The burst of automatic fire from overhead was all Tsai Lee needed. The people panicked and raced in mass for the other side of the street and sought for cover behind the buildings. The police did not try to stop them. Tsai Lee expertly disappeared into the throng of people. She easily slipped from the gathering crowd of individuals who all looked on with morbid fascination at the unfolding events from the building she had just spent a few hours on the early morning in.
Separation was not the best plan but she knew Barett was skilled. She thought for a second that she should help him somehow, but then she remembered how he had single handedly taken out an entire team of highly trained black-ops back in the Puget Sound when she had first met him. It was time to focus on the disk in her bag and Dong-Mei, the albino. She needed to find someone with technical skills who could help her. Tsai Lee corned the next building that was the Dorsett Seaview Hotel and headed north on Shanghai street into the heart of Kowloon. The rain began to fall again.
~~~~~~~~~~~
All four men fell unceremoniously down a half flight of the stairwell. The rat-tating of the big AK-47 echoed off the walls as the bullets erupted out of the backs of the two SWAT men who were in the rear. Fists, feet, and blood went everywhere. Barett and the man we was entangled with spun and flipped upside down, Barett landing on his back and under the man The AK-47 was knocked out of his hands in the process and it clattered down the stairs. The SWAT officer’s hold on his own assault riffle was wrong for him to get a shot off but he was quick and brought the stock of his gun down on Barett’s left collar bone. It hurt but no bones broke. Barett answered with his knee. It shot up and connected in the man’s midsection who was rising again to deliver another blow. He was already off balance with the un-level stairwell so the force of the kick over-ended him and he flipped head over heals, crashing down on the switchback metal landing next to the AK-47. The two, now dead, SWAT men under Barett were like sandbags of resistance and hindrance to his movement as his tried to flip back over. All three of them slid down another two stair rungs. In the jumble of legs, arms, blood, armor, and bobbing heads, Barett saw a large knife strapped to one of the bodies. Without thinking he ripped it out of the holster and threw it down at the man he had just kick off of him. He wasn’t a second too late either. The third SWAT officer had brought up his assault rifle ready to shot just as the blade made solid contact on the bridge of his nose. Barett and the other two bodies continued to slide until they slammed onto the landing.
Barett looked around quickly. Shouts were coming up from about two floors below him. He looked at the bodies and began scheming about ways to booby trap the bodies. He saw that each had pockets of flash grenades.
But a door to the stairwell banged open below with a crash and he knew he was out of time. Barett pulled the pin from three of grenades and threw them down the stairwell. He took three more and jumped all the way up to where he had dropped his bag in one coontail leep and shut the door to protect himself from the flash and blast.
Immediately following the explosion he flung back through the door into the stairwell and literally flew up three more flights to the eighth floor. He could hear pursuers coming up after him. He thought about going all the way to the roof but thought better of that, knowing that there would be snipers out there waiting for him. Everything was about speed now if he was going to get out of the building in one piece. He pulled the pins out of the remaining three flash grenades and dropped them down the stairwell.
The one things nice about a city like Hong Kong is that the buildings are so close to each other. If you look out your bathroom window you will be looking into your neighbor's bedroom in another building. This was going to be his exit. He headed to the north end knowing that was the only building close enough for him to jump, hopefully without being seen. He chose a door and ran with his shoulder down. The door gave easily. Inside was a small apartment that belong to a person who had a strange collection of large black and white photos of hands. Out of the little living room was a balcony. Barett carefully stepped up to the window to assess the possibilities. There were no windows he could see in an easy jump but there was a ledge that looked promising. He was guessing there were snipers getting into position. He was hoping they would be looking at the rooftops and the lower windows where the gun fire had come from. He would have to risk it.
Sliding open the balcony windowed door enough him, he slipped his bag onto his back and prepared himself; then jumped.
The landing on the six inch ledge was good. No one had seemed to noticed his evacuation route as not bullets rained down on him. He quickly edge himself to his right, rounded the corner of the building and found a window that was easily big enough for him to fix through once he broke the window. Luckily no one was home. It was a office storage room of some sort with mountains of paper other odds and ends stored about the room.
Exiting the room, he snuck down a hallway and went up two flights of stairs. The escape had worked so well that he thought it would be best to try it one more time. The next building was a giant 55 story building. Within a few minutes he had moved three buildings down the street away from all the police, SWAT teams and snipers. No wonder superheros of the comic book world are inclined to use this mode of travel. He walked out the front door and looked south into the crowd of people who and gathered under protective awnings do keep out of the rain and watch to see what events were unfolding down the street.
What now?
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Barett moves quickly into the growing crowd of morning commuters. Checking his gear, and seccuring it, he uses his counter tracking training to weave and dodge through the crowd. Attempting to work his way west on Wing Sing ln., then up to Reclamation st. and then north to Water Loo rd.
Grabbing some old food from a trash can, he smears it over his cloths, using some dirt and grease to break up the lines of his face. Hoping that this will make a better disquise. Tsai Lee still had the 2-way radio they used last night, Barett was emphatic that she keep it in her gear.( that at least is one good thing he has done ). He is hoping that when she gets to a safe spot, she will remember to turn it on. Right now he is on the look out for a motorize scooter, or one of those three wheel motorcycles that has some room in the back for cargo or gear. If he can rent one, he will, if he needs to steal it, he will do that as well. Mostly he will stop in each alley and check for tails and police, making sure to keep a steady pace away from the action. Searching the crowd he wants to find Tsai Lee and make a plan to find the Albino.
Tsai Lee's heart leapt at the chaos. Winding carefully through the crowd, trying hard to fit in. She had one goal; find a quiet place and turn on the radio that Barrett had bothered her so much about carrying. They need to reunite and make their way north to the Albino to retrieve more information. She prayed that she could reach him by radio.
Barett's mind had been pondering something,...... something Utah had said to him, before they left South America, while they were camped in the jungle, and that had stuck with him this whole time.
" You should be concerned with the Eternal Nature of your soul, your postion with God when you leave this world. "
He had said things like this before, mostly to be ignored or mocked for his tone and religion, by Dave and Him. But this statement kept coming back to haunt Barett. Before seeing that bomb go off and the recent trip in Africa where they had talked at length about the after-life and religion, while they trekked across the desert, he had considered himself invincible, and that what ever he did was right.
Utah called it belonging to the "Church of what's happening now". Barett didn't think himself untouchable, he had just never really considered that he was mortal, and that what he did would effect him for Eternity.
Since that time he had been trying to live some of the tenets that Utah had so long preached to his brothers. He gave up Beer, which wasn't hard since he hardly drank the stuff. And after things had ended badly with the British Nurse he gave up what little womanizing he did. Dave had always claimed that being a Gemini sign made him a little unpredictable, flip floppy if you will. Mostly Barett liked to put on more of a show than he planned. If you visited his room, in his personal space, you would find it more classic and refined then the gun wearing cowboy, that he came off as. A bit of a dual personality if you like, some of the girls he would bring back to his pad, in the past would comment on this, like saying. " I was expecting black walls and clothes piled on the floor, your place is clean and nice....not what I was expecting..." Oddly enough this turned some of them off. For the most part he lived a relatively clean and organized life, but was very guarded on what went on in there. The last few years mellowing him some. Especially the time with Mellisa in the northwest. But now here he was in Hong Kong, with a woman that he was strongly attracted to, strugging to keep himself " Morally Straight " as Utah put it. This might end up being a bigger problem then the disk and the guys with swords that wanted to kill him, he thought.
Trying to put these things out of his mind, Barett went back to focusing on the task at hand. Tsai Lee he decided was not someone to cross, but to be handled with care, in all things, and at all times. This he needed to keep in mind.
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