He stood, chilling…
A door opened noisily behind him, and he whirled about like a tiger. Athalia stood framed in the opening to the warehouse.
"What's keeping you?" she said. "We're all waiting."
"Waiting?" he echoed. He glanced at his chronometer, but he could not remember what it had said when he had looked at it just a short while before.
"It's been more than ten minutes," said Athalia, and jerked her head toward the warehouse interior behind her. "Come along. We've got a lot of questions for you."
Chapter Fifty-four
Opening the door into the warehouse, he found a change in those waiting there; and a change in the very atmosphere of the wide, chill, echoing enclosure. For a second, the faces at the table looked up at him in a savage eagerness, with the glitter of excitement found in the eyes of starving people held back too long from food spread plainly before them. It came to him then that he had forgotten how many years people like these had suffered from the Militia, without a chance to strike back in equal measure. It was small credit to him after all, he told himself, that he should be able to move them now to the point of action for Rukh and against such an enemy.
They dropped their heads, turning their eyes away from him as he stepped through the door and began to approach the table; but the caution was useless. To anyone trained by life as he had been, the fire in those seated there could be felt as plainly as the radiation from a metal stove with a roaring blaze in its belly.
"The question is," said the man in the knitted jacket to Hal, as Hal retook his seat, "whether we've got anything like the number of people you've planned for to do something this big. How many men and women do you think you'll have to have?"
"For which part of the operation?" asked Hal. "To go into the prison section of the Center and bring Rukh out won't take more than a dozen people—and half of those are there only to be dropped off at points along the route, to give us warning if any force is sent against us from the front part of the Center. Any more than six people in on the actual rescue—that's five, including me—would get in each other's way in any small rooms or corridors. Our real protection's going to be in getting in fast and getting out again before the Center's officers realize what's happened."
"Only twelve?" said the tall man who had gotten up to leave, earlier. "But who's to back you up outside, once you've brought Rukh Tamani out?"
"Maybe a dozen more," said Hal, "but those don't need to have combat experience, like those I'll take inside; and in fact, the only really trained help I'll need are going to be the five with me. Give me five former Command members and the others can be anyone you trust to have courage and keep their heads under fire."
—Or give me just two Dorsai like Malachi or Amanda, the back of his mind added. He put the thought from him. Nothing was as useless as wishing for what was not available.
"But you want us meanwhile to staff a full-scale assault on the front of the Center—" began the man in the knitted jacket.
"Thirty people who can actually hit most of what they shoot at," said Hal. "Plus as many more as you've got weapons for and can be trusted not to kill themselves or their friends. But by the time the assault starts, you ought to be able to use those you put to work to stir up the riots and fights, earlier. I'll say it again—the attack on the Center from its front is only for the purpose of occupying the attention of the Militia in the building, for the twenty minutes or so it takes us to get Rukh out. Don't tell me a city area this size can't come up with a hundred hard-core resistance people."
He stopped speaking and looked down the table at all of them. For a moment none of them answered. They were all looking at the tabletop and elsewhere to hide their satisfaction with his answers.
"All right," said Athalia, once more from the far end of the table where she had reseated herself. "We'll have to talk over the details, of course. Why don't you wait in your room until I bring you our answer?"
Hal nodded, getting to his feet. He left the room and all of them to what he was fairly certain was already a foregone conclusion. But instead of going to his room, he stepped out the front door of Athalia's establishment into the darkness and the cool night air of the yard. Three low shapes, heads down and tails wagging solemnly, moved in on him. He squatted on the dirt of the yard and held his arms out to them.
Above them, the cloud cover of the night sky was torn here and there to show the pinpoints of stars. The dogs pressed hard against him, licking at his face and hands…
The next day fighting broke out in the city, here and there, at first between individuals and then between the congregations of various churches. A few fires erupted. The day after there were more fires, fighting was more common and mothers did not send their children to school. By afternoon of the second day, the only people seen on the streets in Ahruma were adults armed with clubs, at the least, and squads of Militia, who ordered them back inside whatever buildings belonged to them, then went on to help the overburdened firemen of the city deal with the conflagrations that seemed to be erupting everywhere. The tempers of the Militiamen had shortened with exhaustion; and the reactiveness of the civilians had risen to match.
"It's out of hand," said Morelly Walden, coming into Athalia's front room late on that afternoon. The slack skin of his aging face was pulled into a shape of sad anger. "We're not controlling it any longer. It's happening on its own."
"As it should," said Hal.
Athalia's front room had been made into a command headquarters; but she and Hal were the only people other than Morelly there at the moment. Morelly looked from Hal to her.
"The city doesn't have a single district left that doesn't have at least two or three fires," he said. "It could end with the whole area burnt down."
"No," said Hal. "The firebugs who've been tempted to go to work on their own are getting tired, just like the Militia and the rest of us. Dawn tomorrow, things will begin to slack off. There's a pattern to riots in cities that's existed since there were cities to riot in."
"I believe you," said Morelly, and sighed, "since I know you from the days in the Command with Rukh. But I can't help worrying, anyway. I think we ought to make our move on Center now."
"No," said Hal. "We need darkness—for psychological as well as tactical reasons. If you want to worry about something, Morelly, worry about whether both the rescue teams and the ones who'll be attacking the front of the Center are getting some rest so as to be ready for tonight. Go check on them. The attackers shouldn't move into position until full dark; and the rescuers mustn't move until the fighting's been going on up front for at least a couple of hours; long enough to draw as many of the Militia in the building as possible up to the front of it."
"All right," said Morelly.
He went across the room and through the door leading back into the warehouse where the cots had been set up for those not presently needed on the streets.
As the door closed behind him, Athalia looked directly across the room at Hal.
"Still," she said, "isn't it about time you were waking those who're going in with you?"
"They already know all I know about what we'll run into," answered Hal, nodding at the plans on the table, plans drawn from the information they had been able to gather from Athalia's contacts with the Center, of the corridors and passageways leading to Rukh's cell. "From here on, it'll be a matter of making decisions, and their following the orders I give. Let them rest as much as they can—if they can."
Shortly after sunset, word came back to Athalia's front room that sniping at the front of the Center building had begun. Hal went into the warehouse to gather his two teams; the one that would penetrate the building and the one that would guard the service courtyard where deliveries were normally made, at the back of the building, where the first team would go in through the barracks kitchen entrance. Of the twenty-five men and women he sought, he found all but one of them awake, sitting up for the most part on the edge of their cots and talking in low voices. The
exception was a slim, dark-skinned man dressed in the rough bush clothing that was the informal uniform of those in the Commands—a last minute replacement for one of the interior team whom Hal had not met yet, slumbering face-down.
Hal shook a shoulder and the other sat up. It was Jason Rowe, who had led Hal originally to the Commands and to Rukh Tamani.
"Jase!" said Hal.
"I just made the last truck in," Jason said, yawning hugely. "Greetings, Brother. Forgive me, I've been a little short on sleep lately."
"And I was giving you credit for being the one person here with no nerves." Hal laughed. "How much sleep have you had?"
"Don't worry about me, Howard—Hal, I should say—I've had six—" Jason glanced at the chronometer on his wrist—"no, seven hours since I got here. I heard about you being here and thought you'd need me."
"It's good to see you—and good to have you," said Hal. Jason got to his feet. Hal looked around and raised his voice. "All right, everyone who's with me! Into the front room and we'll get ready to leave."
As the trucks that carried them got close to the Center, they heard the whistle of cone rifles from a couple of blocks away, and when they were closer yet, the tall faces of the buildings on either side of the street brought them echoes of the brief, throaty roars of power weapons, like the angry voicings of large beasts.
The trucks turned into a street along one side of the Center; and the metal gates to the service courtyard entrance, almost to the rear of the block-long buildings stood wide open. Whatever Militia Guards had kept their post here, normally, there was now no sign of them. Instead, four men and one woman in civilian clothes and holding power rifles, with two still figures in uniforms lying against the rear courtyard wall, were waiting for them. Their trucks were waved into the courtyard, and the gates closed behind them.
"Everyone out!" Hal called as the trucks stopped.
He got out himself and saw the riders in the main bodies of the trucks dismount and sort themselves into two groups. He turned to the seven men and five women he would be taking inside with him; and saw that they had already congregated about Jason, as a recognized Command officer.
"Power sidearms and rifles, only, inside," he told them. "Who's got the cable?"
"Here," said one of the men, partially lifting the small spool of what seemed only thin, gray wire, at his belt. The wire was shielded cable for a phone connection between the invaders which the communication equipment in the center would not register, let alone be able to tap.
"Stretcher?"
"Here," answered a woman. She held up what seemed to be only a pair of poles wrapped in canvas.
'Good," said Hal. He looked for the four people who had been guarding the black metal gates when the trucks arrived, and saw one of them, a man, standing a little apart from the two groups. "Anyone in the kitchen there, as far as you know?"
"We were inside," said the man, shifting his power rifle from one arm to the other. "There was just one person on duty. She's tied up in a corner of the main room."
That would mean, thought Hal, that the kitchen attendant on duty was a civilian. If she had been of the Militia, they would have killed her.
"All right," Hal turned back to his dozen people. "After me, then. If you fall out of touch with me, or something happens to me, take your orders from Jason Rowe, here. Keep together; and you observers take posts in the order we talked about earlier today. Report anything—anything at all out of the ordinary you see or hear—over the phone circuit. Come on."
They went in, with Hal in the lead. Inside, the kitchen was only partially lighted over the sinks at one end and smelled heavily of cooked vegetables and soap. Hal saw a bundle of dark blue cloth under the furthest sink that must be the bound and gagged attendant.
"First observer, here," he said. One of the two women in his group, taller and leaner than the other and in her forties, stooped and took the end of the cable from the drum slung from the shoulders of the man beside her, clipping it to a wrist phone on her right arm. The detailed map of the Center's interior, which Athalia had provided for Hal to study, was printed in his mind. He led the rest off through a doorway in the wall to his left, down a long, straight corridor where the odors, by contrast, were dominated by the sharp smell of some vinegarish disinfectant.
Dropping off observers at the points already picked out on the map he had studied, Hal led deep into the interior of the block-square building and quietly down three flights of ramps. At the base of the last of the ramps, a man in black Militia uniform snored lightly on a cot beside a bare desk and just to the left of a barred door leading to a corridor lined with metal doors that could be seen beyond. The Militiaman slept the utter sleep of exhaustion, and only woke as they began to bind his arms and legs to make him a prisoner.
"How do I open the door to the cells?" Hal asked him.
"I won't tell you," said the Militiaman, hoarsely.
Hal shrugged. There was no time to waste in persuading the man, even if he had preferred doing so. With his power pistol he slagged the lock of the barred door, which had not been designed to resist that sort of assault. Kicking the still-hot bars of the door to open it, Hal led the six who were left, including the team member with the reel of cable, into the corridor lined with cell doors. The last of the observers was left behind with the trussed and gagged Militiaman.
The doors of the cells, like the door on the cell Hal had shared with Jason, long before, in Citadel's Militia Center, were solid metal with only a small observation window which could be covered with a sliding panel. The observation windows on the cells they passed were uncovered; and as Hal glanced into each, he saw it was empty. They reached the end of the corridor where it ran into another corridor at right angles, running right and left.
"Shall we split up, Hal?" Jason asked.
"No," said Hal. "Let's try to the right, first."
The leg of the cross corridor to the right offered more empty cells—but also three inhabited ones. They slagged the locks on these and released two men and one woman who turned out to have been arrested the day before in the course of the rioting. All three had been badly treated; but only one of the men required assistance to walk; and this the other two gave him. Hal sent them back to the room where the last observer waited with the bound Militiaman, with orders to follow the cable wire from there to the kitchen and freedom.
In the same way Hal and his team proceeded through eight more corridors and cross corridors, releasing over twenty inmates, only one of which had been there before the riot; and who had to be carried out by his fellow-rescued on a makeshift stretcher. Still, they had not found Rukh; and a coldness was settling into existence, deep inside Hal, at the thought that maybe they were half a day too late—perhaps she had died and her body had been taken out to be disposed of by whatever method was used in Centers like this one.
"That's the end of it," said Jason Rowe at Hal's left shoulder.
They had come to the end of a corridor and the wall that faced them was doorless and blank.
"It can't be," said Hal. He turned about and went back to the room before the entrance into the cell block.
"There are other cells," he said to the captured Militiaman. "Where?"
The white face of the bound man in the black uniform stared up into his and did not answer. Hal felt something like a breath of coldness that blew briefly through his chest. A living pressure went out from him and he saw the man on the cot felt it. He stared down.
"You'll tell me," he said; and heard—as a stranger might hear—a difference in his voice.
The other's eyes were already wide, his face was already pale; but the skin seemed to shrink back on his bones as Hal's stare held him. Something more than fear moved between the two of them. In Hal's mind there came back a long-ago echo of a voice that had been his, telling a man like this to suffer; and now, in front of him, the Militiaman stared back as a bird might stare at a weasel.
"The second door, in the first corridor to the right
—it isn't a cell door," the man answered, huskily. "It's a stair door, to the cells downstairs."
Hal went back to the cell block. He heard the footfalls of Jason and the others on the concrete floor behind him, hurrying to keep up. He came to the door the Militiaman had mentioned and saw that the window shield of it was open. The view through it showed an ordinary, empty cell. He tried the door handle.
It was unlocked.
He swung it wide; and it yawned open to his left. Stepping through, he turned and saw a picture screen box fastened over the window on the inside face of the door. Beyond were wide, gray, concrete stairs under bright illumination, leading downward. He descended them swiftly, through the door at the bottom, and stepped into a corridor less than fifteen meters in length, with cell doors lacking windows spaced along each side of it.
Where the windows might have been were red metal flags, and these, on all the doors but one, were down. Hal took five long strides to the one with the flag up and reached for its latch.
It was locked. He slagged the lock. Holstering his pistol, he tore off a section of his shirt, wadded it up to protect his hand, and, grasping the handle above the ruined lock, swung the door open.
A sewer stench struck him solidly in the face. He stepped inside, almost slipping for a second on the human waste that covered the floor. Inside, after the brilliance of the light in the corridor outside, he could see nothing. He stood still and let his senses reach out.
A scant current of moving air from some slow ventilating system touched his left cheek. His ears caught the even fainter sound of shallow breathing ahead of him. He stepped forward cautiously, with his arms outstretched and felt a hard, blank wall. Feeling down, at the foot of the wall, his hands discovered the shape of a body. He scooped it up; and it came lightly into his arms as if it weighed no more than a half-grown child. He turned and carried it put the doorway into the light.
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