by Steve Perry
“Wh-wh-what is it you want from m-m-me?”
She smiled.
~ * ~
Time for a strategy-and-tactics meeting.
Cutter stood near the doorway in the temp HQ, leaning against the wall. There was a story to that, Jo was sure, why he liked to stand, and by the door, but he’d never told it. Just like there was one about why he was called Rags. Gramps knew that one, supposedly, but he wouldn’t tell it, he’d just laugh and shake his head.
The place still had a faint chemical odor the air coolers hadn’t filtered out, and the air was too dry, but it was comfortable enough.
It was her show, and she nodded at the core group. “Okay. What you found out, what you think it means. Gramps?”
Gramps said, “There are people whose pockets fill with NDs if the Rajah is occupied. I got a list and ran checks on them, but I don’t see anybody who leaps out. The Rajah is apparently an easygoing sort, but not when it comes to his family. If he finds who is responsible for his daughter’s being grabbed, they are dead, their families are going to forfeit any property they own in his kingdom, and their asses will be kicked across the continent. You’d need to make a shit-load of money to make that risk worthwhile.
“Meanwhile, I got some stuff on the Thakore Ilmay Luzor. While Rama might consider him vile and despicable, he doesn’t seem to be much worse or better than any of the rulers on this world. Prince of a fellow or scum of the galaxy, depends on who’s telling the story and their connection to it.
“Luzor has several palaces in his country, and a couple of them are far enough out of the way that he could stash somebody there without the locals catching it. Pretty much it.”
Jo nodded. “Formentara?”
“The state of augmentation on this world is primitive. Most of the locals don’t hold with it—manly men and womanly women consider it a crutch they’d rather not use. If Brahma had wanted them to see into the infrared, then he would have given them different eyes, blatha-blatha, that kind of crap.”
Zhe smiled. “What this means is that Luzor’s Army is basic stock, and save for a few bodyguards, whose identities are kept secret, the chance of running into somebody faster or stronger than we are is small.
“However, Luzor, it is rumored, has had some modification of his sexual gear, so that he is somewhat larger and more potent than once he was.”
“Still hope for you, Gramps.”
Gramps looked at Gunny and shook his head. “I can give you testimonials, kid.”
“From your paid companions?” Her smile was sweet as it could be.
Gramps laughed.
Point to Gunny.
Jo said, “Gunny. You’re talking. Keep going.”
Gunny nodded. “My contact allows as how the marriage between Rama and Indira is political. If it follows custom, they will smile and hold hands in public, wave at parade-goers and festival attendees, produce a couple of heirs, but have private lives behind closed doors if they want. She seems to like him more than she needs to, though Ah can’t tell how he feels. Word is, he’s a bad boy, and the fems line up to fall under him.”
“Yep, us bad boys, we get the women,” Gramps said.
It was Gunny’s turn to laugh.
“Makes you wonder if Rama’s rage against her kidnappers is anything other than his ego being stepped on.” That from Wink. “How dare somebody insult me thus!”
“Something to consider,” Jo said.
Gunny continued: “Rama is apparently a bully, hides behind his rank.
“Luzor has a couple of favorite watering holes, one of which is next to his summer palace in the highlands. Somebody spotted him there day before yesterday.”
“Could mean Indira is nearby if he has her,” Gramps ventured.
“Or that she’s across the country, and he’s giving us something to look at,” Jo said. “Table that, we’ll get back to it.
“Doc?”
“Luzor seems to be in good health. His vices are mostly those of heteromale adults. Has three wives and four mistresses, ten kids. No animals, aliens, nor children in his bed. He drinks a little, tokes some, eats well enough so he’s carrying a few kilos padding. Like to gamble, bets on windskiff races, and has a distillery where he likes to tinker with liquor, mostly blended whiskey. “
Jo waited, but Wink was done. She turned to look at Kay.
Kay said, “The kidnapped girl is supposedly being held at a hunting lodge in the foothills of the Rudra mountain range along this country’s borders with Pahal and Balaji. I do not have the PPS coordinates, but I have the name of a nearby body of water, Lake Om.”
“What?” That from Rags.
It was followed by a chorus of overlapping fuck-me and aw-shit comments from the rest of the group.
“You couldn’t have just said that before we all prattled on?” Wink said.
“It was not my turn to speak,” she said.
Jo chuckled, and most of the rest of them did the same, or at least grinned. Good that the deadliest being on the planet was so polite, hey?
“How did you get this?”
“There are Rel here. I asked one of them, and he told me.”
“You believe him?”
“Yes. Rel are prey.”
“Oh, well, sure, I guess that explains it,” Gramps said.
“Prey cannot help themselves. They will give up anything to avoid being killed and eaten. The Rel knew that had I caught him in a lie, he would be in trouble.”
“Would you have done that?” Jo asked.
“I would not have eaten him. I do not care for the taste of Rel.”
Jo didn’t ask the obvious question: How Kay knew what Rel tasted like.
Some of the others exchanged amused looks. Yeah. They heard what she said, and understood the implications. Must have eaten at least part of one ...
“Any information about who is holding her?”
“The Rel did not have details. He had the basic information from a fellow Rel who got it somewhere unknown. That one is no longer in the area, else I would have questioned him.”
I bet you would have. “Well, then,” Jo said. “We have a focus. Let’s find out everything we can about this hunting lodge.”
~ * ~
ELEVEN
One of the things that a small private military force needs to know how to do is gather intel, and CFI was as good at it as anybody. It didn’t take long to find out what was available on the area; they had tapped into weathersats, the local computer nets, and now they were gathered around a projected map of that part of the world.
The overview was enough for them to see the green of giant forests and of an inland sea and several large lakes and rivers.
“All right,” Jo said, “here’s the place. This is the spysat feed from twenty thousand klicks. That is Lake Om, on the border with New Mumbai, Pahal, and Balaji. These are the Rudra Mountains, and it’s in the northern reach of the Sanvi Forest—or the southern arm of the Kadam Forest, depending on how you want to look at it.
“There is apparently some disagreement as to whether Lake Om is in Pahal or Balaji—the Pahali claim it, so do the Balajians. It has apparently changed hands a couple of times in the last thirty years.
Jo nodded at the map. “Zoom, one centimeter to one thousand meters.”
The map expanded to a closer view.
“It’s rugged territory. Hilly, old-growth forest, only one road along the shore of the lake, and only a couple linking that to anywhere. Military border guards on both sides keep a fragile peace at the moment, and they have been known to throw stuff at each other every now and then.”
“Border duty sucks,” Gunny said. “Easy to get killed by a bored sniper.”
“Zoom, one centimeter to three hundred meters.
“There is the only structure deemed a hunting lodge on the lake’s southern shore. There are five fishing lodges, and several summer homes, but because of the dispute, none of these are supposed to be in use, so if somebody is there, either the
y sneaked in, or they have somebody’s approval.”
The others nodded. Sure. They knew how that worked.
“Air traffic is restricted, and with the roads guarded, that means—”
“Crap,” Gramps said. “We’ll have to hike in.”
“If you get tired, Ah can carry you,” Gunny said.
“You think?”
“Sure, dried-up old husk like you? No problem.”
He smiled at her. “On your back?”
“Never mind, Ah rescind my offer.”
“Zoom, one centimeter to five meters.
“No vehicles parked where we can see them at the lodge, and there doesn’t seem to be any heat sig when we peep at it with IR, but if you look closely at that dirt road—full zoom—you’ll see that there is fan splash to the sides, see? And wheel tracks, too. Weather history says it rained there six days ago, four centimeters total, which is enough to have washed away fan or tire marks, so somebody drove to or from the place on that road since it rained.”
She looked around. “Anybody want to offer any suggestions on our approach?”
Nobody did; they knew how it had to go: Treetop-hugging flight to a spot far enough away to avoid being detected but close enough to get there on foot. Stay in the forest as much as possible to keep from being spotted visually by surveillance flights, some kind of bollixer to screw up DLIR or MS gear on aircraft sensors or ground sensornet, for however long it took to hike to the place. Avoid the soldiers on either side, figure out a way to breach the lodge, find the girl, and collect her without getting her or themselves killed.
Oh, and stay off the XTJC’s scopes, while they were at it. Because they sure as shit would meddle with it, just in case CFI might possibly break some law, and there were some going to be bent and busted on an operation like this, so they had a point.
They’d need a local, a guide who knew the terrain. Maps were fine, but never the territory, and what looked like an easy walk from a spycam might be a complete impossibility for a soldier on foot.
Still, this was what they did, and they were good at it. Set it up properly and turn it loose, and they could make it run.
“So, let’s lay it out,” Jo said.
~ * ~
“This here is Singh,” Gunny said, “a private in the Rajah’s Army who grew up near the border where we are going. The Rajah has lent him to us for a while.”
Wink guessed that Singh was about nineteen, if that. Either he was using depil, or didn’t need it, because he didn’t have any facial hair, as most of the older troops here seemed to have. Fresh. Still wet from the morning’s dew, but the Rajah sent him.
Jo said, “Welcome aboard, Singh. You know the territory around Lake Om?”
“Yes, Captain, sah, I was born in Vishnu Village, in the North Reach. I lived there until I joined the Honored Rajah’s Army six months ago.”
“Combat experience?” Jo asked.
“No, Captain, sah, not as yet. Eighty-eight hours sim-training.”
“Well, with any luck, we won’t see any action on this mission. In and out fast and clean.”
The boy’s smile seemed to falter a hair, and Wink figured the kid would love to see it blow up so he could shoot some enemies. Young soldiers had a lot of expectations and fantasies about how it would be and what they would do and feel. Invariably wrong, those expectations.
“We will be fielding a small strike team,” Jo continued. “Half a dozen plus yourself. We’ll be hiking, and we will want to get as close as we can by air without being detected, and stay out of sight until we achieve our objective. We need your knowledge to make this go like we want.”
“I understand, Captain, sah.”
Jo grinned. “Just call me Jo, it will make things easier. We are less formal than regular military.”
“Yes, Jo, sah.”
Wink grinned at that one.
Jo said, “You’ll stay with Gunny until we take off, she’ll acquaint you with our procedures, which might be a little different than what you are used to.”
Wink smiled bigger at that. There was an understatement. If the kid got used to how they did things, it would ruin him for any kind of regular army. And, of course, the real reason he had to stay with Gunny was for security. The Rajah might have vetted him, but once he got the particulars, they didn’t want him wandering off where he might be tempted to tell somebody about his glorious new assignment. Lot of ops had been busted because somebody bragged too soon.
Wink was going even though he wasn’t the best combatant. If somebody got tagged, or the girl was injured, they needed a medic who could function in the middle of a crap-storm, and he could do that. He could shoot well enough to hit man-sized targets nearby.
Kay appeared, as she often seemed to, from out of nowhere.
“Something?” Jo asked her.
“We are being spied upon.”
“Sure,” Jo said, “that goes without saying. Lot of eyes pointed in our direction, probably birdshit cams all over the place, sats footprinting us every hour. Fart, and an electronic ear will hear it, and an e-nose sniff it and catalog the odor.”
“These eyes are organic, and belong to the XTJC sergeant we met shortly after we began to set up camp.”
“Our friend Hothead Hosep? Really? Where is he?”
“Three kilometers to the southwest, on the roof of a temple, atop a small rise. High enough to allow him to see our buildings. He has a scope on the camp.”
Wink said, “How did you spot him?”
“I caught his scent on my patrol.”
Wink shook his head. Hard to hide from somebody who could ID you by your body odor fifty meters away.
“We could put up a balloon wall,” Gunny allowed. “Block the sucker’s view.”
“And let him know we know he is there,” Jo said, “so he can move or bring in a different watcher. No, better the devil we know than the devil we don’t.” She paused. “Might be good to give him something to wonder about.”
“If you are captured by the enemy, don’t let them give you to PsyOps,” Wink said.
“I hear that,” Gramps said.
“I think The Man in the Iron Mask,” Jo said. “Gunny, see if we have somebody who is close to a somatic match.”
“Got it.”
~ * ~
Singh, who seemed to be a likable sort, wondered what they were talking about, and Gramps elected to tell him while Gunny was off running her errand—Singh wasn’t going anywhere, and maybe they could teach the kid enough to help him stay alive in the sometimes-tricky world of the private military.
As he led the younger man to his temporary quarters, Gramps filled him in.
“Here’s the deal, Singh. When you have a spy watching, and you know it, you have an advantage if he doesn’t know that you know he’s there. So you can put on a show and he’ll buy it because he thinks he’s watching something real.
Singh nodded. “I understand. And this ... masked man?”
“L’Homme au Masque de Fer, an old Terran story. There are several versions, but the most well-known one concerns a French king who had his twin brother imprisoned, to protect his rule. He did not want to kill his sibling, but it was important that nobody knew who he was, and the tale goes that he had an iron mask made to hide his brother’s identity, and he kept him in the mask and imprisoned for life.”
“That sounds cruel.”
“It was Terra, son, cruel goes with the territory. In any event, there were people who suspected that Le Roi—the King—had done this thing, and they tried to find and reveal the prisoner’s identity.
“In one version, this happened, and the brothers were made to trade places—the King was masked and jailed and his twin freed to become the ruler, with only a few men the wiser.”
“Karma. But what has that to do with this situation?”
“Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that our spy hiding in the temple up on the hill happens to see a security detail moving a prisoner into a vehicle? This
prisoner is, say, wearing a hood so facial features are hidden, but also suppose that a somatotype scan of this action comes up with a female of a height, weight, and physique that is not too different from that of the Rajah’s daughter, Indira?”
Singh considered that for a moment. The concentration on his face faded as he got it: “A spy might think that CFI had found Indira but was keeping her for some purpose. Extortion, perhaps.”