Warrant Officer Marquardt paced around his small office. He had read the
briefings that Lt. Jeracho had faxed him, so he knew most of what to expect
when the invasion of Rouge Squadron was carried out. However, that wasn't
what worried him.

What worried him was that Most Holy was still unaccounted for. This was a
problem for two main reasons. First, after Half Holy's death he wasn't in the
most stable of states. Second, there would be no telling what would happen
when or if he found CMO Rosenberg.

Suddenly, the phone rang, breaking Marquardt out of his concentration. He
lifted the reciever. "MAUL Mechanized Infantry, Fourth Division. Marquardt
here."

The voice on the other end was a deep male voice, obviously electronically
masked. "A little bird told me that your Commander in Chief was headed to
Peoria. *click*"

"Wait what the--" Marquardt asked into the reciever. It was no use. The
line was dead, the dial tone professing to that. Quickly, he dialed the
communications center.

"MAUL Comm Cent--" began the officer on the other end.

"This is W.O Marquardt. I need you to run a trace on a phone call made to
this phone just a couple seconds ago. Can you do that?"

"Well yeah, we can but usually we need approval fr--"

"This is important. Do it." Marquardt slammed the phone down and ran out of
his office.

The communications headquarters was located across the courtyard from the old
Tactical Warfare building, where Marquardt's office was located. It was just
a small, plain white building. The only thing that really gave it away as an
information center was the large array of antennas and the large
JihadLinker[tm] sattelite dish mounted on the roof.

Marquardt burst into the room. "Well?" he asked. "Found anything yet?"

The commanding officer in the room, a corporal, studied Marquardt's
nameplate. "No, we haven't, W.O Marquardt," he addressed.

"What's the holdup?" Marquardt inquired.

"There's no holdup. Teng--" a short, red-haired sergeant behind a computer
terminal glanced up, "Look on the phone logs .. we're looking for a call
to W.O. Marquardt's .. quarters?"

"Office," corrected Marquardt.

"Okay, office then." The corporal stared at the glowing computer screen
while the sergeant typed on the keyboard.

"Umm, I'm not showing any outside calls to W.O. Marquardt's office," spoke
the sergeant.

The corporal grunted. "Check for inside calls."

The sergeant pressed a few keys, and the computer beeped. "Okay, the call
came from ... General Most Holy's quarters?"

Marquardt bolted from the room and sprinted across the MAUL campus to the
CinC's quarters. The door was unlocked. /Must have been left from the search
party,/ Marquardt thought. He tiptoed in. Carefully, he crept through the
apartment. The bedroom door caught his eye, and he entered.

The phone was on the floor in the middle of the room. The reciever lay on
the hook, a small electronic project circuit board wired to it. The wire
from the that board led to another board, which was duct-taped to a portable
microcassette recorder. There were wires leading both to the recorder and the
phone base.

Gingerly, Marquardt picked up the recorder and pulled the plug from the
phone jack. It let out a high pitched squealing and then, suddenly, 
General Most Holy's own voice sprang forth from the recorder's internal
speaker-- "--that your commander in chief wa--*VWRRRRRRRP*--ird told me--"
Marquardt pressed the stop button on the recorder. He glanced down at the
phone setup. Now how the heck could .. and more importantly, why the heck
/would/.

Marquardt went back to his quarters, confused and perplexed. He examined the
Rouge Squadron data. "Heavy Infantry? What the heck does that mean?"
Marquardt asked to the air in the room. The air neglected to answer.

There were men out canvassing the area between MAUL HQ and Peoria, Illinois.
Soon, there would be answers to all the questions.