Hunters Ch. 03

"Ich denke du lügst. Nein, Ich bin hier zu arbeit," said the voice. The first sentence sounded very agitated, the second was very concerned. "I think you lie. No, I am here to work," flashed up on the screen, and the actors came on again, with the officer reaching for what was probably some weapon that was on the far side of his body and the man in the flannel held his hands up and shook his head.

"Stehen Sie hier, Ich geh. . ." the voice said and choked off with a strangled gurgling sound. "You stand here, I'm go. . ." flashed up on the screen. The scene showed the officer turning around after speaking and the man in the flannel choking him and breaking the officer's neck. "Sometimes the language barrier just breaks down," flashed up on the screen. Heinrich reached down and shut off the TV.

"Stay quiet und by mich und du vill be gut," Heinrich said. "I vill be goink in mit du, und I vill get du insite."

"Can we take guns in there with us?" Max asked hopefully. Heinrich shook his head.

"No metal. Even ein bullet vill trip alarm." Max rolled his eyes and took out his gun. He set it on the television and began pulling extra clips from his boots, his belt and two from the inside of his flight suit. Heinrich laughed a hearty, deep belly laugh.

"Du kommst prepared, Ionian!" Heinrich said, still chuckling. "Aber kommst, ve vill geh zu ze compound. Es ist time." Heinrich opened the door and they went to a closet a few feet from the small office. He gave Max a set of white coveralls with "Über Sauber" embroidered on the back. Heinrich got a pair of coveralls out for himself as well and he began putting them on.

"Remove dien suit, Morgan. It vill not look richtig und they vill not let uns in," Heinrich said. Max took his flight suit off and pulled the white coveralls on.

"What about boots?" Max asked, pointing to his combat boots. Heinrich looked at his feet and the feet of the first man that Max had spoken to.

"Otto, gibst er dein Steifeln," Heinrich said quickly.

"Aber. . ." Otto started

"Nein Aber. Gibst er dein Steifeln. Du mochtest haben dem wenn er est tot." Otto only nodded and took his boots off. Max put them on and laced them quickly, but he had a very bad feeling about all of this. He didn't like that they were speaking in English, albeit broken English, and then suddenly switched to German. He was positive he was walking into a trap.

"Ready to go," Max said as he stood up from tying his boots. Heinrich looked him over and nodded.

"Ve go," Heinrich said and they went out through the main laundry among huge washing machines and strings of hanging clothes that were moving through a dry somewhere in the building. They walked out an area in the back and out into a loading dock area. There was a truck waiting just through an overhead door that was already running. Max got in and they pulled out of Über Sauber and Max took very good mental notes on how to get back. He was going to have to come back for his gun and his boots before he left Earth.

The trip was only a few minutes, and Heinrich seemed to stick to twisting back roads instead of the main thoroughfares, but that was just fine with Max. It gave him more time to calm himself down and focus. Aggression and fear are emotions that will throw a plan out of balance, but if they're focused, they bring everything into light and the world becomes clear. Right now, Max was extremely angry at being played for a pawn, and at letting himself be played into a trap. He was also scared because he was walking into a military complex with no gun and an unfair home-team advantage. They knew he was coming, but Max knew one thing they didn't. Max knew he was leaving.

"Your Anders ist on ze 8th floor. I vill tell you ver to find Anders. After das, du bist on your own," Heinrich said as he backed the truck up to a loading dock. "Zu gehst zu Anders, du go left zu ze stairs. Second floor, take links und go zu ze door ab end of hall. Geh aus ze stairs zu 8th floor und Anders is at end of hall. Door code is one, three, seven, neun, one. Okay?" Max nodded and watched as Heinrich got out of the cab. Max quickly followed his lead. Heinrich went to the back of the truck and opened it. Max saw two laundry gurneys inside; Heinrich pushed one of them out to Max and pushed the other himself. Max followed the German's lead and walked right in.

There were two guards dressed in midnight blue uniforms inside the doors, and Max noticed that these guards were using HK machine guns. After being in business since well before the turn of the century, HK knew how guns should be made. They shot straight, they shot fast, and they almost never jammed. If a gunfight did start, it would be up to human error to not hit Max, and that was a fact that he was growing more and more painfully aware of.

They pushed their carts inside the main doors and Heinrich kept walking. They went through a metal detector and Heinrich passed but when Max went through, a buzzer sounded. "Here we go," thought Max. The two guards stepped forward from behind the uprights of the metal detectors.

"Armen auf," said the guard. Max guessed to put his hands on his head and wait to be patted down. He guessed wrong. "Armen auf!" said the German firmly. Max put his arms straight out this time and the guard shook his head and started patting Max down. "Geh aus und kommst züruck," the guard said. Luckily for Max he waved his arm through the metal detector and then pointed at Heinrich. Max backed the cart out and then came back through. Again, the buzzer sounded. The guard that had been ordering Max around motioned to the cart and the other guard started searching it. He didn't search long before he came up with a combat knife. Max sighed deeply.

"Was ist das?" the guard said haughtily, waving it in the air a little. The first guard moved quickly and brought Max's hands behind his back and restrained them with what felt like a zip- tie. Max just let him do it. The first guard came closer with the knife, moving it in his hand to for a firmer grip. The guard behind Max was holding him by his restrained wrists and had Max in a position that would be difficult to muscle out of. The guard with the knife rushed forward.

Max threw his chest back and smashed the back of his head into the guard's face behind him. The guard stumbled back, letting go of Max in the process, and Max was free to move around. The guard with the knife rushed forward with the knife out in front of him. Max dropped and twisted behind the metal detector. The guard jerked downward to try to slice into Max's legs but Max tripped him instead, sending him into the other guard, knife first. The blade sank into the guard's leg, clear to the hilt and he screamed painfully. Max twisted his feet between the now-screaming guard's legs and tripped him. The knife thudded loudly on the floor, and the guard's head bounced off the cement, silencing him for the time being.

The other guard seemed paralyzed for a second, debating to try to help his friend or deal with the escaping prisoner. That hesitation was all Max needed. His foot went to the side of the guard's knee, hyper extending it sideways until the guard's leg almost bent in half. Max barely rolled out of the way of the falling guard and head butted him after he hit the ground. His body went limp and Max got himself to his feet. He bent down and pulled the knife from the other guard's leg and used it to cut the plastic zip-tie holding his hands together. Max looked over to Heinrich to see him standing in a doorway, holding an HK with the barrel leveled straight at Max's chest.

"Das ist ze end, Herr Morgan," the big German said and a smile crept onto his face. Max's left eye started to twitch and then he saw something moving behind Heinrich. It was at the end of the hallway and was coming up behind him.

"Was machst du da?" came a deep voice from behind Heinrich. Max shifted the knife in his hand to throw it better if that's what it came down to. Heinrich's smile lessened but did not completely vanish.

"Ich habe der Martian. Er totst twei Brudern," Heinrich said over his shoulder, keeping his eyes locked on Max. Max's eyes quickly floated around the room, seeing how easy it would be to get a machine gun from a guard. The one that took the knife in the leg was probably going to be the easiest; the sling was just around his head and the weapon was off to his side. The other guard was just about lying on top of his gun.

"Prima! Geh für der Fürher. Ich habe ihn," the voice said. Heinrich nodded and backed through the door he was standing in. The guard would have to cross the line of fire and then Max would act. He saw the shoulder of the same blue uniform of the men at his feet and he threw the knife and dove for the gun around the guard's neck.

The knife caught the guard in the chest and sunk in a few inches. By the time Heinrich knew what was happening, he didn't have a clear shot to hit Max. With a quick roll to the ground Max picked up the guard's head by his hair, swung the gun out and dropped the guard's head. Max charged forward toward the wall along side the door. The guard with the knife in his chest slumped forward and made a sickening gurgling sound as the knife drove deeper into his lung. Max took a quick look at the wall and saw that it was plaster on the outside. He took a step back and let loose a burst with the HK in a tight arc where Heinrich should be. The HK tore chunks out of the sheet rock out of the wall went through the other side, ripping through it like tissue paper. Max waited a second and fired another burst, chewing up more of the wall. Hearing nothing from Heinrich, Max looked cautiously through one of the holes he had just blown in the wall. Heinrich was laying face down in an ever-growing pool of blood.

Max had other problems though; the HK was not silenced and there would be more guards. Lots more guards. He quickly went to the men around him and took an extra HK and all the ammunition he could find. After less than a minute, Max was ready to go. He pulled the knife from the guard in the door way and stuck in Heinrich's back just to be sure that he wasn't going to have to fight through him on the way back through. Max remembered the directions and hoped that just maybe he wasn't lied to about that. He'd have to grab a guard without seriously injuring one and ask him a few questions.

Max didn't waste any time in going to his perceived destination. He followed the directions exactly and was facing almost no opposition. That alone was worrying him more than if he was fighting off the entire army of Rotterdam. He didn't see anyone until the stairway that was mentioned in his directions to where Anders was being held. Then all hell broke loose.

Max saw two guards running down the stairs, taking defensive position in doorways and they were shouting, apparently to more Germans who were on the way. Max started shooting at a door, waiting for the bullets to chew through the steel and weaken the lock. It didn't take long and he shouldered the door in just as the Germans in the hall started firing. He was inside what looked like a utility closet, and there were chemicals everywhere. Max's eyes kept shifting between the bottles and the open door, listening for the sounds of boots coming down the hallway.

"Shit, it's all in German," hissed Max under his breath. Something caught his eye though, something that's universal to any language. There were hazardous materials signs on half of the chemicals. After a very fast search, he found one that looked to be the most flammable judging from the warning diamond numbers. Max dumped most of the contents of the plastic bottle down the floor drain in the center of the room and shook the bottle. He kept shaking it as he ducked around the corner to see where the Germans were positioned. More had joined the two that had come down the stairs, and there was a small group all bunched up. Max's head came back around the corner as their guns opened up and a torrent of lead flooded the hall.

Max shook the bottle a few seconds more and threw it out into the hallway by the small group of men near the stair well. He let lose a burst with the machine gun as and ducked back into the relative safety of the supply closet. The Germans opened up with their machine guns and there was shouting heard above the gunfire, but Max couldn't make it out. Both the guns and the voices were silenced a split second later when an explosion rocked the hall. Flames shot past the door that Max was hiding in. Max shot around the lock of the door across the hall and ran out of his room and barreled through the new door. In the instant that he was exposed in the hall, he saw that all the Germans in the hall were down, and some were on fire. Max was out of the room almost as fast as he had gotten in it and was in the hallway, looking over the guards on the ground and trying to cover the staircase in the hall as well as all of the other three door ways into the hall. One face down guard near Max began to moan softly.

Max put a boot to him and rolled him over. The German coughed and wheezed and Max saw that most of the skin on his face was either black or red. Max was seriously beginning to like the potency of the cleaning supplies of Europe. The man's eyes opened slowly and it was obvious he was in extreme pain.

"Speak English?" Max asked calmly. He pointed the HK at the guard's forehead. The guard shook his head. Max frowned. "Prisoners?" The guard only looked scared and confused in response. "Auslander?" Max asked after a short pause, thinking back to his German lesson. The guard pointed up the stairs and then to the right of the staircase. Max nodded, kicking the guard in the head and knocking him out.

He started charging up the stairs at the same time more guards started coming down. Max brought his other machine gun to bear and cut down the oncoming Germans, but he caught a bullet in his left arm and it went numb after a blinding flash of pain. Max ran up the rest of the stairs, blood running down his arm and leaving a trail of crimson dots in his wake. Here the directions changed from where Heinrich said to go. Heinrich said to take a left at the stairs. Max trusted the dying man more than the one walking him into a trap and went right. The 3 doors on either side of the hall all had security locks on them. Max let loose a burst of machine gun fire at the first door on his right and the bullets barely penetrated. Max gave the door a tremendous kick, and the door caved under his foot. His eyes lit up and for a second he forgot that he was even wounded.

The room that Max had gotten into was not a jail cell, but a munitions storage. There were dozens of handguns, a few HK's in some racks and some cardboard boxes. Max looked at the boxes very quickly and saw one that grabbed his attention; it wasn't in English, but the main word on the box was Canitri, and Max knew that they were an explosives manufacturer. He opened the box and sure enough, there were 12 gray-pink bars of extremely stable high explosive inside. Max grabbed a bar of the explosive and tucked it in his crimson stained white uniform and looked around for another box that should have contained the detonators and he was very happy to find that this one was in English. Not only that but it was from Digidet, the premiere company for making easy to use electronic detonators. They also happened to be the chief military suppliers in the system.

Max opened the box and counted 25 detonators and the master switch. The detonators were white and about the size of a match stick with a head on it the size of a pencil and half of an inch long. Max's fingers pushed on the two ends of the detonator and the number "01" appeared on the head. He turned the stick and the numbers ran all the way up to 50 before recycling back to 1. Max repeated the process with the master switch; a similar device with a body as thick as Max's pinky and a head the size of his thumb. He played with the detonators and with the master switch for another second or two before peeking back out into the hall. A three-shot burst of an HK made him duck back inside the room. He grabbed a small wad of the explosive from the box and wrapped it around the detonator. Max put the master control switch on to "01" and turned the detonator on to the same number. He stuck his hand out the door for just enough time to flick the explosive down the hall. He waited a second and a half and pushed the top of the switch down and it gave a little beep. A fraction of a second later an explosion shook the building for the second time in 5 minutes.

Max moved fast, pounding on the doors until he got to the last one on the left. Someone pounded back.

"Speak English?" Max shouted. He heard a muffled yell from the other side of the door. Max could barely hear it and couldn't' understand any of it. There was a pause and Max checked the hallway again for more Germans. It was a mess from the explosion and dust was still thick in the air from the smoke and from the pulverized sheet rock walls. Then Max heard it; 3 close poundings on the door, 3 slower harder knocks, and then 3 more fast hits. SOS in Morris code. Max fired a round into the door and he hoped whoever was on the other side backed up. He grabbed a small pinch of the grayish putty and smashed it in between the door and the door jam beside the door handle. He stuck a detonator in it and backed off a few feet down the hall. Max pushed the head in on the master control and a flash of fire and a billow of smoke erupted around the door. A second later the door flew out of the door jam and Max could make a boot out in the smoke surrounding the door. He heard coughing from inside, but it didn't sound right somehow; but his ears were ringing from the explosions and the gunfire in the small spaces.

"Corporal Anders? This is Major Morgan. Corporal?" Max shouted.

"Jesus H Christ, it's about time you got here!" rang a voice. Max must have been hearing things wrong, his hearing had to have been more damaged than he thought. A form walked out of the smoke and dust and Max realized that he wasn't hearing wrong and his ears weren't ringing nearly as bad as he thought they were. Corporal Anders, the best pilot in the Martian Special Forces, was a woman.