Steven Kent - Rogue Clone

I took confidence from the ease with which I had passed through that last checkpoint. Had I stopped to think about it, I might have hesitated before entering the base. Mark Hopkins was supposed to be out reviewing guard stations, a fact that should have told me that he had something to do with security. My luck had held so far, and I did not stop to think that it might end soon.

Ahead of me, Fort Clinton looked more like a constellation of stars than an Army base. Most of the complex was blacked out. Shutters had been closed across windows of buildings so that the only light they emitted came out in thin stripes that dissolved into the night air. The buildings themselves looked darker than a shadow.

Helicopter gunboats ran slow patrols above the fort while jets circled the area high in the atmosphere. I could not see the gunboats or the jets, but the loud chop, chop, chop of helicopter rotors echoed up from the ground and the searing roar of jet engines thundered and faded in the darkness.

The guard at the gate barely checked my identification. I drove a Fort Clinton Army jeep. After a glance at my papers and a sweep of my face, he signaled his pals to let me through.

Following base signs, I found my way to the administration building. The lobby of the building was brightly lit. Officers in fatigues hustled up and down the halls. Men hunkered by communications consoles, relaying orders and checking the overall readiness of the soldiers. No one so much as looked in my direction.

This administration building was no different than thousands of other similar buildings across the galaxy. Colonel Bartholomew Wingate’s office was right where I expected it to be. And, as I suspected, the colonel was nowhere to be found. I went out to my jeep and drove until I found officer housing. I only hoped that I had enough time to find Wingate before he bolted.

Base commander housing tended to be big and conspicuous, and I had little trouble locating Wingate’s estate. There was a stealth jeep in the driveway that looked black and sinister, a phantom car meant to blend in with the night.

I parked my jeep along the street and climbed out into the misty night hiding behind a stand of trees as I waited to see what would happen next. If Callahan was right about Colonel Bartholomew Wingate, I would not have to wait very long.

Wingate’s front door was about ten yards ahead of me. His house was easy to spot. His porch lights blazed while every other house on the block was dark. I sat in the silence, my mind wandering.

There was so much that the U.A. intelligence community did not know about the enemy. We knew that the four rebelling arms—Cygnus, Scutum-Crux, Perseus, and Norma—all had their own governments. But we also knew that Gordon Hughes, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, was the acting president of the Confederate Arms. Was there one government or four?

From everything I had heard, the arms had formed a shaky alliance. The only thing they had in common was that they wanted the Unified Authority out of their space. The Morgan Atkins Separatists, on the other hand, wanted to topple the Unified Authority. They wanted to conquer and destroy, but unlike the renegade arms, the Mogats did not have the kind of infrastructure that would allow for an army. They had controlled the Galactic Central Fleet for more than forty years and did nothing with it.

Then there were the Japanese. Approximately 12.5 million people of Japanese descent fled Ezer Kri because of the Unified Authority occupation of their planet. No one had ever satisfactorily explained how 12.5 million people could have fled a planet in a system patrolled by the Scutum-Crux Fleet, but I had my ideas. They could have been evacuated by a large fleet of self-broadcasting ships such as the dreadnaughts, battleships, and destroyers in the Galactic Central Fleet.

The last estimate I read placed the Mogat population at approximately two hundred million. The combined arms had approximately thirty billion citizens. So how did the Japanese fit in? They numbered less than thirteen million; how important could they be? And yet, for some reason, people were calling the GC Fleet by a Japanese name.

An hour passed. I remained crouched, hidden from Wingate’s house by trees and a shrub. An observant driver might have spotted me among the trees, but no one came down this road. The base was at high-alert and the officers were at their stations.

When the enemy finally appeared, they were dressed in Army fatigues and spoke common English. They drove a jeep, leaving the windows open to enjoy the breeze. After the trip down in a Galactic Fleet transport, they must have been glad for the cold fresh air.

The jeep rolled up the street right past me. It parked in front of Colonel Wingate’s yard and two men climbed out.

“I told you this was the right street,” one man said. He had a single bar on his fatigues. Had he not been an enemy commando, that bar would have made him a lieutenant in the Army.

“I spotted the house,” the other man said. He wore the same clever disguise. They were wolves in wolves’ clothing.

“How hard was that?” the first man said. “It’s the only house with its lights on.” They spoke loud enough for me to hear them from thirty yards away. Stealth work was clearly not their strength. An angry-looking Wingate came to the door before they reached it. He might have been watching from the window, but he might also have heard their pointless babble.

“Ready, Colonel?” one of the commandos asked.

Wingate turned off the lights outside his house and locked the door behind him. He did not speak as he walked over to the stealth jeep in his driveway, a rucksack dangling over his shoulder. He climbed into the back seat. I could see his head through the rear window. The commandos climbed into the front seats, and the jeep rolled out of the driveway.

I wished I had marked that jeep with the laser pointer that Bernie Phillips loaned me. Then I could have asked his trusty Marines to do the tracking. I did not have the option this time. The Marines had returned to their base.

Colonel Wingate and his commando escort drove with their headlights off. Since their stealth vehicle had night-for-day vision built into its windshield, that was no problem for them. To avoid being spotted, I also drove with my headlights off. I did not want the base police or the traitor I was tailing to notice me. The only thing in my favor was that instead of following Wingate, I sped ahead to the place I hoped would be his rendezvous spot.

Before taking me into town to kidnap the Army soldier, Colonel Phillips had shown me several maps of Fort Clinton and the surrounding area. There was no way a sellout like Wingate was going to ride out the attack. His soldiers were going to die. The Pentagon would send men to survey the base and there would be huge inventory discrepancies. Even if Wingate survived the attack, he would be arrested and killed in the aftermath. His Confederate Arms pals might not care if he got himself executed, but he might spill some important information in the process. To keep him quiet, they either needed to kill him or get him off the planet. Either way, they would need to send down a transport with a team of commandos. When that transport returned to the fleet, I aimed to hitch a ride.

By studying the maps, Phillips and I located the most likely spot for an enemy transport to land. It was only an educated guess, but it proved right.

Driving almost blind, I headed up a slow grade toward the raised parade grounds along the eastern gate of the base. This area was dark and mostly empty. Sure enough, every few seconds I spotted just a glimpse of the phantom black car in the darkness.

This part of the base was dark and lifeless. We passed no other cars. The landscape was studded with old-fashioned drill towers, standing high over the ground on stilts made of logs. A half-mile ahead of me, Wingate’s jeep slowed as it passed through a poorly-lit guard station. The gate at the guard station raised as Wingate approached. A commando left the station and climbed into Wingate’s stealth jeep.