CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
One Hundred Kilometers Due West of the Bataan Peninsula
Sergeant Kindy decided to wait until dusk, then lead his squad across the fields to the building complex. While they waited, he set Corporal Nomonon and Lance Corporal Ellis to provide security to their flanks and rear and assigned Corporal Jaschke to take a census of the compound. He himself watched the compound, trying to discern any patterns of movement or activity that might give him a hint to the location of the entrance to the underground complex.
Jaschke got out his ocular and connected it to his comp, then began methodically looking at the people visible in the fields and the compound, focusing on each face. He wouldn’t be able to get a complete record of everybody there, nor could the census tell what any of their positions were, but the census would give the Marines a minimum number of people present. At first, every face Jaschke focused on was new to his comp, so the numbers added up rapidly. But then he began recording faces a second and third time, and the count slowed down. This was also potentially valuable information, knowing which people moved around the most and where they came and went. Later, Jaschke would feed the data to Kindy, and Kindy might be able to see connections between the census data and his own observations.
When the sun was only a couple of diameters above the horizon, Kindy touched helmets with Jaschke and asked him for his data. By feel, they touched their comps together and Jaschke initiated contact transmission. Seconds later Kindy had all the census data and began studying it.
Jaschke had been right about Kindy’s being able to integrate the data with his own observations. Kindy quickly picked out three men from the data, men he’d particularly noticed while he was watching.
One was a young man, bare-headed, with a short haircut. Despite his civilian clothing, he looked every bit a junior enlisted man. He, more than anybody else in the compound, constantly went from place to place. According to Jaschke’s data, he visited more places than anybody else in the compound. But no matter how many times he went out, or how many locations at which he stopped, he always returned to the same place—the building Kindy had tentatively identified as the headquarters building. Kindy thought he must be a runner.
The second man of note was older and grizzled. He wore a hat and held himself ramrod straight; his gait was nearly a march. Just like the younger man looked like a junior enlisted man, this one had the look of a senior sergeant. He didn’t go out and about as often as the runner did, nor did he visit as many places. But whenever and wherever he went, he did so purposefully, and always returned to the headquarters building.
The third man who had caught Kindy’s eye left the possible headquarters building the least and went to the fewest other locations—actually only three others, one of which seemed to be a mess hall. He looked to be intermediate in age between the sergeant and the private, and his gait was likewise between the sergeant’s brisk march and the runner’s more casual gait. The most distinctive thing about him was his clothing. Even though he was dressed in the same basic farmworker style as everybody else in the compound, his appeared to be of a finer cut and more meticulously cleaned. To Kindy’s experienced eye, he looked like the senior officer of a small unit, a captain or perhaps a junior commander. Make that a major, Kindy thought—most of the armies of the Coalition forces had instituted the rank of major; majors normally held staff positions.
Kindy decided to think of the probable officer as a major. There was a joke he’d heard a couple of times: “The Confederation Marine Corps doesn’t have majors because a major is an officer fit only for staff duty, and the Marines only have officers who are fit for command.”
Of the other two locations the major visited, one looked to be his quarters. The other was a small, nondescript building that the sergeant and the runner also visited. That building had one odd feature—its roof bulged higher than one would expect of a building that took up so little ground. On reflection, Kindy thought the excess height could contain the workings of an elevator to the underground complex.
In all, the census had identified ninety-seven people in the compound, eighty-eight of whom were men. All but a few of those men—the ones operating equipment in the fields—had a clearly military air about them. Nobody wore a uniform, everybody was dressed as an agricultural worker, except for a few who were dressed in white, as though they were food service workers.
Ninety-seven people, eighty-eight of them men. Most of the men looked military. Kindy pondered the situation. Why would soldiers be going around their own compound in civilian clothes? Why would the military bury a complex underneath a farm?
The answer to the second question was obvious; the military complex was buried under the farm to hide it. But hide it from whom? Surely the Coalition wasn’t expecting Force Recon, which was the Confederation’s only military asset that could penetrate so deeply behind enemy lines. Didn’t they realize how effective they’d been at preventing the Confederation Navy from launching its string-of-pearls? Or did they expect the navy to be able to search and analyze the entire landmass from the orbiting warships? That must be it—the Coalition didn’t know the limits on the navy’s surveillance abilities.
Kindy began to think about how the squad could get into the elevator building, if that’s what the high-roofed, nondescript structure was, and take the elevator down without anybody noticing anything amiss.
The sun began sinking below the horizon and Kindy put his squad in motion.
Kindy prepared another report and uploaded it the next time the Kiowa was in range.
Inside a Farming Complex, One Hundred Kilometers Due West of the Bataan Peninsula
Sergeant Kindy started the squad moving when the bottom of the sun’s disk kissed the horizon beyond the farm building complex. They went single file at twenty-meter intervals, with Corporal Nomonon in the lead, followed by Kindy. Corporal Jaschke brought up the rear, with Lance Corporal Ellis between him and Kindy.
They took their time, there was no rush, they had eleven hours standard to get in, find what they were looking for, and get back out, before sunrise. Plenty of time. Besides, there was still a good deal of activity inside the complex, and they wouldn’t want any of the locals bumping into a Marine because they couldn’t see him.
Each of the Marines used most of his array of sensors during the movement across the fields. Nomonon had his ears turned up, and his motion detector and sniffer on. He used his light-gatherer screen to aid his vision. Kindy rotated through his infra, light-gatherer, and magnifier screens, and sometimes flicked on his UV finder. His ears were up and motion detector on. Ellis, the least experienced Marine in the squad, used only his infra and his motion detector. His ears were halfway up. Jaschke rotated between his infra and light-gatherer screens and had his motion detector and sniffer on. Like the others, his ears were turned up.
Third squad crossed the fields at a leisurely pace for anybody not a Force Recon Marine in hostile territory, but a fast pace for them. It took three hours for them to move the ten kilometers from their observation point to the building complex, the last hour of which was spent crossing the last kilometer.
Fewer people were out and about by then. Those who were, mostly went back and forth between the barracks structures or between a barracks and the mess hall. The headquarters and the small building that was the squad’s immediate objective were just about the only other buildings anybody went to. The grizzled sergeant was the most frequent visitor to the small building. Those two buildings were the only ones lit from inside—and the small building was only intermittently lit.
Kindy directed Nomonon to take a long route to the small building, passing by the headquarters and mess hall. He paused outside the heaquarters building and listened. All he heard was a low susurration of unhurried voices and the occasional ticking of office equipment. He stood a couple of meters away from a window and took a look inside. The only people he could see were the sergeant and two younger men. One of the young men looked like a company clerk, or duty NCO. The other, not quite as young, looked like a duty officer. Kindy wondered, if there is a duty officer and a duty NCO, where are the sentries? Except for the guard box at the far side of the complex, the Marines hadn’t seen any evidence of sentries.
Whatever their function was, the three men in the room sat in relaxed conversation, evidently with no idea that an enemy reconnaissance patrol had them under close observation. The Marines then checked the building they had tentatively identified as a mess hall, which turned out to be a combination dining and recreation hall. Through different windows, they saw a dining room crammed with eight-man tables, a sparsely appointed weight room, two smallish rooms with tables at some of which men sat playing games, and a trid theater. Peals of laughter came out of that room, though Kindy didn’t recognize the trid or any of the actors he saw.
In all, the headquarters and the mess hall presented scenes one might find on any military installation in time of peace—or far from any action during war.
Kindy directed Nomonon to proceed toward the shedlike building with the high roof.
The building was dark when the Marines reached it. Kindy had them settle themselves against the side of a nearby barn where they had a clear view of the entrance. Only a few minutes later, a light came on inside, then the door opened and the man Kindy called the major came out. The officer reached somewhere out of sight to the side of the door and the light went off. The door was open long enough for Kindy to see—nothing. The small building seemed to have only one room, and that room was empty.
Kindy didn’t have enough information to go on yet, so the Marines continued to wait. He didn’t think they’d have to wait long; during the hour the squad had spent crossing the last kilometer of fields, he observed that people came or went from the building at irregular but frequent intervals.
He was right. The next person came in less than ten minutes. A man walked up, opened the door, and reached inside. The light came on. Kindy was able to see past him to the far corner of the room where someone else was rising from below the floor. The elevator moved, if not silently, then at least quietly enough that Kindy couldn’t hear it from where he stood, not even with his ears turned up halfway.
Now that he knew what he was looking at, Kindy saw runners set into the walls at the corner—he’d been right, the building held an elevator. The door closed and reopened a moment later to let a man out, presumably the one Kindy had seen rising.
Kindy gathered his men close and touched helmets to tell them what he’d seen and what they were going to do.
They waited three minutes, until nobody was visible nearby, then dashed to the building and inside. Kindy didn’t grope to turn on the light; instead the Marines used their light-gatherer screens. The view through the light gatherer was eerie, and it could be unsettling to people not used to it. Everything was monochrome, and there wasn’t a sharp perception of depth. But the Marines were used to it and had no trouble seeing where they were going or what they were doing.
The floor in the far corner of the room clearly showed the platform for the elevator, which was more than large enough for the four Marines to stand on together. A thin pillar at the platform’s free corner helped support an overhead and anchored restraining chains that ran between it and the walls. An unobtrusive plate on one wall had two buttons, each marked with an arrow, one pointed up, the other down.
Kindy wondered at what he saw as an astonishing lack of security. Or was the security all below the surface? There was one surefire way to find out. He gathered his Marines on the floorplate and pushed the lower button. The elevator began to descend quietly.
As they dropped, he thought about what might meet them at the bottom of the shaft. How might a sentry, or even a passerby, react to the appearance of the apparantly empty elevator? Not with immediate violence, he was sure of that. Perhaps whoever was there would think the elevator was malfunctioning and put in a call for a service tech. Or think someone was playing a prank.
But what if the shaft bottomed in a locked room or locked cage? What if someone was waiting to get to the elevator and stepped onto the platform before the Marines had time to get off it?
Kindy decided to stop worrying and just be ready for anything.
The elevator seemed to drop down a featureless shaft for a long time; the walls of the shaft barely cleared the edges of the platform. But the drop didn’t take all that long, really, nor was it a rapid descent. When the elevator eased to a stop, Kindy estimated they were no more than twenty meters below the surface.
No locked room, no locked cage, no sentry, met the elevator when it reached the bottom of the shaft. There wasn’t even anybody casually passing by. The shaft ended at the intersection of two finished tunnels that looked more like hotel corridors than tunnels. Soft lights glowed from panels set at the tops of the walls.
The Marines quickly stepped off the platform; the platform rose as soon as they were all off. They listened for a long moment, but the elevator didn’t come back down. Kindy looked at the walls and saw a plate with three buttons. Evidently the third one was used to call the elevator.
Kindy set his Marines to look down each of the four corridors. Kindy’s was featureless until it ended fifty meters away in a door. Nomonon’s had two doors on each side, then turned to the right forty meters away. Jaschke saw a ramp leading downward about twenty meters distant. Dim shapes were visible beyond the open door.
Ellis’s tunnel ended in an open doorway through which came the sounds of air compressors. Kindy had him lead the way. Ellis and Nomonon walked along one wall, Kindy and Jaschke along the other. There was enough room between them for a large person to pass by without bumping into any of the Marines.
The Marines stopped at the entrance and Kindy and Ellis cautiously looked in and to the sides. The room was filled with armored personnel carriers.
Kindy signaled the others to wait and stepped into the room to estimate its size and contents. There were fourteen columns of APCs to either side of the doorway. He went to his right to make sure there were full columns beyond the rank he could see. There were. He then checked to the left and found the same.
There were twenty-eight columns of APCs that ran as far as Kindy could see into the dimly lit room. He used his range finder to check the length of the room, as well as the length of the APCs and the interval between, then calculated the total: enough armored personnel carriers in this one room to mount an entire heavy division. He looked at the overhead and wondered what held it up—he hadn’t seen any pillars.
Kindy checked the time. They’d been inside the compound for more than an hour; there were seven hours left before sunrise and he wanted to be on the other side of the fields before sunup, and he wanted to reserve two or three hours for crossing the fields. Rather than examine the APC garage further, he had the squad backtrack to check out the downramp Jaschke had seen.
They froze halfway back to the intersection—the elevator was coming down and voices came from the shaft. Without needing orders, all four Marines lowered themselves to the floor and pressed against the wall.
The elevator reached bottom and two men stepped off; one was the “major,” the other a slightly older man, also with a military bearing. They didn’t look around, but turned straight toward the closed door at the end of the corridor Kindy had first looked down. Kindy eased silently to the intersection and watched the two. When they reached the door, the major placed his hand on the wall next to the door and the door slid open—there was an electric lock keyed to handprints, or some other biometric of the hand.
When the door closed behind the two, the Marines rose and continued to the downramp.
The ramp went down about ten meters deeper underground and ended in a cross corridor. A windowed door was at either end. Kindy sent Nomonon to one and went to the other himself. He decided immediately they weren’t going through this door.
Kindy saw a large common room filled with soldiers in partial uniforms, going hither and yon, in and out of other spaces that opened into the common. He backed off. Nomonon reached the foot of the ramp at the same time he did. Nomonon had seen a similar setup on the other side of the door he’d looked through.
“Now we know where the soldiers are who go with the APCs,” Kindy said, touching helmets.
“I saw another elevator over here,” Nomonon told him.
“Show me.”
This elevator wasn’t directly below the one the Marines had taken from the surface, and it was much larger; Kindy thought it could easily accommodate twenty or more men at a time. It was set into an alcove, walled in on three sides, rather than in a corner like the other elevator, and no molding or other architectural device marked the edges of the alcove. That was why Kindy hadn’t spotted it when he’d first glanced in its direction—he had looked along the plane of the wall, and there was nothing to catch his eye.
As Kindy looked up into the darkness of the shaft, the platform started to descend. He moved his squad back onto the ramp where they could go back up in a hurry and positioned himself at the entrance to the ramp so he could see who came off the elevator. He heard low voices and a single high-pitched laugh before the elevator reached bottom and a dozen soldiers exited. They split into two groups and headed to the doors at the ends of the corridor. They looked relaxed and happy, as though they’d just done something enjoyable.
Kindy thought for a moment, figuring angles and distances. He decided that the large elevator’s top end had to be inside the mess hall, and that the soldiers were returning to their quarters from watching the trid or playing games.
He wasn’t going to learn more there, not without taking a prisoner, but third squad had to get in and back out without anybody in the complex realizing they’d had visitors. So taking a prisoner was out of the question.
He sent the squad back up the ramp. There were two corridors they hadn’t checked yet. One was the corridor with the door at the end, the one that had opened when the “major” had placed his hand on the wall next to it. Kindy send Nomonon and Jaschke down the other corridor, which had doors on both of its sides and turned at the end.
None of the doors was locked. The two corporals opened each door and gave a quick look to what was inside before moving on. They didn’t take long studying what they found around the corner at the end of the corridor, either. They rejoined Kindy in moments and touched helmets to report their findings.
“The doors on the left are entrances to an armory,” Nomonon said.
“An unlocked armory?” Kindy asked.
Nomonon treated the question as rhetoric. “I saw thousands of small arms in locked racks. There were also large strongboxes with padlocks. My guess is they hold ammunition.”
“Enough small arms for a heavy division?” Kindy asked.
“Maybe enough for a regiment.”
Kindy nodded to himself; that probably wasn’t the only armory under the farming complex. He suspected the troop areas off the ramp the squad had gone down weren’t the only troop areas, either.
“The right side had fuel drums,” Jaschke reported, “probably for the APCs. There were also crates with markings that indicated they’re ammo for the APCs’ integral weaponry.”
That rocked Kindy. What kind of fool would store ammunition and fuel in the same place? It wouldn’t take much to cause a catastrophic explosion that might destroy the entire underground complex.
It was time to get out and report what they’d found. Kindy decided to request permission to come back and make an accident.
They had no way of knowing when the next person would want to use the elevator to the shed building, so they waited, one Marine in each of the corridors just a few meters from the elevator, for someone to come down. Someone did in just a couple of minutes—the grizzled sergeant.
The Marines dashed silently onto the platform as it began to rise. The sergeant must have felt something, because he turned and looked back quizzically, then shook his head and continued toward the palm-locked door.