Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [103]
“Okay, Chief,” Jackson said. “We’ve got this truck pulled up tight to the building. You use it to climb to the roof, and Falco and I will make the deliveries.”
“You’ll want this, sir,” Chief Harris said rather formally. He handed the detonator box to his lieutenant. Jackson knew what the chief meant. He could see that the telltale indicator on the box was glowing with a faint red light, indicating that the nuclear device had been armed. In case something happened to the chief, he had given Lieutenant Jackson the means to detonate the bomb remotely.
“Get up topside, Chief,” Jackson said as he took the lethal little box and slipped it into his front pocket. “We’ll wait for you here or at one of the other emplacements up the line.”
“Roger that, sir,” Chief Harris said as he and Falco set the box down close to the front of the truck.
Quickly opening the case, he pulled the backpack holding the Mark 92 out and slung it from his shoulders. He quickly went up the side of the truck where it was close to the power building and clambered onto the flat roof. No shots rang out, and there wasn’t anything else Falco or Jackson could do. The lieutenant came down from the cab and helped Falco move the box into the enclosure surrounding the gun right in front of them. It had blocked most of the movement at the front of the truck, and there didn’t seem to be any personnel in the area.
“Damn,” Jackson said as they moved into the weapon enclosure. “There’s no one here at all. These people depend entirely on machines for their defense. All the troops around here are doing is feeding the weapons. They’re servicing the machines, that’s all.”
“So what does that mean, LT?” Falco said.
“It means that we may have a chance to pull this off,” Jackson said as he looked around the enclosure at the tools of war inside. “You follow procedure and you can fool a machine. It’s meant to notice something out of the ordinary and will ignore anything that’s supposed to be there. Now let’s go back and bring up another crate.”
While the two SEALS continued moving the boxes around, up on the roof Chief Harris could see that there were several more gun emplacements that he had to be concerned about. But the guns were each in one corner of the roof. They didn’t swivel back to face him, and they certainly didn’t depress their barrels; otherwise, they could have shot at the building they were meant to protect. Up on the rooftop were several ventlike structures, shaped like inverted J’s. He went up to the center one and heard a fan running somewhere inside the building.
Ducking his head, the chief moved under the open mouth of the ventilator and peered inside. Darkness met his eyes. When he shone a dim blue light down into the darkness, the only thing he could see was what looked like a rotating fan blade. There was no way to get into the building from there.
As he moved from vent to vent, Chief Harris noticed the same thing at each opening. There was nothing below him but a fan blade. If he tried to enter the building through the ventilation system, he would be cut to ribbons. Then, at the third vent he examined, he turned off the light before pulling his head back. Far below, he could see a faint light glowing. It was a blue light, the kind of light the alien pilot had said showed the position of the power core. It made as much sense as anything else, and the chief was running out of options. He pulled the pack off his back and flipped it open. Reaching inside, he armed the electronic timer on the Mark 92, quickly spinning the combination dial through the timing sequence. As a backup, he also released the locks and pulled the old-fashioned safety pin that released the mechanical timer.
Finally, he took a breath and entered another sequence of numbers on the covered keypad. A bright green light started flashing. He watched the light flash