As an afterthought Daniel slammed the concertina door shut. “Woetjans?” he murmured to the panel. “You can open it after we’re out on the street, but we can’t afford anybody glancing in while we’re stuck here in traffic.”
Hogg started the engine, an air-cooled diesel, as Daniel put his feet on the passenger-side running board and reached through the open window. The cab was a tight squeeze for two; the three of them couldn’t possibly sit inside.
Although the jam was beginning to clear, Daniel assumed they’d have to wait anything up to an hour before they got into traffic. Instead Hogg leaned out the window and waved frantically at a jitney. The driver, a man who’d have looked villainous even if he’d had both his ears, stopped dead and opened a gap.
The turbocharger howled as Hogg pulled back the throttle, sending the truck into the traffic stream without difficulty. “A guy I know,” Hogg murmured. “He must be laughing his head off to be working with the cops tonight.”
Hogg’s driving had generally been done on country tracks, but his rough and ready style didn’t seem out of place in the present circumstances; at least he was sober. Daniel hung on grimly as they bumped and squealed toward the exit one truck’s length at a time.
The commandoes let vehicles pass in opposite directions alternately at the bottlenecks. To avoid seeming furtive Daniel looked at each Alliance soldier that the truck came abreast, but the troops in battle dress weren’t interested in wog officers. They just wanted to get the mess cleared up so that they could return to the porch of the palace. Nobody wanted to tell his grandchildren that he’d been crippled by a wog jitney while pretending to be a traffic cop.
“You didn’t have any trouble inside?” Daniel asked, speaking with his lips close to Adele’s ear.
She turned to look at him. “No,” she said. “Nothing worth mention.”
The truck reached the exit. A jitney with three screaming women tied together in the back tried to pull through the opening ahead of them. The commando on gate duty fired his submachine gun into the jitney’s splashboard. Bits of plastic sprayed the driver and the buttocks of his companion, facing backward to keep an eye on the prisoners.
The passenger yelped and jumped out of the vehicle. The driver stalled his engine. Hogg gave the commando a friendly salute and drove through the gateway, slamming the jitney sideways with his fender as he did so.
They swayed into the street in a wracking turn. “Here we go, sir!” Hogg cried cheerfully. “We’re really moving now!”
“We’d be moving if we jumped off the palace roof,” Adele said calm-faced over the intake howl. “And the result might be very similar.”
Before tonight Daniel hadn’t considered the librarian to have a sense of humor. He’d been wrong, but on balance he thought he’d prefer that Adele keep her humor to herself for the time being. . . .
The first time Adele Mundy had seen the entrance to the Naval Warehouse Compound, the gateposts were decked with bunting in honor of the Founder’s Day celebrations. Tonight a three-bar barrier was swung across the road and the squad of Kostroman sailors on guard aimed stocked impellers at the approaching truck.
Hogg rowed through the gearbox to slow the truck before he actually squeezed the brake lever. Either the brakes needed maintenance or most of his experience had been with vehicles with bad brakes. Riding with Hogg made Adele wonder if the fellow had any experience. He’d only grazed objects with the truck’s left side, though, so perhaps he was just being especially careful of his master hanging on to the passenger-side window.
The truck ground to a halt six feet from the barricade; the engine ran at a chattering idle. Three sailors were outside the gate. They moved to the sides, out of the fan of light from the headlamp mounted in the center of the truck’s hood. Only the first of the four light standards along the entranceway worked, and it was now behind the vehicle.
“I’ll take care of this,” Daniel muttered into the cab. He dropped from the running board and strode to the sailor who wore a holstered pistol instead of carrying a heavy impeller. “We’re here with a delivery for Grand Admiral Sanaus,” he said to the Kostroman. “Items for safekeeping during the present awkwardness. The password is Greatorix.”