“I’m not Linking,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s like my helmet went deaf.”
As I stared into my helmet, the truck slowed to a stop. A moment later, the sea of men in front of me parted as our driver called out to me from the back of the truck. As I pushed through the crowd, I noticed that all of the men had removed their helmets.
“What is it?” I asked.
“General, I tried to contact you over the interLink, sir, but I could not get a signal.”
“Somebody is jamming the signal,” I said, trying to sound as if I had known that all along.
“Yes, sir,” said the driver. “There’s an overturned jeep about a quarter mile up the road from here.”
“One of ours?” I asked.
“Maybe we should send some men to have a look at it,” Hollingsworth suggested.
“See to it,” I said, deciding to play things safe even as my instincts told me not to worry.
Hollingsworth sent a fire team in to investigate. The team included a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a grenadier, and a team leader. I watched them as they went up the road, knowing that the time had come to make a tactical decision. I needed to choose between communication and equipment. If we wore our helmets, we would not be able to communicate; but we would have radar, sonar, and optical lenses to provide us a tactical edge. With our helmets off, we would be able to speak; but we would be blind to snipers and traps.
Communications or security? I asked myself. I opted for security.
Using the heat-vision lenses in my visor, I scanned the road ahead and saw no signs of people other than the men I had just sent out. I pulled off my helmet and barked out orders.
“We’re hiking in from here,” I told Hollingsworth and the noncoms who had gathered around me. “Tell your men to stay in a tight formation and keep their helmets on until we give the signal to remove them.
“There may be snipers out there,” I said. “If there are, I want to see them before they hit us.”
As we fanned out, the men we sent to investigate the jeep were already on their way back. We sent four men, but eight men returned.
“What happened?” I asked the patrol leader.
“They hit the jeep,” the man said.
“Was anybody hurt?”
“The jeep’s in bad shape,” one of them said. With their jeep destroyed and the interLink down, the men in Hollingsworth’s original patrol could neither proceed nor call for help. Their only option had been to dig in and wait for backup.
The terrain was mostly flat, though much of it was buried under mounds of debris. We secured the area quickly, then moved forward.
We reached the jeep. It lay on its side, all of its wheels shredded. Somebody had gouged a two-inch-deep trench across the road, then filled it with spikes.
I knelt beside the spikes and tried to pull one out. They were wedged in tightly. It took a little work, but I managed to pry one out of the ground.
“Bastards,” Hollingsworth muttered.
Whoever set this trap wanted to get his point across without starting a war, I thought. Placing a mine would have been easier. It would also have been lethal.
“Do you think the militia did this?” asked Hollingsworth.
“Why don’t you ask your pal Doctorow,” I said. “I hear you two are tight.”
Hollingsworth heard me, but he did not respond. He stood still and silent for a few seconds, then excused himself to go check on his men. The stupid son of a bitch should have known it would get back to me.
I stood and looked off across the landscape. If the militia had time to set these spikes, they’d had time to set up more surprises. None of the traps would be lethal, just something to get our attention.
The street leading to the government compound was clear, but the ground on either side of the road was knee-deep in the debris of buildings destroyed long ago. Two-thirds of a mile ahead of us, the abandoned government complex rose out of the ground like small buttes in a desert. In the middle of the buildings, a wide gap marked the target—the building we had knocked down during our battle with the Unified Authority.
There might be bombs ahead. There might be snipers.
“See if you can contact Fort Sebastian,” I told Hollingsworth though I knew it was useless. “I want to know if they’ve seen anything.”
A moment later, he said, “Nothing, sir.”
“Maybe we should send a man back to tell them what’s going on,” Hollingsworth suggested.
It was a good idea but not necessary. “Not yet,” I said. “Not until I know what’s out here.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was just after 03:00. The sky was dark except for the stars and a crescent of moon so thin it looked like it had been made with a single stroke of a pen. I put on my helmet and searched the area using night-for-day lenses, then I switched to heat vision. On the off chance that the locals had snipers hiding along the side of the road, I hoped to spot their heat signatures. The lenses showed me nothing but a barren landscape giving off very little heat.
As I thought about it, I became more convinced that Doctorow would not sanction a firefight. He would not send snipers, but he might have had his demolitions experts set some traps. Doctorow had a couple of retired Navy SEALs among his troops. They had top-notch demolitions training and field experience.
While the rest of us waited by the overturned jeep, a team went out to look for IEDs. None of my men had extensive demolitions training, and it showed. One of my dupes accidentally set off a trap. He might have stepped on a cap, or broken a laser stream, or possibly kicked a trip wire. Whatever he did, he triggered fireworks, sending a fifty-foot phosphorous geyser of red-and-white sparks into the air. The man closest to the fireworks fell on his ass as if he’d been shot, but he’d only been startled. They hadn’t set off a specking mine, after all, just a flare display.
Once we knew the only traps were for show, we pushed ahead. We moved slowly, spreading out over a rolling field of rubble and debris. Bits of glass reflected the dark sky along the ground. I stepped on small shards, grinding them into the dust under my armored boots. Larger blades only shattered. We did not worry about making noise as we covered the silent landscape. After the fireworks, we were pretty sure that any hostiles in the area would know we arrived.
Using the telescopic lenses in my visor, I located the remains of the fence we’d erected around the armory as a perimeter. They might have used trucks or tractors; someone had torn the chain link aside, leaving only the skeleton of a badly twisted frame standing.
I allowed my men to approach the edge of the grounds, then had them stop. I searched for heat, then holes, then radiation. The area came up clean.
“Have your men secure the area,” I ordered the platoon leaders. “No one gets in or out.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said.
“The rest of you, spread out and look for holes, traps, bombs, tunnels, cameras, anything. I want to know if anyone has been digging or if this is a wild-goose chase.”
“What about snipers?” Hollingsworth asked.
“If you find one, shoot him.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hollingsworth.
I looked across the area. Somebody had planted a row of six flagpoles along the far end of the field, just beyond the wreckage of the underground garage. Oddly shaped black flags hung from each of the poles.
I went for a closer look, putting on my helmet as I walked, skirting around the wreckage. As I stepped closer, I saw that it was not flags that hung from the poles but antique gas masks. The masks were not so much a warning as a message.
At the base of the poles sat a small silver box, no larger than a beer bottle. I approached the box for a closer look, already afraid that I would not like whatever I found. It might have been a small canister filled with any one of a million deadly gases or germs. It could also have been a bomb. It wasn’t. It was a device for jamming communications, and my interLink gear came back to life the moment I fired my M27 into it.