“I don’t think so.”
“Do you know this to be true?”
“No.”
“Then you should not risk angering the general.”
Dropping the spoon, Paul leaned forward. “Cheri’s lonely. I feel it.” He tapped his heart. “The general isn’t being reasonable—”
“Amigo, the Marines with the Orion ships are the great secret weapons. The general, the country, cannot take chances of having the enemy discovering them.”
“No,” Paul said. “At this point, it doesn’t matter.”
“I know, my friend. You should have stayed in the Recon Marines. They allowed you to do things your own way while out in the field, where you lived like a hermit most of the time. This is too tight an organization for someone like you. As I said, we are warriors. You are a warrior who pretends to be a soldier. Warriors must have women or they become angry. I’m very angry. So I will join you tomorrow evening.”
“We’re indispensable,” Paul said. “Even two weeks ago, and I’d say they’d try to replace us. But not now that our suits work so well and they’re teaching us to use the flyers.”
“We are the best, si.”
“Our guys won’t shoot us down, even though I spotted antimissile batteries a week ago.”
“Where?” asked Romo. “I have not seen these.”
“Do you remember when the general ordered me to turn back? What was it, five days ago?”
“Yes. You jumped several miles in the wrong direction. I remember quite well. You said you’d gotten lost, and I couldn’t believe the general accepted your lie.”
“You’re right, I did it on purpose. I wanted to get a look, to see if they had any perimeter defenses. Our HUD sensors are good, better than I expected, and I picked up high-energy readings. Comparing it to Chinese weaponry specs we have in our files, I’d say those were tac-lasers.”
“You are always thinking, amigo. I applaud you.”
“Even if there aren’t any girls in the town for you to—”
“Hey,” Romo said.
Paul stopped talking.
“I am your blood-brother. I will join you, but do not ask anyone else. They are good men, and some of them are warriors, too, but they like to obey the general too much. They would turn you in.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “I know.”
“I will go.”
“Got it.”
For several seconds, they sat in silence. Finally, Romo said, “Yes.”
Paul raised an eyebrow. “Yes, what?” he asked
“You are welcome.”
A rare grin touched Paul’s lips. “Thanks—amigo.”
“De nada.”
Stars blazed overhead as Paul strode in his battlesuit toward the squad’s lifter. Every step left crushed grass and a deep imprint in the soil.
A mile away began a large pine forest. The squad practiced tonight in a glade near a small lake. Behind him, Romo followed in his powered armor.
The squad practiced night maneuvers, using sensors to guide them through the dark. The only active weapons system was the fifty-caliber rifle. It was part of his right arm. He aimed it and a targeting computer showed him a dot on his HUD where he’d hit. He could subvocalize, “Fire,” and it would shoot, or he could press a forefinger pad in his glove if he’d activated it for that.
“Sergeant Kavanagh, you are out of position.” The words crackled in the headphones that were part of the inner helmet.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Paul muttered under his breath.
“My diagnostic is showing me that your comm-equipment is in working order. What’s wrong, Sergeant?”
The trick for this little stunt had been finding and deactivating the kill-switch in his battlesuit, the one that would let the monitor shut him down. He’d known there would be one, which was why he’d kept searching after a sane man would have quit. At the back of his inner helmet was a fingernail-thin shutdown unit with a little green wire in it—now a cut green wire.
“Ready?” Paul asked.
“Si,” Romo said.
“What are you doing, Sergeant Kavanagh?” the monitor asked.
Paul climbed aboard the open lifter. It had a guardrail around it and an upright control panel in the center. One problem with dropping Marines in the middle of the enemy was extraction after completing the mission. Even if they could maintain the Orion ships in orbit, they didn’t have boosters that could descend, land and climb back out of the gravity well with the Marines again. Whatever the mission ended up being, it would probably be more like Doolittle’s raid over Tokyo.
On 18 April 1942, Colonel Doolittle with sixteen Army B-25s took off from the carrier Hornet, even though couldn’t possibly land again on the carriers. They flew eight hundred miles to bomb the Japanese main island of Honshu, Tokyo and the Emperor’s Palace in particular. Afterward, the B-25s either crashed-landed at sea or barely made it to China. One plane touched down at Vladivostok, where the crew was interned for the duration of the war.
The Marines’ ticket home would be to reach the American front lines in Manchuria. They’d have to fly there. The lifters would plummet from orbit in special pods, landing near the dropped Marines. The machines had a five hundred mile range, depending how high they tried to go.
“Let’s do this,” Paul said.
“Sergeant Kavanagh—” the monitor said.
“Lower the volume of the monitor communication,” Paul told his suit’s computer. Like an obedient servant, it did so. Paul could still hear the man if he concentrated, but it let him ignore the increasingly strident message.
“Do you know how to fly this gizmo?” Romo asked.
“Just done it on the simulator, but how hard can it be?”
Romo grabbed a guardrail with two articulated, strength-augmented gauntlets.
Thirty seconds of trial and error brought the fans online. The lifter vibrated and lurched off the ground, rising into the air. Their helmets muffled the torturous shriek. That was one of the backdrops to the lifters. They were loud.
Paul took them one hundred feet high. If the thing crashed, they should still be okay from this height. The battlesuits had shock absorbers in the boots and legs, as well as strength amplification. With the armor, they could make thirty-foot leaps like metallic kangaroos with attitude.
“The monitor sounds angry,” Romo said.
“Yeah, well, the general should have let me talk to my wife. I asked enough times. Now I’m done making requests.”
“We may have miscalculated their reaction.”
“We’ll see,” Paul said. “Now how about you pipe down so I can concentrate on what I’m doing?”
For the next ten minutes, Paul and Romo zoomed across the Montana countryside. They flashed over the pine forest, heading toward a small town to the west.
“Sergeant Kavanagh, this is General Allenby speaking.”
“Do you hear that?” Romo asked Paul.
“Raise the monitor volume to regular,” Paul told his suit.
“Kavanagh—”
“I hear you, General,” Paul said.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“The town down the road will have a phone connection. I plan to use it to talk to my wife.”
“Is this a joke?” Allenby asked.
“No, sir, I’m quite serious.”
“You’ll be drummed out of the Marines for this stunt.”
“Really?” asked Paul. “You’ve gone to all this hassle to train me, train my suit and now you’ll ground me just before the action?”
“Are you mentally unbalanced?”
“You wanted determined soldiers with balls,” Paul said. “So why are you surprised when you get exactly what you want? How many times have I asked to speak to my wife? I’m determined, sir, and I’ve always had more balls than you can imagine.”