The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

nearest bridges spanning the river just to the south.
    Paige’s cell rang. She answered. It was someone aboard the AWACS, circling high above. Travis could just discern the tinny voice over the phone, reporting a visual on something strange happening down in the city.
    “We noticed,” Paige said.
    In Travis’s ear, the sniper and spotter teams reported in, one by one, as they retook their window positions.
    The reality of what was about to happen descended on Travis like a poison cloud. He saw it settling over Paige at the same time, as she watched the flashlights race in toward the building. The nearest were past the bridges now.
    The last of the snipers reported in. Travis could picture their rifles silently tracking the advance of the crowd while they waited for the order.
    “We should just let them in,” Travis said.
    “They’ll kill every one of us,” Paige said.
    “Yeah.”
    He was surprised by how little fear he heard in his own voice. How little he felt, for that matter. Maybe there was just too much of it to process. What he had in place of it was logic.
    “It’s not their fault,” he said. “A few of us dying, instead of hundreds of them, that’s not a hard choice at all.”
    For a moment he saw agreement in Paige’s eyes. What other option was there?
    And then her eyes changed, and in the same instant Travis understood why. The wicked effectiveness of Pilgrim’s trap became clear. There would be no simple way out of it. Not even by suicide.
    “Christ,” he whispered.
    He saw in his mind what would happen in this building, less than a minute from right now, if they held their fire and let the crowd in. He saw the rush of bodies coming up the stairs like fluid under pressure. Saw them clambering over one another, tearing at the jungle of wiring that filled the space of every floor. Crashing through the clearings with the metal boxes, and the delicate wires for the pressure pads that were almost certainly not decoys.
    “If the nuke goes off, the crowd dies anyway,” Paige said. “The whole city dies.”
    Travis could hear it in her voice: confirmation of everything she’d feared about this building. Here at last was the spare hostage. The one Pilgrim wasn’t afraid to pull the trigger on.
    But she also looked confused. Damn confused. And even in the tension of the moment, Travis thought he knew why. Because the whole building seemed to have been devoted to creating this effect. The whole building was the second hostage. So where the hell was the weapon Pilgrim had spent a decade working on?
    Travis’s line of thought was broken by a singular cry from the mob, clearer than the rest. It was furious, and wild, and so high-pitched that it could only belong to a very young girl, maybe younger than ten.
    The crowd’s leading edge was less than twenty seconds from the building.
    “Fuck, fuck, fuck …” Paige breathed.
    Travis wondered how many kids were among the crowd, but only for a moment, because he already knew how many. Every kid in Zurich would be out there, soon enough.
    “Miss Campbell?” one of the snipers said over the comm unit, the voice tight like a wire.
    The question was obvious.
    So was the answer.
    Paige swallowed hard, bit down on whatever she was feeling, and said, “Weapons free.”
    The night came alive with gunfire.
    Travis saw the muzzle flashes from a dozen windows below him, across the face of the building. Saw the red paths of tracer rounds cutting through the fog, the snipers picking out individual targets for each shot. And though he couldn’t see the victims at street level, as the snipers could with their FLIR goggles, he saw the results as clearly as he needed to. The flashlights at the forefront of the charge were suddenly kicked backward, their beams flipping end over end. The front ranks were cut down in rapid succession, and Travis heard screams of pain, mixed with surprise and fear. Men, women, children.
    But the charge didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. The rest of the surge, coming from behind the fallen, hardly faltered over the bodies. Travis saw the wave of incoming flashlights stutter-step where the first victims had gone down. The dead served only as speed bumps for the horde.
    More flashlights were coming on in the windows of other buildings as the sleeping residents of the city woke, roused either by gunfire or by the effect the Ares had had on them. Beams flared behind panes for spare seconds, just long enough for their owners to take a