The necklace.
Parris glanced at her men. They were focused on what they were doing although she didn’t for a moment think they weren’t listening. They were trained to pay attention to every externality, to monitor their surroundings at all times.
She dug into the pocket of her shirt and pulled out the chain and held it out to him and was dismayed to see her hand was shaking.
Adrenaline, she told herself. She had stopped moving and the adrenaline was still dissipating, so the excess was making her shake. That was all.
Adán took the chain. His hand closed over hers, the chain caught between them. He squeezed her fingers.
“Thank you,” he said in a normal voice and moved away, detangling the chain.
“Back to the gulley, sir?” Locke asked.
Parris hefted her pack. “Yes. Hot drinks and food for everyone and an analysis for me.” She looked at her watch. “We might still be able to move on, after that. It’s early. Everyone needs a break, first, though.” She didn’t voice her belief that calories would help her feel normal once more. She had never had this reaction while still operational. She had always clocked off before letting herself think about and react to a mission.
They walked in single file back to the gulley, with flank lookouts. Everyone was silent. Locke tapped two of the four who had stayed on the beach and sent them to the top of the gulley as lookouts. Everyone else moved into the chasm and dropped their packs and relaxed.
Parris looked at her watch. Three a.m. It was too early to contact the base and she had nothing to report except they had found where the core had been. Strickland was only interested in results. He trusted her to get the job done and not trip him up with useless reports.
She dropped her pack in the sand and sat on it. Everyone did the same.
“Jonesy, fire up a burner and get water boiling,” Locke said, as he settled beside Parris.
Ramirez was digging in his pack, a pen torch in his mouth so he could see what he was doing. He grunted and pulled out a flat, folded dark green bundle. “Yo, Caballero. Here.” He tossed the garment at Adán.
Adán was standing just behind the tight circle of men. He caught the fabric and held it up. Cargo pants.
“You’re my size,” Ramirez said. “Your jeans are wet, which means you can’t move silently.”
“Should probably bury the jeans, anyway,” Odesky said.
“Thanks,” Adán said. He looked around for somewhere to change.
“Better just shuck ‘em here,” Locke said. “Sentries aren’t monitoring anywhere else. We’re all friends.”
Adán kicked off his shoes. “Whoever has their cellphone out, this is your big chance. Photo like this you could sell for a few thousand.” He dropped his jeans, which made a soggy, heavy sigh as they dropped.
No one moved.
He thrust his legs into the cargo pants and fastened them. “I feel thirty pounds lighter,” he admitted with a grin. He picked up the denim and tossed it into the surrounding shadows.
“They really pay a couple thou’ for a shot of your butt?” Donaldson asked as he shifted in the sand and pointed to the space he’d made.
Adán settled in the space and crossed his legs. “I had to pay three and a half thousand to get a photo of me changing my shirt taken down from a gossip site, because the shirt had a brand name on it and the company objected.”
“Fuck,” Jonesy breathed as he stirred packets of freeze dried soup into the pot on the burner. “That’s ridiculous.”
“You’d be surprised by what people care about when fame and money get involved,” Adán said.
“Do you care about that shit?” Ramirez asked.
“Right now? No. Not for a while now.” Adán looked down at his hands. “Not since the war started,” he finished.
Parris saw nods around the circle. No one said anything. That wasn’t their way. They observed. They saw everything.
Locke stirred. “What are you thinking, captain?”
She looked at him, hiding her surprise. They always stepped away from the men when they were conferring. He never exposed her like this.
Locke’s gaze was steady. His brow lifted.
Everyone, she realized, was waiting for her to answer, their attention sharp. Including Adán.
She made herself relax. “We still need to find the cobalt, only I’m starting to think we won’t find the core in a neat little lump anymore. I’ve been playing it in my mind. They brought the core over from where they first got it and dumped it a hundred meters down at the end of a rope, so it wouldn’t show up on monitors. They had to do it because they weren’t ready to take it to where they needed it. The place or the equipment wasn’t ready.”
“Equipment for what?” Donaldson asked, voicing the obvious question for everyone.
“To make the bomb,” Adán said.
Everyone looked at him.
Adán grimaced. “Doomed City,” he said, his tone apologetic.
“Shit, yeah,” Amos said. “The dirty bomb in San Francisco that Smokey Silva stops from going off.”
Adán nodded. “Radioactive isotopes are metals. They’re in a big mass. Dirty bombs can’t spray a big lump of metal around, so the ore must be broken down. Shaved or ground, usually. It lets the radioactive material spread as far as possible when the bomb goes off.”
Odesky shook his head. “We’re in the middle of nothing up here. They’d have to build a buried bunker with fail safes and fences and a shit ton of remote handling equipment for a job like that. We’ve been all over the area…there’s nothing here or we would have found it.”
Parris’ gut clenched. “You don’t need all that equipment if you’ve got people who can do it for you.” Her heart thudded unhappily.
Odesky looked as though he had swallowed rotting fish. “People can’t do it. They’d all die from radiation sickness.”
“Yes, they would,” Parris breathed.
Adán groaned. “The missing people.” He hung his head. “They’re using Vistarians to build the bomb.”
The silence throbbed.
“We gotta find this thing, captain,” Rockman said softly. “We gotta find the people.”
Parris nodded. “Odesky, you said twelve feet of concrete shields Cobalt 60. Would twelve feet of rock do the same?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“Shit,” Donaldson breathed. “A cave.”
“A cave,” Parris confirmed.
“We know they didn’t carry the core overland,” Ramirez pointed out. “We’d have seen traces all over the goddam forest if they had and there was nothing.”
“It was heavy, even without the container,” Parris said. “I think they would have let natural buoyancy do the heavy lifting. I think they used a boat—a bigger one than the little dinghy they left behind. A faster one with an outboard, perhaps. Adán, you said you don’t know the land this far north, but do you know if there is a cave that is accessible only by sea?”
Adán lifted his head. “Dozens of them,” he said, his tone strained. “The whole top end is riddled with them. Seals live in them. Naturalists love the place.”
“Not for the next hundred years they won’t,” Donaldson muttered.
“Stow it, Donny,” Locke said.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Locke, the map,” Parris said.
Locke pulled a folded map from his thigh pocket and spread it on the sand in front of her. Everyone gathered around.
Parris focused on the tip of the island. It looked like a sharp point, only the scale of the map was high. She glanced at the scale and measured the tip with her eye. “About five miles across at the tip. It’s a lot of ground for twenty of us to cover. Although, the scanners will zero in for us. There will be a trace for them to find. If they’re using people, there will be a landward entrance and it should light up the dial like a Christmas tree.” She divided the map and assigned teams to each section.
Adán cleared his throat.
Parris
looked up.
He wore an apologetic expression again. “I don’t want to step on toes…”
“You’ve got a stake in this, too,” Parris told him. “Everyone does. That’s why I’m doing this here and not off conferring with Locke in my office. Speak freely.”
“Wouldn’t scanning the cliffs from the sea be easier?” he asked.
“Miles easier,” she said. “Except the only boat we have is a dinky rowboat. We don’t have the time it would take to row the length of the cliffs. There’s twenty miles of them, judging from the map.”
Adán nodded. “I just happen to know where there is a larger dinghy just lying on a beach waiting for someone to grab it. One that takes more than four and has a ninety horse power outboard motor attached to it.”
Parris sat up. “Where?” she demanded.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Dawn in thirty minutes!” Duardo shouted so Flores could hear him over the top of the ceaseless cracking of rifles and whine of bullets. The twelve men behind the sandbags were doing a superb job of looking and sounding as though the full weight of the Loyalist army was still hunkered down up here.
Flores looked at his watch and nodded. “Let’s go!”
Duardo signaled to Captain Altira. Altira nodded and gave him a thumbs up, then turned back to firing one of the five rifles he had spread out across ten meters of sandbags. He pulled the trigger, moved on to the next rifle, sighted and fired and moved on again.
Duardo and Flores jogged in a big circle around the rear of the smelter shed. They ducked from bushes to rocks to trees, until they reached the sandy, steep goat track down to the sliver of shoreline at the foot of the cliff.
They strode down the track, the sand shifting under their feet and speeding them on their way as their footing slipped and slid downward.
Ten thousand years ago, the main island and the Big Rock had once been one island, until a stream had run across the land and chewed a shallow channel across the width. Rain and wind had worked through time to wear the channel into a steep-sided chasm that eventually reached down to sea level, when the water rushed through it to form a new island off the tip of Vistaria.
The channel was a frothing churn of seawater only twenty meters across. It could have been a hundred miles across, for all the difference it made. Even though the two armies could reach out and shoot each other across the chasm, the little ribbon of water was uncrossable. The surge and rips that tore through the channel would sweep any swimmer or non-powered craft straight out into the Pacific.
Daniel and Garrett’s guerilla unit had destroyed the bridge that joined the two islands for over a hundred years. Now girders and concrete and iron rebars the width of a man’s wrist made the water look like a bowl of chunky cereal. Ten meters of frothing white sea tore through the middle.
Lieutenant Juarez stood at the bottom of the goat track, waiting for Flores and Duardo.
“All set!” he reported. “Keep to the right, sirs. Two feet that way, you’re in sight of the Insurrecto rifles.”
To confirm his statement, a slug pounded into the steep slope to Duardo’s left. Even down here, two hundred feet below the rifle lines, the crack and bang of guns was loud.
Duardo hugged the rock beside him and lifted his cellphone and punched the “send” button on the text he had thumbed out two hours ago.
The image of a thumb jerking upward appeared.
He put the phone away. “We’re committed,” he told Flores.
“It’s more than time,” Flores declared. He pulled his chest armor straight and put on his helmet. “How long?” he asked and hefted his assault rifle.
A deep, throbbing roar of many motors rose, echoing off the vertical walls of the channel. “Now,” Duardo said.
They leaned as far out from the wall as they dared, to peer around the slope at the north end of the channel.
Fifteen boats were making their way at top speed toward the narrow channel. Top speed was not what it used to be. The boats were the bulk of the fledgling Loyalist navy. The troops had been working on them for the last two days. Soldered and welded iron armor all over their tops and fronts and their left hand flanks weighed them down.
The hurricane, then days ago, had scattered iron sheeting across the island. It laid on the ground like scattered leaves. Now it had been refashioned into plate armor.
The fishing boats and pleasure cruisers drew together as the channel narrowed.
There were cries from the Insurrectos, above, as the boats were spotted. Guns fired a staccato fusillade. The slugs bounced off the armor with sour whines. The boats kept up their wallowing speed, the motors revving hard to move the extra weight on each boat.
Duardo reminded himself to breath as he watched the fifteen craft cram together into the narrow channel and keep moving.
The speed was enough, as he had hoped it would be. The phalanx of armored boats hit the wreckage of the bridge and grounded themselves upon it with a crunch of wood and a scraping and ding of metal hulls buckling. The boats in the ten meter channel jammed together, their propellers whining, their sides crunching and splintering.
Flores grimaced.
Duardo patted his shoulder.
In planning sessions, when Duardo had first proposed deliberately wrecking the boats to make a bridge, Flores had been appalled. “They are our transports!” he had cried.
“All the more reason to use them this way,” Duardo replied. “There is no going back now, General. If we retreat, if we give up even a yard of territory, then we will lose.”
As the wrecked ships settled, grinding against each other, Juarez signaled. From farther along the ten-foot slice of beachhead at the base of the cliff came a file of Loyalists, armed and armored, running at full speed for the first of the moored boats. They clambered into the boat, while the Insurrectos fired uselessly at the iron plating that shielded them. Duardo watched as the file of soldiers turned into a river of figures pouring over the side of the boat, then clambering into the next one, then the next.
The personnel who had piloted the boats picked up their own guns and joined the river.
On the other side of the channel, another goat track lead up to the flat ground at the top of the cliff. Quickly now, the Insurrectos would spot the vulnerability and take action to halt the Loyalists from climbing up the cliff.
Only, Duardo and Flores had anticipated every possible Insurrecto response, two days ago. There were snipers behind the Loyalist sandbags with rocket and grenade launchers to discourage Insurrecto attempts to rush the head of the track. Every man swarming up the cliff was armed with blades and guns and a determination to win through, no matter what.
This was the crunch point.
“Time to go,” Flores declared.
They rushed down the last few feet of goat track and joined their men.
* * * * *
The trek to the beach where Adán had been found by the village guerillas, Jose and his people, took the rest of the night. Parris kept them at a jog-walk-trot pace to cover the ground as quickly as possible, while she juggled strategies in her head. The coming day presented a challenge but there was no help for it. They could not stop now. She didn’t think her unit would want to stop.
The men chewed jerky and drank energy drinks as they jogged. They had left their gear in the gully, covered over. Locke stayed as a nominal guard and coordinator, with two others to spell him. At first, Parris had decided Adán should stay with Locke, only she could not do without Adán’s local knowledge. It would be critical now. Instead, she had Locke give Adán his armor.
The unit ran with as little as possible to weigh them down. They used the narrow dirt road labeled “Coastal Highway 1” on the map. There was no time to pass silently through the land and ease through trees. They met no one on the road, though. It was as if everyone had left the area, instinctively escaping trouble.
The large boat was still there. It laid on its side, the metal hull glinting in the first rays of the sun. Th
e man Adán had called Joaquim was beside it, the arrow jutting from his throat and his sightless eyes filmed over. They dragged the body into the tree line, then flipped the boat back onto the keel and dragged it to the water.
The motor fired up with a deep burbling note that promised plenty of power.
“Everyone in,” she called. “Let’s go.”
Everyone found a seat. Everyone faced forward, even Adán. They were eager to finish this.
“There’s a quarter tank of fuel,” Ramirez reported.
“One pass should be all we need to find the place. After that, the motor will be too loud to use, anyway.”
They cut through the water at a speed that lifted the nose of the boat and bounced them over the waves with flat slapping sounds. The coastline they had spent two hours running along slipped by in a blur. The solid cliffs lifted up from a rocky headland at the end of the last bay, climbing like stairs, rising higher and higher. As they curved to the west, wet rocks thrust out like jagged teeth before a massive headland.
Ramirez slowed down, bringing the boat in closer to the rocks. Close enough so they could hear the slap of the water against them and the suck of surf as waves surged between them.
Odesky had the large scanner on his knees, his gaze on the dials, as Ramirez steered the boat along the edge.
“There’s a cave,” Donaldson murmured, pointing. “Right on the water, too.”
“That’s not it,” Parris said, eyeing the rocks between the cave mouth and the open sea.
“Yessir,” Donaldson replied.
“The cave they used has to be accessible by boat,” Adán told him. “They floated the core right inside.”
Twenty minutes later, they found the cave.
Parris sat up, staring at the tall crack in the rocks that widened at the waterline into a twenty foot chasm. At the same time, Odesky clicked with his fingers, his gaze on the scanner. He held up the scanner. “They’re here.”
“Now what, Captain?” Ramirez said.
She cocked her rifled. “We go in.”
The boat tilted and turned as Ramirez lined the prow up with the crack in the cave and opened the throttle.
Casualties of War Page 25