Enemy Invasion by A. G. Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

slip past. He then waved
    for the other two to follow him into the office.
    He advanced into the thick, white cloud of halon gas, which had cut visibility down to a metre. The other two guards took positions to his left and right and they went forward in a line.
    “Stay close,” the leader whispered into his comm. “Keep to your firing vectors.” He wasn’t so much worried about the intruders – the halon would have knocked
any fight out of them by now – as getting shot in the smog by one of his own men.
    His earpiece crackled and his second-in-command, who was leading a second team up the emergency stairwell (the only other way off the level), barked an urgent message. The leader shook his head
and spoke to his men. “Beta team has been fired upon in the stairwell. One man down.” Then he added, “Shoot anything that moves in here.”
    His men nodded and they carried on, reaching the centre of the floor where the glass cube stood, only half intact. Halon hung densely here, but the leader spied something at the far end of the
office space – a shadow moving through the mist.
    “Target, two o’clock!” he barked, firing at the shape. His men spotted it and also went “weapons free”. Computer terminals and office chairs exploded as their
bullets cut a swathe through everything in their path. Ten seconds later, the leader held up his fist for them to cease firing.
    Inside the halon cloud, nothing moved.
    The leader gave the forward signal and they continued their advance.
    Hack removed his T-shirt and held it over his mouth and nose as he staggered towards the far end of the office, where the halon was less thick. Seconds before, he’d
    considered approaching the guards as his only way out of the gas – then they’d opened fire indiscriminately. Now, heart racing, Hack staggered in the other direction, still trying to
    process what was happening: between the poisonous gas and the trigger-happy idiots on the other side of the room, his chances for survival were looking pretty slim.
    He reached the back wall of the office and followed it towards a door, praying it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t. He collapsed into the adjoining room on his hands and knees and kicked the
door shut. His lungs were on fire from the gas he’d inhaled, but Hack fought the urge to crawl into a ball and lie there on the floor. He was in a conference room with a long table and
floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. The halon was pouring under the door and through several holes in the wall made by stray bullets, so he moved to the other side of the table and leaned
against the window.
    Outside, the skyline of Hong Kong Island glittered, its shimmering skyscrapers distant and unreachable. One IFC was lit up directly ahead and Hack thought of Batman again – not much chance
of making it off the building without a glider or parachute, and even then it would probably be suicide. There was, however, a thin ledge that ran around the edge of the level. It was less than a
metre across, but Hack guessed it would be possible to walk round the ledge to the other side of the building and maybe even climb down to one of the lower levels. He touched the window –
thickened safety glass that would take a sledgehammer to break.
    Another volley of bullets burst through the wall of the conference room. Hack hit the carpet as a round tore over his head and through the window. The glass went opaque as the bullet punched a
one-centimetre hole in the middle of the pane.
    Wasting no time, Hack threw the T-shirt over his head, grabbed one of the leather chairs from the table and heaved it at the weakened pane. The chair sailed through the glass and over the side
of the building. Gulping down some of the halon-free air blasting through the gap, Hack struggled forwards and stepped out onto the ledge.
    Standing on the side of a building, seventy-seven floors above the earth, a half-metre ledge doesn’t seem very wide at all. The window panes