Countdown: H Hour (11 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

There are, as it turns out, only two different modes

of loyalty that arise spontaneously. The first, of course,

is the family. The second is the boys’ gang.

—Lee Harris,
Civilization and Its Enemies

MV
Richard Bland
, South Atlantic

There were other naval types for whom, of course, the meeting was the be all and end all of existence. Having suffered through more than a few of those, in his Navy time, Captain Pearson liked to keep his meetings infrequent and short.
At least where possible.

The meeting, as were most, was held in the conference room not far from the captain’s quarters. The room was spic and span, the walls decorated with nautical themes, and the Formica conference table top, though old, was gleaming.
I might have to tolerate leaving rust marks on the hull, but I don’t have to put up with sloppiness inside.

Despite—or perhaps equally because of—having given Sergeant Hallinan three days confinement on bread and water, the ship seethed.
It was
, thought Captain Pearson,
something you can feel, even if you can’t see it. The line grunts detest the special operators and the feeling is returned in full. This is out of my league to handle. And then there’s the medical supply issue . . .

“TIC Chick and I can draw blood from the crew we have aboard, to build up a store,” Cagle said, “but we’re still stuck for the drugs. None of the regimental shipping is conveniently placed to meet us, mid-ocean . . . or anywhere on any ocean.”

“We sure as shit can’t make landfall,” said Warrington, “not with what we’re carrying. So we’re fucked?”

Cagle grinned. “Not necessarily. Interestingly enough, some pirates from the Horn of Africa area—they’ve taken to calling it Punt, of late—recently grabbed a humanitarian aid ship, a
medical
ship. They’re from MSF, Doctors Without Borders, so that’s probably going to have everything we need.”

“Rescue the ship and crew?” asked Captain Pearson. “I think that’s more attention than we can afford.”

“Fuck ’em,” said Stocker, heatedly. “Tranzi bastards are as responsible as anyone for the mess the world’s in.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Cagle half-agreed.

“Capture at sea?” asked the skipper. “Take the boat, take what we need, move the crew over, then sink it?”

Warrington shook his head; the captain’s power really stopped at the edge of his command and surely didn’t cover ordering an operation not in his mission statement. “We’re killers, not murderers. If we took the ship, we’d probably have to let the aid workers go. And we could never guarantee or take their word that they’d be quiet.”

“Just a thought. But we wouldn’t have to let them go.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Cagle said, “it’s already landed.”

“Buy from the pirates?” suggested Stocker’s XO, Simon Blackmore. Blond, blue-eyed, standing about five-nine and with broad shoulders and a powerful chest, the young Welchman was formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Rifles. He, like a dozen of his brother officers, had been put on the beach when the Brigade of Gurkhas, in another ill-considered financial austerity measure, had collapsed from two battalions, that down from four, further down to one. The regiment had snapped up a couple of those officers and a larger number of the middling senior noncoms. It would have snapped up some of the Gurkha rank and file, too, but they were too bloody expensive for machine gun fodder.

Once quite broad, Blackmore’s sense of humor had become somewhat impaired since being robbed of his regimental home. And the regiment, AKA M Day, was . . . trying, in both senses. He wasn’t sure at all that he belonged here.

Simon continued, “I mean, really; how much do we need, weight and cube wise? Wouldn’t it fit in one of the CH-750’s? Two at the outside? And there’s not a lot of news coming out of Punt to give us away; now is there?”

“We could probably buy the aid workers,” suggested Pearson. “Then we could hold them until the mission was done.”

“Out of our price range,” said Warrington. “Easily run a million bucks a head, as hostages. And there’s probably what, forty of ’em?”

“Fifty-two,” said Cagle. “That would eat the profit for the mission almost entirely.”

“Let’s just defer a decision on the tranzis,” Warrington said. “Maybe we’ll save them; maybe we won’t. Depends.”

“Fuck ’em, anyway,” Stocker repeated. “Not our mission. Not our problem.
Not
our people. In any sense.”

“Do we have any connections in Punt?” Pearson queried.

Warrington sighed. “Since we killed a rather large number of them some years back, probably not good ones.”

“They don’t know who did that, or that we’re affiliated with the group that did,” said Stocker.

“If you were them, would you take any chances on heavily armed white foreigners who come from the sea?” asked Cagle.

“Put that way,” Stocker conceded, “I suppose not.”

“Don’t worry about it, in any case,” Cagle said. “The people who took the ship aren’t the same group the regiment blitzed. Besides,
I
have a pretty good connection in the area.”

“From what?” asked Stocker, gaping.

“I . . . ummm . . . used to do humanitarian aid work there.”

“Dickhead.”

Before Cagle could form a retort, the hatch to the conference room sprung open. Framed in the grommet-lined steel was Sergeant Major Pierantoni. He took a half step forward, folded his arms, and leaned against one side of the hatch.

“While all you high and mighty sorts are solving not only our problems, but the world’s, I thought you might like to know that A FUCKING RIOT HAS BROKEN OUT ON THE MESS DECK!”

Warrington’s head sank on his chest.
The hard stuff we can find a solution to. It’s the easy shit—or what
ought
to be the easy shit—that bites us in the ass.

Looking up at Pierantoni, Warrington asked, “Who the fuck started it?”

“No clue, Boss. Doubt we’ll ever find out, either. But I think we ought to get our asses down there before serious blood gets spilled.”

“Right,” Warrington answered. “And Skipper? I think you might better arm your crew.”

Mess Deck, MV
Richard Bland,
South Atlantic

The only bright spot was that in one corner of the mess deck two of Stocker’s four Gurkhas, kukris drawn menacingly, had cornered a dozen or so of Charlie Company’s brawlers, holding them in place by sheer intimidation, while a third Gurkha guarded the backs of those two, holding off several of Warrington’s men. The khukri of the latter, glinting under the artificial light, shifted like lightning, left to right and back, punctuated with barely perceivable flicks.

The fourth Gurkha was probably off meditating somewhere.

Otherwise, though, things were pretty dark. In the center, four Charlies had one of Alpha’s operators down, taking turns kicking him in the sides and belly. Off by the serving line, an Alpha, Feeney by name, appeared to be drowning a Charlie in a large vat of warming soup. As Warrington watched, Feeney pulled the Charlie trooper out, reddish soup—or perhaps soup and blood—streaming from face and hair. He pulled him out, but only long enough to set him upright, land several solid punches, grab him, and stuff his head back into the mess.

Most of the other three corners were just a wild melee, with no discernible winners. If Charlie had the numbers, Alpha had the experience.

“Wade in to break it up?” Stocker asked.

“Provided we are breaking it up,” Warrington replied. “To which end, you and yours go after yours and get them in the corner with the Gurkhas. Me and mine . . . well . . . first we’d better save that poor bastard from drowning. But we’ll push our own into the opposite corner. After that . . . Vug, I dunno.

“On which happy note, A Company, such as you are, follow meeeee!”

On the plus side
, thought Cagle, standing just behind Warrington,
TIC Chick and I are going to get a serious work out.

Stocker nodded once, briskly, and told his exec, “Simon, go reinforce the Gurkhas. Deck anyone who gets in your way. The rest of us will start breaking them up and pushing our troops to you.”

“Aye, sir,” the lieutenant replied. With a gulp, he stepped into the anarchic mess. After a few hesitant steps, he had to jump back for a moment as a Charlie company body sailed across his path, arms flailing and face spitting teeth and blood. He looked in the direction from which the soldier had come and pointed at an Alpha, just recovering from the punch he’d thrown.

“Freeze, Sergeant!”

For a moment the trooper, Sergeant Hallinan, in fact, seemed disinclined to obey. He took two lurching steps forward, then hesitated.

If I strike an officer
, thought the sergeant,
Warrington will have the skipper put up a yardarm and hang me from it. That, or bread and water for a fucking year. Mmm . . . not how I wanted to die, actually, either hanging or boredom.

“Ye . . . yessir,” Hallinan answered.

Simon pointed again at the corner opposite the one where his Gurkhas were holding some of the company’s men prisoner. “Go there. Now.”

“Yessir.”

Past Hallinan, Warrington and Pierantoni trotted for the soup vat, pushing scrappers out of the way or jumping over the semi-comatose, as needs must. There, they heard their operator, Sergeant Feeney, staring down into the soup and laughing maniacally. “Ha, ha, no more bubbles from you, motherfucker!”

The sergeant major kidney punched Feeney from behind, then grabbed his hair and pulled him over backwards. The soldier from C Company came up into the air with him. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

“Mister Cagle!” Pierantoni called over his left shoulder, “This one’s for you!” Then he let go of Feeney’s hair, taking instead a grip on his collar and belt, and began to run him straight into the wall of the corner Warrington had designated. Feeney slammed off the wall and then fell into a heap.

Looking around for someone with a degree of his wits about him, Pierantoni settled on one. “You! Sergeant Hallinan! You’re in charge of this mess until further notice. Sit on Feeney if you have to, and take charge of the rest as we send them to you.”

“Yes, Sergeant Major,” Hallinan replied.

Sometimes they came in of their own accord, more or less. Sometimes they were forcibly carried over by Stocker or his first sergeant. In one case, one of the captive Charlies, just awakening from a punch-induced unconsciousness, turned and began to go for the XO. A mild—for certain values of mild—tap from the hilt of a Gurkha kukri split the soldier’s scalp and laid him out in a heap on the deck.

“Thanks, Sergeant Balbahadur,” Simon said. The Gurkha sergeant shrugged:
Just my job, sir.

At about that time, a file of shotgun-armed sailors appeared with their captain. Pearson gave the order, “Lock and load,” loudly enough for everyone on the mess deck to hear. Whoever’s attention that failed to garner, the sound of multiple shotgun slides being worked—Ka-ka-ka-
chunk-k-k
—got
everyone
’s notice.

Captain’s Quarters, MV
Richard Bland,
South Atlantic

“Okay,” Warrington asked, “besides us and the squids, who
isn’t
under arrest?”

The A Company XO sported a huge and ugly shiner. He wasn’t the only one with injuries among the command groups. And Cagle and TIC Chick were still busy down below sewing torn flesh and passing out Motrin and cold packs.

Stocker answered, “My three Gurkhas and seventeen others who weren’t on the mess deck at the time. All the rest are on deck with shotgun bearing sailors watching them.”

“Of us? Nobody,” said Sergeant Major Pierantoni. “Somehow every one of them managed to get into it. The aviators stayed out, sensibly.”

Pierantoni pointed at Warrington’s eye and asked, “And, by the way, what are you going to do about that? Legally, I mean.”

“Nothing. I never saw who landed it on me.” Warrington looked around the room and added, “I think it would be better if none of us saw anything that could lead to charges.”

“What about Feeney and the guy in the soup?” asked Pearson.

Stocker cleared his throat and said, “Private Cuthbridge will live. Besides, it was a clear cut case of self-defense.”

Pearson sputtered, “Self def—”

“It was self defense,” Warrington said. “For everybody. Self-defense, got it?”

Seeing that the captain was inclined to disagree, Warrington added, “We can’t do anything about it, Skipper, not and have a hope of completing the mission.”

“My ass,” Pearson said. “We
already
don’t have a hope of completing the mission with two companies that are supposed to work in harmony and hate each others’ guts.”

“I know,” Warrington said. “And I wish I knew something we could do about that.”

One of Pearson’s crew knocked on the hatchway. “Enter,” said the captain.

“This just in, sir,” the rating said, handing over a printed off sheet from CNN.

Pearson read it, then began to laugh. “Best news I’ve had lately,” he finally forced out, passing the sheet to Warrington.

“What is it?” Stocker demanded.

Warrington, likewise laughing now, wiped a tear—wincing—from his blackened eye. “The regiment has mined the shit out of Venezuela.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The media’s power is frail.

Without the people’s support, it can be shut off

with the ease of turning a light switch.

—Corazon Aquino

Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

Republic of the Philippines

Mrs. Ayala sat in a shadowy alcove of the small outbuilding, Pedro and her other most trusted guard to either side of her and slightly in front. On a strong wooden frame, set at an angle and bolted to wall and floor, lay a pale and terrified looking journalist, with a very bright light focused on his face. The journalist, one Mohagher Kulat, was buck naked, something that Lox was mildly surprised to see bothered Mrs. Ayala not a bit.

Given that, though
, he thought,
I’m unsurprised to discover that she is completely unbothered by what we’re about to do to this poor bastard. Then again, if I’d seen my wife’s finger snipped off on national television, I might be disinclined to Christian charity, as well.

Still, I’m glad it wasn’t a woman we grabbed.

Kulat had been taken from the street in front of his house, at about the same time as a different half of Welch’s team had grabbed his cameraman, a Mr. Iqbal. Iqbal’s auto had been driven off by Welch, while Kulat had been bustled into the trunk of Pedro’s taxi. They’d both arrived at the safe house in a state of chemically-induced unconsciousness. There, they’d been stripped, bound, and prepared for questioning.

Wires ran from the journalist’s genitalia to a field telephone. It was World War Two surplus, but it would do. There were more sophisticated methods of electrical torture, but Lox’s background was Army rather than police, hence field expedient oriented when it came to coercive methods of interrogation.

Lox reached out a meaty hand, slapping the journalist across the face hard enough to split his lip. It was also hard enough to get his complete and undivided attention, quite despite the lingering effects of the drugs used to subdue him.

“Hello, Mr. Kulat,” Lox said. “Before you ask, my name is of no use to you. Suffice to think of me as the man you are going to tell everything I ask you to tell me.”

“Fuck you,” the journalist said, blood spraying from his split lip.

Lox smiled as he wiped the spray from his face. He turned to Semmerlin, manning the field telephone, and said, “Go.”

Semmerlin began turning the crank ferociously. Hand-generated electricity coursed up the wires and through Kulat’s genitalia. He screamed and writhed, his back arching half a yard from the platform to which he was bound.

“Intermittent,” Lox ordered. Semmerlin slowed the spin of the crank, just enough to let Kulat’s back slump to his platform, then cranked it ferociously again, pulling another agonized shriek from the man’s throat and again causing his body to deform itself into a stiff arch. This he repeated, half a dozen times, until Lox held up a restraining hand.

“You owe me an apology,” Lox said. When none was forthcoming, he signaled Semmerlin to begin the process again. After several more minutes in mindless, gibbering agony, the prisoner took advantage of a short lapse in the current to scream, “I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry . . . please
I’m SORRY
!”

“Good,” Lox agreed. “And now that we’ve gotten over our little impoliteness, let me tell you what’s going on.”

Lox seemed to hesitate for a moment. “Hmmm, on further reflection, let’s talk a little about morality, since the human mind is capable of all kinds of self-delusion if it thinks itself to be uniquely in the right. This is especially true of journalists, it seems.

“You have a wife and children, do you not, Mr. Kulat?”

Kulat tensed, not answering. If these madmen didn’t know about his family they would be safer.

“It was a rhetorical question, Mr. Kulat,” Lox said. “Through our contacts with the police”—that was
almost
a complete lie, but Lox thought it might be useful to have Kulat think it was so—“we know you do. And we’re not, for the moment, at least, interested in them. This could, of course, change.”

Lox let the threat hang in the air for a few moments, then said, “I would like you to imagine whichever one it is in the world you most love, in the hands of your enemies. Perhaps it’s your wife, or your son. Maybe it’s a father or mother. No matter, just imagine. Put your best loved face to that image in your mind.

“Now picture that best loved face, and the human being behind it, kidnapped, mistreated, tortured, dismembered. What would you not do to save them?

“What if the person who had the key to saving them were, like yourself, a member of the press? Would you care much about freedom of the press, in that case? Would you care enough to let that best beloved suffer a horrible life and then die a worse death?

“If you didn’t know how to save them, would it be wrong for you to hire someone who did?”

Lox gave a grim smile. “I ask you these things, Mr. Kulat, so that you will understand that you are the key to saving someone else’s best beloved, and there is no limit to what we will do to you, on behalf of our principal, to get that person back, whole and safe. What you would do, or would hire someone to do, we will do. In case you didn’t understand that, what you would do, we
will
do. And freedom of the press means less than nothing to us. Indeed, we tend to blame you—all of you—for the state the world is in.”

Lox reached into a pocket and pulled out a pair of rubber medical gloves. These he put on. From a different pocket he took a set of cheap steel vise grips. Those he adjusted, then carefully closed on one of Kulat’s testicles. The vise grips were just tight enough to be noticed, not so tight as to really hurt.

“Electricity is good for this purpose,” Lox advised, “but there’s always the risk of cardiac arrest. And, besides, some people are more terrified of physical damage, especially to their reproductive systems, than of mere pain. Your persona suggests that kind of vanity.”

Lox’s voice changed from conversational to hard. “Your cameraman is being held in a different chamber of this compound. I am going to ask you questions. He will be asked the same questions. If your answers do not match, there will be pain and there
will
be damage.”

With a grin, Lox asked, “Now, to begin, what is the airspeed of an unladen European swallow?”

Safe House Bravo, Muntinlupa, Manila,

Republic of the Philippines

Maricel was considerably more American in her ancestry than she was Filipina. Her great-great-grandmother, who had been in the same line of work (well, at different times in
both
of Maricel’s current lines of work), had gotten herself knocked up by the artillery major (white, of course, in those olden days) in whose house she’d taken domestic service, not so very long after the end of the Philippine Insurrection. The major had bought her off with what, at the time, she’d thought was a fair and generous settlement. It hadn’t lasted, of course, which was why great-great-grandma, and later the half Kano great-grandma, had both ended up working various knocking shops. This was also how great-grandma had ended up giving birth to the child of either the 31st Infantry Regiment or the 200th Coast Artillery Regiment. That was as much as she’d been able to narrow down grandma’s paternity.

Three quarters American, and substantially white, grandma had been in great demand—practically a whiff of home—for Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines on R&R from Vietnam. This was how Maricel’s mother had ended up seven-sixteenths American white, seven-sixteenths American black, and a bare one-eighth Filipina. Mom had not the first clue to her paternity. Neither did grandma. When you’re dealing that kind of a volume business . . .

Maricel’s mother had broken that long line of honorable service to the U.S. Armed Forces, managing to get herself pregnant with a Swiss businessman, on vacation from a dowdy wife. This made Maricel half Swiss, seven thirty-seconds American white, seven thirty-seconds American black, and a bare one sixteenth Filipina. She was considerably taller than the local norm, and, despite the black heritage, considerably lighter. Thus, instead of being an LBFM, she was more in the lines of a Large, Off-white, Fucking Machine, an LOWFM.

And though there was not a trace of genetic predisposition to prostitution in Maricel’s make up, memes propagate just as well as genes do, if not even better. The memes she’d grown up with included sex as being about as sacred as going to the bathroom and sex as about the only way to make a living as a bastard girl of only marginal local ancestry . . . those, and that the more you did it, and the better you did it, the more money you could make and the sooner you could retire before your looks and allure fled.

Maricel carefully did up Sergeant Malone’s zipper and belt before rising to her feet. She rebuttoned her own blouse as she rose. She had much larger breasts (see ancestry, such as it was, given above) than the typical Filipina and had learned at mother’s and grandma’s knee that men liked to play with them while being blown.

“So it’s no problem to take the day off, boss?”

Malone shook his head. “Nah. Everyone’s entitled to a day off now and again. Go see your family and relax. We can send out for Chinese or something.”

“No need, boss. I stayed up late making
champorado
for your breakfast and a nice pork
adobo
for your lunch. I’ll be back in time for dinner.”

“Nah,” Malone replied. “We’ll still send out for Chinese for dinner. You take the
whole
day off. Be back in time to make breakfast the day after tomorrow.”

“Yes, boss. Thank you, boss. I promise something extra special then.” Whether she meant extra special in terms of eating, or extra special in terms of being eaten, she left hanging.

Before she left, Malone slipped a ten down her shirt to nestle between her breasts. With a quick glance at the darkened window, Malone said, “You’d better hurry; it’s getting late.”

Leaving, she called over her shoulder, “Since you’re going to send out, Fu Lin Gardens and Gloriamaris are both pretty good.”

There had once, and in the not so distant past, been public transportation in this part of Muntinlupa City. Not that the residents had needed it; they’d all had cars. It had been mostly for the domestic help. Those days were past, buried under “austerity measures” that were closer to survival measures for the local government. Sure, the well-to-do types could have afforded the taxes. They simply would not, and would give more to any political group that would keep them from paying taxes than the taxes themselves cost.

Thus, Maricel had to walk more than three miles to Dr. Santos Avenue to pick up a bus to take her, not home to her mother and grandmother, but to Tondo, to TCS, to report in and to see the child that was—she was a hooker; she was
not
stupid—plainly a hostage for her good behavior.

Once past the well-to-do area, streetlights became a memory of a happier and more prosperous day. That is to say, the poles were there but nobody had replaced the burnt out lamps in, oh, a very long time, long enough that people had, at some level, begun to forget that the poles even had a purpose. They were just there, dysfunctional and useless as all the other trappings of civilization.

Only once was she accosted. After she hissed, “TCS,” the man fled away. If anything, she was in greater danger from the broken sidewalks and potholed streets that, like the streetlamps, nobody was taking care of anymore.

On the bus, once she reached a still functioning line, Maricel had time to think.
This wouldn’t be such a bad life, if I had my baby with me. Every one of them but Zimmerman uses me just about every day, which I could take or leave, but every one of them slips me at least ten bucks, forty-thousand pesos, whenever they do. Plus my maid’s salary. And I get to keep it all, rather than the lousy hundred bucks I might make a week, servicing fifty guys, under TCS. And the quarters would more than do for the baby and me, both. Damn, why is it all the really nice arrangements never last
?

Tondo, Manila, Republic of the Philippines

However brave a show she’d put on while walking the streets, Maricel couldn’t breathe easy and relax until she’d passed through the borders of Tondo, to the safety of her own people, her own tribe.

In that secure cocoon, now, Maricel and Lucas sat on opposite sides of an old metal table, off in a private corner of the gang’s headquarters. Lucas was project officer, so to speak, for the enterprise, as he was for most high profile kidnappings.

“There are six of them,” Maricel reported. “One of them’s in charge, Mr. Benson. Supposedly some high up Kano executive. But even if he’s dressing like one, he doesn’t
act
like an executive. I don’t know what he acts like. He sings a lot, weird Kano songs I never heard before: ‘Rickity-Tickity-Tin, Goodbye, Mom, I’m off to drop the bomb.’ Things like that.”

And maybe I don’t
know
because the Americans pulled out their combat forces a long time before I turned thirteen and went into the life. Mother or grandma, though, might know. And once, just once, one of them called Benson, “Sarge.”

“I mean, if everybody but the big boss used me I’d put it down to him being married and faithful, but not minding what the peons do, and that would be that. But it’s not like that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Lucas said. “What’s their security like?”

“Typically four of them will be gone for a while on any given day, mostly in the day but sometimes at night. There are
always
at least two of them on guard, one inside and one walking between the house and the wall around it. And when they’re on guard they are
scarily
alert. And very heavily armed.

“And . . . ”—the girl struggled for the right words— “. . . they’re strange, you know. They all make use of me, except for one, Zimmerman. But, tell me, how often does an executive adopt share and share alike with his minions? And they’re not sharing because they’re kinky, or anything. Pretty vanilla, as a matter of fact. Just
tsupa
and the occasional fuck. No gang bangs. No lez shows, not even a suggestion. No whips and chains.”