The Dark Edge Chronicles - Hardwire

Diversion

His shock of salt and pepper hair tucked neatly under his combat helmet, Lieutenant Yousef Bin Mohammed frowned as he received a report from his vanguard unit he had sent up into the BCE Building via the earpiece he wore. The commander of Metro Toronto's Emergency Situation Response Unit, dressed in the same black fatigues his team wore, was hunkered down behind a Plexiglas barricade set ten meters back from the front lines.

Those front lines were formed by a tight cordon of standard white with blue and red trim patrol cars with armored windows and doors, nestled up tight to the broad sets of stairs leading into the BCE Building's front lobby area. Behind them stood tense officers in flak jackets and helmets, both pistols and shotguns aimed at the BCE Building's front doors, faces grim in the blue and red light reflected from the patrol cars' rooftop bubble lights.

More officers, openly carrying Heckler Koch automatic rifles had sealed off a five-block perimeter around the downtown core, to prevent anybody from getting out. Hopefully that would be enough to trap the responsible parties, if they weren't already long gone.

According to the vanguard unit, the top three floors of the main tower were completely obliterated, as if somebody had fought their own private war up there. With strange reports coming out of Calgary, Alberta about some hyper-violent gang war that seemed to be raging in the prairie city's streets, the last thing Mohammed wanted to do was let anything get out of hand in his city. And so he had moved quickly when he had received reports of unusual activity in the downtown core.

Only to find the private war already apparently finished. Frowning even more deeply, Mohammed was about to tell the vanguard unit to spread out and make a thorough search of the damaged floors when he heard rough shouts rising up from where the uniformed officers had blocked off Bay where it joined to Front. Immediately the ESRU commander switched frequencies.

"Perimeter team, what the hell is going on over there?" the slender commander asked tightly into his throat mike. He got nothing but static in reply.

Teeth grit in silent frustration as he felt the situation begin to pull itself out of his control, Mohammed stood and stared at the point where his perimeter team should've been monitoring the Front/Bay intersection. And felt his eyes fly open in astonishment as a FedEx delivery van spun around the corner, a number of dark bodies hanging from open doors and windows with strange-looking weapons in hand.

Mohammed could also feel his eyes narrow into tense slits as he watched those self-same weapons spit silent fire to cut down the knot of officers that had been preparing to stop the vehicle before it run them over at the corner. And then it was flying up Bay, northward and directly towards his position.

Having watched their comrades at the corner mowed down without regard, the officers that were fortified behind the car cordon, immediately turned and opened up on the hurtling van which, oddly enough, was making no sound as it screamed up Bay. And, despite the fact that they were now close enough to hear even if they were silenced, the strange weapons continued to fire without even the hiss of rounds cutting through the air.

Silent, perhaps, but as effective as any other weapon: as Mohammed looked on in frustration, he watched windows shot out, officers go down with shouts of pain and side panels get hammered by rounds smashing into them. On the other hand, the dozens of rounds that were sent the van's way seemed to be having absolutely no effect at all as the van raced on unimpeded and unmarked, its passengers still hanging from windows and open doors without a wound to touch them.

They could only be one of the parties that clashed in the penthouse offices high up in the BCE Building's main tower.

"Shoot for the tires, Allah damn you!" Mohammed screamed into his throat mike. And then the van was smashing aside two of the cordon patrol cars with the scream of twisting metal and the tinkle of breaking glass to charge directly past the slender ESRU commander.