THE ASSAULT LANDING craft rested in the farm compound in front of the barracks. Trouble sat in its command center, surrounded by his noncoms and civilians. Tom would keep his next date with Senate investigators. Trouble wouldn’t let Steve out of his sight; Ruth, he didn’t want to.
“That’s all we’ve got on Richman.” Major Urimi finished updating Trouble on the situation. It hadn’t taken long.
“They didn’t want info out on the place.” Steve stepped forward. “I had my suspicions as to why, but I never guessed at anything like this.” Trouble would give Steve the benefit of the doubt because of what he’d been through. Still…
“They started a major new city hall a year ago. That really got me wondering. Most buildings go up. This one went down, twenty-five stories. Only two above ground.” Steve’s fingers roved the map, then stopped. “This place, the one you’ve got labeled ‘Country Club ??.’ That’s the place. A lot more underground than above.”
“It is on a hill,” someone behind Urimi observed.
“Then it’s more a command bunker than a city hall.”
“A fallback position to hold until they can get some kind of relief force through,” Trouble muttered.
“They’ve already got a call out,” Tru Seyd added. “Half an hour ago a coded message came up from the surface, shot through the station’s comm service using hidden protocols, then headed out to all four of the jump point buoys and caused them to make immediate pass-throughs. Damnedest thing I ever saw.”
“Elevate things to the political realm.” The skipper joined them on line. “Then thumb their noses at us when observers arrive and tell us to back off by a seventy-five, seventy-four Senate vote.”
“Not if we take that bunker apart before the observers get here,” Trouble pointed out.
“Might not be that easy,” Urimi noted. “We’ve looked over the station. It’s got a hell of a lot of remote machine guns. Tru closed down the security center before they used them. If they’ve got the same stuff covering that bunker and the ‘golf course,’ it’ll be damn costly to do a frontal assault.”
“Then maybe we better take the redoubt tonight,” Trouble suggested.
“Too late,” came again from off Urimi’s screen. “It’s active, making music like a division in full combat kit. Lots of people headed in. If we dropped tonight, we might keep some out, but we might also run into other stuff. I’m reading an antiair envelope stretching fifty miles out around that town.”
“If they’ve got missiles to back up the radar.”
“You want to guess which garage or condo hides the SAM?”
That seemed to exhaust that idea.
“Might be some advantage to letting the bunker fill up,” Urimi muttered. “Not everyone here is into the illegal side. We got the station when the computer geeks took a better job offer. If they don’t know enough to run and hide, they probably aren’t guilty of anything worse than failing to ask around about the company they hired on with. In this mission, we got to separate the sheep from the goats.”
“And if all the bad guys dig into the bunker, all our sour apples are in one barrel,” the skipper said, mixing her metaphors.
“That might be a good idea,” Steve said slowly.
“Because?” Trouble egged him on.
“There’s a lot of water around here. You may have noticed the frequent and excessive rainfall.” Steve grinned at Trouble.
“Not lately,” Trouble countered.
“Even Riddle has to have a dry season. Anyway, when they started digging city hall, they ran into all kinds of springs in the hill. Had to work out a whole series of drains, or the ten bottom floors would have been flooded half the year. Anyway, there’s a major drain pipe running from under that bunker directly into the main city sewer. Since it hasn’t rained for a couple of days, it might not be underwater at the moment.”
“Worth a try.” Trouble glanced at Gunny. He was grinning as he nodded his head.
“They’ll have sensors covering that access,” Tru opined. “Can I go dirtside with you boys?”
“If we put a load of explosives in there, then give them thirty minutes to surrender and evacuate.” The skipper spoke slowly, weighing each thought as she said it. “I like it. At oh-four-hundred, I’ll drop the brigades to surround the city and begin moving in toward the center. By noon, we ought to have the bunker isolated. I could drop a demolition team and full countermeasures squad to support you. Think your engineers could map that sewer system between now and then?”
“We got sixth squad with us,” Gunny said.
“I think we can,” Trouble assured his skipper.
“Any questions?” Umboto asked.
There were none.
“Hell of a slim brief. You know the objectives. Keep in touch with the units on your flanks. Let’s not kill each other, or any civilians we can avoid. Good luck to us and Godspeed.”
Trouble turned to Gunny. “Sergeant, mount ’em up. We’re moving out.” Gunny did that with his usual ease. The civilians were Trouble’s problem. “Steve, you’re coming with us. Tom, I got to keep you safe. You and Ruth stay here.”
“I don’t think all the guards bugged out with Zylon.” Tom shook his head. “I’m not hanging around here.”
What was safer, the frying pan or the fire? “I’ll send you topside with this lander once we’re in town,” Trouble decided.
Ruth took a seat like a mountain settling onto a tectonic plate. “You too,” Trouble said. Ruth gave him a wide-eyed look that neither agreed or disagreed.
“Thought we might need some extra gear, sir,” Moss said, handing out weapons and battle suits to the civilians. “Just like on Hurtford Corner.” Trouble had no choice about having civilians in that fight. Here, it seemed he had none either.
• • •
Zylon Plovdic did not like being turned away at the front door of company headquarters. “You’ll have to park that rig in the garage down the hill,” she was ordered. “We can’t have a lot of cars in our parking lot here.” Zylon dismounted her entire staff and led them into the rambling two-story building while Mordy disposed of the vehicle. Above-ground, all you saw was a health club. As with so much of her life, it was what you couldn’t see that mattered.
Immediately, Zylon realized her staff was underdressed. Everyone here sported coats, ties, even three-piece suits; her guards still had mud on their boots. “Where’s Big Al?” she asked one of the security people seated at the information desk.
He glanced up, took in Zylon and her associates with a single sweep, and went back to the board he was watching intensely. “Tied up in meetings. Not seeing anyone today. Ned, is there anything we can do about that bogey?”
Nobody ignored Zylon Plovdic. “Listen up, boy. I’m the one who got Big Al out of bed this morning. I’m the one who let all of you know we had a little problem here. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be waking up tomorrow morning to find this place under new management, you without a job and no idea how it happened. Now, if you don’t want to be handed a hoe and put to work for some of my boys, you’ll tell me where Big Al is.”
That got the fellow’s attention. He cast a very worried look to the man on his right, apparently his supervisor. That one didn’t even look up from his board. “Mr. Alexander Popov is presently tied up in meetings in the seventeenth-floor conference room,” he said evenly. “Those in attendance have asked not to be disturbed. Rod, I’ve called in the unknown. No reaction team available. They don’t want to call out the junior militia.”
“Thank you,” Zylon huffed. “Maybe Big Al will send me and my boys out to settle your little problem.” That got a rise out of them. She signaled her crew to a bank of elevators; Mordy rejoined them. For not yet three in the morning, the place was alive. She shared the elevator with suits who got off at the fifth floor, Acquisitions and Contracts; seventh floor, Legal; and ninth floor, Promotions and Sales. Aware of the stares her crew got, she deposited them at the tenth-floor cafeteria before going on to seventeen.
As soon as she exited the elevator, the receptionist looked up from his desk. “May I help you?”
“Big Al told me to see him as soon as I got in. I’m the one who raised the alarm.”
“Ms. Plovdic, yes. He asks you to wait for him. As you understand, things are a bit unusual this morning. At the moment, the board is facing some very challenging opportunities.”
The loud voices overflowing the two thick wooden doors and flooding the heavily carpeted foyer told Zylon everyone didn’t see the same opportunities in this morning’s challenges.
She sat.
• • •
The assault craft flew low, heading up the river that flowed through Richman. A hundred miles out, they picked up a search radar. “Military issue,” the spacer at the countermeasures station announced.
“I think they bought it cheap at an army surplus sale,” Steve contributed. Trouble wasn’t sure he’d trust that data.
Fifty miles out, a computer demanded their access code and insisted they surrender control of their vehicle. The bos’n ducked lower and yanked the craft around to an easterly heading. They made a couple more nudges into radar coverage, got queried each time, but saw no sign of a lock-on or a missile.
“Would be nice to know if they could land the troops in closer,” Steve suggested.
“Be nicer still to get where we’re going,” Trouble reminded the bos’n at the controls. They stayed low and outside radar.
South of town, a series of ridges ran east–west. They used those to close in, staying in their shadows to avoid the radar. Ducking over the ridges got them noticed, queried, but still not shot at. No human voice objected to their presence. Trouble called their experience in to the command post.
“We’ve been following you,” the skipper told him. “I think I’ll skip a few fast movers over town at the start of the drop. If they don’t draw fire, I’ll move our landing zones up to the outskirts of town. No use wasting an hour driving in if we can land there.”
The assault craft rose above the final ridge, hanging in air, ready to duck. When nothing came their way, it slipped over to land in a park’s meadow. The platoon took nearly five minutes to exit the craft, unusually long, but this load out included sixth squad and its full set of engineering gear. It also included a few choice words with Tom and Ruth; they refused to stay aboard. Giving up on commanding civilians, Trouble waved the craft off to return to the station for the demolition team and countermeasures he wanted before he would even think of assaulting the bunker.
It was 0300 hours as fire teams moved from the woods into the outlying streets. Here, among condos and convenience stores, nothing moved. Still, Trouble wanted his crew off the streets as soon as possible. An engineer released several “tunnel gnats” at the first sewer drain they came to.
The tiny flyers, less than three centimeters across and supported by a single spinning blade, hovered for a moment, then dove down the drain. Trouble watched the corporal’s board as the gnats spread out. Reporting back by laser comm beam to a base gnat that hovered in the first drain, they split up. Half went right, the others left. The right-hand team quickly hit the end of the pipe. The left team reported a six-foot-high sewer pipe two blocks over. The platoon headed in that direction.
There was traffic on that road. The first car caught half a squad down a manhole, the other half waiting. Everybody scrambled. The manhole cover was back in place when a duded-up gal, late getting home, passed by. Trouble never sent more than a four-trooper fire team out at one time after that. There were more drive-bys, fancy dressed, finally heading home, or work clothed, heading for an early shift. In between them, Trouble slipped his marines down the manhole.
By 0320 Trouble had his team out of sight. Now the tunnel gnats went to work in full force. As the marines slowly made their way toward the center of town, the gnats mapped the sewer. Trouble let them go in all directions until he was confident they had a good route toward the bunker, then had the gnat boss recall those headed in the wrong direction. Every five minutes, they raised an antenna up a drain to listen for traffic aimed at them.
Everything was quiet, frighteningly quiet.
• • •
“Zylon, my dear, so glad to see you.” Big Al was his usual positive self. Two dozen Very Important Managers had left the meeting quickly, their faces showing various levels of confidence and anger. Behind Big Al, five more trailed from the room looking a lot less sure of themselves. “Thank you for the call. Seems High Riddle has had a change of management that went unnoticed by the security watch office down here. Disgusting oversight.” Al eyed a man in a gray-and-black uniform. Zylon smiled at him. The thought of adding him to her field hands was a pleasant image to contemplate.
“However”—Al turned back to her—“at the moment, we have everything well in hand. We’ve sent out an emergency call and expect to have a full Senate investigation launched on this atrocious matter by tomorrow. We should have no trouble holding out until they arrive, should we, Carl?”
The uniformed man nodded. He would have looked more assuring if his face were not so ashen. “All the weapon pits are active and under positive control. Every inch of our ‘golf course’ is under automatic weapon, mortar, and antiarmor rocket coverage. If they’d only bought the surface-to-air missiles I asked for…”
“Yes, yes, Carl.” Big Al cut him off. “No one in uniform is ever content with his toys. You must make do with what management can afford. So long as you use what you have to the utmost, I am confident we will be left here unmolested until our lawyers can sort this out.”
“Sir.” A young suit with the nose of a rat broke in. “Has security checked our asshole, as you named it?”
“Yes.” Big Al fixed his gaze on the security boss.
Carl’s face drained from gray to translucent white. “I will make sure of that as soon as I return to my command post.”
“Darling Zylon, why don’t you go along with Carl? Your team would be a fine addition to his people.”
“Covering our asshole?” Zylon echoed.
“Water drainage system,” Big Al tossed off. “Normally quite full, but Riddle does indeed have a dry season. May not be quite as underwater as we assumed. Right, Carl?”
“I shall see to it.” He headed, stiff-legged, for the elevator.
“So shall I,” Zylon answered, following the fellow. She wouldn’t mind wearing a cute uniform like that. Colors would look good on her. She’d want a floor-length skirt, slit up the side. Yes. She had plenty of security experience on her résumé. If Carl’s job became vacant, she’d fill it.
• • •
Trouble had an antenna up at 0400, but he needn’t have bothered. Fifty assault landing craft dropping out of orbit set off enough sonic booms to wake the dead and send people racing from their houses, putting on whatever they found handy.
“Okay, crew, the show is on,” Trouble announced over the laser network maintained by tunnel gnats clinging to the roof of the sewer. “These civilians know this isn’t their average Monday morning, so keep your heads up and your asses low. Fourth squad, fall back and spread out to maintain contact with our initial entry point. Taylor, you and a private return to the LZ and get ready to lead in our support teams.”
“Should never have laughed at the LT’s butt,” Taylor muttered, but he headed back the way they’d come, leaving pairs of troopers at each major intersection.
“Lieutenant, gnat boss here. I think I’ve found our target.”
“Show me.”
On Trouble’s heads-up, a maze of lines appeared. Most were yellow. One ran off to the left of the rest before branching into four other lines. “There are bars at the mouth of that red one.”
“Have the gnats mapped that branch?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pull them back, then. I want to be real careful exploring that one.” Beside Trouble, Steve nodded.
“Be real careful,” he whispered. “Don’t make so much as an extra drop of water fall before we got that puppy wired our way.”
• • •
Izzy was having a much better day than she’d expected. Pirates had not shot up her troops. The landing was going down unopposed. Well, almost. Some irate fools felt that having their sleep disturbed gave them the authority to scream at armed men. The stupidity of civilians never ceased to amaze her. Faced with strong men, armed, her first goal would have been to be elsewhere, fast.
With the first companies of each brigade moving in rapidly, she assigned LZs closer to the center of town and moved the second wave into them. Things were going so smoothly, there had to be a rub. She checked the “city hall/bunker.” None of her troops were near it. Why did she expect a rub there—big time?
“Has Trouble gotten his support units?”
“They’re on the ground and moving up,” Urimi answered.
Good. Or rather, as good as it was going to get. If she isolated all her problems in the redoubt, and then couldn’t get at them, what then? Could she really blow them up?
That bridge she would wait to burn until she was on it.
• • •
Zylon liked the Security command post. It was full of tight butts going purposefully about their business. She could really enjoy this place. A few people would have to go, like Carl and the pasty-faced woman who brought him the bad news.
“We’ve lost the sensors in the tunnels,” said pasty-face. “They’re always full of water, and we couldn’t keep cameras working. Last time the camera circuit went down, we let it go.”
“Has anybody actually taken a look at them today?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Have a repair team do it immediately.”
“And a fire team,” Zylon added coldly. “We move out in five minutes. I’ll be back by then with my team. I’ll need twenty full sets of automatic weapons and night visual gear.”
“I’ll see to that,” the woman said and cringed away.
“This is going to be fun,” Zylon crowed. She turned on her heel and went to find her men.
• • •
Trouble left his platoon strung out behind him and waved Tru forward. For once, the three civilians did what he signaled them to do—stay put. That was the first time Steve, Tom, and Ruth had paid any attention to him. Nobody should have to go to war with civilians around who took his orders for suggestions.
Trouble and Tru rounded a corner. Down the eight-foot-diameter pipe he could just make out a branch off to the left. Tru signaled the marine to halt, then produced a gizmo from her satchel. It skittered forward like a spider, trailing a web out behind it. A window on Trouble’s heads-up opened, showing a bug’s-eye view of the tunnel. He saw nothing unexpected, which did not relieve the tension growing in his gut. Today, what he didn’t know would be what killed him.
Tru’s heads-up dimly showed several windows. The lieutenant waited for the expert to send him one she considered important. He had a long wait. Even after the multilegged scout reached the side entry, all Trouble got was a picture of mesh, bars, and a dribbling stream of one-centimeter-deep water. Ten years of high-tech mayhem gave him the patience to wait.
“Damn,” Tru finally whispered, and retreated to the last side tunnel. “They got that place covered. Video, motion, laser, the works, and probably the best available. This is going to be a challenge.” The woman grinned.
“Let me know when you’re done with your challenge. I’m not moving anyone in there until you’re downright bored.”
“Good move, marine.” Tru aimed her comm unit down the tunnel. “Measures and counters, I need all you got. We got to sink our own tunnels, hack their cables, and set up our own feedback to them. Get a move on, folks.”
“How long?” Trouble asked.
“Best guess two, maybe three hours. Could be four. In the meantime, sit tight, trooper. Catch a nap, relax.”
Trouble passed the word to Gunny. Half his platoon probably would flake out. He headed back to the demolition team. He wanted them in and out fast, like a millionaire’s spoiled brat at boot camp. He got no objections from the swabbies, and drafted third and fourth squads to support them.
He was leaving as Corporal Taylor faced a leadership challenge. “Man, Corporal, how do I get out of this squad? The LT ain’t ever gonna forget you.”
Back in front, Tru was a happy camper. “I heard from some ex-miners how fast these little beggars cut through, but you got to see it to believe it.” She grinned at several one-centimeter holes in the pipe’s wall, fiber-optic lines flowing smoothly into them. Tru’s handheld screen showed new lines reaching out toward the target one. “Got to isolate their sensor pods, cut into their network, record their reports, then randomize them and rerun them for public consumption while we close down their whole sensor suite. Neat, no?”
“Neat, yes. Just let me know when I can get that place rigged for booms.”
“Two, three hours.”
• • •
Zylon bossed a crew of forty; she liked that. Each of her guys now had someone else working for them. She doubted the gray-suited security personnel saw it that way, but that didn’t matter. What Zylon saw was real; the rest were fantasizing.
Down here, it was cold and damp. They’d found a break in the cabling, just as the fiber optics left the sensor ring. A quick patch, and she was watching a very boring hole in the ground. “No problem,” she reported to Security with a voice mail to Big Al. “I have everything under control. Nothing will happen down here we can’t handle.”
Beside her, Mordy slung his automatic weapon and juggled three grenades. His grin showed that he agreed with Zylon; anybody came in here, they were dead before they got their head in the hole. “Tell me about your board,” she said, caressing the neck of the tech concentrating on the readouts. Might as well learn something, as well as have fun.
• • •
“Marine, you there?” The skipper’s voice startled Trouble.
“Yes, Captain, we’re working on getting in.” He eyed Tru; she held up a finger. “One hour, maybe less.”
“Well, the bunker has stopped us in our tracks. They got machine guns, mortars, rockets dug in everywhere you look. All controlled from somewhere else. We move within a hundred meters of their perimeter, and we take fire. Tried everything, smoke, decoys. They got a sensor suite that won’t quit. No heavy artillery until tomorrow to start plowing ground. Even then, I suspect they got backups for their backups.”
“We wait them out,” Trouble surmised.
“We got problems up here from the civilian population.”
“Quite the contrary. Except for a few shouters, they’re very easy to get along with.”
“So why isn’t declaring martial law and locking them down for a day or two gonna work?”
“Because nobody’s got any food in their refrigerator. Would you believe that every meal around here is eaten out? Every block’s got a restaurant, or a fast-food place. Nobody cooks.” Trouble waited. You don’t rush the skipper.
“And nobody’s got any cash in their pocket. Everything is credit card.”
“And the bastards closed down the credit network,” Trouble and the skipper ended together.
“Nobody up here can buy a sandwich or a plate of waffles or pay for a load of vegetables the farmer just brought to market. We got eighty thousand hungry people and no way to feed them.”
Trouble had a mental image of an old Sunday-school story with Izzy trying to multiply loaves and fishes. He didn’t dare laugh. “So we got to close these people down.”
“Close them down, dig them out. Something. How does it look from our side?”
“Give us another hour. We’ll move the demolition charges in there fast, then weld all entrances from the bunker shut. You give them thirty minutes to call it quits, or else.”
“Or else I blow them out. That will be an interesting order.” The skipper’s voice had a choke in it as she closed out.
Could she give such an order? Could Trouble legally and morally execute it? Interesting. He’d damn sure rather blow a big hole in the ground than see a lot of good troopers pay for that bit of real estate. But if the bad guys just sat quiet, neither giving in nor taking action…Like Izzy said, take things one step at a time.
“I got good recordings on all their sensors.” Tru cut into his thoughts. “I’m ready to randomize, cut out the original signal, and begin replay.”
“Demolition team, third and fourth squads, ready to move out?”
“Yessir”s echoed down the tunnel.
“Do it, Tru. Let me know when it’s safe to move.”
• • •
Zylon had learned that the tech was a very married man. In addition, she’d learned more about the sensors than she ever wanted to know. From a purely technical point of view, they were wonders. The video gave her a boring picture of empty sewers with only a trickle of water flowing through them. The motion detectors were good enough to note ripples in that flow—and the footfalls of rats in the adjoining tunnels. The metal mesh at the mouth of the tunnel at least kept those filthy things out of her line of vision. Just to make sure, lasers randomly laced the tunnels to check air or water density. Nothing got past these suckers. Now, if only the tech was more interesting.
“What was that?” Several of the sensors had tiny spikes rising minimally above the background squiggles.
“Probably nothing. Just another lander’s sonic boom. You pick those up even down here. That’s how good my babies are.”
Right, tell me about it. No. Don’t tell me about it. Zylon wondered what was happening upstairs. There’d been a few probes along the perimeter, but those had died away quickly. With emphasis on the died. She hoped someone tried her little hole in the ground. She wanted to have something to show for all her boring commitment to duty.
• • •
“Bad guy’s sensors are down. That tunnel is yours,” Tru announced.
“Gunny, occupy those tunnels,”
“You heard the man. Move it, move it, move it.”
First squad moved out, rifles sweeping up, down, right, left. One fire team established itself at the next junction. Second team cut the wiring off the entrance to the target tunnel, then they and second squad disappeared down the hole with Gunny.
Trouble joined the demolition team. “Let’s move that stuff up there quickly and gently,” he said. The Navy types trotted out with loads of explosives on their backs. And damned if Steve and Tom didn’t grab a load and follow them.
Trouble reached the mouth of the tunnel as Gunny reported back. “Four tunnels secured. There are eight entry ports. I’ve got Private Harz welding them down.”
“Good.” Trouble stood aside; the head of the demolition team, a grizzled chief, handed him a box. “Don’t lose that, sir. I’ve timed the charges to drop this tunnel first, then blow up the other four. That way, we’ll have a plug in place. Force won’t have anyplace to go but up.” The chief’s grin was deadly. He’d done it right. Now it was up to the officers to decide if it was done at all.
“Four of the exits sealed,” Gunny reported. “Now we start on the right side.”
• • •
“What’s that smell?” Mordy growled.
“Damned if I know” seemed to be the general response, as if any of them cared.
“Smells like welding. I got stuck on a welding crew once. That’s welding.”
“And who do you think has a welding torch around here?” That got the other guards laughing at him. Mordy shut up.
Zylon didn’t laugh. Who would be welding? She studied the squiggles on her no longer talkative tech’s board. All of them stayed low, where they were supposed to be. None of the video showed anything new, certainly not a welding torch. The tech had told her about a test you could run; see if the system was picking up random inputs, or if the inputs were too orderly to be random. He only ran that test once a day; had to shut down input for five minutes to evaluate one minute.
Zylon punched the test button. All screens went blank. They stayed that way for a long minute. When the screens came back to life, red letters streamed across them: 52% PROBABILITY THE SIGNAL IS GENERATED. TEST STILL RUNNING.
“Somebody stick their head down an access hole. I want one eyeballed,” Zylon ordered.
There was a pause while one of her men raced up the corridor to the first access hatch. “It won’t turn,” he shouted.
“Put your back into it, wimp.”
“It won’t turn. It’s hot, like it’s been welded.”
“I told you so,” Mordy bellowed.
“Everybody, check all the access hatches. Take your guns, you idiots. Move.” With and without guns, then all with guns, the mob scattered unevenly in different directions.
“This one’s hot and won’t open, too,” one shouted.
“Mine, too.”
“Mine turns. I can open it,” Mordy hollered.
“Get back here, you stupid idiots,” Zylon screeched. “Back this way. Those hatches are open. To them.”
Eighteen or twenty armed men pelted back up one maintenance corridor and headed down another. Zylon followed them. Not too closely. She wouldn’t want to be hit by a stray bullet. She would supervise this, but from a safe distance.
• • •
“We got problems.” Tru came over the net smooth and even. “They’re shouting and moving up there.”
“Gunny, clear teams out of the left-hand side. I’ll take the right,” shouted Trouble. That was where the hatches weren’t yet sealed. Gunny ran; so did Trouble.
At the first right-hand branch, Trouble skidded to a halt. “Clear out, folks, we got company coming. Keep an eye on the service hatches.”
“You heard the man,” Corporal Taylor shouted. “Lock and load. We got targets coming.”
With a cheer, marine gunners readied themselves. Demolition people kept their heads down, going from pallet to pallet, pulling red-flagged pins from their charges and flipping switches.
Trouble headed farther down the tunnel. He got there as the first hatch swung open. The fire team was only four strong; still, the private first class had deployed his crew to cover both hatches. Unconsciously, the teams had gone to cover—behind stacks of explosives. Trouble had read somewhere that direct bullet hits weren’t supposed to set the stuff off. Like all marines, he didn’t trust what he read in manufacturer’s flack ads. “Get away from the explosives,” he shouted as he opened fire on the first one to drop to the floor of the tunnel.
That one crumbled. He looked familiar—Mordy? Others fired long, unaimed bursts from the lip of the hatch. One ducked his head down to get a better picture of what was happening. Trouble put a three-shot burst into his skull. As if in slow motion, the guy who wanted to know too much fell through the hole to land atop the first one. There was a break in the racket of rapid but unaimed fire.
“Quick, close the doors. Don’t let them get through!” came a familiar scream from up above. Zylon!
Is that bitch everywhere?
Both hatches clanged shut, almost in one sound.
“Any of you demolition guys got booby traps for those hatches?” A chief was already pulling something out of a satchel at his waist. He underhanded one to a blue-suiter close to Trouble; then both clambered up the rungs in the tunnel. The explosives slapped onto the hatches with a solid plop.
“Don’t want to be the joker who opens that the next time,” the chief said, dropping to the tunnel floor. “Now, ladies, gentlemen, and marines, I suggest we get the hell out of here.”
“You first,” Trouble offered. Navy men ran. Marines backed up quickly, weapons at the ready.
• • •
“Keep the exits covered. Anybody comes through them, shoot. You, tech, call Central. Tell them we need more guns. They’re coming in the back.”
“But they were welding the hatches shut,” the tech answered.
“Weren’t those explosives down there in the tunnels?”
“I didn’t get a good look; were they?”
“Shut up. Call Big Al. Tell him I’ve got the army stopped, but I need more guns. Do it now,” she shrieked.
• • •
Trouble was the last one out. Gunny waited for him at the main tunnel.
“No more after you, sir. Everybody’s accounted for.”
“Good, folks. Let’s back up some. Chief, if one of those booby traps goes off, will it take everything with it?”
“Don’t know, sir, but it sure won’t give me the blow I planned. By the way, sir, that’s no way to handle the detonator.” To use his rifle, Trouble had slipped the little finger of his left hand through a strap on the detonator. It dangled there rather firmly, Trouble thought.
“I’ll take it,” Tom said. He stepped forward, gently removed the device from Trouble’s finger, and tossed it toward the chief. He threw high. Steve caught it.
Trouble was already jogging down the tunnel, headed for the next junction where Ruth and Tru waited with the rest of the platoon. He patched himself through to the command post to bring them up to date. “The demolition charges are in place, but we were discovered. I suggest you issue your ultimatum and give them five minutes to respond. Otherwise, we’re going to have to go back in there and fight them for the explosives. Not something I want to do.”
“Fire in the hole!” came from behind Trouble. He twisted as he ran. Tom and Steve had the detonator. Tom took the safety cover off. Steve yelled, “Fire in the hole!” once more.
Trouble yelled, “No!”
Steve pushed the button.
The mountain danced around them; Trouble dove for the mud at the bottom of the pipe. For the next week or two he bounced around, a ping-pong ball in the devil’s own game. When the dust settled, the ceiling was still above him, not on top of him. He sat up, facing where Tom and Steve lay laughing like maniacs.
“When they ask you what happened,” Steve said as he gasped for breath.
“Tell them it was two disgruntled ex-employees,” Tom finished. “I think we had good cause to be disgruntled,” he said, slapping Steve on the back.
“Very good cause,” Steve agreed.
Trouble shook his head. Would he ever finish the paperwork on this one?