LITMIR.BIZ

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were lovers—but she remained professional and focused during times like this. She had seen too many mistakes caused by people not paying attention, and as a doctor her first concern had to be her patient.

      Mildred could see that Ricky wouldn’t make it to the outside in the two minutes they had left. He was slowing even now, not quite limping but certainly dragging his heels. His face was looking paler, too: blood loss.

      “Jak, we’re going to have to stop,” Mildred called.

      Without slowing his pace, Jak glanced over his shoulder and nodded. “We go. No point all dying.”

      It was a harsh truth, Mildred knew. She turned back to Ricky, indicating an open doorway. “Stop here,” she instructed.

      “But Ryan said...” Ricky began.

      Mildred shot him a look. “I need to look at that wound,” she said. “In here.” She led him through the open doorway into what appeared to be a television monitoring room. The room contained two swivel chairs and a bank of television screens that dominated one wall in a gentle curve.

      Ricky looked around with evident concern. “Lot of glass here if the bomb goes off.”

      Mildred ignored him. “Lift up your arms,” she said, and Ricky did so.

      * * *

      RYANSTOODINthe doorway to the control room, wondering how long they had.

      “J.B.?”

      Inside the chamber, J.B. crouched by the device, warily eyeballing it. The timer was attached to a chemical mix with an explosive and an accelerant to increase the blast. When it went off, it would appear to be a single explosion, but in fact there would be two in very quick succession, the first triggering the full payload of the device. The Armorer judged the size of the device.

      “The armaglass will hold the explosion,” he called back to Ryan.

      “What about defusing it?” Ryan asked.

      J.B. shook his head, still holding the wire cutters in front of him. “This bastard’s wired up six ways to Sunday. I’d need hours to figure it out,” he admitted.

      “How long do we have?”

      “Thirty seconds,” J.B. replied, slipping his wire cutters back into his jacket pocket. Then he got up from his crouch, knowing better than to rush. Rushing only made a person careless; the one time in a million that a person would slip on the floor of a chamber and earn a concussion. Thirty seconds was plenty of time to get out.

      Ryan was waiting for J.B. at the door to the control room. If the bomb went off early, they were dead, but Ryan wouldn’t leave J.B.—they had been brothers in arms for too long for him to do that.

      J.B. made his way swiftly to the chamber door and pulled it closed behind him. Once the door was closed, the mat-trans chamber was designed to be airtight to ensure a clean jump when in use. J.B. trusted that to help protect them from the blast. There were fifteen seconds left now before the bomb went off.

      J.B. turned, checking his pockets nervously as he hurried from the room. He still had the M-4000 and the Mini-Uzi he habitually carried; it wouldn’t do to escape the explosion only to find himself weaponless.

      Ryan watched as J.B. strode toward him.

      “What are you still doing here?” J.B. asked, irritated.

      “You think I’m letting you get blown up on your own?” Ryan snapped back. “Too much water under the bridge for that.”

      J.B. nodded. “Ten seconds,” he said as he followed Ryan into the stark corridor.

      Then the two men started to run, hurrying for the nearest doorway, which was cracked open. They pried it open wider to accommodate their size and slipped inside.

      “Four...three...two...one,” J.B. intoned. When he got to “two,” both men turned away from the direction of the blast and placed their hands over their ears.

      A moment later a dull sound like a thump reverberated through the redoubt, followed by a much louder boom accompanied almost instantaneously by the tinkling sound of shattering glass. Ryan and J.B. fell to the floor as the shockwave rocked through the redoubt.

      * * *

      JAKWASWITHDoc and Krysty when the bomb exploded. They were standing in a garage area of the redoubt, close to the surface and far enough away that they heard the explosion as a kind of distant cough. Still, they all knew exactly what it was and for a moment a solemn hush seemed to pass over them.

      Krysty tensed. “Ryan...”

      Doc held on to her, pulling her close. “Relax, Krysty, my girl,” he said, trying to calm her. “We don’t know what has happened yet.”

      “I want to go back,” Krysty told him.

      “Going back would only serve to place us in more danger,” Doc said reasonably. “They will come to us when they are ready.”

      A few paces ahead of them, Jak had adopted a semi-crouch as he walked toward the door to the redoubt. The door lay on one side of the wide, garage-like area within which a few military vehicles still remained. The vehicles had been stripped down to shells, their components and armament long gone, tires removed along with anything else that anyone might be able to put to use. Worryingly, the door to the redoubt was open and showed about four feet of blue sky along with the scrappy dirt of an overgrown track.

      Jak’s Colt Python had materialized in his hand once more. He didn’t like the fact that the door was open. It meant someone had been inside, which the bomb had already indicated, and that maybe they hadn’t had time to close it again, which meant they could still be nearby. Jak’s pale hand flicked at the Colt’s trigger guard absently as he approached the opening, padding toward it on silent feet.

      Jak stopped for a moment at the open door and listened, isolating the sounds coming from outside. There were birds chirruping, the buzz of insects...and a being, moving amid the undergrowth, feet shuffling on leaves and grass. A moment later Jak heard another sound—more figures approaching, moving in unison with military precision, moving fast.

      Blaster poised in front of him, Jak stepped through the open door of the redoubt.

       Chapter Three

      The redoubt door had been propped open using a web of sawed-down tree limbs and pieces of metal, Jak noted as he stepped through the opening. The construction was well planned and solid, raised on a scaffold-type arrangement. In addition, attention had been paid to the meeting point where the door slid into the wall. There was no exposed hinge or mechanism there, but someone had gone to a lot of trouble to bend the thick titanium door so that it would not snap back. Someone who wanted to get in and get out again.

      There were trees all around, and it took a moment for Jak to zone out the noises of the local fauna and locate the sound of shuffling feet he had first noted from inside the redoubt. There. To the left.

      A dirt track led to the redoubt entrance with a scrubby grass border to either side, wide enough to carry a wag. The scarred remains of a tarmac road had all but disintegrated, leaving black chunks of broken tarmac dotted amid the dirt. Jak stepped over the path and onto the grass, where he could ensure his passage would remain silent. The grass shone with dew, catching the morning sunlight in sparkling spots like glitter.

      The sounds of marching feet were getting closer, and they were moving fast. Jak guessed at least three people were among the group, but it was hard to tell from the way the footsteps echoed. There could be three or three hundred moving in step.

      Crouching, his blaster held in one hand, Jak scrambled across the scrub, weaving swiftly between stubby trees. His keen eyes spotted the figure crouching behind a bush, tiny red berries arrayed across it like beads of blood. It was a man, mid-thirties with a little gray clouding his dark beard, wearing cotton clothes, light and simple and remarkably clean. His hands were dirty, though, and there

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