Schmidt One looked up at his brother and said, “When we come back out of here, we’re going to have to stop for me to patch the hole. Otherwise they’ll find it the next time they run their maintenance checks. The idea’s that we were never here, right?” It wasn’t really a question.
“Cally, you’re through first,” the fixer said. “Tommy, get the other side. It just wouldn’t do for her to get scratched up on all these rough edges.”
“Nope. Ruin the whole effect.” Papa O’Neal spat neatly out the driver’s window. “Through you go. Get moving.”
George put the box of coffee supplies, graced by a well-known brand name, on the ground next to his brother. “Here,” he said, handing each of them a small data cube. “Terrain updates. That’s what the pictures were for. Cross referenced with the hummer’s tracking measurements, it should be pretty solid — at least for what I was able to see. I’ve also marked backup rendezvous points.”
Cally took the cube without comment, pocketing it. Tommy and Harrison at least nodded at the smaller man, who smiled faintly before going back to the car.
Sunday followed her through the fence, letting her get as far away as she could without losing sight of her. He began following as she moved in to the southwest. He could hear the faint crackle of leaves under Harrison’s feet behind him. Good thing the noisier man would be the farthest one from any unfriendly ears.
They’d walked just over two hundred meters, by his pace count, when Cally raised her hand and stopped them. He echoed the signal back to Harrison. She stripped her camo jumpsuit off and stowed it under a bush, patting the pocket of her black windbreaker, rubbing her ear to make sure the dot earphone was in place. Flesh toned and about half the diameter of a ladybug, it was practically undetectable. Tommy checked his earphone, too, patting the pocket with his buckley.
Once the extremely stacked and tempting blonde was on the road, Tommy could keep pace with her slow jog at a safely increased distance, watching the flash of red from her tank top through the trees that concealed his own muted gray. He listened carefully as he went, waiting for her to find and draw off the guard.
“Hey!” He heard a masculine voice from the direction of the road. He stopped cold, raising his hand to stop Harrison. “Excuse me, ma’am, but this is a restricted area.” He heard the voice say, apologetically. Definitely not the tone he’d have taken with some unknown man. He almost felt sorry for the guy. Dangling Cally in front of him was a below the belt hit if there ever was one.
“Oh, is it? I’m so sorry, I didn’t see the sign. I got a little turned around, anyway. Could you point me back to base housing? My sister-in-law is going to think I’m such a dummy,” she said.
The voices were far enough away that he had to listen carefully, and wouldn’t be easily overheard. He started forward again, carefully, beckoning with one hand. Harrison would have to go in first with his box, so he’d be looping around Tommy. The voices were moving down the hill as his female teammate succeeded at drawing the young soldier along with her. Single women on base were in short supply.
“Oooh!” The high feminine squeal of dismay was followed by a pause. “It’s my ankle…”
He couldn’t hear the rest. They kept moving, cutting in to approach the road. There was a five-yard strip of grass on each side of the road before the gate to the chain link fence surrounding the archive building, and a good fifteen yards between the fence and the building. Where the front of the building jutted out from the hillside, the structure was surrounded by neatly trimmed boxwood hedges. Fortunately, the gate was open, the guard mount a precaution against a theoretically possible intrusion that nobody seriously expected. Harrison crossed the open area at a fast sprint, setting down the box on top of the hedge as he vaulted it with more agility than Tommy had known he had, and pulling the box down out of sight. Too big to try to go over the hedge without either landing in it or hitting the wall, Tommy ducked around the back after covering the gap between the tree line and the building. He barely had room to crouch down below the top of the hedges without scraping himself to bits on the hedge or the brick wall, or lying flat on the dirt. Dammit. The pictures they studied had had a mock-up of a suit and a scale model of a SheVa tank in the courtyard. Someone had moved the damned displays. He supposed they were lucky to have any cover at all.
He thumbed his pocket open and pulled out his PDA, tapping the transmit button. “Dude, I need a beer,” he said, and ended the transmission. Seconds later, alarms began wailing across the base, sounding the drill alert. Soldiers all over the base would be grabbing their AIDs and their gear to get their information and execute their movements to set up an appropriate defense in response to the specified “Posleen attack.” Over the next few seconds, half a dozen or so men sprinted out of the building and through the gate, disappearing quickly from Sunday’s limited view. The activation phrase had been his own idea. He couldn’t think of anything less likely to be flagged as a code phrase if it was somehow overheard. Papa had grumbled that it lacked style. Tommy had told Papa that next time he was on the pointy end, he could die with style if he wanted to — again. It hadn’t been a fair thing to say. After all, it had only happened the once. Still, without the Crabs’ miracle slab to patch up even the dead, as long as there was enough brain intact, they were all being more careful.
They waited another two minutes to make sure as many men as possible were clear before Harrison went in through the front door. It wouldn’t do to wait too long and have Cally lose her grip on the attentions of the guard. Yeah, as if that was likely to happen. Getting out of the bushes wasn’t fun. Schmidt One had to crawl across the bigger man’s back on his knees so he wouldn’t leave boot prints all over his back. Silks were stain resistant as hell, but they picked up dirt like anything else. The other man brushed off his back, getting the slightly damp pine chips off him. Tommy dusted off the bottom of the coffee box and handed it back.
The morning was brightening in the way only a crisp fall day could. He was warm in his silks, but could feel the cold against his face and hands and see his breath. As he looked up to watch Harrison around the side of the building, he could see the trees down the slope bending in the wind. In the lee of the hill, he didn’t feel much wind, but he was starting to hear it. A quick glance up at the sky showed a line of heavy clouds as a colder front blew in from the northeast. Great. He gave Harrison a full minute before walking around the back of the hedge to the front of the building, PDA in hand.
He opened the door to see Harrison shrug at the counter clerk.
“No coffee maker? I dunno, maybe you’re getting one. All I know is this is the building number I got and I need a signature. Hey, even if it’s ultimately supposed to be somewhere else, it don’t say so. Might as well drink it. Hell, I would.”
“If it has our number on it…”
“Excuse me, I’ve just got to finish something up.” Tommy waved the PDA at the clerk, showing the blue stripe, and walked past the desk. The clerk barely glanced at him, busy signing for the coffee.
“So, hey, did you see the last game of the series? That homer in the top of the sixth? What a beautiful…” He heard Harrison settling in to shooting the shit with the bored clerk.