Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [103]
The SEALS drifted along among the crowd, with no one seeming to take notice of them. They saw burly crewmen from freighters and combat ships, many roaming in large gangs, some of them drinking and some of them going to get drunk in one of the many taverns and bars that seemed to line the whole concourse.
Soon they approached the jetway leading up to the ship they planned to steal. A pair of Eluoi commandos, each carrying the battery pack and plasma guns that they first had encountered the year before, floated before the entrance to the tube leading to their ship. There was no door across the hatch, and the SEALS watched as another of the cargo trains, this one manned by two commandos and carrying six cylinders of cargo, pulled up before the two guards.
One looked over a manifest while the other watched the passing crowd; clearly, these men took their duties seriously. Sanders led his team right past the entrance, the men pulling themselves along, taking care not to appear interested in the Eluoi supply ship.
“That’s our target, men,” the junior lieutenant said when they had floated down to the balcony of a crowded tavern a couple of dozen meters away. “We need to take out those two guards and then get into the ship in a hurry.”
His Teammates nodded. Sanchez and Marannis started out, using the air jets of their suits to ease down to the main concourse level, darting through the crowd toward the entry to the access tunnel. Sanders, Schroeder, Dobson, Robinson, and Keast came next, drifting near the upper bulkhead of the compartment, some ten meters above the two scouts. For the time being, LaRue, Falco, Rodale, and Chief Harris waited at the outside shelf of the tavern across the way, where they could keep an eye on things and react as necessary. They were the follow-up force.
Although each man wore his personal carbine on its strap, for form’s sake Rodale and LaRue had placed their heavy weapons in soft duffel bags, since even Parvik had allowed that the sight of something like Baby or the M76 Wasp rocket launcher might attract undue attention from the rough crowd in the industrial station. It seemed that there was at least one inviolate station rule, as Parvik informed them: Use a weapon large enough to put a hole in the outer hull and everyone in the place would drop what he was doing and try to kill you. Even G-Man found that an acceptable reason to leave Baby in her wraps.
The two scouts drifted past the guards at the mouth of the docking tunnel, moving within about six meters of the two Eluoi. The green-eyed sentries watched the SEALS move on; Marannis and Sanchez displayed no interest in the guards.
“Hey!” Sanders cried loudly, addressing the two Eluoi from his position near the ceiling of the wide concourse. “What the hell do you think you’re doing down there?”
The outburst drew the attention of many of the occupants of the station, including the two guards, who looked up and fingered their guns, watching the officer and his men suspiciously.
That was their last mistake. Marannis and Sanchez moved like striking snakes, reversing course with the aid of their suits’ directional jets. Each scout had a knife in his hand, and the two blades slipped almost simultaneously up through the side of the sentries’ necks and into their brain cases. In the same movement the scouts pulled the Eluoi corpses, neither of which leaked so much as a drop of blood from the fatal puncture wounds, still plugged by the knife blades, into the entryway of the air lock leading to the target.
The rest of the SEALS swiftly joined them, Sanders and his men swooping into the docking tunnel with the aid of their maneuver jets while Chief Harris led the backup party from the balcony toward the objective. The scouts already were stashing the two bodies in a storage locker just around the corner, out of sight of the main