“Ambala?” Lavager shouted. His voice echoed metallically off the walls. He walked carefully down the rows of gleaming retorts, his pistol drawn. “Ambala! Come out, goddamnit, if you’re here!” He grinned wryly and thought to himself, What a stupid thing to say, if he’s not here why am I shouting?
At the near end of the buildings was a suite of offices and changing rooms. Lavager was headed toward them when one of the doors banged open and a short figure in a white lab coat appeared.
“Ambala?” Lavager raised the pistol.
“Is that you, Mr. President? I thought I recognized that distinctive voice of yours!” The red light reflected off the figure’s glasses as he smiled broadly in relief.
“Ambala, are you all right?” Lavager holstered the pistol and gripped the man’s outstretched hand.
“Fine, sir, we’re all fine. We took refuge in here at the first sign of alarm.” Ambala—Dr. Ambala Jullundur, the scientist in charge of the secret research project at the Cabbage Patch—wiped perspiration from his forehead. “There was terrible shooting and many explosions—” Several other scientists and technicians emerged from the office rooms and all began talking at once.
“Quiet! Quiet! Now listen. We’ve been attacked. The raiders nearly killed me in an ambush kilometers away, and they’ve caused a lot of damage and casualties here. But you are all right and everything is fine in here.” He turned to Dr. Jullundur. “So that means, Ambala, we’re still in business, right?”
“Yes, Mr. President, we are. The damage to the other buildings may cause some delay, but there has been no harm to us or to our equipment. Mr. President, who did this to us?”
“I have a pretty good idea, Doctor, and I’m going to do to them as they have done to us. Now, you people stay put in here. As soon as I’ve gotten things stabilized and organized outside, I’ll send someone for you.” Lavager took Dr. Jullundur’s hand again and shook it. “Stay calm, I’ll be seeing you soon.”
Sergeant Corfram had done a good job getting things organized. “They took one of our lorries, sir, a Brimmer cross-country LX6. Ident number CHO1939.” He gave Lavager a handheld communicator. “I have General Ollius at army HQ, sir.”
“Good work! You are now Lieutenant Corfram. General?”
“Yessir,” Ollius replied. “What is going on out there? I’ve heard—”
“Never mind what you’ve heard. Now, I want you to do some things and do them quickly. You know that strategic intelligence platoon that works for your G2? I think a Lieutenant Svetlanacek commands it?
Get them out here at once. Next, I want Gyrfalcons in the air to the southwest of the Cabbage Patch, I repeat, southwest of here. They are to look for a Brimmer cross-country LX6, license CHO1939. It’s carrying a lot of men, how many, I don’t know, but they are to take it out. Got that? Take it out. If there’s more than one lorry out there that fits the description, and the pilots are not sure if it’s the one, take it out too, take them all out. I don’t care if one of them is full of missionaries going to a prayer meeting, get every damned lorry the pilots can spot. Next, send me a motorized infantry battalion, General, men who can move and shoot. What’s left of the security battalion here is not up to pursuing anyone. Copy so far?”
“Yessir.”
“Wake up your war plans people. Have them waiting for me. Call my cabinet into session at once. They can wait for me too. You are now Army Chief of Staff with the rank of full general effective from this very minute. Cut the necessary orders. I’ll sign them when I get back.”
“But General Ollwel—?”
“He’s hors de combat . Forget him. Finally, get a hopper out here ten minutes ago. Have all that stuff cooking by the time I get back to the city. Out.” He handed the communicator back to Corfram.
“Lieutenant, you heard what I told the General. I lost some good men here today and I need replacements. You’re one of them. Come with me.” They spent the next few minutes rallying the survivors, organizing damage-assessment teams, and teams to search for dead and wounded. “Give me a full report on the situation out here before the end of the day. When the infantry and recon units get here, work with them to organize a pursuit of the raiders. The infantry battalion commander will have tactical control of the operation, but you, Lieutenant, represent me personally and will report to me on everything. One final thing I have to do. You carry on.”
Lavager returned to the portico where he found Gina and Roland sitting. Al-Rashid had already been taken to the makeshift aid station. “His wounds are not life-threatening,” Gina informed Lavager. Lavager sat down next to her and petted Roland. The sun was just coming up. “What are you going to do now, Gina?”
Gina shrugged. “Go home, sir. Take care of my—” She bit her lip and hung her head, but did not cry. Lavager put his arm around the girl. “No. You’re coming to the city with me, Gina. I’ll have people take care of your family. I’ll arrange everything. Do you have any other relatives or close friends you’d like to have with you now?” Gina named several people and Lavager nodded. “I’ll see they’re notified and brought to New Granum. I’m going to have you put up in town for a few days, Gina. Ever hear of the DeLuxe Inn? It’s a five-star hotel—” He paused as a thought struck him. No, this young lady should not be left alone in a luxury hotel after what had just happened to her. “Do you know my daughter, Candace? She’s just about your age.”
“Yessir.” Gina’s face brightened. “I’ve seen her in the trid news, with you. She’s really feck!” “Feck” was a term the Margelan teens used among themselves to describe something wonderful and “in.”
Lavager had often heard Candace use it. Lavager had often thought if something were feck it’d naturally be the opposite of “feckless,” so the word made some sense to him, but as with most teenage slang, nobody was sure just where it had come from.
“Well, if you agree, I’ll take you back to my house and you and Roland here can stay with Candace for a while, until we get everything straightened out. Candace will like you—and Roland. What do you say?”
“Oh, yessir, I would like that! Thank you, thank you!” She put her arms around Lavager’s neck.
“Look, Gina, the sun’s coming up.” As he spoke, the rim of the sun poked above the trees just beyond the ruined perimeter fence, casting its rays through the haze of smoke upon the ruins of the Cabbage Patch. The sight was not the most inspiring Lavager had ever seen. He shrugged. “I’ve always liked the dawn, even here. It’s another day we’re above ground.” He searched inside his vest and fished out an Anniversario, which he lighted.
“That smells good,” Gina whispered, her head against Lavager’s shoulder. How much she reminds me of Candace, Lavager thought. He smoked in silence for a while. They didn’t need him just then; he could rest for a spell. How nice it would be to just rest, not worry about politics, war, government, anything. He thought of Ollwelen and his heart raced in anger. After all their years together Ollwelen turned traitor on him. Well, time enough to deal with that. “When this is over,” he said softly to himself, “and I’ve got everybody on my side and everything is straightened out, Candace and I will take a long, long vacation, maybe just not come back to New Granum at all.”
From far away came the sound of approaching aircraft. Good. General Ollius was on the ball. Gina had gone to sleep beside Lavager. He smiled. “Come on, Roland, old fella, let’s get your mistress back to town. And then I’m going to deal with some people like they’ve never been dealt with before.”
In the Air, East of the Cabbage Patch
“Hometown, this is Gamma Lead. Over.”
Gamma Lead’s radio crackled, then a voice said, “Gamma Lead, Hometown. Go.”
“Hometown, does Racer have a unit at—” Gamma Lead rattled off map coordinates.
“Wait one, Gamma,” Hometown said and went off the air, but not for long. “Gamma Lead, that’s a negative. What do you have?”
“Stand by to receive visual, Hometown.” Gamma Lead pressed a se
ries of buttons that transmitted images of the scene he was orbiting at six thousand meters.
“Received, Gamma. Stand by.” Soft static again filled Gamma Lead’s earphones. After a longer wait than the previous one, Hometown came back. “Gamma Lead, Racer requests you take a closer look. Can do?”
“Right up the exhaust pipe, if that’s what you want,” Gamma Lead replied, then on the flight circuit,
“Wing, let’s take a closer look.”
The flight of two Gyrfalcons of the Margelan air defense corps banked sharply and pointed their noses groundward. They were at Mach 1.25, so the object on the ground had no warning of their approach before they flashed above it at less than fifty meters.
A Hilltop Ten Kilometers East of the Cabbage Patch
The rain stopped while Lieutenant Tevedes was in the tree, but the trunk was still slick with dripping water. He had just started to climb down the tree when the sonic boom from the two Gyrfalcons slammed into him. The blast knocked him from the tree and rocked the lorry violently, throwing around the Marines inside it. Tevedes landed hard on one shoulder and flipped over with an audible cracking of bone.
“Doc!” Sergeant Daly shouted, and jumped out of the cab to rush to Tevedes’s aid. He could barely make out the platoon commander in infra, but it looked like the lieutenant lay with his shoulders and head at impossible angles. Daly opened Tevedes’s face shields and saw the officer’s eyes were open wide and his mouth gaped like a beached fish gulping for water. Natron reached him seconds after Daly and swore as soon as he saw Tevedes’s face. “Don’t touch him,” he ordered. For the first time since they left the hidden AstroGhost, the corpsman raised his face screens. He bent low over Tevedes’s head and turned his own head so his ear was above the man’s mouth. He felt a puff of air and softly breathed a sigh of relief as he straightened back up. He removed his gloves, then as gently as he could, felt around Tevedes’s shoulders and upper body. He reached down and sharply pinched the inside of his patient’s thigh, but Tevedes didn’t react.
“Can you feel this?” he asked as he lifted Tevedes’s hand and bent it back. Tevedes croaked a noise. From the shape of his mouth, Natron was confident he’d said, “No,” though it might have been, “Ow!”
The corpsman did a couple more quick tests, then rocked back. “All right,” he briskly said to Tevedes, “here’s my off-the-cuff diagnosis. I think your neck is broken, and your spinal cord might be damaged. If I had another stasis bag, I’d put you in it and let the surgeons aboard the Admiral Nelson worry about you. But I don’t—and I can’t take any of the other Marines out of their stasis bags, because they’re liable to die if I do.
“So what I’m going to do is brace your neck and put you on a backboard to hold you steady. It’ll be enough to keep you stable until we get you back aboard the ship. Do you understand?”
Tevedes tried to say something, but all that came out was an almost inaudible, “p-p-p.”
“Planes, is that what you’re saying.”
“Y-Yeh.”
Natron looked up. “Daly, where are you?” he called out.
“Up here,” Daly called back. “Halfway up the tree. I’m looking for those aircraft.” He looked all around in both visual and infra, but didn’t see any sign of the two Gyrfalcons.
Directly Above Second Platoon
If Daly had looked straight up, he might have seen the two fighters turning in a very high, very slow, very tight orbit.
Gamma Lead transmitted the visuals he’d taken during his low pass over the lorry that had been identified as the same type as the one missing from the Cabbage Patch and was waiting for further orders.
They came. “Gamma, Hometown. We’ve got a positive ID from the registration number on that vehicle. It is the one taken from the Cabbage Patch. The intruders can’t have gotten very far, so run a search pattern north and east of the lorry. Transmit your infras to me, Racer says they are impossible to spot in visual and have very good infra damping.”
“Roger, Hometown. Gamma initiating search pattern north and east of the lorry.” Gamma Lead switched to local and asked, “You heard, Wing?”
“That’s an affirmative, Lead.”
“Drop to two thousand meters, one thousand meters spread.”
“Two thousand altitude, one thousand spread. Got it, Lead.”
“On my mark. One, two, three, mark.”
The Gyrfalcons turned on their wing tips and dove for their search pattern altitude, north and east of the lorry.
Doc Natron had Lieutenant Tevedes’s neck braced and his body strapped to a metal panel he found inside the lorry in fifteen minutes. Once the injured platoon commander was loaded, he turned to Daly. Both section leaders were dead, Gunny Lytle was in a stasis bag, and Lieutenant Tevedes was strapped to a backboard—and heavily sedated.
“Well, now, Sergeant Daly,” he said slowly, “it looks like you’re in command. What do we do now?”
“It looked to me like those aircraft are looking for us northeast of here,” he said. “We’re going southeast as far as we can, then turn straight for the puddle jumpers. Mount up.”
Natron didn’t move. “We’ve got six dead, and four more so badly hurt there’s no way they can travel via puddle jumper. So what are we going to do when we get there?”
“We’re Force Recon. We leave nothing behind, not even footprints. We’re going to pick the puddle jumpers up and take them with us. It wouldn’t do to leave them behind for somebody to find later on.”
“I like your thinking, Sergeant. All aboard this Ship of Fools.” He climbed into the cargo compartment to tend to his patients during the journey to where they’d left the puddle jumpers. Daly climbed back into the cab and told Nomonon to head southeast. As soon as he was sure they were far enough away from the search area, he’d stop and send an update to the Admiral Nelson . Maybe he’d request that the AstroGhost meet them where the puddle jumpers were hidden. That would make getting away from the searchers easier and might save the lives of some of the wounded.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Room 1007, New Granum DeLuxe Inn
“That’s it,” Sergeant Ivo Gossner said when he’d decoded the burst transmission from the Admiral Nelson . “It’s a go.” They were going to assassinate a sovereign head of state! He put some effort into controlling his trembling. Sure, Jorge Liberec Lavager wasn’t President of a world, merely the head of a nation-state, one of several on Atlas—but he was a head of state nonetheless. Gossner didn’t know of another instance where Marines had carried out a political assassination. He’d never even heard rumors of Marines conducting a political assassination, and there were rumors about everything Marines did, and a lot of things they didn’t do. Lance Corporal Bella Dwan was lying on the bed in their room. She had taken off her blouse and skirt before she lay down on top of the covers wearing just the undergarments she’d bought on the shopping trip the previous day. The undergarments in question were sexier than any Gossner knew her to own back at Camp Howard, and sexier than any he’d glimpsed on her since they’d checked into the hotel. He didn’t know if she was confident he wouldn’t try anything or if she was deliberately teasing him. Or he had to admit that it was possible she had no interest whatsoever in sex and assumed that he didn’t either. He had to control his trembling again, but this time it was because of the sight of her scantily clad body. When Ivo Gossner couldn’t see into her eyes, he found Bella Dwan to really be a very attractive woman. He forced himself to focus on her closed eyes and ignore the rest of her.
“Bella, did you hear me?”
She didn’t open her eyes, but she did say, “I heard you.” She grinned. Dwan’s grin was that of a big cat about to pounce on a grazing antelope. Gossner looked away so he didn’t see the look she gave him as she curled up into a sitting position with her legs crossed camp-style in front of her.
“Damn, it’s a go,” she said softly. Her eyes glittered with anticipation.
“So we need to get out there and see i
f we can do it from that empty building. Get dressed and let’s make like tourists.” He rose from the chair he’d been sitting in and went into the water closet without looking at her.
She watched him go with an expression on her face that, had he seen it, he wouldn’t have known what to make of.
Center Boulevard, New Granum
They walked past Ramuncho’s Restaurant on the other side of the street. Even though it was midafternoon on a business day, the street was nearly as crowded as it had been the previous evening. This time most of the people about were dressed in business garb, and walked purposefully as though they were rushing from meeting to meeting. Still, a large minority were obvious tourists out shopping, dining, or looking for parties. There were enough people shopping that Dwan’s oversized handbag didn’t look out of place on the street.
Gossner saw immediately that they’d been right when they decided they couldn’t pull off the assassination from the access alleys between the buildings; both foot and landcar traffic was far too dense for the maser to get off a full shot at the target. They circled the block to Ranstead Street and passed the front of the vacant building they’d entered the previous night. They knew neither the name nor the address of the building, but they both had a good enough sense of spatial relations to know where it was. Even if they hadn’t, they couldn’t have missed it—it was the only building on the block that had a “to let” sign on it. A dearth of shops and restaurants meant there were far fewer tourists on Ranstead Street, but there were nearly as many people in business garb as there had been on Center Boulevard. They wouldn’t be able to enter the building during the day, at least not through the front. They’d have to go in at night and simply wait until the target showed up at Ramuncho’s. The maître d’ had told them Lavager dined there often enough to justify holding a table for him, but how often was that, how long might they have to wait? And how might the raid on the Cabbage Patch affect his dining out? Would he stop going to Ramuncho’s until the crisis caused by the raid was over?
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