Pointblank, p.14
Pointblank, page 14
“Speak,” Nommertwee said after a moment.
“Sir, I have completed my investigation of the movements of these officers for this morning.”
“I doubt you’d be disturbing me if you hadn’t,” Nommertwee said. “What did you find?”
The aide swallowed and cleared his throat. “Sir, the only location the—the dead men had in common this morning was the officers’ mess. They were all there for breakfast at the same time.” He looked pale; he’d also been there.
Nommertwee turned back to the doctor. “Could it be food poisoning?”
The doctor arched his eyebrows. “Food poisoning usually has symptoms that build up over a short period of time. And if it was, the pathogen responsible should have affected more than just six officers.” He shrugged. “But then, we are on a strange planet where there could be pathogens that act in such a manner.”
“Check it out.” Nommertwee glanced around at the six bodies. “And test for poisons, someone might have killed them deliberately.” He turned to the aide. “I want the officers’ mess closed until we find out what happened. And arrest everyone who was working there last night and this morning. I want them in the stockade where they can be questioned.”
“Yessir!” The late colonel’s aide scampered out of the sick ward.
“Doctor, I will leave you to your duties. Notify me immediately of anything you find.”
“I’ll do that, sir.” The doctor watched Nommertwee’s back as the man left and thought, I suspect whatever caused these deaths is beyond my abilities to discover.
CHAPTER
* * *
FIFTEEN
Logistics, Marine OTC, Arsenault
The academic standards required to graduate from OTC were strict. If any candidate fell below 75 on any written examination in any course, remedial coaching was required; to miss that mark twice meant going on probation; a third failure resulted in the candidate’s immediate expulsion.
The most difficult course for Jak Daly was called “Logistical Support in the Company and Battalion Area of Operations.” It was taught by a civilian, a Dr. Honsue Mitzikawa. Dr. Mitzikawa always dressed in a rumpled suit, squinted at the class as if he suffered from uncorrected nearsightedness, and spoke in a high, reedy voice that from the first moment of the class got on everyone’s nerves. Plus, the subjects he taught were excruciatingly boring. They included, as he told them on that first day, but were not at all limited to, such arcane endeavors as rationing, water purification methods and procedures, transportation requirements, ammunition resupply—Daly looked forward to that—energy resourcing, and something Mitzikawa called “Hand Receipts and Statements of Charges: Conducting Inventories in a Hostile Environment.”
But by the end of that first day of class, Daly had begun to form a somewhat more positive view of the skinny civilian instructor. At one point during Mitzikawa’s introduction he asked Daly a question. Referring to his class roster and seating arrangement, he ran a bony finger down the chart and, as luck would have it, rested the digit right smack on Daly’s name.
“Candidate Daly.” Mitzikawa squinted in Daly’s general direction. “Can you give us the formula for calculating the time gap in a convoy of two serials with two march units each with the gap between units as five minutes and the gap between serials as ten minutes? Quickly, quickly now, we’re all waiting.”
Daly thought quickly. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Don’t call me ‘sir,’ Candidate Daly!” Mitzikawa screeched. “I work for a living!” Total silence enveloped the class as they stared back at Dr. Mitzikawa in unbelieving horror, as if he had just uttered an unforgivable blasphemy. Feigning utter amazement, he asked, “You never heard that expression before?” Sure, they’d all heard the expression before, but no one ever expected to hear it from the lips of a faculty member, in Officer Training College! Then someone laughed. “I learned that in the army,” Mitzikawa admitted. “I was a professional private first-class. Then I got tired of hauling boxes and became an officer, a logistician, so I could kick the boxes instead. You’ve heard the expression, haven’t you? ‘Yesterday I could not even spell logistician. Today I are one’? Well, that’s me, ladies and gentlemen! Then I got a real job: teaching at this charm school. Okay.
“Mr. Daly, we’ll get back to figuring time gaps in convoys later in this course, and believe me, by the time we’re done, you’ll all be figuring them in your sleep—that is, when you aren’t having nightmares of old Rumple Stiltskein making you do push-ups all over the grinder.” He smiled, revealing crooked teeth, and the entire class burst into raucous laughter.
Mitzikawa stood grinning idiotically for a few seconds, then held up his hands for silence. “Keep it down, keep it down! If the commandant thinks you’re actually enjoying this course, he’ll have you all committed.” Another big grin. “But, children, let me tell you at the beginning here, there are only four rules of military logistics that you should know. Know them and you can run any logistical operation. Are you ready? Write these down if you can’t remember them.
“One. Fair Wear and Tear. You can write off almost anything due to FWT. Well, don’t try it with a Dragon, but anything you can wear or carry can be turned in or junked due to Fair Wear and Tear. Got that?
“Two. Combat Loss. Ah”—he held up a bony forefinger—“that’s how you write off a Dragon, an artillery tube, even your convoy of two serials, whatever in the hell they are!
“Three! Oh, you’ll love this one, my children.” Mitzikawa virtually beamed with pleasure. “RFM for short: Read the Fucking Manual! Yes! Nobody can remember all the crap he’s going to learn in this course, but remember, everything is in the Marine Corps Orders, the manuals, the regulations, the instructions, the whatevers. You want distance, rate, and time calculations—are you listening Candidate Daly?—turn to Field Manual 55-15, SSIC 04000, ‘Transportation Reference Data,’ Chapter One, and voilà! There you have it!”
“But, Dr. Mitzikawa!” One of the students raised his hand. He’d been taking notes on his data pad and had just used it to access the library’s online catalog. “That’s an army publication!”
“What?” Mitzikawa came back to earth suddenly. He glared at the student and puffed out his cheeks. “Of course it’s an army field manual, you cretin! The army figured all this business out years and years ago, back about the time Napoléon was hauling his guns around behind horses! The army writes, the Marine Corps fights! You don’t expect the Navy Department to waste its money writing its own goddamned manuals when the army’s already done that, do you?” He shook his head as if dealing with a recalcitrant idiot. “Silence in this classroom!” he shrieked. “Not one more syllable from anyone. We are now going to have a logistician’s epiphany!”
Then Dr. Mitzikawa began to dance behind the podium, hyping himself up to reveal “Honsue’s Fourth Secret of the Logistician’s Code.” He extended both arms over his head, revealing big sweat stains under his armpits. “Ah, ah, ah!” he intoned, as if he were reciting a mantra, looking at the ceiling, asking God Himself for guidance. “Here it is! Remember this rule, the Golden Rule of Box Kickers, and you can forget the other three! This rule is the definitive solution to any problem an S4 staff officer may encounter in a long career!” There now ensued a long, long pause as Mitzikawa stood there, arms raised, eyes closed tight, a beatific smile on his face. And then:
“FOURRRRRRR! When in doubt, ASK YOUR SERGEANT!” Dr. Honsue Mitzikawa shrieked. “Class dismissed!”
Later, as they were leaving class, Ubrik sidled up to Daly and asked, “Well, what do you think of this guy, Jak?”
Daly shrugged. “He’s frigging crazy as a kwangduk on a hot mess kit, Manny. But what the hell, nobody’s perfect.”
Candidate Quarters, Marine OTC
Daly and Ubrik sat in their room going over the day’s logistics class lesson, the dreaded distance, rate, and time calculations.
“Jak, let’s take a break, go down to the gedunk, and get us some junk food, the kind of crap that’ll make us into fatassed staff officers,” Ubrik said, laughing.
“Ah, I don’t know, Manny. I’ve got to get this stuff figured out. Besides”—he shrugged—“I was just thinking about that lance corporal, you remember, Beverly Nasaw. For some reason all this, this”—he gestured at his computer screen, which was displaying chapter 1 of FM 55-15, “put me in mind of an early death.”
Ubrik laughed. “Oh, Beverly, yes, yes, tragic accident.” something in the way Ubrik spoke made Daly wince. He had the ridiculous impression that Ubrik, of all people, had been a bit jealous of Daly’s budding relationship with the woman.
“I mean, Manny,” Daly went on, “hell, I can sight in a maser rifle at a hundred meters in the dark! Do a forced march over the mountains with a whole army after my ass—”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Ubrik responded with feeling. “Hadn’t been for you, Jak, and I’d never have made it through zero month!” He patted his friend gently on the shoulder.
“But this stuff, Manny…” Daly gestured helplessly at his console.
“All right, Jak, here’s how it’s done. You have a column of two serials with two march units each and the gap between march units is five minutes and the gap between serials is ten minutes. Then: [(number of march units minus one) times march unit time gap] plus [(number of serials minus one) times (serial time gap minus march unit time gap)]. There it is, or expressed like this:
“Time gaps = [(4-1) × 5] + [(2-1) × 5] = [3 × 5] + [1 × 5] = 15 + 5 = 20 minutes!”
“But what the hell does it all mean?”
“Hey, Jak, who gives a damn? This isn’t a course in teleology! This is the Marine Corps, we’re only interested in getting from point A to point B so we can blow up point B! Remember the formulas! That’s all you need to do to pass the exam. If this ever comes up again in real life, do what old Mitzikawa said, look it up or ask your S4 sergeant.”
“Manny, you’re a frigging genius when it comes to this stuff,” Daly said.
“Naw, formulas just come naturally to me, Jak-O. All right, let’s move on to calculating road space for a convoy of eighty-seven vehicles. You divide the number of vehicles by their density plus time gaps and time rate divided by sixty minutes. Density is 8.5 vehicles per kilometer; the rate is fifty kilometers in an hour; and the time gaps are equal to twenty, so:
“Road space
per klick…”
“Ah, the hell with it, Manny, let’s go to the gedunk!”
Logistics, Marine OTC
On the final exam in transportation reference data, Daly scored an impressive 76. In fact, much to his amazement, he passed all the exams, even the pop quizzes used to surprise the students at the beginning of classes. Months later, just before graduation, Daly approached Dr. Mitzikawa, who had by then become almost a friend of the beleaguered candidates, and asked:
“Dr. Mitzikawa, on the first day of class you told us you’d be giving us a lecture on something you called ‘Hand Receipts and Statements of Charges: Conducting Inventories in a Hostile Environment,’ but we have never had this lecture and the course is almost over now.”
Mitzikawa gave Daly a lopsided grin. “Jak, nobody ever fails my course. You and I both know half to three-quarters of the stuff I teach you in this course you will never need to use again. But the Marine Corps figures all its officers should be exposed to this material, so you have some idea of what the experts have to deal with. ‘Hand Receipts and Statements of Charges’? Jak, were I to load you up with nonsense like that, they’d commit me! I just threw that in there to screw over your minds. Like I told you on the first day of class, Read the—”
“—Fucking Manual.”
“Or?”
“Ask your sergeant.”
“Candidate Daly, you ever read Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter?”
“Can’t say as I have, Doctor.”
“Pity. Well, with those answers you just gave me, by the time this course is over, you may just have earned your own ‘scarlet letter,’ a great big ‘A.’”
CHAPTER
* * *
SIXTEEN
Following a Road, Five Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula
Fourth squad flew close to the ridgeline, only a few meters above the scrub that covered the slope, so they could quickly drop into cover if they spotted traffic either on the ground or in the air. Sergeant Williams kept an eye on the road, carefully looking for sign that the tracks the squad had been following for the past hour turned off or otherwise disappeared. Every kilometer or so, the squad paused while Williams dropped down to take a closer look. Every time he did, the tracks shone a little brighter in infrared. The suspected laser-emplacement vehicle had to be moving fairly fast, at least seventy kilometers per hour; Williams thought they would have caught up with it by now if it had been going fifty or even sixty kpm.
Williams wondered about that; seventy kpm or faster seemed too great a speed for a specialized military vehicle to maintain for so long. Sure, a sturdy landcar could manage one hundred kpm or even faster on a gravel road, even one as poorly maintained as this one was. So could most military vehicles. But the vehicle they were seeking carried passively controlled laser guns, a relatively fragile cargo. Or had it emplaced its last gun and was heading back for another load?
“Dust cloud,” Lance Corporal Rudd’s voice interrupted Williams’s thoughts.
The squad leader didn’t ask where; Rudd was on point and mainly watching ahead. Williams looked that way. A few kilometers to the front the road bent around a spur of the ridge it was following; a faint dust cloud rose above the spur. Williams accelerated to close with Rudd and signaled him to land. By the time Corporal Belinski and Lance Corporal Skripska caught up and began to drop to the ground, Williams had given Rudd new orders and the two of them were rising again, so Belinski and Skripska followed their leader without knowing what the change in plan was.
They figured it out soon enough. Alerted by Rudd’s terse report, they’d looked forward and seen the dust cloud. Rudd was no longer paralleling the road, he was moving at an angle, climbing the ridge side, on a course to intercept the dust cloud on the other side of the spur.
The Marines increased speed and were only a couple of kilometers behind the dust cloud when Rudd topped the spur. He immediately dropped back behind the spur and landed. Belinski and Skripska joined him while Williams popped to the top to take a quick look for himself.
“Got him,” Williams told his men when he joined them. “We’re going to make a kill. The road bends back to the left up ahead. We’re going ten klicks beyond the bend to set an ambush. I’m taking point. Let’s go.”
The four Marines took off at top speed, staying well below the top of the ridgeline so the puddle jumpers’ exhausts couldn’t be seen from the road.
When they were far enough ahead of the laser emplacer that it wouldn’t notice their exhausts, Williams stopped the squad and hopped up to the top of the ridgeline to look for an ambush site. Half a kilometer ahead was a jumble of rocks on the side of the ridge that looked as if it could be dislodged by a small explosive charge to tumble onto the road. Other rocks on the slope could provide the squad with cover—thanks to their chameleons, he didn’t concern himself with concealment.
To his left, back the way they’d come, he saw the dust cloud of the rapidly approaching vehicle.
Williams wasted no time getting his squad into position to the rear and sides of the rock jumble. As soon as they shucked their puddle jumpers, Rudd helped him emplace the explosives.
That done, Williams took his place to the left rear of the rocks; Rudd joined Belinski at the right rear. Williams would spring the ambush by setting off the charges. They waited for the vehicle to arrive.
And waited.
Williams had estimated that the vehicle was no more than five minutes away when he took his place with Skripska. After ten minutes he stood up to take a look. There was no dust cloud in sight. He got out his ocular and used it to scan the road and its sides. They were both empty of any traffic, moving or stopped.
“Saddle up,” he tight-beamed to his men. “We have to backtrack and find out where he went.” He strapped on his puddle jumper as he trotted to the rock jumble to retrieve the explosives.
A Hidden Track, Five Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula
Six kilometers back, fourth squad found a narrow track in the trees to the north where the laser gun emplacement vehicle had turned off the road. Sergeant Williams silently swore; if he’d had somebody watching the road while the squad was getting into its ambush position, they would probably have seen the vehicle make the turn. But he hadn’t and had lost ten or fifteen minutes on the satellite killer—perhaps long enough for the crew to set up another gun, perhaps long enough for the gun to find and kill another satellite. If the navy was still launching satellites…
Williams left his men on the ground at the entrance to the hidden track while he popped up to take a look, but the canopy was too thick for him to spot the way underneath it. From the brief look he’d taken of the track before he’d popped up, he knew it was too narrow and winding for the squad to traverse using their puddle jumpers at the speed they’d need to close the gap. So he needed to figure out where the vehicle might have gone. If they were setting up another gun, there had to be a clearing someplace.
He dropped back down to tell his men to wait while he went ahead for a quick recon. He rose to five hundred meters and flew a zigzag path over the forest. Five klicks in, he found the vehicle. Its crew looked to be setting up another gun at the edge of a small clearing. Taking time only to log the coordinates of the clearing, he spun about and headed back at top speed.
Sergeant Williams didn’t hear the shout behind him as he took off.
Minutes later, the four Marines of fourth squad had dropped their puddle jumpers and were moving at route march through the woods twenty-five meters in from the track; at this point, speed was more important than silence. Fortunately, the canopy was dense enough that there was relatively little growth under the trees to impede rapid movement. Williams didn’t know how long it would take the crew to set up the laser gun, or whether they’d leave the clearing as soon as they’d finished setting up. If the vehicle came back along the road before the squad reached the clearing, the Marines would hear them coming and could set up a hasty ambush. Otherwise, the Marines would hit them in the clearing, then destroy the laser gun and the emplacement vehicle. But if the crew got the gun set up and left via a different route before the Marines got there…
