The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 50

Joe drove two kilometres, and then two more. They came to a crossroads where one dirt road met another at an angle, and Joe slowed down and glanced over at Ellie.

Ellie was looking at a map on her tablet.

“Turn right,” Ellie said. That was towards the side of the road that the militia compound had been on. Joe turned, and they drove for another ten minutes, and then, at the next intersection, Ellie said, “Right again.”

Now they were on the road behind the compound, and several kilometres back from it. Ellie wanted to recon here, too.

This road seemed much the same as any other in the area. It was mostly empty fields and run-down old farmhouses and clumps of trees. The trees were useful, Ellie thought. There was more cover here, out in the open countryside, than there was in Afghanistan.

Joe drove, and Ellie watched out the window, looking at the roadsides. She couldn’t see any sensors or surveillance equipment along this road, either, but she wouldn’t necessarily expect to. Not to actually see it. Not unless it was the most obvious, industrial kind of sensor, cameras on metal poles, that kind of thing, sensors which were intended to be seen and deter interference. There was nothing like that visible.

“Is there any electronic noise here?” Ellie said to Sameh.

“Nope,” Sameh said. “Nothing. Not even home internet.”

“Nothing at all?”

“This doesn’t really seem like somewhere with a lot of data warehousing going on.”

“I suppose not,” Ellie said. She looked over at Joe. “Don’t slow down,” she said. “But keep an eye out for somewhere we could watch from.”

Joe nodded, and kept driving.

Ahead, the road bent, and went up a slight ridge, and there was a line of trees at the top. Perhaps a windbreak, Ellie thought. Perhaps just an old fence or hedge that had become so overgrown it had started turning into a forest.

She turned in her seat and looked at the trees as they went past. The clump was dense, dense enough to conceal the SUV if they drove through the gate in the next-door field, and then once in the field, parked the SUV right in among the trees. She turned, and looked out across the fields into the distance, carefully, trying to see the militia compound. She couldn’t, but when she checked the map on her tablet again, the distance between marker at their current location and the marker showing the compound was only a kilometre and half apart across what looked like open fields.

Ellie looked out the window, thinking. They ought to be able to see the compound from those trees, at the top of the rise, if they were standing still and had binoculars and also a little more time to get themselves lined up just right. They could see, and they could launch sensor packs or mini-drones too, if they needed to.

It would do, Ellie thought. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.

It would make her feel better to go and stand on actual dirt, somewhere close by to the target.

There was no particular reason to, she knew. There was no real reason she needed to be able to see with her actual eyes, except that it made her feel better. She wanted to be nearby, watching, close enough to get a feel for the area. She wanted to be able to smell and hear, and not just look at imaging data on a tablet screen. She also wanted to look at the route across the fields to the back of the compound, just in case they ended up infiltrating that way, and to get some idea of how well fenced and guarded the back of the compound was.

She was satisfied that those trees would be a good place to watch from.

They needed to leave now, and to stay away for a while too, in case anyone in the militia compound had been watching for passing vehicles, and counting them in and out, making sure everyone who went past actually left the area again. They would go away for a few hours, disappear and let anyone who’d been watching the road calm down and forget about them, and then they would come back, up this road, and see what there was to see as the back of the compound.

And then Ellie would decide what to do.