“Everything alright, sir?” he called.
“Yeah, we’re fine,” Alonzo shouted back. Gesturing to two men who hadn’t yet boarded trucks.
“Open the gate, you two.”
It seemed to take forever for them to push the gate open wide enough to get a truck through. The moment it did, Dashratha hit the gas – simultaneously with two of the other three trucks.
“Fucking go,” Mullins snarled, gesturing at the one on the right. It had almost collided with his.
That truck moved forward, Alonzo climbing in as it headed out the gates. Then another truck, and then the driver of the last one gestured for Dashratha to go ahead.
Heart pounding, Mullins watched the huge Rajput drive his truck forwards. Followed by the last one.
“Lieutenant Gorman?” one of the guards outside the gate asked. Going in.
“Oh, shit!” he exclaimed a moment later.
From somewhere came the sound of high-powered engines. Alarms started to wail.
Alonzo leaned out the window of his lead truck as it started to power across the landing grounds.
“Hey, Army motherfuckers!” he shouted. “Semper fucking fi, assholes!”
***
Oh shit, thought Croft, watching the whole cargo area on the other side of the landing grounds light up. Floodlights coming on everywhere. He could distantly see figures running around in the new light. We’re under attack.
Should I do something?
He had about a hundred and seventy-five men here. True, they were as green as he was and only had one magazine apiece, but there were a hundred and seventy-five of them.
He looked at Sergeant Gonzalez, who seemed completely unconcerned.
Why?
“What’s going on over there, Sergeant? You know?”
Gonzalez shrugged.
“Probably just some Colonial Guard drill, sir.”
“You sure?”
“They’ve got a barracks right over there. Whole battalion of `em, the ones who guard the freight depot.”
“I think I saw that building. Didn’t look big enough for a company to live in, and they’ve got a battalion there?”
“Short-term posting, sir. Besides, at any given time, half or more are riding trains. Protecting `em against guerillas.”
“I hear the CGs aren’t worth much,” Croft said, more for the sake of making conversation than anything else.
“The ones here aren’t worth shit, sir,” said Gonzalez. “They take bribes, they steal, they sell their weapons to the enemy – you name it. Do yourself a favor, sir, and never give information to CGs unless you want Buddy to have it within the hour.”
“There’s no good ones?”
“Sure, there’s a few vetted and competent units. Lifers, not short-termers doing their two years because they can’t afford to pay the exemption. They’re all in Richmond. Governor Harris won’t send `em away unless he has damn good reason.”
“Incidentally, where the hell is Alonzo and his working party? I should have asked exactly where they’d be, for the sake of communication. God damn it – they didn’t bring their weapons with them. What if the terrorists are up to something?”
Gonzalez shrugged.
“I’m sure they’re fine, sir,” he said.
***
“What the hell?” Skorzy demanded, as the four trucks burst through the gate of the target compound. His team was just approaching, carefully skirting through the dark railyards.
“Semper fucking fi, assholes!” he heard someone shout from one of the trucks. Then all four raced across the landing grounds, heading for the roadside loading docks on the other side.
Marines? What the hell are Marines doing here? There shouldn’t be Marines within five hundred miles!
No time to think. Those asshole jarheads had blown everything.
“We go ahead anyway?” one of the men asked Calhoun. “Gate’s wide open!”
Calhoun shook his head, then looked at Skorzy.
“We get the fuck out of here,” Skorzy snapped, as a low thumping sound began. Quickly getting louder – helicopter blades.
“Why?” one of the men asked.
Moron.
And again, what the hell are Marines doing in Godfrey’s Landing?
***
“OK, boys,” said Alonzo. They’d driven the trucks in a wide circuit back around the shuttleport to some dark loading docks at the rail terminal. It seemed that Godfrey’s main railyard had been built right next to the shuttleport, which made sense.
Except that they were now, again, within half a mile of the place they’d just raided. Attack helicopters flew overhead, rotors beating the air in a steady thup-thup-thup pattern; loud engines and shouting.
“You did a good job, but we ain’t done yet.”
Alonzo was ripping the stenciled US Army insignia off the truck doors – it seemed to have been done on thin sheets of plastic, which tore away easily. Someone went to help him.
“Get those covers off the damn trucks – fold `em up and put `em in the cabs,” he said. “They’re gonna be looking east in the direction we ran, not west. But in case someone blunders down this way, they’re going to be looking for trucks with covers on back. So pull the fuckin’ things off. Tarpaulins under the passenger seats – throw those under the crates. Then get your proper clothes back on.”
Mullins began frantically unbuckling the sections of cover from his side of the nearest truck. Someone else joined him, and soon the cover came off. It’d been held in place by eight broad iron bits of framework.
God, if we get caught, we are so, so, so fucked. Alonzo tased an officer. Repeatedly. That’s – God, it’s assault on a superior officer and the different branch doesn’t matter a fucking damn. And we were all accessories to that.
The thought made him redouble his speed; he helped to spread a bright blue tarpaulin over the crates that filled the back of the truck. Someone tossed him a length of cord and he tied it down, running the cord through brass rings on the edge of the tarpaulin.
“We’re going to load these onto the train tomorrow?” Andrews asked, when all the work was done.
“I’ll take care of that,” said Alonzo. “We’ll need most of a boxcar if we’re to put `em all on board, but that shouldn’t be hard to organize. Freight office is used to rush orders, and Buddy doesn’t seem to care much about fucking up boxcars. I’ll have guys from Division do the loading. If they don’t feel like they’ve earned their ten percent, they’ll want an even bigger slice.”
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