They covered most of the remaining distance before anyone realized that whatever they might be wearing, the van's occupants weren't Gyangtsese.
"Wait a min-" someone began, and Sandusky casually tilted his silenced M-97 to the side and opened fire.
The rifle's silencer was remarkably efficient, and the militiamen looked down in astonishment as their harness lights began to flash. Then the tingler circuits kicked in … at which point the "dead" sentries suddenly started making rather more noise than the rifle had and got their posteriors into contact with the sidewalk with remarkable speed.
Sandusky and one of the fire team's riflemen had already peeled off, finding positions which let them dominate the sidewalk and street immediately in front of the building with fire. While they did that, Metternich, Johansson, and the rest of Alpha Team opened the front door, tossed a pair of flash-bang "hand grenades" into the building's lobby, and followed them in a moment later with their own weapons ready.
"What the -?" Colonel Sharwa began as the ear-splitting "CRACK!" of Metternich's "grenades" shook the office building he'd appropriated as his HQ for the exercise. He glared at the communications technician, still standing in the doorway.
"Go find out what the hell is going on!" he barked.
"Yes, Sir! Right away!" the tech replied. He spun on his heel to sprint away, then, suddenly, stopped.
Sharwa's glare grew even more pronounced as the tech stepped slowly and carefully backwards into the office. He opened his mouth to flay the unfortunate man, but then he froze, his mouth still open, as Sergeant Abraham Metternich, Imperial Marine Corps, followed the com tech into the room.
"Good afternoon, Colonel Sharwa," the Marine said with exquisite military courtesy.
Then he raised his combat rifle, and Sharwa's harness began to flash as the Marine squeezed the trigger.
Chapter Five
"God damn that son-of-a-bitch!"
Planetary Governor Jasper Aubert slammed himself down in the comfortable chair behind his desk. He was a tallish man, who normally had the well-groomed, smoothly dignified good looks of the successful politician he'd been back on Old Earth. At the moment, however, he looked much more like a petulant child throwing a temper tantrum than like Seamus II's personal representative from the sophisticated old imperial capital world itself.
"Pankarma?" Бkos Salgado asked, as he followed the Governor into the office.
"What?" Aubert looked up from his scowling contemplation of his desk blotter.
"I asked if you were referring to Pankarma and his GLF idiots."
"As a matter of fact, no," Aubert half-snarled, his cultured Earth accent notably in abeyance. "Not that Pankarma isn't a son-of-a-bitch in his own right. Not to mention an ambitious, possibly traitorous bastard. But I was 'referring,' as you put it, to that other son-of-a-bitch, Kereku."
"Ah." Salgado nodded. He wasn't exactly surprised, even if the governor of a Crown World wasn't supposed to talk that way about the sector governor for whom he theoretically worked. Given the fact that Salgado's opinion of Sir Enobakhare Kereku closely paralleled that of his own immediate superior, however, he felt no particular urge to point out the inappropriateness of Aubert's comment.
"May I ask just what the good Sector Governor has done this time?" he inquired after a moment.
"He's decided to 'counsel me,' " Aubert snapped. "Jesus! He's talking to me as if I were some sort of political intern! God damn, but I hate these career bureaucrats who think they understand how politics work! You think that ivory-tower asshole Kereku would have survived six months in real-world politics back on Terra?"
"Sir Enobakhara?"
Salgado laughed at the thought, although, despite his own intense dislike for Kereku (and his officious chief of staff, Obermeyer), he had to admit privately that one thing Kereku wasn't was an ivory-tower intellectual. True, Kereku was firmly aligned with the reactionary bloc which had gathered around Sir Jeffrey Madison, the current Foreign Minister, and the Earl of Stanhope, in the senior levels of the Out-Worlds hierarchy. Salgado was, of course, a protйgй of Senator Gennady, like Aubert himself, which meant that Kereku was far more likely to adopt confrontational policies in either of them or. And, equally true, the Sector Governor was also technically a bureaucrat, never having won an elective office. But, for all that, he was scarcely a typical example of the breed.
Kereku had started out in the diplomatic corps and done superlatively there, then moved over to Out-World Affairs decades ago. Salgado didn't have much faith in Kereku's judgment where Gyangtse was concerned, and he'd done his best -generally successfully-to steer Aubert into a more pragmatic policy. But he had to admit that Kereku had at least gotten his ticket punched. If he'd never won an election himself, he'd put in his own time in exactly the sort of positions that Salgado currently held-not to mention holding five separate Crown World governorships and overseeing two successful Incorporation referendums himself-before rising to his present rank.
None of which made the effort of imagining Kereku as a successful politician any less of using.
"I think you can safely say that the Sector Governor … wouldn't have prospered in real politics," he agreed once he'd stopped laughing.
"Of course he wouldn't survive it," Aubert agreed viciously. "But he's lecturing me on the 'political dynamic' here on Gyangtse. Lecturing me! As if he'd ever visited the damned planet more than once himself or had the least idea what these frigging neobarbs are trying to pull!"
"Lecturing?" Salgado repeated. "Lecturing how, Jasper?"
"He obviously thinks I don't have a clue," Aubert said bitterly. "On the basis of his own vast, personal experience-with other worlds!-he seems to think this entire planet is about to go up in a ball of plasma! He's even talking about the possibility of some sort of serious armed, open resistance movement-as if these GLF clowns could find their backsides with both hands!"
"It sounds like that insubordinate piece of work Palacios has been running around behind your back," Salgado said, his own expression turning ugly. Бkos Salgado had had precious little use for the military even before he and Aubert arrived on Gyangtse. The military was no more than a necessary evil, at the best of times … and in Salgado's opinion, it was most often the military's ham-handed approach to politically solvable problems which produced the sort of disastrous situations that same military then used to justify its own existence.
More to the point, in this instance, Major Serafina Palacios was exactly the sort of Marine he most loathed. She looked so tautly professional, so competent. So utterly devoid of a single thought she couldn't fire out of a rifle's barrel. Although Salgado had absolutely no interest in learning how to read all of the ridiculous 'fruit salad' Marines-like the anachronistic, lowbrow primitives they were-insisted on draping all over their uniforms, she'd obviously had her ticket punched by the senior members of her own xenophobic, militaristic lodge. That was they way they groomed their own for accelerated promotion, and her arrogant attitude showed that she knew it. Worse, he was certain she spent all of her time looking down her nose at him, as if her experience carrying a rifle and bashing in neobarb skulls was somehow superior to his own hard won understanding of the horse-trading realities of practical politics.
He'd taken pains to depress her pretensions and put her in her place when she first began hawking her particular brand of alarmism, and her apparent inability to grasp the fact that he was her superior in the Gyangtse pecking order infuriated him. She'd simply ignored him-just as she'd ignored or disregarded the intelligence reports of the militia, which lived here and might thus be reasonably expected to actually know a little something about the planet-and asserted her right as Aubert's official military adviser to go right on repeating her mantra of doom at every meeting with the governor. Until Salgado had taken to arranging creative schedule conflicts whenever Palacios tried to corner Aubert and pour her paranoia into his ear, that was.