Control Point (31 page)

One of the enrollees had raised the flag during control class that morning, which set Swift into his usual fit of impotent screaming that a resigned Salamander didn’t bother to check. He administered a perfunctory oath at the base of the flagpole before jogging back to the group to resume instruction.

Britton went through the exercises, not really paying attention. He realized that he no longer needed them. His basic control was fluid, solid. He could call and shunt away the magic at his will. There was nothing more for him to learn there. He looked at Swift and shook his head. It was becoming impossible to sympathize with him. The man’s impotent posturing trapped him in that tiny space, his world become the whole of the little muddy compound. And for what? Pride? Some
obscure ethical point that nobody apart from him even cared about?

How are you any different?
Britton asked himself.
You’re both resisting. How are you any better?

I am better. I’m looking for a way out. Swift is sulking. I don’t know what the hell he thinks he’ll accomplish by spinning his wheels here. At least I’ve got a plan.

Really? And what plan is that? Get the worm that is never arriving? Get Scylla out of her cage?

Face the music, pal. Your plans stink. You and Swift are closer than you think.

Scylla paced the yard, her guards quaking behind her. All her power, Britton thought, and all she’d managed to do was intimidate two soldiers who locked her up anyway. She was nothing more than a bully. When she paced past him, she nodded greeting. Was that madness he saw in her wide-eyed grin? “Have you forgotten me, Oscar?” she asked. “Won’t you let me help you?”

Britton looked at his feet until she passed, the guards moving sheepishly behind her, doing their best to look as if they were hurrying her along.

But he could feel her presence, her feet crunching on the frozen mud, the guards standing uneasily behind her. Why had she stopped? Weren’t they supposed to keep her moving? “Scylla, …” he said, looking up.

Scylla had moved twenty yards down, along with her guards. It was Fitzy who stood before him. The chief warrant officer’s condescending look was gone, replaced instead with an earnest concern. “Morning, Novice, you ready to do some good?”

Britton looked around him at Wavesign’s childish lack of control, Swift’s pouty impotence, Scylla’s half-mad, half-reasoned hostility. He was surprised to find himself actually glad to see Fitzy. Hope blossomed in his chest.
Is he serious?
“You bet I am, sir.”

“Good, let’s go.”

Downer looked wistfully after them, but Fitzy waved her away. Salamander only nodded as Fitzy turned on his heel and took off without saluting. He set a good pace, walking so fast that Britton had to jog to keep up, even though his legs were much longer.

“We in a hurry, sir?” Britton winced as soon as the words were out, waiting for the string of invective that Fitzy usually reserved for those who asked foolish questions.

But Fitzy only nodded. “Got a problem that you’re uniquely suited to solve, Keystone. About time you earned your wings, so to speak.” The seed of hope in Britton began to flower.

They moved up the muddy track and through the checkpoint out of the SOC enclosure and down another wider road that led toward the FOB’s central plaza. Britton realized a moment later that they were heading toward the cash. Therese. His heart leapt.

He opened his mouth to ask another question, and Fitzy silenced him with a wave. “I’ll give you the full rundown in exactly two mikes. Just shut up and haul ass for now.” The chief warrant officer broke into a run.

They dashed through the cash’s front flaps, pushing past the signs marking the trauma ward, and headed through a side flap that led to a covered walkway that looked recently erected judging by the shiny new tent poles and fresh gravel. Britton looked around for Marty, but they were nowhere near the urinalysis section, and, while he saw many Goblin orderlies helping out in the bustle of the trauma floor, he couldn’t spot Marty’s dotted-paint pattern, his kindly eyes, his wide, splay-footed stance.
When I first got here, I couldn’t tell one Goblin from another,
Britton mused.

At the end of the covered walkway, a miniature trauma center had been set up under a new tent on a freshly laid gravel bed. Two sentries stood at the entrance, carbines ready. They nodded at a glance from Fitzy and stood aside to let him and Britton pass. The center’s interior was kitted out for emergency care, with two gurneys and mobile medical pallets piled with equipment. Britton could make out surgical tools, a defibrillator, and a heart monitor. A doctor stood ready, two Goblin orderlies at his sides, already scrubbed up and ready to work. Beside them stood Therese, also in scrubs, a Physiomancer’s lapel pin prominently displayed, as well as a polished and worried-looking army colonel. His name tape read
TAYLOR
.

Britton nodded to Therese, and she smiled back behind her surgical mask. He started forward to embrace her, but Fitzy’s
hand on his shoulder stopped him, rotated him to face the likely reason all this medical might was on standby.

Three combat operators stood in the tent’s other half, geared for dynamic entry in all the tactical gear Britton’s own men had worn on the high-school roof. Tabs arced across the Velcro patches on their shoulders:
SPECIAL FORCES
. Beside them, a SOC Hydromancer stood. He was likewise rigged for war but carried no weapon other than his holstered pistol, not that he would need one.
BREACHER
, read the subdued gray lettering across his chest, just below a thin stylized gray wave.

A burly Entertech contractor nearly knocked Britton over, fitting body armor and a tactical vest over Britton’s head, strapping a pistol and go bag to his legs, stuffing the pouches with magazines.

“This him?” said one of the SF operators, a grizzled sergeant first class, his face half-invisible under brim of his helmet and the fittings for his night optical device. His name tape read
SHARP
.

Fitzy nodded. “Just give me a sec to get him briefed up, and, hopefully, we can make this work.”

“We don’t have a lot of time. They could be moved, or worse,” Sharp said.

“You can’t rush this,” the colonel said. “Let Chief Warrant Officer Fitzsimmons do his job.”

The SOF operators stared at the colonel with open contempt, completely unimpressed by his rank.

Fitzy faced Britton squarely and placed his hands on his shoulders. “All right, Keystone. I need you to listen carefully and to focus completely. We don’t have time to go through this twice. You with me?”

“Locked on, sir,” Britton said.

“Good.” Fitzy nodded. “You’ve been kind of cut off from the news out here, so you aren’t tracking on the fact that we’ve got two kidnapped marines out of the Second Marine Expeditionary Force running support for the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Mescalero reservation. The res is gigantic. We have no idea where the hell they are, and to be frank, we were starting to lose hope that we’d ever get ’em back. But just about two hours ago, the kidnappers posted a video to the Internet showing proof of life. The video also shows the room.”

Britton nodded. “You want me to gate there.”

Fitzy pointed to a computer monitor mounted to a wheeled cart behind the SF operators. “The video has a pretty good pan of the entire room, hopefully enough for you to get a fix on the location. We had one of our information operations bubbas work up a scratch-and-sniff kit for you, so you can get a sense of what the place smells like. Mission is simple. You gate the team in, keep to the rear, and get the team out when the hostages are secured. Bring everybody home so the medical crew here can work on them. Sergeant Sharp runs the show, for you and even for Captain TrueZero here. The Apache husband their magic users carefully, and we’re not expecting a ton of sorcery on this run, but TrueZero can Suppress well enough if it comes to that.”

“You stay on our six and out of the fight,” Sergeant Sharp added. “I can’t afford to be worrying about you once we hit the target.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Britton said, trying not to bristle. “I was doing assault-team insertions for years before I came up Latent. I know the drill.”

Sharp looked unimpressed, and Fitzy jerked his head toward the computer monitor. “Let’s give this a shot.”

Britton nodded, a lump of fear and excitement working its way from his stomach up to his throat.
I’m finally going to put it to use. I’m finally going to do something.

The video was grainy, but clear enough for Britton to make out a wide brick-walled space. A dirty gray concrete floor, a drop-tiled ceiling with water stains. Rusted machinery parts were jumbled in one corner. A flag hung on the rear wall over a green-painted door, depicting crossed fists, each clenching a rifle, positioned behind what looked like a winged wheel. A narrow black shape, vaguely manlike, rose from the wheel’s center. A wide, knife-toothed grin stretched across it, narrow hands flexing dark claws. Britton thought the shape looked familiar, and a chill ran across his back. Crowning the display was a giant bird skull, striped red and orange. Four hooded men stood behind the two marines, seated Indian style in their uniforms, their faces bruised past recognition.

But they were alive.
Don’t worry about that. Focus on the room. Your job is to get the guys in to do the job.

But something about the scene nagged at him. “Sir?” He said to Fitzy, “That bird skull’s awful big. How the heck would the Apache get their hands on a Ro…”

“Focus, Keystone!” Fitzy silenced him. “Intel’s not your job here.”

Britton bit his lip and concentrated.

As he looked at the video, he felt a movement beside him, and one of the Goblin contractors began to wave a small plastic canister under his nose. The fumes rose, carrying foreign scents—spent diesel fuel, animal manure, dust, and mold. “Close your eyes,” Fitzy said. “Get a real good sense of the place.”

Britton did his best to focus on the smells and the room in the video, trying to ignore the heady silence around him, the stares of the SF operators, Fitzy, Therese, and the medical crew, Colonel Taylor. The pressure made him nervous, and he leaned on the Dampener to shunt the emotion aside.
Focus, focus.

After a moment, Sharp coughed. Fitzy stirred at Britton’s side. “What do you think?”

“I’ve got it,” Britton said.

“Are you sure?”

“No, but it’ll have to do, won’t it?”

Fitzy nodded grimly. “I guess it will. All right, I want a pinhole, Keystone, open for no more than five seconds. I want a quick recon of the room and ID any threats. Can you do that?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Remember, no bigger than a pinhole. We alert the enemy to our entry, and this whole thing is going to go south.”

Britton nodded and cleared his mind. He tried to push all other thoughts from his mind’s eye, focusing on the image of the room, repeating it in his head, centering on the details of the filthy brick, the hung banner, the pile of soiled machine parts. He recalled the smells, the dull cordite tinge burning his nostrils. Then he leaned on the Dampener, letting his nervousness, his desire not to disappoint the crowd staring at him, fuel the magic. The gate materialized perfectly, barely the size of a dime, shedding a tiny pinprick of light. He looked through it, then leaned back, shutting it and nodding.

“Room’s empty, sir. No light source or obstructions. No threats visible. Looks like they abandoned it after making the video.” Britton kept his voice even, but inside he was exulting.
I did it. I watched a video for a minute and sniffed a canister and I can take us right there.
The control, the sense of accomplishment was almost overwhelming. Fitzy grinned at him, and Britton grinned back, grateful in spite of himself.
Bastard gave me this chance.

“All right,” Sharp said. “I wish we had more time to prep, but we need to go now. Keystone, Captain TrueZero, on our six, and do not engage unless called upon. In and out, quick as we can. Normally we’d have weeks to drill for an op like this. But…but things are different.”

You bet things are different. Now the army’s got a guy who can get you there in an instant. You probably wouldn’t have even attempted this mission before. Don’t worry, I won’t let it go to my head.

“I’ve got it,” the SOC Hydromancer groused.

“With all due respect, sir,” Sharp said, “I need you to secure the attitude. I cannot afford to be worrying about either of you.” He nodded to his men, slipping the night-vision device into position over his eyes.

“You might want to hold off, Sergeant,” Britton said. “The gate makes a lot of light. Better wait until you’re through, and it’s closed, before you go to the night optical devices. Otherwise, you might be running this op blind.”

TrueZero smirked, and Sharp nodded, slipping up his NODs and making a
you-got-me
face.

Britton nodded to Fitzy and widened his stance. “Folks might want to step back a bit.”

As the group complied, he heard Therese whisper behind him, “Good luck, Oscar.”

“Yes,” added the colonel, almost as an afterthought. “God-speed.”

“Don’t fuck it up, Keystone,” Fitzy added, “or it’s your ass.”

Britton grinned and slid the gate open, wide enough to admit the operators abreast. The SOF soldiers hesitated a moment, staring at the portal. Sharp motioned them forward, and they went, following their carbine muzzles as if they were dragged by them, walking evenly, calm, perfectly stable firing
platforms. Sharp made a zipping motion across his lips to Britton and TrueZero before moving through. Britton and TrueZero drew their pistols and followed behind. They entered into the darkness, and Britton shut the gate, an array of smells hitting his nose. The IO guys had gotten it almost exactly right. The air was thick, close, and freezing.

He heard the low clicks of the SF operators snapping their NODs into place, and Britton followed suit, the world transforming from black into pale green and white. He’d operated on NODs before and paused to adjust to how they flattened the world, robbing him of depth perception and color, plunging him into a weird ghost world, mechanical and unforgiving. But it was well worth it. The benefit of seeing in the dark far outweighed any minor adjustments that had to be made to do it. Britton looked left and right, able to take in the rest of the room that the camera’s aperture had cut off. Two metal doors stood at the far end. The SOF operators were already stacking up alongside it, Sharp anchoring the three men. Britton and TrueZero took up position on the door’s far side, shoulders pressed against the wall, pistols pointed at the floor, out of the line of fire as instructed.