Gust Front

by John Ringo

  "No, honey," he snapped, not taking his attention away from the visitor. At normal speed the van would just about be clearing the woodline. They might unload under cover and try to sneak up. Or they might barrel-ass right up to the door. If the second, they would be here in less than a minute. Which meant that time was about over for the conversation. "Figure it out yourself."

  "I'm kind of in a hurry," said Harold as if reading his mind. "I think I need a yes or no. Now." He leaned forward and his right hand drifted downward.

  "Well, I never did like the balance on that Galactic piece of shit," Cally said to no one in particular. There was a sound of a slide drawing back.

  Mike Senior closed his eyes just in time to block out the blood and brains from Harold Locke's head as an exploding .380 round from Cally's Walther PPK opened it up like a melon.

  He wiped his eyes, lunged to his feet and spit the soft-boiled-egg-like brains out of his mouth. "Good work, girl, but we got company."

  "I know," she said. "That's why I hurried. I was hoping he'd give some more away. Bunker?"

  "Yeah." He paused for just a moment as she carefully safed the small pistol and started towards the command bunker. "How did you know?"

  "Your right hand twitches when you've got losing cards. That and you lied about the beeper." She didn't mention her first reaction. Why she had started trying to open the puzzle box right after they came in. It was because the man had looked at her like Grandpa looked at a chicken he was about to harvest.

  He nodded his head and smiled. "I don't think you learned that from your father, did you?"

  "No," she said, thumbing towards the door out in obvious emphasis. "But Dad didn't teach me how to play cards. Mom did. Let's go."

  CHAPTER 54

  Rabun County, GA, United States Of America, Sol III

  0325 EDT October 11th, 2004 ad

  The team leader's head came up at the crack of the pistol round and he shook it violently. There were two protectees though. One was a young female and the profile on the assassin did not make that a pretty picture. There was still a mission; the question would be how to proceed.

  He waved for the point to stop and turned to the technical expert. That worthy was deciphering the readout from the Galactic-supplied life sensors. He made a motion for three humans, one terminated. One male, one female alive. Male and female were moving.

  The team leader checked the location and gave the point hand signals to move to the opposite side of the house and do a covert entry. He waited impatiently for more intelligence.

  * * *

  Mike Senior finished strapping Cally into the Kevlar battle armor and threw his own on. Cally had pulled down her British 7.62 Bullpup and the sight of her with pistol and rifle made him think of other ways to spell her name. The drying blood flecked through her blonde hair was a sight to behold.

  "You're a mess, Grandpa."

  "You don't look so hot yourself," he snorted, fixing the last two straps in place and picking up his MP-5. The friction sling rode smoothly and he hopped up and down for a second to ensure there weren't any rattles. "And the living room is going to be a bitch to get cleaned up."

  "Sorry about shooting him, then. Not."

  * * *

  The point monk checked the window for entry. He popped up a microcam and scanned the bedroom beyond. It looked like a spare, bed made, no one around, no personal items, no mess. Next he checked the window for tell-tales. It had magnetic alarms but they were easily bypassed. There were motion sensors in the room, however. He bypassed the window alarms, jimmied it and made a slow entry into the room. As long as you moved very slowly, the sensors would not detect you. If they were set to detect motion that slow, they would false-alarm on every breath of air. He moved into the room, the camera on his shoulder faithfully repeating the picture back to the team leader.

  * * *

  "They're in the downstairs guest bedroom," said Papa O'Neal. The command bunker was connected to the kitchen by a short tunnel. From it he had a commanding, and camouflaged, view of the approaches. He also had readings from the sensors scattered throughout the property and house. The sensors were not connected to alarms, so they were set on the highest possible threshold. Detecting false alarms from reality was something of an art. However, the bedroom also contained a small sound mike and camera. Occasionally kinky but old habits die hard.

  "Who is it?" asked Cally, sliding her Bullpup behind her back and checking the mine controls. She got the fun part; her job was detonating them on Papa O'Neal's command. Well, she might let Papa O'Neal try a few. If he was nice.

  "Hmm, lemme see," answered Mike Senior. "Black body armor. Black ski masks. Black weapons. Black boots. Gee, Santa Claus?"

  "Police?"

  "No, they'd have it across their backs in great big letters," said Papa O'Neal, gesturing at the picture of the point moving stealthily down the hallway. "They're good, though. Shame we're gonna have to kill 'em."

  * * *

  The point froze at the entrance to the living room. The body slumped across the rawhide chair was not one of the protectees. It appeared to be the target. He began to relax out of his crouch.

  * * *

  "That's odd," said Papa O'Neal.

  "What?" asked Cally, running a circuit check. The detonators were designed to take a low-voltage test current without actually exploding. Only two circuits were dead. Very good. And there was one claymore placed directly behind their visitors. As soon as Papa O'Neal gave the word, one special operations team was toast.

  "He just relaxed. If he was backup for Harold he should be more tense, not less."

  "What else could he be?"

  "I don't know. But it's odd."

  * * *

  The team leader looked at the tech with a puzzled expression in his eyes. Then he shrugged, picked up his cell phone and consulted a scrap of paper.

  * * *

  A red light over the phone in the bunker began to blink. Papa O'Neal looked at it with a puzzled expression and picked it up.

  "Michael O'Neal, Senior?" asked a faintly accented voice on the phone.

  "Yes," said Papa O'Neal, warily.

  "Are you and Cally O'Neal in good condition?"

  "Yes."

  "In general, if I might ask, where are you?"

  Mike Senior chuckled evilly. "In a command bunker watching you and your point scratching your heads. Smile for the cameras!"

  "Ah," said the commando, cautiously. "We were ordered to respond to protect you from one Harold Locke, an operative of . . . An operative who had been given a contract on you. You are in good health?"

  "Yes."

  "Oh. That is good. We will withdraw then."

  "Okay," Papa O'Neal agreed warily. "You'll understand if we don't invite you to tea?"

  There was a dry chuckle. "Of course. Question: Do you want us to dispose of the body or would you prefer to yourself?"

  It was a good question. If there was an investigation the body would be a mountain of evidence pointing right at Cally. The fact that he was an assassin would not even be worth bringing up in a trial. There was no proof.

  The question really was: Did he trust these people not only to dispose of the evidence but to do so as perfectly as possible? In the end the answer surprised him.

  "Yeah. Thanks. Come to tea some other time. With a few less friends."

  "God be with you, Mr. O'Neal."

  On that odd farewell the group broke into activity. The point opened the front door of the house while three other black-clad troops slung their weapons and trotted forward. Two vans pulled up within seconds and, as the four in black on the inside bagged the body, another group in white exposure suits exited the second van. These individuals lugged in a variety of materials, mostly cleaning supplies and equipment, and began a thoroughgoing cleaning of the room.

  Once practically every scrap of blood and brain was cleaned up, they closed the curtains to the room and doused the lights. Papa O'Neal could not determine precisely
what went on, but he had a pretty good idea. Many modern investigation techniques involved materials that fluoresced or are visible only under ultraviolet light. Undoubtedly the team was cleaning up these otherwise invisible bits.

  When the lights came back on it was to reveal the last of the group exiting a perfectly cleaned room. The only thing suspicious about it was that most living rooms do not look like a factory clean room. The body bag had already disappeared into the maw of the evidence van. Once both groups loaded up the two vans pulled out without, as far as Papa O'Neal could determine, a single word being exchanged. One of the white-suits had donned mufti and drove the rent-a-car. From the time the point man entered the living room, less than an hour had elapsed. The only face they saw was the white-suit and he was wearing dark sunglasses and a beard.

  "Damn," whispered Cally. "Who were those masked men?"

  "I dunno," answered Papa O'Neal with a broad smile. "But they sure knew what they were doing." Fellow professionals were so hard to find.

  CHAPTER 55

  The Pentagon, VA, United States of America, Sol III

  0424 EDT October 11th, 2004 ad

  Jack Horner stared at the map-screen and wondered what in hell he was supposed to do. The roads out of the Arlington pocket were jammed with refugees. Turning the corps around had thrown the whole evacuation plan into a cocked hat and it had yet to recover. Although the interstates had been cleared of stalled vehicles, the side roads had become so gridlocked that virtually no one could get on the major arteries.

  Most of the evacuees had panicked when the Tenth Corps had been destroyed. They did not understand that it would take the Posleen hours and hours to move around the Occoquan Reservoir and that Ninth Corps was in the way. Quantico—which had become the graveyard of the corps it once hosted—was a bare thirty minutes from Arlington. Faced with a nonmoving traffic jam, many had turned off their cars and started walking.

  These vehicles now created a nearly impassable obstacle to movement. Many of those on foot had made it to the interstates where they were being picked up with buses. But many were wandering aimlessly northward on back roads, imagining that the Posleen were right behind them. These lost souls would eventually find their way to the Potomac bridges and safety. But many would be caught on the wrong side. Too many. The current guess was hundreds of thousands.

  Normally, in exercises, he would be sending in flying armored columns about now. Their purpose would be to slow up and misdirect the Posleen while military police backed by light armor would be rounding up, and in some cases driving, the refugees.

  Unfortunately that would have been the task of either the Tenth Corps, which was no more, or Ninth Corps, which was fading fast.

  Part of Eighth Corps, the One Hundred Fifth Infantry Division, had arrived in northern D.C., but they were scattered hither and yon. It would take them a while—quite a while if recent history was anything to judge by—to get all the armored vehicles off the lowboys and the units assembled. And the idea of flying columns with those troops was a joke. Three months before he had sent an entire MP brigade from Fort Bragg to Fort Dix to put down a mutiny by the same unit. They were just as likely to run back to New Jersey as throw themselves between the Posleen and civilians.

  And then there were the landings. Over fourteen B-Decs had exited hyperspace in the last twenty-four hours. Four had been totally destroyed by the remaining fighters and frigates. But that had been at the cost of three frigates.

  The PDCs were still in their cleft fork. Designed to stop the landings, they were unable to perform that function, instead being held back to stop liftoffs on the part of the landers. Despite that, Europe had lost twelve of their total of twenty Planetary Defense Centers. China had lost eight, America four.

  But the landings were occurring everywhere. There had even been one in Phoenix, for Christ's sake. With more Posleen coming in from God-knew-where, he could not totally strip any area of its local defenders. But he needed to get troops from somewhere.

  He knew that the maps and graphs were not reality, but they were all he had to work with. The chart of Ninth Corps strength was dropping like a waterfall as more and more Posleen charged into the gap between Lake Jackson and the Occoquan. The icon of the Second of the Five-Fifty-Fifth was nearly to the staging point behind Lake Jackson, but even a flank attack would hardly stop the Posleen at this point. Hell, it might just point them to the way around. So far they hadn't tried that.

  There was only one mobile unit left at Indiantown Gap, the closest base to Arlington that hadn't been emptied. Harrisburg had a brigade of the Twenty-Eighth Mech to defend the area. So. Time to dump out the tacklebox. And call a few people out of hiding.

  * * *

  The gentle rocking of the five-ton truck as it negotiated the stop-and-go traffic of the interstate was at first maddening and then lulling. But Michael O'Neal was heading to the sound of distant musketry as fast as he could.

  Every time a unit stopped for a rest or the truck he was riding on broke down he hitched a ride with another unit. Usually the Fleet uniform alone would guarantee a ride. Once he had traded on his name. Once it had been necessary to get a higher chain of command involved. But it was slow going. He wasn't worried that the Posleen would go away; they were going to be around for weeks at least. But he was worried about the company being thrown into battle with Nightingale in command. It was his nightmare come true.

  So he was nearly asleep when the AID chirped.

  "Incoming call from General Horner."

  Mike sighed and didn't bother to open his eyes. "Accept."

  "Mike?"

  "General."

  There was a pause. "We tried."

  "I know."

  Another pause. "We've got a situation . . ."

  "Refugees."

  "Yeah," the general sighed.

  Mike flicked his eyes open. At this point the AID could practically read his mind and a hologram of the battlezone suddenly appeared in the troop compartment. The soldiers who were awake stirred uneasily. Suddenly, without a word of command from the Fleet Strike officer, a hologram of the battle over the eastern United States was floating in the darkened interior of the truck. The lights from the next truck in the convoy partially washed it out. But then the AID polarized that area and created a shadow zone.

  It was as advanced as radio to an aborigine and just as alien. As superficially sophisticated as the soldiers were, the technology was still stunning.

  The AID sketched out probable movement rates for the scattered evacuees in Arlington. Then the time for the Posleen to reach them, assuming that the Ninth Corps lasted as long as anticipated. Then it sketched in the best possible movement time for the MI battalion. The three washes of color clearly missed proper intersection.

  "We'll be too late," Mike said quietly. Everyone expected the cavalry, yellow flags flying, to come rushing in at the last moment. Well, this time the cavalry was just too far away and scattered to the winds. After all his careful preparations, it was coming down to too little, too late.

  "I'm ordering the movement anyway. I've got a gut that the worst point is going to be around the Fourteenth Street bridge."

  "Yeah," Mike nodded, "makes sense. It's almost the last one in the line going east, it's a chokepoint and everybody knows where it is." The bridge was overlooked by Arlington Cemetery and led directly to the Lincoln Memorial.

  "Yeah. I'm expecting that once the refugees are in contact, that will be where the biggest backup is. And the Third Infantry is planning on holding the south side as long as they can."

  "Let me guess."

  "Yeah, the CO more or less said that the Posleen could have Arlington Heights over his dead body."

  "And he meant it literally." The Old Guard was fanatical about Arlington. Much more so than about any passing President or minor monuments. However, the unit was primarily ceremonial and had virtually no heavy weapons. "Well, I suppose one more stupid symbolic action won't hurt any more than all the others."


  "He's our President, Captain O'Neal," the general said quietly. The rebuke was clear but Mike could tell the general's heart wasn't in it.

  "Your President," Mike said just as quietly. "We renounce our citizenship when we join the Fleet. Remember? Sir?"

  The statement was greeted by silence.

  "Have you told the battalion they're moving, yet?" Mike asked, changing the subject.

  "No, I'm going to call Major Givens right after we get done."

  "I need to be there, General." Mike flicked the hologram away with a wave of his hand and puffed out a breath of air. The fog from his breath was misty white in the light from the following truck.

  "Well, I don't see how, Captain."

  "Helicopter."

  "Are you nuts! The Posleen'll destroy it before you're halfway to Indiantown Gap! Hell, look at the ambush of Second batt!"

  "Fluke," snapped Mike, pulling up the map again. This time he took command of the display, tapping on vectors and assigning threat levels. "Shelly, cross-link this to General Horner."

  At those words, heard throughout the compartment, the troops realized who the Fleet captain had been arguing with. Their heads ducked as if he were going to be hit by lightning at any moment. Mike paid them no mind.

  "We're almost to Winchester. Have a bird meet me there. Blackhawk, Kiowa, I don't care. We'll stay low by slipping through the gap at Harper's Ferry. I'll intercept the unit somewhere on Interstate 83."

  There was silence on the other end as Horner studied the schematic. The hologram had the plotted positions of Posleen and probable fields of fire. If an aircraft stayed below one hundred feet, all the lines ended well short of the route he had sketched in. "You're assuming two things that are not true. One: that the Posleen will not take off. If a lander lifts it throws this whole thing away. Two: That there are no more landers coming in. We've had three landings in the past hour."

  "And if one is coming in, or lifts, the schematic changes. Shelly will keep it continually updated. That's what she's for. We land if we have to until the threat is past."