In “Goshawk,” David Garvey was taking a robo-cab to meet with his legal team at a Japanese restaurant:
“In less than the blink of an eye, David turned the right handle protruding
from the steel plate slowly clockwise, screwing the plate to the cab’s door frame and then snapped the other handle smartly to the left. The audio unit linked to the cab’s central station began to pick up a faint ticking sound. David quickly slipped the green Glock 19 automatic pistol from the utility case into his right shoulder holster and squeezed both palms tightly against his ears. David tugged the Kevlar-lined jacket over his head and shoulders. One muted explosion shattered the cab’s rear engine compartment, flinging bits of shrapnel and pieces of metal through its back window and into the nearby crowd of pedestrians. A second blast hurled the cab’s left-rear door outward.
A high-speed, precision video taken from outside the cab at that instant would have shown pressure bursts all along the rear edge of the door as its latch and surrounding door parts vaporized. The door latch held for the briefest of moments, in part because all doors had been remotely locked shut to keep David from escaping and making the cab his coffin. The door latch held just long enough to let the cab door rotate slowly in this blink between milliseconds from its original vertical position into the horizontal plane. It was just long enough to give this metallic bird a good spin as it flew free of the latch’s failing grasp.
The whirling door caught Wesley “Spats” Ungarn in mid-stride between a blue-and-white city bus and the dying cab. Its fierce impact jerked Spats out of his motorcycle boots and smashed his lifeless body against the idling bus. His 9MM semiautomatic pistol clattered to the pavement. Spats Ungarn’s final message to the living was borne by his second hand grenade. With its pin gone, the malignant metal pineapple that was designed to finish off David Garvey tumbled between the scuffed brown shoes of an elderly Chinese official of Transport Workers Union Local 100, who had been checking payment of driver dues and the steps leading up into the open front door of the kneeling bus.”
@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Avenue
#terrorism, #kevlar, #handgrenade, #escape
