War To The Knife (11 page)

“No, I’m not. You’ll find the file in here, on the top of the pile. Read it for yourself.”

Jake accepted the suitcase from him. “I’ve got to tell General Allred about this at once! He’s not the bastard who gave the order to invade Laredo – that was his father – but he’s still the Head of State of our enemy. We’ve
got
to try to nail him!”

“That’s what I figured – but can we? Do we still have enough effectives? Will we be able to reorganize so quickly after evacuating our remaining major bases like this? Oh, yes – while we’re talking about bases, where did this one come from? I’ve never heard of any base on the Laguna Peninsula before.”

“It’s new. The cave system is natural, of course – it runs through the limestone cliffs along the seafront. It was discovered decades ago, but there were no minerals to be exploited and access was very difficult, so it was ignored. Two years ago General Allred decided we needed a bolthole, a last-ditch place to retreat and reorganize that the enemy couldn’t learn about by torturing those who knew our existing bases. He assigned some of our more seriously wounded people – those who had only one leg or one arm left, that sort of thing – to come here with laser cutters and excavation gear and open up vehicle access to the cave. They worked very slowly and carefully, making sure they concealed every trace of what they were doing. It was finished just a couple of months ago.”

“Gotta hand it to him; the General’s a fortune-teller or a prophet to have seen this coming.”

“I don’t know about a prophet, but he’s got good instincts. We’ll be evacuating our combatants here over the next few days by airvan. Most non-combatants and supplies will travel by ground convoy, but not come directly here – we don’t want to leave tracks alerting the enemy to where we are. They’ll go to intermediate destinations, where they’ll leave their vehicles under cover and be flown here by airvan. We’ll all laager up here while we figure out what to do next.”

“And Niven’s Regiment?”

“Most of us are already dispersed in the Caristo region, so we’ll stay put, as will the families of those in other regiments who’ve found a safe haven in other areas. It’ll be for the Council to decide where we all go next, and what we’ll do. They’re meeting tomorrow to discuss Marvin Ellis’ arrival and what to do about it. Your news has given them a lot more to talk about!”

“I thought the General wanted you there for the meeting?”

“He does – I’ll be heading back there tonight by airvan – but he sent me here first to help get this place up and running.”

“Sounds good.” Dave looked at his father soberly. “Without multiple secure bases, can we really go on? Is this the end for us?”

Jake sighed. “I don’t know. I sure hope not.”

“Me too! I always figured we’d go down fighting, not just fade away like… I don’t know, like a rainstorm dying down as it moves off into the distance.”

“You’d prefer thunder and lightning?”

“Hell, yes!
If I’ve got to die, let it be facing the Bactrians with a heap of their bodies lying around me and a shout of defiance in my throat! Screw ’em all!”

~ ~ ~

TAPURIA: SECURITY SERVICE HEADQUARTERS

“I don’t care how busy you were with other things! You were supposed to put your surveillance mission ahead of everything else!”

The agent whined, “But, Lieutenant, you don’t understand! Major Moshira
ordered
me to buy the diamonds for him. I couldn’t go against his orders – he’d have had me shot!”

Yazata rolled her eyes skyward. She was beginning to understand how the rebels had been able to glean so much information, and steal so many things, from under the very noses of the Security Service. She snapped into the handset, “I’ll talk to Major Moshira about this. Meanwhile, submit your excuses to me in writing by not later than fifteen today. You haven’t heard the last of this!”

“Yes, Ma’am.” The man’s voice was sulky, like a child who’d been caught doing something wrong.

As she replaced the handset a knock came at her office door. She looked up to find Major Moshira standing there, his face pale and drawn. She came to her feet, snapping to attention. “Yes, Sir?”

“Have you heard the news?”

“Er… what news, Sir?”

“Colonel Kujula and his team were killed yesterday.”

“What?”
In her shock she forgot to use the normal honorific, but in his agitation he didn’t seem to notice.

“He was at the base we destroyed a few weeks ago. The combat engineer patrol he was visiting out there appears to have been wiped out by the rebels.”

She recalled with a mental frisson of horror,
I asked to go with him! If he’d said yes, I’d be dead too!

The Major straightened with a visible effort at self-discipline. “You’re about to be summoned to the Military Governor’s office. You’re to tell him only that the Colonel ordered the engineers to open up the base to retrieve evidence we believed would be there, based on information provided by a prisoner. Don’t speculate about anything else. Understood?”

“Er… no, Sir, I don’t understand. He’s the Military Governor, after all, and we’re under his authority. Shouldn’t I answer any questions he asks me?”

“No!
I don’t care what the regulations say about who’s in charge. We’re the Security Service, the
true
guardians of the Satrapy, and you’ll do well to remember that!” His voice was snappish, vindictive. “Tell him only what he absolutely
has
to know, nothing else! Be sure I’ll know at once if you disobey me, and you won’t escape punishment. Understood?”

“Y – yes, Sir.”

He turned on his heel and walked away down the corridor.

As she sank back into her seat, her desktop comm unit rang. She picked up the handset. “Lieutenant Yazata speaking.”

“Lieutenant, this is Captain Dehghan, aide to Major-General Huvishka, the Military Governor. Your presence is required immediately at the Command Bunker. How soon can you get here?”

“I – ah… It’ll take me fifteen to twenty minutes, Sir.”

“I’ll so advise the General.” He hung up without waiting for her reply.

She realized two things as she raced her car towards the Military Governor’s compound. First, her agent probably hadn’t been joking about what Major Moshira might have done to him had he disobeyed his order to engage in black-market speculation on his behalf.
I wonder if he was using official funds to do that?,
she pondered. The second thing was that the Major must have an informant or some sort of monitoring device in the Military Governor’s office – otherwise how could he have known about the imminent summons?

She began marshalling her thoughts. If the Colonel was dead, her temporary assignment to the Security Service was now subject to the whims of whoever took over from him as Commanding Officer of the SS mission on Laredo. That would probably be Major Moshira in the short term… and the Major had a wandering, lustful eye that had mentally undressed her on more than one occasion. If he were now to be in authority over her, she might be faced with a very difficult situation. On the other hand, if she asked the General for a transfer and the Major was listening to the conversation, he’d hear whatever she said to justify her request – which might land her in even worse trouble.

She mulled over the situation as she drove, and by the time she turned into the Military Compound parking area she’d reached a decision. She parked her car, then opened the secure equipment locker bolted to the chassis and took out a small flat black box. She blessed the late Colonel Kujula for trusting her with it as she switched it on, checking to ensure that the red diode indicator was illuminated, and dropped it into her pocket. If Major Moshira was angry with her for carrying it, she’d excuse herself by saying that the Colonel had ordered her to use it when meeting clandestinely with agents, as she had earlier that morning. In her shock at the news he’d brought, she’d forgotten to switch it off or remove it from her pocket.

The security desk at the entrance to the Command Bunker complex was expecting her. A guard escorted her down three levels to a corridor lined with offices, and delivered her to Captain Dehgahn in the anteroom to the Military Governor’s suite. He ran his eyes up and down her uniform as he got to his feet, and nodded in approval.

“You’ll do. The General likes to see smartness in his officers.”

He knocked at an inner door. “Lieutenant Yazata is here, Sir.”

“Well, don’t just stand there, man – bring her in!” The voice sounded angry.

She followed the Captain into the office. While he closed the door, she crossed the carpet to stand at attention in front of the desk. “Lieutenant Yazata reports to General Huvishka as ordered, Sir!” Even as she spoke, she felt the electronic device in her pocket start to vibrate.

The General was a tall, spare man. He leaned back in his chair and looked at her penetratingly, his cold gray eyes seeming to bore right through her. “What can you tell me about Colonel Kujula, Lieutenant? You worked for him, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Sir, I was his aide until a couple of days ago; but before I say more, there’s something I must show you.” She removed the jamming device from her pocket and laid it on the desk. “Have you seen one of these before, Sir?”

He went very still. “Yes, I have – I used one in a couple of previous assignments back on Bactria. That’s a jammer to block eavesdropping devices, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And from the way it’s vibrating gently against my desk, it’s clearly found something to jam here, right?”

“Yes, Sir.” She quickly explained about Major Moshira’s warning. Turning to Captain Dehgahn, she asked, “Sir, how long was it after the decision to call me in that you actually made the call?”

“Not more than ten minutes.”

Major-General Huvishka growled, “Yet Major Moshira knew about it before the call was made. He
must
have been monitoring our conversation in here! What the
hell
is the SS playing at, to treat me as if I were the enemy?”

“Sir, with respect, as far as I can tell they think you
are
an enemy – or at least a rival,” she said flatly. “From comments I’ve overheard, they seem to regard the Army as competing with them for the role of ‘Guardians of the Satrapy’, as they call it. As an Army officer on assignment there I’ve often been treated with disdain and distrust, even by their enlisted personnel. If they had enough SS people here to staff their office exclusively with them, I think they’d be a lot happier.”

“Thank you for alerting me to this, Lieutenant. That, in itself, has justified bringing you here today. Now, to get back to my question, what can you tell me about Colonel Kujula? He’s just got a reinforced platoon of my combat engineers killed – or so we assume – and I want to know why they died. They were sent out on his orders.”

“Sir, he told me that a prisoner we’d taken at that base a few weeks before had proved to be a senior rebel officer. He’d been interrogated, and provided information. All the Colonel told me was that there was something hidden in the base that we had to recover. He had me contact our regional garrison in his name, and order a patrol of combat engineers to be sent to the base. They were to dig through the rubble left after its destruction to see whether they could find… whatever it was. He said he was going to fly out there to join them in an assault shuttle. I asked to accompany him, because I’ve never been in the field before, but he refused. That was when he reassigned me to handle his agents in and around Tapuria, so I don’t know any more, Sir.”

“It’s a good thing he didn’t allow you to go with him, or you’d also be dead! You didn’t receive any report or signal from him to suggest that they might have found anything?”

“No, Sir. Did they find anything on his body?”

“They haven’t found it yet, and they may never do so. The patrol appears to have camped close to the entrance to the base, at the foot of a steep hillside. They made routine calls at twenty, at midnight, and at four yesterday morning – then they never called again. By noon they’d missed two routine calls and the regional garrison was getting worried. They sent a drone to investigate, but all it found was a massive heap of rock at the foot of the hill. They then sent an infantry company out there in assault shuttles. It reported that the mid-section of the hillside, above the entrance to the base, had been undermined by what looked like multiple plasma cannon shots. That brought down hundreds of thousands of tons of rock and soil from the cliffs above. It completely covered the place where the patrol had reported it was camped. The landslide’s up to twenty meters deep there.”

“And no-one knows what’s underneath it, Sir?”

Huvishka made a sour face. “We presume the patrol’s vehicles and the Colonel’s assault shuttle are in there somewhere, along with all their bodies; but thanks to a panicky sentry yesterday afternoon, we can only guess. He saw two figures emerge from the bushes and fired on them at once without waiting to identify them. They proved to have been members of the combat engineer patrol. They must have escaped whatever happened to it, but since he killed both of them we can’t ask them what it was. He’ll be court-martialed and executed, of course, but that won’t bring them back. The only other evidence is the wreckage of one of our armored cars about a hundred meters from the landslide. It had been destroyed by a plasma cannon bolt.”

“Are there no more engineers to dig away the landslide and locate the vehicles and bodies, Sir?”

“Not in that area, and I don’t have enough of them to assign another platoon to the job. I only have one battalion of combat engineers, and they’re split up into independent platoons and spread all across the continent to support my infantry units. I’ve asked repeatedly for more engineers from Bactria, but every time I do they turn me down because of cost – infantry are a lot cheaper to train, equip and support in the field. Anyway, never mind that now. Lieutenant, thank you very much for revealing to me the extent of my problems with the SS. To prevent reprisals against you, I’m going to transfer you immediately to my staff. For now you’ll assist Captain Dehgahn with his duties as my aide. He has a lot of extra work at present, what with the upcoming parade for the Satrap and our impending handover to a civilian Administration, so he’ll be glad of your help.”