by David Weber
The one question in Chiawa's mind, the concern that awoke a tiny kernel of internal doubt, was the way they were doing it. Gyangtse was a planet where people who gave their word were expected to keep it . . . even when they gave it to criminals and traitors.
None of which mattered very much at this point, he reflected. He sat for a moment longer, then nodded to his communications tech.
"Send the execute," he said.
"Yes, Sir!" the corporal said crisply, and keyed his microphone.
"All units, this is the command post. Execute Scoop," he said clearly. The transmission went out over the militia's radio net, because it simply hadn't been possible to establish landline connections to all of Chiawa's people.
"I say again," the corporal repeated. "Execute Scoop."
". . . cute Scoop."
Ang Jangmu Thaktu's head snapped up as her com unit picked up the transmission. The GLF had its sympathizers even in the ranks of the militia. Even if it hadn't, there was always a militiaman somewhere who needed a little extra money and was prepared to "lose" equipment for the right price. Which was the reason her com was official militia issue, with the same signal encryption protocols as the one Captain Chiawa's com tech had just spoken over.
Thaktu had no way of actually knowing what the code word "Scoop" signified, but she could think of at least one ominous application of that particular verb. More to the point, she hadn't picked up a single hint of its existence from any of their militia sympathizers, nor a single scrap of communications chatter up to the moment the order to execute the operation was transmitted, which represented far tighter security than the militia normally achieved. There had to be a reason for that, and she snatched up her own civilian com.
"It's a trap!" she barked. "It's a trap! Breakout! I repeat, Breakout!"
Namkha Pasang Pankarma froze between one step and another as the doors to the elevator at the end of the hall slid smoothly open. The uniformed militiamen in the elevator car sat behind a tripod-mounted calliope, and the multi-barreled autocannon was aimed straight at him. At almost the same instant, four more doors opened—two on each side of the corridor—and more militiamen, armed with combat rifles, appeared in them.
"This is Captain Chiawa, of the Planetary Militia," a hard voice announced over the luxury hotel's intercom system. "You are surrounded. You are also under arrest, as directed by President Shangup in the name of the Planetary Government, for treason and the commission of terroristic acts. I call upon you now to surrender, or face the consequences."
Pankarma simply stood there, unable to believe what was happening. Despite Ang Jangmu's fears, despite his own reservations, he'd never anticipated anything like this. Surely even idiots like Jongdomba and Shangup knew better than to violate a promise of safe conduct this way!
"You will surrender now," Chiawa's amplified voice said harshly. "If you do not, we will employ deadly force."
Sergeant Lakshindo nodded to the troopers of his militia squad.
"You heard the man," he said. "Let's go!"
The squad filed out of its place of concealment in the Annapurna Arms' basement and took up its planned position to cover the hotel's main entrance. That entrance led to the hallway in which, Lakshindo knew, the GLF delegation was being taken into custody at that very moment, and under Captain Chiawa's ops plan, Lakshindo's squad was responsible for crowd control and for blocking the only possible path of retreat for Pankarma and his fellows. They were also supposed to be alert for any external threat, though exactly what sort of "external threat" they might face was more than Lakshindo could imagine. After all, operational security had been so tight on this one that even the members of Lakshindo's squad hadn't known what was going to happen until they reported this morning.
The sergeant stood with his back to the street, watching his people take up their posts, and grimaced in satisfaction. He would have preferred an opportunity to rehearse it all at least once, but his militiamen moved briskly, their expressions and body language calm enough to disguise their excitement from anyone who didn't know them as well as Lakshindo did.
He nodded mentally as they settled into place, then keyed his own microphone.
"Command post, Lakshindo," he said crisply. "We're in position."
"Command post copies you are in position, Sergeant," the com tech replied.
Lakshindo released the transmission key with a sense of profound relief. He'd been more than a little anxious when he was first briefed on Operation Scoop, and it was a vast relief to discover that his anxiety had been misplaced.
"Excuse me, Sergeant?" a voice said politely.
Lakshindo turned to the man who'd spoken. It was one of the reporters, he saw, taking in the other's press badge and the camera crew behind him.
"Yes, Sir? Can I help you?" Lakshindo said, equally politely, mindful of Captain Chiawa's admonition that everything had to be kept as calm and low-key as possible.
"Could you tell me what's happening?" the newsy asked, extending a microphone in Lakshindo's direction.
"I'm afraid not," Lakshindo replied. "Not yet, at any rate. I understand a statement will be issued shortly by Brigadier Jongdomba's headquarters. In the meantime, however, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to step back from the lobby entry."
"Of course, Sergeant," the reporter said, with a respectful nod.
He stepped back and to the side, gesturing for his camera crew to follow him. But the cameraman and his two assistants appeared to have been taken by surprise by the gesture. They started to follow their newsy, but as the cameraman turned hastily, he bumped into the closer of his assistants and dropped his camera. It hit the pavement and shattered, and the sudden disaster to such an expensive piece of equipment drew Lakshindo's eye like a magnet.
Which was why the sergeant was looking in exactly the wrong direction as both the cameraman's assistants produced sawed-off combat rifles from under their jackets and opened fire.
Lakshindo felt the impact of at least half a dozen rounds. The tungsten-cored penetrators of the discarding sabot ammunition penetrated his antiballistic, unpowered armor effortlessly at such point-blank range. The sledgehammer blows battered him backwards, and he went down, eyes huge with disbelieving shock and agony as the penetrators—tumbling after slamming through his armor—shredded his heart and lungs.
The rest of his squad was frozen in total disbelief. They were still staring, brains numbed by the shock of their sergeant's sudden, brutally efficient murder, when the cameraman and reporter produced their own machine pistols. Then all four of the "newsies" opened fire, even as two nondescript civilian vans screeched to a halt and at least a dozen more armed men and women began erupting from each of them.
Three of Lakshindo's troopers actually managed to return fire before they died. None of them hit anything, and as the last of them was slammed to the ground, Ang Jangmu Thaktu led her attack force across their bodies and into the building.
Chapter Seven
Serafina Palacios was in the middle of a conference with her company commanders when the com on her desk beeped softly.
"Just a second, Kevin."
She raised one hand in Captain Trammell's direction, then activated the com implant in her mastoid instead of walking across to her desk.
"Palacios," she said. She listened for a moment, and Trammell and the other company COs watched with casual curiosity—which became abruptly uncasual as she stiffened suddenly in her chair.
"Repeat that!" she said sharply, then shook her head as if the person at the other end of the com link could actually see her disbelief. "And then?" she prompted. She listened again, then said, "They did what?"
"No," she said after a moment. "No, I believe you. I only wish I didn't. All right. This is going to turn into the mother of all clusterfucks, and it's going to do it fast. I've got all the company commanders right here. I'll pass the heads-up to them and get them back to their companies ASAP. In the meantime, get all of our people stood to. Transmit the Bloc
khouse alert now—my authority."
The five captains sitting in her office looked at one another. Then they looked back at her, as her eyes refocused on them.
"I take it you heard," she said in a desert-dry tone.
"Blockhouse, Ma'am?" Trammell asked for all of them, and she nodded grimly.
"Our esteemed militia colleagues have just screwed the pooch by the numbers." Her tone was no longer dry; it was harsh, biting. "Not that they didn't have help. It would appear that Governor Aubert's invitation to Mr. Pankarma wasn't issued in good faith after all."
"Jesus," somebody muttered, and Trammell pursed his lips in a silent whistle.
"That's right," Palacios said. "When Pankarma and his delegation arrived at the Annapurna Arms, Brigadier Jongdomba had Colonel Sharwa's regiment waiting to arrest them in the name of the planetary government."
"After they promised safe conduct?" Trammell sounded like a man who very much wanted to disbelieve what he was hearing.
"Ah, but they didn't," Palacios said bitingly. Trammell and the others just looked at her, and she laughed harshly. "Governor Aubert promised them safe conduct, not President Shangup. And, if you'll notice, the military forces directly answerable to the Governor as His Majesty's representative—that's us, by the way—had nothing to do with the arrest attempt."
"And who's going to believe Shangup and Jongdomba would even have dreamed of doing something like this without Aubert's approval?" Captain Adriana Becker, Bravo Company's CO, demanded incredulously. But Kevin Trammell had zeroed in on another part of Palacios' terse explanation.
"You said 'attempt,' Skipper," he said. "Please tell me they at least managed to pull it off."
"No, they didn't." Palacios shook her head, her expression equally disgusted and apprehensive. "Apparently the GLF wasn't quite as trusting as Governor Aubert—excuse me, as President Shangup—hoped. They had a strike force of their own ready, and they must've been tapped into the militia's com net. They came crashing in while the militia were still trying to take Pankarma's party into custody."
"How bad was it, Ma'am?" Captain Schapiro asked softly.
"We don't have much in the way of details yet, Chaim," Palacios told Delta Company's commander. "What we do have, though, sounds pretty damned bad. Apparently, the GLF punched out an entire militia squad on its way in—no survivors. Then they shot their way through another couple of squads to pull Pankarma out. But about the time they got there, the idiots who'd been trying to arrest Pankarma in the first place, seem to have opened fire themselves. According to the preliminary reports, they killed a half-dozen or more of their own people, but they did manage to kill at least half of the GLF delegation, as well . . . including Pankarma."
"My God." Captain Kostatina Diomedes shook her head, her face ashen. "The GLF will go up like an old-fashioned nuke!"
"And a good chunk of the rest of the planet will be right behind them," Palacios agreed grimly. Then she shook herself. "All right. All of you know everything I know at this point. Get back to your companies—now. I'll pass everything else I get to you the instant I have it. Now go, people."
She watched her subordinates gather up their computer chips and memo pads and head for the door. Most of them went straight through it at something between a brisk jog and a run, but Trammell paused in the doorway and looked back at her.
"Yes, Kevin?" she said.
"Boss," he said quietly, "you went to Blockhouse on your own authority."
"Yes, I did," she said flatly. Then she inhaled and gave her head a little toss. "Sorry, Kevin. I know what you meant. But there's no time to clear it with Aubert ahead of time—assuming that asshole Salgado would even let me talk to him in the first place! Besides, this whole fucking mess is the result of their brainstorm, and it's obvious they went to considerable lengths to lay the blame off on the militia and Shangup if anything went wrong."
"But, still —" Trammell began.
"No." She cut him off with a sharp shake of her head. "I know what you're going to say, and I can't risk it. Right this minute, they're probably in a state of shock over there. And you know as well as I do that the only thing they're going to be thinking about right now is how to save their own asses. Their first instinct is going to be to try to keep their heads down and let someone else—anyone else—take the fall. Which means they're going to be busy trying to shove all of this off on Jongdomba, too. And Jongdomba couldn't organize a bottle party in a distillery on this kind of notice. Or do you actually think he had a contingency plan in place for something like this? Because, if you do, I've got some nice beachfront property on the Mare Imbrium I'd like to sell you!"
Trammell opened his mouth in fresh protest, then closed it. For just a moment he was deeply, selfishly—and guiltily—grateful that he wasn't in command of the battalion.
"No, Ma'am," he said. "I don't think the militia ever even heard of contingency planning. But going to Blockhouse without the Governor's authorization is going to raise a shitstorm. If anything—anything at all—goes wrong, Aubert's going to try to hang you for it."
"My mother always told me the real test of anyone's character was the enemies they made," Palacios said with a cold smile. "I'll take my chances, Kevin. Now, go."
"Yes, Ma'am."
Trammell surprised them both by coming briefly to attention and saluting formally. Then he obeyed her order and vanished.
Captain Karsang Dawa Chiawa stood in the corpse-littered hallway and stared about him in shock.
This wasn't supposed to happen, his brain told him numbly. They were supposed to surrender!
But they hadn't.
"Sir." He looked up dully from the contorted bodies and the death-stench of ruptured organs and blood. Somehow, he thought distantly, it was the smells, far more than the sights, which were going to live in his nightmares.
"Yes?" he said.
"Sir," his com tech resolutely looked away from the bodies himself as he held out a handset, "Colonel Sharwa wants to speak to you."
Oh, I'll just bet he does, Chiawa thought bitterly, but he only nodded and held out his own hand.
"Chiawa here, Colonel," he said into the handset.
"Chiawa, you fucking idiot!" Sharwa bellowed into his ear. "What the hell did you think you were doing?!"
"Colonel, I —" Chiawa began, without much hope that he'd be allowed to finish the sentence.
"Shut the fuck up!" Sharwa shouted. "I don't want to hear any goddamned excuses! It was a simple enough mission, and now, thanks to your fuckup, God only knows what's going to happen!"
Chiawa shut his mouth and gritted his teeth while the com rattled against his ear.
"Just how bad is it?" the colonel continued.
"Sir, I've lost at least thirty men," Chiawa said harshly. "They ambushed my outer security squad—apparently they had their own armed people mixed in with the newsies." The newsies which you specifically told me we couldn't bar from the hotel approaches without "giving away the game," he thought bitterly. "Then at least another twenty or thirty of their people shot their way into the hotel. I lost more of my people on their way in, and several members of the hotel staff were killed or wounded in the crossfire. And —" he drew a deep breath "— Pankarma's group hadn't surrendered when the shooting started outside. I'm not sure exactly what happened. According to one of my people, one of the GLF delegates produced a pistol. I don't know if that's true. If it is, I haven't seen the gun yet. But whatever happened, my people opened fire."
"You mean —?" Sharwa seemed unable to complete the question, and Chiawa's lips twitched in a humorless smile.
"I mean Pankarma himself is dead, Sir," he said flatly. "At least half his 'delegation' is also dead."
"But you have the others in custody," Sharwa said.
"No, Sir. I don't." Chiawa turned, looking away from the bodies and the puddles and pools of gummy blood. "The gunmen coming in from the outside shot their way through to the 'delegation' too quickly for that. As far as I know, they got all of th
e survivors—some of whom may have been wounded—out with them."
"Shit!" Sharwa exploded. "Couldn't you do any fucking thing right? Now the bastards know their precious leader is dead, or at least wounded, and we don't have a single goddamned bargaining chip!"
"Sir, when this operation was planned, I was assured that —"
"Shut up! Just shut the fuck back up!"
"Sir," Chiawa continued, despite the order, "however we got here, the situation is coming completely apart. We need more —"
"I told you to shut your trap, Captain." Sharwa's voice was suddenly icy. "Of course you want more men. And just what in your brilliant handling of the situation to date suggests to you that I'd trust you with a kindergarten class? If I give you more men, you'll just make this disaster even worse!"
"Sir, we've got to get a mobilization order out before —" Chiawa began, then looked up as Lieutenant Nawa came running into the hallway.
"We've got trouble out front!" Nawa was breathing hard, his eyes wide. "The crowd's getting ugly. They're starting to throw bricks and paving stones. And they're demanding to see Pankarma—now."
Chiawa closed his eyes. Then he opened them again, held up one hand at Nawa in a "wait" gesture, and drew a deep breath.
"Colonel," he said into the handset, interrupting a further tirade. "The mob —" he used the noun deliberately, hoping it might break through to Sharwa "—outside the hotel is turning violent. And it's demanding to see Pankarma."
"And what the hell do you expect me to do about that?" Sharwa demanded. "You're the genius who killed the bastard! If a mob's gathering, disperse it!"
"Sir, I don't know if that's the best approach," Chiawa began. "If we —"
"Goddamn it, Chiawa! Get some people out there and get those sons-of-bitches under control! I don't care how you do it, Captain, but you damned well better do it now!"