by Eric Thomson
“Agreed. Tackling the question from that angle wouldn’t help. Fortunately, there’s another way to get what we need.”
“And that would be?”
Decker turned a lazy grin on her.
“Think about it. You’re the Queen of Schemes who turned me into an unwitting spy before we were even formally introduced. This should be obvious.”
Talyn frowned as she parsed her partner’s words, then her eyes hardened.
“No. We’re not going to that extreme.”
“Yes, we are, unless you come up with a better idea. We have to find a lead on the Son of SMERSH before it’s too late. Remember, the buggers need to be lucky only once. We have to be lucky every time. We dodged their trap on Celeste, but that was too damn close. Ari Redmon is the only lead we’ve uncovered.”
“Or her case could be entirely unrelated, Zack.”
“You don’t believe that, not with Drake conveniently dying soon after stirring up a shit storm to save her. It’s the break we need. Besides, you and I are pretty much convinced she’s innocent, and that means getting her out of exile and back into a uniform.”
“Which we could do through regular channels,” Talyn pointed out.
“And ring all sorts of alarm bells? Give me a better idea that won’t let the bad guys know about our investigation, and I’ll consider it. Otherwise, I’m counting on your support when I lay it out to Ulrich.”
Seven
“Ludicrous.” Commander Manfred Yang’s face twisted into a mask of disapproval when Decker finished outlining his proposal.
The Marine grinned at him.
“Think of it this way, if the plan fails, I’m out of your hair forever. And as a bonus, I’ll be stuck on Desolation Island until my dying day.”
“There’s little chance of that,” Talyn said, patting her partner’s arm. “I’ll extract him once he’s found Redmon, and if I don’t, it’s a given he’ll find his own way off. They say escape is impossible because the surrounding seas are impassable to humans. But knowing Zack, he’ll make the Commonwealth Correctional Service eat its claims.”
She turned to Ulrich.
“I was skeptical at first when he laid out his idea on the way back from Fort Arnhem. But if we want to retrieve Redmon without alerting the opposition, one of us has to go in as a convict while the other arranges for a covert extraction.”
“And since I have a better chance of surviving whatever makes exile on Desolation Island such a delightful life sentence, I’m the only possible candidate to follow in Ari’s footsteps. Besides, I have plenty of relevant experience, such as being kicked out of the Corps, living in bondage and dodging deadly life forms. Not to mention I seem to be the section’s retrieval specialist. What do you say, sir?”
Ulrich gave Zack a long, speculative look, and then he nodded once.
“Approved — in principle. I expect a well thought out plan before I give permission to proceed. It would be a shame if I lost two of my best operatives because we forgot something.”
Yang’s nostrils flared as he said, “Sir, we’re proceeding on assumptions that aren’t supported by tangible evidence.”
“More than a hundred and fifty suspicious deaths and disappearances among top intelligence agents and Special Forces operators in the last twenty-four months, isn’t evidence?” Decker asked. “Three dozen spec ops missions ending in unexplained failures isn’t evidence? Redmon, the S-3 of humanity’s premier Special Forces unit, involved in planning their operations and thus a vital cog in the covert ops community wasn’t a prime target?”
“Correlation does not equal causation, Major. I’m sure Marines are taught to recognize the difference.”
Ulrich raised a restraining hand.
“I think we can allow that Major Decker’s theory of someone quietly crippling the Fleet’s covert action abilities has legs. Or it has enough legs to justify taking his proposal seriously.”
“And this Ariane Redmon?” Yang asked. “There’s a good chance she may not have any information of use to us. Is that worth risking two field agents? Never mind that all we have to exonerate her are statements by the troops involved in the incident. They’re hardly what any sensible analyst would call reliable witnesses. Redmon’s court-martial certainly didn’t think so.”
“I’m sure if we dug deep enough,” Decker replied, “perhaps returned to the scene of the so-called crime, we’d find evidence convincing enough to overturn the verdict. But it wouldn’t do us much good if we don’t nab whoever railroaded her. I’m sure none of us wants assholes like that serving with impunity, and the only one who can point us in the right direction is Redmon herself. Then there’s the time factor. The longer we take to figure out who revived the SMERSH idea, the more of our colleagues and friends will die. It wouldn’t be good for them or for the Fleet.”
When Yang opened his mouth to reply, Ulrich said, in a tone that indicated the discussion was over, “At this point, I suggest Zack and Hera get started. Needless to say, none of this goes beyond the four of us.”
*
“Trying to memorize every square meter of the island?”
Talyn let the door to their assigned, secure planning room slide shut behind her.
“That’ll take a while, considering it’s what? About ten thousand square kilometers?”
Decker, eyes narrowed in concentration, stood before a large three-dimensional holographic terrain projection.
“The Correctional Service’s records concerning Desolation Island lack in details,” he said. “This map is from our own satellite records. I’m sure they have useful data stashed away somewhere, but it’ll be on Earth, behind ten layers of safeguards, and I flunked hacking school. I’ve picked up a few things from the imagery that aren’t in the official record.”
He pointed at the southwest coastal plain.
“This is where they set up the official convict settlements, each surrounded by fields and pastures, with easy access to timber and stone quarries. They also each have a small harbor for fishing on the inshore side of the barrier reef, where the native saurian predators don’t go. An idyllic agrarian lifestyle for those who didn’t screw up badly enough to deserve death. It’s a perfect prison that needs no guardians, where the inmates either work or die and escape is impossible.”
His didactic tone elicited a crooked half grin.
“You took that almost verbatim from the official travel brochure, right?”
“Pretty much. The surveys of Parth’s ecosystem indicate you’d need something the size of a destroyer to make it across the thousand or so kilometers of ocean separating Desolation Island from the mainland. Between some of the roughest seas anywhere and the native predators, attempting to venture beyond Desolation’s barrier reef by water would be suicide. And even if you reach the southern continent, good luck getting through the coastal jungles.”
He called up another map projection, this one of a long, narrow continent-sized landmass, and pointed at a dark blob in its center. “The nearest town, Rabanna, is almost five hundred kilometers inland, on a river that heads north, not east towards the coast.”
“Isn’t Rabanna home to the Marine Light Infantry Regiment?”
“Yep. Fort Erfoud,” he tapped the projection, “where hard-core disciplinary cases are turned back into useful Marines. But that’s in the brochure too. What’s not advertised is the presence of convict groups apparently living deep within the forest of the island’s central plateau.”
The projection of Desolation Island reappeared and grew until a tiny section of the interior filled the available space.
“Evidence of encampments.” He indicated a clearing with visible lean-tos, smoking fires and ant-like humans frozen in place by the high-resolution satellite image. “Could be a hunting expedition from one of the coastal settlements, but I doubt it. I found a dozen like that scattered over the interior. There are probably more.”
“Convicts who decided the agrarian lifestyle wasn’t for them and turne
d into hunter-gatherers? Exiled from the exiles, so to speak?”
Decker shrugged.
“Could be, though, in a jungle with limited edible flora and fauna, it would be a hard existence. The ecosystem survey says Parth doesn’t exactly abound with native species capable of delivering the full spectrum of nutrients a human body needs to survive.”
“Let’s hope Ariane Redmon picked up a scythe and joined the harvest crew. Otherwise this mission will not succeed.” She dropped into a chair and tossed her beret on the table. “You’re scheduled to receive a transmitter implant tomorrow. It’ll be keyed to hit Fleet-operated satellite frequencies. Find Redmon, activate it, and I’ll be there within a few hours aboard an aircraft rigged to penetrate the island’s surveillance network without tripping any alarms.”
Talyn tapped the back of her neck at the base of her skull.
“They’ll put it inside your thick cranium. It should escape detection by standard sensors, and you’ll be able to activate it by thought. We’ll give it a test before leaving, to make sure. I’ll carry a field medical kit to extract the subcutaneous tracking microchips you and Redmon will be wearing, courtesy of the Correctional Service.”
“Good. That takes care of the immediate escape.” He sat across from her and leaned forward. “We also need to rebuild one or two last resort cover identities, including one for Redmon. Once we’re off Desolation Island, we’ll have to vanish while we make our way back to Caledonia. I don’t intend to trust any cover ID handed out by our custodian, not this time.”
“An untraceable last resort will need work. I’m not sure we can manage even a single good one without delaying your departure.”
“Then we make sure to have at least one passable last resort each, and tinker with the IDs we draw from the custodian. If you intend to sign out equipment from the quartermaster, sanitize it yourself. And launder any untraceable creds you take from the black ops fund manager. We have no idea who’s leaking and those three are on the list of possibles.”
Talyn nodded.
“I’ll make that my priority for the next few days. Hiding the IDs from Ulrich and Yang might be tricky, so I’ll probably work from my quarters for part of the time. That leaves the front end. Have you come up with convincing criminal charges yet?”
“No. The tricky part is to shape them so I’ll face a classified court-martial that ends with a sentence of exile. I’d rather not find myself condemned to twenty-five years in a rehabilitation colony or worse yet, locked up with the incurable psychopaths on Parth’s arctic tundra.”
“Ulrich will make sure things go the way we want. If necessary, he’ll even abort the whole thing.”
“Hence the need to calibrate my supposed crimes. I wish I had a few friends in the judge advocate general’s branch off whom I could bounce my ideas.”
“I have one or two possibles if you’re actually stuck. But for now, it would be best if we figure this out on our own. Maybe start by comparing ideas to recent court cases.”
“Sounds about as entertaining as skinny dipping in a pond full of leeches.” Decker sighed. “I better finish my study of Desolation Island. You want to see if we can get a table at L’Habitation for supper? Thinking about my diet once I’m on Parth has put me in the mood to splurge on the finest of fine cuisine, cost be damned.”
“Sure. I’ll call and use my feminine wiles on the maître d’.”
“Warn him to have the best Shrehari vintage chilled and ready, will you?”
*
“I see nothing in your plan that needs improvement,” Ulrich said once Talyn and Decker finished the mission briefing a few days later. He glanced at Yang. “Manfred?”
The Special Operations Section’s chief of staff shook his head.
“It’s as sound as one can make it, I suppose. Will you brief the CNI?”
“I’d better, so he doesn’t have a fit when I charge Zack. But it’ll only be to the extent that a classified operation requires his apparent dismissal from the Service and condemnation to exile. Besides, we may need to invoke the weight of his three stars when it comes time to making the court-martial and its results vanish afterward.”
“If we could find a way to wipe everything from the record automatically after a period of time has elapsed,” Decker said, “I’d feel that much better. You know, in case present company and the CNI are struck by amnesia, an aircar or a platoon of evil ninjas.”
Ulrich nodded.
“Of course. Manfred will see to it once the sentence has been recorded. And on that subject, what charges will I be laying against you, Major?”
“I thought we’d go with a Redmon-style case and accuse me of culpable homicide. This would have transpired during an operation that never happened, but supposedly occurred while I was playing knight in shining armor searching for Doctor Sakal. It has the beauty of not compromising any real mission, and of being unprovable beyond the evidence we’ll fabricate. There’s no trace of my movements from when I left Valeux Station until I reappeared at Dordogne. It’ll also be easier to erase from the record. And because I’m supposedly the intelligence community’s loose cannon,” he gave Yang a sardonic smile, “as well as an amateur, we’ll find plenty who’ll believe I finally fucked up.”
Eight
Yang stuck his head into the planning room a few days later, interrupting one last rehearsal of the plan to retrieve Ariane Redmon.
“Major Decker, report to Captain Ulrich at once. Commander Talyn, stay here.”
Zack and his partner exchanged a glance. She gave him an encouraging smile as he stood and tugged his uniform tunic into place.
“I’ve got your back, big boy, but good luck nonetheless.”
He and Yang walked through the bullpen where agents worked when not on missions and stopped at the door to Ulrich’s office.
“Major Decker reporting as ordered, sir,” Zack announced.
“Enter, and stay at attention, Major. Thank you, Commander. You may return to your duties,” Ulrich replied. When Decker and Yang had complied, he continued. “Major Zachary Thomas Decker, having been presented with evidence of malfeasance on your part during a classified mission, and upon the advice of the judge advocate general’s office, I am charging you with culpable homicide. Do you wish me to read out the particulars at this time, or do you want to read them yourself in the presence of a defense lawyer?”
“I wish to read them in the presence of a defense lawyer, sir,” Zack replied in a voice devoid of emotion. The mission was finally on, and he felt a sense of relief after days spent waiting for Ulrich to line everything up.
The captain nodded once.
“Very well. I am ordering you confined to quarters pending trial, except for meals and such duties as Commander Yang may assign. A representative of the provost marshal’s office will affix a tracking device on your person and collect any weapons you carry or keep in your quarters. You are not to discuss the charges with anyone other than your lawyer, who will hold the requisite security clearance to learn of the particulars. You are not to communicate with anyone outside the Special Operations Section — your lawyer excepted — unless you have my permission. Do you understand these restrictions, Major?”
“I understand and will comply, sir. I give you my word as a Marine and as an officer.”
Ulrich’s eyes shifted from Zack’s face to the doorway. “I see the provost marshal’s representative has arrived. You are dismissed.”
*
“I’ve been Naval Intelligence’s go-to guy for a lot of classified cases, Major,” Lieutenant Commander Ty Buell, Zack’s defense attorney, said. “Having read the charges and seen the evidence, in my professional opinion, you’re screwed.”
“Is that a legal term?” Decker asked, lips twitching to restrain a grin. “Because I’ve been using screwed to describe some distinctly non-legal matters.”
They were meeting in Zack’s quarters, a place he was beginning to loathe after three days of confinement, except to visit the o
fficer’s mess at mealtimes. Talyn, who lived in the adjoining suite, was scrupulously avoiding him, to maintain the pretense, so his contact with other sentient beings had been limited.
Buell snorted.
“Gallows humor? I’m not saying the prosecution has an airtight case, but in my experience, a panel of officers will most likely find you guilty. This will be especially true if the members come, as they would in your case, from the special operations community, due to the security classification. They’ve been in enough ambiguous situations to see your actions as falling clearly on the wrong side of the line.”
“Perhaps I should just plead guilty.”
“The court wouldn’t accept a guilty plea under these circumstances.”
“Oh?”
Buell sat back and crossed his arms.
“This sort of culpable homicide comes with a severe sentence — exile, life imprisonment or the like. Fortunately, the death penalty is off the table. Consequently, the Fleet wants to make sure the prosecution proves guilt beyond any reasonable doubt, and that means testing the accusations in court. You’re entitled to your turn in front of the panel, and I’ll do my best for you. But I prefer to manage my clients’ expectations. In your case, what I’m saying is don’t expect to walk back into your previous life.”
“Fair enough.” The lawyer’s reaction pleased Decker, though he took care to not show it. He had put together the fake evidence of his supposed criminal actions, with Talyn’s help, and evidently, he’d done it right. “When’s the trial?”
“The CNI likes intelligence-related cases to be dealt with on a priority basis, due to the national security implications, so it’s just a matter of assembling the panel. I met with the prosecutor this morning, and he’s almost ready to go. I figure a week tops. The trial shouldn’t last more than two days.”
