White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel (20 page)

The sound of the approaching train was
getting louder and the rails were almost groaning as the weight of
the train vibrated along the tracks.

Archie let out a shout of satisfaction
as the tree shifted and the trunk flopped to the ground.

Carmen slung the rifle over her shoulder
and clambered over the line and picked up branches in her hands,
ready to pull like crazy.

Archie picked up the raw end of the
trunk and nodded.

She pulled. The tree was heavier than
she had thought it would be. She thrust her boot up against the end
of a tie and pushed with her leg for better leverage. It moved
sluggishly. Archie was red in the face and with a curse, he dropped
the trunk and stepped back, his chest heaving.

“Again!” Carmen called.

He wiped at his forehead with the sleeve
of his tee shirt, then bent and picked up the trunk once more.

Carmen threw her entire bodyweight into
dragging the thing backward. It moved a few inches.

“Again,” she called and heaved.

A few more inches. But it was
moving.

In her mind, a mental clock was ticking
down. She began to pull on the tree in a rhythmic tugging, taking
small steps back as it moved.

Finally, Archie was a pace away from the
rail and most of the foliage was hanging over the side of the
track. The trunk, a good eight inches through the middle, straddled
the two rails.

Archie looked up and dropped the trunk.
“Take cover!” He headed for the trees.

Carmen leapt over the rails and ran
after him, but stopped at the edge of the tree line and unslung the
rifle. There was a tree with a fork in it at almost the perfect
height. She settled the barrel of the rifle into the fork and bent
and took aim.

“What are you doing?” Archie
demanded.

“If I can take out the driver, I can
slow the train,” Carmen muttered.

“He doesn’t have dead man controls,”
Archie shot back. “Killing him just means there’s no one there to
apply the brakes. Come and get under cover. Look, the guards on the
top of the cars have seen you.”

She looked at the train as it curved
around the bend. The tree had been seen. The guards, who had been
watching their flanks, now turned to face the front of the car. She
heard a rifle shot, but it didn’t come anywhere near her.

There was a shout from within the trees,
barely heard over the noise of the train. It had come from farther
along the track. Figures stepped out from the trees and began to
run alongside the train. From among them, she spotted Garrett, who
was half a head taller than anyone else in the camp.

The guards saw them, too. They instantly
moved back to their positions where they could protect the side of
the train, pulling their rifles around to aim downward. Garrett and
his men would be far too easy to pick off.

Carmen bent to focus along her sights,
her heart squeezing. She aimed carefully and let off a round.

One of the guards on the roof threw up
his arms. His rifle toppled over the side as he fell backward. The
other guards all jerked around to see where the threat was coming
from. Then they all hunkered down, hugging the roof of the car.

The driver of the train had finally got
close enough to see that the tree across the tracks was too
substantial to drive over. The engine brakes came on, squealing
stressed metal.

Garrett hooked a hand over the big door
handle and hauled himself up onto the lip of the door, then leaned
down to haul up the others. He ducked as a guard tried to shoot at
him, but as the guard didn’t want to lift his head very high and
expose himself to Carmen’s line of sight, the shot went wide.

Carmen tracked the guard with the rifle
and as he eased into her sights, she fired again. The guard
flinched and ducked back down. She had missed.

The train was slowing now. Three
Resistance members were clinging to the side of the car and Garrett
was fumbling with the door, trying to open it.

Another guard, a braver one, lifted
himself up onto his knees and leaned over the edge, taking careful
aim.

At Garrett.

Carmen barely aimed, this time. She
jerked the tip of the rifle the fraction of an inch necessary to
line up with the guard. Then she pulled the trigger compulsively.
Once, twice, three times. She should have taken the time to squeeze
it. She knew that, but the knowledge was far away. More immediate
was the danger to Garrett.

The train had slowed to a walk and would
stop in a few seconds, about six feet short of the tree. The guard
who was aiming for Garrett jerked sideways. She hadn’t hit him but
she had distracted him.

Then something slammed into her
shoulder, sending her staggering backward. Her knees grew weak.
Heat and icy coldness tore through her, stealing her breath and her
strength.

She fell back on her butt. Her left arm
wouldn’t work.

“Carmen!” Garrett’s voice, sounding
strained.

Carmen lifted her right hand to her
shoulder and touched it. Agony flared, sending another wave of cold
through her.

There was a lot of shouting, over by the
train. The train had halted.

Good. We stopped it
.

But the thought was fuzzy.

She put it together slowly. She had been
shot. So all this muzziness and the hot and cold feelings…that was
shock.

She could almost hear Garrett scolding
her.
Move your ass Escobedo! They’ll come for you
!

“
Carmen
!” It was Garrett’s voice
and this time she wasn’t hearing it in her head only. She looked
up, forcing her head to lift. She really wanted to lie down for a
while. Lying seemed easier.

Garrett was running toward her. Behind
him, two of the guards that had been on the roof of the car were
chasing him, their rifles lifted. The other fighters were
scattering. Running for their lives.

Carmen tried to shout a warning to
Garrett but her voice wouldn’t work.

He dropped to his knees next to her, his
hands on her shoulder. “You should have run,” he said.

“He was going to shoot you,” Carmen told
him. It took enormous effort to say it.

His fingers were pressing against the
wound and behind her shoulder, too. It hurt.

Something flickered from the corner of
her eye and she glanced up.

The guard was standing over Garrett, his
rifle raised. As she looked, he brought butt of the rifle down
against the back of Garrett’s head.

Garrett fell against her, his full
weight dragging her down. She toppled backward and cried out as her
shoulder slammed against the earth. Bright sparks flittered in her
mind.

Just before the blackness completely
swamped her, she thought distantly,
I’m lying down
. Then,
tinged with panic that could only express itself in her mind,
Garrett!

Then nothing.

Olivia tapped on the door that led out to the
balcony. “I don’t want to interrupt…” she began.

Calli got to her feet and walked over to
the door. “Come out and join us,” she said and drew her out onto
the balcony. There were two other women there. Minnie was one of
them.

Calli pulled up a battered kitchen chair
and patted the seat. “Have a seat. We’re sharing a bottle. It’s
almost a tradition.”

The young woman who was a stranger to
Olivia thrust a nearly full bottle of mescal toward her. “I’m
Téra,” she said, her voice husky. “It’s just family here. I guess
we’re sisters. Duardo is my brother.” She wrinkled her nose. “Big
bossy brother.”

Olivia took the bottle absent-mindedly,
as she sorted out the relationships. “Daniel and Duardo consider
themselves brothers,” she concluded and took a swig from the
bottle, then grimaced. The Vistarian mescal had a slightly smoother
taste than others she had tried, but there was a spice she couldn’t
identify that added its own unique punch to the flavor. She had a
feeling she would have plenty of chances to get used to Vistarian
mescal.

Minnie shook her head when Olivia
offered the bottle to her, so Olivia turned and handed the bottle
to Calli. “Why is this a tradition?” she asked curiously.

“It’s not. Not really. But we seem to
end up on this balcony, watching the sun go down every time the men
head out on an operation,” Minnie said.

Olivia glanced down at the beach. It was
deserted. There were tents and equipment piles and tire marks all
over the sand. But there wasn’t anyone to be seen there. Farther up
the cove to the north, the semi-permanent cabins they called
billets marched in two regimented rows. There was a sentry at the
far end, but no one moved along the sandy street running between
the huts.

Even Nick had donned army greens and a
bullet-proof vest for this operation. Every single able-bodied man
was heading for
Las Piedras Grandes
in the most
cobbled-together fleet of sea vessels ever collected. There had
even been three or four wooden fishing smacks, complete with their
tall netting structures at the back of the decks, crowded with
armed personnel. They had chugged out into the bay with the rest of
the vessels. One of them had looked to be decades old, the paint
stripped away and the raw planking showing in the rays of the
rising sun, but the engine had run smoothly and the boat had been
keeping up with everyone else.

“How long will it take them to get to
The Big Rock?” Olivia asked.

“Duardo thought they would be there by
sunset,” Calli said. “But that was a best estimate. They weren’t
going to leave anyone behind, so if an engine failed, or one of
them was in trouble, the whole fleet would have had to wait for
them.” Calli looked out at the sun, which was dipping down into the
sea. “They could be there by now,” she added and passed the bottle
back to Olivia, who turned and gave it to Téra.

“This sitting on my ass and waiting just
sucks,” Minnie said, her voice tight.

Olivia nodded. “I used to wait for my
dad to come home from missions. Then I got to wait for Daniel when
we were in the White Sands. And now I’m waiting again.”

“How do you deal with the anxiety?”
Calli asked softly.

Olivia grimaced. “I don’t know,” she
confessed. “I never have got used to it. About the only thing I
found that helped, just a little bit, was staying busy.”

Calli let out a sigh. “Well, finding
something to do isn’t a problem around here.” She stood up.
“Speaking of which. Téra, I’ll have one more mouthful, then there’s
about six inches of paperwork on my desk.”

Téra passed the bottle back. “Is there
anything I can help with?” she asked.

Minnie got to her feet. “There’s plenty
for me to do, too. Who on earth invented this civilian quarter
master crap, anyway?” She glared at Calli.

Calli smiled. “If you seriously want
something to do, Téra, then come with me. I just lost all my
military aids.”

Olivia stood up. “I’ll help, too,” she
offered.

They all retreated back inside the old
house. The mescal bottle stayed on the little table in the corner
of the narrow balcony.

Duardo took the night glasses the
sergeant offered him and scanned the compound on the other side of
the shiny, new fencing that enclosed it.

The administrative offices of the
Garrido Silver Mine had started life as a group of reconditioned
temporary buildings that had been flown onto the island in
pre-fabricated panels and constructed on top of poured
concrete.

Enclosed walkways joined all the huts
together into a large half-donut. There was a powerful commercial
air conditioning unit sited just behind the complex, feeding into
all the huts, but it wasn’t running right now.

There were out-buildings and much more
robust sheds that housed equipment and workshops. There was a
single building sitting off on its own, behind the administrative
buildings. It had security warnings plastered all over the concrete
walls and from here Duardo could see at least four security cameras
pointing at the front of the building, where the big sliding door
was. There was even a security guard box next to the door.

The high security building housed the
silver smelter and refining equipment and would have also stocked
the silver ingots before they were shipped out. During the first
wave of the rebellion, the Insurrectos had attacked the smelter and
blown a large hole in the back of the building, which had disabled
the smelter. Presumably, the attack had been designed to seize any
silver stocked in the smelter building, but there had been none.
The mine had barely begun proper operations. The small amount of
silver that had been processed had been quickly transported
elsewhere, as a demonstration that the mine was operational.

Duardo had only ever seen the mine on
television and in photographs in the news. The mine had been
expected to prop up Vistaria’s sluggish economy. The opening of the
mine had been closely followed by the media, so he was familiar
with the buildings in the admin compound. The mine itself was two
miles away, an open-cut operation that had been running twenty-four
hours a day.

The fence that ran right around the
compound was so new there was no rust or dust or dullness to the
chain-link. The barbwire on top would be very sharp. The fence
hadn’t been there when the media had reported on the mine, so it
had to be an Insurrecto addition.

“Is the fence going to create any sort
of problems?” Nick asked.

Duardo shook his head. “The fence, no.
It’s the high number of armed guards that concerns me. Look.” He
held the glasses out to Nick, who rolled onto his stomach and put
them to his face.

They were lying on the sandy dirt, a
kilometer away from the compound, hidden by scrubby weeds and
bushes. The bulk of the army was on the beach, or the boats,
another two kilometers to the south. Nick and he had crept forward
to assess the situation before launching the attack. General Flores
remained behind and they were keeping in contact via cellphones
using the new stealth software.