Depths of Blue Page 4

  “Not a problem, Colonel. I’ll return to my ship. You can contact me when you’d like to set up another meeting; it’s your money that keeps me here.”

  “Call me Phil, and I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” he said dismissively as he turned to follow the private out of the room. “Route ninety-two is the one you took to get here from the rendezvous point. You’ll be spending some time here with us until I can get this sorted out. Never fear, we have a room set aside for you. You’ll be well taken care of.” With that he strode out of the room.

  “Well taken care of?” This place made her more and more uncomfortable. Hutchinson was certainly charming, but that couldn’t quite compensate for the strange behavior and rudeness of his men. Of course, she had very little choice in the matter. As long as she was unable to contact her ship, there wasn’t much she could do in a building full of armed men, surrounded by fortifications and still more armed men. This place gave her the creeps. She would bide her time and duck out at her earliest opportunity, profits be damned. The money would be no good to anybody, her or the ruling council back home, if she wasn’t around to close the deal.

  Chapter Three

  Jak bounced up and down in the back of the armored personnel carrier. The springs on this one were definitely going to pot. If they weren’t already there. Jak’s teeth and bones rattled with every bump and pothole that the APC hit. The twelve men crammed in there with her endured the jostling with the same stoicism she did. She kept one hand in a firm grip on the forestock of her sniper rifle and the other hand clamped around the edge of the bench seat. She didn’t want to lose her grip on either one. If she lost her seat, she would be exposed to the ridicule of the others riding with her. Dropping her rifle could knock the alignment of the barrel askew. She wouldn’t have the luxury of running a complete diagnostic and resighting the weapon before heading into the field. In the long run that would be even more painful than being the butt of jokes from the dozen muscle-bound meatheads who were there with her.

  She knew many of them, most only by sight. Collins was there, though she wished he wasn’t. He was the only one of the group who didn’t know enough to keep her at arm’s length. She wasn’t there to make friends. She was only there to do her job and to find her brother’s killer.

  Jak was thrown into the man next to her as the APC took a hairpin turn. The front was along the base of a long escarpment which was the single biggest reason that the Orthodoxans hadn’t been able to punch through their lines over the past thirty years. The top of the escarpment was a perfect place for artillery emplacements and gave Devonite snipers the ability to pick off Orthodoxan soldiers with impunity. The sniper squads all took shifts at various places atop the escarpment and did their best to wreak as much havoc from afar as possible. There was even a scoring system where each rank of enemy combatant was worth so many points, officers being worth the most. At one time Jak had topped the leader boards; second place had gone to Bron. Her point total had dropped off when she had started volunteering for more and more missions behind enemy lines after his death. Points gained during those missions didn’t count since there was no independent verification of kills.

  “Sorry,” she grunted. The man next to her—Walters, she thought—shoved her back into a sitting position. He shrugged and resumed his quiet conversation with the man next to him. She regained her grip on the bench seat and turned her head to gaze out one of the little windows that lined the personnel cargo area. She could see the rock wall of the escarpment whizzing by at high speed. After another hairpin turn, during which she managed not to end up in anybody else’s lap, all she could see was sky.

  There wasn’t much to do except stare through the window at nothing. They had a ways to go before they reached their drop-off point. Jak’s mind turned back to the mission briefing. The lieutenant had brought the insertion team together and filled in some of the blanks that had been left out in McCullock’s message. She’d already done her homework and had her route and its alternatives plotted out in her mind. It was little different than dozens of other missions she’d carried out behind enemy lines. The only deviation was her target. She’d never gone after an offworlder before. For a moment she wondered how high a score Bron would have seen fit to assign to an offworlder. She had no beef with someone from offworld, but if he was going to smuggle new weapons to the Orthodoxans, he had to be stopped. The smuggler would go down just as quickly as an Orthodoxan with a bullet through the sternum.

  Twenty minutes of bumps later, she’d collected a new set of bruises and the APC was slowing as it neared its destination. As it came to a stop, she slid her pack and ghillie suit out from under the bench seat. The doors at the end of the carrier were opened from the outside and bright light shone into its dim interior. She squinted against the brightness and hopped down from the vehicle. As soon as she hit the ground, she slung her pack over her shoulders and started a close inspection of her rifle. She didn’t think it had been knocked into, but this would be her last chance to verify the calibration.

  “All right, listen up,” barked a dark-haired man as he descended from the passenger’s seat of the vehicle’s cab. Everyone turned to face him. “We don’t have much time to get in place before the artillery opens up and the infantry assaults the far pylon. Hump your sorry asses into position.”

  Jak and the others snapped hurried salutes. Lieutenant Ackerley wasn’t a stickler for formality so the salutes weren’t as crisp as they would have been with someone like Captain McCullock. Ackerley commanded in the field on a regular basis and was more than willing to let the niceties slide during a mission.

  In the distance Jak could make out a brilliant field of shimmering blue. The force field ran the width of the isthmus ­and marked the outer edge of Orthodoxan territory. As they got closer to their positions, Jak could see the field more clearly. Rising ten meters into the air, it reared up out of the blasted and broken terrain that clearly marked the front lines on the isthmus. Thin poles were driven into the ground every hundred meters to the north and south as far as she could see. Between the poles a bright blue light pulsed slightly. Ahead of them, on the other side of the tree line, was one of the pylons. The pylons were much larger than the guide poles. Each one was wider around than three men holding hands could reach. These structures provided power to that section of the force field. Such assets were usually heavily guarded. This one was far enough from the bulk of the fighting, however, that it was watched less closely than most. The commander of the Orthodoxan unit tasked with guarding Pylon 5 was also tremendously lazy and more than a little corrupt. He’d been in the pocket of the Devonites for the past three years. He would almost certainly turn a blind eye to all but the most obvious Devonite action.

  The rest of the unit hunkered down to wait, the men assuming relaxed but watchful positions. Jak found herself a slightly elevated perch and slung the rifle off her shoulder. She laid herself flat on the ground and rested the rifle against a rock protruding from the top of her little hillock. She pulled a silencer and the infrared scope from one of her jacket’s front pockets and affixed them to her weapon. She felt more than saw a presence to her right while she peered through the scope into the distance beyond.

  “Everything good, Stowell?” Ackerley asked as he squatted down next to her.

  “I think so, sir. Just double-checking.” She sighted on a Haefonian wild turkey that had alighted atop the pylon. The view through the scope lit everything up in shades of green, disguising the bird’s muted blue plumage. “Permission to recalibrate?”

  “No time,” he said. “The festivities will start shortly.”

  “Yes, sir.” It didn’t look off, but she would have been happier if she could have rechecked the alignment of the barrel. She would have to hope that everything was in as good a shape as it looked.

  Ackerley checked his wrist chronometer. “If I’m not mistaken the diversion is about to start at any moment.” Dull thumps of artillery in the distance echoed his words alm
ost immediately, and the lieutenant smiled.

  “Right on time.” He raised his voice to be heard by the rest. “Let’s give those Orthodoxans some time to notice the shelling. They’re a little slow, so we might be here a while.”

  A subdued chuckle rippled through the men, and Ackerley lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes and aimed them through a gap in the trees to a barely visible building a few kilometers behind the force field. Jak trained her sights on the far-off Orthodoxan outpost as well, zooming in on the building until it was clearly visible through the force field’s blue shimmer. A few minutes after they began watching it, men boiled out of the outpost’s doors like ants fleeing an anthill being stirred. Enemy soldiers piled into trucks, followed more slowly by officers who grouped together at the door talking worriedly. One of them glanced warily in their direction. Jak knew he couldn’t see them, but she watched closely for any sign of hesitation. The officer jumped into the front of one of the trucks, and she breathed a small sigh of relief. The vehicles lumbered off to the south.

  Ackerley waited until the trucks and their accompanying dust clouds must have been out of sight of even his binoculars. Jak busied herself with securing her rifle and scope and getting ready to move out. The rest of the men stayed patiently in their positions until Ackerley nodded.

  “Let’s go” was all he said, but the men moved smoothly into action. Four men approached the low hill from which Jak and Ackerley had observed the Orthodoxans and set up a couple of two-man mortars. They readied them in case a stray Orthodoxan noticed their movement. Firing through the force field was impossible; they would need to loft projectiles over it. Collins and three other men crouched as they ran forward and took up overwatch positions at the edge of the tree line. They would cover Jak until she made it into the Orthodoxan trenches. The last two men approached the pylon at a run. When they reached the base, one pulled out his entrenching tool and hastily dug at a loose pile of dirt abutting the pylon. The other man watched intently, pistol drawn and a large set of bolt cutters clutched in his other hand. Their position was the most exposed, but they moved with the ease of much practice. The first man reached into the hole he had dug and pulled out a thick wire. From experience, Jak knew that the wire was thicker than her thumb. He sat back and held the wire stretched between his fists. After a quick pause to holster his pistol and slip on a pair of thick, insulated gloves, the other man snipped the wire in half with the bolt cutters. The force field winked out between the pylons.

  Ackerley slapped Jak on the shoulder. “That’s your cue,” he snapped.

  Jak took off at a sprint. She dashed down the side of the small hill, hoisting the pack containing her ghillie suit and supplies over her shoulder as she ran.

  “Go get ’em!” She heard Collins half shout to her as she passed him. Even had she cared to, she didn’t have time to acknowledge him as she ran on. The success of the insertion operation counted on the force field being interrupted for a short enough time that the Orthodoxans didn’t notice its absence. As she passed them, the two men who had brought down the field were already fitting the pylon with a replacement wire that looked identical to the one they had just cut and removed. It would be virtually impossible for the Orthodoxans to tell that their pylon had been tampered with if they chose to look, which they rarely did. She completed her sprint by sliding into an abandoned trench a hundred meters from the force field right as the flickering blue light reappeared behind her. She fetched up against the trench’s far wall and stayed there for a couple of moments, breathing hard. With her back against the side of the trench, she could see the top of the field above the crumbling earthen edge.

  Jak caught her breath, then headed north through the trench running parallel to the force field. The Orthodoxans had abandoned these trenches not long after they had put up their electric wall. From the top of the escarpment, Devonite artillery had pounded the trenches severely after the completion of the fence. The Orthodoxans had been forced to retreat to their bunkers and outposts outside the range of the light artillery. Neither side used heavy artillery often. The shells were extremely expensive and since satellites for both sides had been knocked out of the sky early in the civil war, heavy artillery wasn’t particularly accurate. Unless a target could be painted with a laser, using it was at best an expensive shot in the dark.

  She moved quickly but cautiously. Jak had occasionally come across evidence of Orthodoxans in their trench system. She didn’t want to run into a patrol so she kept her eyes and ears peeled. She would have wagered that she knew these trenches better than the Orthodoxans did. This area was one of her favorite insertion points. Her family’s home hadn’t been far from this area, just a little further north and east. She just needed to follow the trench system north and west until it met the foothills and she could disappear into the heavily forested hills. She grinned. The forests beckoned her on and she sped up a little bit. In the trees she would be able to be herself in a way she couldn’t when she was “home.” With still more speed, she ran toward her sanctuary. Bron’s absence to her left throbbed in her consciousness. She’d heard that men who lost limbs could sometimes feel them even though they were long gone. Entering the field without her brother still felt wrong, but at the same time, it felt like he was still there. She put his absence out of her mind or tried to. She could think of other things, but Bron’s absence always weighed on the edge of her awareness.

  * * *

  Jak leaned against a tree’s trunk, feet planted firmly on the branch stretching out in front of her. She paid no heed to the forty meters between it and the ground. The forest and trees were her second home. As a child she’d spent more waking hours in them than she had in the house in which she’d been born and grown to adulthood. Her attention was on the boxy building in front of her. It had taken her the expected three days to reach the sector where Hutchinson’s so-called palace was located. Her tree lay just outside the wall enclosing his compound. She wasn’t sure if the Orthodoxans were stupid or lazy, but they hadn’t bothered to clear the forest on the other side of the wall. Being days from the front was no excuse to get so lax. Still, if they were going to hand her advantages she would certainly take them. The question now was…which one?

  From her vantage point, she could see the back of the main building. A long balcony lined the second floor, and a lavish deck ran the length of the first. Through the infrared scope, every detail was visible even though night had fallen almost completely. When her gaze passed over the series of lonely outbuildings to the side of the house, her mouth tightened. She knew what those buildings represented and they made her sick.

  In the back of her mind, Jak was aware that her window of opportunity was rapidly closing. As was typical in the mountains, darkness was falling rapidly. She’d hoped to arrive with more daylight to properly scope out the compound’s defenses, but it had taken her longer than she’d thought to negotiate the last leg of the mountains.The forecasted storm would hit sometime in the wee hours of the morning and she wanted to be long gone by then. Even the Orthodoxans, though they were criminally incompetent, would be able to track her through mud. She needed to kill the offworld smuggler and get back to friendly territory in a hurry to avoid the inclement weather.

  The branch she was on stretched over the wall, offering one way to get into the compound. The four-story drop didn’t faze her, but getting out would be difficult, given the height of the wall and the security measures at its top.

  She surveyed the area in front of her more closely and snorted out loud. The undergrowth had been allowed to grow wild from the wall almost to the deck at the back of the house. The Orthodoxans probably thought that was all right since the plants were less than half a meter high and the ground sloped toward the deck. They’d still left her more than enough cover in which to conceal herself. They were practically begging her to come in and off their important visitor. She smiled mirthlessly; she was happy to oblige them on that count.

  From her left she caught a f
licker of movement coming her way. Through her scope she watched an older soldier amble along the base of the wall. He was probably about forty years old, which for an Orthodoxan was impressive. Most enlisted men didn’t survive that long unless they caught someone’s eye. Maybe he’d impressed Hutchinson, which didn’t say much for him. She swung her rifle to her right and sighted on another, much younger soldier coming into view from the opposite direction. Exactly forty-five minutes had elapsed from the last time these two passed, and almost exactly forty-five minutes since the pass before that. The men’s paths along the outside of the wall crossed, and they stopped to chat almost directly beneath her perch. Even though she was a fair way up the tree, she was able to hear what they said without having to engage her auditory implant.

  “All clear, Mercer?” the first one asked.

  “Of course it is,” Mercer replied. “We’re so far from the front that the Devonites can’t be bothered to show their faces.”

  The older man snorted. “They don’t have to. We walled them out and ourselves in. They just sit there and take potshots at us over the fence from the top of that bloody cliff and we just have to bend over and take it.”

  “How long did you serve at the front?”

  “Fifteen years. I’d still be there if I hadn’t pulled the colonel’s ass out of the fire.”

  “Really?” The unnamed soldier looked impressed. “I didn’t know you served with the Adonis. Is it true that he was a hardass?”

  “You wouldn’t believe what he was capable of by the way he is now. He terrorized those Devonites, terrorized not a few of his own men too. But he got the job done and killed a shit-ton of those bastards while he was at it. Then he had the by-blow of one of the Supreme Congress flogged and got pulled from the front. Probably would have been strung up if he hadn’t made himself into a damned war hero. So he got assigned to the middle of nowhere to coordinate troop and supply movements. He thrived under pressure out there. I’m sure he’s been going stir-crazy the last three years. Nothing ever happens here.”