Текст книги "A Time to Die"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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Some of the cave entrances were merely scooped shallowly into the red rock, others had collapsed or were clogged with debris brought down by the summer floods. Alphonso indicated one of these and gave an order to his men. They stacked their weapons and began to clear the debris from the mouth of the cavern.

Within an hour they had opened it sufficiently for Alphonso and Sean to scramble through into the cave. Deep in the gloomy gut, Sean made out the shape of the first truck. His eyes accustomed themselves to the poor light as he moved toward it, and he saw others parked beyond it.

"How the hell did you get them in here?" he asked incredulously.

"We pushed and carried them," Alphonso explained.

"I hope to hell we'll be able to get them out again," Sean muttered, and climbed onto the running board of the nearest vehicle.

It was coated with a thick layer of red dust. He yanked open the door on the driver's side and sneezed in the dust, but saw with relief that the key was still in the ignition.

He reached in and turned it. Nothing happened. The ignition light stayed dark and the needles on the dashboard instruments never flickered.

"I disconnected the batteries," Alphonso told him.

Sean grunted. "Bright lad, but how the hell did you know to do that?"

"Before the war I was a bus driver in Vila da Monica," Alphonso explained. It was odd to think' he had ever had such a prosaic occupation.

"All right," Sean said. "Then you can help me get this one started. Is there a toolbox?"

Each of the trucks w.& equipped with two spare tires, a hand pump, a toolbox, a to aulin, and a long-range fuel tank. Once rp Sean had reconnect8d the battery of the first truck, there was sufficient charge to produce a dull red glow in the ignition lamp on the dashboard and to raise the needle of the fuel gauge to the "half" position but insufficient to kick the engine over.

"Find the crank handle," Sean ordered. It was secured behind the passenger seat in the cab. Two hefty Shanganes swung the engine over with such gusto that it fired and stuttered, then burst into a steady roar. Thick blue exhaust smoke filled the cavern, and Sean lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal. Two of the tires were flat and had to be pumped by hand. While this was being done, the troopers cleared the last of the rocks and tree trunks from the mouth of the cave and with the transmission in four-wheel drive Sean reversed sharply down the incline and bounced and jolted over the rough ground.

When the truck hung up on the boulders of the riverbank and the wheels spun without purchase, twenty men flung their combined weight on it and by brute force shoved it through. The Unimog crashed over the lip of the bank and into the river-bed.

Sean drove it clear and parked under the opposite cliffs. He left the engine running to charge the depleted battery, and they climbed back to the cavern and started work on the second truck.

Apart from flat tires and batteries, they found no serious defects in any of the vehicles. One after the other, they coaxed the engines to life, then manhandled them down into the river-bed. It was the middle of the afternoon by the time all three trucks were lined up on the white river sand.

"Get the men to change uniforms now," Sean ordered. "Tell them to leave their other gear in the cave."

Joking and laughing, they stripped off their Renarno tiger stripes and donned the British-pattern battle dress of the Zimbabwean Army. While they were busy, Sean went over the vehicles again. He found the army registration papers in a plastic wallet in the cubbyholes of each of the Unimogs.

"Hope we never have to show them," he grumbled to Job.

"They are probably listed as stolen or destroyed."

He opened the caps on the fuel tanks and physically checked the contents of each. "Enough to get us to Grand Reef and back to Saint Mary's," he estimated, "with not much to spare."

He ordered the windscreen and side windows of the cabs to be cleaned but the body work to be left as it was, caked with mud and dust.

It gave them the appearance of a patrol returning from a sortie into the deep bush and, more important, partially obscured the military markings and registration numbers.

Once the men had changed into disguise and cached their Renamo uniforms, Sean and Job inspected each man and his equipment minutely before allowing him to board one of the Unimogs.

It was almost five o'clock before they were ready to leave. Both Job and Alphonso had heavy-vehicle driver's licenses, and one of the Renamo troopers, who gloried in the name of Ferdinand da Costa, claimed driving experience. Sean took the passenger seat beside him to check his performance.

Job drove the leading truck, while Alphonso was in the middle and Sean and the learner driver in the rear. Apart from a heavy foot on the accelerator pedal, Ferdinand da Costa proved himself an adequate driver, but Sean took the wheel from him at the difficult places.

In line astern, they churned through the heavy sand, following in the wheel ruts of Job's Unimog, winding up the river course for half a mile before they reached the first obstacle.

It required the combined efforts of all forty men to heave and shove the trucks up the first rocky chute in the river-bed, and even then they had to cut twenty-foot-long mo pane poles and use them as levers to prize the wheels up over the larger boulders.

The powerful truck motors bellowed in high revolutions, blue diesel smoke billowed from the exhausts, and Sean remarked to Job, "An open invitation to every Frelimo within twenty miles to join the party." Then he checked his wristwatch. "We are failing behind our schedule."

They tried to make up time along the easier stretches of the river course, but the sunset and darkness caught them still almost twenty kilometers from the main east-to-west road between the sea and the border post at Urntah.

Nightfall made the journey more arduous. Sean dared not use the trucks" headlights, and they had to proceed in darkness alleviated only by starlight and a moon in its last quarter.

It was after midnight before they could at last leave the river-bed by negotiating a low spot in the bank. With four men walking ahead of the lead truck to guide it around ant bear holes and other concealed obstacles, they struck out directly southward and within two hours had intersected the overgrown disused track Alphonso had told Sean about.

Sean called a halt. They spread the field map on the hood of the lead truck and by flashlight studied it anxiously.

"We are here," Alphonso told him. "This track runs up to an old asbestos mine; it was abandoned by the Portuguese in 1963 at the start of the Frelir& war."

"We'll rest up hWe," Sean decided. "Get the trucks off the road and covered with branches. We must expect the Hinds to overfly us sometime tomorrow. No cooking fires, no smoking."

At four that afternoon, they woke those still asleep and ate a hasty meal of cold rations. Sean ordered the journey to be resumed, and they stripped the camouflage from the trucks. They boarded the entire raiding party except for the four men who walked ahead of the leading truck, examining the ancient overgrown wheel ruts of the track for Frehmo anti vehicle land mines, probing any suspicious lump or hollow with a bayonet before waving the column forward.

The sun was just setting when at last they came in sight of the main road, its macadamized surface snaking through the open forest and winding around the scattered kopJes. Scan halted the column well back out of sight of the road and went forward with Job, leaving Alphonso in command.

From the top of a commanding hillock they kept the road under observation until it was fully dark. During that time two patrols passed, both heading eastward, each comprised of three or four battered and dusty Unimogs packed with armed men in Zimbabwean combat gear and with an RPD light machine gun mounted above the cab.

They rumbled along with strict intervals of a hundred meters between vehicles, and watching them through the binoculars Sean remarked, "Well, at least we look like the real thing."

"Except for your pale face," Job pointed out.

"A birth defect," Sean apologized. "But I'll keep it out of sight until it's needed."

They scrambled down from the hilltop and trudged back along the track to the hidden trucks.

"From here you are on your own," Sean told Ferdinand, the driver. "Do try to remember to put the clutch in before you change into bottom gear, you'll find it a great help."

Dressed in the uniform of the deceased guards major, Sean climbed into the back of the cab behind Job's driving seat. The space was barely sufficient to contain him; he had to twist his shoulders at an angle from his hips and sit flat on the metal floorboards. It was uncomfortable to begin with, but Sean knew that within a few hours it would become agony. However, he was out of sight yet able to communicate with Job merely by raising his voice.

Without headlights, the column drove the last mile to the juncture with the main road. The scouts they had sent ahead whistled that the road was clear, and they raced forward and swung onto the meta led surface, heading westward toward the border.

As soon as they were safely onto the highway, they switched on the headlights, dropped their speed to fifty kilometers an hour, andadjuste( t spacing to tie ter in erva S. To an observer they were just another Zimbabwean mechanized patrol.

"So far, so good," Job called over the back of the seat to where Sean was hiding.

"What's the time?"

"Seven minutes past eight."

"Perfect. We'll hit the border post just after ten, when the guards are thinking of going off duty."

The hundred kilometers to the border seemed much further. The metal floorboards of the cab were corrugated and cut into Sean's buttocks, transferring the impact of every pothole in the neglected highway up his spine into his skull.

"Get under the tarp! Border post ahead!" Job called at last.

"Not too bloody soon," Scan assured him as the truck slowed and overhead floodlights flooded the cab. Sean pulled the tarpaulin over his head and sank down as low as he could below the seat back.

He felt the truck brake and trundle to a halt. Job switched off the engine and opened the door of the cab. "Wish me luck," he muttered as he stepped down from the cab.

Neither of them knew what to expect. The border formalities must surely be relaxed to accommodate the interchange of troops guarding the railway line. Job was dressed for the part and in possession of a genuine army pay book and ID. The truck's registration papers were likewise genuine. Yet they could be compromised by some small, unforeseen detail or by an alert border guard.

If anything went wrong, Job would give a single long blast on his whistle and they would shoot their way out. All the rifles and rocket launchers were loaded, and the RPD machine guns on the cabs were manned.

As the minutes drew out, Sean's nerves stretched tighter. He expected at any moment to hear the shrilling of Job's whistle and shouting and gunfire.

At last there was the crunch of footsteps on gravel and the voices of Job and a stranger approaching the truck. Both doors of the cab opened, and Sean tried to shrink himself as the truck tipped slightly under the weight of more than one man climbing aboard.

"Where do you want me to drop you of!?" Job asked casually in Shana, and a voi&. Sean had never heard before replied, "At the edge of town.

III tell you where."

Sean turned his head a stealthy inch and through the gap between the seats saw the blue serge cloth of a customs inspector's uniform. With horror he realized that Job was giving an off-duty inspector a lift into Umtali.

The truck pulled forward, and the inspector lowered the side window and shouted to the guards on the barrier.

"It's all right, open!" As they accelerated ahead, Sean had a glimpse of the raised barrier through the window. He had to cover his mouth to prevent himself laughing aloud with relief and triumph.

On the back of the Unimog, the troopers seemed infected by the same reckless spirit of abandon. They were singing as the column wound down the hill to the town of Umtali. Job was casually discussing with the customs inspector the merits of the Stardust Night Club and the price of a short time with one of the bar girls.

"Tell Bodo, the Barman at the Stardust, that you are a friend of mine," the inspector advised Job when they dropped him off on the outskirts of the town. "He'll get a special price for you and tell you which of the girls have the clap and which ones are clean."

As they pulled away, Sean could at last crawl out behind the seat and slump gratefully into the passenger seat. "What the hell kind of trick was that?" he complained. "You damn near gave me a hernia."

"What better way to get V.I.P treatment," Job chuckled, "than to have the head of the customs service as a pal? You should have seen the guards at the border saluting us!"

"Where is this nightclub?"

"Not far. We'll be there before eleven."

They drove in silence for a few minutes while Sean rehearsed the next order he had to give. He waited until Job turned the truck into a dimly lit side street and switched off the engine. In the side mirror, Sean watched the other two Unimogs pull in behind them, cut their engines, and switch off their headlights.

"Back home again," Job chuckled. "Nothing to it."

Back home," Sean agreed. "And back home is where you are going to stay."

T" here was a long silence. Then Job turned his head and looked at Sean thoughtfully.

"What do you mean by that?"

"This is the end of the road for us, Job. You aren't coming to Grand Reef, you aren't hijacking any Stingers, and you sure as hell aren't coming back to Mozambique with me."

You're firing me?" Job asked.

"That's it, pal. I've got no more use for you."

Sean took a small wad of Zimbabwean dollars, part of the oney General China prov an o to "Get rid of that uniform as soon as you can.

If they catch you in it, they'll shoot you. Take the next train back to Harare and go see Reerna at the office. She's holding about four thousand dollars in back pay and bonus for you. That will be enough to tide you over until Capo Monterro's estate pays out the money it owes us. My Job ignored the proffered money. "You remember that day on Hill Thirty-oneT"

"Shit, Job, don't pull that sob stuff on me."

"You came back for me," Job said.

"Because sometimes I'm just a bloody fool."

"Me too." Job smiled. "Sometimes I'm just a bloody fool."

"Listen, Job, this is not your shauri anymore. There is nothing in it for you. Get out. Go back to your village, buy yourself another couple of pretty young wives with Capo's dollars. Sit in the sun and drink a few pots of beer."

"Nice try, Sean. Pity it didn't work. I'm coming back with you."

"I'm giving you a direct order."

"I'm refusing to obey it. So convene a court-martial."

Sean laughed and shook his head. "She's my woman, so it's okay for me to risk my life."

"I've been nursemaiding you for almost twenty years, and I'm not giving up now," Job said. He opened the cab door. "Let's go and find Cuthbert in his Superman suit."

Sean left his cap and tunic on the seat; the insignia of a famous regiment would be out of place in a cheap nightclub. The Stardust was at the end of the lane in a converted furniture factory, a barnlike building with all its windows blacked out. They could bear the music from a hundred paces out, the hypnotic repetitive beat of new wave African jazz.

Women were clustered around the entrance. In the overhead light their dresses were as colorful as butterfly wings. Their hairstyles were flocculent Afros or the intricate beaded dreadlocks of the Rastafarians, their faces were painted into death masks of ds like iguana rouge and purple lipstick with iridescent green eyeli lizards.

They swarmed around Sean and Job, rubbing themselves against them like cats.

"Hey man, get me in!" they lDleaded. "Give me five dollars to get in, darling, I'll dance with Y'O and jig-jig, man. Everything."

"Come on, whitqyj" A child with a tender, immature body in a shiny dress of cheap nylon, the face of a black Madonna, and ancient weary eyes, seized Sean's arm. "Take me with you and I'll give you something you've never had before." S re the front of Sean's body and cupped her hand to fondle him. Sean took her wrist and restrained her.

"What have you got that I've never had before, sweetheart?

AID ST They pushed their Way through the rustling nylon skirts and lawyers will handle that. You will be entitled to half of that... clouds of cheap perfume and at the door paid their five dollars.

The doorman stamped their wrists with an indelible dye in lieu of an entrance ticket and they ducked through the black curtain.

The music was a stunning, painful assault, the lights were revolving strobes and ultraviolet. The dance floor pulsated with humanity transformed into a single primitive organism, like some gigantic amoeba.

"Where's the bar?" Sean bellowed into Job's ear.

"I'm a stranger here myself." Job seized his arm and they struggled through the engulfing sea of light and sound and gyrating bodies.

The faces around them were transported as if in a religious fervor, eyeballs rolled glaring white in the rays of the ultraviolet $ V, lamps, sweat glistened on upraised arms and streamed in rivulets down jet black cheeks.

They reached the bar. "Don't risk the whisky!" Job yelled. "And make them open the beer in front of you."

They drank directly from the cans, besieged in a corner of the bar with the ocean of humanity pressing hard against them.

There were a few white faces, all male, tourists and Peace Corps and military advisors, but most of the clientele were black soldiers still in uniform so that Sean and Job blended into their surroundings.

"Where are you, Cuthbert, in your Superman shirt?" Sean pushed away one of the more persistent bar girls and peered over the heads of the dancers. "We'll never find him in here."

"Ask one of the harm en Job suggested.

"Good thinking." Sean reached across and grabbed the front of the Barman's shirt to get his attention, then stuck a five-dollar bank note into his top pocket and shouted the question in his ear.

The Barman grinned and yelled back, "Wait! I find him."

Ten minutes later they saw Cuthbert working his way down the bar toward them, a skinny little man wearing a Superman T-shirt at least two sizes too large for him.

"Hey, Cuthbert, anybody ever tell you that you look like Sammy Davis Junior?" Sean greeted him.

"All the time, man." Cuthbert looked pleased. Sean had obviously picked out his pet vanity.

"Your uncle sends his love. Can we go somewhere to talk?"

Sean suggested as they shook hands.

"Best place to talk is here," Cuthbert answered. "Nobody else going to hear a thing you say. Get me a beer, can't talk with a dry throat."

Cuthbert downed half his beer at a draft and then asked, breathless from the effort, "You were supposed to be here last night.

Where you been, man?"

"We were delayed."

you should have been here last night. Would have been easy, man.

Tonight, well, tonight is different." – "What has changed?" Sean asked with a sink of dread in his chest.

"Everything changed." Cuthbert said. "The Hercules arrived seventeen hundred hours. Come to pick up the goods."

"Has it left yet?" Sean demanded anxiously.

Don't know for sure. She was still there when I left the base at twenty hundred hours. Sitting out there in front of number three hangar. Perhaps she still there now, perhaps she long gone. Who knows?"

"Thanks a lot," Sean said. "That's a great help."

"That's not all, man." Cuthbert clearly enjoyed being the bearer of evil tidings.

"Hit us with it, Cuthbert."

He finished the beer in another long swallow and held up the empty can. Sean ordered another and Cuthbert waited for it, drawing out the suspense masterfully.

"Two full para commandos of the Fifth Brigade came down from Harare in the Hercules. They real cool, those Fifth Brigade cats," Cuthbert said with relish. "They real mean dudes, no shit."

"Cuthbert, you've been watching too much Miami Vice on television," Sean accused, but he was worried. The Fifth Brigade were the elite of the Zimbabwean Army, converted by their North Korean instructors into ruthlessly efficient killing machines. Two full para commandos of a hundred men each, added to the standing garrison of Third Brigade troops-almost a thousand crack veterans on base.

"Your uncle says you are going to take us in, Cuthbert. Pass us through the gates."

"No way, man!" C#thbert was vehement. "Not with those Fifth Brigade cats in there."

"Your uncle will be pissed off with you, Cuthbert. He's a pretty al cat himself, man, Uncle China is." Sean imitated Cuthbert's co hip jargon.

Cuthbert looked worried. "Man, I've fixed your pass," he explained hurriedly. "You'll have no trouble getting in. The guards are expecting you. You don't need me, man. No sense I should compromise myself, no sense at all."

"You've got the pass here?"

"Right on. The password too. You'll have no trouble."

"Let's go." Sean took Job's arm and steered him toward the door. "That Hercules could take off any time."

Cuthbert hurried between them down the lane to where the three Unitnogs were parked.

"Here's the pass." He handed the plastic-covered card to Sean.

It was slashed with a scarlet "Top Priority" cross.

"The password is a number, "fifty-seven," and your reply is "Samara Machel." Then you show the pass and sign the book.

Simple as a pimple, man. You in like Flynn."

"I'll tell your uncle you couldn't bring yourself to come with US.

"Hey, give me a break, will you? No sense me getting culled, man.

I'm more use to my uncle alive and kicking than dead meat."

"Cuthbert, you are wasted in signals. You definitely should be on television." Sean shook hands with him and watched him scurry back into the Stardust Club.

There were clusters of women around the back of each of the three trucks, giggling and joking with the troopers who hung out over the tailgates. One of the girls was climbing aboard, boosted by eager hands, her miniskirt tucked up high on her long thin black legs.

"Get those whores out of there, Sergeant," Job snapped at Alphonso. The women around the tailgates scattered and three or four others descended hastily from the backs of the Uniniogs with their skimpy clothing in varying states of disarray.

Sean and Job climbed into the cab of the lead truck, and as they drove off Sean buttoned on his tunic and tipped his cap over one eye at a rakish angle.

"What are we going to do?" Job asked.

"Number three hangar at Grand Reef is in full view of the main road. We will drive up the highway. If the Hercules is still there, we go in. If not, well, we'll go back the way we came."

"What about the Fifth Brigade?"

"They're just a bunch of ex-gooks," said Sean. "You weren't afraid of them before, so what's changed?"

"Just asking to pass the time." Job grinned at him sideways.

"You want to tell Alphonso about them?"

"What Alphonso doesn't know won't hurt him," Sean said.

"Just keep going."

The column of three trucks drove sedately through the sleeping town of Unitali. The streets were deserted but Job obeyed the traffic fights punctiliously, and then they were out on the open highway.

"Twelve minutes past eleven." Sean checked his watch, then read the road sign in the beam of the headlights. "Grand Reef Military Base, fifteen kilometers."

tightness in his stomach muscles, the short He felt the familiarness in his breath, and consciously slowed and regulated his breathing.

It was always like this before a scene.

"There she is," Job said softly as they topped a rise in the highway.

The airfield was fully lit, the beacon lights glowing orange and the blue and green dotted lines of the taxiways and runway beyond them.

In the stark white light of the floods, even at a distance of almost two miles, the Hercules looked gigantic. its forty-foot-high tail fin towered above the roof of number three hangar.

The Royal Air Force rounders were painted on the monstrous silver fuselage and on the high tail fin, and Sean immediately that it was one of the Marshall stretched-out converrecognized of Lockheed's Hercules original C-MK3 transports made for sions the R.A.F.

Pun over," Sean ordered. Job flicked his taillight indicators and pulled into the side of the road. He switched off his headlights, and one after the other the following Unimogs did the same.

In the silence Sean said softly, "So the Hercules is still here. We are going in."

"Let's do it," Job agreed.

and ran back to the second Sean jumped down from the cab truck just as Alphonso climbed down to the roadside.

"Sergeant, you knoW" what to do. I'll give you forty-five minutes to get into position. Then I want exactly ten minutes of diversionary fire, everything you've got."

"The first plan was twenty minutes of diversion."

"That's changed," Sean told him. "We expect a much stronger response than we first thought possible. Ten minutes and then pull out fast. Head straight -back for Saint Mary's Mission, we are abandoning the RZ ;nlthe Umtali pass. Hit them hard and then get out. Understoo&"

"Yehbo.

"Go!" Sean said, and Alphonso jumped up into the cab.

Through the open window he saluted Sean and gave him a cheery grin.

"Break a leg," Sean said softly, and the Uniniog pulled out and headed down the highway toward the brightly lit base.

Sean watched the headlights turn off the main highway onto the secondary road that bypassed the perimeter fence of the airfield.

Then he lost them among the trees. Sean marked the time with the bevel ring on his Rolex and walked back to join Job in the leading truck.

He lay back in the passenger seat, pushed his cap to the back of his head, and focused his binoculars through the open window at the huge aircraft that squatted on the tarmac under the floodlights.

The tail ramp at the rear of the fuselage was lowered like a drawbridge, and he could see into the cavernous cargo hold. There were four or five human figures moving about inside the hold and two more at the foot of the ramp. As he watched, a forklift truck trundled out of the open doors of number three hangar. Its fork arms were loaded with a stack of long wooden cases, four of them, one on top of the other. The cases were of raw white wood, and stenciled on them in black paint were letters and numerals he could not decipher. He did not need to-the shape and size of the crates were unmistakable.

"They are loading the Stingers," Sean said, and Job sat up straight in the driver's seat.

The forklift truck wheeled around the stern of the Hercules, then climbed the open ramp and disappeared into the cargo hold. Minutes later it reappeared, drove down the ramp, and wheeled into the hangar. Sean glanced at his watch. Only five minutes had passed since Alphonso had driven ahead to set up the mock attack.

"Come on," Sean muttered, and shook the Rolex on his wrist as if to speed up the mechanism.

Twice more they watched the loaded forklift truck make the journey from out of the hangar and up into the belly of the Hercules and return empty.

Then it turned aside and parked at the far end of the hangar. The driver in blaze orange overalls climbed down from his seat and sauntered back to stand with the two other stevedores at the tail ramp.

"Loading completed," Sean whispered again, and checked his watch. "Seven minutes to go."

Job unbuttoned the flap of his holster and drew the Tokarev 7.62-men pistol. He withdrew the magazine and checked the load, then slapped the magazine back into its recess in the pistol grip and returned the pistol to its holster.

Through the binoculars, Sean saw the men who had been working in the cargo hold come down the ramp in a group. Three of them were white men, two in flying overalls and the other in British regulation battle dress. Two pilots and one of the Royal Artillery instructors, Sean guessed.

"Start up!" he said, and Job kicked the engine to life.

We should try to knock out those floodlights," Sean muttered. We can't load the truck in the full glare, not with the Fifth Brigade breathing down our necks."

He was looking at his watch, tilting the dial to catch the glow of the instrument panel. "Okay, Job. Here we go!" he said, and the unimog pulled forward. In the rearview mirror, Sean watched the second truck, driven by Ferdinand, fall in behind them.

As they drove parallel to the main runway of the airfield, Sean was assailed with a thousand memories. It all seemed exactly as it had been ten years before. No hangars or buildings had been added. He picked out the windows of his old office in the main admin block beyond the control tower, and as Job slowed the truck and turned onto the short driveway that led from the highway to the base gates Sean almost expected to see the insignia Of the Ballantyne scouts between that of the Rhodesian Light Infanthe Rhodesian African Rifles on the arch above the gates.

try and the wire mesh gates, Job halted the truck under the lights facing and two guards came to each of the side windows of the cab. They carried their AK rifles at the trail and peered in at Job and Sean.

Job lowered the side window, exchanged the Passwords with the commander of the guard, and handed him the plastic-covered pass. The man took it to the guardhouse and made an entry in the register, then two of his men opened the main gates and he waved the convoy through.

Casually Sean returned the salute the guards threw him as he passed, and he told Job quietly, "Just like Cuthbert said, simple as a pimple. Now head straight down toward the admin block, but turn behind the control tower as you reach it."

Job drove slowly, obeying the on-base fifteen mph. speed limit, and Sean unbuttoned the flap of his webbing holster and drew his pistol. He withdrew the magazine, pressed two cartridges out into the palm of his hand, then reloaded them in reverse order and slapped the magazine back into its recess in the Pistol grip' Why do you alwaysjo that?" Job asked.