The Ramal Extraction (10 page)

“We will be fielding a small strike team,” Jo continued. “Half a dozen plus yourself. We’ll be hiking, and we will want to get as close as we can by air without being detected, and stay out of sight until we achieve our objective. We need your knowledge to make this go like we want.”

“I understand, Captain, sah.”

Jo grinned. “Just call me Jo, it will make things easier. We are less formal than regular military.”

“Yes, Jo, sah.”

Wink grinned at that one.

Jo said, “You’ll stay with Gunny until we take off, she’ll acquaint you with our procedures, which might be a little different than what you are used to.”

Wink smiled bigger at that. There was an understatement. If the kid got used to how they did things, it would ruin him for any kind of regular army. And, of course, the real reason he had to stay with Gunny was for security. The Rajah might have vetted him, but once he got the particulars, they didn’t want him wandering off where he might be tempted to tell somebody about his glorious new assignment. Lot of ops had been busted because somebody bragged too soon.

Wink was going even though he wasn’t the best combatant. If somebody got tagged, or the girl was injured, they needed a medic who could function in the middle of a crapstorm, and he could do that. He could shoot well enough to hit man-sized targets nearby.

Kay appeared, as she often seemed to, from out of nowhere.

“Something?” Jo asked her.

“We are being spied upon.”

“Sure,” Jo said, “that goes without saying. Lot of eyes pointed in our direction, probably birdshit cams all over the place, sats footprinting us every hour. Fart, and an electronic ear will hear it, and an e-nose sniff it and catalog the odor.”

“These eyes are organic, and belong to the XTJC sergeant we met shortly after we began to set up camp.”

“Our friend Hothead Hosep? Really? Where is he?”

“Three kilometers to the southwest, on the roof of a temple, atop a small rise. High enough to allow him to see our buildings. He has a scope on the camp.”

Wink said, “How did you spot him?”

“I caught his scent on my patrol.”

Wink shook his head. Hard to hide from somebody who could ID you by your body odor fifty meters away.

“We could put up a balloon wall,” Gunny allowed. “Block the sucker’s view.”

“And let him know we know he is there,” Jo said, “so he can move or bring in a different watcher. No, better the devil we know than the devil we don’t.” She paused. “Might be good to give him something to wonder about.”

“If you are captured by the enemy, don’t let them give you to PsyOps,” Wink said.

“I hear that,” Gramps said.

“I think
The Man in the Iron Mask
,” Jo said. “Gunny, see if we have somebody who is close to a somatic match.”

“Got it.”

Singh, who seemed to be a likable sort, wondered what they were taking about, and Gramps elected to tell him while Gunny was off running her errand—Singh wasn’t going anywhere, and maybe they could teach the kid enough to
help him stay alive in the sometimes-tricky world of the private military.

As he led the younger man to his temporary quarters, Gramps filled him in.

“Here’s the deal, Singh. When you have a spy watching, and you know it, you have an advantage if he doesn’t know that
you
know he’s there. So you can put on a show and he’ll buy it because he thinks he’s watching something real.

Singh nodded. “I understand. And this…masked man?”

“
L’Homme au Masque de Fer
, an old Terran story. There are several versions, but the most well-known one concerns a French king who had his twin brother imprisoned, to protect his rule. He did not want to kill his sibling, but it was important that nobody knew who he was, and the tale goes that he had an iron mask made to hide his brother’s identity, and he kept him in the mask and imprisoned for life.”

“That sounds cruel.”

“It was Terra, son, cruel goes with the territory. In any event, there were people who suspected that
Le Roi
—the King—had done this thing, and they tried to find and reveal the prisoner’s identity.

“In one version, this happened, and the brothers were made to trade places—the King was masked and jailed and his twin freed to become the ruler, with only a few men the wiser.”

“Karma. But what has that to do with this situation?”

“Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that our spy hiding in the temple up on the hill happens to see a security detail moving a prisoner into a vehicle? This prisoner is, say, wearing a hood so facial features are hidden, but also suppose that a somatotype scan of this action comes up with a female of a height, weight, and physique that is not too different from that of the Rajah’s daughter, Indira?”

Singh considered that for a moment. The concentration on his face faded as he got it: “A spy might think that CFI
had found Indira but was keeping her for some purpose. Extortion, perhaps.”

Gramps grinned. “Good. What else?”

The young man blinked and thought about that. He was not slow: “So if the vehicle carrying this decoy were to drive away, the spy would likely have it followed?”

“Exactly.”

“But—to what end? What would be the point?”

“Couple-three things: to keep J-Corps busy watching the left hand while our right hand does something else. To screw with them—to waste the XTJC’s money and manpower in payment for spying on us. That can mount up fast, troops, vehicles, spysat time.

“And maybe to anger them enough do something foolish that might give us an advantage in dealing with them.”

“Anger them?”

“We lead them on a merry chase to a location a couple of hundred klicks away where our people can slip out a back way. Leave J-Corps a note stapled to a wall when they kick in the door looking for the kidnapped woman: ‘
Gotcha
, assholes!’”

Singh liked that. He grinned. Then he frowned, and said, “Is this not dangerous?”

“Some. But if the OIC of the local garrison, Colonel Hatachi, is any kind of old hand, he or she will know we outmaneuvered ’em and will take a lesson from it. Enemy outsmarts you, you give him credit.”

“And if Colonel Hatachi is vindictive?”

Gramps shrugged. “We deal with that if it happens.”

“Surely they have more than one watcher?”

“Oh, yeah. But if they think they have something worth taking down, they might well go after the red herring big-time.”

“Red herring?”

“Herring is a type of cold-water fish, and ‘red’ refers to
a way of curing it that gives it a pungent, strong odor. On Earth, people used to use certain kinds of canines to track escaped prisoners. The old story is that these fish were used to distract the tracking dogs.”

“Crushed rosa pepper is better,” Singh said. “We have hounds on Ananda, used for the same tasks. A dusting of pepper behind one makes them sneeze and impairs their ability.”

Gramps grinned.

“So we will be leaving on the mission soon?”

“Yes. We have a plan, and the longer we wait, the more variables can creep in. There is virtue in patience, but sometimes, quicker works better. Gunny will see that you get the kit you need when she gets back. Welcome to CFI, Singh.”

Jo would have loved to see the expressions on the J-Corps dickwads’ faces when they kicked in the door of the building where they thought they were going to catch cutthroats doing something majorly illegal. She had printed out the hardcopy alliterative note herself: “Hey, Hosep—how’s it hanging?”

Yes, it was petty, but sometimes, that’s what you did. Never pass up a chance to fuck over an enemy…

By the time Hosep and the J-Corps guys calmed down, Jo and her strike team would be long gone…

Gunny didn’t like being saddled with the kid; it had been a while since she’d had to take care of a total noob—Rags liked his people seasoned, and while CFI recruits weren’t always perfect, they had track records, it was a requirement. Been a long time since she’d had to show somebody which end of the gun to hold and which to point…

She would have preferred to have a combat ranger with
ten years in war zones under his belt walking point, but it happened that the best guy available as a guide for this sortie was Singh, and that was what they had to work with. They had to make do.

Still, she had babysat enough unscuffed boots when she’d been in the regular army, and it came back even after a long time away from it: Do what I tell you, do it right fucking now and don’t ask fucking questions…

As they sat in the hopper, zipping along seventy meters up, just over the tops of the tallest trees in one of the major forests that were thick all over this country, she could see how eager Singh was to get into it. He looked the part—the shiftsuit and pack, the carbine, the nervous half smile and shifting gaze. Her quick assessment of his skills allowed that he knew how to fire his weapon well enough, and his response to commands was decent. He had basic military training, but he was untested, and when the line went hot, it was never the same as training. Some of it might survive first contact with the enemy, assuming he lived through it.

Well. With any luck, there wouldn’t be any contact with the enemy until they got to the hunting lodge, and once he helped them get there? He was expendable.

Gunny didn’t feel any guilt at the thought, she was long past that. Once there was an engagement, once the boomware cranked, shit happened. Best plans ever, people still got zapped, that was the nature of the activity. If you survived, that was good. If not, too bad. If you wanted to die in bed, you should never leave home, and you better be careful stepping out the shower—shit happened everywhere.

She had only to keep him alive until they got where they were going, though she’d try to keep him that way until they were done. He seemed like a nice enough kid.

Her com button popped: “That’s the Avril River we are crossing, portside,” Jo said. “Means we are nearly through the Sanvi Forest, about a hundred kilometers from our
landing site. We arrive in the vicinity in fifteen minutes, people.”

It was a big stretch of woods—there was as much of it north of the border in Pahal and Balaji as on the New Mumbai side. It had different names to the north and east, but it was the same old-growth firlike trees in an unbroken swath more than four hundred klicks long, as much as a hundred klicks wide in places.

Lot of green, and there were seven or eight other major forests on this continent, not quite as big, but big enough. Plenty of building material, animal and plant habitat, and nobody would freeze on this planet for lack of something to burn for a long damn time.

Thick trees, dense canopy, not much undergrowth, relatively speaking, that was good for them. It would keep them from being seen from the air and allow them to do a fast forced march.

Fifteen minutes? She could lean back and drop off for a quick snooze…

Wink missed the fluttery belly and anal pucker, the need to go pee when his bladder was empty, the speedy surges, the smell of his own sweat. Once upon a time, he had those every time he anticipated another dance with Dame Death.

Not so much lately.

He smiled. It was something one of his med-school teachers liked to say, back in the day. Dr. Morse had been a short, heavyset, bald man for whom the treatment for alopecia hadn’t worked; he was forever making passes at the students and rarely scoring, and he considered himself a philosopher of sorts.