Bo picked up the microphone and pressed the transmit switch. “Glass Palace, this is Saber Six actual.”
Ten seconds passed before Major Murphy’s voice replied. “Bo? You’re awake early. You ready for this?”
Bo brightened. “Yes, sir.”
“I want you to take the mounts out ahead of your main body. Just in case Tapper’s convoy runs into trouble,” Murphy replied. “Once those vehicles he’s grabbed have made it back up the pass and are on the way to Camp Stark, I’ll feel better about covering them with ground forces and what artillery we have. It’s their distance from your position I’m worried about. So I want you in the field, leaning in their direction. You can use your movement to search for water sources, but nothing that puts you out of position to provide immediate support to the convoy as it moves to the rendezvous.”
“We expecting resistance? Pursuit?”
“Yes, to resistance. As for pursuit? I’m hopeful,” Murphy replied with what sounded like a smile. “Once they’re here, you’re going to have to be ready for phase two.”
Bo nodded. “You’re poking the bear.”
“Exactly. How many can you mount?”
Bo took a deep breath. “I can mount twelve, easy. There are another five or six leg infantry who are learning to ride the whinnies now. I can take them along, too.”
“You can’t recon and teach riding at the same time.” It wasn’t a statement as much as an unasked question with something behind it.
“It would slow us down a little, sure.”
Murphy paused. “I want you to take Aliza Turan with you. Do you know who she is?”
Bo’s stomach flopped and rolled on itself. “I do. She’s one of the Israelis.”
“That’s her,” Murphy said. As he continued, his voice was firm and direct. “She’s also a trained equestrian. I know that’s not the same thing as a teacher, but she’s taken lessons and can keep an eye on your new riders while you keep an eye out for water.”
“With respect, she ain’t the kind of rider we need.” Bo frowned, thinking of all the trained equestrians he’d known who were pure crap on even simple trails. “Plus, she’s a terrorist by her own admission, sir.”
“She’s going with you. She has asked to be involved in operations, and we need everybody in the organization supporting the mission. This is a good place to start. As for what she was doing when she was captured? Read up on your history, Bo.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Bo blurted and added a perfunctory “sir” at the end.
Murphy’s voice was low and firm. “Take Miss Turan and your troops out at first light. Patrol sector four and be prepared to support the convoy as it approaches. Keep your eyes out for enemy pursuit of any kind and stay in contact with me through the relay at OP Two.” Murphy paused. “Plan to recover all forces back to the FOB by dark.”
Bo nodded. The mission was as clear as any he’d run in his career. “If the enemy comes after the convoy? What do you want us to do?”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it,” Murphy said. “Find us a good watering hole if you can. Just stay ready.”
“Always ready, sir.”
The connection faded out, and Bo replaced the microphone on the top of the radio set. He turned to Yarbrough. “Who’s your relief?”
“Lieutenant Meehan, sir. Takes over in an hour. Said he wanted to be on the comms when the recovery went down.” Yarbrough didn’t look happy, and it matched the return of a snarling feeling in Bo’s stomach.
Great. Just great.
* * *
Aliza Turan woke at the first sounds of activity beyond the thin sides of the small tent. She clutched the scratchy green wool blanket to her brow, fearing the voices were finally coming for her. But…the voices she was hearing now were not those voices. Because this place was certainly not that place.
She took a deep breath, lowered the blanket, and opened her eyes. The other women were not yet awake. They were still snug in their cots and makeshift beds. Their sense of security in this strange land, and under the circumstances, amazed her. Soldiers, she understood all too well, could make anyplace their home in a matter of hours, sometimes even less. All they needed was a cot and a blanket to feel as if they were meant to be there. For Aliza, a cot, and even a blanket, were luxuries. Trust and security were not.
Fully awake, she forced herself to lay there for several minutes listening to the sounds of the morning. A mission was underway, that much they all knew, but it didn’t seem to faze her counterparts. They all had their jobs to do—even the ones who spent more time getting out of their work than what it would have taken them to actually do it. The hard labor projects, particularly filling sand bags, shuffled from one soldier to the next. In her frustration at seeing men and women gleefully shrug off their tasks, she’d ultimately taken up their shovels and gotten to work. Before long, the unrelenting heat forced her to shed her familiar outer blouse and work in a short-sleeved shirt. Surprise at what that revealed gave way to guilt, and the modern soldiers eventually began to work alongside her.
Modern soldiers. She tossed that adjective around in her mind. They were certainly more modern than she, having been removed from battlefields in the later years of the twentieth century. But here on R’Bak, they were all antiques, long confirmed as missing and presumed dead. She snorted softly. When they told her that not only was it 2125, but that she was far from Earth, she’d laughed in their faces.
You sound like the Nazis, she’d said only to watch them recoil in shock. You want us to believe whatever you tell us. To believe your lies. So you can cut into us. Experiment. Never again. The recovery technicians blanched and covered their mouths with nervous hands as she showed them her left forearm and the blue numbers that would forever adorn her skin.
Gray-uniformed soldiers had taken her from her home, a small village named Tegernsee south of Munich, five days after her seventeenth birthday. At gunpoint, the Nazis loaded her and her family into squalid railcars and moved them toward a place she’d remembered as a vibrant city that was now only mentioned in whispers: Dachau.
Aliza fought tears remembering her parents’ faces as the Nazis separated them. In the first few weeks, they saw each other often enough that the camp seemed a hardship and not a prison. But as the tide of war changed, there were fewer people in the camp from those early days. Time blurred into months and then a year. The Nazis marched her father off to the gas chamber when she was eighteen. Her mother disappeared three months after that. Her siblings…all of them in the last days, mostly to typhus.
Somehow, she was spared. Food became so scarce that, when the Americans approached the gates, Aliza and the others didn’t have the strength to cheer. She saw the revulsion and horror in the soldiers’ faces as they tried to help her and the others. Even as she started to heal and her strength returned, she knew she could not trust them. Free and supposedly able to return home, she couldn’t bear to go back to her village and see the same people who’d given her family up on the street. She couldn’t forgive them, but more importantly, she couldn’t trust them. Trust would never come easily again, if at all.
Aliza opened her eyes anew and saw a few other women moving in the tent. She sat up and shrugged the blanket away. There was enough light that she could see the numbers on her arm as if to remind her she might be in the distant future, and on a planet very far from home, but she was who she was and the others, especially the soldiers, weren’t to be trusted any more than necessary.
Her head snapped up at the sound of a loud, almost purring noise, and she smiled. Like her, the whinaalani were early risers. While the animals weren’t horses, they were enough of an analog to settle their roles in her mind and inspire her to get out of her bunk every day. The whinnies were intelligent and docile when mounted, except for when the locals attempted to do so. Then they seemed agitated and almost angry. As she watched the creatures in the makeshift paddock, they were playful and wild. She’d grown up with horses
and learned dressage from a very young age, so being around the whinaalani was comforting. And the memories they evoked, both at home before Dachau, and her life after it, were not unpleasant. Not at all.
There was a crunch of footsteps outside, and the door flap was pushed slightly, and modestly, to one side. A man, silhouetted against the compound outside, spoke softly. “Miss Turan?”
Aliza replied, “Yes?”
“Ma’am? Captain Moorefield needs to see you. As soon as you can, please?”
“I’ll be right there,” she said. The man ducked away from the door, pulling both flaps discreetly closed.
Since her awakening four weeks before, she had had exactly two conversations with the overall officer in charge: Major Rodger Murphy. He had taken a keen and genuine interest in her, and once she had been convinced that the improbable future was real, she met with the chief medical officer, Doctor Arthur, to go over her medical history. When that had concluded, Major Murphy had stopped in to speak with her a second time and affirm that she had a place among the Lost Soldiers. It wasn’t much, he said, but it was better than the alternative. Murphy had been kind but also very frank, evidence that he understood her from the outset. Captain Moorefield? Not so much.
Aliza dressed quickly, tugging on the boots that somehow weren’t her size but didn’t hurt her feet, and left the tent. Her mind drifted back to Murphy’s last conversation with her. He’d asked several details about her life, especially after leaving Dachau. Where had she been? What had she done? What was her last memory? He had listened intently to the last story, even smiling at one point when there was nothing particularly happy about it. She’d asked him why he was smiling, and he’d said it would be something the Lost Soldiers could use in the very near future.
Apparently, that near future is now.
* * * * *
Chapter Twenty-One
R’Bak
Dawn broke in a spectacular display of purples and orange like nothing Bo had ever seen on Earth. He caught himself staring to the east, into the almost blinding beauty, and forced himself to look away. Mounted on Scout, he’d intended to move around the paddock and check on everyone—what an old brigade commander had called MBWA, or management by wandering around. In his service, especially during his time attached to the United Nations effort in Somalia, the technique had proven invaluable for seeing how work was being done. Around him, the soldiers familiar with their mounts were helping the rookies with the tack for riding whinnies. The long cold sleep hadn’t affected the ability of those who had ridden on Earth, and it turned out they were solid examples and adequate teachers. They handled the job with the aplomb of old soldiers teaching the new recruits, probably what each of them had experienced in their first days wearing a uniform. In the paddock, the din of the new recruits’ nervous activity contrasted with the focus and quiet resolve of the experienced riders. Combined, the feeling was electric and excitement coursed through Bo’s veins in a way it never had before other mounted patrols. Until, that is, he saw Aliza Turan walk into the paddock with a bright smile on her face.
Her dark hair tied into a ponytail, Aliza wore the green olive drab fatigue pants the Vietnam veterans knew all too well. Her black, polished boots had straps instead of laces, exactly like his own. Where she’d gotten the tanker boots he didn’t know; they were only supposed to be worn by those who had earned them. As fast as the thought came up, he squashed it. Nothing from that old Earth mattered anymore.
You always said I mattered, Bo. What happened to us?
He blinked and kept staring at Aliza Turan. Her matching green fatigue shirt was open but tied at the bottom in front, revealing a black shirt underneath. Bo clenched his jaw and nudged Scout toward her. The whinnie trotted her direction, almost happily. Turan waved to a couple of the others and stopped to talk with Sergeant First Class Whittaker. She smiled and touched his arm and the grizzled old sergeant grinned.
“Captain Moorefield,” she smiled up as Bo rode up. “Good morning.”
He nodded and touched the wide brim of his boonie hat. He would have preferred a more traditional cavalry Stetson, but it would have to do. “Miss Turan.”
“Major Murphy asked me to join you today.”
Bo pressed his tongue against the inside of his teeth for a long moment. “I’m well aware of what Major Murphy asked, ma’am.”
Her smiled faded at his tone, and her dark eyes became serious. “I will assist you as needed.”
“Sergeant First Class Whittaker is my NCOIC. All I need you to do is assist the newbies.” He jerked his head toward a group of unsure soldiers watching others saddle and prepare to mount up.
“NCOIC,” she squinted. “You mean your second in command?”
Bo frowned at her. “Yes. That’s right.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied with a quizzical raise of her eyebrows. “This new terminology is confusing.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s a sign of weakness,” Bo said with a grunt.
“I’ll try to remember that.” She smiled at him and turned toward the whinnies. “You have any recommendations for my mount today?”
Bo studied the collection of whinnies in the paddock. “What can you handle?”
“They’re much like horses, yes?” Turan said. “I rode dressage growing up and can handle almost anything.”
“They’re wilder than horses when you first get started. Not like broncos, but close,” Bo said. He pointed toward a whitish-gray whinnie with a thin blaze of red along its triangular forehead. “That one. She’s a solid mount. We call her Athena.”
Turn nodded and followed his gaze. “She looks good. I trust your judgment.”
“We’re leaving in ten minutes. Let’s get the newbies mounted up, Miss Turan.” Bo jerked Scout toward the compound’s front gate. “Sergeant Whittaker? Ten mikes. I’ll meet you at the front gate. I need a SITREP from the CP.”
Whittaker nodded. “I’ll see that Miss Turan gets everybody in the saddle, sir. She seems to have a good handle on things.”
Bo frowned. “I want to get moving. Put the newbies in the center of the formation and keep her there.”
“Respectfully, sir? That woman will go wherever the hell she wants. You’ll be hard pressed to stop her.”
Bo sighed. “Just get them saddled up, Top.”
“You want her armed?”
He thought about it for a long moment. The effort involved with taking an untrained civilian on a patrol was one problem. Providing that civilian with a loaded weapon bumped it up to another level entirely. But Murphy mandated that soldiers remaining planetside on R’Bak had some weapons training and that they had all “qualified” at a modified weapons range built into the west side of the compound. “Did she qual?”
Whittaker grinned. “Expert on the M1911, sir. Shot thirty-nine out of forty, if memory serves me right.”
“Good for her,” Bo grunted. “Make sure she has a sidearm, then. Standard load. Pull extra water for everyone, too.”
“You thinking it’ll be a long day, sir?”
“Yeah.” Bo glanced toward the high ground. “Pull a ration, too. Just to be safe.”
“Done, sir,” Whittaker said. He jerked his head in Turan’s direction. “She’ll be fine, sir.”
“I’m not worried about her,” Bo lied. “Have the patrol ready to move out, Top.”
“You got it, sir.”
As Bo turned toward the command tent and readied himself to nudge Scout into a trot, he noticed Whittaker smiling. He clenched his teeth. This clusterfuck was Murphy’s idea and as much as Bo wanted to get back on the PFM and give the major a piece of his mind, he knew it wouldn’t do any good. They needed more riders, and while a training program was something he and his squad could do, they couldn’t do it fast enough. Not without help. He glanced back at Turan, surrounded by smiling soldiers as she taught them how to mount the whinnies from the side, like a horse. Not a man in the group was paying attention to the training as she climbed up and swung a le
g over the whinnie’s back in one smooth motion. Her fatigue pants were baggy, but not enough to hide her athletic figure.
Sharron loved horses.
She rode dressage, too.
Bo mentally slapped himself even before her words came into his mind.
You always argued with me about my horses. You were never willing to hear that the Army cost us more in time and money than my horses ever did. You knew how important they were to me and that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the Army.
He nudged Scout and said to himself, “I will be glad when I don’t hear your voice anymore, Sharron.”
A whoop sounded from behind him. He whirled in the saddle, just in time see Turan cheering and leading the others in applause as the first of the recruits, Private First Class Boyd, vaulted into the saddle.
“Whoa, Scout.” He spun the big whinnie in place and trotted over. “Miss Turan. This is not a cheerleading competition. Getting the recruits into the saddle and prepared to ride doesn’t merit a celebration.”
“They need confidence.” She met his gaze. “And a good leader’s encouragement.”
Bo clenched his jaw as he felt blood rushing to his face. “Then encourage them to get their asses onto their mounts so we can move out.”
Turan smiled up at him. “And what would you have me do then, Captain Moorefield?”
“Once they’re mounted, I expect you to stay in line and keep your interval, Miss Turan,” he replied and forced a tiny smile onto his face. “Keep the FNGs in the middle of the formation and do what I ask. Is that clear?”
“And what is an FNG? I do not understand your American love of acronyms.”
Bo frowned and let out a quick sigh of frustration. “Fucking New Guys. The inexperienced riders. The ones you’ve been assigned to babysit in the hopes they can someday ride patrols without adult supervision. Can you understand that, Miss Turan?”
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