Team 491.
“Can’t we use a truck bomb now?” Patel asked.
“They have barricades all around the hotel. We couldn’t get a truck up to it.”
“Barricades can be knocked down,” said Spence, the practical engineer.
“We’d need heavy equipment to do it,” Sula said. “And how are we going to get that up on the rock?”
Spence flicked her cigarette in the ashtray and shrugged. “All sorts of ways. They have building projects on the High City that can provide us cover, I assume.”
“You’ll handle the arrangements then?”
Another shrug. “Sure.”
“And any truck bombs?”
“Of course.” She smiled. “The bombs are more in my line, really.”
Patel looked at Spence and smiled. “I know just where I can get the equipment we need. A government storage facility, near one of my enterprises. I don’t even think it’s even guarded at night.”
“Let me run up to the High City first and see exactly what’s required.”
Julien looked from one person at the table to the next. “You know,” he said, “I’m beginning to think we’re actually going to do this.”
Casimir looked at Sula and gave one of his rumbling laughs. His eyes were sparkling. “With the White Ghost leading us,” he said, “how can we fail?”
Autumn came quickly on the heels of the Naxid missile. A blast of frigid wind blew in from the northwest, howling around the corners of the buildings like mourners crying their anguish at the death of Remba. The wind blew cold for days. Leaves turned brown and crisp and were blown from the trees before they could display their glories of orange and yellow.
Sula, wearing a windbreaker and with a scarf wrapped around her blond hair, traveled over the High City, confirming the information given by PJ, Sidney, and other informants. She took note of defenses and dispositions, as well as the location of police patrols and the hotels and palaces where security forces slept.
The project began to develop its own astounding plausibility. Naxid defenses in the High City were surprisingly thin. Most of the security forces weren’t barracked on the High City at all, but in the complex of hotels around the train station at the base of the funicular. If the secret army attacked at night and could hold the two routes to the crest of the acropolis, they might have a chance of maintaining a grip on the High City, at least for a while.
Sula didn’t want to refer to her scheme directly; she thought it might tempt fate. Instead she called it Project Daliang, after a campaign fought by Sun Pin, the general of Qi. When Wei attacked Zhao, Zhao appealed for help to Qi. Sun Pin was expected to march into Zhao to help drive off the invaders, but instead marched straight for Daliang, the Wei capital, which forced Wei to abandon its campaign and retreat in disorder.
Sula never explained the significance of the name to anyone. That too might tempt fate.
As the cold wind died and a crisp autumn cooled the high spirits of summer, as explosions and rifle fire continued to shake the windows of the capital, she began to look seriously at her order of battle and to make plans.
With the Naxids weaker than expected, her problems were entirely with her own forces. Her soldiers had never trained for a real battle, and she had no idea whether they could ever fight one. Security was another problem—she knew there had to be informers in her ranks, and so the large massing of the action groups, and the elaborate plans necessary, were going to be hard to keep secret.
While she pondered these difficulties, she made two more appearances in uniform, one in a secret clinic where survivors of the Remba disaster were treated with stolen antiradiation drugs, and again in public during the Harvest Festival—a dispirited business under rationing—where she arrived in the Old Third with a convoy of stolen food, handed out a few copies ofResistance to the startled Torminel survivors of the police massacre, and vanished before the police could reappear.
Again she heard the words “White Ghost,” lisped from a fanged Torminel mouth at the moment when she swung herself out of the cab of the lead truck and into the crowd.
Each appearance was celebrated in editions ofResistance . She began to see graffiti around the city:Long live the White Ghost! For the White Ghost and the Praxis! Down with the Naxids, up with the White Ghost!
The mysterious Axtattle sniper continued to make appearances, not always on the Axtattle Parkway, but always attacking military convoys from a height. Sula found out who he was on his sixth excursion, when he was wounded by counterfire and his family brought him into one of the secret clinics.
The sniper was a semiretired Daimong named Fer Tuga, a hunting guide from the Ambramas Reserve, half a continent away. On his periodic visit to Zanshaa to visit his daughter, he’d take the hunting rifle he left in her apartment and use it to kill Naxids.
The last occasion had gone wrong when the Naxid convoy returned a torrent of accurate fire within a few seconds of his firing his first round. He’d barely escaped with his life.
“The Naxids have got to have something new,” Tuga reported. “Either they saw me behind a darkened window or they saw the bullet in flight.”
It turned out to be the latter. A small mobile phased-array radar system linked by a cleverly programmed computer to automatic weapons platforms.
Sniper tactics at once became much less profitable. Bomb use increased by way of compensation. Bombs began getting larger and more sophisticated, and adapted to different targets.
The Naxids moved more security forces into the capital, which just created new targets.
There were plenty of ways for Project Daliang to fail, and Sula tried to work them all out in advance. She spent long hours with maps of the city and with timetables, trying to arrange for proper rendezvous. Two light earth-moving machines were abstracted from government stores. Prisons were put under observation. Word was passed along the entire unwieldy apparatus of the secret army that action was imminent, and that it would involve taking and holding buildings. Bombs, grenades, and rockets were manufactured and stored in secret depots. Grannies were set to work baking ammunition for the Sidney rifles.
Sula went up to the High City on a day when chill drizzle had turned the funicular’s flagstone terrace dark and wet. She wanted to inspect the empty Ngeni Palace and make certain it was adequate for hiding the Bogo Boys and the other strike troops who were scheduled to come up the cliff.
PJ seemed more cheerful than usual. “I’m happy to show you the old place,” he said, “but when are you going to need it?”
Sula hesitated, sensing something behind his words. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been evicted. Some Naxid clan has requisitioned the property. I got the notice two days ago, and they gave me ten days to get myself and my belongings out.” He gave her a brilliant smile. “I can be useful now. I don’t have to live in the High City. I can move to the Lower Town and become a soldier in the secret army.”
Already calculations were flooding through her mind. “Can we check the weather report?” she asked.
He led her to a desk, and with a few commands she discovered that the cold drizzle would last for another two days, then be pushed away by a high pressure front from the southwest. There would be at least four days of beautiful, sunny, summery weather.
There’s our window,she thought. She hoped six days would be enough.
She straightened and looked at him. “I hope you’ll employ our trucking firm to move your belongings to your new lodgings.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have any belongings to speak of. Not since my father lost all our money.”
“You’ve forgotten the pile of weaponry that Sidney gave us, and that’s still in storage.”
“Oh.” PJ’s eyes widened.
“And surely Clan Ngeni doesn’t want all their furniture and other possessions to go to the Naxids? Or have the Naxids insisted that everything remain?”
PJ looked as if he hadn’t considered this. “No,” he said. “I suppose I can take anything.”
“Then we’ll remove your clan’s stuff for you. And I’ll need to look at the palace after all—assuming, of course, that you don’t mind if we use the place for one last operation.”
“Certainly. Of course.” Anxiety crossed PJ’s expression. “But I really can join the secret army after I’ve left the High City?”
