“There’s no sign of him,” he tells her. “Probably means he’s lying low somewhere. We’ll get to him when we can.”
“When we can?” Khan spits the words out as though they’re poison. “We’ve got to find him now, before we do anything else.”
McQueen wants to grab her by the throat and shout in her face that Greaves caused this by wandering off in the first place. Greaves bought Lutes this hideous, unseemly death. But he doesn’t say that, because it’s the part of the truth that matters least. The senior officer takes the decisions, and the rap. Everything that’s happened here is down to him, first and last.
So he just pulls his arm sharply away from her grasp and gives the order again. “Follow the leader. Single file, ten yards apart. Start and stop on my mark. If any of you steps out of line, I’m going to handcuff them and frog-march them, which will be bad news for everybody.”
Khan looks like she’s inclined to argue again, but then she thinks better of it. The fact of Lutes’ death is sinking in. Her face twists in surprise and pain as though something sharp just dug into somewhere soft. Well, it’s tough all over. Every one of them can see that they’re playing a bad hand in a bad place.
“Single file,” he repeats. “Don’t close up.”
McQueen leads them away from the killing ground, sticking to the shadows and the angles of walls, spacing them out along a skirmish line, making them as difficult a target as he can.
They’re being followed. Something is fucking pacing them. The enemy don’t let themselves be seen, not clearly, but there are flicks of movement from the buildings on either side, skitters of sound. Again McQueen is tempted to cut loose, but the middle of the street is no place to make a stand. Dig in first, then see what comes, unless the bastards force the issue.
They don’t. The lieutenant gets the science team into cover in what used to be the Corn Exchange. He manages to find a place he can actually fortify, a first-floor room with a wide view of the street and a flat roof at the back that will make a good line of retreat. He establishes a perimeter, about twenty feet across.
He calls Rosie. Tells the colonel they’re in a hole they can’t climb out of and if he can find time in his busy schedule to stop by, the field team will be delighted to see him. Informal dress, guns prepped and armour up.
Carlisle doesn’t bother asking questions he doesn’t need the answers to. “Wait there,” he orders McQueen. And McQueen does. Meanwhile, he finds a nice place to sit by the window with his rifle resting in his hands. Come on, you bastards. Let’s see you. But there’s nothing to see now. Nothing moving. The only sound is a pigeon cooing from up on the roof.
The radio is silent for three minutes, which is the time it takes to retract the airlock and the extension blisters. When the colonel pings them back McQueen can hear the sound of Rosie’s engines in the background, already warming up. Evidently he succeeded in conveying a suitable sense of urgency.
Foss and Sixsmith have got the windows; Phillips is at the door, which he’s cracked open seven eighths of an inch with the barrel of his rifle right up against the gap. The whitecoats are sitting in a tight circle on the floor, facing outwards. They’ve got their guns at the ready but McQueen has told them to keep the safeties on. He is not going to put his own or his people’s skins in between a terrified amateur and a moving target.
Khan is as pale as a sheet and her hands are shaking. Funny, he would have thought she would be one of the last to lose her nerve. But she’s sweating it for the Robot, of course.
The radio squawks again. Carlisle, asking for a GPS. McQueen gives him both that and his take on the situation. “It’s quiet right now but they’re close and I think they’ll make a move before you get here.”
“I’ll bring Rosie right to you,” Carlisle says. “ETA two minutes. Use the time to locate enemy positions if you can. Anything you spot, I’ll light up from the street before I retrieve you.”
“Copy,” McQueen says tersely. And he doesn’t bother with “Out.”
Khan is practically gnawing her fist off. Her eyes show darker than ever in her bleached-out face. “Can we try to send Stephen some kind of message?” she asks McQueen. “So he can find us?”
“Like what?” Foss snaps, reaching the end of her tether. “A fucking smoke signal?”
“We don’t want him to find us,” Private Sixsmith says, with less of an edge. “It wouldn’t be a good idea for him to come into the open right now. He’s better off keeping his head down until we come.”
She glances across at McQueen as though McQueen might have an opinion on this. The lieutenant doesn’t say a word, and prominent among the words he doesn’t say are, “Small loss.” He is much more concerned with the silence and stillness out in the street. The enemy were practically treading on their heels and now they’ve disappeared. It doesn’t make any sense.
“How long will we have to wait here?” Akimwe demands.
There is no answer to that question that will do justice to the lieutenant’s feelings, but he’s about to give it a shot when something he has been noticing subconsciously makes it into the forefront of his mind.
That sound he just heard was wings. Birds taking off from the roof.
He looks up. Listens. When Akimwe starts to speak again, he grunts a terse “Shut up.”
A loosed pebble chatters and chuckles its way down the roof ridge.
McQueen aims at the ceiling. The next thing that moves is going to get a bullet, just to make a point.
But the next thing that moves is Penny. She screams as the window shatters, showering her with broken glass. She goes down into a crouch, clutching her face.
That was no gunshot. It came in on a curved trajectory and it lost height too fast. McQueen guesses what it was even before he sees the pebble lying on the naked floorboards at his feet. A stone out of a slingshot. He snaps his fingers to get the whitecoats’ attention. “Take off your coats,” he says quickly. “Now. Wad them up and cover your faces. A headshot is the only thing that can actually kill you.” They scramble to do it, all except for Penny who is still praying to Mecca. Akimwe asks if she’s hit but she’s not answering.
A slingshot is a low-tech weapon even by junker standards, but it’s effective. Much more worrying are the scraping and wrenching sounds from right over their heads. The bogeys are ripping the slates off. They’re going to come in through the roof.