Countdown: H Hour (5 page)

The red glow of the bridge lights made the captain’s scowl seem even more fierce than usual. Pearson still hadn’t been able to remove that scowl from his face, nor to get over the embarrassment of one of
his
reefers—and the most important of the lot—failing. “Regiment says we can pick up a new supply at Capetown or, failing that, Tuticorin.” He shrugged. “At least they’re more or less on our way. I don’t think they’ve thought that one through.”

“I’d feel a lot better about it,” said Warrington, “if they had some
other
ship make the pickup and deliver it to us at sea. We’re supposed to be fucking
secret
, after all.”

“None available,” Pearson replied. “They’re all either committed to home base defense, or too far out of the way.”

“Yeah . . . well . . . I’m thinking we’re going to have to retrieve them by air.”

“That has its own problems,” Pearson pointed out. “We’ll not only have to erect the flight deck again, but we’d risk being spotted by ground-based radar. And neither the South African nor the Indian navies are organizations to be sneered at. Neither are the air forces. At least not when you’re a big fat freighter.”

Below, on the temporary flight deck, the first of the CH-750’s had disappeared as the container doors were closed. Even as the crane whined the container into the air to move it to stowage, Number Two touched down.

CHAPTER FIVE

Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is

suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his

destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death,

but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him

something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state

of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.

—Jean Baudrillard

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

Lucio Enrique Ayala scratched absentmindedly at something itching his leg. Insect or jungle fungus, he didn’t know. His ancient back rested, if that was quite the word, against the center pole of the hut in which he’d been imprisoned. His posterior and the back of his ancient, skinny legs rested on dirt rapidly turning to mud. From one leg led a rusty iron chain, triple looped about his ankle and running off to a rock bigger and heavier than he could have lifted as a young man.

He’d tested the rock, shortly after being chained to it.
I sure as hell can’t budge it now.

Old Man Ayala didn’t have a clue where he was, except that it was mostly jungle and not too far from the sea.
Big help, that is.
No
place in this part of the country is too far from the sea
. He recalled that his captors had said something about “Basilan,” shortly after his capture, but whether he was actually on that island, or on one of the more than seven
thousand
islands, greater and lesser, that made up the province he couldn’t know.

Probably not Basilan Island, though
, he thought.
Too many very nervous Christians, there, too mixed in with the rest, and the army takes too much interest in the place for my “hosts” to be as comfortable as they plainly are . . . some one of the other islands completely owned by the Moros . . . probably one the army’s given up on.

He looked down at his tightly chained ankle and felt a surge of despair, thinking,
Not that it makes a lot of difference; the army could be half a mile away and they’d still not have a clue I was here. And they’d be as likely to bring down artillery on this hut as to make any effort to see what was inside, first. Can’t say as I’d blame them.

Ayala had done his military time as a young officer, long, long ago. A signals man, he’d been. And, like everything else in his life, he hadn’t let the experience go to waste. Briefly, he mentally chalked off what he did know, even if he thought the knowledge useless.
I’m not all that far from the sea; I can smell the water and, when the wind’s just right, hear the surf. I’m either in or near a major Moro base. I think I’ve seen as many as two hundred of the bastards at one time. And it
is
a major base; regular huts for barracks, rifle ranges, big kitchens and mess halls, a more or less regular hospital, though I didn’t note any doctors. I saw that much, at least. And they’ve got some heavy weapons, too. Mortars certainly. And I thought I saw a recoilless rifle on someone’s shoulder the last time they walked me like a dog for exercise, two days ago.

So what’s that mean? At least a big company, the way we’d think of it, or maybe a small battalion in Moro terms. I’d guess a small battalion. And that’s just what I’ve
seen.
Could be five times as many within a half a mile. Shit.

The old man sighed.
Ah, Paloma, pearl of my heart. I
wish
you hadn’t been such a stickler for appearances. I’d much rather have been in bed with you, comfortably, than with any number of young bimbos. And I’d sure as hell rather be in bed with you now than here, with this band of pirates.

Smiling, Ayala thought,
Ah, my very dearest, what pirates we were, together, in our youth.

Zamboanga International Airport, Mindanao,

Republic of the Philippines

It was one of the world’s amusing little incongruities that, no matter how much technological sophistication had grown in matters of communication, the most secure form of communication remained what it had been in Caesar’s day and before, the human messenger. For what Janail needed, no mere message carrier would do; he had to go himself and he had to fly out of this nothing much airport.

The “International” part was usually more wish than reality. Oh, there’d been any number of international flights over the years—not even including American and Japanese fighters and bombers, circa 1942 to 1945—but the service never seemed to last. Zest Airways or South East Asian Airlines or Nocturnal Aviators would give it a whirl, then eliminate the service after a few months or years. It was simply a loser, and no one really seemed to know why. This, perhaps, helped explain why different air lines kept trying.

The sucker airline
du jour
was Royal Brunei, the sultan’s finances being in a parlous state, what with the Allah-help-us, rock bottom price of oil in a world rapidly sliding into the poor house.

Not that the sultan was willing to bet a great deal of increasingly scarce money on the venture. No, no; not when he’d already had to add fifty percent to the number of Gurkhas he kept on hand, the Gurkhas being affordable where keeping up the oil welfare state was becoming increasingly unaffordable.

No, there was no money to spend on new aircraft for a new service. The sultan—or, rather, a cousin running the airline on the sultan’s behalf—had brought a couple of Fokker 50’s out of retirement and put them to work.

Which works out conveniently for me
, thought Janail, trudging up the ladder to the Fokker’s cabin,
because I
really
didn’t want to go through Manila, even if I’m reasonably sure the authorities don’t have a decent picture of me.

’Course, I’d have preferred the complete anonymity of travel by sea. Sadly, too many pirates who answer to
nobody.
Too many pirates, too many
hungry
pirates, given how little trade there is lately. Especially down by Sulu.

Kudat, Sabah, East Malaysia, Island of Borneo

Flight, airport, and civilization were all well behind Janail now. With the lights of Kudat glowing dimly to the west, aboard a narrow skiff, putt-putting between the overgrown green banks of the inlet jutting south from the Sulu Sea, Janail slapped absently at a buzzing mosquito. Maddeningly, the damned thing refused to stay in one place long enough to be killed, moving from ear to neck to face and back to ear, without ever once settling down for a meal.

“Fickle bastard,” the kidnapper muttered.
Note to self: When I’m sultan, mosquito eradication program. High priority.

Seated beside Janail, his companion, the Pakistani Mahmood Abdul Majeed, gave a victory grunt. He’d succeeded in killing one of the little winged Satans. “
Il hamdu l’illah
,” the Pakistani muttered, in a language not his own.

Odd
, thought Janail,
that this fat little scientist retains all the faith I’ve long since cast aside. Not that he needs to know that, of course, but playing along with his religious carping since we met in Brunei is getting wearisome.

Where Janail traveled on a single, not very large bag, tucked under his seat, the Pakistani’s baggage took up most of the forward third of the skiff, from just ahead of their legs to just behind the man at the machine gun at the bow. Mahmood’s assistant, Daoud al Helma, sat in the sodden bilges, just behind that.

First pointing his chin at the baggage, Janail then inclined his head toward his companion and asked, “And you’re
certain
that you can tell if the devices work with your instruments?” He spoke in English, their only common tongue.

“Yes,” Mahmood answered, eyes automatically trying to follow an unseen flying pest. “At least insofar as anyone can tell without actually detonating one. I can check the quality of the nuclear material, judge the serviceability of the conventional explosive, determine the quality and serviceability of the switches and detonators. All that.”

“You’re certain you can’t be fooled?”

Mahmood shook his head. “No, another scientist with the right backing could perhaps fool me with a counterfeit. And the man we’re going to see could easily buy that scientist and give him that backing. But you shouldn’t worry, even so.”

“Why not?”

“Because some things can’t be counterfeited and, given the raw materials, I can make a bomb, or two of them, no matter what the pirate ahead may think.”

Ahead loomed a massive yacht, well—even
ostentatiously—lit and very, very unconcerned with the infestation of pirates in the area. If the light had been natural and external, the yacht’s hull would have shown as blue. As was, it seemed a black to match the night.

Janail couldn’t make out the details, despite the lights, but he was reasonably certain that the yacht was so thoroughly armed, and its occupants so willing to open fire on the slightest provocation, that the yacht’s master considered pirates the least of his problems.

No more does the fully grown great white shark fear the hammerhead.

Yacht
Resurrection
, between the coast of Kudat

and the island of Pulau Banggi, South China Sea

Physically unprepossessing, balding, very rich, and with the paunch that usually went with that, Valentin Prokopchenko sipped an almost incredibly ancient Dalmore from a chilled glass. He considered vodka a drink for peasants.
And
I
am not a peasant.

Born into an hereditarily highly placed—one may as well say, “aristocratic”—Communist family, in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as a young man Prokopchenko had seen the writing on the walls. “Let others try to salvage this house of cards,” he’d said to himself, back then, as Soviet communism had begun to crumble. “I’m looking out for me and mine.”

And who could blame him? Even his parents—dedicated Communists, to be sure—hadn’t been so dedicated as not to watch out for the futures of their ever-so-precious children just a little more than they tried to ameliorate the plight of long-suffering mankind. Their wisdom in this was amply shown when son Valentin had, indeed, taken care of them, keeping them from the grinding poverty of the collapsing Soviet Union’s final and worst days.

At least we thought they were the worst,
Prokopchenko thought, then took another sip of his scotch.
We lacked imagination. The worst days are now, except for the days to come.

Where Boxer, back at Camp Fulton, in Guyana, kept a map on his wall which could have been labeled, “Advance of Barbarism across the Globe”—it was actually labeled, “Marketing”—Prokopchenko had a very large plasma screen. His organization, moreover, was larger and considerably better funded, than M Day, Inc., if not quite so well armed, conventionally. Minions fed the computer that fed the plasma screen with data ranging from trade routes and volume, through corruption indices, through influence of the intelligentsia, through drought, through the rise in certain communicable diseases, through mass migrations, through per capita wages, taxation, life expectancy, the price of food, through inflation levels and the skyrocketed price of precious metals . . . through . . .

Suffice to say, if there was a phenomenon or trait of intelligence importance, Prokopchenko’s screen showed it, both individually and in composite form. And in the composite?

We’re fucked.

Everything, every indicator, is for a near total collapse of civilization within twenty years. A couple of relatively strong city states might survive the fall. Singapore has a chance. Maybe Panama, which might as well be a city state already. Maybe a couple of dozen others will make it. But every form of organization above the level of a city or, at best, a not too large province, is crumbling under the weight of corruption, deindustrialization, demonetization, breakdown in law, and every man or woman for him or herself. And the only cities I expect to survive are the ones that break away from their larger states soon; those, and the few that have no larger state to suck them dry.

And, yes, I had my shortsighted part in all that, not that my contributions were decisive and not that it would have made any but the slightest difference if I’d been a model of communist propriety throughout the old empire’s collapse. I doubt if anything I did hastened the fall by five minutes. “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” after all. And our tide is going out.

If I didn’t expect the United States to break up I’d move my family there. But they’ve devolved into two big groups—and a whole bunch of little ones—that hate each other beyond words. Ripe for a breakup, that’s what Panarin said, and though I didn’t believe it then, I believe it now. So he was off by a few years? The essence of the thing he pegged perfectly. Beirut in the 1980s would have been safer than the United States in twenty years.

So why am I here, vending things that will surely hasten that fall and by rather more than five minutes?

Because in the days that are certainly coming, when no man can turn to or trust anyone but himself and his close blood relations, solid, material, universally recognized and accepted wealth will be all that will see one’s family through, all that will buy the private armed force to keep unruly strangers away. Well . . . those and a large spot of the Earth’s surface to call one’s very own.

I can’t save global civilization; no one can. So I have to do the next best thing and save some of it—a larger chunk than this boat—for me and mine.

“It’s not the biggest yacht in the world,” Janail said doubtfully as the skiff thumped against the
Resurrection
’s eighty meter hull.

Mahmood shook his head, visible now in the brighter light from the ship. “Most of Russia’s nouveau riche went for more ostentation, yes. Prokopchenko, though, is old aristocracy and privilege. He doesn’t need the display. He needs speed, security, a helipad, and a fair amount of computing power. This gives him that.”

“And you trust him?” Janail asked, not for the first time.

“Not even remotely.”

“You’re the one who put me in contact with him,” Janail accused.

Again Mahmood shook his head. “I trust me. I trust you. I trust him only to put his own interests first. Since we—you—have or will have something he badly wants, I trust that.”