Carnage City: A World at War Novel (World at War Online Book 6) (25 page)

Danny flipped the switch for the first floor, hoping that someone, anyone would pick up on the other end. He wished he had some way to contact the Redd Foxx troops outside so they could cover the weakness in the defenses, but the lack of a phone line made that impossible. They'd be able to communicate within fifteen minutes or so, but by then enemy troops would be swarming over the tower.

Danny was about to give up and head down on foot when someone picked up on the other end.

“What's up?”

“Nora? What the heck are you doing down there?”

“Helping to rally the defenses. What can I do for you?”

“We've lost one of our guns on the north side. We need one of the replacements up here, and we need it fast.”

“Copy that, but we're getting hammered down here. Can you send down a team to bring it up?”

Danny gritted his teeth. “We can try, but we need to cover for the destroyed gun in the meantime.”

“Understood. I'll tell Gray to concentrate a platoon in that direction.”

“Good. I'll head down with a team.”

Danny hung up the line and sprinted back over to Xavier, his balance returning.

“I'm taking three soldiers off the ammo chain and using them to bring up an extra gun. You're in charge of the floor till I get back.”

“Understood. Although there's not many orders to give.”

Danny nodded and headed for the lift, flagging down three troops from the ammo chain as he did so. Xavier was right. Caught with their backs against the wall, there was only one order for Bravo Wolf to carry out.

Keep firing.

A
Ragnarok trooper
appear out of the doorway in front of her, and Selene cut him down with a quick burst from her carbine. Before he had even fallen her team was advancing down the hallway, quickly scanning the side rooms for any signs of enemy activity.

“Clear,” Mara said.

“Are we sure that it's not hidden in one of these side rooms?” Jade asked.

Selene shook her head. “Zach says something like that would need a lot of power, so if it was up here they'd need to jury rig a bunch of electric cables. It would be much easier to do that if they put it in the basement closer to the generator.”

Kelsey nodded. “I'd agree with that.”

But that didn't narrow down the list of targets much. Selene was thankful for her HUD's mapping system because she could set flags indicating passages that they had already traveled through. Even with the radio operational it would be hard to find their way through. Now, isolated in their small groups, this place was a complete nightmare. Selene didn't even know where the stairs might be, let alone where they were keeping the jammer.

But if they were confused, their enemies were as well. Ragnarok might be on their home turf, but they'd have a hard time coordinating a defense without the radio. Alpha Wolf could use the advantage to press their attack further into the building.

Selene chanced a look down at her wrist menu. Ten minutes before the jamming ended. Until then they would continue to exploit the confusion.

Mara suddenly dodged back as she opened a door. “Contact!” she warned as a burst of gunfire tore past her.

Selene quickly pulled a grenade and tossed it inside the doorway.

Bam!

As soon as the explosion went off she stormed inside with Kelsey close behind. One Ragnarok trooper lay dead at the far end of the room. Another was badly wounded and crawling across the ground. Selene shot her in the back of the head for good measure. No sense in allowing the enemy any chance to get the jump on them. If she had combat stimulants on her she might have been able to recover and shoot them in the back.

“We're psycho, aren't we?” Kelsey commented as they headed back into the main hallway.

“Yeah, I'd say so,” Selene agreed. “Though the rules in here are a lot different when everyone's essentially immortal.”

In here there was only one rule: win. And Selene would do everything possible to make sure her side won.

“Let's move!”

“
S
ay that again
?”

Zach fought down the urge to explode and spoke again. “I said that you need to get a blocking force at the far end of the supply tunnel. We're under heavy assault and we're probably not going to be able to hold them off for much longer.”

“How long can you hold out?” Bryce asked at the other end of the line.

“Probably about five to ten minutes, if we get artillery support. After that they'll be inside the building and we're not going to be able to force them out. We can bleed them badly, but we can't win.”

“Roger that. I'm sorry to say that we might need you to do that.”

Zach nodded. The response didn't surprise him at all. Ragnarok had committed a significant amount of forces to the assault on the tower, which meant they had weakened their positions elsewhere. That left them wide open and vulnerable to a hard strike, just as long as it happened soon.

“How long will it take you to push the offensive forward?”

“About an hour,” Bryce said. “We're trying to rouse the rest of the battalions, but it's still kind of early and it's going to take a while. Can you hold out until then?”

“That's going to be tough,” Zach told him. “Ragnarok's had plenty of experience against this place, so they know what they're doing now. We've lost two anti-tank guns already, and they're preparing to storm us with an infantry assault. We can try to hold them in the stairwells, but they can neutralize us with a relatively small force.”

“And the fire escape?”

“Oh, that's covered,” Zach told him. They had turned the entire thing into scrap metal to prevent a repeat of their previous maneuver.

“Try to hold them as long as you can. You want artillery fire?”

“Not until everyone's inside, but as soon as I call can you bring it down?”

“I can, but we're going to have to pull the artillery from the unit allocated to the Alpha Wolf raid,” Bryce told him. “Is that alright?”

Zach frowned. “It's not going to do them any good without the radio, so yeah, pull it from them. Is the rest of the artillery getting ready for the offensive?”

“Yeah, we'll begin the bombardment as soon as we're assembled.”

But would it be soon enough? In the grand scheme of things this fight wasn't extremely important. In fact, since it was happening on a secondary part of the front and drawing in huge numbers of the enemy, the situation was ideal. Hydra would be able to sucker punch the other sections of the Ragnarok line and smash them. Without a significant reserve in place there was no way their enemy could withstand the tide.

That was little comfort to him, though. Once again Black Wolf was under siege and facing annihilation, and once again they were relying on the rest of the alliance to bail them out. That rankled, even though Zach knew they were in a tough spot. They had less than one hundred and fifty troops facing off against an enemy battalion.

It didn't matter. Black Wolf had made their name on the offensive, and sitting around waiting for others to rescue them was galling. Zach felt the frustration rising in him.

“Make sure you block off your end of the tunnel,” he warned again. “I'll call back soon.”

“Copy. Good luck.”

Zach hung up the phone and flipped the switch for the ground floor.

“What's up?” a voice asked on the other end of the line?

“This is command,” Zach said. “Alert all units outside and have them retreat into the tower. We're calling artillery fire down in ninety seconds.”

“Copy that.”

Zach quickly made another call back to Bryce. “Call down the artillery fire. Give us ninety seconds before you start.”

“Copy that, and good luck.”

He hung up the phone and looked down at the holographic map table, scowling as he did so. Being trapped in a cage was frustrating enough, and not being able to fight made it even worse. Someone needed to control the battle, though, and that responsibility fell to him.

But that didn't make him feel any better about it.

N
ora brought
her assault rifle up to bear and fired off a burst, taking out an enemy trooper sprinting between sections of cover. She fired again and again at the incoming enemy horde, but there were too many for them to deal with at once.

As usual, Ragnarok was using numbers to their advantage. The sheer number of attackers made it impossible for Redd Foxx to deal with them all, and the defenders frequently had to duck back into cover to avoid being killed.

Nora shifted her aim and took out another enemy soldier advancing on their position.

Crack!

Something slammed into the side of her face and sent her spinning into the ground. Nora sat up and reached for her cheek. She could feel blood running from a cut, but other than that there was no apparent damage, certainly nothing to keep her from fighting.

She was about to get back into the fight when Liz came running toward her position, crouching low to avoid the enemy gunfire crackling above.

“Orders are to retreat into the tower,” she said straining to be heard over the din of battle. “Spread the word.”

“Artillery, I'm guessing.”

“Yeah. We have ninety seconds.”

Nora quickly shouted warnings to the surrounding troops, then broke cover and sprinted for the tower. Whatever the danger might be from enemy bullets, she certainly didn't want to be outside when Hydra's heavy artillery started falling.

But this was bad. Black Wolf had spent a significant amount of time building strong defenses around the exterior of the tower. If they were willingly abandoning them then their situation was well and truly dire.

She met up with more units coming from different sections of the fortifications as she neared the entrance. Nora took note of their distressingly low numbers. By her estimate, at least a third of the company had been lost.

Once the shells stopped falling they were in serious trouble.

“
W
e're
clear on this level,” Gavin told her as several fireteams converged on the stairwell leading to the basement level.

“Clear from my end as well,” Ethan said.

Selene looked around. “Has anyone heard from Logan yet?”

The other two shook their heads.

“Oh well, this is going to have to be good enough. Leave a fireteam on the stairs to protect our backs and let's move. Have them direct Logan's units after us when they arrive.”

The rest of Alpha Wolf prepared to storm into the lower levels. A pair of troopers stood on both sides of the doorframe and pulled grenades. Selene griped her carbine and watched as they tossed them down the stairs. She didn't know what might be waiting for them at the bottom, but if it was hostile the grenades would give them something to think about.

She glanced down at her wrist menu for the time. Two minutes until the jamming stopped. That would help them as they advance further into the bowels of the complex, but it could also help the enemy regroup and form a coherent defense. So far they had only met scattered resistance.

Bang!

Selene heard the grenades go off at the bottom of the stairwell. Without a word the platoon sprang into action, quickly pushing through the doorway and into the lower level. Selene followed in the middle of the pack, gun at the ready for any signs of trouble.

“Looks clear,” Gavin said over the radio.

“That's a surprise,” Kelsey commented as the unit pushed forward. “Where are the defenses?”

“Maybe they didn't think anyone would get this far?” Ethan suggested as he moved along beside them.

Selene frowned. That didn't seem very likely, or at least it was out of the ordinary for Ragnarok. Why wouldn't they have more troops guarding an important installation like this?

She found out as the lead elements turned the corner. One moment they were advancing forward, and the next they dove back desperately into cover. Two didn't make it and were pulverized by a hail of bullets.

Selene didn't know what kind of opposition they were facing, but she knew the sound of the weapon at once.

Minigun.

D
anny could feel
the shellfire rocking the tower with the sheer force of its blasts. It sounded like an extremely intense thunderstorm raging outside, with constant booms going off every few seconds. From their narrow view through the vision slits he could see the flashes from the explosions. Nothing could live out in the open under such a heavy rain of shells.

But Ragnarok wasn't out in the open, no matter how much it might seem that way. Danny knew from experience that there was always somewhere to hide, especially when you were fighting in an urban environment. A ditch, a low wall, a small crater, the ruins of a building, anything could serve to protect advancing infantry from a bombardment. They would certainly take casualties, but they didn't face annihilation like it might appear.

And once the shellfire had stopped the defenders were in trouble. Danny saw the wisdom in giving up the outer defenses. Redd Foxx had put up a valiant fight with support from Bravo Wolf, but at this point there were too many incoming enemy troops to fend off, and soon enough they'd be swarming over the defenses. Better to retreat into the tower where they could funnel the enemy advance into tight spaces, negating their numerical superiority.

That was all well and good, but they had also given up their breathing space. If Ragnarok broke into the tower and managed to force their way up the stairs then the Hydra troops were completely screwed. Danny knew it could be done, of course. Black Wolf had managed to pull it off with just a single company, so he could expect Ragnarok to do the same with several units at their disposal.

“What's your orders when the shelling stops?” Xavier asked.

Danny didn't respond right away. He looked around at the fourth floor, surveying the damage from the furious battle. Three of their anti-tank guns had been knocked out, along with one of the replacements. Six troops were dead, along with several more injured that were in the process of receiving medical attention.