A Tangled Road to Justice

by Olan Thorensen

“This is great ground for keeping Cherkoff boxed in,” I said. “Open fields of fire for six to seven hundred meters on three sides, with trees providing cover for our people. With us here blocking the road, we could wait them out. That’s assuming the locals would stay with us long enough. Unfortunately, everything that would help us confine Cherkoff also works against us. Since he’s unlikely to come out if he expects help in a day or two, it’ll be up to us to go in after him. That means we’ll have to cross those same open fields of fire. Compounding the situation is that we don’t know how many innocents are in there. Some are common workers not involved with Cherkoff’s crimes, plus there are at least a few families. I doubt Cherkoff would let them out if we offered to let them leave.”

  “No,” Millen said. “He’d want them to stay, to limit our options.”

  “Then there’s that damned 30-millimeter chain gun and the anti-aircraft laser Cherkoff’s men brought with them into Justice. We don’t know what other surprises are waiting for us.”

  “Got some good news there,” Millen said. “Well, mainly good news. Donal Wilton says he’d seen the chain gun and the laser before, but the only other heavy weapons Cherkoff has is a two-man railgun and, from his description, two light machine-guns.”

  “Well, excuse me if I sound cynical, but a railgun and two machine-guns on top of the 30-millimeter sounds like plenty firepower to me if we intended to make an assault with untrained civilians.”

  Millen grinned. “I take it from your use of past tense ‘intended’ that you don’t envision that option.”

  “If we had time, I wouldn’t support anything but sitting them out, maybe sniping at anyone who shows his head, but we don’t have that option if reinforcements are coming. I don’t care if we have a hundred or more people surrounding Cherkoff, I won’t support sending them to be slaughtered.”

  “Let me show you something,” said Millen. He walked toward the truck he’d arrived in. I followed him, as he pulled out waterproof sacks I recognized.

  “You brought the ghillie suits. Read my mind.”

  “Didn’t take much cogitating to figure out it’ll once again come down to you and me doing the dirty work.”

  “Cherkoff,” I said.

  “There you go. If we eliminate the head, the rest of the body will decide there are healthier locales.”

  “It’ll have to be before sunup tomorrow morning,” I said.

  “Yep. About an hour before first light and an hour after. Later gets to be a problem.”

  Both of us had used versions of the ghillie suit previously. In my case, it was to stay hidden to observe or sneak up on people who would kill me if they knew I was there. In Millen’s case, the only experience he’d shared was creeping up to an Ecorium panda—a creature of nightmares. I would definitely have to hear that story sometime, but I took it for granted Millen had had other uses for the suits.

  Our window of opportunity was dictated by the suit’s capability. Its computer-generated camouflage was visually oriented; in the dark, the camouflage was irrelevant, though the suit still provided assistance from thermal recognition. How the suit hid body heat wasn’t clear to me, even though I’d sat through several lectures on how it worked. Something to do with “directed infra-red emissions.” Don’t ask for details. The thermal hiding wasn’t perfect, and if someone was looking only for heat signatures, the closer we got to the person the better chance we’d be detected. However, if we time it right tomorrow, by the time it gets light enough for the lookouts to see us, the ghillie suits will make it hard to spot us. Plus, once the sky lightened and the sun appeared, the solar radiation would help mask what little thermal energy escaped the suits’ operation.

  Bottom line: we had to pick the best approach to the ranch complex, cover much of the ground before thermal detection became an issue, then count on observers switching to mainly visual observation. I knew the plan sounded naïve, but I’d been on both ends of the ghillie experience. In training, a senior NCO had smacked me on the head after crossing an open field of short grass right in front of me. It had taken him an hour to cover a hundred meters, but I’d carried the bruise for a week and respect for the suits forever. In deployments, however, and in contradiction to what you might have expected, I’d learned to fear the suits. They worked so well, I’d known men who’d believed they were literally invisible—men whose FSES tenure tended to terminate early. Magical though the suits were, if you moved too fast, made noise, or were just unlucky, you could still be detected. It always made my skin crawl to imagine being a hundred meters from enemy positions, in open terrain, too far to retreat safely, and suddenly be located.

  “Not that I’m complaining,” said Mayor Bossev two hours later, after we’d deployed all the people we were going to get. “I’m in favor of none of my citizens being shot at, but do the two of you really think you’re going to waltz into Cherkoff’s headquarters, shoot him, and all the world goes back to being happy?”

  “Oh, there’s an element of risk,” Millen assured him, “but this is the sort of thing we do for a living. We don’t anticipate any problems, though the rest of the people need to keep the attention of Cherkoff’s men.”

  Bossev’s expression conveyed his level of belief in Millen’s words. I took over the talking before Millen launched into one of his Westernisms and lost Bossev.

  “What we need you, Ashraf, Chang, the Nazars, and the others to do is keep Cherkoff’s men focused on you. The ranch complex is surrounded by six to seven hundred meters of cleared ground on all sides before forest on three sides. The more they look at you the less attention they’ll pay to the ground closer to them. As long as they continue looking over us, the easier it’ll be for Millen and me to get right up to them.”

  Simple. Right? Well . . . it was simple. Assuming Cherkoff didn’t have any advanced technology that would defeat our suits, assuming we could avoid detection and get among the complex’s buildings, assuming none of Cherkoff’s men literally stumbled over us, assuming we could locate Cherkoff in a setting that didn’t involve twenty of his men seeing us, assuming we killed him, assuming we could exfiltrate (that’s get the hell out of there), then there should be no problem.

  Now, you might have wondered how we would remain undetected if we were inside the complex and shooting was required. We’d be going with our rifles and one pistol each. No grenade attachments—grenades fired by rifles were antithetical to stealth, in case you weren’t sure. Both of us would carry two hand grenades—the kind you threw, not shot toward a more distant target. Once we got in the house—if we got in the house—targets would be too close for the rifle-fired grenades to arm themselves. When our stealth mode was over, we’d use a hand grenade for closer targets, and that baby was armed as soon as you threw it.

  However, silencers on both rifle and pistol were de rigueur if we planned to survive. We also changed ammunition to low-velocity rounds to help with the silencing. The range would be intensely personal—likely, opponents within tens of meters—so we didn’t need to worry about distant targets. We had a limited supply of low-velocity ammunition, and by limited, I mean three magazines’ worth for all weapons.

  No problem, right? But we weren’t going to get into extended firefights, or we would be in deep shit.

  We spent the next three hours getting seventy-seven of Justice’s armed citizens posted in the tree line around the ranch and along the road out. At one point, a group of ten or so Cherkoff men had approached the woods on the southern side—whether to test the siege or escape, we didn’t know. After a brief exchange of fire, they returned to the ranch. By brief, I meant in terms of time, but our people must have shot off half their ammunition before we could get them to take their fingers off the triggers.

  “Well,” I told Millen, “maybe Cherkoff will think we have an infinite supply of ammunition.”

  After that bit of excitement, Millen and I did a recon of the entire perimeter around the ranch, following the tree line, checking again on our people’s posi
tions, and noting the ranch’s guard positions and weapon emplacements. After a final consultation with Ashraf, Chang, and the Nazars, we crashed side by side under one of the VLK trucks for a few hours’ sleep after orders to wake us if anything happened.

  CHAPTER 21

  Eight hours later, Millen and I were 20 meters apart, slithering parallel to each other along the ground. I gauged us to be 100 meters from the nearest ranch structure which we believed was a storage shed. We’d already covered 500 meters from the eastern side of the ranch. When the sky lightened and the sun poked up, the light would be behind us, making it harder for the enemy to see us and helping to hide our thermal signatures. At least, that was the theory, which usually worked out.

  Two hours before first light we’d started off, wanting to cover the first few hundred meters before human eyes might spot us. Until then, thermal detectors would notice heat signatures moving too fast, whereas slow movement often allowed software to conclude it was detecting rocks still radiating from the previous day’s energy absorbed from the sun. Slow was the key.

  About two meters per minute. That was relatively galloping when sneaking up, but our window was tight, and we didn’t expect Cherkoff’s men to be the brightest or most experienced. Aiding us was the weather. The wind moved the fernlike ground cover in waves. Hindering us was that we couldn’t move straight toward the ranch and leave a trail of bent ferns; we had to zig-zag, thereby lengthening the route.

  We’d started off in the dark with the night-vision goggles but left them when the first light let us see ten meters ahead. By the time we were a hundred meters from the building, two things had happened; heat from wearing the suits had begun to be a problem, and we had located three watch positions whose men were in the best positions to spot us.

  I lowered my head slowly to the ground to muffle my voice, and a finger keyed my comm unit—ever mindful to avoid quick movements.

  “If we take out the two men with the railgun and the man who keeps poking his head from around the tractor, that’ll leave a big enough gap for us to get inside.”

  “The railgun crew would be yours,” answered Millen, “but we’d have to time it for when I have a shot on my man and you have shots on both of yours.”

  “Affirmed. I suggest you move directly to your man’s front. I’ll need to slide a little to the right to get a better angle.”

  The railgun appeared to be a crude version of an older anti-armor model, something to accelerate a solid shot or a sabot at high enough velocity to penetrate several centimeters of metal. Armored vehicles were long obsolete on Earth, but anti-armor evidently had utility I wasn’t aware of on lesser-developed colony worlds such as Astrild. Either that, or they were just toys someone had put together. I was inclined toward the second explanation because this gun looked like it had been assembled from a junk pile. Two men could operate it, but it would take a vehicle to move the weight.

  We not only had the opportunity to take out the two-man crew to create a blind spot in the defender’s watch, but this would remove the nasty possibility that the railgun had canister rounds. The gun’s slow cycling was a major liability, but a gun this size could accelerate a canister with thousands of 3- to 5-millimeter steel balls having a range of several hundred meters. I didn’t know whether Cherkoff had canister rounds, but a last-ditch option to eliminate Cherkoff was an assault on this section of the ranch’s defense. Forty-one men and five women commanded by Ron Chang waited hidden in the woods behind Millen and me. If the two of us reduced the defenders on this side enough, and we couldn’t find Cherkoff, we’d signal Chang to storm the ranch. Once inside, it would be a nasty fight.

  Similarly, if we managed to kill Cherkoff, but his men didn’t surrender immediately, Millen and I might be stuck with no way out. Sneaking into an enemy camp was one thing; getting out after the enemy roused was something else. In that case, we’d have to attempt to prevent use of the railgun, as our forty-six assaulted from the woods. In both scenarios, the remote possibility of the railgun being re-manned and firing a canister at our forces out in the open had to be eliminated.

  For now, getting inside was the issue. Best to deal with one problem at a time.

  I comm’d Millen. “Let’s get in position, then we’ll have to synchronize shots at all three men.”

  It took us five minutes to be ready. “I think we’ll have to do it after a back-and-forth check. I’ll say when I have both men in sight, you comm back if you have yours. If you do and mine haven’t moved, I’ll start firing. You follow after my first shot.”

  “Yup, partner. Cooling my heels here waiting fur yuh.”

  I’d have to pay attention in the future to see what triggered Shane, John Wayne, Wild Bill, or whomever Millen was channeling at the moment. Now wasn’t the time.

  “Here goes,” I said.

  A minute passed. Five. I’d get a good shot at one of the two men on the railgun but not the other. Then they’d switch.

  At seven minutes, I was starting to worry about time and light. Then both men moved into view. I gently touched the trigger.

  “Ready here.”

  “Nope,” came back.

  “Shit,” I mouthed silently.

  At eight minutes, my two moved again into view.

  “Ready here.”

  “Go,” answered Millen.

  “Phut!” went my silenced rifle, as the low-velocity bullet exited. The second man had been looking away from his compadre (Millen’s influence again) and didn’t see the man take the round just under his right eye. However, the body bumped him as it collapsed. The seconds it took for him to turn and look down at the body were too long for his brain to register what had just happened. Three seconds later, his body lay next to the other.

  I didn’t hear Millen’s single shot.

  “Both down,” I comm’d.

  “One here,” replied Millen. “No sign anyone noticed.”

  “Okay, up and meet at the railgun.”

  When we knelt beside the gun, we got our best view of Cherkoff’s preparations. Vehicles, short berms, and hay bales were among the components of defenses connecting outer structures. The railgun was nestled behind a makeshift version of a sandbag emplacement, using large brown burlap-appearing bags filled with what I assumed was dirt. The shed was ten meters to its left, with a cluster of what looked like guest or worker cottages to the right rear.

  Our close-up look at the main house matched the satellite images Bossev had shown us. A three-story section canted 45 degrees from our position. A single-story wing ran away from us to the west and a two-story wing ran north. We were fifty meters from the house’s rear, looking at a patio in the back. We had full views of the canted back of the main section and the north wing. We knew from images that the front of the house had a circular driveway that curved to lead toward the roadblock.

  Donal Wilton had given us the general layout. Cherkoff had the third floor to himself. His main lieutenants lived on the second floor of the center section, with most of the other men sleeping in the northern two-story wing. As he brought in men from other ranches, they were housed in the west wing next to a larger patio and pool area, with scattered guard positions throughout the property.

  The cluster of what I assumed had originally been worker and guest cottages now housed doubled-up families of workers Donal didn’t think would likely be combatants. Some of these men had worked the ranch and stayed when Cherkoff took over. Others he’d brought in to operate the ranch: mechanics, farriers, cooks. As for the rest, Donal didn’t know exactly what they did, only that they didn’t associate with the armed Cherkoff men. We hoped Donal’s info was accurate because we intended to ignore the cottage area, except for a machine-gun emplacement near the pool. If things went well, the cottages and the main structure would block the machine-gun from targeting us, except for 20 or so meters as we approached the rear entrance of the house.

  Time was running away from us. It was light enough to look back in the direction where we’d sta
rted to see trees 600 meters away. We’d already seen three different Cherkoff men moving within sight, and there must be more of them rousing inside the buildings. It would be only minutes before the whole plan went to shit.

  “Alligator walk, fast?” questioned Millen. I knew what he meant. There was already too much ambient light to discard the ghillie suits and run, yet we needed to get to the main house fast. We slung our rifles to our backs, got down on our bellies, raised on toes and hands with arms under our shoulders, and took off, imitating how you’d imagine alligators and crocodiles run—at least as seen in vids, since there weren’t many left in the wild on Earth.

  Now, the alligator walk sounded like it would be awkward and slow. That was a yes to the first and not necessarily to the second. You could move surprisingly fast until you were exhausted. However, worrying that someone might spot you and start shooting was an amazing energy booster. We covered the fifty meters to the back patio in no more than fifteen seconds.

  After shinnying over a low rock wall edging the patio, we raced to the back door and quickly shed the ghillie suits. Millen had his hand on the doorknob to check whether it was unlocked, when the door opened and a stupefied woman of about forty stared at Millen. He stroked her under the chin with his rifle stock before she could react, and we stormed into the house.

  Normally, I would have spent a few moments admiring the extensive woodwork in the wide hall and the large rooms. Unfortunately, two men were standing by the front door.

  Phut! Phut! Phut!

  Millen fired three times, dropping the two men. I was meanwhile occupied with the room on our right. It had numerous chairs, along with a sofa and two sleeping bags spread out on rugs—all three with occupants. One man rose up, saw me, and reached for something. Whatever it was, I assumed it involved doing bad things to me—so I shot him.

  Phut! Phut!

  One of the other two men mumbled something and rolled over. The third man never twitched. I turned to find Millen behind me. I pointed a hand at the deep sleepers and raised my eyebrow to convey, “What the hell do we do with these two?”