My head lowered slightly. ‘It’s OK.’
It was probably obvious that I was lying. I was never any good at hiding my emotions. Puppy often seemed to read me like a book, so I imagined that Aleksi had no trouble doing so when the emotion from our past experience was so raw. Things were far from OK. The entire platoon was in a great deal of pain, and I was no exception. We had lost everything, including our morals . . . thanks to me.
Aleksi went straight to the point. ‘Is your platoon still combat-effective?’
‘Enough to perform a recce function,’ I answered. ‘Or fight as a regular rifle platoon . . .’
Aleksi’s eyes locked onto mine with a sudden intensity, as he detected something in my voice. ‘You’d rather fight, I think.’
I regarded the Scandinavian for a moment. ‘Yeah.’
My datapad vibrated gently, alerting me to a transmission it had received. I broke eye contact with Aleksi, looking down at the screen and using my finger to navigate through the menus to read the message on text.
The message was from a Union warship, Cygne, confirming that a request for authentication had been received via tight beam from a friendly call sign on the ground, and providing a long string of letters and numbers.
‘Cygne?’ Aleksi asked, already knowing the answer.
‘Yeah.’
Aleksi pulled back the sleeve of his jumpsuit to reveal a skin-hugging datapad no thicker than a piece of cloth. He tapped the display, squinted at the screen, and then recited the same numbers I had on my own datapad.
The method of using a warship in orbit to authenticate was extraordinarily rare, but then we weren’t exactly expecting to bump into a Special Forces unit we’d never even heard of before. It was almost impossible for an imposter to replicate the method, since it was the warship verifying the sender’s identity using far more information than the code itself. If I was to send up an authentication request, I would need to plug my datapad into a tight beam unit, enabling it to send information on my vital stats, recent activity including weapon usage, and even recordings made by my visor and rifle camera. That information would then be closely scrutinised by both human eyes and intelligent software in a process that could take several minutes.
The Scandinavian cocked his head. ‘Are you happy with the code?’
I continued staring at the code for several seconds, then nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘Something still bothers you, though . . .’
I decided to take the direct approach. ‘Why am I getting this now? Why didn’t you warn us you were coming?’
Aleksi smiled. ‘For the same reason that your sergeant major didn’t warn us that you were coming here. He ought to have passed that information up to EJOC, but he hasn’t. All he gave away was the grid location of your harbour. Perhaps even that grid is incorrect . . .’
My eyes narrowed. ‘What are you suggesting?’
Aleksi held out his hands. ‘Nothing sinister on your part, Andy. Your sergeant major simply knows not to pass on too much sensitive information whilst he’s working for EJOC.’
I stared back at him, unsure how to respond. My platoon knew all too well how EJOC had been manipulated by Paraiso, and how it’s corruption could have wiped out our entire platoon at Cellini were it not for the quick response of our brigade commander, but I felt uneasy discussing it with someone I had only just met.
Aleksi raised his eyebrows. ‘You disagree with me?’
‘No,’ I replied, shaking my head. ‘We had a similar problem in Cellini.’
‘Oh really?’
I told Aleksi about our ill-fated operation to assist Edo in capturing Cellini and the suspicious errors and coincidences that seemed to hamper our efforts, from the lack of air cover during a crucial phase in our operation, to net communications that were intercepted, distorted or fabricated to prevent us from calling for help.
‘We’re pretty sure that politicians from Paraiso were manipulating EJOC,’ I summarised. ‘They wanted the mission to fail so a stockpile of missiles in a nearby warren could be handed to the Militia.’
‘Well, those missiles are a drop in the ocean now,’ Aleksi said. ‘Whatever Paraiso were planning to get the Militia to do with them is pretty irrelevant against the backdrop of all-out war. I’m not surprised by what you’re telling me, though. Don’t get me wrong, Andy, EJOC is a good thing. Without it this planet would descend into chaos within days. But let’s not forget what it is, a collaboration between two colonial powers, with two different agendas. It has to balance the individual security needs of the provinces with the will of Brussels and Moscow. It’s tainted by politics, and influenced in some form by all parties. We work for EJOC, but we keep it at arm’s length, only feeding it the information it requires. There are a lot of people out there that wouldn’t be too happy to learn what we’re doing here.’
‘Like Paraiso?’
He nodded. ‘Paraiso . . . Russia . . . to name only two.’
I thought about the intricate web of deceit that seemed to exist across the planet Eden, threatening to strangle it at any moment. The conflict in the Bosque seemed to have multiple layers, as provincial rulers, corporations and colonial powers jostled to achieve their own aims, aims that were so intertwined that they often barely made sense. How could we operate in such a cluttered theatre, with so many competing factions with such varied agendas? The only people I felt I could truly trust were the friends and comrades I fought with, because all we wanted to do was keep each other alive.
‘Our more . . .’ Aleksi waved a hand as he sought the word, ‘. . . sensitive instructions come from Union forces high command, somewhere up in orbit. They effectively work for EJOC as well, but they still answer directly to Brussels. More importantly, they are entirely military, which means we can trust their integrity.’
Just like brigade, I thought to myself. The brigade commander had ignored his instructions from EJOC and had sent B Company to rescue us from Cellini. How could we have expected less of him? As a senior officer who had risen through the ranks of the dropship infantry, his loyalty to his own men was unquestionable. I reminded myself that there were still others out there we could trust. Our separation from our traditional unit command structure often made it seem as though everyone was against us.
Aleksi suddenly nodded toward something behind me. I turned to see Yulia speaking with Marcus at the far side of the storeroom. ‘Tell me about your friend.’
I explained what I knew about Yulia, that she was a defected Guard officer who had been based in Cellini, and that she had been part of a large underground force that had played a pivotal role in the capture of the warren under Hill Kilo.
‘That’s interesting,’ he said after a moment, still watching her intently. ‘What was her role? Was she in command?’
I considered the question, then realised that I didn’t really know the answer. I had assumed that Yulia was entirely in charge of the large force that had helped us to capture the village, but had never directly asked her.
‘I think so . . .’ I sighed. ‘So much has happened over the past few hours. We never had the time to ask.’
Aleksi said nothing, waiting for me to elaborate further. He listened as I told him how we had captured her, handed her over to the Guard, then rescued her once more and used her as a guide.
‘That sounds messy,’ he said after I finished. ‘So . . . the Guard turned out to be working with the Militia?’
‘Not the Guard itself,’ I said, ‘a group we call the president’s “inner circle”. They don’t want the Alliance to return because they know they will lose power.’
‘Are you sure she isn’t a member of this inner circle?’ Aleksi interrupted.
So that is what is making Aleksi so uneasy, I realised. I had been so wrapped up in my own suspicion of him and his hidden team that I hadn’t considered how Aleksi might view our unlikely partnership with the ex-Guard captain. He knew that we were trustworthy, but it was Yulia and her influence on us that he doubt
ed.
‘Yeah,’ I replied.
He still looked unconvinced.
‘Yes,’ I repeated. ‘She fought against one of the inner circle commanders during the Dakar massacre. You heard about Dakar?’
Aleksi nodded. ‘We heard about it. Edo tried to brand it a Loyalist atrocity assisted by Union troopers. It did our campaign here some damage, and pissed off the Alliance pretty badly.’
‘The massacre was controlled by one of the inner circle commanders,’ I explained. ‘A major called Bhasin. I was with Yulia when she turned against him and his men. She defected after that, and later helped us to track Bhasin when he made his escape from the warren under Cellini.’
The Scandinavian frowned as he tried to put the pieces together in his head. ‘So this Bhasin guy . . . he was also involved in Cellini?’
‘Yeah. He was working behind the scenes, though, working with the Militia commander, Helstrom.’
Suddenly Aleksi’s eyes lit up. ‘Helstrom?’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘You know him?’
‘Yeah, we know Helstrom,’ Aleksi said with a grim smile. ‘We know Helstrom all too well. He commands all the Militia in this area - a real nasty piece of work. He’s a crook who uses the Boskers captured in Edo as slave labour in the local mines. Perversely, he’s probably done more for our cause than we ever could have done.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t follow . . .’
‘While we’re trying to persuade the Boskers to fight against the Loyalist regime, Helstrom provides the example of what happens if they don’t.’
He certainly did that, I thought. A vision of the dead civilians in the valley came back to haunt me, as did the terrified man who had approached me with a bomb. Helstrom was truly wicked, as were his band of mindless thugs that had descended upon the village like a pack of wild dogs.
‘What else do you know about him?’ I asked.
‘His mining operation is state sanctioned,’ the Scandinavian explained. ‘Most of the resources he produces are exported out of Europa, to provinces that choose not to observe the sanctions imposed by EJOC.’
‘Russian provinces?’ I guessed.
Aleksi nodded. ‘Correct. All across Europa, mined resources are sold to Russia in exchange for weapons, equipment, and hard cash. The Union knows about it, obviously, but we chose to do nothing.’
‘Why?’
Aleksi sighed and looked upward, as if he was thinking of a way to explain something complex using simple terms. ‘The co-operation between us and Russia has allowed us to maintain a firm grip on Eden, and also gave us the ability to re-take New Earth. In the face of Chinese aggression, there’s no way we’ll risk upsetting them, not for the sake of illegal trade between provinces.’
‘Or crimes against humanity . . .’
‘You and I both know we live in a cruel world,’ he said, holding out his hands to encompass everything around us. ‘The sad truth is that the Union doesn’t care about mistreated Boskers. What makes Helstrom interesting is that he’s lining his pockets with cash he syphons from his trade with Russia. Creating his own private piggy bank for the day he retires.’
‘He steals money from the Loyalists?’ I asked, my eyebrows raised in surprise.
Aleksi smiled like a grown man would smile at an ignorant child. ‘Oh yeah, he steals money! The war has made Helstrom a very rich man. He has a huge workforce to make up for a lack of high-tech mining equipment, and he doesn’t even have to pay them. He might talk the standard Loyalist rhetoric about “cleansing the Bosque”, but his only drivers are money and power. It doesn’t surprise me that he co-operated with anybody who wanted to stop the deal between the Union and the Alliance.’
‘Do you know where he is now?’
‘He has a base about thirty kilometres from here, a place called Camp Trondheim. It’s basically a concentration camp where Helstrom keeps a large part of his non-European workforce.’
I said nothing, the cogs in my head slowly turning.
The Scandinavian studied me carefully. ‘You’re thinking of attacking it, aren’t you?’
‘Our boss will be there,’ I replied in affirmation. ‘Maybe even the missiles we were tasked to find.’
Aleksi waved a hand dismissively. ‘Those missiles are irrelevant now, in the grand scheme of things. EJOC will want you to prioritise regular Loyalist launch sites rather than Militia amateurs armed with kit they found in an old warren. Even your brigade would agree with that order.’
‘I know.’
‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘the base is too large for a single platoon to even contemplate attacking, and it’s just outside your ops box. Technically, it’s ours to deal with anyway.’
‘Are you going to do anything with it?’
He smiled again, then shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
We both remained silent for a moment. My mind raced to try to figure out a way that we could somehow turn our fate around. Even if we couldn’t rescue our comrades, and even if the missiles were now irrelevant, we could still have our vengeance.
‘So . . .’ Aleksi steered the subject away from Helstrom. ‘Yulia fights against Bhasin, then she disappears, gets converted by somebody in the FEA, then she comes back to Cellini to fight Bhasin again?’
‘I guess so,’ I said with a shrug. ‘Why?’
‘Look, you know this woman better than I do, and the two of you clearly have some history together. I’m just going to say that if I were you, I’d ask her a few more questions the next time I cosy up with her.’
I tried not to show my embarrassment at his insinuation that I was in a relationship with Yulia. Not only was it unprofessional, it certainly didn’t look good in terms of mission security.
Aleksi leant forward. ‘What was her mission, for instance? She and her men - almost half a battalion of them - infiltrated into the warren without anyone knowing, secured the missiles, and then very quickly evaporated once things started going wrong. Why was she instructed to secure the missiles, rather than simply destroying them?’
‘She probably wanted the FEA to find the missiles and keep them,’ I said. ‘They didn’t pose a threat as long as they weren’t in Helstrom’s hands.’
Seemingly satisfied with my answer, he leant back again. ‘I see that. I also see that she might not have known initially that this Bhasin character was conducting his own secret mission to find the missiles, so she might not have known that the missiles were better off destroyed. All the information we have at the moment is that she was met by an agent of some form, banded together with others, armed, briefed, and then sent off to complete a mission based solely on that briefing. That’s textbook agent handling. It’s essentially what my team do here with the Boskers.
‘Apart from information collected from your platoon on its previous operation around Dakar, there is nothing on our database related to Yulia . . . we’ve already checked. That means she hasn’t been touched by our counterparts in Edo, which means we can eliminate the possibility of a Union influence. That leaves absolutely everyone else, including this rogue inner circle. Let’s not forget that the FEA top brass are all Guard, so something as substantial as Yulia’s secret operation would be quite difficult to set up without one of them noticing.’
‘I seriously doubt she’s working for Bhasin,’ I said testily.
‘Does she need to know that she is?’
I fell silent.
Aleksi held up a finger. ‘You’ve got to ask yourself one question, Andy. Who benefited most from Yulia attacking the warren and securing those missiles? You guys? Or Bhasin?’
12
Enforced Rest
To contents page
Aleksi and his team were planning to leave Copehill within an hour, taking Butcher along with them. He didn’t seem willing to discuss their means of casualty extraction, simply telling me that they could have him back in Paraiso within a few hours and that he would receive high quality care throughout his journey. I chose not to press him on the matter, since
their method was obviously sensitive.
I spent the remaining time quizzing him on his knowledge of our ops box and the security set-up of Copehill. The Scandinavian seemed happy to share with me everything he knew on the area, and even called Marcus over to add his own perspective. Yulia had disappeared, I noticed, presumably to catch up with other old acquaintances within the laboratory. I made a mental note to find out more information the next time I saw her, but for now I was far more interested in what Aleksi and Marcus had to say.
To my disappointment, the strip of land we had been assigned to was particularly uninteresting from a military point of view. There were no juicy targets to pick out, nothing that hadn’t already been hit by Union bombs. Aleksi’s team had already set up a comprehensive target list before the campaign had even begun, and many of those targets were now either destroyed or queued up to be destroyed by our warships within the coming hours. There was a large Loyalist warren on the north-western fringe of our ops box, although that was already being observed by Boskers who were reporting directly to Aleksi.
‘To be honest,’ Aleksi summarised, ‘all that’s left for you to do is search for anything we’ve missed. I have no doubt there must be some launchers left over, ones that haven’t been drawn into the centre of the province.’
‘Looks like you’ve done a good job,’ I said.
Aleksi offered a small bow. ‘Thank you. We couldn’t achieve any of this without the Boskers, though. There are only four people in my team, and twelve of us in our regional group, but we work with an entire army of Boskers.’
‘How many are there?’
‘Working for us?’ The Scandinavian puffed his cheeks. ‘Marcus, do you care to guess?’
Even Marcus, a Bosker himself, seemed unable to give an accurate figure. ‘A thousand, maybe . . .’
‘We’re not dealing with conventional military units,’ Aleksi explained. ‘It’s not an exact science.’
RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5) Page 22