The Caledonian Gambit: A Novel

by Dan Moren

  “Cap,” said Tapper, as Page and Kovalic joined him. “I see we’ve found our errant schoolboy.”

  Page looked flustered, which was to say he looked vaguely uncomfortable, like he’d worn an overly itchy shirt. “My fault. I should have gone in with a closer cover, kept an eye on Brody.”

  Kovalic shook his head. “That was my call, lieutenant, not yours. The blame goes on me. Any luck tracing him?”

  “I did uncover a few useful pieces of information,” Page said, pulling out a notebook. Another of the man’s anachronistic affectations—for some reason, he much preferred taking notes with pen and paper than on his comm.

  “As we knew, the property in question is deeded to The Berwick Home for Wayward Girls, at which Meghann Brody has resided for five years.” Page hesitated. “I did access their patient records—which really need better security, by the way—and she’s been diagnosed with a form of catatonia, triggered by trauma.” He gave a quick précis of her file and history: the affair with an Illyrican military officer, the pregnancy, the addiction and overdose.

  “Jesus,” said Tapper. “Poor kid.”

  Kovalic didn’t say anything, but winced inwardly. Page’s revelations were hardly news to him. Using Brody’s sister as leverage hadn’t been his choice—he’d been in favor of telling the kid everything from the start—but he’d gone along with the general’s plan anyway. He’d intended to keep Page and Tapper out of the loop on her condition; they wouldn’t like it any more than he did, but carrying that burden was his job, not theirs. Still, Kovalic sometimes worried that it was all too easy to forget that a name on a page was a person with a life and family. He cleared his throat. “What else have you got?”

  “We only took a cursory look the first time around, so I dug a bit deeper into the organization’s tax records. The chief employee—not that they have many—is a woman named Munroe. She checked out clean enough, but get this: her husband, who died about ten years ago, was Rafael Munroe. You don’t have to go very far to find out about him.” He flipped to another page in his notebook. “He was firmly in the middle of IIS’s most wanted list for the ten years before his death—one of the prime movers and shakers in the early Caledonian resistance movement by the sound of things, and rumored to be a close confidant of De Valera himself.”

  Everything seemed to circle back to the Black Watch. Kovalic scratched at his chin. He hadn’t shaved in two days and the stubble bristled under his touch. “You notice anything else while you were there?”

  A frown appeared on Page’s face. “I did a quick circle of the house when Brody first went in and noticed a man in a groundcar—I wouldn’t have marked him except he had a rather distinctive appearance. A long scar, here.” He traced a finger down the side of his jaw.

  Kovalic looked up sharply.

  “Well, what a coincidence,” said Tapper, meeting his eyes. “If I recall correctly, a man matching that description gave Brody the old heave-ho from the pub last night.”

  “We could try to find the car,” Page suggested.

  “They’ll have ditched it already,” said Kovalic, shaking his head. “Either way it certainly seems to corroborate that the Black Watch is behind Brody’s disappearance—but it doesn’t explain why. Brody can’t be a threat to them.”

  Tapper shrugged. “Maybe he went willingly?”

  Kovalic hesitated. “I don’t think so. From what Brody told us, there didn’t seem to be much love lost between him and his brother.”

  “He could have been lying,” Tapper pointed out. “Maybe this whole thing was a setup from the get-go.”

  “You’re telling me that an amateur pulled one over on all three of us?” said Kovalic, eyebrow raised. It wasn’t simply a matter of personal pride—if they’d gotten fooled by a kid who’d been stuck on an isolated backwater planet for the last five years then they might as well pack it in. “Let’s not start in on the second-guessing just yet.”

  “Abashed” wasn’t a look that showed up on Tapper’s face very often; he shrugged awkwardly.

  Kovalic glanced up at a statue of a beautiful woman whose arms flowed off into blank stumps; clearly the sculptor hadn’t had the time or inclination to finish the piece. He found it disconcerting, not least of which because he’d seen the real thing in his time, and it was never that clean. In his head he started attaching white marble hands to her, just like putting together pieces of a puzzle.

  “No, this is all about the Black Watch. They’re cooking up something,” he finally said. “They’ve got the weapons—hell, we gave them the weapons.” CID, via Danzig and Wallace, had delivered the arms shipments right into the hands of the Black Watch, apparently in exchange for the information Eamon Brody had been providing about the supposed Illyrican weapons project. And while resistance movements always needed arms, the sheer quantity and quality suggested that these weren’t simply for a rainy day.

  “An attack, then,” said Tapper, brow furrowed. “What’s high on their target list?”

  “Their profile says they tend to favor big, flashy demonstrations,” Page put in. “The bombing of the ISC Trident, for example.”

  In Kovalic’s head, a puzzle piece clicked into place. “Tomorrow’s the Emperor’s Birthday.” His comrades exchanged a glance. “It’d be a hell of a splash.”

  Tapper exhaled. “That’s a tall order. I mean, the locals are happy enough to riot when the Illyrican rugby team wins—or loses, for that matter. The Emperor’s Birthday is the biggest Illyrican celebration of the year. Eyes is sure to take extra security precautions and Raleigh City will probably be crawling with uniforms. Why would the Black Watch make it hard on themselves?”

  Tapper’s point was good, and Shankar had told Kovalic as much over their breakfast date. Plus, given IIS’s level of interest in and surveillance on the Black Watch, it seemed like they’d have their ear to the ground about any impending attack.

  “But what if it’s not here?” said Page suddenly.

  “Then we are shit out of luck, because we might as well be playing pin-the-tail-on-the-who-the-fuck-knows,” replied Tapper.

  Something tugged at Kovalic’s mind; there was a logic here that he just wasn’t quite seeing. You didn’t run a politically oriented terrorist group without having a clear goal. He flipped through the combinations, trying a slew of different puzzle pieces, rejecting the ones that made no sense until he landed upon one that seemed to nestle firmly in with what he knew.

  “I don’t know where,” he said slowly, “but I think I know what.”

  Tapper raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “It’s the same reason we came out here in the first place.” He pulled his comm out of his pocket and dialed up the information from Wallace’s data chip, then turned the screen toward his teammates.

  Tapper and Page exchanged glances. “You’re telling me that they’re going to hit the Illyricans’ secret weapons project?”

  “It makes sense,” Kovalic said. “Given the amount of firepower they have, what we know of the Black Watch’s general means and motives, and the fact that Eamon Brody was the source of our information about the project.”

  “Due respect, cap,” said Tapper, “Eamon Brody was also the only source of intel; Caledonia station didn’t seem to catch wind of it. How do we know he didn’t just invent the whole thing? Maybe the Illyricans are up to exactly nothing and this was just an excuse to get some Commonwealth-supplied weapons.”

  “Why kill Wallace then?” Kovalic argued, nodding at his comm. “They could have just left him dangling after they’d gotten their arms; he would have been recalled when the lead didn’t pan out.”

  “They were worried he’d report back,” Page suggested. “That the Commonwealth would find out what they were planning.”

  Tapper rubbed a hand against his forehead. “Which is what, exactly? Taking aim at the Illyricans? Last time I checked, we weren’t exactly buddies with the Imperium—if there is a high-level weapons project, why wouldn’t the Commonwealth want th
e Watch to blow it to high heaven?”

  “The usual reason,” said Kovalic. “Politics. CID might provide aid and arms to resistance groups, but it’s all supposed to be under the table. Something this high profile …” he shook his head. “It wasn’t hard for us to deduce that the Commonwealth has been supplying those weapons; I don’t imagine it’ll be much of a problem for Eyes, either. And if they find out that Commonwealth-provided arms were used to destroy one of their top secret projects …”

  “… then this war goes hot,” Tapper finished.

  “I think someone at CID did the math when Wallace went missing,” said Kovalic. “They realized their ass was hanging in the wind and decided to do some house-cleaning and turn the whole op deniable.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Tapper. “Fucking bureaucrats.”

  Page crossed his arms. “So, where does that leave us?”

  “Right in the middle of a gigantic mess,” said Kovalic. There were too many balls in the air: Brody, his brother, the Black Watch, the Illyricans. He frowned. No, not juggling balls—spokes on a wheel. They just had to find the hub where everything intersected. He raised his comm and started sifting through Wallace’s information; somewhere in here was the key to all of this and Wallace had known it. Not only had he encrypted the data, he’d hidden it in his apartment—and someone had gone through a lot of trouble to try and find it. Which meant there was something on here that they didn’t want anybody to see.

  He started digging through it from the top and let out a breath of relief he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. The chip contained Wallace’s reports, in full. Dates, times, people, and—thank god—places.

  Much of the material was standard: contact reports in which Eamon Brody was cagey and made allusions to needing “resources” from the Commonwealth in order to keep the Illyricans busy. True to his reputation, though, Wallace had been no dummy—he’d done his utmost to corroborate Eamon’s story, and he’d had enough time on the ground to actually work the other angles. Consensus from those sources was that a hush-hush Illyrican project did exist and that the Imperium had spared no expense on the facility for housing and securing it. They’d done their best to keep the location secret, too, but Wallace had sniffed it out. And, fortunately, written it down for the record.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  Page and Tapper, who had been arguing some finer point of assault tactics against a fortified position, paused mid-bicker.

  “Cap?”

  Kovalic ignored Tapper, taking a few tentative steps to find a clear patch of sky. The gray smudges of clouds moved quickly in the brisk breeze, and as they broke he saw what he was looking for: the larger moon of Skye, low on the horizon, and bright with the reflected light of Caledonia’s sun; and, higher in the sky, another disc—the smaller, more distant Aran.

  His heart twinged—his earliest memories of home, of Earth, were the half-circle of the moon against a brilliant blue sky. Never mind that Luna Colony had been operating for more than two centuries and that the moon had been fully mapped decades before that—somehow it had still incited him to adventure, to the stars.

  He pointed up at Aran. “It’s on the goddamned moon.”

  The three of them stared silently at the satellite for a moment. “A secret military base on one of Caledonia’s moons.” Danzig had said something off-handed about it at their first meeting, but neither of them had taken it seriously.

  Page broke the silence. “Makes sense. A lunar military installation would make it easy to control access. And Aran has an erratic orbit, which means it spends most of its cycle far away from the planet. That’s pretty solid security.”

  “Yeah, I’m feeling less optimistic about this whole thing, boss,” said Tapper.

  Kovalic’s eyes flicked rapidly as he factored in the new information. Getting to the moon would mean transport of some sort and, even as impressive as the Black Watch’s resources had been to date, he couldn’t imagine they had access to their own ship. Besides …

  “Any ship that gets within a hundred thousand kilometers of that place without the proper authorization is going to get blown out of the sky,” said Tapper, as if reading his mind.

  “They’d need a legitimate launch point, then,” said Kovalic. “And an aboveboard flight.” That meant the local military base, Westenfeldt, and an Illyrican military flight.

  Tapper shook his head. “I still think this is crazy. Not even these jokers are stupid enough to try and hit a highly-secured military installation. They’ll get wrecked.”

  “They’ve done it before,” Page noted. “The ISC Trident was under construction at the shipyards when they blew it up.”

  “Shipyards, sure,” said Tapper, waving a hand. “But they’re in orbit and there’s civilian access to them—contractors come and go. A military installation on a remote moon is a bit different.”

  Looking back at the armless statue in front of him, Kovalic tapped his lips thoughtfully. “Not as crazy as it might seem at first glance. I’ve been thinking about this. The timing with the Emperor’s Birthday is deliberate. Maybe it’s just political but, from what I’ve seen of this De Valera guy’s handiwork, I think there’s a practical reason at work here, too.”

  Page cocked his head, brow creasing slightly. “Such as?”

  “What if—and this is by no means a stretch of the imagination—the Black Watch knows something we don’t? For example, that the Illyricans are pulling forces from their top-secret research facility to help beef up security at the Emperor’s Birthday celebrations in Raleigh City.”

  Page’s eyes flicked back and forth rapidly, as if computing the possibilities. “As conjectures go, that’s not even that far-fetched. The Black Watch has a pretty high profile: a few well-placed threats at prominent targets in the capital or casual chatter on channels they know the Illyricans are monitoring and they could practically ensure an increased presence.”

  “A feint,” said Tapper.

  “Exactly.” Hands behind his back, Kovalic started slowly wandering the sculpture gallery, taking in the assorted works of art from both Illyrican and Earth culture. The two mingled here, but Kovalic’s seasoned eye picked out the subtle lines of force in the way they were arranged, the Illyrican works almost surrounding the Earth works—protecting them, you might be able to argue, but to Kovalic it looked more like surveillance.

  The rest of his team had trailed after him; he stopped in front of a bronze sculpture of Atlas, the Earth hefted on his broad shoulders, and turned to face them. “All I know is that we could do it. And, no offense to our skills, but if we can do it, then someone else can do it too.”

  Page cocked an eyebrow. “I take it you have a plan, sir?”

  “I’ve got the beginnings of one.” His mind was already whirling away, trying to dovetail the resources they could draw upon with what they needed to accomplish. “The way I see it, we’ve got three priorities. First, strategic intelligence: we need to know what the Illyricans are working on.”

  Tapper nodded to Kovalic’s comm. “Didn’t Wallace know?”

  Kovalic shook his head. He’d scrolled to the bottom of the data file but Wallace’s reports ended without a definitive word on the nature of the project. “From what I can tell, he was killed before he could get the details.” Probably deliberate timing on the Black Watch’s part. Kovalic’s lips thinned. A goddamned shame. Any death in the line of duty was a tragedy, but a needless death like Wallace’s even more so. They’d find the bastard responsible, and when they did … “All he was able to ascertain was that it was some sort of weapon.”

  The sergeant snorted. “Shocker.”

  “Second priority,” Kovalic continued, bracing himself for the inevitable objections, “is to stop the Black Watch from destroying the project.”

  Tapper and Page exchanged a glance and both seemed about to speak up; Kovalic raised his hand to ward them off. “Barring that, we at least need to conceal the Commonwealth’s involvement.”


  “What’s the third priority?” asked Page.

  Kovalic took a deep breath. “Jim Wallace. He may have been CID, but he was still one of ours—and somebody sealed him in that container. That person needs to be held accountable.” He could feel Page’s eyes jump sharply to him and he knew the younger man was thinking of his own first mission, remembering—as was Kovalic—two dead intelligence officers lying in a sewer whom nobody would ever avenge. He couldn’t bring himself to meet Page’s gaze and almost heaved a sigh of relief when Tapper spoke.

  “Too right. Nobody takes one of ours down and walks. So, those are our objectives—what’s the plan, boss?”

  Kovalic turned to Page. “Any more progress on decrypting that data we pulled off Shankar?”

  Page hesitated. “I’m pretty sure I can break it but, given the limited power of the equipment we have, I’d estimate it’ll take about twenty-four hours.” Trace amounts of frustration colored his voice.

  “Time we don’t have if the Black Watch is already on the move,” Tapper interjected.

  “It’s okay.” Kovalic had been thinking about this. “We might not be able to break it, but what if we clone his ID?”

  Page blinked. “Sure, we could do that. But if we just make a bit-for-bit copy, the encryption will still be intact.” His eyes rolled up in thought. “Well, unless the Illyricans are using quantum crypt on their ID cards; then we’re dead and just don’t know it yet.”

  “That’s a chance we’ll have to take,” said Kovalic.

  “All right. What do you want me to copy it onto?”

  Kovalic grinned. “Back onto an ID card. I just have to get an appropriate one.” Which, in turn, was going to mean a little help from their good friend Walter Danzig. He was going to love this.

  “One?” echoed Tapper. “You’re going in alone?” The wrinkles on his face arranged themselves into a pattern of obstinacy. “On a goddamned moon?”