The Forlorn Hope (30 page)

“Umm, I don't remember that I said that,” commented the veteran. He glanced over toward the dockers who were hoisting their apparatus into position. The six poker hands were now face up on the board in Dwyer's lap. The first four of the hands he had dealt so swiftly were straight flushes, king through nine in each suit. The fifth hand was four sevens and the ace of spades.

The last poker hand was a trey and two pairs—aces and eights.

Churchie Dwyer picked up the last hand, the Dead Man's Hand which Wild Bill Hickok had held when a bullet spattered his brains over the card table. “No,” said the veteran, “I don't remember saying that at all.”

*   *   *

“Hey Doc,” gibed one of the troopers in the rented room, “his hang better than yours. Maybe you ought to go back to bodies.”

The crewman from the
Katyn Forest
beamed over the other sewing machine. He had just enough English to catch the drift of the compliment.

Marco Bertinelli gestured angrily. “Maybe you'd like nice business suits?” he demanded.

“Hey, I don't need the shears in my eyes,” said Iris Powers, though the gesture had not really been that close. She stood with her arms out, ready for the Corpsman to drape her with the swatch he was cutting to length.

Bertinelli bent to his work again. “Look,” he said, “tailoring, it's an art. My old man, he'd kill me—sure. But if you make fatigues—” he nodded to the wedge of camouflage print against Trooper Powers' arm— “they've got to look like fatigues, right?”

“Goddam,” said Sergeant Hummel as she tried to tug down the legs of her own new garment. “I swear this crotch seam has teeth. But yeah, you're right, Doc. We're rolling our own instead of picking them up ready made so we don't ring too many bells. Looking like the Federation Guard isn't exactly a low-profile idea.”

“There's plenty of troops around in tailored uniforms,” objected the trooper who had made the first comment. “Hell, Praha's so rear-echelon it's ninety percent asshole.”

“Sure,” agreed Marco Bertinelli. Perfect, the cuff would be a centimeter too long. “But it isn't the strack troops who get assigned to
this
kind of duty, is it?”

Pinched lips rather than words indicated agreement all around the room.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Kings full!” sang the Sergeant of the Guard as he slapped his cards on the table. “Sweet bleeding Jesus, Churchie, it was the best night of my life when I ran into you in Maisie's last week. I swear to God, you're buying the best poker education a man could want.”

There was a buzz from the monitor in the glazed booth attached to the guardroom. “Sarge,” called the soldier there, “it looks like the van, but it's early.”

“Well, handle it,” said Sergeant Bles. His fingers trembled, organizing the pile of large-denomination scrip he had just swept from the table. The other two guards in the game watched their sergeant enviously, but they had folded after the draw. One of them took the deck as Churchie Dwyer passed it with a glum expression.

“I don't understand their papers,” the man actually on duty called plaintively. The guard post was a brick room built against the inner face of the wall. The booth had a view of the entrance road, from the double-barred gates to the line of barracks converted to prison blocks. A fiber-optics system gave the monitors in the booth both a close-up and a panorama of anyone who pulled up to the front of the gate.

“God
damn,
Stieshl,” muttered the Sergeant as he stood up. “Does your mommie got to hold your cock when you pee?” He strode toward the booth. “They got a pass for 1430, they get in. It says 1530 like we was told, then they cool their heels in the steet for an hour, right?” He bent over his subordinate's shoulder to see the paperwork the blonde driver of the van was holding to the receiver.

Churchie Dwyer got up and stretched. He could see the monitor past the two Federal guards. “Well, Del,” he said, stepping casually toward the booth himself, “I guess it's about that time.”

“Now, what the hell,” Sergeant Bles muttered toward the screen. He turned and saw the knife slide out of Dwyer's sleeve.

The mercenary punched him in the solar plexus as hard as his ropy muscles could drive a short blow. The Sergeant's breath whuffed out with a sound too muted to call attention to itself. The fifteen-centimeter knife blade had split all four chambers of his heart. The dead man could not really be said to have felt its passage.

Dwyer cleared his knife with a sucking sound but little blood. The guard sergeant was collapsing in the half-flinch, half-crouch to which the punch would have driven him even without steel on the end of it. Churchie did not have to worry about the men behind him, not with Del Hoybrin in the room. There was a bleat from one of the card players, then a loud crunch. The deck scattered. Some of the cards flicked Churchie's back as he leaned toward the man in the booth.

On the left monitor, the truck driver was saying urgently, “Wait a minute, buddy, I've got it right—”

As the puzzled guard started to look back again for his sergeant, Churchie's left hand gripped his hair to position his head. He stabbed through the base of the guard's skull. The Federal soldier squawked. His torso began to draw itself backward into an arch. The mercenary swore. His knife hilt was clamped against the victim's spine by the convulsion. The blade was sunk for half its length through bone and up into the cortex. Churchie yanked sideways in a panic. Even the density-enhanced blade had its structural limits. It flexed, then snapped off in the skull. The guard's limbs flailed, knocking over his chair and hammering against the wall of the booth.

Dwyer reached over the body and threw the gate switches, outer and then inner. He was breathing very hard. “Bastard!” he panted. “Bastard!” He flung his broken knife against the wall in a clatter.

The van pulled up outside the booth. Two men in Federal fatigues jumped out of the closed back, Leading Trooper Gratz and Hussein ben Mehdi wearing sergeant's pips as the best Czech speaker available for the guard post.

Churchie looked behind him. Del was standing by the overturned table, more or less as he had been when he crushed the skulls of the two card players against one another. One of the sprawled men was breathing stertorously. Neither of them moved.

“—ing door!” ben Mehdi snarled as he rattled the panel beside the booth. The van whined off toward the euphemistically-titled Transit Block, accelerating.

Churchie stepped to unlock the door he had forgotten. Before he did so, he paused to pry the wad of money from Sergeant Bles' dead hand.

*   *   *

“Hey Lieutenant,” the young jailer called as he led the way down the corridor, “they're here for you early.” There were a number of ways to deal with the knowledge that most of the people with whom you worked would be dead in a few days. This jailer handled it by ignoring the fact and treating his charges as if he were an enthusiastic hotel manager.

Albrecht Waldstejn thought that brutality might have been preferable. But then, it was hard to be sure.

Waldstejn stepped back from the shower. The spray continued to swirl down the cell's sole drain. “They can damned well wait, then,” he shouted to the steel door. “Or they can carry me out like this. God knows it doesn't matter to me.”

“Get your clothes on and do it fast!” snarled another voice through the observation gate. “I'm not spending any time here that I don't have to. You, get the door open!”

“Sir,” the jailer objected, “there's no need—”

“Do it!” There was a click as someone laid a magnetic key against the lock plate.

Waldstejn was not sure until the door swung outward. A company of mercs who could not be assigned forward till a contract dispute was settled, well.… But Private Pavel Hodicky was back in Federal uniform, this time with captain's insignia and a sneer on his face to match the false commission. The little deserter was the only man or woman aboard the
Katyn Forest
who could carry on an extended conversation without being branded an outlander. If Hodicky looked young for his rank, then the casualties of the past year had meant sudden promotion for more men than him.

No one spent much time in chit-chat with members of a death squad, anyway.

“Snap it up,” snarled Hodicky in a voice like that of an angry lap dog. Beside him stood the jailer in a gray service uniform. He carried a shock rod, the only variety of weapon permitted within the unit. Two of the three other soldiers waiting in Federal fatigues were mercenaries whom Waldstejn knew by sight but not name. The third was Sergeant Johanna Hummel with a set of Cecach handcuffs instead of the molecular springs which Waldstejn knew the Company stocked for its own use. The condemned officer felt a fleeting surprise that he did not see Iris Powers—but Powers spoke no Czech and might have endangered them all by ignoring a chance direction.

Waldstejn slipped on his boots. As he straightened from fastening them, Pavel Hodicky seized his wrist. The deserter's fingers trembled with suppressed hysteria. “Lock them,” he said to Hummel, “and let's get this over.” The Sergeant obeyed with a clumsiness which could have been explained by embarrassment. The Cecach officer caught the light in her eyes, though, and he knew that she was wired for battle, fearful and exultant together. Waldstejn's own expression of shock was real enough,
Maria;
and it was yet to be proven that death did not lie just beyond the cell, as he had assumed when they gave him word that morning that his appeal had been denied.

“Ah, Lieutenant?” the jailer said. “There's your cap and—”

“Forget it,” interrupted Private Hodicky. He gave Waldstejn a push in the middle of the back. “Mary and the Saints! How long is he going to need it, anyway? Now move, sweetheart,
move
!”

The condemned man stumbled as he marched down the corridor in the middle of four soldiers as grim as any the jailer had ever seen. The man in gray shook his head sadly as he stepped back into the cell.

He had to get the room ready for the next, ah, customer.

*   *   *

“Hey!” said the clerk behind the counter, “
everybody
signs. Don't you know that?”

“Hey?” Hodicky snapped back. “Who the hell do you think you are, soldier?” He glared through the reinforced glass at the arms-room attendant. “All
I
know is they rotated us back for a rest and gave us
this
crap! Now, if you've got any more bloody forms, hand them through so we can get our guns and get out of this place.”

The little private turned from the counter with an ostentatious flare of his nostrils. It had been easy once he had learned to think of them all as images on a computer screen. Just like nights in the lyceum office, inputting data that the system, the System, thought was true.

Of course, a mis-key here and they really would go out as garbage.

Lieutenant Waldstejn was bent over as if he were muttering a prayer to his boots. “Names…,” Hodicky heard him whisper.

“Lichtenstein,” Hodicky said, pointing at Sergeant Hummel, “you sign first.” God the Savior, what would have happened if all three mercenaries had filled out the forms in non-Cecach names? Thank the Lord, thank the Lieutenant. “Then Breisach, then you, Ondru,” he continued aloud. If he sounded like an obsessive-compulsive with a burr up his ass, then that was reasonably in keeping with his present persona. Three soldiers who did not know their own names were more of a problem.

The door guard was watching them instead of his screen. “Wouldn't be surprised to get a little rain,” he remarked with a wave toward his monitors. There was not enough sky visible on them to make the comment more than a hope for conversation. In the alley dividing Transit Section from the next unit over stood the van they had stolen and restenciled for the purpose. Churchie Dwyer had claimed that was easy. The harder trick had been to get two more rifles and a pistol for the ‘Captain', but there were too many troops quartered around the capital for even that to look like an epidemic of theft.

“All right,” the clerk said. He laid the three rifles and the sidearm in the drawer and slid them through to the anteroom proper.

“You boys be careful,” said the guard as he pressed the latch button. He was trying a joke since the previous ploy had been ignored. The bolts in the outer door snicked back into their housings. “Yes sir, this one looks real dangerous—for a no-guts deserter!”

Nobody spoke this time either. The high-voiced officer paused a moment before he thrust his stooped prisoner toward the doorway. The guard did not like the look in the Captain's eyes.

And he did not like the muttered reference to a Delete key.

*   *   *

“There's a van,” Lieutenant ben Mehdi called tensely. He was hunched forward, feeling horribly exposed in the glass booth. If he leaned back, however, he stuck to whatever had spurted onto the chair cushion. There were things ben Mehdi had seen often enough, now, to know that he would never get used to them. The interior of the guard post was one such thing. “Allah be praised, it's them!” He stood up, waving toward the van which was high-balling out of the compound interior.

Another horn squealed angrily. There was a truck outside the gate as well. It looked exactly like the one in which the mercenaries were about to escape.

“Bloody hell,” muttered Churchie Dwyer as he peered past the Lieutenant. The close-up screen showed clearly the gate pass the driver was holding up to it. “Fifteen minutes early.… Say they got to wait, that's what Bles would've done.”

The four bodies were stacked in a corner where they could not be seen through the booth's glazing. Ben Mehdi could have done without a reference to the man he had replaced, however. “Are you crazy?” he demanded. He threw a switch and the outer gate slid back. The van pulled up to the inner one. “You think they're just going to watch when we all get in a truck and drive away?” The Lieutenant closed the gate behind the incoming vehicle and opened the one in front of it. The van with Trooper Powers driving and the Cecach private beside her in the cab waited. Its turbine whined on more throttle than idling required.