“Are you sure that’s what you saw?”
He glanced at the two guards, who had stopped moving. No, he was not sure, and they couldn’t tell him even if he spoke German. Maybe Taylor shouldn’t have blown Steve’s brains out so quickly. In any case, he needed to give Taylor—and himself—some confidence in the mission. “I’m sure.”
“Okay… let’s do it.”
“Back-to-back. I’m front.”
They moved into the lit corridor and Brodie went to the right with Taylor walking backward behind him to cover the rear.
The corridor was quiet, and the air was stagnant and damp. Up ahead was another T-intersection, and they advanced quickly.
Brodie’d had his share of training and real-life experience in urban combat, including clearing buildings, but it was a special kind of suck when you had no idea where you were, where you were going, how big the place was, or even a basic idea of the enemy’s strength. In fact, it was a minor miracle they were still alive.
Suddenly a guard emerged from the left side of the cross-corridor and ran across, firing a pistol erratically. The shots went wide, and Brodie returned fire with a burst of bullets. The figure was thrown back and hit the wall.
Brodie advanced toward the body slumped against the wall. It was the female medic. She stared ahead, dead-eyed, still gripping her 9mm automatic pistol.
Brodie said to Taylor, “Check the left.”
“Copy.”
They entered the T-intersection, and Brodie spun to his right and Taylor to her left. They saw no one.
For a moment they both held their positions, looking down the empty corridors. Then Taylor crouched and took the medic’s pistol, a spare mag, and a key ring that was clipped to the woman’s belt, while Brodie checked both directions. He saw a door about thirty yards down where the medic had come from.
Taylor stood and they moved toward the door, with Brodie backpedaling and covering Taylor’s back.
They reached a red metal door. Taylor tried the knob. Locked. She tried the medic’s keys one by one as Brodie kept eyes on both ends of the corridor.
The third key was the charm, and she turned the knob slightly, then kicked the door open.
The room was pitch-black, and they both dropped to one knee as a muzzle flashed in the dark and a single shot hit the wall. Brodie squeezed off a burst in the direction of the shot, heard someone cry out in pain, then raked automatic fire across the room, hitting metal and concrete and shattering glass.
He stopped firing, moved into the room to his left, and listened. “Clear.”Taylor entered, located a light switch, and turned it on, then shut the door and locked it.
Directly ahead of them, a man sat dead in an office chair. He was in his fifties and wore a white lab coat covered in blood. A pistol lay on the ground near his feet.
They were inside a large room, about forty by thirty feet. An old, faded map of Berlin on the far wall indicated this might have been some sort of command room back in Adolf’s day, but now it had been converted into a lab with long metal tables, computers, tubes, and beakers, and various pieces of high-tech equipment. There was shattered glass everywhere.
“Scott…”
Brodie turned to his right. Taylor had her rifle trained on another man in a lab coat who was crouched in the corner, his hands above his head.
“Bitte…”
Brodie said, “Up.”
The man rose to his feet. “Bitte…”
“Shut up. Speak English?”
“Ja. Yes. Yes. I speak English.”
The man appeared to be in his late forties, heavyset with thinning brown hair. Brodie asked, “What’s your name?”
“T-Tomas. Tomas Stellmacher.”
Taylor asked, “Are you a geneticist?”
