"So when are we heading out?" Hawking asked.
"About noon, I think," Skyler said. "That should get us in by midafternoon."
"Cutting it a bit thin, aren't you?" Hawking suggested. "After we get to Shelter Valley we still have to hike to the back door and then walk the rest of the way to the base itself."
"I know," Skyler said. "But Trapper said afternoon is when the traffic that direction is the heaviest."
"And it isn't particularly heavy even then," Flynn said. "We might want to use Trapper's secondary route, the one that meanders around through a few other small towns before getting to Shelter Valley."
"That might throw the bloodhounds off the trail a bit," O'Hara agreed. "But it'll also cost us more time."
"Command decision time, Skyler," Reger said.
Skyler looked across the room at the window, heavily curtained against the possibility of prying eyes.
"We'll sleep on it," he said. "I'll make the final decision in the morning." He looked at the others, half expecting an argument. But all he got were nods of agreement. "Then let's get to it," he said. "It's been a very long day. Reger, once again our thanks for your assistance."
"Show your thanks when the Ryqril have been thrown out," Reger countered. "Until then, feel free to run a tab." Nodding to the others, he left the room.
"Opportunistic SOB, isn't he?" O'Hara commented.
"Absolutely," Hawking agreed. "I wish we could get some of that same self-interest into the people Anne wasted her Whiplash on."
"Different mind-set," O'Hara said. "Anne's pigeons were all bureaucrats. Cogs in a machine. Reger's the type who wants to run the machine."
"I suppose," Hawking said. "You think we're really going to pull this off?"
Skyler shrugged. "Depends on Lathe," he said. "If his plan works—but what am I saying? Of course his plan will work. His plans always work."
"That sounds like fatigue talking," Hawking warned, getting out of his chair with an elaborate stretch.
"Lathe's had plenty of failures, and he'd be the first to admit them."
"I suppose," Skyler said, feeling a touch of shame for his guilt-driven sarcasm. "Still, I'd bet money that whatever's happening on Khala, he's got it under control."
"I'm sure he does," O'Hara agreed. "Go get some sleep, Skyler. I'll take the first watch."
CHAPTER 15
They sneaked into Caine's cell right on schedule, three hours after he'd let his breathing settle into the slow rhythm of sleep. Security was nothing, he reflected, if not predictable.
But as he opened his eyes to slits he realized that someone had decided to alter the usual script. Instead of one man sneaking in to fix the blocked shower-stall camera while his partner covered him from the doorway, this time there were two men in the room, one angling toward the shower while the other came straight toward Caine's bunk. Possibly to check the second camera setup there; more likely to hold a paral-dart gun pointed at the prisoner. A third man, as usual, stood guard in the doorway.
Still, it wasn't a fatal change, but simply meant that Caine's attack pattern would have to be altered.
Maintaining his slow breathing, he got a grip on the edge of his mattress and waited for just the right moment. The first guard stopped at the foot of the bunk beds as the second reached the shower, his back turning to Caine as he reached up to fix the camera.
And in that instant, Caine moved.
He slid his legs out from under the blanket and rolled off the bed onto the floor, pulling the mattress up over him as he went. The guard at the foot of the bed inhaled sharply, and before Caine had even hit the floor there was the crack of a paral-dart gun.
But darts whose loads had been scaled to penetrate the thin jumpsuit without tearing the underlying flesh to shreds were no match for the foam-filled mattress. A second shot got lost among the foam pellets as Caine hit the floor and rolled back onto his feet. Draping the mattress over the top of his head like an old admiral's hat gone limp, he grabbed the rear bunk support for balance and threw a blind roundhouse kick at his attacker. His foot caught the other squarely in the side of the head, slamming him into the wall and sending his gun clattering off into the darkness.
There was no time to go hunting for the weapon, but Caine didn't especially want it anyway. Throwing a second kick into the man for insurance, he headed across the room to try to cut off the other intruder, whom he could hear making a frantic break for the door. From the doorway guard came a reflexive onetwo shot at Caine's torso, the tiny darts joining the others inside the flopping mattress.
And then, finally, the man woke up to the reality of the situation. His next pair of shots, aimed below the edge of the mattress, slammed squarely into Caine's legs.
Or rather, they slammed into the thick sheaves of manuscript paper he had carefully wrapped around his legs inside the jumpsuit. Caine staggered a little anyway, knowing that giving the expected response would buy him a few seconds.
Sure enough, he could hear the inside man's mad dash for the door slowing slightly as he waited for Caine to fall over. Caine staggered a little more, buying himself another two steps; and then, hurling the mattress toward the inside man, he ducked around the edge and leaped.
In the darkness the other's expression was impossible to see, but his violent twitch showed that Caine had indeed caught him by surprise. His gun, which he'd been lowering, snapped desperately up again.
But he was too late. Caine sidestepped the weapon and slammed a fist into the man's side, catching his gun arm and spinning around behind him just as the door guard fired again. A few of the darts dug into Caine's arm, burying themselves in the paper armor there, but the bulk of the blast caught the inside man squarely across his chest. He staggered the way Caine had pretended to and toppled toward the floor.
And as he did, Caine snatched the paral-dart gun from his limp fingers and fired toward the doorway.
The door guard saw it coming and dived for safety. But like his comrade, he was a fraction of a second too late. In the dim light filtering in from the hallway Caine saw his dive turn into a flounder as he collapsed to the floor.
But as Caine had noted on previous occasions, there were subtly moving shadows outside that showed the opposition was far from defeated. Keeping an eye on the doorway, he took a long step backward and grabbed the comfort chair, flipping it over and resting it on his head the way he'd earlier held the mattress. Unlike the mattress, though, this new impromptu helmet could be carried without exposing his hands. Balancing the chair with one hand, gripping his borrowed paral-dart gun in the other, he headed for the door.
They were good, all right. He was barely halfway there when a pair of heads and guns appeared simultaneously in the doorway, one on either side, one high and the other low, and opened fire.
But between the chair helmet and the rolled-paper-sheaf armor, there was nothing for them to hit. Caine leaned forward in a dead run, knowing he had to get to the door before one of them could reach inside and pull it shut.
He won the race, but just barely. The low man of the high/low combination had a grip on the handle as he came into Caine's view beneath the chair back, his other hand angled to try to shoot upward past the chair into Caine's face. Again, Caine won the race, swiveling the chair just enough to block the other's first shot. Twin kicks to the man's head and torso ensured that he never got a second.
And two steps later, Caine was outside his cell.
A volley of paral-dart fire scattered down the corridor as the momentum from his charge slammed him up against the far wall, the impact nearly knocking the comfort chair off his head. The remaining opposition would be concentrated on his left, he knew, along with whatever reinforcements they'd managed to scramble, all of them dead set on making sure he never reached the elevator and final freedom.