Six Bits (12 page)

A single tear tracked down her cheek.

The End

Inspired (distantly) by the Hunt for Red October

MACOS

The night was ill-lit by a sliver of moon. The moon itself lay partially obscured by high, drifting cirrus clouds. The air was beginning to cool, but the earth remained hot from a scalding summer day. “It’s a great night for this,” Steb puffed as the three young men struggled up the embankment.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Jos, as usual, disapproved. “
Any
night is an insane night for this kind of madness! I can’t believe you two idiots talked me into this! Why can’t we stick to the little stuff like we’ve been doing? Flat tires and sugared tanks cause the Stossa plenty of trouble without getting us into things they’d
kill
us for!”

Nigel turned. “Hey Jos, cool down. We’re not gonna get caught, but you can go on home if you want. Steb and I can do this by ourselves.”

“Sure, you and the ‘war hero’s’ nephew. Of course.
You
can do anything by yourselves,” Jos muttered.

Steb stopped short of the top and shrugged out of his pack. He was thinking that Nigel’s words “Steb and I” had effectively cornered him with no way to agree with Jos’s assertion that this mission
was
a little bit too dangerous. Steb used his boot to kick a small depression for the heavy bucket full of icy water that he and Nigel had been carrying.

While Nigel and Jos continued to argue, Steb shucked his slender frame out of his clothes, extracted his wire cutters and lighter, then dropped the clothes into the bucket of cold water. Pulling on a stocking cap soaked in the ice water made him wish he hadn't cut his hair so short. He picked up their low light goggles and crawled to the top of the embankment. Peering over the edge, he searched for and found the infrared motion sensors just inside the fence and picked a spot midway between them. With a grimace he skidded back, gave the goggles to Nigel and pulled on his icy cold shirt and pants. Then he crawled forward over the warm ground to carefully cut a window in the chain link fence.

Jos, apparently giving up the argument, but unable to bring himself to “weenie out,” also put his clothes in the bucket. He then dragged his equipment twenty feet to the left to set up the six inch pipe that was their "mortar.” The bottom had been capped and a small hole drilled in it. Two empty cans cut into skeletons kept the bottom 10 inches of the pipe open. The top part of the pipe had been lined and wadded with paper. Hundreds of small glass vials found behind the hospital had been filled with fuel, plugged with rag wicks to make little Molotov cocktails, and stacked into the top end of the pipe. Jos squirted more of the volatile fuel through the hole and onto the rag in the bottom section so that the skeletonized can would fill with explosive vapor. Then he inserted the remote controlled wires into the hole that were supposed to spark and fire off the mortar. He stretched out the antenna wire and threw one end of it up onto a bush.

Nigel put on his low light goggles and laid out the rest of their equipment. He checked the pressure in their alcohol canisters and attached them to the tubing that had been painstakingly sewn into their clothing.

Slowly, Nigel moved up to look over the edge. He used his hand to shade his low light goggles from the guard shack's bright lights and carefully surveyed the rest of the grounds.
Ah!
There was actually a guard out patrolling. A hand held up told Steb and Jos to wait. When the guard started to wend his way back to the shack, Nigel scrambled back down to fill the others in on the situation.

As they forced their bodies into the ice cold clothing, Nigel restrained his chattering teeth and described the layout of the compound. As they’d hoped, the tanks and armored personnel carriers were closer to the barracks; the general transport vehicles were distributed around the periphery.

A few seconds after the guard got back to the shack, they pulled the icy stocking caps over their heads. Freshly doused with the remains of the cold water from the bucket the three young men moved down the hill and climbed through the hole in the fence one at a time and walked slowly out amongst the vehicles. As they had hoped, midway between detectors, their cold images failed to set off the infrared motion recognition system.

They gathered at the first transport and Nigel climbed under the fuel tank. He placed his triflanged punch near the corner to prevent a boom from impact on a flat surface. Nigel wrapped the point of the awl with a piece of towel to dampen the sound, and with a sharp blow to the base, punched a hole in the tank with only a muffled thump. He removed the punch but to his dismay only a slow dribble began from the hole. However, with another blow and a wiggle, fuel began to stream out at a satisfactory rate. Each of the three filled a bottle with fuel, capped it and put it in a pocket. They spread out and soon fell into a routine, crawling from truck to truck, punching holes while puddles of fuel slowly grew under the vehicles.

In the guard shack Yasso nervously tugged at his thin, wiry beard. He was a small man of sudden quick movements. He’d been nicknamed “Bug” because of these, insect-like movements. He stepped to the open window and looked out, then cocked his head to one side. Finally he turned to Moman. "Do you hear thumping noises?"

"Dammit Bug! You hear those sounds every night, when it gets colder, the trucks settle." Moman scratched at his crotch and thought,
Yasso’s such a damned weenie, worry, worry, worry!

"But there are more tonight!"

Moman waved his hand and turned back to his magazine.

Yasso turned to the door. "I'm going out for a look around." He stepped out and pulled on his low-light goggles. Then he swore in a clipped fashion as they whited out with light from the nearby window. He flipped the goggles to infrared and began surveying the compound.

When the door of the shack opened Nigel was rounding the front of a truck and froze in his crouched position. He reached slowly for his alcohol valve and flipped it open, gritting his teeth at the shock of cold fluid spraying into his clothing.

Yasso halted abruptly. There was a warm object at the front corner of one of the trucks! His brow furrowed as he stared at it, but it slowly faded away to a few small splotches. He stepped away from the shack to use his goggles on the low light setting.

When Nigel saw the guard's head bob down to check the guard shack’s steps before descending, he darted back behind the truck. He dropped to the ground and crawled under the truck to look for the guard's feet.  Nigel still had on his low-light goggles, but the damn things were useless since he was looking toward the lighted shack.

He lifted the goggles.
There!
He could see the guard's boots outlined in the light from one of the windows. They stood motionlessly for a while, then began to walk his way.

Nigel felt his pulse booming as his body demanded that he do something—anything! The excitement and the cold from the rapidly evaporating alcohol made it so he had to clench his teeth to keep them from chattering. With dismay he realized that the boots were fading from view as the guard got further from the lighted shack. He inched backward toward the far side of the truck.

He couldn’t see the boots anymore! But, now he could hear their tread. They stopped and he could imagine their owner listening with his head cocked. For a moment, he was grateful that he had yet to puncture a fuel tank in this row of trucks. The wind was blowing away, so you couldn’t smell the fuel spilling. Then, to his dismay he heard a ping and high pitched whine as the superconductors of the guard's kalsaw (Kinetic And Laser Superconducting Attack Weapon) charged. When the boots moved again, Nigel began to back out farther. He bumped his head and felt the padding of the strap from the low light goggles, forgotten on his head! Silently cursing himself, he pulled them down and saw the guard's boots at the back of the truck. Moving toward Nigel’s own feet which were hanging out from under the truck's left rear corner! Nigel pulled his feet in and clutched his awl.

The damn guard stopped right beside his feet!
Did he see a scuff? Did he see my boot? Did he smell the fuel?

The guard suddenly resumed his deliberate pace around and back toward the front of the truck. Once again he stopped... After an eternity, the guard slowly headed back to the shack.

Breathing a collective sigh of relief, the three young men resumed punching holes. Finishing the trucks, they reached the armored vehicles. The fuel tanks on the armored vehicles were fully proof against an awl, but the caps on the tanks were not proof against a few lumps of sugar. After sugaring the tanks, they snapped back the lids on the compartments full of charged superconductors that powered the tank's electrical weapons. Uncapping their bottles they dribbled the solvent fuel onto the plastic that insulated the superconductors.

And so it went for seven of the ten tanks and twelve of the armored personnel carriers.

Suddenly the guard shack door slammed open! Both guards appeared, pulling their goggles into place and trotting ten paces from the shack.

The Macos immediately opened their alcohol valves, but Nigel felt only a small trickle of the cold fluid! He’d used up almost the entire can in the previous episode. Fortunately he was on the far side of an APC.

The guards moved out into the lane between the nearest vehicles. Their goggles were on infrared, looking for the man-sized infrared blob that Yasso had seen through their open window a few seconds ago. Moman had already begun to berate “Bug” for wasting their time when Nigel became visible as a splotchy blob crouched behind an APC. Thumbing his kalsaw to laser/infrared he shouted, "Who goes there!" To his embarrassment his voice broke. "Who goes there!" he said again.

He brought his weapon to bear while thumbing it to infrared. The blob disappeared around the corner of the APC. Depressing the trigger, he began walking toward the APC while waving the kalsaw back and forth over the area where he had last seen the blob. Yasso, he noted with satisfaction, was moving toward the other side of the APC.

It was probably the Lieutenant running one of his surprise checks, Moman thought, but if so, the infrared codes on the Lt.'s helmet and uniform would keep the kalsaw from firing. He quickly rounded the corner and came face to face with the blob! The damn kalsaw didn't fire as he convulsively crushed the trigger.
Oh, it’s Yasso!

Where’d the intruder go?!

The two guards spun away from each other.

Steb saw the guards turn toward Nigel, shout and then move toward him as Nigel darted, first behind the APC, then under it. Steb stepped behind the tank he’d been working on. He pulled out the rag he had in his back pocket and jammed it into his bottle that was now only half filled with fuel. He frantically spun the wheel until his lighter flared. A second later the rag was on fire. He heaved the Molotov cocktail hard at a truck in the next row, but it struck the canvas side and fell to the dirt without breaking!

As Moman spun away from Yasso his kalsaw lased a burst of three! The target was a small hot object on the ground near a truck. He lifted his goggles to look at it in real light. It was a small torch wobbling across the ground! There were glowing laser burns in the dirt to either side of it, but the torch apparently hadn't been damaged by the beam that had hit it. Suddenly more fire blossomed at the end of the left laser burn where it went under the truck! In a flash, flames engulfed the whole truck!
Shit! How did that happen? The Lieutenant’s gonna have my ass!

Jos stabbed frantically at the remote control button for their "mortar.” Why wasn't it working?! He ran for the fence to fire it manually.

Nigel lay under the APC waiting for them to decide to look under the truck. He pulled on his low lights so he could see where they were. The flames of Steb's unexploded Molotov cocktail nearly blinded him, but before he could lift the goggles he heard the kalsaw lase and saw the flashes by the bottle. When he got the goggles off he saw that the whole truck was going up in flames! He scooted back out from under the APC. His foot struck something.

It was the guard's boot!

Yasso looked down from the burning truck when something struck his ankle. To his amazement, in the light of the burning vehicle he saw that he had been kicked by someone backing out from under the APC! Saboteurs! He noted with amazement that his kalsaw had lased as he swung it at the man, finger still crushing the trigger. The saboteur began to thrash wildly about on the ground! The damn kalsaw lased another burst and he absently took his finger off the trigger. The saboteur only quivered now.

With some pride, and also some dismay, Yasso thought,
I’ve killed someone!
He flipped on his helmet mike and shouted, "Saboteurs, saboteurs in the compound!"

Yasso ran around the APC to Moman who was dazedly watching the truck burn. Suddenly a flash of heat behind them signaled the explosion of another truck into flames. They spun towards the new fire and their kalsaws lased again, firing at the hot truck.
Shit!
Together they thumbed the kalsaws to manual. Suddenly two neighboring trucks burst into flames!
What the hell was going on? Trucks didn't burn that easily!

Did they?

Steb ran behind the APC to where Nigel lay motionless. There was a smoking hole in the back of Nigel’s head! A great dread gripped Steb, but gritted his teeth and turned Nigel over. He stared into lifeless eyes.
Damn! Damn, damndamndamn....

The guards were coming back! Steb turned and ran. Fear ripped through him. His gut turned to ice and his rubbery legs seemed to be moving in slow motion. A distant part of him was embarrassed as he felt his bladder convulse and piss run down his leg, scalding hot in contrast to the recent freezing driblets of alcohol. He twisted around the corner of the APC and turned toward the fence. His vision tunneled down to the area just ahead of him, but he vaguely noted a laser burst to his right and then to his left.
They must be shooting on manual,
he thought,
either that or I just haven't felt the killing shots… yet.