Crouching at the foot of the support, Heitor removed the timer pin to initiate the detonation sequence. Then he quickly went to the next platform and dropped his other charge.

It was just as he pulled the second pin that Thibodeau stepped from an elevator onto one of the flying catwalks and, looking out over the expansive floor of the storage bay, was shocked to discover what was happening below.

"Thibodeau's backup is on the way," Delure said. "I pulled four men from the office complex, another six off other details."

"How long before they reach him?" Cody asked from his station.

"Could be as long as ten minutes for some of them."

"Not good enough," Cody said. He produced a harsh sigh and turned to Jezoirski. "What about Felix? How fast can we bring him to Thibodeau?"

"Give me a sec to call up a floor plan of the building." Jezoirski tapped his keyboard, scanned the screen in front of him. " 'Hog's in the Level 5 propulsion lab--"

"How fast?"

Jezoirski studied the schematic, then lifted his face. "There's a connecting walkway between the research and warehouse complexes. We can move him straight along this corridor right here to the elevator, then down three levels to the walkway," he said, plotting a course across the screen with his finger. "From there it might need a minute, maybe a minute and a half to reach the warehouse, another couple to get down to the payload storage bay."

"That's at least six minutes."

Jezoirski nodded. "Best we can do."

"Suppose we'll have to live with it then," Cody said. Sweat glistened in the furrow above his lip. "All right, let's hurry up and get the 'hog rolling."

The earthmovers were parked near a ditch they had scooped out of the ground, and had offered solid cover to the invaders until the helicopters marked their positions. As they came under intense fire from a chase squad now, the group of invaders scurried down into the ditch, where they pressed up against its sides and began shooting over its stony rim.

The Skyhawks stuck to them like the predatory birds that were their namesakes, one nailing the tracked vehicles with its SX-5 searchlight, the other shining its light directly into the trench.

"Nest's ready to be cleaned out," the chopper pilot above the ditch radioed the ground team.

"Roger, we're on it," its leader replied.

He turned the barrel vents of his rifle to their closed setting and ordered his squad to move.

The chopper pilot stayed on the horn to guide their advance, and continue reporting on the position of the invaders. As he hovered over the bowl-shaped ditch, the incandescent brilliance and swirling gun smoke inside it gave the eerie illusion that he was peering down into a lava pit filled with almost a dozen trapped human beings.

But the situation below was such that the distance between illusion and reality rapidly closed. The chase squad attacked in a flanking rush, looping around the dozers and front-end loaders to hose the ditch with their guns. Although return fire was heavy, they had the cold confidence of men who had stolen the offensive and gained a maneuverability their opposition had lost. Surrounded, their FAMAS weapons' targeting systems overloaded by the unsparing glare of the searchlights, the invaders had in fact run themselves into a trap.