Backshot (16 page)

She laughed.

* * *

They got back to the hotel four hours later. Sergeant Ivo Gossner was loaded down with parcels. The parcels weren’t heavy—after all, they only contained a few souvenirs and lots of clothing, mostly women’s clothing, souvenirs which were lighter than a similar amount of men’s clothing would have weighed—but there were so damned
many
of them. Gossner felt like he’d been dragged around to more stores than there could possibly be in downtown New Granum, and something was added to his burden in each of them.

Lance Corporal Bella Dwan, on the other hand, carried only one oversize handbag slung over her shoulder containing two small packages with what she referred to as “female necessities that you needn’t worry your sweet little head about.”

Gossner dropped his burden on the bed and they chatted inanely about the shopping expedition while they scanned the room for bugs.

When they didn’t find any, he said, “You’re going to get yours when we get back to Camp Howard, Lance Corporal.”

“All these new clothes! Would you like me to model them for you, sweetheart?”

He tried to glare at her, but was distracted by an odd crinkling at the corner of her eyes. What was that?

If those weren’t the eyes of the Queen of Killers . . .

“I’m going to find a way for us to get out of here without being seen,” he said gruffly, and left.

“Don’t be long,” she said. “I’m hungry after all that shopping.” She turned to her purchases and went through them while he was gone.

He was back in less than twenty minutes and nodded his approval at how she was dressed. The colors of her shirt and pants were muted, matte grays and blacks, yet their pattern was festive. They looked like they’d been designed for a conservative dresser who nonetheless wanted to look filled with gaiety. She had laid out similarly patterned and colored garments for him. The patterns and colors would make very good camouflage at night.

“At least the whole shopping trip wasn’t a waste,” he said as he picked up his clothes and headed for the water closet to change. She made a face at his retreating back. After eating they returned to their room, and slipped back out a few minutes later.

Near Ramuncho’s Restaurant, New Granum

The streets were brightly lit and noisy with lively vacationing tourists and locals out for an evening of theater, dining, or partying in nightclubs. People constantly brushed against and bumped into each other in the boisterous crowds and had to shout for their companions to hear them. But in the service and access alleys behind and between the buildings, it was quiet and dark. There was nobody to note the two shadows that occasionally seemed to hump bigger than they had been and move from here to there, and nobody could have heard the shadows, because they were as silent as shadows should be. Gossner and Dwan moved slowly and carefully, sliding soft-shod feet over the pavement, searching for obstructions and objects that might make noise when they stepped. They probed ahead and to the sides with their hands for obstacles their feet wouldn’t encounter. The pavement seemed to hold the usual amount and assortment of detritus to be found on city alleys, haphazardly lined with frequently overflowing trash receptacles. Almost anybody could be excused for tripping, kicking, or bumping into noisemakers while negotiating them in the night—or during the day, for that matter. But Gossner and Dwan weren’t almost anybody, they were Force Recon Marines, and knew how to move silently though worse places than this; unlit city alleys posed no problem for them. They didn’t speak until their reconnaissance was complete, and they vacated the shadows of the alleys for the shadows of a nearby park, where whispered male and female voices from the bushes wouldn’t cause comment.

“Two places I can do it from,” Dwan said when they were huddled close in a clump of low-lying bushes. Their backs were to a windowless wall and they could see all approaches to the bushes. “But in one of them, I have to be too close to the street, there’s too good a chance someone will spot my mazer.”

Gossner grunted softly in agreement. “Civilians bother me,” he said back. “If there are people on the street, someone might walk into your line of fire while you’re shooting and block enough of your shot to just make the target sick.”

Now that they were really planning it, Jorge Liberec Lavager was no longer President Lavager, he wasn’t even a person; he was simply “the target.”

“I need a higher place. Maybe farther back.”

“I thought I saw something while we were at lunch. Let’s go and check it out.”

“Lead the way.”

They went back into the service alley, to a building that backed onto it opposite one of the access alleys that gave a view of the front of Ramuncho’s Restaurant. During the day, Gossner had gotten the impression it was vacant. A broken ground-level window gave them access to the building’s basement. They had to move by touch in the darkness, but that was not difficult because the basement seemed to be empty. The stairs to the ground floor were sound and the door at their head ajar; it squeaked slightly when Gossner eased it open, but he lifted up on it and the squeaking stopped. They inspected the ground floor, which was easier than finding the stairs in the basement because of the street light that came through the front windows. The ground floor was empty. The second floor was also empty. Gossner squatted and brushed his fingers against the floor. “It hasn’t been vacant long,” he whispered.

“No dust.”

Dwan nodded, and went to look out the back windows. Right away, she found one she liked for the mission. Then she wanted to check the third, top, floor. As they expected, it was vacant as well. Their inspection of the spaces behind Ramuncho’s wasn’t as successful, even though they found several spots from which a sniper could fire through the windows of the back rooms—they didn’t know
which
windows were to the private room Lavager normally used. Reconnaissance complete, they returned to the hotel.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Near the Cabbage Patch, Forty Kilometers northeast of New Granum, Union of Margelan, Atlas

Clouds were gathering in the east when second platoon, Fourth Force Recon Company, went to ground in a dense stretch of forest one and a half kilometers from the suspected weapons research facility-manufactory.

Lieutenant Gott Tevedes transmitted a directional burst message: “First squad, you know what to do?”

Sergeant Jak Daly clicked his transmitter twice for “Yes.”

“Any questions?” Tevedes transmitted. Daly clicked once; he had no questions.

“Second squad,” Tevedes radioed, and asked the same questions of Sergeant Wil Bingh. Bingh replied with the appropriate clicks; he also knew what to do and had no questions.

“Do it.”

Daly and Bingh signaled their men, and the eight Marines rose to their feet and headed for the former weapons factory now called the “Cabbage Patch.” Second squad followed behind first squad, fifty meters to its left. Daly carried a passive mapper; it would scan everything he pointed it at, but didn’t use a range finder so its depth perception wasn’t totally reliable. Bingh carried a scope with face recognition capabilities to take a census of the personnel in the Cabbage Patch. The only data they had on who was in the compound was a rough head count of the military garrison, but that count probably wasn’t reliable. The identifier would make a record of every individual it saw and prevent any of them from being counted twice.

Until they returned to the AstroGhost, they were on full combat footing; it took more than an hour for the two squads to cover the 1,300 meters to their first observation location. The Confederation Navy string-of-pearls-generated topographic maps the platoon used weren’t the most up-to-date maps available to the Marines, but they were the most detailed. The map of the Cabbage Patch and its environs showed a shallow dip in the side of a hill two hundred meters east of the facility and above it. The buildings and roads shown on more recent maps were superimposed on the topo map. The hollow was shallower than the decades-old topo map indicated, and many of the game trails marked on it no longer existed; the trails that were still there showed scant sign of recent use. Nor did all the buildings in the Cabbage Patch complex appear on the map. Several of them looked to be of very recent construction.

Daly was glad the hollow was shallower than the map showed; the Marines would be able to lie comfortably on its slopes and watch in all directions with nothing but their heads exposed outside it; if it had been deeper, they might have had to cling to the sides. Using touches, Daly positioned everybody. He placed Corporal Nomonon to watch the rear; Sergeant Kindy and Lance Corporal Wazzen had the flanks. He took his own place overlooking the Cabbage Patch complex after Bingh signaled that second squad was in its observation position to their south. President Lavager of the Union of Margelan publicly claimed the Cabbage Patch was an agricultural research station. Force Recon was sent in because it was known to have been a weapons factory, and now its security was tighter than could be accounted for by its claimed use—it was more like the security one would expect in a top-secret military research station. The visible and easily-detected-by-other-means security the Marines observed was even tighter than intelligence reports had led them to believe.

The compound was a rough rectangle with its northwest corner chopped off, truncated by the New Granum road, which ran southwest to northeast. Inside the main gate off the road was the administration building. To its right was a cluster of small buildings that looked to be housing; a probable dining hall was adjacent to them. On the admin building’s left was a vehicle barn—at least that’s what the map said. During the time Daly watched, he saw several ground cars and lorries enter and not leave, so the map legend was likely right.

Those buildings and a multistory structure behind the admin building were the original buildings in the compound, and were oriented on the road. The rest of the buildings were laid out on an east-west or north-south axis, though “laid out” wasn’t an accurate term—they seemed to have been thrown up wherever there was space as the need for them arose. According to the map, the building directly south of the original lab was another laboratory, the building to the south of the garage was labeled a barracks. Judging by the uniformed people Daly saw entering and leaving it, he thought that was likely. A small mess hall was south of the barracks, with a military office building to its east. To the east of and between the two labs was a large power plant; the map said so, and it looked like one. Daly wondered what kind of agricultural research could require a power plant that big.

Then there were buildings not on the map. A barracks was southwest of the second lab, another lab was east of the power plant, an unidentifiable building was in the southwest corner, and a foundation for another building had been laid to the barracks’ east. North of the new foundation was a field on which a platoon of soldiers was running combat-maneuver drills. North of the drill field was a short-takeoff-and-landing airfield with hangar and control tower. A tall communications tower stood in the center of the compound.

The entire complex was surrounded by a razor-wire fence of alternating aprons and tightly wound coils. The fence would be very difficult to penetrate without explosives or sustained bursts from a plasma-firing assault gun. The platoon didn’t have any assault guns, but it did have explosives. Unfortunately, the platoon carried little more than the exact amount of explosives they would need to blow up the suspected weapons buildings intelligence knew to be in the Cabbage Patch when the orders for the mission were drawn; there wasn’t any spare to use to blow holes in the defensive fence. To make matters worse, there was a trench outside the wire. From his vantage on the hillside, Daly could see the trench was filled with sharp stakes, making it extremely difficult and dangerous to traverse as well.
It’s too bad we left our puddle jumpers behind
, Daly thought,
we could use them to get over the
trench and wire.
The defenders would be able to see the puddle jumpers themselves, but would likely hesitate before opening fire on the unidentified and apparently unmanned objects. When they did open fire, they probably wouldn’t be able to shoot many—maybe none—of the invisible Marines during the short time it would take them to jump over the trench and wire. The perimeter fence was backed up with fifteen reinforced guard towers and at least fourteen bunkers. Later, after his squad had made a complete circuit of the compound, he found there were eighteen bunkers in all. Each of the towers housed an assault gun.
Now, if we could manage to get the towers to fire on the fence and trenches, they could open
paths for us
, he thought, though he couldn’t think of a way to get the defenders to destroy their own first line of defense.

A quick calculation told him the garrison had to be perhaps two companies strong, allowing for four soldiers per tower and bunker, plus command and communications, and allowing for a reserve. It could easily be larger if the bunkers held more than four men each, or the commander had a rapid-maneuver force in addition to a reserve.

He didn’t see any communications trenches inside the compound, but that didn’t preclude the existence of tunnels for reserves and maneuver forces to move through. Daly drew his men together and told them what they were going to do next. Then he and Wazzen headed south while Kindy and Nomonon went north. They’d move a hundred meters closer to the perimeter and circle the compound to get a closer look. They would rendezvous on the other side of the road opposite the main gate.

On the way around the perimeter, Daly stopped to check on second squad. Fortunately, Bingh had positioned his men exactly where they’d planned; between the chameleons and their skillfully hidden positions, second squad might otherwise have been impossible for Daly to find. Daly touched helmets with Bingh so they could talk without using their radios and asked, “How many have you seen?”

“So far we’ve identified seventy-five different soldiers walking around or on the drill field,” the second squad leader answered. “I saw a major, maybe he’s the commander. And eighteen different people in lab coats, though I wouldn’t swear all of them are scientists—some of them are probably lab techs, and I think at least one was a cook or messman.”

“What about admin or other civilians?”

“Two drivers parked their lorries in the garage and went into the admin building. Nobody else went in or came out.”

“Guard towers?”

“The light’s too poor for identification, but it looks like there are four people in each. I couldn’t detect anyone in the bunkers.”

Seventy-five on the ground and sixty in the towers, a hundred and thirty-five. That accounted for two-thirds of the minimum number of soldiers Daly thought were in the garrison.
If
the garrison had equal-size watches, there were probably another sixty or seventy asleep or otherwise off duty or out of sight. Not counting any who might be in the bunkers.

“What about the main gate?”

“It’s too far away to make out enough detail. There are eight individuals, but the scope couldn’t pick up enough data to identify them.”

“Good job. Keep looking.” Daly told Bingh what his squad was doing, then clapped him on the back and touched Wazzen to let him know to continue the circuit. Detectors the Marines carried showed them the locations of mines, both antipersonnel and antivehicle, that were buried just under the surface of the ground between the forested hillsides and the trench, as well as a variety of telltales to detect infrared radiation and motion. The infrared detectors didn’t cause them any problem, but the motion detectors forced the encircling Marines to keep farther inside the trees than Daly wanted to. He plotted all the mines and detectors on his map. Kindy and Nomonon were waiting for them in the trees across the road, two hundred meters from the main gate.

“The bunkers on my side all seem to be unmanned,” Kindy reported as he touched helmets with Daly. That jibed with what Daly and Wazzen had seen on their circuit.

“Secondary gates?” Daly asked.

“None that are obvious.”

Daly hadn’t seen a back gate either. He found it curious that the compound wouldn’t have any way in or out other than the main gate. Every military installation he’d ever seen had at least one back gate. So did nearly every civilian complex he’d ever seen.

“Any activity here?”

“Nothing.”

“Let’s watch for a while.”

The four Marines settled in to observe the road and the entrance to the compound, and the admin building just inside it. Daly checked the time. It was a few minutes shy of 16 hours. Most government and military installations had a shift or watch change at 16 hours. Maybe they were about to see some activity.

Nobody came out of the admin building’s front door, but at 1615 hours, a group of people in civilian clothes exited the side of the building and headed for the housing area, and a second group exited on the east side. They joined other people, who were probably coming from the labs behind the admin building, in entering the vehicle barn. Minutes later an air-cushion passenger carrier drove out of the garage, through the main gate, and headed northeast, the direction of Spondu.
No night shift
, Daly thought.
Not unless the night shift lives in the housing units
. He could only see half of the housing area from his position. A few minutes after the bus left, a guard sergeant marched eight soldiers up the road along the east side of the admin building to the main gate where they relieved the guards on duty. The guard sergeant marched the relieved guards back the way he’d come. Not long after that, four lorries came from the southwest, the direction of New Granum. The guards at the gate made them wait outside until the officer of the guard came out to admit them. The officer directed them to follow the road to the west of the admin building, then returned to it. He was the only person they’d seen enter or leave the building through its main entrance. When nothing else happened for a half hour, Daly decided they’d watched the front long enough.

“Look for a tunnel entrance on the way back,” he told Kindy and Nomonon. The squad again split into two-man teams to return to the shallow hollow where they’d started watching. Daly stopped to check with second squad again. He and Bingh touched helmets.

“We identified another hundred and fifteen soldiers, including the gate sentries during the changing of the guard,” Bingh reported. “We’d already identified some of the guard sergeants, and we didn’t get face shots of all the soldiers who were heading to the gate.”

“That’s two hundred and fifty positives on the garrison, plus others not positively identified.”

“Right.”

“Tell me about the tech shift change.”

“We identified thirty-six individuals coming out of the labs. There were more, but we couldn’t ID all of them because they were too far away, or we couldn’t see their faces. We didn’t ID any of the people who went from the admin building to the housing area. Do you want to know about the thirty-three who left on the bus?”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Daly replied. “Whatever we do here will be done before they come back. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Nobody entered or left the power plant.”

Corporal Musica, who was using the scope while the squad leaders conferred, poked his helmet in and said, “Six more.”

Daly and Bingh looked at the compound. Soldiers were walking from the barracks to the mess hall.