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  Gravel bounced up and caught John in the side of the head, and cut him; blood trickled from his ear along his neck, but he didn’t dare loosen his grip.

  After a kilometer of being pelted by rocks and stung by sand, the truck eased to a halt at Tango Company’s base. The guard at the gatehouse spoke to the driver, and they laughed. The guard then walked around and opened the back of the truck.

  John squirmed and got his mirror ready. With a flick of his hand, he signaled the others to do the same. John held his mirror at an angle pointed at the undercarriage of the truck. His hand trembled but he forced himself to be steady. He had to.

  The gate guard approached the truck with a long pole and a small mirror attached at one end. He stuck the mirror under the truck and swept it along one side.

  John matched the position of the mirror with his, moved it steady along as the gate guard passed him so all the guard saw was the reflected image of the undercarriage—a meter to John’s left.

  They’d practiced this maneuver all last night. It had to be perfect.

  The guard moved on to Sam’s position, and then Fhajad’s, and finally to Kelly’s corner of the truck.

  Kelly’s mirror slipped and she fumbled—caught it just before it hit the ground. John held his breath; Kelly barely got the reflective surface in place as the gate guard swept her section.

  “Go ahead,” the guard said and rapped the side of the truck. “You’re clean.”

  “How are the dogs?” the driver asked.

  “Still sick,” the guard muttered. “Not sure what the heck they all ate last night, but they’re still squirting.”

  “Damn,” the driver said. He started the engine and rolled into Tango Company’s base camp.

  Last night Fred had fed the guard dogs a paste made of a few squirrels they’d caught, some unripe berries, and the antibacterial ointment in their first-aid kits—a concoction guaranteed to keep Tango’s dogs out of the picture for another day.

  The truck parked inside a warehouse. Two men came and unloaded the back and then left, locking the doors of the warehouse behind them.

  John and the others finally eased themselves down from the truck. None of them spoke. A single word overheard now could blow the entire operation. They silently massaged their aching muscles. John bandaged his ear to stop the bleeding.

  John pointed to Sam and then at the hood of the truck. Sam nodded and got to work. John then pointed at Fhajad and to the side door. Fhajad moved to the entrance and began to pick the lock.

  John and Kelly patrolled the warehouse, looking for cameras, dogs, guards, anything they’d have to remove. It was clear.

  Sam returned with four canteens, which he had, according to their plan, filled with battery acid from the truck.

  There was a click from the side door and Fhajad gave them a thumbs-up. They gathered near the door. Fhajad eased it open, peeked out the crack, then opened it a little more and glanced to either side.

  He nodded and moved out, keeping well away from the overhead lights, skirting the shadows of the warehouse.

  John and the others followed, pausing in the darkest part of the shadows. John held up five fingers, and Sam passed out the canteens of acid. John pointed to his watch and again flashed five fingers.

  They nodded.

  John then pointed to Kelly, and with two fingers pointed to the perimeter of the camp and made a guillotine-cutting motion into his other hand. Kelly nodded and vanished into the darkness.

  Sam and Fhajad moved off as well, making their way to the barracks houses they had previously reconnoitered. There was a crawl space under each building.

  John sprinted to the farthest barracks and slipped underneath. He paused for a moment, listening for any noise, a footfall, an alarm—it was still quiet. They were undetected…which would last for only another five minutes.

  He took three sticks of chewing gum from his pocket, popped them into his mouth, and chewed. John crawled to the center of the building. He carefully took a rag from his shirt pocket, poured acid onto it, and then dabbed the rag to the underside of the wood floor. He was extremely careful not to soak the rag or get any acid on himself. When he touched the rag to the plywood, the wood smoldered.

  After he had soaked a meter-square patch, he checked his watch. Thirty seconds until it was 0455. Just enough time. He primed all three of his stun grenades, set their timers for five minutes, then used the chewing gum to attach the grenades to the perimeter of the acid-weakened section of floor.

  Normally the stun grenades couldn’t penetrate centimeter-thick plywood. Once the acid had eaten through the porous fibers, however, the three grenades would have more than enough bang to turn that meter-square section into a million airborne splinters—shot straight up into the sleeping quarters of Tango Company. Not lethal…but guaranteed to be one heck of a distraction.

  John crawled out, crept back to the warehouse, and rendezvoused with the rest of Red Team.

  John glanced at his watch: 0458.

  He pointed to Kelly and then to himself, then made a curling motion around one side of the warehouse. He pointed to Sam and Fhajad and motioned them around the opposite side. They moved to the far corners of the building.

  John and Kelly crouched and waited. They had a perfect view of the center of the camp, the calisthenics area, the parade grounds, and—right in the center—the flagpole.

  Right on time a Corporal and two guard escorts marched out and unfolded their green-striped flag. He attached one corner to a lanyard dangling from the pole.

  John glanced at the distant forest. The woods past the fence of Tango Company’s camp had been clear-cut. He knew it was more than a hundred meters—closer to two hundred. There was no guarantee that Fred or Linda could hit anything at that range.

  He drew his dart pistol and clicked off its safety.

  At 0500 flashes of light strobed beneath the barracks as the grenades detonated. There was the crackle of wood and the screams of the men and women of Tango Company.

  The Corporal attaching the flag dropped one end and whirled around. Floodlights on the perimeter fence snapped on and pointed inward toward the barracks.

  In the confusion, no one noticed as one of the guards near the flagpole dropped his rifle, grabbed his neck…and toppled to the gravel face-first.

  His partner spotted him and knelt.

  John sprinted across the compound, firing. His first shot went wild, and the kneeling guard spun around to face him. Fhajad and Sam shot him in the back.

  John took aim at the Corporal—who fumbled with his pistol holster, trying to free his weapon. John planted two narq-darts in his chest. The Corporal dropped.

  Two more guards rounded the corner of the warehouse, shouted, and took aim at John.

  He was out in the open, and there was no way his dart pistol could hit those guards from this distance.

  One guard fired. The round pinged off the flagpole not five centimeters from John’s head.

  The guard stiffened and dropped his rifle, wildly grabbing at the back of his head…and the dart stuck into his skull. He screamed and fell, thrashing in the dirt.

  The other guard twitched and pulled a dart from his thigh. Another dart hit him in the chest, and he sprawled to the ground.

  John sent his silent thanks to Linda and Fred. He detached the flag from the lanyard and stuffed it into his shirt.

  He waved Red Team forward, and Kelly led them to the fences.

  Kelly didn’t slow down as she sprinted and closed on the chain-link fence. She tucked and threw herself into the steel mesh. Just before she hit, John spotted the smoking outlines on the fence where she had applied the battery acid.

  The fence broke in a jagged outline, and Kelly rolled to her feet on the other side without missing a stride. John waved his team through. He went last, pausing only a fraction of a second to look back.

  The camp was in chaos. Security lights swung about; there were screams from the barracks. A tank rumbled to life and crunch
ed into the center of the base.

  John ran. Behind them came the staccato report of machine-gun fire—just as they entered the safety of the forest.

  John smiled, panting. “Good work, everyone,” he whispered. “I think those guys were using live ammo this time.”

  Kelly held up a brass case from a 7.62mm round. “Yep,” she said. “No doubt.”

  “Come on,” John said, “let’s not stick around. If they weren’t before, they’re pissed now.”

  Red Team slinked through the forest. They kept to the shadows, and took cover under logs when a Pelican roared overhead looking for them.

  At 0545 they made it to the clearing designated as their extraction LZ. At 0700 hours they were supposed to meet CPO Mendez. Of course, the Chief rarely let them get off this easy—so John had planned for Blue Team to be here as well…only they would remain hidden. Linda and Fred would post somewhere in the treetops and cover Red Team until they were sure it was safe.

  Red Team hunkered down in the brush and waited. They weren’t safe; John knew that. Tango Company would be looking for them, and this is when his team would get anxious…when they would want to talk and brag about their successful mission, or look at the captured flag. To their credit, Red Team stayed still and silent. And Blue Team was nowhere to be seen.

  At 0610 the thunderous roar of a Pelican’s engines filled the air and the craft slowly descended and landed in the clearing. The aft hatch popped open.

  Fhajad started to move, but John set his hand on his shoulder.

  “Too early,” he whispered. “When is the Chief not perfectly on time?”

  Fhajad, Kelly, and Sam grimly nodded.

  “I’ll go,” John said. “You guys back up Blue Team.”

  They gave him a thumbs-up. Sam patted him on the back and whispered, “Don’t worry, I won’t let them do anything to you.”

  “I know,” John whispered back. He pulled the flag from his shirt and handed it to Sam. “Thanks.”

  John crawled away from their position. When he was thirty meters from his team, he stood and approached the Pelican—which was almost certainly a trap.

  He halted halfway across the meadow and waited.

  A figure appeared on the exit ramp of the Pelican and waved him forward. “Come on, son. Haul ass!”

  “Negative, sir!” John shouted.

  The figure turned and muttered to someone inside, “Crap.” He sighed. “Okay, so we do it the hard way.”

  Four men jogged out of the back of the Pelican. They quickly spread out in a semicircle and moved toward John, their assault rifles aimed directly at him.

  John held up his hands.

  “He’s giving up,” one of the soldiers said disbelievingly.

  “Should we just shoot him?” another man said.

  “No,” the one leading them hissed. “Payback first.” He stepped up to John and punched him in the stomach.

  John doubled over from the blow.

  The man hauled him up and patted him down. “We gotta find that damned flag or the Captain will have our asses in a sling. Where is it, kid?” He shook John. “And where’s the rest of your pack?”

  John laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” the man growled.

  “You idiots are bunched up.”

  A hail of darts hissed through the air from all sides. The men from the Pelican convulsed; one fired his rifle, but the shot went wide and high. They fell over, paralyzed.

  John dropped to a crouch, grabbed a pistol from the man who’d punched him, and crawled on his stomach to the Pelican. He crept around the open hatch and swept the interior. Empty.

  He scrambled into the cockpit and pulsed the Pelican’s radar. He got a contact bearing of 110, fourteen kilometers out, but it moved on a parallel course to their position. John left the Pelican and ran across the field.

  Red and Blue Teams were still hidden…and they would stay hidden forever, until he gave the all-clear.

  Their all-clear signal wasn’t something that could be wrung from John—not even torture or CPO Mendez’s best coercion techniques would wrest it from him. He would rather have died than betray his teammates.

  John whistled the singsong six-note melody and called: “Oly Oly Oxen Free!”

  Red Team emerged first and marched across the meadow. Kelly paused to kick one of the men in the head; she took his rifle, too.

  Linda and Fred dropped down from a tree branch and ran across the field. “Oly Oly Oxen Free,” Linda repeated, grinning from ear to ear. “All out in the free. We’re all free.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Time: Date Record Anomaly Estimated 0510 Hours,

  September 23, 2552 (Military Calendar) Aboard

  Captured Covenant Flagship, Epsilon Eridani System.

  Cortana only partially listened to the debate between the Master Chief and the others. The discussion was moot. She had projected the outcome as 100 percent certain that John would convince them all to go, or—failing that—that he would convince the Lieutenant to let him go alone to the surface to investigate the signal…a signal that in her opinion was so easily copied and so blatantly unencrypted it defied explanation how the Chief had conjectured that his team of Spartans had sent it.

  Instead of partaking in the slow and inefficient conversation, she analyzed the Covenant pattern of movement in the Epsilon Eridani system and discerned three important things.

  First, the Covenant warships had extremely regular elliptical orbits about Reach. There were a total of thirteen heavy cruisers and three carriers moving three hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet. Two exceptions to this patrol pattern were a pair of light cruisers hovering over Menachite Mountain—trapped at the bottom of the gravity well and therefore not an immediate threat to her ship.

  Second, there was a blind spot in their patrol patterns that would make a perfect rendezvous location to extract the Chief and the others from their soon-to-be-executed surface mission. She plotted ingress and egress courses, and started the precise calculations she would need if she was to initiate a Slipspace jump so close to Reach.

  And third, and most interesting to Cortana, 217 smaller Covenant craft pushed debris into a concentrated region of space in a high stationary orbit over Reach’s northern pole. Within that region drifted the wrecked hulls of both Covenant and UNSC ships destroyed in the battle for Reach. Floating there were some of the UNSC’s finest ships: the Basra, the Hannibal, and the pride of the fleet, the supercarrier Trafalgar. No human signals emanated from the ships; nor did Cortana sense any active electromagnetic fields.

  She watched as the smaller Covenant ships cut into the dead hulks and jetted away with chunks of Titanium-A armor. They moved like a trail of ants to a location in space over the lower latitudes, a point over Menachite Mountain, where the Covenant used the metal to construct a platform. The thing was already a square plate a kilometer to a side. Clearly, the Covenant had more in mind for Reach than destruction.

  “Cortana,” the Master Chief said. “We’ll need to rendezvous at a—”

  “Coordinates already optimized,” she replied and projected the Covenant blind spot on the bridge displays. “Enemy patrols miss this nine-thousand-cubic-kilometer region. Further optimization reveals that all ships will be farthest from this point at oh-seven-fifteen hours. I suggest we meet there at that time.”

  Cortana felt a pulse of satisfaction at their perplexed looks over her seemingly instant analysis. She enjoyed dazzling the crew with her intellect.

  “Very good,” the Lieutenant replied, still examining her calculations on the display.

  “Optimal course plotted and uploaded into the Covenant dropship to the signal source,” she told them. Then, on a private COM channel to the Chief, she added, “Good luck, Chief. Be careful.”

  “I always am,” he replied.

  Cortana didn’t bother to reply to that ridiculous statement. The Master Chief took so many chances and had defied death so many times, she had given
up calculating his odds of survival.

  The Chief and his team left the bridge. Cortana swept her sensors through the flagship, making sure the path to the launch bay was clear. There were still Covenant on board. She couldn’t pin them down, but there were transient contacts, vent shaft panels had been opened and closed, and several Engineers had gone missing.

  She tracked their Covenant dropship as it cleared the launch bay, entered the upper atmosphere, and drifted toward the surface. Polaski was a fine pilot…but she was only human and prone to illogical bravado and emotional outbursts that overrode the most logical course of action. Cortana wished that she were going down there—both to protect her human charges and because there were many questions she’d like to get answered. Why were the Covenant so interested in Menachite Mountain? Was anything left of ONI’s CASTLE base? Cortana terminated those thoughts. There was too much to do up here.

  Several tasks divided her attention. She kept the Slipspace generators hot in case she needed to jump out of the system in a hurry. She continued refining the calculations that shaped the plasma emitters’ magnetic fields, in case she needed to fight. She isolated the name of their captured ship—Ascendant Justice—from one of the 122 simultaneous communiqués from every Covenant ship in-system. She correlated the numerous religious allusions that laced the communications and continued to build a language-translation subroutine. She diverted additional processing power to the task of tracking the millions of floating objects around her, searching for lifepods, cryotubes, anything that might hold a human survivor.

  The Covenant dropship left sensor range and disappeared somewhere in what was once the Highland Forest on the surface—which activated a new task.

  Cortana began constructing a high-resolution map of the surface—especially the region where the Chief’s mysterious signal originated, as well as Menachite Mountain.

  A quick diagnostic revealed that these tasks were taking much longer than normal. She had to free up some of her over-taxed memory. Cortana began to recompress the data she had retrieved from the Halo construct, and she briefly considered dumping all the data into storage on the Covenant system. She rejected that potential course of action. She had to protect that data at all costs.