Troops were moving about the Slammers’ portion of the encampment in a much swifter and more directed fashion than they had been the afternoon before, when Dick Suilin first visited this northern end of Camp Progress.
The reporter glanced toward the bell—a section of rocket casing—hung on top of the Tactical Operations Center. Perhaps it had rung, unheard by him while he drove past the skeletons of National Army barracks . . . ?
The warning signal merely swayed in the breeze that carried soot and soot smells even here, where few sappers had penetrated.
Suilin had figured the commo gear would be at the TOC, whether Captain Ranson was there or not. In the event, the black-haired female officer sat on the back ramp of the vehicle, facing three male soldiers who squatted before her.
She stood, thumping out her closing orders, as Suilin pulled up; the men rose a moment later. None of the group paid the local reporter any attention.
Suilin didn’t recognize the men. One of them was fat, at least fifty standard years old, and wore a grease-stained khaki jumpsuit.
“No problem, Junebug,” he called as he turned away from the meeting. “We’ll be ready to lift—if we’re left alone to get ready, all right? Keep the rest a your people and their maintenance problems off my back—” he was striding off toward a parked tank, shouting his words over his shoulder “—and we’ll be at capacity when you need us.”
Suilin got out of his truck. They called their commanding officer Junebug?
“Yeah, well,” said another soldier, about twenty-five and an average sort of man in every way. He lifted his helmet to rub his scalp, then settled the ceramic/plastic pot again. “What do you want for a callsign? Charlie Three-zero all right?”
Ranson shook her head. “Negative. You’re Blue Three,” she said flatly.
Blue Three rubbed his scalp again. “Right,” he said in a cheerless voice. “Only you hear ‘Charlie Three-zero,’ don’t have kittens, okay? I got a lot to learn.”
He turned morosely, adding, “And you know, this kinda on-the-job training ain’t real survivable.”
Suilin stood by, waiting for the third male mercenary to go before he tried to borrow the Slammers’ communications system to call Kohang.
Instead of leaving, the soldier turned and looked at the reporter with a disconcertingly slack-jawed, vacant-eyed stare. The green-brown eyes didn’t seem to focus at all.
Captain Ranson’s eyes followed her subordinate’s. She said angrily, “Who the bloody hell are you?”
It wasn’t the same face that Suilin had been interviewing the night before.
There were dark circles around Ranson’s eyes, and her left cheek was badly scratched. Her face, her hands, and her neck down to the scallop where she’d been wearing armor, were dingy with fouling spewed from the breeches of her tribarrel when jets of nitrogen expelled the empty cases.
Ranson had been angry at being forced into an interview. She’d known the power was in the reporter’s hands: the power to probe for answers she didn’t want to give; the power to twist questions so that they were hooks in the fabric of her self-esteem; the power to make a fool out of her, by the words he tricked her into saying—or the form into which he edited those words before he aired them.
Now . . .
Now Suilin wondered what had happened to Fritzi Dole’s body. He was almost certain that this small, fierce mercenary wouldn’t shoot a reporter out of hand to add to the casualty count, no matter how angry and frustrated she was now. . . .
“I’m, ah,” he said, “Dick Suilin. I’m, ah, we met yesterday when the—”
“The reporter,” Ranson said. “Right, the bloody fool who didn’t know t’ hit the dirt for incoming. The interview’s off.”
She started to turn. “Beat it,” she added.
“It’s not—” Suilin said. “Captain Ranson, I need to talk to somebody in Kohang, and your commo may be the—”
“Buddy,” said Ranson with a venom and disgust that shocked the reporter more than the content of the words did, “you must be out of your mind. Get out of here.”
The other soldier continued to watch without expression.