by John Ringo
"We're closing in on the Florida killers, too. That's a slower process because we think we've got the killers in our search pool, but it's still a matter of going down the list and finding the whereabouts of each possible. With the limited video from the mom's buckley, we were able to narrow it down to ten thousand probables on one of the shooters, and we're down to three hundred to check in depth. That is, they were probably within two hundred and fifty miles of Orlando at the time of the murders."
"And if you don't have them in your list? Then you're back to Step One?" Cally asked.
"Not exactly." Sands chewed on the end of one nail contemplatively. "We've got a search pool on the other car shooter, and he's going through the same process. It's a bigger pool, so it's taking longer, but it gives us twice as much chance to find our targets in this first run of analysis. We could usually make a safe bet that thugs on this level would have a rap sheet and use those to narrow the pool more quickly, but in this case, we can't, because the Tir's people have the power to either eliminate or tamper with a rap sheet, and we don't know whether they will have seen the need to do so or not.
"Oh, they're starting the evac today. Tommy'll be down there for the men who are seeing family off. I understand Cap Andreotti is going out on the first bus, so the Maise kid should be down there to say goodbye. It'd probably be a nice thing to update him on as much of the investigation as opsec allows," Sands said.
"Pinky Maise is no kid. Yeah, I'll fill him in on what I can. Keep your mouth shut, because I'm doing it on my own initiative and authority, and I don't want any bullshit about it. Maise-the-younger isn't going to say a word to anybody. I'd trust the dad with almost anything on base, and I'd still pick Pinky to be the most closed-mouth of the two. Kid's fucking amazing. He's having a hell of a traumatic childhood but, hey, look how I turned out." Cally grinned evilly at the girl.
She had a meeting scheduled with the Maises but there was time to go over the defense plans. They would, naturally, hang back a bit to give her time to finish her business with Tommy. This, at least, was a military task she understood well, it being what she cut her teeth on at the tender age of eight. The defense of the house in Rabun Gap against the Posleen during the war had been her curriculum in the harshest school of all—survival.
This had some weaknesses, but it looked like the best defense they could throw together in a hurry with the resources they had. By the time they could do better, they'd have the base evacced, anyway.
Succeeding rings of claymore mines were set to drive enemy into a kill zone, with a camouflaged trench line of defenders to cut them to pieces and mop up whatever was left.
It also showed her why Tommy wanted to split the on-base DAG contingent into three groups. One group manning the fixed positions, one group sleeping, one group doing readiness tasks that gave their attention a break from the vigilance required on the line. Each group on the line would rotate one or two men onto break every ten minutes, so that each hour each man got a break, in place, to restore his alertness.
The plan made use of available automated sensors. In this case, just a couple of clean AIDs were almost unbeatable, but redundancy in defense layers was rarely a bad idea.
When she was down to the fine details, she had her buckley page Maise and request his presence.
When he and Dad got to the cafeteria, Pinky thought, and not for the first time, that these people must be poor. Their tables and stuff, and the food, were crappier than at Joey's school, and that was saying something. He had to try not to sniffle or even almost cry when he thought about Joey. These people didn't think he understood that Joey and Mom weren't ever coming back. Kids his age didn't understand death. It was one thing he decided he'd keep hidden, after all. Pinky liked secrets. He didn't much like this one, but it would make Daddy feel worse, so he kept his mouth shut.
The floor in here was all shined up, as if somebody had decided that if they couldn't have money to buy better stuff, they could at least be clean. It made sense to him, but he reminded himself not to ask for too much stuff and maybe embarrass them. They were being real nice, and kept him and Mr. Andreotti alive even if they couldn't—he decided not to think about that anymore right now.
Pinky figured he could get lots more information out of this if he played it right. The grown-ups were trying real hard to treat him like he was older. They were trying too hard, and he figured he might be able to use that.
He'd have to be real careful. Miss O'Neal came across pretty sharp. Pretty all around. Her hair was the blondest he'd ever seen without being white, and her eyes a real pretty blue. He didn't know if they were really that color without her contact lenses. She had really big breasts. Joey would have—well, anyway, they were big—the first thing you noticed even if, like him, you were too young to really care.
His dad was holding his hand. He'd done it a lot ever since he came back. He didn't think Daddy noticed how much he did it. It was okay.
They walked over to the table where Miss O'Neal was looking at something on her buckley. Pinky had to free his hand from his dad's to scramble into a chair. He sighed. His feet still didn't reach the floor and it was embarrassing. He wanted to move all the time, and with his feet hanging down like this, he almost couldn't help but swing them. With a child's instinct for manipulating adults, he stilled them and sat up straight like a good boy and tried to look earnest, wise, and precocious. It wasn't as easy as he'd expected, because he was so used to acting the other way. Trying to look more mature was new.
"I'm glad you could take time to see me," Cally said.
Pinky knew this was a grown-up politeness, because she was his dad's boss. Daddy would have had to come regardless, but he was glad to be there himself. He wouldn't have gotten much information out of Dad.
He wasn't supposed to interrupt, but Pinky decided this was a good time to get away with being a kid and forget that. "Can you tell us what's going on about all of it?" he asked. "I mean, it's all linked together with the same guys behind it, right? So the more you know on the rest of it, the more it helps with Mom and Joey." He let his voice break just a little on that last bit, and hoped it was the right touch. He tried to add "hopeful" to the complicated expressions he was already trying to pull off and quashed a twinge of triumph. She was buying it.
"Okay, Pinky." She looked at him like she respected him, not like a kid.
His dad, thank God, didn't break in. He was still buying the advice of that shrink to let him get information. Good.
"We have, besides your family, the Swaim murders in Florida, the grandmother murder, and the coed murders. The grandmother case is . . . closed. Three people that we know of were involved in the coed murders. We've located two of them, but we want to verify that there weren't other participants before we take them down."
She grimaced and Pinky guessed that she would have preferred they do that for Mrs. Grannis, too—wait in case they needed the guy to find somebody else who was in on it. Pinky didn't think so. Why would somebody need to send more than one person to kill a little old lady? Anybody who would kill somebody's grandma like that, Pinky was glad he was dead. It made it the tiniest bit better for him that somebody on the bad guys' side was dead, even if it wasn't the same ones that—he wasn't going to think about that right now. Miss O'Neal was still talking, and he didn't want to miss anything.
"We're still looking for the people who killed the Swaims in Florida. On your case, we just caught a break, we hope. The guy who left his DNA at the scene—"
"The puker," Pinky broke in, unable to resist.
"Yeah, the puker. He's been arrested for something else, so we know where he is and can grab him."
"Somebody's on the way, right? How far do they have left? What if he gets bailed out before they get there?" Despite himself, the questions burst out of Pinky in a rush. It was embarrassing, but okay. He already had probably the only extra information he was gonna get.
"Oh, I forgot to offer you anything to drink, do you want—" Miss O'Neal
began.
His dad shook his head. Pinky just kept his eyes fixed on hers and said, "No."
"As soon as we have the members of a team in one place and a mission plan, we're on the road," she said. "We should have plenty of time to get there. Like I said, we're getting a team out as soon as we can."
"Nobody's left yet," his dad said flatly.
She hesitated. "Me. He is, by God, coming in alive," she said. "As soon as I can swing it, we're out of here."
"We'll get out of your way," Pinky said, getting up. "Right, Daddy?"
Daddy was letting himself be led around way too much. His eyes had a funny, far away look like he wasn't exactly paying attention to things. Miss O'Neal looked at him and her forehead crinkled a little.
"Charlie, do you have an appointment scheduled with Dr. Vitapetroni's office?" she asked.
He looked at her for a second like he didn't understand what she was asking. "No. I guess I've been too busy, ma'am," his dad said.
"Make one. That's an order," Miss O'Neal said. "Dismissed."
Pinky was glad she did that. He didn't think his dad was crazy or anything, but seeing that shrink might help, and he didn't think Daddy would have listened to a little kid, or maybe not to his friends from the unit, either. He caught Cally's eye and could see they both understood that Pinky would make sure Dad didn't forget. He could nag and pester. He was good at it.
As boy and man disappeared out the doorway, they passed a couple coming in, the first of the lunch crowd. There would be more, as these no doubt heralded the beginning of the lunch rush. Time for her to go find Sands.
"I didn't think you wanted to be interrupted, but your husband has made a pickup call. He should be here whenever they can get him in," the buckley said.
"Why?" Cally asked. "Is something wrong?"
"The call said he was coming in to improve communication."
"Then he and I have yet another breakdown in it, because I won't be here." She was trying to joke but it came out as irritation. Too much was happening too fast, and she still—irrationally, she thought—resented every moment she didn't get to spend around her husband. It wasn't like they were newlyweds, even though they'd just had the honeymoon, and just came out into the open as married. Hell, even just as a mistress to the Tong, who didn't know who she was, being the mistress was sort of open. Kind of. When you got down to it, it was kind of hot.
That's it. She was acting like a fucking newlywed. Or a no longer getting to fuck newlywed. Mission face, mission face, mission face dammit. She couldn't help it; she felt a goofy grin sneaking over her face.
Time to find Sands and Tommy. And to stop freaking grinning like an idiot.
Michael Li hated the tropics with a passion, and most of all he hated the Darien jungle in Panama. Despite wearing a white suit of the lightest non-GalTech material he could find, he was sweating like the proverbial pig. This was also despite having the suit jacket off. His collar was not unbuttoned, nor were his sleeves rolled up, because it limited the damage from the bugs who found him far too tasty, insect repellent or not. Oh, it helped. Just not enough.
Li had grown up inside. As a child on the moon, outdoors had been a great adventure he'd preferred to decline, going outside the pressure locks only once, when forced to, on a school field trip. The low-grav playgrounds were cool growing up, but it was also something to take for granted, another familiar thing from home that was absent on Earth.
The city park a few elevator hops and corridors away was his idea of "outdoors." It had plants. Plants were supposed to be decorative and stay where someone put them—out of the way. Sounds outdoors were supposed to be birds chirping and piped music of flowing water or ocean surf.
Hence, he hated Earth's outdoors, and the Darien most of all. Every hour of the day or night, some animal or other was shrieking at the top of its damned lungs; vegetation wasn't occasionally in the way, it was always in the way; and the bugs, and the heat, and the humidity.
He normally stayed in his air-conditioned headquarters, or his room, as much of the time as possible. His goddamned AC, older than Darhel panties and a piece of shit to begin with, was broken again. He couldn't hide in his bunk all day; he'd look like a wuss. At least there was a chance of a breeze out here.
He also, he admitted, wanted to emphasize the privations he was enduring in the name of the Tong when he called his boss and gave him an update. He had the O'Neal army commanding officer's report, too, for delivery, but he could just send that as an e-mail after the call. It was damned convenient for the O'Neals to have to send all their communication back and forth through the Tong. Useful.
The boss was really sticking his neck out on this deal, and Li was along for the ride by association, but he was starting to believe it might work. These military guys seemed to know what they were doing and were doing less whoring and drinking than he'd expected. He didn't know why it surprised him that the O'Neals had ended up with their own private army. It was an unusually good force of mercenaries, a large number of them actual blood family. If they were smart and bribed the right people at the right times, there was no reason they couldn't do quite well out of it, if they were finally coming around to being practical. Since they had chosen a line that complemented the Tong's enterprises instead of competing with them, this thing really had potential. In the long run, for his own future, it might even be worth this sojourn in sauna hell.
He looked at his watch. It was a couple of minutes until eleven, and his boss was usually punctual, which fit his military background. Officially, the boss had come into existence out of thin air. Unofficially, he was military and some kind of officer before the Tong recruited him.
"Michael, your boss is on the line," his PDA said in its pleasant tenor voice.
"Thank you, Huan. Put him through."
A holo of Yan Kato appeared over the buckley, with enough of the background caught in the stream to suggest that his boss was in the back of a store; shelves stacked with goods rose, ghostly, in the background of the holo, fading out around the edges.
His superior had the kind of face the Tongs gave people who didn't start out Asian. Unless someone was a very good fit for a specific ethnicity, they tended to avoid having someone look wrong for a single type by having them look like a cross of a number of Asian ethnicities. It was common enough for people to really be half Vietnamese and half Korean, or half Chinese, a quarter Korean, and a quarter Japanese, or half Chinese and half white American. Usually, if someone had a mish-mosh appearance and too sketchy of a background, people just assumed round-eye, but it wasn't polite to say so. "Yan" looked rather unconvincing to him, but Li didn't give a rat's ass for his ancestry as long as the Grandfather accepted him and he kept doing a good job. His boss was a rising star, which made for an auspicious horoscope for Li.
"Status?" Yan asked.
"Quarters and administration are up. Half the storage facilities are up and receiving the first shipments. We have a secondary location up on the coastline and are shipping food and equipment to whichever location has the lowest transportation overhead," he said. That last consisted largely of the right bribes, but how many people and how much varied. "The Mirandas have quite a hatred for Elves. The O'Neal organizational associations have opened doors there, acquiring information that has kept down costs." He didn't like having to admit it, because he was used to thinking of the Bane Sidhe as impractical idealists—which they were. However, in this case, the O'Neal Grandfather had skillfully parlayed that into a business friendship over the years. Mostly low level, but of long standing. Good planning, that.
"How are the soldiers?"
"Better than the general reputation of soldiers, but this is not an area of my expertise. I have a report from their Colonel Mosovich to Sunday. He suggested himself that I send it through you. The soldiers appear to find being here to be of ample training value. Although they drink and visit women, they are not excessive. They are willing to work and have been very helpful camouflaging the buildings," L
i said. Of course they were helpful. The buildings housed their own quarters, food and supplies.
"How soon can you get them on the boats out?" Yan asked directly, his desire for speed showing on his face.
"It would be difficult to equip and load them in less than a week," Li replied, meaning that he couldn't do it in less.
"Get them out in three days. Use money to expedite whatever it takes." His superior could be disturbingly direct at times like these.
"That would be very difficult within the customary constraints of good business. The soldiers might find their supplies primitive, as well." Li meant, of course, that there was no way he could get these men equipped well enough to get them onto boats to Venezuela in three days without spending so much money he'd get shot for it, no matter what his boss said. Oh, he could tell them they were equipped, but getting them to agree with that assessment and board the boats was another thing altogether.
"Do what you have to do. There are others who find it in their interests to bear the costs. I have a message from their superiors with orders for the soldiers; they'll work with you."
Yan said it firmly, leaving Li in no doubt that the boats would be leaving in three days with whatever and whoever he could have aboard them. He was beginning to get a headache. At least, with their orders in his hands, he would be able to pass some of the headaches on to Colonel Mosovich. He didn't envy the man. Then again, he didn't envy himself, either.
