Retreat Hell (45 page)

Gonzalez shrugged.

“I’m sure they’re fine, sir,” he said.

***

“What the
hell
?” Skorzy demanded, as the four trucks burst through the gate of the target compound. His team was just approaching, carefully skirting through the dark railyards.

“Semper fucking fi, assholes!” he heard someone shout from one of the trucks. Then all four raced across the landing grounds, heading for the roadside loading docks on the other side.

Marines? What the hell are Marines doing here? There shouldn’t be Marines within five hundred miles!

No time to think. Those asshole jarheads had blown everything.

“We go ahead anyway?” one of the men asked Calhoun. “Gate’s wide open!”

Calhoun shook his head, then looked at Skorzy.

“We get the fuck out of here,” Skorzy snapped, as a low thumping sound began. Quickly getting louder – helicopter blades.

“Why?” one of the men asked.

Moron.

And again, what the
hell
are Marines doing in Godfrey’s Landing?

***

“OK, boys,” said Alonzo. They’d driven the trucks in a wide circuit back around the shuttleport to some dark loading docks at the rail terminal. It seemed that Godfrey’s main railyard had been built right next to the shuttleport, which made sense.

Except that they were now, again, within half a mile of the place they’d just raided. Attack helicopters flew overhead, rotors beating the air in a steady thup-thup-thup pattern; loud engines and shouting.

“You did a good job, but we ain’t done yet.”

Alonzo was ripping the stenciled US Army insignia off the truck doors – it seemed to have been done on thin sheets of plastic, which tore away easily. Someone went to help him.

“Get those covers off the damn trucks – fold `em up and put `em in the cabs,” he said. “They’re gonna be looking east in the direction we ran, not west. But in case someone blunders down this way, they’re going to be looking for trucks with covers on back. So pull the fuckin’ things off. Tarpaulins under the passenger seats – throw those under the crates. Then get your proper clothes back on.”

Mullins began frantically unbuckling the sections of cover from his side of the nearest truck. Someone else joined him, and soon the cover came off. It’d been held in place by eight broad iron bits of framework.

God, if we get caught, we are so, so, so fucked. Alonzo
tased
an officer. Repeatedly. That’s – God, it’s assault on a superior officer and the different branch doesn’t matter a fucking damn. And we were all accessories to that.

The thought made him redouble his speed; he helped to spread a bright blue tarpaulin over the crates that filled the back of the truck. Someone tossed him a length of cord and he tied it down, running the cord through brass rings on the edge of the tarpaulin.

“We’re going to load these onto the train tomorrow?” Andrews asked, when all the work was done.

“I’ll take care of that,” said Alonzo. “We’ll need most of a boxcar if we’re to put `em all on board, but that shouldn’t be hard to organize. Freight office is used to rush orders, and Buddy doesn’t seem to care much about fucking up boxcars. I’ll have guys from Division do the loading. If they don’t feel like they’ve earned their ten percent, they’ll want an even bigger slice.”