“Yes sir.” the sergeant replied. He was in the driver’s seat of the vehicle, strapped in and ready to watch the show through the periscopes on his hatch.
Although Jesse was the tank commander, today on his skeleton crew, he sat in the gunner’s seat of the 65 ton vehicle. The main gun was already loaded. He looked through his periscope and briefly considered the absurdity of using an Abrams main battle tank against a stationary target that didn’t shoot back.
Talk about overkill, he thought.
He spoke softly into his microphone while gripping the firing mechanism.
“Three…two…”
26.
Section Central, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Duncan remained silent waiting for his chance. He sat in the dark, comfortable with his view of things. He was wearing a helmet with night vision optics attached. He could see everything in the hangar well enough. He patiently waited as Damien stalked slowly from pallet to pallet in the dark. He breathed slowly in and out, watching.
Damien worked his way around the pallets, sometimes springing up and swiping, as if he expected another attack from above. When he had made his way forward in the hangar and run out of obstacles behind which Duncan might have hid, it was clear the man was losing his patience. He broke the silence again.
“So where are ya, Tommy-boy? Don’t tell me yer too scared to keep playing our little game?”
Duncan smiled in the darkness. He had never left the game.
“You know I’m going to find you eventually, right? And then I’ll be carving me up a slice of presidential corned beef, is what I’ll be doing.”
Duncan raised his hand and the object he held. He pointed it at Damien but didn’t turn it on yet. No, no yet. Wait for it to be perfect.
Damien stepped backward in the dark. The faint glowsticks had finally died completely and the man’s pupils—no matter how dilated—could not see in the total dark of the yawning hangar’s space. The man spun suddenly, slashing out with his knife at nothing. He dropped slowly to the floor and crawled in the total dark toward the steel security door. When his outstretched fingers in the dark brushed against the door, Damien stood and put his back to it. He waved out in the dark again with the blade of his knife. Then he slid his back along the door, moving toward the center of the giant steel obstacle.
Just where I want you to go. Duncan thought. Just a few more feet.
“Come on, Duncan! Come out and fight!”
The cockpit of the stealth modified MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was perfectly comfortable as Tom Duncan, callsign: Deep Blue, raised and fired the handheld laser target designator, painting Damien with an invisible beam of light that the Black Hawk’s systems could use to lock in on the man. He was standing no more than four meters in front of the helicopter, but he couldn’t see it because Duncan was running the controls in night-vision stealth mode.
“Haven’t you got anything to fookin say?”
Duncan toggled the loud speaker. “Yes, actually I do.” His voice boomed across the hangar and echoed hard, sounding like it came from everywhere at once.
Then he flicked open his night vision goggles and toggled the powerful klieg spotlights on the ESSS stub wings to either side of the helicopter’s body. The lights threw the entire hangar into a bright white wash. Even though the rotor blades weren’t spinning, the vehicle must have looked like doom to Damien with its four AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, two to a side.
“Goodbye,” Duncan said. He pulled the trigger, launching one of the Hellfires on the left port stub off its hardpoint. The solid-fuel rocket activated, propelling the missile forward across the 4 meters at a speed of 145 meters a second—Damien didn’t even have time for the thought go through his brain that he was about to die. The rocket blasted through him and into the steel door. Its 20 lb anti-tank warhead blew the door clean off the opening to the hangar and sent it blasting out into the daylight. The door slammed hard into the front of an Abrams main battle tank that was stationed just a few further meters away, where the steel door crumpled hard against the main gun of the tank, leaving a situation that looked like the tank had tried to drive through the door and failed miserably.
Tom Duncan exhaled and smiled.
“Ahh, Hellfire. Best damn $70,000 I ever spent.”
Epilogue
Deep Blue smiled. He was about to get a promotion.