than one arms length apart in order to accomplish this without hitting the walls on either side. As soon as everyone was settled, Armand waved at them to follow and began walking towards the far end of the room. They trailed behind him, keeping somewhat in formation but not actually marching. The MPG did not march since their philosophy dictated that their precious training time be spent learning something useful instead of how to walk from one place to another in a way that looked aesthetically pleasing.
Armand led them through a series of dank hallways and into a hanger complex full of parked F-20 fighters. These circular space fighters were sitting atop their ground wheels in neat lines, lethal laser cannons protruding from turrets on the front, their canopies open in the alert position. Several of them were undergoing maintenance by spacecraft mechanics in coveralls. A few of the mechanics looked up at the formation as it marched through their hanger and then went back to what they were doing, seemingly uninterested. On the spaceward wall of the hanger were a series of airlocks that the fighters could pass through to be launched. All of the doors were securely closed and locked and marked with yellow danger lines on the floor.
A set of doorways at the far end of the hanger led them to another hanger, this one empty and abandoned looking. Though the floor looked as if it had recently been cleaned and mopped, all of the parking areas were devoid of spacecraft and the airlocks had a layer of dust on the doors. When the last man was in the hanger Armand brought them to a halt and then walked over to the door and issued a command to the computer terminal that guarded it. The doors all slid shut with a clank that echoed back and forth several times.
'All right, guys,' he said to his company. 'This is it. We'll be staging in this room for the immediate future. Everyone find yourself a place to call your own and get settled in. Blankets and pillows will be brought in later and we'll be having our meals brought to us here. There are bathrooms at the far end through those doors, but other than that, no one is to leave this room. There is to be no communication out of here and to enforce this rule, the cellular antennas have all been shut down so your PCs won't work.'
The men broke ranks and began looking for a favorable piece of the floor to camp out in. They settled in for a long wait. Through the remainder of that day, the rest of the special forces battalion was transported up and marched to the hanger to join them. By 8:00 PM, Eden time, all 640 men were present and accounted for. They waited, unsure what their purpose in being there was but anxious to get on with it anyway.
The WestHem marine intelligence unit, which was quartered at the barracks in Eden and attached to the fast reaction division, had noted that a number of Martian Planetary Guard soldiers were transported up to Triad. They could hardly have failed to note it since the unusual event of a C-8 surface to orbit craft taking off from the various bases around the planet had clearly been seen by tens of thousands of people. The Major in charge of the unit simply filed the information away in his computer, not really giving it a second thought. After all, who cared what the pretend soldiers were doing? He never bothered to try finding out just how many soldiers had been taken up there or what they were equipped with or what their purpose might have been. By the time he went to bed that night he'd forgotten all about the information. He would remember it the next day however, once it was too late.
The FLEB agents, who tried to monitor everything the greenies did these days, noted the same thing. The information was passed all the way up to Corban Hayes himself, who simply shrugged and disregarded it. He was anxious about the Laura Whiting takedown scheduled for the next morning and wondered why his underlings had even bothered to bring the movement of MPG troops to his attention. So they shipped some people up to Triad? Who cared? It never occurred to him that there might be a connection between this information and the Laura Whiting matter. It would be a matter that he would later deeply regret ignoring.
There was a group of people that
It is interesting to note that the OMI and the EastHem government they served had much greater knowledge of and respect for the MPG than the WestHem government that it was a part of. After all, it was the OMI's job to evaluate the opposition in the event that they ever decided to invade Mars. Ever since the MPGs first fledgling days as a group, Henry's had been spying on their maneuvers and listening in on their transmissions when they could. Operatives on the planet itself, some under diplomatic cover, some illegal spies posing as Earthlings or Martians, had gathered everything they could on the composition of forces and the tactics they employed. There was a file on General Jackson and all of the other commanding officers complete with detailed biographies and up to date photographs. The OMI admired Jackson tremendously and knew that if they ever tried to take Mars from WestHem, that he and his troops would give them quite a rough time of it.
The OMI had been following closely the recent events on Mars, both by monitoring the media transmissions and by observing from stealth ships in orbit. With the cool analysis that came with not being involved, they had long since figured out where Laura Whiting and General Jackson were heading.
'What do you think?' the head of the covert intelligence division asked his boss when the information was confirmed.
'Let me get this straight,' asked the deputy director as he looked the data over. 'You're saying that the MPG moved their
'That's correct,' he said. 'We have about as absolute of a confirmation as we're going to get on that one. Three different sources. We intercepted the call up order as it was put out, three of our operatives were able to observe known members of these teams entering their bases this afternoon, and the asset we have in orbit was able to observe a lifter moving from the four key bases and docking at the Triad MPG base.'
'And in Denver?'
'The information is not as solid but its still high on the scale,' he said. 'It seems that a federal indictment and arrest warrant were issued by a grand jury accusing Laura Whiting of various crimes. One of our operatives there was able to actually talk to one of those members. It seemed that this young women, who was not very smart I understand, did not take her oath of secrecy very seriously.'
'And do we have any idea if the MPG knows about this arrest warrant?'
'We have no way of knowing for sure,' he said, 'but I can't believe that they wouldn't. Jackson, as you know, has a pretty impressive array of agents, both on Earth and Mars, including civilian workers in the FLEB building itself. He keeps his ear to the ground and his job is made a lot easier by the contempt that the WestHem people have for him and his organization.'
'So you're saying that if a warrant was issued and transmitted to Earth, Jackson and Whiting would most likely know about it?'
'Correct.'
The deputy director smiled. 'My friend,' he said. 'I think that food is going to become a bit cheaper in EastHem in the near future.'
'Shall we wake the executive council with this data?'
'I think we should. And I think that we're in for a jolly good show on Mars tomorrow morning.'
Chapter 5
Don Mitchell, son-in-law of Director Clinton, had of course been given the honor of leading the takedown team that would take Laura Whiting into custody. He and his team gathered at the main FLEB office at 0700 that Thursday morning. There were forty of them, including himself, and he divided them up into teams of ten, each of which was assigned a leader. He then briefed them on their mission, an act that did not carry the dramatic punch he had hoped for since every last one of the men had already heard through the grapevine what they were going to be doing that day. Still, those that weren't in the official loop pretended to be surprised when they heard the news
