''But marines and certain dumb boot ensigns like to play in the mud.'' Tommy grinned and got elbowed in the ribs…hard this time. But the point was made; there was an exit from the landing site. It took Kris another half hour to put all of plan B in Nelly's memory.
Now she laid out a soggy line of march to Gunny. He nodded. ''Tough, but nobody joined the Corps for easy.''
Kris signaled her tech specialist. ''Hanson, sniff the route I fed to your heads-up.'' It was 10:00 P.M. by Sequim's 25.33-hour clock, and going from gray, stormy day to dark, even this far north, when Kris's two squads headed into muck up to their waists. The going was slow. Battle suits kept the icy water out, even as the camouflage systems struggled to match the suits against the ever-changing backdrop. One poor marine's suit gave up; head to toe, he was sand yellow, no matter what background he waded through. The suits kept the water out, but armor was thin insulation against a chill as cold as Gunny's heart. And whether the water was up to their waist or below their knees, each step still buried their boots in mud up to their ankles. To make matters worse, gnats or some local equivalent developed a taste for them. Kris slapped her faceplate down as her troops followed suit. Breathing became slow as they sucked against filters designed for nasty things a lot smaller than a gnat.
As 2300 hours approached, Kris's tiny command was back on hard ground. She signaled a break while she, Gunny, and her tech examined the woods ahead. The trees here stood thirty meters tall, their greenery perched high on bare, scaly trunks much like the Earth evergreen forests that had so quickly spread across the Blue Mountains of Wardhaven's temperate region. But unlike Earth stock, these evergreens' needles ended in barbs. Kris's briefing didn't say how allergic her troops were to whatever was in those barbs, and she didn't want to find out. ''Keep buttoned up,'' she ordered.
While the others rested, Hanson searched the woods for any sign of human life, booby trap, or general discomfort. The Stoolpigeon swept low, adding its contribution. ''There're a few big things here and here,'' Hanson advised, overlaying his sensor reports onto Kris's map. ''Probably nothing we can't handle, but it would make for a more exciting night than my recruiter ever promised, and mixing it up with party animals is bound to get the neighbors talking.''
Kris marked them on her team's charts with a ''No Go,'' and asked what else.
That got a shrug. ''Plenty of medium to little stuff. For the local furry residents, this is the time of year to make hay.''
Kris dismissed him with a ''Thanks.'' I'm coming Eddy.
The break seemed to have refreshed her troops; Kris's legs had gone from screaming to just hurting. I got to spend more time in the workout room if I'm going to hang with marines.
Around her, the night was deepening into solid dark. She was right on her schedule. Kris and her troops moved silently among the shadows of the sparse undergrowth. The techs kept a lookout for human presence, but it was nature that got them. The rain had left everything with a sheen in the fading light—and slippery. Twice, a marine went down. One was just embarrassed by her fall; the other ended up activating the pressure bandage at his suit's ankle. He continued with a limp and teeth gritted against the pain.
Half an hour later, Kris hand-signaled another halt about 100 meters before the trees petered out. While her troops settled in, she and Gunny inched forward carefully to get a personal look at the doors they'd come to kick in.
The hunting cabin was a two-story log structure; the few small windows gave a good idea of just how cold the winter months were around here. A steep-roofed veranda covered the front and the back of the house. Infrared showed a half-dozen man-sized heat sources scattered front and back. However, night-vision scopes showed only two of the six supposed guards to have a real human body to go with the heat.
Kris brought the Stoolpigeon in as low as she dared, five hundred meters above the house. Get too close, and even stealth gave a radar return. With two gunmen outside, Kris wanted a solid lock on inside target locations. Four in-house heat targets showed temperature variations. Kris opened her faceplate and whispered, ''Six targets.'' Gunny nodded.
For fifteen minutes Kris studied the six as they slept. Only one, the guy on the back veranda, showed any action, and that was merely to clomp inside to visit the head. In the house, three men seemed pretty solidly asleep in beds. A fourth man, on the upstairs landing, the appointed executioner if any effort was made to rescue the girl, never moved from his chair.
''Pretty unprofessional,'' Kris observed. Negotiations had dragged out for a week, the main sticking point a starship willing to take them wherever they wanted to go. No captain wanted to have anything to do with these bozos.
''If we'd followed my plan, my squad would have taken these duds before they even knew we were here,'' Gunny growled.
With a shrug for what might have been, Kris waved Hanson forward to examine the 300 meters of cleared ground circling the lodge. From 500 meters, the lowest they dared risk the Stoolpigeon, it had identified nothing interesting about that plot of land. Up this close and personal, Hanson quickly spotted the hum of several low-powered batteries.
''What they powering?'' Gunny demanded.
''Working on that, Sarge.''
Not fast enough for Gunny, he ordered his own tech forward. Both took a few more minutes of fiddling with their sensor suite before Hanson let out a low whistle. ''Hyper low power lasers,'' he whispered. A moment later, he had the frequencies. Kris adjusted her laser defense system and found herself looking at a cat's cradle of beams, crisscrossing the field but only rising twenty-five or thirty meters. Nothing on the Stoolpigeon would have spotted these things unless it buzzed the field—and that was against policy. Damn! These fellows knew too much and were way over-equipped. Who the hell staked them for the up-front costs of this job and was telling them what to do?
Then again, Sequim was a rich planet, and its manager had a wide range of investments in its wealth. Kris wondered who he was meeting with tomorrow to borrow the millions demanded to ransom his young daughter's life.
Kris, raised the daughter of a cynical politician herself, expected there would be many offering help…for ''minor'' considerations. Kris frowned; she'd never thought about who offered to loan money for Eddy's ransom and what collateral was demanded. Interesting thoughts…for later.
Hanson was still busy; he grinned when one of his sensors started blinking in several multicolored sequences. ''I got residue from the out-gassing of C-12 and soft plastics,'' he whispered.
''Let me see that,'' Gunny barked softly and grabbed the instrument from the tech's hands. He frowned at the gadget, batting it on the side once, then studied it some more.
Finally, he glared at the field. ''I don't see any digging out there, Didn't see any from orbit. Don't see any now.''
''Mark 41 Chameleon land mines?'' Kris suggested.
''They aren't issue yet,'' Gunny snapped. ''They just started up production!'' His words slowed as what he knew was possible fought with what he saw. ''Damn, if these sons-a-bitches have that kind of pull?'' He left the rest unsaid
''There's mines out there, Sarge,'' Hanson said with surety.
''Rigged to the lasers or just pressure?'' Kris asked.
''Your guess is as good as mine, ma'am, but I'd bet both.''
Kris took a good smell of the marshy tundra ahead of her. Rubbing her eyes, she studied the sky. Cloud cover was thick, but there was a graying light to the south. Dawn was an hour away. True, these fellows had a tendency to sleep until well after the sun was up, understandable when the sun was only down for three or four hours. Still, the guards were more restless come daylight. And a single noise would change a sleeping watchman to a shooting one—with enough daylight to see what he was shooting at. Kris needed to get herself and ten fit marines across that last 300 meters and get them across fast.