“Yeah. So?”
“You’re right. But we weren’t going to stumble in blind anyhow. And I can’t let the ‘what ifs’ take over.”
“I know, Cap’n, I know, jes wanted to bring it to your attention.”
Ed glanced around the room at his squad. Camo or not, no one was going to mistake them for regular army, what with their bearded faces, helmet-less heads, and motley collection of weapons. Which was both good and bad; if they stumbled across an army patrol they’d never be able to pass for regular army, even at a distance, but at least they should be safe from friendly fire. Hopefully. He looked back down at Early.
“You going to need help getting up?” He did an admirable job of keeping a straight face.
Early squinted up at him. Ed was silhouetted against one of the filmy windows lit up by the morning sun.
“I saw how badly you were shaking last night trying to keep your rifle on the kid,” Ed went on. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Early, for a second there I thought you were having a heart attack.”
Early looked from him to George, who’d walked up and was now trying hard to hide a smile. “It’s gotta be hard being the only retiree on the squad,” George said innocently. “We’ve got time this trip to stop for afternoon naps, don’t we?” He raised his eyebrows at Ed.
“Oh you miserable bastards,” Early cursed. His hands gripped his rifle tight as he stood. “If either a you carried a real rifle maybe we could have an adult conversation.” He’d been forty-nine years old, just three years from retirement, when the war started, and that was near on a decade ago. Through all the years of fighting he’d managed to keep the same rifle he’d started with, a National Match M1A. Compared to the carbines the Army and just about everybody else used it was long and heavy and didn’t hold much ammo, but what he hit stayed down. And he had a track record of hitting what he was aiming at quite a bit more often than not.
George held out his stubby carbine. “You want to trade for the day? I don’t mind carrying an antique.” He eyed the bright scrape down the handguard. He knew he needed to repaint the thing, but finding spraypaint these days was nearly impossible. Grease, though, he should be able to find some grease inside this former machine shop to rub on it.
Early was visibly insulted. “Carry one ‘a your poodle shooters? No thank you. I take my job seriously.” He scowled at the short-barreled carbine in George’s hands. “I think I’d be insulted, you shot me with that thing.”
It was so easy to push Early’s buttons. George sobered up first. “How many rounds you got left for that beast again?”
Early pinched his lips together unhappily. “Thirty-four. We don’t do something soon I’ll be throwing rocks.”
Ed checked his watch. Time to go. He pulled the SatLink6 and battery out, assembled it and switched it on, unable to contain his impatience as it booted up. Once it was ready to go he looked at the signal strength icon. He’d charged the battery for twenty minutes early that morning, hooking it to the roll-up solar panel he’d laid on the concrete out back where it caught the morning sun. George was tasked with carrying the drone jammer, and he had his own rubber-backed solar panel for the four working batteries they still had for it.
“Can we get a signal here?” Ed asked. It wasn’t the metal in the roof interfering with the signal. Satellite coverage in the city had never been great, even though back before the war every car with a satellite radio never had any problem getting a signal. He supposed the military had shut down or taken over a lot of the birds in orbit. Or the ARF had taken them out.
George pointed. “That corner, usually.”
Ed moved to the rear corner of the shop room and was rewarded with a half-strength signal reading. “Better than nothing,” he muttered. He pulled out the tablet and got that up and running. He quickly checked the forum thread and saw there were no new messages, then used his thumbs to type in the other now-familiar web address.
George moved up quietly behind him and peered over his shoulder as a list of cities appeared on the small screen. Ed tapped one and the two men waited.
“I’m surprised it’s stayed up this long,” George said, nodding at the screen. “Whoever this guy is, he’s good.” He blinked. “I wonder if it’s Uncle Charlie, or someone on his team.”
The palm-sized screen changed from bluish-white to a mottled brownish green and both men breathed silent sighs of relief. Ed checked the readout in the corner of the photo for the time it was taken. “Christ, Zulu, Greenwich Mean Time, I can never remember. When was this taken?”
George checked his watch. “Thirty-seven minutes ago.”
“Not bad,” Ed said, nodding, as he used his fingertips to zoom in on the satellite photo. The mottled colors soon resolved themselves into a busy crisscross of tiny lines and dark splotches.
“No cloud cover,” George observed, staring at the screen. He then looked out the grimy windows, peering upward into the dark blue sky, idly wondering what piece of the world the satellite that had taken this photo was over now. “Better save this and disconnect.”
“Shit, yeah, right.” Ed saved the ultra-hi-res photo file and then pulled the battery from the SatLink. He then moved to the far corner of the building where the walls and pipes prevented any signal from going in or out. You never knew when someone might be trying to trace your signal, although passive downloading from a piggybacked Polish server was a far cry from broadcasting propaganda. He put away the SatLink and peered at the photo on the tablet.
Ed tapped the zoom button repeatedly, leaning close to peer at the screen until his nose was almost touching. The resolution on the satellite photo was scary good.
“Move a little north, about one tic,” George suggested. “That’ll center us.” He watched as the squad leader re-centered the screen. What was now displayed on the tablet’s small screen was a section of the city approximately one mile across. Both men squinted at it. “You think they have a clue we’ve got access to this?” he wondered aloud, much as he did every time they studied satellite data.
“As soon as they found out they would shut it down,” Ed replied. “Unless ARF controls the satellite. I don’t know.” His world was filled with unknowns. Since he couldn’t control them, he tried not to worry.
“Unless they wanted to feed us doctored photos.”
“Now there’s a cheery thought.”
“Too iffy, though,” the taciturn man said. “The photo covers the whole city, and unless they knew exactly when we’d download it, and where we were when we did, and where we wanted to go, they wouldn’t know exactly how to fudge it to get any benefit. And if they knew all that they’d just send in armor to surround us.”
“Hmmm. I wish this thing was bigger,” Ed said for the hundredth time, staring at the small screen. “See anything?”
“Not yet. Keep heading in.”
As Ed resumed zooming in on the satellite photo, he commented, “I don’t think whoever set this up is still hands on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think he set up a ghost piggyback program for the bird to download an extra copy of these photos to this site. In fact, they probably don’t come directly to this site, I’m sure they’re routed through all sorts of blind links before they end up there.”
“That makes sense. I forgot, you were in computers, before, weren’t you?”
Ed glanced back at him briefly. “A little bit.” Ed didn’t like talking about his life before the war. Not many of the men did.
“All right, stop there.” Both men studied the picture carefully. “Okay, this is us,” George said, pointing with his finger at a tiny tan rectangle in the center of the screen, the building in which they stood. “What do we got?”