Countdown: H Hour (31 page)

Instantly Graft was on his feet, racing for the now uncovered entrance. He didn’t bother finishing off the Moro who would now never get to take his piss. He did donate a bullet to the head of the other one. And then he was in the entrance, almost face to face with another stranger.

While there is life there is hope
, the doctor thought, in the near total darkness of the prisoner’s hut. The one candle added but little light, and that more concealing than illuminating.
But as life flows away, so does hope. My patient will not last until morning. I have failed.

It hurt, deep inside. Nearly weeping, the doctor thought,
I don’t even have a decent needle for intravenous.
Shaking his head with frustration and despair, the doctor wondered,
Allah, why did You give me any skill at all in the practice of medicine only to deny me the means of using what skill I have
?
I confess, I will have questions of You in the hereafter.

The doctor heard a couple of odd thumps and metallic sounds, then footfalls. He sensed a presence at the hut’s entrance. He turned to vent his anger at whichever one of the guards had interrupted—

Oh, shit,
the doctor thought, at seeing the very large, very plainly not Filipino man, in camouflage clothes and wearing some bizarre kind of mask over his face.
Not . . .

And that was the last thought the doctor ever had in this world.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

And when the thousand years are expired,

Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.

—Revelation 20:7, King James Version

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

The first thing Graft did, after downing the Moro standing over the small, reclined body of a man, was grab the candle and hold it up by the man’s face. The candle flickered, albeit not much, from the man’s shallow breath. So wan was the man that it took Graft a few moments to confirm in his own mind the message he sent the
Bland:
“I have the target. Alive. Not well.
Really
not well.”

Next, Graft went outside and grabbed the two dead guards by their collars, dragging them inside the hut before anyone stumbled over them. One of the corpses caught on something. When Graft went to inspect he saw it was a chain. Looking left he saw a rock. In the other direction the chain led to Ayala.
Shit
!

He followed the chain right to where he expected it, a locked shackle around the old man’s foot. The foot didn’t, itself, look gangrenous, which eliminated Graft’s first solution to the problem, severing the foot.
Double shit.

The chain?
I’ve got nothing that can get through that big old iron bastard, not without a week to saw at it. How then . . . aha!

Hmmm . . . that’s going to draw a lot of attention, though. Well . . . I sorta planned for drawing a lot of attention at some point in time.

Crouching low, Graft left the hut again and bent to retrieve the claymore that one dead Moro had upset, its clacker, and the clacker for the other, the other being left pointing at the guard shack across the trail. Keeping his pistol in one hand—
Note to self:
Change the motherfucking
magazine, ya dumb ass
—made the retrieval awkward. Graft dropped the claymore once on the way.

Once back inside, after changing the magazine, he put down his pistol and pulled a knife, using the point to pry the claymore apart. After scooping out the C-4 from inside, being careful to retain as much of its flat form as possible, he placed the redundant body, plastic and ball bearings, aside. Reflattening the explosive as best he could by hand, he molded it into a V and placed the open end of the V down on the chain. There were formulae for that, but Graft went with Factor P, for plenty.

A pound and a quarter of C-4 ought to be plenty.

The C-4 was about equidistant between the rock and the prisoner. That was based on a crude, rather a purely unconscious, calculation, to keep as much of the blast away from both himself and the prisoner, while having to take no more of the chain than he possibly could avoid.

Frantically, Graft unscrewed the plug that held the cap in place and placed it at the V’s very points.

Hmmm . . . need something to absorb the shock; the old man can’t take much more. For that matter, I’m no fan of keeping close company with large booms. Oh well, nothing to hand besides some fresh meat. They’ll do.

The doctor’s body—though Graft thought of it only as the body of the one he shot inside the hut—came first. Graft dragged it to the chain and bent it into a C, on one side of the explosive V. Next came one of the Moros, he wasn’t sure which one and didn’t much care, either. That one, with the doctor, formed an oval around the C-4. The last one went atop those two.

“Gentlemen,” Graft whispered into his mike, “I am starting the party in a few seconds. SITREP, please.”

“We’re coming up the ladders now,” said Warrington. “
Rachel
reconfirmed the guards weren’t replaced.”

“Idling off the landing point,” said Stocker. “We hit the beach three minutes after the order.”

“Aviation’s ready to go,” said the commo man on the bridge of the
Bland.

Okay,
thought Graft, as he bent his own body over Ayala’s to provide what protection he could.
And, Lord
?
For what we are about to receive.

With that, Graft cupped a hand over his one open ear, tucked the other against his shoulder, and squeezed the clacker.

Shaped charges, which was what Graft had formed from the C-4, are much misunderstood. They don’t, in the first place, really concentrate the explosion. In fact, the bulk of the blast goes outward. Conversely, a rather small percent of the total power is directed inward, at the focus of the cone. On the other hand, that relatively small percentage of the blast that is focused is
very
focused, enough so that the jet of hot gas and sometimes metal that it forms can get through a great deal of very tough stuff.

That’s what the V of C-4 did, albeit less efficiently than the shaped charge norm; it sent a jet of gasses, effectively a hot knife, against the metal of the chain, which might as well have been butter. The chain was cut.

However, there’s a price for everything. When the rest of the explosion hit the bodies Graft had placed around it . . .

Jesus,
Graft thought, pulling a length of smoking intestine from his shoulder.
Fuck that was ugly.

He wasn’t too badly stunned, and his hearing was still fairly good. He could thank the Moros for that.
But I won’t.

Graft pulled on the chain attached to Ayala’s leg. It moved lightly; the C-4 had done its job. Gathering the still fairly long segment of chain up, he placed it on the old man, then picked up and tossed the man over his shoulder. This was suboptimal but optimal required more time than he had.

Jesus, he doesn’t weigh anything, hardly.

Already there was shouting coming from the guard shack opposite. Looking around, Graft saw that the C-4 had tossed one of the Moros more or less bodily through the walls of the hut, at least, there was now a big hole there. Crouching with Ayala still on his shoulder he fought his way through the hole, breaking bamboo and branch, shredding leaves and grass.

Once outside, Graft cut left, to the other claymore’s clacker. He stooped down—
Oh, shit, my back
!—and grabbed it. One squeeze and there was another explosion, this one aimed and propelling its seven hundred-odd steel ball bearings fairly precisely at the guard shack. What happened there, Graft couldn’t see. He could hear, however, a
most
satisfying chorus of screams and shrieks well blended with a lovely bass section of frothy coughing from bloody, violated lungs.

Roughly thirty fragments and ball bearings per vertical square meter was enough to pretty much do a dam-dam on anything living, down range.

Well, that gives me a little time.

The hut nearest the claymore caught fire almost instantly, the flames leaping up the walls to the roof.

Graft tossed his head back, flicking the night vision goggles up and away from his face. Firelight would do better for the nonce.

“Ssseeemmmeeerrrllliiinnn!”

Maria, the small, young, and much abused slave girl, lay in a fetal position, eyes tightly clenched and sucking her thumb for a change, on the floor of the guard shack when the claymore went off. She didn’t know what had caused it, but she could see the results once the blast shocked her eyes open and set the grass above alight.

There is a God,
the girl thought, watching her rapists bleed out by the light of the burning roof.
There is a God, but I’d better get out of here.

She didn’t know how to use a rifle, but knives were pretty much universally understood, She took one from one of the bodies, then fled into the night in the direction she’d last seen her brother.

Once he heard the first boom, Semmerlin knew it was “weapons free.” He immediately jacked the bolt on his rifle, sighted on a likely man-shaped glow in the scope, and squeezed off a round. The stock jammed hard against his shoulder as the rifle coughed, lightly. There wasn’t a lot more sound than would have come from a .22 short.

From off in the distance came another loud explosion, followed quickly by flames rising to the sky.

Again he worked the bolt—
click-clack; click-clack
—launching a stubby brass casing up and to the right. Semmerlin sighted on a silhouette that seemed to be trying to pull on some trousers and squeezed. In both cases the big—forty-nine gram!—bullets moved slowly, at just over a thousand feet per second. But they passed through the light walls as easily as the thermal images had passed going in the opposite direction. And when they hit, they hit with about twenty-four
hundred
joules.

Both targets went down, dead maybe, but for sure at least dying. Not only did the heavy projectiles hit with massive force; being so wide they dumped virtually all their energy into the flesh in an instant.

Click-clack; click-clack.

Semmerlin swung the heavy rifle left, then right, searching for targets. Someone was standing in the open, facing away and waving a rifle. He seemed to be shouting. Some others ran toward that one.
Oh. A leader. Goody.

Cough. The presumed leader, struck from behind, bent forward at the middle as he threw both arms out. His rifle was sent flying. The others gathered and stood around for just a moment, staring down at the body. If their leader had been shot why hadn’t there been a sound of a shot? This was
not
fair.

Click-clack; click-clack.
Cough.

He heard, “Ssseeemmmeeerrrllliiinnn!”

No need to whisper now, really, Semmerlin answered, “Bugs, Mr. Rico. Zillions of ’em. I’m a burnin’ ’em down.”

Semmerlin swung right again. He saw Graft rounding a bend in the trail, feet a near blur. Looking more carefully, he thought,
Uh, oh.

Dipshit
, Graft thought, as his legs churned through the meters between himself and Semmerlin. Fast as he was running, he couldn’t simply run. His head swung left to right—fortunately, the old man on his shoulder was so thin he didn’t really interfere with the left view—looking for any threat to himself and his burden. Five times his pistol gave off its anemic cough, missing three times and hitting twice.

Since he ran into three armed Harrikat along his route, this was not quite enough.

In a mutual race to the death, Graft pulled his pistol down even as the Moro raised his rifle. Everything seemed to be in slow motion. The mercenary’s vision narrowed at the edges to nothing more than his—
too slow, God-dammit
—pistol and the little man who was determined to kill him.

Then the Moro’s chest just
exploded
in a shower of blood and meat. Arms twitched as his body twisted obscenely to the ground. Graft heard in his earpiece, “You owe me big time, sucker.”

“. . . sucker.”

Semmerlin laughed inside. It wasn’t every day you got one up on Graft. It was a fine feeling when you could.

He’d been counting his rounds carefully as he engaged. The magazine held seven rounds, of which he’d already fired six.

Bullets were flying now from both sides though. Graft probably needed suppression a little more than he needed a .510 caliber guardian angel. Semmerlin set the rifle aside and pulled the Pecheneg toward himself, settling his shoulder into the stock.

Yee haw
! The Pecheneg spoke with considerable authority—about a hundred times—as he sent a long burst first to Graft’s left, then to his right, to both cause the Harrikat to duck and discourage pursuit.
Brrrrrrrrppp. Brrrrrppp.

“That was a little fucking close, shitbird.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch.”
Brrrrrppp.
“Never happy.”
Brrrrrppp.
“You’d complain”—
Brrrrppp
.—“if they were gonna hang you”—
Brrrrppp
.—“with a golden rope.”
Brrrrrppp.

Graft streaked by Semmerlin’s firing position, unfriendly shots following closely.

“Keep going!” Semmerlin shouted. “I’ll hold ’em here long enough.”

Graft didn’t need the advice. Still holding the frail little man over his left shoulder he sped past his partner, straight up the trail on his way to the cliff and safety.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

All men dream, although not in the same way.

The ones who dream by night in the dusty shelters of

their minds, wake up the next day and discover that

it was just vanity; but the ones who dream by day are

dangerous men, because they can represent their

dreams with the eyes open to make them possible.

—T.E. Lawrence

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

There’s a time and place for stealth and then there’s a time and place for, “Get your fucking asses up the ladders!”

Warrington uttered those words roughly a millisecond after hearing the first explosion coming from the enemy camp, to his northeast. It wasn’t as if the men on the beach or scrambling up the rope ladders were slacking off, but they had been trying to be careful and quiet. There’d be no more of that; legs pumped and arms grappled as they pushed up, one man’s head often enough close enough to smell another’s ass, if he hadn’t wiped properly.

The two and a half teams under Warrington represented about a platoon in manpower, or a little less. In power, though, there was little comparison. They had fully five Pechenegs and two recoilless rifles, with almost all the ammunition for the latter being antipersonnel. Every man had his own radio, and everyone had some kind of night vision capability, scope or goggles. Moreover, all the scopes were thermals. Every man carried at least one claymore. Perhaps best of all, they were sufficiently strong and fit that they ported about twice a normal infantryman’s load in ammunition.

Feeney appeared at the edge of the cliff, recognizable by the outline of his ogre’s shape. At the top he stopped and bent a knee, reaching down to haul his normal partner, Hallinan, up and over. At the other ladder Cagle, bowed under a positively
huge
aid bag, stopped about waist high at the lip, then swung a leg over. The next leg followed right enough, leaving Cagle fully prone almost at the cliff’s edge. Then the medico pushed himself and his load up from prone to hands and knees, then stood up fully.

“Cagle, find a low spot.”

“Roger.” The medic trundled off. About fifteen meters from the cliff’s edge he found something, terrain-wise, that would do, a shallow depression sheltered by a rock outcropping and with trees to either side. Dumping his bag to the ground, he took a couple of red chemlights from his load-bearing vest, bent them, shook them, and pinned them low, near the roots of the neighboring trees.

Shadows formed into small groups, then the groups ran past Cagle’s aid station toward the camp. They didn’t go very far toward it, just enough to provide some standoff distance between the enemy they expected and the cliff. There was a minimum of shouting, though clearly they were being pushed, prodded, and folded into something resembling a cohesive perimeter. As soon as they were set, some of the men took over security, other broke out their “wretched little shovels” and began scraping out rough fighting positions, while still others began to set their claymores out, generally fifty feet to the front.

MV
Richard Bland
, Sulu Sea

The MI-28 gunships had already gone; a night vision scope pointed toward the island would have seen them, almost skimming the waves, about halfway between it and the ship. Following along with a pair of roaring
whooshes
, one after the other, the CH-750s sped down the Marsden Matting, lifting off long before they came even near the end of the strip. They sank under their loads, pulling up just before touching the sea. Both gained altitude, just enough, then veered toward the island.

Welch’s eyes followed the light planes down the runway. Once they lifted, and got out from the mild glow of the chemlights placed along the runway, he lost them.

Terry became aware of a tiny shape standing next to him, likewise staring forward, though not necessarily comprehending what she saw. He didn’t look. He didn’t need to. Only one person aboard ship had that size, or that peculiarly aristocratic presence.

“Yes, Madame?” Terry asked Paloma Ayala, without looking away from the view presented through the bridge’s forward windows.

“This will work, Major Welch?”

Madame was dressed as she always dressed, tastefully, richly . . . well. She wore pearls, remarkably large, perfect and—so Welch suspected—not at all cultured, as befitted her age and station. Her hand stroked a gold crucifix at her neck, as if seeking comfort from her God. She sounded quite calm, and so Welch would have taken her, had she not asked the same question roughly once every waking half hour since boarding the
Bland.

Terry consulted his watch.
Yep, right on time.

“I know,” the woman said. “I
know
.” Terrified for the fate of her husband, she allowed fear to creep into her voice. “But . . . but . . . my husband is my
soul mate
. I couldn’t find another even if I were still young and beautiful. I
must
have him back.”

Thinking of his own wife, Ayanna, back in Guyana and, so it had been reported to him, safe and home again following the war with Venezuela, Welch said, “Madame, I assure you, you are still beautiful.”
And I understand about soul mates.

“There are no guarantees in this sort of thing, Madame,” Welch said, as he had said to her so many times before. “Anyone who says otherwise is a fool. Or a liar. Or both. But if I didn’t think we had a good, even an excellent, chance of success, I wouldn’t have come this far.

“For what it’s worth, though there’s a lot still to do, and the risks are still large, we have your husband away from the Harrikat.”

Though at an intellectual level Paloma knew that that meant a lot less than she’d like it to, at a purely emotional level it was the next thing to Heaven. Tension drained from her shoulders at the news. She slumped and began, softly, to cry. “Thank you. No matter what . . . thank you.”

Glad you’re appreciative,
Welch thought,
because I’m going to be asking for a very large favor here, very soon.

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

The very first explosion had awakened Janail with a start. His first thought had been,
Oh, crap, one of the idiots dropped a match in the ammo dump. I’ll have his balls—

That thought cut off as he heard the next explosion, bare seconds later.
No . . . no, those were about the same power. That wouldn’t happen at the ammo dump. Oh, shit.

The slave girl at his side whimpered. He paid her no mind.

He raced half naked and shoeless, stopping only to grab a rifle, before emerging into the dirt road in front of his hut. Already flames were arching to the sky from a burning hut to the south. He guided himself like a homing pigeon toward those flames.

He heard the moans of the dying in what remained of the guard shack.
They don’t matter
, he thought, turning away from that and toward Ayala’s hut. The left side of his face nearly burned from the heat from the burning hut nearby. Already, the material of Ayala’s hut was beginning to smoke.

The explosive blast inside had extinguished the candle. No matter, there was enough light leaking from outside through the entrance and the newer hole for him to see that not only was Ayala gone, but the entire area was littered with pieces of bodies.

“My prisoner,” he murmured, “my money.” Then he shouted, “My weapons!” With shoulders slumping he thought,
My sultanate.

Whatever his others flaws and deficits, Janail didn’t lack for either decisiveness or determination. Stepping back outside, he called for his datus, his officers. A tracer from somewhere to the south zipped by. Janail paid it no mind.

Small knots of the slave girls and their brats streamed by, heading to presumed safety in the north. As four of Janail’s six datus gathered around him—
Who knows where the other two are
?—he set his mind and heart on winning.
They can’t be off the island yet. If they were, there’d not be any firing. No, I have to assume Ayala is still here, somewhere. Where
?
Probably in the direction that firing is coming from. Sure, why not
?
They got ashore unseen. That means the cliff.

“Camana, Ampuan,” he addressed two of the datus. “Assemble your companies and drive to the cliff. Camana, you’re in charge.”

“Salic,” Janail addressed the datu of his weapons company, “support them.”

“Yes, Janail,” answered the scar faced, older datu, in the turban.

“Be sure to spread them out. I haven’t seen or heard any, but they may have aircraft in support. Now, all of you; go!”

With acknowledging head nods, those three sped off to gather their men, followed by their own radio telephone operators, or RTO’s.

Janail didn’t really care overmuch about the datu who served, in effect, as his number two. The missing company commander, though; he was important. Janail shouted out, “Molok?”

“Here, Janail,” came the answer from the shadows. Datu Molok had been more sensible than most, taking up a covered position before a bullet found him.

“Get your men into their positions along the western beach. I don’t know if there’ll be more coming by sea, but I don’t want it to surprise me, either.”

“Ampatuan, your company is with me. Bring them here, but do not cluster them. Get me a radio and someone to carry it.”

Something to the east and moderately high in the air fired, rockets and machine guns both. Further flames began rising from the direction of the piers.

Fuck
, thought Janail,
they’re going after the boats, too.

Semmerlin fired a short burst at a head that poked around the mosque. The head was a little too quick for him; he missed. Where the Moro had gone, he couldn’t be sure, though a fair bet was that he’d taken to ground and was crawling forward.

That wasn’t the first miss he’d had, either. Not long after Graft had passed on his way to the cliff, the first Moros had begun showing up in something like an organized fashion. He’d dropped two, he thought, and those only because of surprise. Since then? No luck. If they showed themselves it wasn’t for more than an instant.

Problem is, these little fucks are actually pretty good. If they’d just rush me I could drop a shit pot with the daisy chains. As is, there aren’t enough to justify it.

I think maybe it’s time for Mrs. Semmerlin’s little boy to unass the AO.

And, since I’m not going to get a lot of use out of the daisy chains, I may as well expend them to drive the little shits’ heads down. It’ll give me some smoke to cover my withdrawal, too, which, given the light from the fires, I’m probably going to need.

As if to punctuate that last thought, a burst of fire from somewhere off to his left chipped bark just a few inches over Semmerlin’s head.

Thinking,
Oh, Mommy, I’m a comin’ home
, he reached for the clackers.

Datu Salic had three platoons in his company, one of mortars, one of heavy machine guns, and the other of recoilless rifles. The mortars could pretty much see to themselves. At least, they could once they got the ammunition from the dump and established radio contact with Camana. The heavy machine guns were way too heavy to move easily, and impossible with a useful load of ammunition. They were mounted on high tripods for antiaircraft work, with at least a fighting load of linked .50 caliber or 14.5mm, depending on the type of gun, piled behind them. They were Salic’s least favored platoon, not because there was anything wrong with the men but because he was fairly sure that if the Philippine Armed Forces decided to evict them from their little island the eviction notice would come in the form of some bomb-carrying aircraft he couldn’t hope to touch with mere machine guns.

The recoilless rifles didn’t need a lot of ammunition, being direct fire weapons. What they did need the crews were able to retrieve from the dump in passing.

Salic only had four of them, and those four were all U.S. designed, Chinese-built, M18, 57mm jobs. They were all pretty old, having seen service with the People’s Liberation Army and the Moro Liberation Front, before finally being stolen from the latter by the Harrikat. Ammunition was fairly plentiful, if rather old and therefore a little iffy. It had a nice little high explosive warhead and a useful white phosphorus rounds, though the anti-tank warhead had never been worth much. Salic had only kept a couple of dozen of the latter, expending the rest for training purposes. He’d been just paranoid enough to have each crew load up with two of the AT rounds.

The crews, six or seven men per gun, were in a widely spaced column, trotting behind Salic, far enough from the steadily firing machine gun that he felt comfortable having them trot upright rather than crawl.

Two sets of explosions, so close together as to be almost indistinguishable, off to Salic’s left front, had him and all his men diving for cover in a flash. Mere fractions of a second after that, explosions seemed to erupt all around, though none were precisely on target.

“What the fuck was that, Datu?” asked the recoilless platoon leader.

“I don’t know,” Salic answered. “But whatever it was I didn’t hear so much as a pebble reach us from the first blasts. Check that your men are all healthy and then get them back on their feet and into the trees.”

Because I think we’ve got company up above and I wish I hadn’t left all the heavy machine guns behind.

With one hand gripping his rifle around the stock and the other curled around the carrying handle of his Pecheneg, bent over at the waist so low that the firearms sometimes slapped the ground, Semmerlin sprinted back toward the cliff, staying just off the trail. He’d been on the right side, previously, so he looked for a place on the left side from which he could delay the Harrikats’ advance. As the wise old sergeant had said,
Randomization is your friend.
He was definitely in doggie mode—which is to say, “any tree will do” mode.

He settled on something he found about two hundred meters back from his previous position. This was a large tree with the advantage of having a solid looking boulder between it and the trail. It was actually the boulder that had first attracted his attention. Between the two was a nice little gap, maybe eighteen inches across. The machine gun he reloaded and set aside, though he left it close enough to grab at need. The suppressed .510 caliber he also reloaded, with a seven-round magazine, and then settled himself and the rifle into a firing position from which he could cover the trail junction.