Part 19 (1/2)
He drew his dart pistol and clicked off its safety.
At 0500 flashes of light strobed beneath the barracks as the grenades detonated. There was the crackle of wood and the screams of the men and women ofTango Company.
The Corporal attaching the flag dropped one end and whirled around. Floodlights on the perimeter fence snapped on and pointed inward toward the barracks.
In the confusion, no one noticed as one of the guards near the flagpole dropped his rifle, grabbed his neck ... and toppled to the gravel face-first.
His partner spotted him and knelt.
John sprinted across the compound, firing. His first shot went wild, and the kneeling guard spun around to face him. Fhajad and Sam shot him in the back.
John took aim at the Corporal-who fumbled with his pistol holster, trying to free his weapon. John planted two narq-darts in his chest. The Corporal dropped. Two more guards rounded the corner of the warehouse, shouted, and took aim at John. He was out in the open, and there was no way his dart pistol could hit those guards from this distance. One guard fired. The round pinged off the flagpole not five centimeters from John's head.
The guard stiffened and dropped his rifle, wildly grabbing at the back of his head ... and the dart stuck into his skull. He screamed and fell, thras.h.i.+ng in the dirt.
The other guard twitched and pulled a dart from his thigh. Another dart hit him in the chest, and he sprawled to the ground. John sent his silent thanks to Linda and Fred. He detached the flag from the lanyard and stuffed it into his s.h.i.+rt. He waved Red Team forward, and Kelly led them to the fences.
Kelly didn't slow down as she sprinted and closed on the chain-link fence. She tucked and threw herself into the steel mesh. Just before she hit, John spotted the smoking outlines on the fence where she had applied the battery acid.
The fence broke in a jagged outline, and Kelly rolled to her feet on the other side without missing a stride. John waved his team through. He went last, pausing only a fraction of a second to look back.
The camp was in chaos. Security lights swung about, there were screams from the barracks. A tank rumbled to life and crunched into the center of the base.
John ran. Behind them came the staccato report of machine-gun fire-just as they entered the safety of the forest. John smiled, panting. ”Good work, everyone,” he whispered. ”I think those guys were using live ammo this time.” Kelly held up a bra.s.s case from a 7.62mm round. ”Yep,” she said. ”No doubt.” ”Come on,” John said, ”let's not stick around. If they weren't before, they're p.i.s.sed now.”
Red Team slinked through the forest. They kept to the shadows, and took cover under logs when a Pelican roared overhead looking for them.
At 0545 they made it to the clearing designated as their extraction LZ. At 0700 hours they were supposed to meet CPO Mendez. Of course, the Chief rarely let them get off this easy- so John had planned for Blue Team to be here as well... only they would remain hidden. Linda and Fred would post somewhere in the treetops and cover Red Team until they were sure it was safe.
Red Team hunkered down in the brush and waited. They weren't safe; John knew that. Tango Company would be looking for them, and this is when his team would get anxious ... when they would want to talk and brag about their successful mission, or look at the captured flag. To their credit, Red Team stayed still and silent. And Blue Team was nowhere to be seen.
At 0610 the thunderous roar of a Pelican's engines filled the air and the craft slowly descended and landed in the clearing. The aft hatch popped open.
Fhajad started to move, but John set his hand on his shoulder.
”Too early,” he whispered. ”When is the Chief not perfectly on time?” Fhajad, Kelly, and Sam grimly nodded. ”I'll go,” John said. ”You guys back up Blue Team.” They gave him a thumbs-up. Sam patted him on the back and whispered, ”Don't worry, I won't let them do anything to you.” ”I know,” John whispered back. He pulled the flag from his s.h.i.+rt and handed it to Sam. ”Thanks.”
John crawled away from their position. When he was thirty meters from his team, he stood and approached the Pelican- which was almost certainly a trap.
He halted halfway across the meadow and waited.
A figure appeared on the exit ramp of the Pelican and waved him forward. ”Come on, son. Haul a.s.s!” ”Negative, sir!” John shouted. The figure turned and muttered to someone inside, ”c.r.a.p.” He sighed. ”Okay, so we do it the hard way.”
Four men jogged out of the back of the Pelican. They quickly spread out in a semicircle and moved toward John, their a.s.sault rifles aimed directly at him.
John held up his hands.
”He's giving up,” one of the soldiers said disbelievingly.
”Should we just shoot him?” another man said.
”No,” the one leading them hissed. ”Payback first.” He stepped up to John and punched him in the stomach. John doubled over from the blow. The man hauled him up and patted him down. ”We gotta find that d.a.m.ned flag or the Captain will have our a.s.ses in a sling. Where is it, kid?” He shook John. ”And where's the rest of your pack?”
John laughed.
”What's so funny?” the man growled.
”You idiots are bunched up.”
A hail of darts hissed through the air from all sides. The men from the Pelican convulsed; one fired his rifle, but the shot went wide and high. They fell over, paralyzed.
John dropped to a crouch, grabbed a pistol from the man who'd punched him, and crawled on his stomach to the Pelican. He crept around the open hatch and swept the interior. Empty.
He scrambled into the c.o.c.kpit and pulsed the Pelican's radar. He got a contact bearing of 110, fourteen kilometers out, but it moved on a parallel course to their position. John left the Pelican and ran across the field.
Red and Blue Teams were still hidden... and they would stay hidden forever, until he gave the all-clear. all-clear.
Their all-clear all-clear signal wasn't something that could be wrung from John-not even torture or CPO Mendez's best coercion techniques would wrest it from him. He would rather have died than betray his teammates. signal wasn't something that could be wrung from John-not even torture or CPO Mendez's best coercion techniques would wrest it from him. He would rather have died than betray his teammates.
John whistled the singsong six-note melody and called: ”Oly Oly Oxen Free!” ”Oly Oly Oxen Free!”
Red Team emerged first and marched across the meadow. Kelly paused to kick one of the men in the head; she took his rifle, too.
Linda and Fred dropped down from a tree branch and ran across the field. ”Oly Oly Oxen Free,” ”Oly Oly Oxen Free,” Linda repeated, grinning from ear to ear. ”All out in the free. We're all free.” Linda repeated, grinning from ear to ear. ”All out in the free. We're all free.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALYX Estimated 0510 hours, September 23,2552 (Military Calendar)Aboard captured Covenant flags.h.i.+p, Epsilon Eridani system.
Cortana only partially listened to the debate between the Master Chief and the others. The discussion was moot. She had projected the outcome as 100 percent certain that John would convince them all to go, or-failing that-that he would convince the Lieutenant to let him go alone to the surface to investigate the signal . . . a signal that in her opinion was so easily copied and so blatantly unencrypted it defied explanation how the Chief had conjectured that his team of Spartans had sent it.
Instead of partaking in the slow and inefficient conversation, she a.n.a.lyzed the Covenant pattern of movement in the Epsilon Eridani system and discerned three important things.
First, the Covenant wars.h.i.+ps had extremely regular elliptical orbits about Reach. There were a total of thirteen heavy cruisers and three carriers moving three hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet. Two exceptions to this patrol pattern were a pair of light cruisers hovering over Menachite Mountain- trapped at the bottom of the gravity well and therefore not an immediate threat to her s.h.i.+p.
Second, there was a blind spot in their patrol patterns that would make a perfect rendezvous location to extract the Chief and the others from their soon-to-be-executed surface mission. She plotted ingress and egress courses, and started the precise calculations she would need if she was to initiate a Slips.p.a.ce jump so close to Reach.
Arid third, and most interesting to Cortana, 217 smaller Covenant craft pushed debris into a concentrated region of s.p.a.ce in a high stationary orbit over Reach's northern pole. Within that region drifted the wrecked hulls of both Covenant and UNSC s.h.i.+ps destroyed in the battle for Reach. Floating there were some of the UNSC's finest s.h.i.+ps: the Basra, Basra, the the Hannibal, Hannibal, and the pride of the fleet, the supercarrier and the pride of the fleet, the supercarrier Trafalgar. Trafalgar. No human signals emanated from the s.h.i.+ps; nor did Cortana sense any active electromagnetic fields. No human signals emanated from the s.h.i.+ps; nor did Cortana sense any active electromagnetic fields.
She watched as the smaller Covenant s.h.i.+ps cut into the dead hulks and jetted away with chunks of t.i.tanium-A armor. They moved like a trail of ants to a location in s.p.a.ce over the lower lat.i.tudes, a point over Menachite Mountain, where the Covenant used the metal to construct a platform. The thing was already a square plate a kilometer to a side. Clearly, the Covenant had more in mind for Reach than destruction.
”Cortana,” the Master Chief said. ”We'll need to rendezvous at a-”