“You got him?” I asked.
“Yeah, he’s marked,” Phillips said.
“Now if he would just shut up and drive,” I said.
But the sergeant continued to pace back and forth and berate his men. “So you ladies think you can keep this block safe? I’m not sure who I would bet on if it comes down to you five speck-suckers against a gang of kindergarteners.
“You need to be alert. Do you hear me soldiers? Alert! A! L! E! R! T!”
I could not help myself. I painted the laser across the sergeant’s A-L-E-R-T ass. His soldiers were too busy looking him in the eye to see a filament-wide laser beam shining on his butt.
“You marking another jeep?” Phillips radioed me. “I’m getting another signal.”
“Sorry,” I said as I slipped the pointer back into my clothes.
The sergeant inspected each man’s weapon, wasting another five minutes, leaving me in that fetid alley smelling of rotten food. I saw a rat scurry among some distant crates. I would even the score with that sergeant for making me wait, I told myself, and I felt better.
A few minutes later, the sergeant climbed into his jeep. He slammed the door behind himself and sped away.
“I wish somebody would stomp that specker,” one of the soldiers said.
Somebody was about to.
Moving in absolute silence, not kicking a can or brushing a box, I walked through the alley. I did not think those soldiers would notice a marching band parading by with that arc light shining in their eyes, but I did not take any chances. A stealth jeep filled with Marines met me at the end of the alleyway. I climbed in.
“I don’t know where you marked the target that second time, but it’s a good thing you did,” Phillips said. “This guy drives like a frigging maniac. That second mark is a lot clearer.”
Our driver watched the road through a night-for-day lens in the windshield. I did not envy him that task. I had used similar technology in my old combat armor. Night-for-day lenses, with their monochrome displays, just about annihilated your depth perception.
A radar panel on the dashboard showed our position, the sergeant’s position, and the position of our second stealth jeep, along with any nearby Army vehicles. Sergeant Target was on his way to the next barricade, three miles away. His car swerved severely as he drove. Our jeeps, driving on parallel roads, flanked him on either side.
“What’s the matter with him?” Phillips asked.
“Probably drinking and driving,” I said.
“Was he drunk?” Phillips asked.
“He’s a sergeant,” I said. “You can’t tell without a blood test.”
This was a lucky break. A shitfaced sergeant might crash his car. He might stop for a drink, be found by looters, and be stripped from his car. It fit perfectly into our plans. He had given us an alibi, assuming we needed one.
Looking at the map, I saw that our sergeant was still one mile from the next barricade. “Last chance to back out,” I said to Colonel Phillips.
Phillips picked up the microphone and said, “Take him.”
Our driver accelerated. Looking at the map, I saw that the driver in the other jeep had also picked up some speed. We streaked ahead for two blocks and gained a good lead, then swerved around the next corner and planted ourselves in the middle of the road. Using a computer to aim our searchlights on the sergeant, we leapt from the car and drew our weapons.
Our second jeep pulled in behind the sergeant. Once our lights went on, the other driver flashed his, too. And now the brain-dead sergeant, Mr. A.L.E.R.T, did exactly what we hoped he would do. Instead of hunkering in his jeep and calling in his situation, he grabbed his weapon and stepped on to the street. The searchlights blinded him, and he stood with his arms over his eyes too dumb to move.
I approached from the front. The searchlight shone over my shoulder.
“Who are you?” the sergeant muttered.
“Are you drunk, sergeant?” I asked as my right fist slammed into his jaw, dropping him to the street. He fell and did not stir. The drivers in the stealth jeeps cut their searchlights as I knelt beside the fallen Army man and stripped him down to his underwear. I took his uniform, wallet, ID and dog tags. These articles I placed on the hood of his car. Then I stripped my clothes off and handed them to Phillips.
“Damn, Harris. You didn’t need to do that,” Phillips said.
“The last thing he heard was drunk,” I said.
“So?” Phillips asked.
“The word will stay fresh in his subconscious. It’ll be the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up,” I said.
“Does it work that way?” Phillips asked.
“It does with me,” I said as I buttoned his shirt over my chest. That was a lie. I had never gotten so drunk that I passed out.
“Good thinking,” Phillips said.
The sergeant was a clone, of course . . . brown hair, brown eyes. He was shorter than me, and broader around the neck and the chest. He also had a gut. The sleeves of his fatigues ended well shy of my wrists, but I didn’t worry about it. I was not headed to Fort Clinton for a fashion show. The soldiers manning that base would be too busy to notice my sleeves.
As for the good sergeant, he was on his way to the brig at Fort Washington. There he would remain in a cell until he woke up. He would tell them that he was a soldier in the Unified Authority Army. They would tell him that they found him passed out and naked on the street. Thanks to the bottle he carried in his jeep, the story would be an easy sell. His blood alcohol would be legitimately high. If everything went as expected, Phillips would be in the clear. Had he known what we were doing, Colonel Batt Wingate would have been worried.
I nodded to Phillips and climbed into the Army jeep. The air inside the car smelled of beer and flatulence. Using the dome light in the roof, I examined my dog tags for a name—First Sergeant Mark Hopkins. Then I rolled down the window and started up the engine. I was about to pull forward when one of Phillips’s men waved for me to stop.
“You might want this,” he said, handing me the sergeant’s M27. I thanked the man and left. Rather than follow Sergeant Hopkins’s designated course, which would have taken me through three more checkpoints, I found a circuitous route that took me through alleys until I passed all but one final guard station. There I would need to make an appearance.
The jeep barely fit through a few of the tighter alleys. Dumpsters, trash cans, and abandoned cars choked some of the back ways. I saw looters, too—mostly harmless men, scurrying like rats through the shadows, trying to hide by diving into buildings when my headlights turned in their direction. These men traveled alone or in teams of two, mostly. Had I run into a mob, I suspect they would have come after me.
I left the cover of the alleys before entering the final checkpoint. The soldiers guarding that checkpoint would expect an Army sergeant to come up the street. So I pulled onto good old Main Street, Safe Harbor, a six-lane thoroughfare leading to an endless suspension bridge that spanned a great river.
The checkpoint looked like a wall of light spanning the front entrance to the bridge. Soldiers milled around the titanium barricade which stretched the width of the road. There must have been an officer in charge at this post. The soldiers were far more alert than the ones at the other barricades I had seen. They held their guns at the ready. Men sat in the machine-gun nests on either side of the bridge. Soldiers sat behind the wheels of the jeeps and all-terrain vehicles on the edges of the post.
None of this would matter as long as I did not do anything stupid. I slowed my jeep and coasted up to the barricade before coming to a stop. Somebody flashed a spotlight on me; the glare through the windshield was blinding. I lifted a hand to block the glare as I opened my door.
“May I see your identification?” a soldier asked from somewhere within the light.
I felt through my pockets and produced Sergeant Hopkins’s ID.
Hopkins and I were different models of clones, but we were both clones. We both had brown ha
ir, brown eyes, and similar facial features. I was an elongated version of Hopkins, a more than reasonable facsimile with this blinding spotlight bleaching my skin and features.
“Could you cut the light?” I asked. It seemed like something a dumb-ass sergeant might ask.
The soldier handed back my ID. I heard the grating yawn of metal scraping across a concrete surface as the barricade slid open.
“You’re clear,” the soldier said.
So I drove across the bridge, watching the island of light diminish in my rearview mirror. The bridge stretched for more than one mile, the yard-wide cables that supported it forming an arc that reminded me of the spokes of a bicycle tire. A blanket of thick clouds stretched across the sky. Rain so fine that it felt like mist filled the air. An enormous mile-wide river rushed beneath the bridge, but it was so far below me that I could barely hear the hiss of its currents. And covering everything was the inky blackness of night.
I took confidence from the ease with which I had passed through that last checkpoint. Had I stopped to think about it, I might have hesitated before entering the base. Mark Hopkins was supposed to be out reviewing guard stations, a fact that should have told me that he had something to do with security. My luck had held so far, and I did not stop to think that it might end soon.
Ahead of me, Fort Clinton looked more like a constellation of stars than an Army base. Most of the complex was blacked out. Shutters had been closed across windows of buildings so that the only light they emitted came out in thin stripes that dissolved into the night air. The buildings themselves looked darker than a shadow.
Helicopter gunboats ran slow patrols above the fort while jets circled the area high in the atmosphere. I could not see the gunboats or the jets, but the loud chop, chop, chop of helicopter rotors echoed up from the ground and the searing roar of jet engines thundered and faded in the darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The guard at the gate barely checked my identification. I drove a Fort Clinton Army jeep. After a glance at my papers and a sweep of my face, he signaled his pals to let me through.
Following base signs, I found my way to the administration building. The lobby of the building was brightly lit. Officers in fatigues hustled up and down the halls. Men hunkered by communications consoles, relaying orders and checking the overall readiness of the soldiers. No one so much as looked in my direction.
This administration building was no different than thousands of other similar buildings across the galaxy. Colonel Bartholomew Wingate’s office was right where I expected it to be. And, as I suspected, the colonel was nowhere to be found. I went out to my jeep and drove until I found officer housing. I only hoped that I had enough time to find Wingate before he bolted.
Base commander housing tended to be big and conspicuous, and I had little trouble locating Wingate’s estate. There was a stealth jeep in the driveway that looked black and sinister, a phantom car meant to blend in with the night.
I parked my jeep along the street and climbed out into the misty night hiding behind a stand of trees as I waited to see what would happen next. If Callahan was right about Colonel Bartholomew Wingate, I would not have to wait very long.
Wingate’s front door was about ten yards ahead of me. His house was easy to spot. His porch lights blazed while every other house on the block was dark. I sat in the silence, my mind wandering.
There was so much that the U.A. intelligence community did not know about the enemy. We knew that the four rebelling arms—Cygnus, Scutum-Crux, Perseus, and Norma—all had their own governments. But we also knew that Gordon Hughes, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, was the acting president of the Confederate Arms. Was there one government or four?
From everything I had heard, the arms had formed a shaky alliance. The only thing they had in common was that they wanted the Unified Authority out of their space. The Morgan Atkins Separatists, on the other hand, wanted to topple the Unified Authority. They wanted to conquer and destroy, but unlike the renegade arms, the Mogats did not have the kind of infrastructure that would allow for an army. They had controlled the Galactic Central Fleet for more than forty years and did nothing with it.
Then there were the Japanese. Approximately 12.5 million people of Japanese descent fled Ezer Kri because of the Unified Authority occupation of their planet. No one had ever satisfactorily explained how 12.5 million people could have fled a planet in a system patrolled by the Scutum-Crux Fleet, but I had my ideas. They could have been evacuated by a large fleet of self-broadcasting ships such as the dreadnaughts, battleships, and destroyers in the Galactic Central Fleet.
The last estimate I read placed the Mogat population at approximately two hundred million. The combined arms had approximately thirty billion citizens. So how did the Japanese fit in? They numbered less than thirteen million; how important could they be? And yet, for some reason, people were calling the GC Fleet by a Japanese name.
An hour passed. I remained crouched, hidden from Wingate’s house by trees and a shrub. An observant driver might have spotted me among the trees, but no one came down this road. The base was at high-alert and the officers were at their stations.
When the enemy finally appeared, they were dressed in Army fatigues and spoke common English. They drove a jeep, leaving the windows open to enjoy the breeze. After the trip down in a Galactic Fleet transport, they must have been glad for the cold fresh air.
The jeep rolled up the street right past me. It parked in front of Colonel Wingate’s yard and two men climbed out.
“I told you this was the right street,” one man said. He had a single bar on his fatigues. Had he not been an enemy commando, that bar would have made him a lieutenant in the Army.
“I spotted the house,” the other man said. He wore the same clever disguise. They were wolves in wolves’ clothing.
“How hard was that?” the first man said. “It’s the only house with its lights on.” They spoke loud enough for me to hear them from thirty yards away. Stealth work was clearly not their strength. An angry-looking Wingate came to the door before they reached it. He might have been watching from the window, but he might also have heard their pointless babble.
“Ready, Colonel?” one of the commandos asked.
Wingate turned off the lights outside his house and locked the door behind him. He did not speak as he walked over to the stealth jeep in his driveway, a rucksack dangling over his shoulder. He climbed into the back seat. I could see his head through the rear window. The commandos climbed into the front seats, and the jeep rolled out of the driveway.
I wished I had marked that jeep with the laser pointer that Bernie Phillips loaned me. Then I could have asked his trusty Marines to do the tracking. I did not have the option this time. The Marines had returned to their base.
Colonel Wingate and his commando escort drove with their headlights off. Since their stealth vehicle had night-for-day vision built into its windshield, that was no problem for them. To avoid being spotted, I also drove with my headlights off. I did not want the base police or the traitor I was tailing to notice me. The only thing in my favor was that instead of following Wingate, I sped ahead to the place I hoped would be his rendezvous spot.
Before taking me into town to kidnap the Army soldier, Colonel Phillips had shown me several maps of Fort Clinton and the surrounding area. There was no way a sellout like Wingate was going to ride out the attack. His soldiers were going to die. The Pentagon would send men to survey the base and there would be huge inventory discrepancies. Even if Wingate survived the attack, he would be arrested and killed in the aftermath. His Confederate Arms pals might not care if he got himself executed, but he might spill some important information in the process. To keep him quiet, they either needed to kill him or get him off the planet. Either way, they would need to send down a transport with a team of commandos. When that transport returned to the fleet, I aimed to hitch a ride.
By studying the maps, Phillips and I located the m
ost likely spot for an enemy transport to land. It was only an educated guess, but it proved right.
Driving almost blind, I headed up a slow grade toward the raised parade grounds along the eastern gate of the base. This area was dark and mostly empty. Sure enough, every few seconds I spotted just a glimpse of the phantom black car in the darkness.
This part of the base was dark and lifeless. We passed no other cars. The landscape was studded with old-fashioned drill towers, standing high over the ground on stilts made of logs. A half-mile ahead of me, Wingate’s jeep slowed as it passed through a poorly-lit guard station. The gate at the guard station raised as Wingate approached. A commando left the station and climbed into Wingate’s stealth jeep.
As if this were a cue, the attack commenced the moment Wingate’s car left the base. It came in the form of a silvery red beam that poured out of the night sky like a translucent pillar. The scene remained absolutely silent for a moment, then fire, smoke, and sirens erupted as a building exploded. I watched this scene unfold as I drove, and I looked at my wristwatch to mark the time. Once eight minutes had passed, I knew the whole thing would be over.
Fire trucks flashing red and white warning lights streaked across the base. From where I sat at the edge of the parade grounds, I could see fire blazing below, and I could see the immaculate red and white light twinkling from the tops of the fire trucks.
When I reached the gate, I noticed the shattered glass of the security booth and knew that the commandos had slaughtered the men left to guard this gate. There was no blood, no major destruction. The commandos had probably sneaked up to the gate on their way into the base. A couple of quick shots from a high-powered pistol, and the gate was theirs. Did Wingate care that men under his command had been ambushed?
Behind me, lasers rained down from above. Beams as big around as water towers struck buildings. Smaller beams no more than one foot in diameter flashed quickly, striking jets and gunboats right out of the sky.
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