Washington in our jeep.”
“You don’t mind?” I asked.
“Base Command, Base Command, this is post fifteen in Sector A, come in,” he said into an interLink microphone that was attached to his poncho. He must have received the response through an unseen earpiece.
“I have an incoming Marine colonel looking for Fort Washington. Requesting permission to drive him.”
He put a hand over his ear to block outside sounds. “That is correct. I said a Marine colonel …yes, that would be the equivalent of colonel in the Marine Corps.”
The corporal bent down again and said, “Okay, I’m cleared to drive you to the base.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
Then, lowering his voice just shy of a whisper, he added, “Leave the keys in the Paragon …just in case.”
I couldn’t really leave the keys in the ignition since I had hot-wired the car. “You know anything about hot- wiring cars?”
“No sir,” the corporal said.
“I’ll leave the ignition running,” I said. I turned the car around, backed into the nearest alley, and stepped out into the rain. The downpour was hard and steady, but the air was warm. Sitting in an open-air bungalow on an evening like this could have been very pleasant, I thought, assuming you had the right company.
The corporal led me to his jeep, a sturdy little five-seat auto with a hard top. It did not have mounted machine guns or a missile carriage—clearly the Army did not expect to face ground forces.
I was not so confident. Once out of the rain, I put my pistol in my ruck and pulled out my M27. I grabbed two extra clips and hid them in my jacket.
“You expecting a war?” the corporal asked as he climbed in.
“Better safe than specked,” I said.
“Colonel, we have road blocks set up every eight blocks across Safe Harbor. Intel ran a scan. There may be a couple thousand looters out there, but the last thing they want is to mess with us.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “This just makes me feel a little more relaxed.” I patted the M27.
“Sort of a security blanket, sir?”
“Ever been in combat, Corporal?”
“Mostly police actions.”
“That’s good,” I said. “You’ll know what I am talking about soon enough.” Dead is dead. It doesn’t matter if you’re shot by a scared looter or a separatist sniper.
The strange sensation of driving through empty streets never went away. We drove through the financial district with its tall skyscrapers, the light of our headlights reflecting on marble and glass facades the way it might reflect on the surface of a still lake. I kept looking for men in suits. We drove past a row of apartment complexes and grocery stores, and I automatically checked the buildings for lights. The only time we saw people was when we passed roadblocks.
The soldiers would see us, slow us for visual inspection, and salute us on our way.
“Spotted any looters, sir?” the corporal asked. I didn’t answer.
The most haunting thing we passed was a LAWSONS convenience store. These were stores that never closed. Lights were always supposed to be on in these stores and the doors were never supposed to be locked. Yet here was a LAWSONS that was as dark and deserted as any dance club on Sunday. Even the LAWSONS sign over the door was dark.
The corporal drove like a maniac. He streaked down the wet streets so quickly that he could not possibly have swerved in time to avoid hitting another car had one appeared. When he came around corners, he did not slow down, causing the jeep to drift more than it turned.
“You know, I’ve been stationed in Safe Harbor for two years now and I’ve seen more of the town over the last five hours than the last twenty-four months. It’s not a bad place, really …a little dark, maybe.”
“Did you see the feed from New Gibraltar?” I asked.
“I’d like to see them try something like that around here. McCord would send one thousand fighters and shoot their asses down,” the corporal said.
“From what I hear, the Separatists only had four ships at Gateway,” I said.
“Yeah?” the corporal said.
“And from what I understand, they have over five hundred ships in their fleet.”
The corporal frowned. The dim green glow of the dashboard lights lit up the lower half of his face. It lit his bottom lip, the bottom of his nose, and the folds of skin under his eye sockets. The strange lighting made his expression grim. “Five hundred ships? I didn’t know that.”
The entrance to Fort Washington Marine base was up ahead. You did not need to know military tactics to see that it was also on high alert. Bright lights lit the main gate to the base. Red strobes flashed on and off on the half dozen radar dishes that spun around the wall of the fort. Unlike New Gibraltar, which looked like a modernized version of an old medieval castle, Fort Washington was a sprawling campus that took up several square miles.
Looking beyond the gate, I saw the taillights of jeeps rushing between buildings. They drove by headlight only. The streetlights were out. There were no lights on the outsides of the buildings. Throughout the grounds, the only bubbles of light were emplacements for long-range cannons capable of hitting ships outside the atmosphere.
Crazy driver that he was, I expected the corporal to race up to the front gate and screech to a stop. He showed more common sense than that. With the base on alert and armed guards all around the entrance, the corporal slowed to a crawl and coasted to the gate.
The guard who approached the jeep did not draw his M27, but I could sense a dozen other weapons pointed in our direction.
“Corporal,” the guard said.
“Just bringing you one of your own,” the corporal said, nodding toward me.
I handed the guard my ID. “I brought in a local thug named Jimmy Callahan about a week ago. Your MPs have been keeping him and a couple of buddies in the brig for safekeeping,” I said.
The guard walked around the jeep for a better look at me. He read my ID, considered it, and reread. “Wait here, sir,” he said and went into his booth to phone command. When he hung up the phone, he handed me my card and saluted. A moment later the gate went up, and the other guards saluted as we drove by.
The corporal may have been Army, but he knew his way around this Marine base. He skirted the motor pool and the barracks and brought me right to the administration building. I thanked the man and he saluted me, then he drove off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jimmy Callahan and his two bodyguards sat in an interrogation room. Both of Callahan’s stooges smoked, he didn’t. The three of them sat without speaking to each other. Callahan did not even look in the other boys’ direction. He occasionally reached up to smooth his hair as he considered his various options.
I watched this scene on a security screen in the chief ’s office hoping for a clue about Callahan’s general mood. The man was a sphinx for nearly five minutes, then he gave me a clear insight by staring into a supposedly hidden camera and sticking his middle finger out at it.
Two MPs escorted me to the interrogation room and locked the door behind me.
“You’re a colonel now?” Callahan asked as he turned to look at me. “You must have run away from something really big this time. Know what I mean?” He bobbed his head in that arrogant way as he spoke. Behind him, Silent Tommy and Limping Eddie, the two bodyguards I maimed right before the explosions, stubbed out their cigarettes and sat like statues. They did not seem as happy to see me as their boss was.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Allow me to explain. You run away from the battle at Little Man and they make you lieutenant. Now, in two short weeks, you’re a specking colonel. What did you do, run away from New Gibraltar?”
It became very apparent that there were two Jimmy Callahans. The first, the one speaking to me at this
