And so the bizarro alien counterpart to our own CIA mobilizes for a covert mission, sneaking through the night in a military convoy led by their commander's personal tank... yeah. Actually, the chapter cut takes us from the heavily-armed caravan rolling out to a squad of Apparatus infantry sneaking about on foot, so it's up to the reader to figure out how they managed to slip into a Fleet patrol base.
Hisst, Gris, and fifteen soldiers from the 2nd Death Battalion are Solid Snaking their way along, dodging patrols and searchlights as they creep through the dark base, examining the rows of empty spaceships sitting out in the open for saboteurs or inclement weather to wreck havoc on. I guess in Hubbard's mind anything able to travel in space is proof against rust and dirt, so you can just leave it out on the tarmac indefinitely.
Gris' boss proves to be an old pro at stealth, what with how he mutters the numbers on the spaceships to himself as he searches for a specific vessel. We also get our first mention of the "lepertige" when Gris compares Hisst's eyesight to one, and it's basically going to be the only alien animal Hubbard can come up with for this book. I can only assume that it shares its habitat with wolfyotes and preys upon deeralope.
Hisst eventually finds what he's looking for, a ship that made a recent trip to Earth. He has one of his underlings from the so-called "Knife Section" dress up like a Fleet courier and sends him off to deliver a forged message. Ten minutes later a Fleet crew hurries out, mans their ship, and takes off. Hisst happily comments that the crew will be "safe" at Spiteos within an hour, while their ship will be found "burned to a crisp" in the desert, thereby arousing suspicion when investigators find the crash site totally bereft of remains.
This makes Gris, seasoned Apparatus agent as he is, a bit nervous since "the kidnapping of a Royal Fleet crew and wanton destruction of an expensive long-range star patrol craft was a bit wide even for that lawless organization." Lombar Hisst, meanwhile, is pleased with the night's work so far and is eagerly looking forward to hitting the officers' lounge and abducting "that (bleep), (bleep), (bleep) Jettero Heller!"
This is a short chapter, and I'd merge it with the next one if Chapter Four weren't twice as big as this one. That's because it's the chapter that introduces Jettero Heller, and Hubbard needs to spend a lot of time telling us why we should worship the guy.
Oddly enough, intelligence services having tanks isn't unheard of. Organizations that are intended to monitor other branches of their governments sometimes have an actual parallel military to defend against or instigate coups as needed. My professors said that the KGB deployed tanks during the last days of the USSR, though Wikipedia isn't helping me validate that any. But it makes sense in totalitarian states with a desire to preserve ideological purity against forces from within and without - if the state's army decided to stop following the glorious Communist/Islamic/Flying Spaghetti Monster Revolution, you'd need an equally-powerful group to counter it. And that's why Iran has both a formal Army and the Revolutionary Guard.
But this Coordinated Information Apparatus packing a tank for its leader or having "Death Battalions" is a little less plausible. There's no indication that Voltar's government is concerned with enforcing a specific ideology, and if they were they obviously don't entrust the Apparatus to do it, or else they'd be sending their best and brightest to run it instead of their rejects and criminals. In fact the Apparatus' actual function seems a bit vague - the Fleet is the one running intelligence missions to other planets, and Gris told us the Apparatus was mainly concerned with stockpiling police reports for their blackmail value. So the not-CIA uses its power to blackmail the government into allowing it to continue to blackmail the government.
This isn't even the most pressing problem with the Apparatus, but we'll get to that later.
Go back to Chapter Two
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