“Roger that.”
He was starting back down the hill, when Jeff’s finger snap brought him up short.
“How’s it going with the eggheads?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know; they seem to be having fun, to tell you the truth.”
“Fun?!” Jeff shook his head. “If they can’t get that thing working, we might as well turn ourselves in to that circus down there and hope for the best.”
It wasn’t anything he didn’t already know. He saluted with a finger and started back down the hill. Watching Doc Jensen tinker with his precious phone booth reminded him of his childhood. He’d watch his dad work on something around the house; he’d ask a question and get a grunt in reply. Then a string of profanity would break out. He’d ask what was wrong, thinking the worst. Jensen would just wave him off—“Nothing I can’t fix, just didn’t think I’d have to.”
They’d been there six days, and as far as he knew, the eggheads still weren’t done “running their tests.”
They’d explained what they’d seen to Dom. The young Pole had just looked at both of them in confusion. “Pregnant?”
“Very.” Jeff had just made a motion indicating a baby bump that they wouldn’t have seen if it hadn’t been for the NVGs they were wearing. They were going to need them. The night was moonless, and darkness had descended quickly in the narrow canyon.
“I’m not going to shoot a pregnant woman,” Dom stated.
“We aren’t planning to shoot anybody.” Kyle had been worried about that as well.
“She shoots at us . . . ?” Jeff gave voice to his own biggest worry.
“We’ll listen in if we can. Take them when they’re asleep. Incapacitate a sentry if they put one out, and I’m guessing they will.”
He got nods in the affirmative from both of them. He tapped his helmet, turning on his headset. “Comm check . . .”
Before he’d started his crawl inward towards their campfire, he’d had a moment of concern that he might have lost his touch. He used to pride himself on his ability to slow crawl. There had been one time on the India/Pak border, where his unit had been teamed with a very green unit of Indian special forces. He’d been the one who had snuck into the village and planted an audio bug under the floorboards during a meeting of the local muj community organizers. One of the elders hadn’t liked the tea he’d been served and dumped his cup out. Most of it had dripped through the floor onto the small of his back.
He wasn’t that close to this target, but he could still make out snippets of the conversation over the burbling sound of the creek downhill, off to his right. The pieces that he could hear just confused him all the more. The four of them sat around the fire just talking, except for the lady. They’d brought a fold-up, reclining lounge chair for her, and she was curled up on it, asleep.
The two white guys looked less like a Cabela’s ad without all the gear and more like two locals at ease with camping out. Their socked feet were propped up on a logs facing the fire. The black guy, he worried about. The guy seemed even more alert than he had when they’d observed the group walking. The more he watched the man, the more he was convinced the guy was a soldier, or had been one at some point. Maybe he was just nervous; the man kept looking over at the sleeping woman. So, maybe a wife or girlfriend to complicate the issue. You could usually trust people to react in a certain way when threatened. Throwing loved ones into the mix added a layer of unpredictability that they all could have done without. At a second glance, in the light thrown off by their campfire, he started to think the two white guys might be related as well.
“Dumbass here thought . . . Rodeo clown . . . Missoula.”
Sparse words reached him without context. He wasn’t going to learn anything from this position; he had to get farther away from the creek. Problem was, he had a lot less cover in that direction. Jeff was already covering the best approach to the camp, and the former SEAL would be as close as he could get. Dom had set up farther away, where he watched the whole group through his rifle’s scope.
“I can’t hear shit over the stream.” He subvocalized the words into his mic, less than a whisper.
It was nearly a minute before Jeff came back. “Hold position, I’ve got audio.”
He’d played this game before, though not in some time. Someone else was in a better position than he was; he wasn’t going to risk that by moving. Jeff had the ball. He tried to listen in and picked up on a pattern where the two white guys seemed to just be telling random stories. The black guy laughed occasionally, but there was always a regular scan of the area and furtive glances in the direction of the sleeping woman.
Then he heard the dark-haired cowboy ask something. Whether it was just luck or the man’s voice changed an octave while he was asking a question, he heard it.
“How in . . . you . . . hooked . . . Sir Geoff?”
Sir Geoff? He resisted the impulse to ping Jeff. He’d be listening, too; he didn’t need another voice in his ear.
The black guy, the soldier as he’d categorized him, spoke with a deeper voice that was a little easier to hear; he was getting five words out of ten instead of three. Unfortunately, they were just words, and names that made no sense to him. “Captain Britt . . . Tom . . . in North Carolina.”
The conversation reached a lull after a while; he was still on pins and needles. How the hell could Sir Geoff play into this? Had the government gotten the location of the mine from the old man? It would explain how these people could be here? But whoever they were, they weren’t government. He’d couldn’t imagine a more un-official looking group.
After nearly an hour, Jeff’s voice broke in with the barest of whispers. “Not hostile. I repeat, not hostile. Break off, and pull back.”
Kyle breathed a sigh of relief and started the first of many slow movements that would inch him back towards the heavier brush at the creek’s edge.
“Need to drain the lizard king!” He glanced up at the campfire; one of the rednecks had stood up and made his announcement to the entire forest. The idiot was hopping around on one foot, trying to pull a boot on.
“Incapacitate if you have to,” he intoned. “Nothing more.” He ordered, praying the guy found a tree to piss against before wandering into where he or Jeff had set up.
No such luck; the guy stumbled and almost fell when the other one tried to trip him going around the fire.
“Keep it up, dumbass . . .”
Those two had to be brothers, he thought. The lizard king’s owner looked outward into the darkness for a moment, before settling on a direction towards the creek.
Shit! He could see the outline of a handgun in a hip holster against the light from the campfire.
“He’s armed.” Dom’s voice came in a lot louder; he was far enough back from the campfire with his rifle that he didn’t have the same need to whisper.
“Copy. Do not engage,” he whispered back.
He’d have to handle it himself. Mentally, he shook his head when the man walked through a cobweb hanging between the pine trees.
“Sonofabitch . . . I hate spiders” he heard the man mumble to himself as he went the wrong way around a tree and was suddenly headed right towards him.
By then, Kyle had made it to a tree and slowly came to his feet. He hugged the tree and leaned his body around the trunk away from the man’s path, afraid to move his feet for the noise they’d make. He held his knife, pommel down, knowing he’d crack the guy’s skull if he had to.
He let out a breath as the figure lumbered by, mere feet away from the tree he half hid behind. He lifted one foot with every bit of caution he could muster and got it back underneath him, taking the weight off his arms that were wrapped around the tree.
He slowly turned back around to face the creek, and could see the man’s outline just reaching the water’s edge.
“Jeff? Can you talk yet?”
“Sir Geoff sent them,” Jeff whispered. “My brother and sister have been with him awhile. They picked up your
two idiot cousins not long ago. They are looking for the mine. The lady is some sort of scientist or computer whiz.”
Sir Geoff was alive! He tried to ignore the feelings that engendered. This could still go very badly. Bad things happened in the dark when you were trying to be cute and not servicing everything that moved.
“Continue pull back,” he ordered. Feeling a little more secure with the gurgle of the creek and the sound of the man pissing as he sang a very off-key version of “Oh! Susanna,” he moved backwards at a creep away from the fire and farther upstream.
Jeff had said they were with Sir Geoff; there’d be time to set something up that would be a lot less risky. That, and he very much wanted to know where Sir Geoff was.
*
Bay of Riga, Chandra
It was a small RHIB as far as the line of rigid inflatable boats went, but it had two 100-horse outboards and seating for eight plus the pilot. Jake had the boat flying through the wave crests of a heavy sea blowing in from the west or port side.
He’d skirt down the side of one wave and plow lengthwise through the trough until he’d launch the boat up and over the next wave, usually with a shout of joy that the wind would tear away the instant it left his throat. He looked down at one of his passengers, a Jema by the name Harsti. The man had volunteered to swim ashore with him, but at the moment, he was bent over with his head in his hands, the contents of his stomach covering his wet suit.
Jake smiled to himself. Mission accomplished. You are an evil bastard. He knew he could do this better alone, without having to worry about a partner he had no confidence in. That wasn’t quite right—he had no knowledge of Harsti’s ability—but a night like this wasn’t the time to learn.
He slowed the boat as the water grew calmer. He knew from the map that there was a spit of land off the port side jutting out from the target island. It had to be there, because nothing else would have altered the wave action. He slowed further, engaging the lock on the wheel as he slapped down a single NVG monocle and tightened the chin strap on his helmet.
The sound of someone else retching in one of the forward seats reached him, and he smiled again. He had warned them. A pile of black granite swam out of the darkness, and he jerked the wheel to starboard and slowed further. These boats were close to unsinkable, but he could still lose a prop or run aground and rip out the bottom easily enough.
The dimmest outline of the surf being washed ashore by the wind materialized about a hundred yards ahead. He slipped the boat into neutral after killing his forward momentum and looked back at the rock pile he’d avoided, trying to judge the drift. It wasn’t too bad, mostly just wind driven in this bay.
“Drop the anchors!”
All the Jema were hurting from the boat ride, but two of them struggled out of their highbacked seats and tossed their anchors, nothing more than large rocks webbed with rope. He turned to check the stern in time to see another Jema do the same. He watched the rope play out, until the end of it snaked between the man’s legs and disappeared over the side.
The Jema looked up at him in what he took as surprise.
He just shook his head. Shit.
“You do know, you people would be Vikings on my world!”
He judged the drift again, and the two anchors in the front seemed to be holding them in place. His fault, he knew. These guys weren’t sailors, and he hadn’t expressly told them the anchor rope needed to be attached to the boat.
He clapped Harsti on the shoulder. “You stay with the boat until I signal with a light from the shore. That will mean I have a passenger, and you come help me. Right?”
“Yes, I’ll wait here.”
“Good man!”
There wasn’t any current, just choppy wind driven waves. He made quick work of the swim, staying on his side, gun held out of the water to the best of his ability. By the time he stood on the shore, he was very aware that he hadn’t spent much time in the water of late.
He took his time arranging his gear, and brought with him only what he would need. He gave himself three hours before he had to be back in the water, and set off up the narrow strip of dark gravel.
It was ten minutes before he located an unnatural break in the foliage leading inward from the shore. It had the look of a deer track, but in the dark could have just as easily been a footpath. He used the night vision at intervals, and had been moving along the track, moving gently uphill for twenty minutes, before he picked up a slight glow through the trees.
He left the trail and within minutes had spotted a small cluster of wooden longhouses. It looked like something out of a medieval setting. Three of the large houses were set around a small courtyard, covered in brick. A well with a long-handled iron hand pump and what he assumed were oil lamps within the structures were the only things that gave the place any semblance of technology beyond what he thought of as early medieval in Earth terms. The Kaerin had done a real number on this world, retarding its natural development.
This place didn’t have the look of anything beyond a small community farm. He couldn’t see for certain even with the NVGs, but he thought the land flattened out and looked to be cleared out on the far side of the huts. Movement caught his eye near the pump, and he spotted a large, mangy-looking dog sniffing the air. It looked like a cross between a long-haired Labrador and a hound of some sort.
Shit . . . he loved dogs. It wasn’t fair; the animals would give their loyalty to and sell their lives for the lowliest shitbag in the world. Why did there always have to be a dog? He had his “hush puppy” holstered to his thigh. A suppressed .22 firing subsonic rounds. It was clear the dog had picked up a scent he didn’t recognize and was still in the process of deciding if it was worthy enough to kick it up the chain to his owner.
Light spilled out from the end of the hut farthest from him as a door was opened. A woman’s voice called out. He couldn’t quite make out what she said, but the dog’s head came up in an instant and took off in the direction of the voice. He breathed a sigh of relief as both the woman and the dog disappeared into the yellow-green bloom of light that the night vision device created.
When the door slammed shut, he was left staring at the empty farmstead. Small blooms of light leaked out from around the eves of two of the huts; occasionally, he’d pick up a flicker of light from one of the two chimney openings. Other than that, there wasn’t much he could see. He’d determined that the hut closest to him was empty, or at least didn’t have any lanterns or a fire going inside.
He knelt at the base of a skinny pine tree, letting the cold rain keep him awake for close to an hour before there was any movement. The same door as before opened, spilling enough light that it took his goggles a moment to adjust. A woman with a young child in hand was walking towards him across the bricked-over courtyard, both of them hurrying with their heads bowed against the rain.
He couldn’t make out any features or guess at the age of the woman; the light bloom from the lantern she carried blotted out most of her form. They beelined to the nearest of the longhouses and then disappeared inside. The light from the woman’s lantern spilled out from between the pine boards of the hut, and he realized it must be a lot older than the other two longhouses. There was no chinking between the boards, and the lantern threw enough shadows from within that he could now tell it was being used as an animal pen for what he guessed were sheep. That explained the smell.
From his experience in Afghanistan, he knew sheep were generally quiet at night. So, this was the manger and outhouse. He had time to wait for another customer. He wasn’t about to abduct a woman taking a kid to the head; he told himself he had standards. He’d try to hold out for her husband, or better yet, the long-toothed village elder with prostate issues.
He thought he could hear the woman admonishing her child; he recognized the Jema word holos, which meant cold. A few minutes later, the woman pretty much raced her child back across the courtyard to their longhouse. He just shook his head, thinking that the trip to the outhouse
must really suck in the middle of winter.
He came to his feet and moved down to the abandoned longhouse. Checking the courtyard from the rear corner of the structure for signs of any other movement, he was hit by the rich smell of animal manure. He moved as quickly as he could around to the front of the building and went inside through a door made of rough-hewn planks, hanging on hinges made of thick leather.
The sheep, a dozen or so, didn’t do anything but look up in the direction of the door when he squeezed inside. It was an old abandoned dwelling. The longhouse had a well-built, stone-and-mortar firepit sitting in the middle of the floor, lying cold. The “outhouse” was a simple seat built over a hole in the far corner. The rest of the space was taken up by a waist-high pen holding the sheep. He moved back towards the door and slid behind some large wooden barrels. Glancing out from between the wall planks, he saw that the courtyard remained cloaked in darkness.
He could afford to wait for another hour, maybe a few minutes more before he had to head back. With luck there wouldn’t be any more children, and the dog would stay inside where it was warm and dry. The dog worried him far more than anyone else who may reside in the other two houses.
It was well past the time he had allotted himself and was about to give up when the door to the middle longhouse creaked open. No lantern this time, and he had a much better look at the figure that emerged as they were backlit from the light inside. A young boy, middle teens at the most, waited a moment under the wood awning above his door before ducking his head and sprinting across the courtyard.
Jake almost knelt down behind the barrels to hide, but then thought better of it. It wasn’t like he was going to take the kid out, and this was what he’d come for. The door to the manger slammed open, and the figure made straight for the makeshift head. He did a double take as the young boy sat down to pee and then suddenly realized there was probably a logistical reason for that.
New Shores: The Eden Chronicles - Book Three Page 12
