every electronic tripping of the trigger mechanism. Potentially very deadly as we try to penetrate the time-transfer base perimeter.”
Lieutenant Easley spoke. “If I may interrupt, Mr. Naile, I’ve heard mentions of time-transferring and the future, regarding the six volunteers and now these guns. I know this is a highly secretive mission, but—”
“McKinley’s people didn’t tell you much of a damn thing, did they, Lieutenant?” Jack posited. “Just that you’d be briefed as appropriate, I imagine. Give the lieutenant the barebones version of this, Ellen.”
Ellen started with, “We’re from the future, and your six volunteers will be traveling to the year 1996 with us as soon as we knock out the resistance at the facility we’re about to attack. On the plus side, the jet-fighter aircraft and the helicopter—flying machines—haven’t gone airborne yet.”
Outside of seeing it in a motion picture or on television, or reading about it in a book, Jack Naile had never actually seen someone’s jaw drop—until he saw Lieutenant Easley’s drop.
The original plan had been to ignore electronic countermeasures and simply storm the time-transfer base by force, using what would appear to its defenders to be a frontal assault while, in fact, a second element of Lieutenant Easley’s force would accomplish a flanking movement that would become an envelopment.
The objectives were two, both equally important. First was to gain control of the time-transfer capsule to deny the accomplishment of a time-transfer that could alert Lakewood Industries’ forces in the objective future that there was trouble and to bring high tech reinforcements.
The second objective was to sabotage the VSTOL and helicopter aircraft so that they could not get off the ground and be used to interdict either or both attack elements.
Because of the present physical layout of the base, however, both objectives could be attacked as one. Upon inspection of the time-transfer facility from their observation vantage point, it was determined that the two VSTOL aircraft had been moved to within the fenced area surrounding the time-transfer capsule. So had the helicopter. On the plus side, all of the surface fighting vehicles were absent.
Except for the computer-regulated guns, a full-scale assault was still the plan, because it was the only workable one, since no means were at hand to disable any motion or heat sensors positioned as part of an alert system. The key to the problem, Jack concluded, was to deal with the guns—somehow—and go ahead with the attack before random chance kicked in and the time arrived for the aircraft to lift off. It seemed logical—but, unprovable except in the doing—that the guns would accept the fact that an adversary was terminated and no longer classifiable as a target when the intruder dropped below a certain artificially designated horizon line—fell down dead or wounded. If that were the case, in theory it would be possible to crawl along the ground beneath this horizon line without creating the conditions that would precipitate the guns being activated. The only trouble with that idea, if indeed such functional characteristics as he imagined were, valid, was getting past what heat, motion and other types of sensors were part of the extended perimeter defense and were likely also linked to the guns and would set them to firing.
Getting past these sensors was impossible, given the constraints of time and technology.
The guns were mechanical sentries. To get past sentries, it was often necessary to disable them permanently. The only remaining option was to “kill” the guns themselves with a shot to the brain.
“Do you think, Corporal Jensen, that you and the five best marksmen in your platoon can each hit the respective target simultaneously?” Jack asked as he pointed over the rocks toward the six computer-controlled guns. “The greatest distance looks about two hundred fifty yards. You’d have to hit the little boxlike affair on top of the gun, maybe using the red diode—that’s a light—as an aiming point.”
“Simultane—what you said—means all at the same time, don’t it, sir?”
Despite their desperate circumstances, Jack found himself smiling. “Yes, Corporal. That’s what simultaneously means, true enough.”
“I make the longest away of them guns at two hundred and eighty yards. Them box things with that there red light, they looks to be steel or iron.”
“Probably neither, because of the weight. Most likely, a relatively thin material your rifle bullet shouldn’t have any trouble penetrating. Can you and five other guys hit reliably at that range with those .30-40s of yours? That’s the question.”
“Yes, sir.” And the stocky corporal slapped the for end of his Krag-Jorgensen rifle