Читать книгу Damage Control - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 45

The fleet-exercise parking lot was a trapezoid that held about eighty vehicles. They had reached the back of it—yellow grass and livid green weeds, black mud and the odd scrub tree. The mud ran almost to the fence, and the walking was worse. Clavers and Fidel plodded ahead, but Benvenuto and Ong were holding each other up, staggering, no longer caring about mud or grass or firm ground.

Alan knelt where there was bamboo and some kind of thorned cane. “I’m going to do a recon up the far side to see if I can check out our vehicle and if there’s anybody at the gate. If the gate’s down, we’ve got another problem.”

“Go through it,” Fidel muttered.

Alan shot him a look but said nothing. “Meanwhile, I want you guys to look for a way in without going over the fence.”

Benvenuto, who was lying flat, said, “Don’t raise the river, lower the bridge.”

“Talk English,” Fidel growled.

“Like, dig—dig?” Benvenuto giggled. “Go under, get it?”

Alan made himself sound confident, trying to pump them up. “Use whatever works. Only big enough for the biggest of us to squeeze through—I guess that’s you, Fidel.” He stood in a half-crouch. “I’ll be back.” He glanced at Ong, who was next senior to him and should have been told to take charge. Nothing.

Fidel got up. “I’m coming with you.”

“Better alone.”

“Unh-unh—sir. By the time you get that antique into firing position, you’d be in two pieces. You go; I cover you.”

Alan grinned. “Okay, Mom, I’ll take the pistol.” He handed Clavers the .303; she looked hurt, but she turned over the CZ. Alan grinned at them. “Dig good.”

He and Fidel went along the rear of the parking lot to the corner and turned up the long side. They hadn’t gone ten yards when Alan stopped, hearing a sound he knew he shouldn’t hear, an anomalous clink, then silence, then a soft sound of two things brushing together. He motioned Fidel back, knelt. Seconds later, an Indian noncom in fatigues appeared inside the fence thirty yards away, a new, black-plastic-stocked AK in his hands.

“Shit.” He pushed Fidel down as a signal for him to stay there and hurried, crouching, back the way they had come. When he reached the others, Clavers and Benvenuto were scraping in the earth with their pocketknives, a pile of dirt between them.

“Bag it!” he whispered. “Guy coming inside the fence. No shooting!” He looked down at the pile of dirt. “Kick it out of the way, push grass over it—!”

He waited with them until the noncom had come into view, come down the fence in a crouch, and gone past. The man was edgy, worried more about what was ahead of and behind him than what might be outside the fence.

“He see them?” Fidel said when Alan rejoined him.

“You think I’d be standing here if he had?”

At the far end of the fence, they knelt and studied the gate. An officer and three EMs were there, all armed. The arm of the gate was down and two cars had been parked bumper to bumper across the road.

“Iffy.”

Fidel grunted. “Maybe they’re good guys.” He was being sarcastic.

Alan watched. And waited. Nothing happened—and then the officer’s cell phone must have rung, because he took a device from a pocket and put it against his ear. An alarm went off in Alan’s head: these guys somehow had a cellphone net that was still functioning. And then the officer reached inside his shirt and withdrew something, the gesture alone telling Alan that it was on a chain or lanyard. The thing gleamed in the sunlight. Then the officer took it in his fingers and connected it to the cell phone.

“Bingo,” Alan said. Fidel pulled his brows together. Alan felt for the thing he had taken from the Indian commodore and put, yes, right there in his left-hand pants pocket. He had pretty much forgotten it in everything that had happened; now, he took it out. It lay, golden, shell-like, in his palm, the USB-port connection a small extrusion at one end.

“What the hell’s that?”

“Something that tells me those aren’t the good guys. Come on.”