs up one flight of stairs from the tunnel to level U3. Court trailed everyone else, keeping his gun pointed behind him as they moved through a gray concrete passage lined on both sides with old Soviet communication, mapping, and electronic signals intercept equipment. More murals on the walls, instructional signs in Cyrillic, everything covered in spiderwebs and dust. Off the passage they could see more hulking analog and early digital equipment lined up or stacked up in storage areas and in open rooms that looked like they’d once served as extra-secure shelters. Court found it hard to believe all this equipment would not have been taken away by the Cubans at some point; even the scrap metal value would have been significant in the impoverished nation, and he wondered if this area had been, like the tunnel, sealed off until Hinton and his people reopened it to use as a clandestine computer center.
Pace said, “Chris, we need to go up another level.”
“Yeah. I see another stairwell ahead, we’ll move up. At least we’re not on the same stairs where we made all that noise back there.”
“Roger that,” Pace replied. It seemed as if they’d bypassed any more LAWs or security by coming this way.
Soon the team entered an open room with two sets of double doors on the far wall, spaced apart on opposite sides of a concrete stairwell that flowed into the center of the room. It was as dark and dirty here as it had been on the entire floor, but there was obviously more artificial light coming from above, filtering down the stairs and into the room, which made Court optimistic they were heading towards the enemy’s nerve center.
Hash led the way now, and he raised his rifle and then stepped towards the stairwell, “slicing the pie” slowly so he didn’t make himself an easy target for an unseen enemy.
Court watched while the man looked up, then immediately leapt back, away from the stairs.
The concussive report of a Greyhound’s 6.5-millimeter boomed through the concrete room, and then more gunfire erupted. The flooring in front of the stairs pocked and disintegrated; Court and Zack dived to the left, as Travers, Zoya, Pace, and the four others scrambled to the larger area to the right.
The gunfire stopped and Travers called into his headset, “Everybody okay?”
