Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [121]
“Anybody hit?” Jackson asked over the local communicator. He was relieved as all of his men checked in; no one had so much as a tear in his pressure suit. “All right—in pairs, let’s secure this hangar before we move in to the ship,” he ordered.
The men moved like the precision-trained commandoes they were. As half the SEALS started out, one moving along each wall, several checking the overhead deck or poking around behind the hulks of the battered shuttles, the other half of each fire Team kept his weapon ready and his eyes open, watching for any threat. When the first group had moved halfway across the hangar—which was large enough to hold three or four good-sized jetliners—they halted and took up firing positions so that the second members of each fire Team could advance.
“Got a varmint runnin’ over heah!” barked Gunner’s Mate Dobson, his thick Alabama accent unmistakable over the comlink. The SEALS snapped off a shot at a suited figure who dived between a pair of metal crates, but the slugs skipped off the cover in a shower of sparks. Dobson and his partner Robinson shot past the crates, weapons trained on the place where the pirate had disappeared.
“Damn, Skipper. Sum’bitch made it through the airlock!” declared Dobson in a disgusted tone.
“Well, we know where they are then,” Jackson noted, using his jets to propel him over to the fire Team. He saw the secured hatch, smaller than some of the other passages out of the hangar, leading toward the interior of the ship. Of course, there was no way to tell how many bad guys were on the other side of that barrier, or what kind of reception they were arranging for the SEALS.
“Want me to blow the door, L.T?” asked Harry Teal who, despite his medical skills as a corpsman, was also a whiz at just about every kind of explosive. “We could make it pretty hot for them.”
“I know,” Jackson replied, thinking. He looked to the right, where the gaping black hole of the blasted airlock provided another way into the ship. The passageway obviously continued the vacuum of the hangar deck, and was utterly lightless. A quick check of the IR scanner shower no specific signs of heat, nothing that would indicate a power source or living body. He knew that within that dark chamber they would eventually come up against some kind of closed hatch, but he was considering the possibility of taking these fellows by surprise.
“Tell you what, Harry. Why don’t you rig a charge. Set it for remote detonation so you can set it off with your clicker. The rest of you men, regroup over here.”
The Team formed up outside the blasted airlock as the two scouts, Sanchez and Marannis, probed into the shadowy confines and Harry Teal set his C-6 charge. The corpsman drifted over to the CO after two minutes, holding a small detonator in his hand. “I can set it off from up to a kilometer away, L.T,” he said.
“Good.”
At the same time, Sanchez glided back out of the airlock to make his report. “Got a short corridor inside sir. It T’s after about twelve meters. The branches go twenty or thirty meters right and left. Each ends in another airlock, closed and secured. There’s also a hatch just at the base of the T. That one’s open. The control panel looks dark—I think it’s disabled, Skipper.”
Still moving in combat formation, half the men stationary to cover their companions who were moving, the Team moved through the blasted hatch, some SEALS high, others low, all of them alert. The metal of the framework was peeled and twisted, indicating that a considerable force had been used to force the entry.