Pointblank, p.16
Pointblank, page 16
Whatever their function was, the three men in the room sat in relaxed conversation, evidently with no idea that an enemy reconnaissance patrol had them under close observation. The Marines then checked the building they had tentatively identified as a mess hall, which turned out to be a combination dining and recreation hall. Through different windows, they saw a dining room crammed with eight-man tables, a sparsely appointed weight room, two smallish rooms with tables at some of which men sat playing games, and a trid theater. Peals of laughter came out of that room, though Kindy didn’t recognize the trid or any of the actors he saw.
In all, the headquarters and the mess hall presented scenes one might find on any military installation in time of peace—or far from any action during war.
Kindy directed Nomonon to proceed toward the shedlike building with the high roof.
The building was dark when the Marines reached it. Kindy had them settle themselves against the side of a nearby barn where they had a clear view of the entrance. Only a few minutes later, a light came on inside, then the door opened and the man Kindy called the major came out. The officer reached somewhere out of sight to the side of the door and the light went off. The door was open long enough for Kindy to see—nothing. The small building seemed to have only one room, and that room was empty.
Kindy didn’t have enough information to go on yet, so the Marines continued to wait. He didn’t think they’d have to wait long; during the hour the squad had spent crossing the last kilometer of fields, he observed that people came or went from the building at irregular but frequent intervals.
He was right. The next person came in less than ten minutes. A man walked up, opened the door, and reached inside. The light came on. Kindy was able to see past him to the far corner of the room where someone else was rising from below the floor. The elevator moved, if not silently, then at least quietly enough that Kindy couldn’t hear it from where he stood, not even with his ears turned up halfway.
Now that he knew what he was looking at, Kindy saw runners set into the walls at the corner—he’d been right, the building held an elevator. The door closed and reopened a moment later to let a man out, presumably the one Kindy had seen rising.
Kindy gathered his men close and touched helmets to tell them what he’d seen and what they were going to do.
They waited three minutes, until nobody was visible nearby, then dashed to the building and inside. Kindy didn’t grope to turn on the light; instead the Marines used their light-gatherer screens. The view through the light gatherer was eerie, and it could be unsettling to people not used to it. Everything was monochrome, and there wasn’t a sharp perception of depth. But the Marines were used to it and had no trouble seeing where they were going or what they were doing.
The floor in the far corner of the room clearly showed the platform for the elevator, which was more than large enough for the four Marines to stand on together. A thin pillar at the platform’s free corner helped support an overhead and anchored restraining chains that ran between it and the walls. An unobtrusive plate on one wall had two buttons, each marked with an arrow, one pointed up, the other down.
Kindy wondered at what he saw as an astonishing lack of security. Or was the security all below the surface? There was one surefire way to find out. He gathered his Marines on the floorplate and pushed the lower button. The elevator began to descend quietly.
As they dropped, he thought about what might meet them at the bottom of the shaft. How might a sentry, or even a passerby, react to the appearance of the apparantly empty elevator? Not with immediate violence, he was sure of that. Perhaps whoever was there would think the elevator was malfunctioning and put in a call for a service tech. Or think someone was playing a prank.
But what if the shaft bottomed in a locked room or locked cage? What if someone was waiting to get to the elevator and stepped onto the platform before the Marines had time to get off it?
Kindy decided to stop worrying and just be ready for anything.
The elevator seemed to drop down a featureless shaft for a long time; the walls of the shaft barely cleared the edges of the platform. But the drop didn’t take all that long, really, nor was it a rapid descent. When the elevator eased to a stop, Kindy estimated they were no more than twenty meters below the surface.
No locked room, no locked cage, no sentry, met the elevator when it reached the bottom of the shaft. There wasn’t even anybody casually passing by. The shaft ended at the intersection of two finished tunnels that looked more like hotel corridors than tunnels. Soft lights glowed from panels set at the tops of the walls.
The Marines quickly stepped off the platform; the platform rose as soon as they were all off. They listened for a long moment, but the elevator didn’t come back down. Kindy looked at the walls and saw a plate with three buttons. Evidently the third one was used to call the elevator.
Kindy set his Marines to look down each of the four corridors. Kindy’s was featureless until it ended fifty meters away in a door. Nomonon’s had two doors on each side, then turned to the right forty meters away. Jaschke saw a ramp leading downward about twenty meters distant. Dim shapes were visible beyond the open door.
Ellis’s tunnel ended in an open doorway through which came the sounds of air compressors. Kindy had him lead the way. Ellis and Nomonon walked along one wall, Kindy and Jaschke along the other. There was enough room between them for a large person to pass by without bumping into any of the Marines.
The Marines stopped at the entrance and Kindy and Ellis cautiously looked in and to the sides. The room was filled with armored personnel carriers.
Kindy signaled the others to wait and stepped into the room to estimate its size and contents. There were fourteen columns of APCs to either side of the doorway. He went to his right to make sure there were full columns beyond the rank he could see. There were. He then checked to the left and found the same.
There were twenty-eight columns of APCs that ran as far as Kindy could see into the dimly lit room. He used his range finder to check the length of the room, as well as the length of the APCs and the interval between, then calculated the total: enough armored personnel carriers in this one room to mount an entire heavy division. He looked at the overhead and wondered what held it up—he hadn’t seen any pillars.
Kindy checked the time. They’d been inside the compound for more than an hour; there were seven hours left before sunrise and he wanted to be on the other side of the fields before sunup, and he wanted to reserve two or three hours for crossing the fields. Rather than examine the APC garage further, he had the squad backtrack to check out the downramp Jaschke had seen.
They froze halfway back to the intersection—the elevator was coming down and voices came from the shaft. Without needing orders, all four Marines lowered themselves to the floor and pressed against the wall.
The elevator reached bottom and two men stepped off; one was the “major,” the other a slightly older man, also with a military bearing. They didn’t look around, but turned straight toward the closed door at the end of the corridor Kindy had first looked down. Kindy eased silently to the intersection and watched the two. When they reached the door, the major placed his hand on the wall next to the door and the door slid open—there was an electric lock keyed to handprints, or some other biometric of the hand.
When the door closed behind the two, the Marines rose and continued to the downramp.
The ramp went down about ten meters deeper underground and ended in a cross corridor. A windowed door was at either end. Kindy sent Nomonon to one and went to the other himself. He decided immediately they weren’t going through this door.
Kindy saw a large common room filled with soldiers in partial uniforms, going hither and yon, in and out of other spaces that opened into the common. He backed off. Nomonon reached the foot of the ramp at the same time he did. Nomonon had seen a similar setup on the other side of the door he’d looked through.
“Now we know where the soldiers are who go with the APCs,” Kindy said, touching helmets.
“I saw another elevator over here,” Nomonon told him.
“Show me.”
This elevator wasn’t directly below the one the Marines had taken from the surface, and it was much larger; Kindy thought it could easily accommodate twenty or more men at a time. It was set into an alcove, walled in on three sides, rather than in a corner like the other elevator, and no molding or other architectural device marked the edges of the alcove. That was why Kindy hadn’t spotted it when he’d first glanced in its direction—he had looked along the plane of the wall, and there was nothing to catch his eye.
As Kindy looked up into the darkness of the shaft, the platform started to descend. He moved his squad back onto the ramp where they could go back up in a hurry and positioned himself at the entrance to the ramp so he could see who came off the elevator. He heard low voices and a single high-pitched laugh before the elevator reached bottom and a dozen soldiers exited. They split into two groups and headed to the doors at the ends of the corridor. They looked relaxed and happy, as though they’d just done something enjoyable.
Kindy thought for a moment, figuring angles and distances. He decided that the large elevator’s top end had to be inside the mess hall, and that the soldiers were returning to their quarters from watching the trid or playing games.
He wasn’t going to learn more there, not without taking a prisoner, but third squad had to get in and back out without anybody in the complex realizing they’d had visitors. So taking a prisoner was out of the question.
He sent the squad back up the ramp. There were two corridors they hadn’t checked yet. One was the corridor with the door at the end, the one that had opened when the “major” had placed his hand on the wall next to it. Kindy send Nomonon and Jaschke down the other corridor, which had doors on both of its sides and turned at the end.
None of the doors was locked. The two corporals opened each door and gave a quick look to what was inside before moving on. They didn’t take long studying what they found around the corner at the end of the corridor, either. They rejoined Kindy in moments and touched helmets to report their findings.
“The doors on the left are entrances to an armory,” Nomonon said.
“An unlocked armory?” Kindy asked.
Nomonon treated the question as rhetoric. “I saw thousands of small arms in locked racks. There were also large strongboxes with padlocks. My guess is they hold ammunition.”
“Enough small arms for a heavy division?” Kindy asked.
“Maybe enough for a regiment.”
Kindy nodded to himself; that probably wasn’t the only armory under the farming complex. He suspected the troop areas off the ramp the squad had gone down weren’t the only troop areas, either.
“The right side had fuel drums,” Jaschke reported, “probably for the APCs. There were also crates with markings that indicated they’re ammo for the APCs’ integral weaponry.”
That rocked Kindy. What kind of fool would store ammunition and fuel in the same place? It wouldn’t take much to cause a catastrophic explosion that might destroy the entire underground complex.
It was time to get out and report what they’d found. Kindy decided to request permission to come back and make an accident.
They had no way of knowing when the next person would want to use the elevator to the shed building, so they waited, one Marine in each of the corridors just a few meters from the elevator, for someone to come down. Someone did in just a couple of minutes—the grizzled sergeant.
The Marines dashed silently onto the platform as it began to rise. The sergeant must have felt something, because he turned and looked back quizzically, then shook his head and continued toward the palm-locked door.
CHAPTER
* * *
EIGHTEEN
Approaching Cranston from the West
Sergeant Wil Bingh popped up to see above the trees to beyond the next bend in the road, as he had regularly for forty kilometers. He hadn’t seen any movement since the convoy with the odd weapons system had passed them an hour earlier. For the first time since then, he now saw something other than continuous forest. The treetops in the distance thinned, and the peaks of high roofs were visible through them; either the land hadn’t been completely cleared when Cranston was established, or the citizens had gone on a tree-planting frenzy soon after moving in.
Bingh dropped back down and sent a burst transmission to first squad to halt and gather on him. He raised the screens on his helmet so they could see where he was.
“The town’s up ahead,” he told his men when they joined him. “It’s got a lot of tree cover, so I couldn’t see that convoy that passed us—or where the bivouac of the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers is, either. We’ll go deeper into the trees for the next five klicks, then drop our puddle jumpers and continue on foot. And from here on, we have to be particularly alert for enemy patrols.
“Any questions?”
They were all professionals, each of them with several successful missions to his credit, and they’d worked together for long enough to know what each of them would do. None of them had any questions about what they were going to do or how it would be accomplished.
“Let’s do it.” Bingh lowered his chameleon screen and vanished from view.
The four Marines headed away from the road, keeping track of each other by keeping the exhausts of the puddle jumpers, and the UV markers on their backs, in view. Their movement was slower than it had been when they were following the road; they had to weave among the tree trunks and stay under the spreading branches.
Nearly an hour later, Bingh stopped the squad while he popped up to take a look around. The ground gently rolled under the trees, but seen from above, the undulations of the treetops had no particular relation to the irregularities of the land below. Several kilometers to the east, Bingh could see the tops of some buildings poking through the tree cover, but he didn’t dare go high enough to see down through the tree cover—while he was effectively invisible, someone sharp-eyed in the town might be able to spot the exhaust from the puddle jumper. He took a line-of-sight azimuth, fed it into his UPUD, then dropped back down and raised his helmet screens. The other Marines also exposed their faces.
“We’re on foot from here,” he told his men. “Unass your puddle jumpers. We’ll secure them here.”
In a couple of minutes they had the puddle jumpers bundled in a chameleon tarp with a line attached to it. Lance Corporal Wehrli took the end of the line and shimmied up a tree to a fork about six meters above the ground. He pulled the bundle up and used the line to tie it into the fork. While Wehrli was securing the puddle jumpers, Bingh marked the location of the tree on his UPUD.
“Wehrli, take point,” Bingh ordered when the four of them were ready. “Then me and Musica. Pricer, rear point. That way.” He removed a glove and pointed. “Move out.” He closed his screens; so did the other three. Wehrli stepped out in the direction Bingh had pointed. They started off at a brisk walk and gradually slowed as they got closer to Cranston.
Just inside the Trees on the Outskirts of Cranston
Cranston was a town of some thirty thousand people, constructed entirely from local materials, mostly using hand tools and small power tools—it almost looked as though some massive time machine had lifted it whole from a mid-industrial-period culture and put it down there. The four Marines settled just inside the forest fringe at the edge of the town and observed.
After a time, Sergeant Bingh began wondering why the town was there. From his vantage he saw mostly close-packed housing, with a shopping district and some light industry. No heavy industry was visible from his position. Nor did there seem to be any major roads coming through. They hadn’t passed through farmland on the way in, nor had he seen any clearings large enough for significant food growing. The nearest navigable river was more than twenty-five kilometers to the north. None of the materials he’d studied aboard the Admiral Stoloff had said there was anything worth mining near Cranston. None of the sensors the squad deployed picked up any of the chemical traces that would indicate the presence of industry—or several thousand soldiers with weapons and equipment.
So why was the town there?
And where was the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers regiment? Or, for that matter, where was the convoy that had passed the squad on the road?
People walked about, or rode here and there on adult-size, muscle-powered versions of children’s three-wheel toy vehicles. The only people who seemed to be in a hurry were children running from one playground to another.
After watching for a while longer, Bingh began to think Cranston might be a Potemkin village. He needed to get a closer look. He formulated a plan and passed it to his men.
Near dusk, people began ambling toward the houses and went inside—nearly all of the people were men. That might be reasonable if Cranston were an old-fashioned society where the men worked outside the home while women worked at home. But, Bingh reflected, with that many men outside, if most of them had a wife who worked at home, there should have been more children in evidence than he had seen. Lights began twinkling on in the houses, and lamps came to life one street at a time. The sensors that had failed to produce evidence of industry or a concentration of soldiers had also failed to pick up any indication of enemy sensors that might be capable of detecting the heavily chameleoned Force Recon Marines. Of course, the Marines’ sensors couldn’t detect passive sensors the Coalition forces might have watching.
