Full night had fallen and the demolition team could not be more than a few minutes behind them, but Broben had left no rear guard to slow them down. The plan now was to let them catch up.
He turned away from the wall and dropped back down behind the rock where Martin knelt studying Sten’s unfolded cellophone. Wennda’s tricked-up binoculars were plugged into it, and on the filmy screen was an image of the Redoubt wall.
“Okay, smart guy, run through this for me one more time,” said Broben.
“All right,” said Sten. He fiddled with the binoculars and the image rotated.
Broben glanced at the crew. All of them so far past tired that they’d become some kind of meat machines that would numbly do their jobs till they broke down. All jokes and even grousing had stopped after they’d lost Farley and Wennda and Yone. These last few miles they’d started snapping at each other like whipped dogs. An overwhelming resignation colored every gesture. A sense of going through the motions. They watched the dark canyon behind them or looked at the lighted screen and they waited for a plan from their new commanding officer.
Broben had never wanted a job less in his life.
Yone had led the mortar fire straight to where Farley and Wennda had taken cover behind the cigar-shaped rock. The round had hit and they were gone. Farley, Wennda, Yone. Just gone.
The fissure entrance was a hundred yards away and there would be a firefight if they waited any longer. And there was nothing to wait for now. Just a deep gash in the ground. Even the rock was gone.
Broben gave the order and they ran for the fissure. Targeting lights had speared out but no more mortar rounds were launched. They had entered the darker fissure and stayed close to the left-hand side and they had kept on running.
The next five miles had been a cat-and-mouse game of sprinting in the dark and then taking cover and trading potshots. The pursuing demolition team had them on targeting but the bomber crew had them on range. Broben knew the game would change when they reached the Redoubt at the end of the fissure canyon, because there’d be nowhere else to run—and the Redoubt would start shooting at them, too. They had to gain some distance and buy some time. That meant keeping up the pace, ignoring their exhaustion and pain, and not stopping to catch their breath or exchange fire. Whenever there was good cover Broben posted a rear guard and left him to lay down suppressing fire while the rest kept going. The rear guard would shoot to pin down their pursuers, then high-tail it back until he reached the relief guard Broben had stationed. The relief would hunker down to stall the demo team while the one who’d caught up to him kept going and did his best to catch up to the group.
The tactic slowly gained them ground and time. It also strung the crew out along the fissure floor, wore them out even faster, and burned precious ammo.
Then they’d jogged around a fissure corner and there was the slab of the Redoubt wall glowing faintly in the distance. The ragged line of exhausted crew had put on a last fresh burst of speed. A thousand yards from the wall they’d taken cover while the rear-guard stragglers caught up.
And now here they were, hunkered down before the vast patchwork slab of the Redoubt and waiting on their new CO to put his stamp on some kind of plan.
“Okay, smart guy, run through this for me one more time,” Broben told Sten.
“All right.” Sten enlarged the image on the cellophone. “There are motion detectors at these points, and cameras here.” Red circles appeared where his finger tapped along the Redoubt wall. “This shows the estimated scope of each sensor.” Pale wedges spread from the red circles like shining headlight beams. Sten tapped again and several lighted wedges darkened. “These sensors have failed. Maybe they don’t know how to fix them, maybe they can’t.” He shrugged. “But there’s a gap—here.” He indicated an unlit trapezoid to the left of the large equipment door. “It’s very narrow toward the outside limit of the sensors’ range, wider as you get closer to the wall.”
“The team your CO sent out five days ago had the same info?” Broben asked.
“Probably.”
“‘Probably’ didn’t get them in.”
Sten shrugged again. “I can give you the data. I can’t tell you what they did with it.”
Broben frowned at the image. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m not trying to bust your chops. So you don’t know how they tried to get in?”
Sten and Arshall traded a look. “No idea,” said Arshall. “We weren’t involved.”
“There’s this way that Indians would steal horses from forts,” Martin ventured.
Broben looked at him as if he’d heard wrong.
The small belly gunner knelt beside Sten and indicated the Redoubt image on the com panel. “They’d wait till a party of riders was due back at the fort, and they’d get a couple of braves up by the wall. When the riders got in sight of the fort, the Indians would attack them from cover. The fort would send soldiers out to help the riders, and the two braves at the wall would sneak in before the gate closed. Everybody in the fort would be watching the fight outside, and the braves would round up the horses and then they’d just open the gate again and drive them out. The war party would break off their attack and go after the horses.”
Martin looked up. They were all staring at him. “It just seemed kind of similar,” he said after nobody said anything.
Broben looked down at the image on the com panel. “Can you make that bigger and show me where there’s cover on this side,” he asked Sten.
“Sure.” Sten enlarged the image. Broben studied it while the crew glanced among themselves.
Broben asked Sten and Arshall questions about the smartsuit camouflage, about the narrow gap in the Redoubt’s sensors.
“You’re not thinking of doing this cockeyed stunt,” Plavitz said, incredulous.
Broben gave him a withering look. “Unless your relatives were better at breaking into forts, yeah, we’re gonna do this,” he said.
“It wasn’t really my relatives,” said Martin.
“You said it’s an old Indian trick.”
“I don’t know how old it is. I saw it on Hopalong Cassidy. Double feature. It worked pretty good.”
Broben stared. “You are the worst Indian I ever saw,” he said.
Broben crouched behind the lava berm and watched Garrett, Everett, and Shorty creep toward the massive wall in single file like cartoon characters tiptoeing past a bomb.
Much harder to see was who they were following. Sten and Arshall had activated their body armor’s camouflage, and the stealth smartsuits were visually sampling their surroundings and minimizing the two men’s heat signature. All five men walked perfectly straight, kept their arms close to their bodies, didn’t look back. Sten had said his visor would show him the path, but to Broben it looked like three men and two ghosts creeping along an invisible but very narrow hallway.
The plan was for Arshall and Sten to lead Garrett, Everett, and Shorty to the wall. The crewmen would lie low while Sten came back for Broben, Plavitz, Francis, and Martin. Meanwhile, Arshall would head straight toward the blind spot out in the open in front of the main door and wait for the demolition team to arrive. When they did, he’d fire on them while the rest of the men stayed low. Broben was betting the fireworks would cause the Redoubt to send a troop transport after the demo team. When the door opened for the transport, Sten would make like the Invisible Man and slip in. From there he’d either find an access door or reopen the main one and admit the rest of the men.