Countdown: H Hour (32 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced and the inconvenience is often considerable.

—Jane Austen

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

“They were
there
,” fumed Slepnyov to his gunner. The man’s actual title was “Weapons and Navigation Officer,” but “gunner” would do.

“I mean right
there
! Maybe thirty men carrying four or five, maybe even six heavy weapons. In the fucking open. Meat. Just meat. And then some fucking
asshole
on the ground had to set off some explosions and they all ducked. Why? Why, why,
why
did he have to do it while my finger was pressing the firing button? Why? A whole
pod
of rockets! Wasted. Why? Is there no
God
?”

“Slepnyov,” answered the gunner wearily. “You—oh, deny it if you like, but I know better—are still, at heart, a communist. You
already
didn’t believe in God.”

“And there’s my fucking proof!” the pilot snarled.

“Where’d they go by the way?” the gunner asked.

“Scattered and somewhere in the trees. We don’t have any really superb weapons for people inside forests, you know. And there’s
more
proof, as if I needed any.”

Providing proof of friendly intent and disposition was always a tad problematic for those who just had to run towards groups of nervous, essentially trigger-happy, friends. For this there was something called the “running password.” No, no, it didn’t pass from mouth to mouth. Nor did it resemble a running joke. It was something the soldier shouted for all he was worth when running for his life from the enemy.

The running password had a couple of criteria associated with it. It had to be easy to remember, even when scared out of one’s wits. It was good for it to be more or less unpronounceable by one’s enemy-du-jour, words with “W,” for example, if fighting Germans or Slavs; “L’s” and “R’s” were good for most Asians, “V” wasn’t bad for Latins.

It was also supposed to be followed by a number, for the number of people attempting to pass lines. This could, in some circumstances, be a problem.

“Schickelgruber Twwwooo! Schickelgruber Twwwooo!” Graft screamed, as he passed between Feeney and Hallinan. He’d been shouting the same thing for about three hundred meters.

That one would have worked, even with a German, since the German would have pronounced it
too
correctly. The problem was in the “two.”

“Hallinan,” Feeney said dramatically, “I only saw one man pass by; Graft, I think it was. That means somebody’s still out there . . . gotta be Semmerlin. One of our own is out there, Hallinan. I gotta go get him.”

Hallinan himself wasn’t sure. Unlike Feeney, he’d noticed the burden on Graft’s back. Maybe that was the “two.” But, on the other hand, there had been a two man team, so maybe “two” was Semmerlin, maybe shot and bleeding in their flight. Graft would have wanted to go back for him, if so, but Graft, Hallinan knew, was a real pro. He wouldn’t have risked the mission for a single man, except when, as now, a single man
was
the mission.
Sooo . . . I dunno.

“I gotta go get him, Hallinan. He’s one of
ours
.” As fiercely as Feeney despised those who were not “ours,” his devotion to those who were was just as strong or stronger.

“I’ll go with you.” Keying his mike, Hallinan reported to his team leader, “Semmerlin’s out there on his own. Feeney and I are going for him.”

The team leader, not having any better information, passed that on to Warrington who said, “Roger.”

The suppressed big bore rifle, Semmerlin discovered, was not entirely suitable for occasions when the enemy wasn’t just standing there. Oh, sure, the forty-nine gram bullet was vicious if it hit, but, being subsonic, it took a whole second, more or less, for the bullet to travel to the target at three hundred meters. Since displacing back, he’d only gotten two of the Harrikat who’d gotten a little bold, themselves.

Now? Now they were crawling below his ability to see, or making short rushes that made it almost impossible to lead them properly. And a few were spraying the trees around him, or bouncing bullets off his rock—
pretty sure that’s just random; doubt they know exactly where I am
—none of which was doing a thing for his marksmanship.

And they
were
getting closer.

No, they don’t know exactly where I am. But they’ve got at least a general idea. Time to go
?
I think maybe so.

A long burst, maybe twelve rounds, from a machine gun somewhere to his front, hammering a tree just behind him, convinced Semmerlin that getting up and running was not the best of all possible ideas.

But, crap, those little bastards
are
getting close. Maybe not grenade range . . . yet. But close. Maybe a hundred twenty-five, hundred and fifty meters. Hmmm . . . dumb-ass, you should have set up a claymore on a trip wire when you first got here.

Oh, well. No use crying about it.

Semmerlin began wriggling back, snakelike, away from the little gap between tree and rock. Once back he rolled to one side and slung the rifle across his back. Then taking the machine gun to cradle in his arms, still like a snake, he began crawling up the slope that led to the cliff.

The shore by the piers was only about two minutes away, as the LCM’s bow arose and fell in the heightening waves close by the island. In his goggles Kirkpatrick saw one of the gunships lashing a tree line with its 30mm chin gun. The other rode shotgun on the landing craft, maybe two hundred meters behind the boat and a like distance to its right. By the piers, themselves, two small and one larger boat burned merrily. Whether that was from rockets, tracers, or some combination of the two, coupled with leaking fuel from gas tanks, the coxswain didn’t know.

By the bow, Kirkpatrick saw the grunt commander, Stocker, peering out at the shore over the left corner of the ramp. There were no grunts directly behind him; they were leaving a little space for safety for the Elands, both of which were already almost completely unlashed and almost ready to be unleashed onto the shore.

Suddenly, the night was lit from behind as the MI-28 lashed out with half a pod of rockets. Kirkpatrick’s goggles flared, went dark, then gradually came back from the effect of the explosive flashes erupting ashore. The gunship’s chin gun kicked in. Smaller explosions, not quite enough to overload the light amplification tube in the goggles, lit up the shore.

Kirkpatrick hoped the supporting fire would be enough to kill or drive off anyone on the other side who might be waiting. He knew, however, that hope wasn’t a plan, and that, historically, that never happened even if you were using sixteen-inch naval guns in support. Some of them
always
lived.

If they’re there. Hmmm . . . the helicopter wouldn’t have fired if they weren’t, I suppose. After all, he can see. I hope the grunt commander can figure that out.

Still keeping his hands on the controls, Kirkpatrick lowered himself into the lightly armored wheelhouse. At a quarter of an inch of steel, the armor wasn’t much. It was still better than nothing.

“Where’s the aid station?” Graft called. “Where’s the fucking aid station?”

“Over here, Graft,” Cagle shouted back. “Follow the red chemlights.”

Still with his small burden over his shoulder, Graft hurried over, dodging trees along the way. Cagle helped the sergeant ease Ayala from his shoulder, then lay him out on the ground. By the dull red of the lightsticks, Graft saw that Cagle had already scraped out a shallow trench for Ayala. He’d also hung several IV’s from the nearby tree and rolled out his instruments. Cagle started an immediate search, mostly by touch, for any wounds.

“You done good,” the medic said. “He hasn’t been shot.”

“I didn’t check his vitals,” Graft said, as Cagle began doing just that. The sergeant sounded apologetic, adding, “There just wasn’t time.”

“Not a problem,” the medico answered. “Shit, his blood pressure’s down to about the level of a corpse. Gonna be a bitch getting a needle in his veins in that condition . . .” Cagle grabbed another light and began searching Ayala’s arm for some place he’d have a half decent chance of getting a needle stuck in. Tsk-tsking at the poor prospects, Cagle muttered, “Well . . . it’s shit, but it’ll have to do . . . goddamit, I missed.”

“Train to standard, not to time,” Graft said. “Stick the son of a bitch again.”

“You’ve been listening to Riley’s and Coffee’s stories,” Cagle accused.

“It’s not a crime.”

Paying no further mind to Graft, Cagle made another attempt. The needle went into the skin easily, then the medico began to search with it, going by highly experienced feel for the vein. “Annnddd . . . there it is.”

“You’re good,” Graft said admiringly.

“The best,” the medico responded cheerily. “Well, except maybe for TIC Chick. And she’s not so hot out with the snakes, bugs, and dark.”

“Hey,” Cagle said, “the radio’s right there, patched in straight to TIC Chick. Get on it. As I give you symptoms and injuries relay them to my wife so she can get everything ready.”

“Yeah, sure, fine,” Graft replied. “But hurry it up, will ya, Doc. One of my men’s still out there and I’d really like to get him back.”

They’d been caught moving to the bunkers that covered the beach, but not quite at those bunkers, when the enemy struck. The delay, and getting caught, wasn’t really anyone’s fault, except maybe their enemies’, but between the night, the surprise, the fear . . . it all took up time.

Molok felt his company—in Harrikat terms, that meant maybe sixty men—almost disintegrate around him. One moment they were moving forward with a purpose; the next they were just a bunch of frightened individuals, with no purpose higher than not getting perforated. First came the rockets—fifteen or twenty of them; he wasn’t quite sure—some spilling out cargoes of flechettes, others impacting the ground and trees. The explosions were to be expected, but the sound of the flechettes was absolutely chilling, almost like a swarm of intelligent killer bees. He’d never faced flechettes before, hadn’t even known they existed. But the killer bee sound, coupled with the two men in front of him who, by the light of the burning boats down at the shore, began spouting blood like a matched pair of obscene fountains, were enough to let him know that whatever they were, they were something particularly evil.

Those two died quietly, surprised, shocked, and bled out before pain could really register. Others didn’t. After the passage of the killer bees, even after his ears had been assaulted by the rockets that struck the ground, Molok could hear screams coming from as many as half a dozen throats.

“Run for the bunkers!” he screamed to his men, getting up and sprinting himself. “It’s your only chance!”

After the rockets, something a good distance out to sea began firing what had to be the mother of all machine guns. Molok couldn’t really make out any details, by the thin moon and the flashing strobe light underneath, but as he ran he thought he saw a helicopter gunship. That was bad news. That meant he wasn’t facing some rival Moro group, but probably Philippine regular forces. Maybe even Kanos.

With that dreary prospect in the back of his mind, he reached the command bunker overlooking the shore and dove in. The bunker was dark as an infidel’s soul; Molok had to find the field telephone by touch. Once he did, he pulled it from its case and, holding it to one ear, stood to look out through the central of the bunker’s three broad and narrow vision ports.

He felt another man crawling into the bunker behind him. “Who is it?” Molok asked, drawing his knife. The bunker was too close quarters for the rifle.

“Just me, Datu,” said his RTO. The man sounded infinitely weary. “Sorry it took so long to get here. Something hit me in the thigh. Twice. A little pinhole on one side . . . on the other, a slice. It was gushing like a woman in season. I don’t know what it was, but if I hadn’t stopped to bandage it I’m not sure I’d have made it here at all.

“I brought the radio.”

“I will call a medic,” Molok said.

“No point, Datu. He was turned into a colander. I will live or not as Allah sees fit.”

The radios carried by the individuals of A Company were very short range, no more than a quarter of a mile, ordinarily. Leaders had longer ranged sets, of course. Despite this, Feeney kept repeating into his set, “Don’t worry, Semmerlin, we’re coming for you.” That Semmerlin didn’t answer, especially since both Feeney and Hallinan presumed he’d been right on Graft’s tail, was
most
worrying.

“We oughta go back,” Hallinan said. “We’re never going to find him this way.”

“No,” Feeney insisted. “You never leave your brother.”

Again into the mike, Feeney whispered, “Semmerlin, don’t worry; we’re coming for you.”

Both were almost surprised when Semmerlin’s voice came back, fainter than a baby’s breath, “Hold your position; I’ll come to you. But you gotta be a little patient.”

CHAPTER FORTY

Success is not final, failure is not fatal:

it is the courage to continue that counts.

—Winston Churchill

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

How the hell did I get in this position
?

“This position” was, for Semmerlin, basically in a small depression, with a tree on each side, his rifle unloaded, and about a dozen Harrikat on all sides. How he’d gotten into such a unenviable position he wasn’t quite sure, but thought it might have something to do with,
Give the little fuckers credit; they can
move
when they want to.

What had actually happened was that he’d set off the two daisy chains, hitting nothing, screwing up Slepnyov’s targeting, which had driven the Harrikats’ recoilless rifle platoon to first duck, then run like hell for the tree line and past it, humping their guns with them. One minute he’d been crawling to the southwest, basically alone; the next they’d been
everywhere.

I can see at least a dozen of them, and that’s just in front of me. I’d guess from the sound that there are at least that many behind me, maybe more. That one fucker haranguing them sounds like he’s addressing a good sized audience. And I’ve got no loaded rifle, my machine gun is kinda on the noisy side, and my pistol has only seven rounds in the mag and one in the chamber.

I am
so
fucked.

He remembered a couple of other items still draped to his body then, and, reconsidering, thought,
Or maybe not.

Then
very
slowly,
very
quietly, and ever so carefully, Semmerlin’s fingers began pulling out first one, then the other, of the two claymores remaining to him.

Each was already primed for tripwire operation.
Ah, but that won’t do. No way I can quietly get them fixed to something, solidly enough to use the tripwires to detonate them. Nope, it’s gotta be electric.

And this is
really
going to sting.

After taking out the claymores, he pulled out the clackers and the caps, with their already attached wire. These he set down and concentrated on one claymore at a time. It took a little extra time but, not wanting to risk inadvertently setting off the trip wires—
Murphy rules
!—he unscrewed that adapter and set it carefully to one side. The plastic shipping plug came out next. He slid the wire through the slit in the plug and pulled it through to seat the cap right up against it. The cap then went into the claymore. A few twists to the plug and it and the cap were well enough seated. Then his fingers followed the wire to the spool, feeling for the connector. This he attached to the clacker. It wasn’t exactly proper procedure, but proper procedure really didn’t cover these particular circumstances.

The whole assembly, minus the clacker which stayed close to him, went to the other side of the tree in front of him.

Fortunately there’s no range safety officer nearby to bitch about it.

Okay, now let’s get the other one.

One of the boats by the pier suddenly blew up with a major burst of flame. The little one near it promptly sank, extinguishing its own fire. The remaining boat, the largest, continued to burn, lighting up both the beach and a low ridge lined with rather well-camouflaged bunkers.

Heavy machine gun fire from the LCM’s two .50 calibers thumped overhead, thrashing at what was beginning to appear as a line of winking bunkers, facing the beach. They didn’t seem to be doing all that much good, since the fire coming in—causing the sand to jump and the water to spout—wasn’t lessening any. The detachment had known that defense line was there, courtesy of the late Kulat and Iqbal, but really hadn’t expected the Harrikat to be able to man it quite so quickly.

One bunker in particular, off to the right edge of the beach, was being a serious pain in the ass.

“On the right! On the right!” Stocker shouted into his radio, speaking to the Eland section chief. “Get the fucking bunker on the right!”

Machine gun fire from that bunker rattled off the Eland’s just-barely-adequate armor. It also swept the area in front of the landing craft, with occasional rounds pinging off the steel ramp and whining off into the air menacingly. Only Stocker and a single squad had managed to get off the boat—and that only because they took a not inconsiderable risk in following the Elands ashore—before the machine gun had made it impossible for anyone else to debark. At that, one body from that squad, perforated and ruined, bobbed in the waves to the left of the ramp.

Someday I’ll probably convince myself that I was just excited
, thought the Canadian.
But the truth is, right now I’m so scared I can’t spit.

Balbahadur was doing his bit from inside the well deck, the pipes encouraging the men to risk the fire and storm over the ramp. But they were only human. Nobody would move.

Can’t say as I blame them
, the Canuck captain thought.
Wouldn’t do it myself if I hadn’t had the armored car to follow for cover.

“Meh sees him,” answered the Eland section chief. “But only if I stands up in de turret. Wish is bad fo’ meh health. I ain’t got no good shot. Number two?”

“Meh on it,” replied the other car commander. His turret traversed slowly under the power of a hand operated crank. The gun depressed a few inches, then raised almost too little to notice. When it spoke, a great flash of almost solid-seeming flame leapt forward from the muzzle. The entire car rocked back with the recoil. Downrange, a tiny fraction of a second later, a bunker was first lit up like Christmas, then wrapped in a dark cloud, before more flames burst out from the firing port.

“Meh loves me some HEAT, meh does,” exulted the commander of Number Two.

Number One answered, “Yeah, but de HEAT no seem to work on all of dem. I hits meh one? It shoot right back, like twas nothin’.”

Turning back to the open bow, maybe fifty feet behind him, Stocker did a rush, followed by a fall, a roll, and another rush, to get behind the left side gunwale of the boat.

Sticking his head around the corner—risking that head, in fact—he shouted into the well deck, “Get the fuck off this boat!” Nobody moved; all Stocker could see, and that not well, were the whites of eyes, as if saying, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Balbahadur?”

“Sir?” answered the Gurkha piper, temporarily abandoning his pipes.

“ ‘Blue Bonnets Over the Border’ and use your boots if you have to, to move these people out!”

“Sir!”

“You heard the captain, you cunts!” the Gurkha shouted over the roar of battle. “Get off this boat.”

Then, in fine Gurkha style, to show the way, Balbahadur resumed his playing, and marched—almost as if on parade—to the ramp. There he stopped, as calmly as might be imagined, marching back and forth across the ramp, port to starboard.

Bullets were still coming in—precisely from whence nobody could say—kicking up spouts of water and pinging off the steel of the hull. Balbahadur, true to his ancestors, paid them no mind whatsoever.

Khan, like the rest, sheltering in the questionable cover of the gunwale, stood up and shouted, “Come on, you pussies! If the sergeant can just stand there in the open, we can at least
move
.” With that, the Afghan began running forward, slapping people’s backs as he went, to spur them on. The two platoons, minus, of C Company, after an understandable moment’s hesitation, began to flow across the ramp, around the piper, and onto the shore.

Behind them, Kirkpatrick raised the ramp and reversed engines, turning his wheel left and right to wiggle his boat off the shore. His machine gunners still kept up a steady fire—
For all the good it seems to be doing
, thought the coxswain—as he backed.

Commendations
, Stocker thought, as his platoons spread out around him.
The writing of, eloquently, earliest convenience.

Then he breathed a sigh of relief that what had been starting to look like a disaster was unfolding as something rather better than that. His RTO, who had been left behind on the LCM, now flopped to the prone next to the captain.

“Get me the gunships,” Stocker ordered.

“Yessir, right away, sir. Sorry for being late, sir.”

With impatience tempered by the knowledge that, after all, his men were only human, Stocker said, “Just do it.”

“Yessir.”

Stocker put his head up before it was driven down again by a low flying burst. Looking behind he saw that his men, the two platoons of them that were with him, were out of the boat and on the beach. That was the most he could say, though. Even the destruction of that bunker off to the right hadn’t appreciably reduced the amount of incoming fire.

Crap. Not getting anywhere.

The RTO handed him the microphone, announcing, “The gunships, sir.”

Stocker took two deep breaths to force some calm into his voice. This wasn’t, he found, the easiest thing to do with bullets cracking overhead and hitting the sand to his front. He took a couple more, just to be sure.

Slepnyov and his wingman had pretty specific rules of engagement. It was at least
suspected
that the cantonment area on the island housed some substantial numbers of women, and quite possibly children, and that a fair number of those were probably slaves, Christian Filipinos and Filipinas, that the local government wouldn’t be overjoyed to see slaughtered. Yes, of course the Ayala family had the pull to kill any official investigations. But, once her objective was met, Welch had had serious doubts that Mrs. Ayala’s power, attitude, and interest would go all that far.

“We’re just minions to her,” Welch had briefed his subordinates, in a briefing from which Paloma had been tactfully excluded. “And, even if we were more, we’ve still got to live with ourselves. We do what’s necessary, but gratuitous carnage is not in our SOP.”

As far as it went, Slepnyov was happy with that restriction. After all, he hadn’t taken any fire from the camp. Neither had his wingman. And the RPV hadn’t noticed any antiaircraft weapons.

Though, of course,
thought the Russian,
it might not. They’re not necessarily all that big.

The radio gave off a couple of the odd beeps that indicated a secure transmission. “Slep? Stocker.”

“Slepnyov, Captain.”

“I’m held up here, Slep, and falling behind schedule. Let me tell you what I’ve got.”

“Go, Captain.”

“My company,” he said, “two platoons of it, plus the armored car section, are pinned down on the beach south of the piers. There’s a line of bunkers to our west. The bunkers are pretty intelligently placed. We can see a few; others we can’t, though, even with the Elands’ thermals. They’ve got to be strongly built; I’ve
seen
the Elands’ main guns hit a couple that just shrugged the hits off. I need something bigger. And I need it to hit them from either the north or south; the bunkers don’t seem as strong except to the side facing us.”

“I gots something for that, Captain. Can you say ‘thermobaric’? Wait a minute.”

Slepnyov, switched languages, sending a message in Russian to his wing man. Stocker picked up the message, without understanding a word of it. He didn’t really need to, in detail. Both helicopters pulled pitch, noses rising as they changed direction. Then they headed out to sea, formed in echelon, and returned to take up a position somewhat shy of the camp area. A flash started at one of them, then streaked across the sky. To Slepnyov’s south, to Stocker’s west and front, where the flaming streak met the ground there was suddenly a massive blast.

Slepnyov grunted with satisfaction. The satisfaction even grew a bit, as two tiny men staggered out of the bunker he’d targeted, one clutching his throat, the other tearing at his own eyes. The chin gun up front whined, then chattered. Both men, one after the other, began to do the Spandau Ballet as the ground erupted around them. They fell in ruined heaps of mangled flesh.

The second gunship likewise fired, its guided missile also touching the ground with cosmic thunder and a massive cloud.

“See?” said Slepnyov’s gunner. “I
told
you there was a God.”

“Yeah? Fuck off,” answered the pilot, as he used his helmet’s heads-up display to set another target for the gunner.

“Good choice,” said the gunner, once the target was clear. He armed another F Model Ataka missile to deal with that bunker. “And hold her steady for a few seconds.”

“Sure, but after this shot we have to move.”

“Roger. Missile away.”

Just off to the northwest edge of the camp, the Harrikats’ heavy machine gun platoon leader, which is to say also the antiaircraft platoon leader, had no illusions about the capabilities and limitations of his guns. He’d been tempted to take a swing at the little buzzing aircraft that had made a couple of passes to the southwest, then really concentrated on lashing the mortars into the next world, but,
No . . . they’re at extreme range, in the first place, and I can only see them when they fire, in the second place. Waste of ammunition, and sure to get us smashed flat to no good purpose. Like those helicopters up there. I can hear them. But see them well enough to engage? Not a chance.

Something flashed above the platoon leader, and about four hundred meters to his east. Another flash and streak formed right after. From the platoon leader’s perspective that second shot—if he had doubted it was a shot the amazingly robust explosion at the end of it would have removed those doubts—came from a bit farther away and somewhat to the north. There was a third shot. Then the sound of the helicopters changed slightly. They were moving.

Oh, please, merciful Lord, let them come closer. Let them come close enough that the flames from the huts let me and my men see them. Please? I’ll free a couple of slaves if You do.

Like other fighting men, the Russians had many, many admirable qualities. Also like others, by no means excepting Americans, they had their flaws. Among these was a tendency to follow orders very literally. This had its place, of course. It also had places where it didn’t belong.