Countdown: H Hour (27 page)

PART IV:

H Minus

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I hate mankind, for I think myself one

of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

—Joseph Baretti

Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

Republic of the Philippines

Not far from the main house, Maricel, trussed up like a chicken and certain she was for the chop, lay on one side next to a small, linear open area she distantly understood to be a dirt airstrip. Welch stood above and beside her, saying nothing.

She’d been left like that, on her side with no neck support, for the last half hour while a bunch of big strangers—nine or ten of them, she thought—busied themselves on all sides of the airstrip. None of them had said a word to her either, not even the one she recognized, Malone. There also seemed to be a couple of women, little ones, smaller than her, standing by.

For the most part, she couldn’t see what the men were doing. She could see that lights had begun to appear along what she guessed were the edges of the strip. In the distant glow of those lights, barely, she made out one man—
maybe the one who hurt me
—hunched over something or other.

Oh, God, please, please don’t let them kill me. Please.

Maricel was pretty sure they were going to take her up in a plane and then throw her out, maybe over land, maybe over water.

Water
, she decided.
Why tie my feet, too, unless they want me to drown
? She began to cry, until the big Kano ordered her, “Shut up.”

The men had discussed what to do with her and the notion of paying the girl in kind for the death of their friend, and in precisely the same coin, had come up. Welch had squelched that, for the nonce, at least, not because he didn’t think that, in a just world, it was appropriate. No, what saved her was the knowledge of what her interrogation had done to Lox, on the inside. He didn’t think the men’s condition would be improved by watching her choke, either; rather the opposite.

What we
are
going to do with her, I’m just not sure
, he thought, standing there in the dark, waiting for his flight.
What I am sure about, though, is that we can’t leave her here, unguarded, I need every man for the mission, and we can stow her away on the
Bland
until we figure it out. Besides, if we decide to kill her, I need a few more officers to constitute a court-martial. The men still won’t like it, no matter what a couple of them might have said, but they’ll be a little more accepting if the whole thing has at least the trappings of law.

Fact is, though, that I don’t want to kill the poor little shit anyway. Yeah, she was part—a big part—of a criminal conspiracy. Yeah, that conspiracy murdered two of my men. But . . . well . . . what the hell choice did she have? What the hell choice did she ever have, in her whole life
?

The man who was hunched over, the one Maricel thought had tortured her, straightened. She heard the voice—
Yes, it’s the same one
—call out, “The first plane’s two minutes out, Terry.”

Maricel heard the engine, a sort of anemic buzz, approaching. With each second, and each little increment of increase in the buzz, she prayed a little more fervently. Then, almost before she understood what had happened, the plane—tiny little thing—was on the ground, right before her eyes. A team of four, she thought, was actually picking up the tail to turn the thing around.

Two men—neither of them Malone—picked her up and carried her to the plane, her head hanging like a dog’s. Neither of them was particularly gentle. Then again, neither of them had any reason to bear her good will.

What Maricel found particularly frightening was that neither of them took the chance to cop a feel or squeeze her ass.

I’m not even a woman to them. They’re gonna kiiilllll me.

At the plane, the pilot had already tossed the door open. One of the men carrying Maricel, the one by her feet, said something she didn’t quite catch. Then he let go of his end, letting her feet fall to the ground, while he fiddled with the chair inside the cabin. When he had that out of the way, the other began feeding her head first into the luggage space behind the passenger seat. Then both men forced her lower half in, apparently not much caring that the space was designed for light freight, not people . . . not even slender and not really so very tall people. Just being stuffed into position cost Maricel a few bruises and scrapes. Then they put the chair back into position. That cost her a little pain, too.

She wasn’t thinking particularly clearly—and who could blame her for that? Had she been, she might have realized that there was no good way to get her out of the cargo compartment to dump her over water. The big Kano entered the plane, ass end first, sat back, and buckled himself in. From the dash he pulled a set of headphones with a boom mike, placing them over his head and adjusting his mike to sit about three fourths of an inch in front of his mouth. Somebody tossed him a bag from outside, then closed the door.

The plane shuddered and hummed as the pilot gave it some gas. Maricel felt it move, bouncing as it covered the rough strip.

The CH-750’s were normally flown without a copilot. Not only wasn’t there enough room for three—not comfortably, as Maricel could have testified if she hadn’t been on the verge of pissing herself with fright—but the light planes normally carried a fairly heavy load of ordnance. Another pilot could have cut into that, considerably.

“You
sure
we’ve got enough lift for this thing, Jake?” Terry asked of the pilot.

“Close, sir, but yes. Two hundred and five for you. Forty for your bag. Maybe one hundred and ten for the girl. Hundred and forty-five for me. Leaves us about sixty-five pounds. That’s good because the air is hot and wet, so a little thin.”

“Okay, just checking.”

The pilot jerked a thumb to the rear, asking, “That the bitch that set up half of the team you had with you?”

“Yeah . . . that’s her.”

Using a falsetto stolen from an actress in one of the many films about Robin Hood, Jake said, “I likes me a good ’angin’, I do.”

“Might come to that, Jake. It just might come to that.”

Jake chuckled, then adjusted the throttle. The engine began to hum, shaking the plane as it moved it. The lights the men had set up to either side passed slowly at first. Still, Terry counted only two on his side before Jake pulled the stick and the thing was airborne.

“Now let’s hope we can get over the trees,” Welch observed.

“Piece o’ cake,” the pilot replied.

The CH-750 was almost as capable of flying nap of the earth—that was when you were flying and could look
up
and still see trees—as a good, modern helicopter. There had been arguments at the club—sometimes rather
severe
ones—between helo pilots and the CH-750 pilots who insisted that they could do it better.

From Terry’s point of view it didn’t much matter; both sets of pilots were certifiable maniacs. This opinion wasn’t reduced in the slightest when the CH-750’s tricycle landing gear did, in fact, scrape the trees at one end of the strip. He didn’t attribute that to pilot error so much as that night vision goggles tended to rob depth perception.

“Sorry about that, sir.”

The pilot couldn’t see Welch’s nod. He did hear him say, “Any one you can walk away from. As long as you can get us all to the ship . . . however many lifts it takes.”

The pilot pushed on the stick, causing the plane to lose height as it followed the trees. At that point, Maricel
did
lose bladder control.

You could hardly blame her for that, either. After all, she’d never in her life flown before.

One of the tough parts of flying this area was that, as a former bastion—in every possible and historic sense—of the U.S. Armed Forces, the place was inundated with radar. While the U.S. was long gone, the Philippines’ forces—who were certainly doing the best that could be expected given the economy—Air Force and Navy, in particular, kept up as much as possible. For example, while the former Naval Base at Subic Bay had been given up to civilian enterprise, San Miguel, to the northwest, was still a fully active naval station. That—not just San Miguel but all the active radars in the area—was why Jake had to keep so close to the trees that he’d be picking bark and leaves out of the landing gear for a week.

Fortunately, Jake had been stationed here before, with the Navy, and pretty much knew the radar patterns by heart. That’s why he turned his tiny command to fly between the mountains of Bataan Natural Park and Mount Mariveles before slipping down to wave-top level for the trip out to the ship.

Thank God
, thought Jake,
for what remains of the Global Positioning System.

MV
Richard Bland
, South China Sea

The ship was heading due north, but going very slowly, just fast enough not to appear suspicious.

Pearson had better radar available than the one he was using. The problem was that that radar was military grade. A military grade radar, suddenly lighting up the world, close to an area hotly contested between the Philippines, China, and Vietnam, would have been like a nun, dressing up as a tart, wandering Times Square. It was bound to attract the unwanted and unwelcome attentions of all the wrong sorts of people.

Instead, his radar people worked with what they could, a not so very splendid civilian outfit, that wouldn’t be noticed by the local authorities even if it could be picked up, but which also hadn’t a prayer of picking up an itty bitty sport plane flying almost between the waves.

“Pity,” said Warrington, standing on the bridge, looking forward over the deck of containers.

“What’s that?” the skipper asked.

“Huh? Oh, I was thinking out loud . . . that it was a pity we couldn’t modify these things so that there was a flight deck that ran all the way through, down below. Then we wouldn’t have to bust people’s asses setting up the PSP flight deck. We’d just open some doors, fore and aft, and there it would be.”

“Harder than it sounds,” Pearson replied. “You don’t notice it so much because you’ve gotten used to it, but this vessel jumps around quite a bit. That might pitch an incoming plane up in the air but, what the hell, the sky is big. Pitch a plane up with something that has a roof over it? No, thanks.”

“Good point,” agreed Warrington, cheerfully.

Pearson noticed the cheer. “What’s got you so happy.”

“Oh, I don’t care for command, particularly. I like being in charge of a given mission, mind you, but the bullshit of legal and
technical
command is not my cup of tea. Welch is welcome to it.”

The speaker on the bridge squawked with Jake’s voice, saying he thought they were about three minutes out. One of the bridge crew, on a huge night vision scope, announced, without taking his eye from the rubber eyepiece, “I see them, bearing Green-Zero-nine-seven.”

The captain automatically looked over his right shoulder but, of course, couldn’t see damned thing.

Picking up a mike, Pearson ordered, “Give me a signal, Jake.”

“He’s wagging his wings,” the observer announced.

“I see your wagging wings,” said Pearson.

“That’s me.”

“C’mon home, honey, dinner’s waitin’. But circle for a couple of minutes.”

“Wilco.”

Using the ship’s intercom, Pearson further ordered, “B Bird, get ready to launch.”

“She’s up,” replied the chief of the flight deck.

“Launch.”

“Why the close timing?” Warrington asked.

“Stealth, really,” the captain replied. Seeing that Warrington didn’t quite understand, he added, “Just imagine if someone, somehow, is tracking Jake. And Jake suddenly disappears off their screen. Imagine the horror. Imagine the frantic calls for rescue. Imagine the stupid looks on our faces when somebody investigates and discovers that the innocent-seeming merchie is actually an assault carrier. With
captives
aboard, no less. Imagine looking out from between prison bars for a very, very long time.

“This way, if someone
is
tracking Jake, they see a plane. They lose a plane for a couple of seconds but, ‘no problem, there it is. Dumb-assed pilot must have been playing footsie with the merchie.’ ”

“Ohhh.”

“Oh.”

Ayala Country Estate (Formerly Safe House Alpha),

Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon, Republic of the Philippines

Lox watched the small plane take off into the night. He didn’t know that particular pilot but, no sweat, Jake would be back for him. That penultimate flight carried Pedro and Mrs. Ayala. Aida and Pedro’s partner had gone before. Pedro had also advised Lox, “Tell them, if you can, not to try to take our guns. It could be ugly. Oh, and not Aida’s, either. She’s a bitch.”

“Welch knows,” Lox had replied.

Both of those prior flights had flown out with the smaller Filipinos seated in tandem in the one passenger seat. It was tight, to be sure, but way better than the cargo space. Besides, none of them were big or anything like fat.

“It’s going to be at least a half hour before Jake returns for me. Still, might as well get it over with now.”

With that, Lox walked back to the house and grabbed two cans of gasoline. He poured most of one into each of the two interrogation rooms. The rest went into the one holding cell.

The police might someday investigate the events of the next two days.
Good luck to them
, Lox thought, as he flicked a lighter to life,
finding anything bigger than a useless scorched chromosome if they do.

Fortunately, the estate was isolated, and the local fire department, with a bare thirteen men and women, plus old and obsolete equipment, was grossly overtasked already.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I suppose every man is shocked when he hears

how frequently soldiers are wishing for war.

The wish is not always sincere; the greater part

are content with sleep and lace, and counterfeit an

ardour which they do not feel; but those who desire it

most are neither prompted by malevolence nor

patriotism; they neither pant for laurels, nor delight

in blood; but long to be delivered from the tyranny of

idleness, and restored to the dignity of active beings.

—Dr. Samuel Johnson

MV
Richard Bland
, Sulu Sea, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

The
Bland
’s sole remote piloted vehicle, or RPV, didn’t need a deck to launch from. The entire thing, aircraft, launch rail, and control station, fitted neatly inside a single twenty foot container for storage and transport, with the rail going above the container for launch.

Of course, a deck certainly made it easier to recover the thing. Still, not much was deck was needed. Pearson’s naval crew had laid enough Marsden Matting across already, as a first step in laying the entire deck for the CH-750’s. What they had down already was more than sufficient for the Searchers. Indeed, it was almost sufficient to launch the CH-750’s, if not quite enough when they were under full load. It was not enough to recover them.

Israel, from whom the regiment had bought their RPVs, had quite a selection available, from little hand-held jobs to large, long endurance, high payload aircraft that were a match or near match for—and in some ways the superior to—those made in the United States. M Day had none of the largest class, and some of the smallest, but had settled in the main on Israel’s Searcher IIIN, in a clever little under the table deal with India coupled with a really
big
favor done on behalf of Israel. As both inside joke and memorial of the favor, the RPV had “Saint Rachel of IHOP” stenciled in small letters down both sides.

A fair amount of the space in the container, when in transit, was taken up by the aircraft itself. The control station took up slightly more. The various recon packages—from signal gathering to air sniffing to thermal imaging—took up still more. Even with that, the bulk of the space was taken up with dunnage—packages, frames, wooden and plastic beams and braces—to hold everything in place while in transit. Fortunately, Guyana—home base—was a place to have some pretty solid custom cabinetry made. Fancy? Maybe not. Solid? Absolutely.

The Searcher IIIN, N for “Navalized,” was smaller than its predecessors, even quieter—and they’d been very quiet—had slightly improved range, and a better AI to bring the thing home in the event of communication failure. That said, reports from the front in Guyana had suggested there were some problems, as several had simply disappeared without any obvious cause.

Welch had asked for three or four RPV’s for the mission, back at regimental headquarters. The regiment had let him have one.

Which was stupid as shit,
Welch thought.
If there’s any rule that ought to be tattooed on the foreheads of everyone in the military, everywhere, it’s that if you absolutely must have one of anything, at the objective, you
must
start with more than one. The one we have, therefore, had better fucking work.

Both Welch and Lox stood over the RPV’s pilot, in the space vacated by the launch rail. But for the corrugated metal of the container walls, the baskets and the cabinets, and the fact that the whole assembly rocked with the ship, as far as either could tell they were in the cockpit of a rather sophisticated aircraft. The pilot had screens for everything, plus computers, controls that mimicked those found on manned planes, plus a truly bizarre looking virtual reality helmet, sitting on his dash, for when the TV screen might prove not quite enough.

“And we’re . . . airborne,” the pilot announced over his shoulder.

“Peter,” said Welch, “stay here. Match what
Rachel
finds against what we think we know. I’m going the bridge and then to bid Graft and Semmerlin good bye and good luck.”

Emerging onto the darkened deck, right up against the port gunwale where the control station had been set, Welch guessed from the sound that the full flight deck was maybe half laid. Consulting his watch and thinking back to the navy’s operations order he’d listened to, he decided,
Pretty good time, so far.

The way to the superstructure led along the gunwale, and past the launch rail and its bipedal supports. In the darkness he almost missed it—indeed, he almost tripped over it—because that bipod was already down and the flight crew struggling with pins to disassemble the entire apparatus. It just wouldn’t do to have even fairly heavy metal objects lying around, once the flight deck became active.

Just shy of the superstructure, at the edge of the ad hoc runway, two containers were opened. There was just enough non-suspicious light coming from the superstructure’s portholes for Terry to make them out, as well as the one CH-750 that sat fully out in front of one of them, with a part of the deck crew unfolding and locking down its wings under the supervision of Jake, Terry’s pilot for the evacuation from the safe house in Hagonoy. Welch couldn’t really see them very well, but there was also a line of rocket and machine guns pods sitting on the deck, waiting to be mounted.

One of the things Terry found surprising was how quiet it all was.
They must have rehearsed the shit out of
all
the crews. Kudos to Warrington and Pearson. Good damned thing, too. Even if I can’t see them for beans, there have got to be some small craft out there. If one of them happened to be working for the bad guys, and reported suspicious sounds, our job could become a
lot
tougher.

Everything had seemed fine on the bridge, with Pearson in total control of his part of the operation. By the time the ship was twenty miles west of Zamboanga City, the crew had lowered a floating platform over the starboard side and run a net from the gunwales down to the platform. Once the platform was down and confidently secured, three men crawled down the net, Welch, Semmerlin, and Graft. There, swaying with the wake-induced turbulence, they took control of the two SeaBobs as they were lowered, easing them down gently and accurately, then laid them out on the platform. The formerly bright yellow SeaBobs had been painted and then covered in dark tape, just to make sure. Two packages, containing arms, uniforms, ammunition, night vision, and radios came down next.

“Good luck,” Welch said, just before the scuba-equipped Graft and Semmerlin eased themselves off the platform and into the water. He used a foot to push in the bundles of gear after them. Once the pair were well away, Terry climbed the cargo net back to the gunwale. There, the landing craft was uncovered, and hooked up to a crane.

Quietly, the SeaBobs carried the pair to a spot several hundred meters to the ship’s starboard, where they waited until it was safe to head for their objective. After ten minutes’ wait, Graft, the senior, said, “Let’s go.”

The ship veered north again, which course it would maintain until Graft reported he was at the objective. It would not launch the main force until he reported that the target was secured.

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

There was a cliff to the west and southwest quadrants of the island, perhaps eighty feet in height. It would not really suit to get an old and frail, quite likely also sick and weak, man down it to the sea. It could be done, but was a last option. Nor, for that matter, was it terribly suitable, which is to say it was completely
un
suitable, for an assault. Thus, there was good reason to believe it was only lightly guarded. Graft and Semmerlin, staying underwater except twice when they surfaced to get their bearings, rounded the island and headed for the base of that cliff.

MV
Richard Bland,
Sulu Sea, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

The numbers of people on the island counted by the Searcher’s thermal, about four hundred, wasn’t a surprise. In that particular the Philippine Army report provided by Aida had been accurate. Bunkers and other fortifications, identified by the late Mr. Kulat and Mr. Iqbal were pretty much as Lox had squeezed out of them.

No real surprises, in any case
, he thought.

That information was passed to the bridge, where one of Pearson’s men duly annotated the map, changing the color codes for those items from “Suspected” to “Confirmed.”

The heat signatures from the hut tentatively identified as the hostage’s, though, were problematic. There were two men outside, which was expected. But there were also two inside. One of them supine and the other one moving from one side of the hut to the other, with occasional stops at the supine one between the two.

No idea what that one is, but I’d better pass it to the bridge and to Terry.

The
Rachel
continued its overhead patrol, with the pilot being very careful to keep it out of any path that would place it directly between the island and the moon. The nav computer was absolutely crucial to that security measure.

Little by little, Lox was gratified to see, and one by one, the dots that indicated standing or seated men narrowed and stretched out, even as the few fires died away. The Harrikat, barring only the guards around the shore, two of them near the west side cliff, and a few more, were going to sleep.

Lox used the ship’s intercom, which had been hooked into the control station. “Bridge, Lox. When he pops up to check in, advise Graft that there
are
two guards walking the length of his cliff, which is about what we expected. If he needs, I can advise him when they’re at one extreme or the other.”

“We’ll patch you through to him directly,” said the bridge.

“Roger, that would be better.”

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

Graft and Semmerlin cut their motors when they were still about a hundred meters from shore. That was far enough that the sounds of the waves beating on the cliff’s base and the gravel and rocks in front of it should have covered any sound made by the sleds. Any closer? An unnecessary risk, they thought.

The SeaBobs and the packages they carted arose to the surface, dragging the men along with them. Commercial SeaBobs were naturally buoyant; these had been modified to be flooded and sunk if desired. From there, it was flipper work, men pushing devices rather than devices dragging men.

There was a different feel to the water, which feeling grew as the men neared shore. Eventually, Graft felt he could reach down and touch the gravel. He did; it was there. A wave picked him up, moved him, then set him down. Graft held in a curse as a barnacled rock scraped his knee, drawing blood.

Graft, followed by Semmerlin, stopped paddling and assumed more of a crouch. They still kept as much of their bodies in the water as possible. The cliff’s base was perhaps fifty feet away, more heard than seen. At the base, they tied off their SeaBobs to a couple of rocks and sank them in place. It mattered little to the mission if the SeaBobs were lost, as they didn’t have enough power remaining to get anywhere useful. It did matter that they not drift out where they might be seen or, worse, might wash ashore.

They’d recover them later, if they could.

Already Semmerlin was stripping down and fitting up. On went his uniform, boots, and combat harness. On went the Kevlar kneepads. He slung a suppressed .510 caliber subsonic rifle across his back. It had a loaded magazine but no round in the chamber. The pistol that went into a shoulder rig, on the other hand, was loaded, previously loaded, in fact; the sound of a slide being worked being altogether too loud and distinctive. On his head went a set of headphones with mike, those being hooked in to the radio at his belt. Over that he put on a climber’s helmet modified to take a set of night vision goggles, with the goggles already mounted. He had a pair of thick leather gloves, but only put on one of them, hooking the other to a carabiner. For the other hand, he was likely to need fine sensing and control, groping his way up the cliff.

Heart pounding, with excitement more than fear or exertion, huddled at the cliff’s base, with waves sometimes still washing around his ankles, Graft reported, “Pelican,” over the radio, in a tense, subdued whisper. It meant:
We are safely ashore.

The ship sent back, “Roger, be advised there are two guards along the cliff, but not directly above you. We’re patching Lox through from now on. He’ll keep you up to date.”

“Roger,” Graft acknowledged.

In the dank glow from the sliver of the moon, and even that mostly blocked by the cliff’s height, Graft and Semmerlin were barely shadows to each other’s eyes. The latter helped Graft on with his minimum required arms and equipment, that mostly being a helmet with NVG’s, knee pads, a small personal radio with earpiece and boom mike, the silenced pistol in a shoulder rig, a long rope, a smaller piece of rope, and a sling clustered with spring-loaded camming devices, or SLCD’s, and carabiners. Much of the rest would come up on Semmerlin’s back, after Graft had established a rope to the top of the cliff. The final load would be hauled up behind them, once the rope was set at the top.

Even with that, and lightly laden, Graft looked up at the near vertical face of the cliff at the base of which they’d landed and whispered, “Shit. This is
so
going to suck.”

“Hey, cheer up,” Semmerlin whispered back. “At least it’s not sheer. There are hand– and footholds, and you’ll find them.”

“I’m over forty,” Graft muttered. “Closer to fifty, in fact. And you think a few handholds are going to cheer me. Besides, I’m lead climber, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. You’re a better free climber than I am. So, okay, fine. Now just imagine trying to get up that son of a bitch—
silently
—if there weren’t any handholds.”

“Point,” Graft agreed, putting on and buckling down a safety helmet. “Well . . . watch me, then.”