Countdown: H Hour (41 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY

For the low, red glare to southward

when the raided coast-towns burn?

(Light ye shall have on that lesson,

but little time to learn.)

—Rudyard Kipling, “The Islanders”

Navotas, Republic of the Philippines

There was a long, long trail of dead men with tattooed faces all along Marcos Highway and Lapu-Lapu Avenue. The Gurkhas didn’t actually keep count; they just weren’t that kind of people.

The route was right at a mile, a twenty-minute walk. Taking a bit of care about it, though, had driven the time up to over an hour. Setting up, again with considerable care, had taken the better part of another hour and a few more tattooed faces rapidly turning pale.

Finally, everything was ready. Overhead the RPV circled, silent and, if not itself deadly, conveying information that would turn into sheer deadliness in just a minute or two. The two sniper teams from A Company were stationed in a multi-story parking garage just east of the Marcos-Lapu-Lapu intersection. A Company’s antielectricity team—“Team Juice”—was just off Circumferential Road three and the Binuangan River, ready to cut service.

Stocker’s First Platoon was tucked in against some warehouses, southwest of Marcos. Second had moved up almost to North Bay and Lapu-Lapu. Third and Weapons, the latter having left their mortars and reconfigured as infantry, were stretched out in little knots along Lapu-Lapu, between Bangus and North Bay. The two Elands, freshly, even ostentatiously, painted in Philippine Army colors, idled for the nonce to the northeast side of Marcos. Farther out, three of the “Arms Distribution Teams”—at the bridges by the Navotas bus terminal, at Lapu-Lapu, and at Circumferential three—waited, guarding the presents.

This is going to be so much
fun. Stocker inwardly giggled. He had a loudspeaker borrowed from the
Bland
clutched in one hand. He wanted TCS to know, there at the very end, why they were being destroyed.

“Team Juice?”

“Juice,” reported the antielectricity team.

“Cut power.”

There were more or less subtle ways to take down an electric transfer station. Juice wasn’t big on subtlety. They’d just wired the thing “for sound.”

Boom
. The explosion was, no doubt, loud. It still wasn’t really all that much louder than when a transformer blows on its own.

Ah, music to me ears
, thought Stocker, from about half a mile away.
Eh
?

All the lights in the area went dead. Now only A and C companies could see a bloody thing.
Yeah . . . fighting fair is stupid.

“Sniper teams?”

“Standing by,” came the answer.

“Be some good lads, if you would, and start taking out any TCSers on the grounds around their headquarters, eh?”

Stocker could neither see nor hear either the suppressed shots or the subsonic bullets. Enough time passed for him to ask, “Are we quite finished yet?”

“One sec . . . aha, gotcha, motherfucker. We’re finished now, sir.”

“Very good. Now, First Platoon, move forward to North Bay. Get in position for the assault. And remember, boys, no prisoners and no survivors.”

It was the dogs that awakened Diwata, dogs howling in the slums to the west. She immediately reached for the light on the night table by her bed. Several taps on the controlling base produced nothing.

“Funny,” she said, softly and sleepily, “I wonder what’s killed the power. I wonder what set those dogs to howling. Might be the electric outage, I guess. Stupid dogs . . . ought to be shot . . . ”

At that point two ninety millimeter explosions shook the building, throwing Diwata from her bed to the rug below.

MV
Richard Bland,
Wharf at Barangay 129, Tondo,

Manila, Republic of the Philippines

Maricel nearly fainted when the light came on and the door to the container holding her cage opened. She’d been sure she was for death, and had been dreading every minute since she’d been taken aboard. When she saw the man who’d so brutally tortured her, she didn’t faint, quite, but her legs, refusing to hold her up, collapsed under her, letting her fall to the corrugated metal deck.

Cringing, looking around clasped hands held in front of her face, she begged, “Please, no. I have a baby. Please . . . I’m so sorry. Please don’t. Please, please,
please
?”

A small woman, Filipina, Maricel thought, entered the container after her tormentor, closing the door gently behind herself. That woman made a subtle
get to your feet
gesture.

Cringing back even more, Maricel couldn’t form words. Her head shook back and forth violently.
Nonononononono
!

“It’ll be all right, girl,” Aida said. “Come with us.”

That promise meant nothing.
But what can I do? They can just kill me here and then carry my body and dump it. And they might make it hurt more if I don’t go easy. Yes . . . they’ll hurt me more to punish me for making them clean up the mess. I can’t take any more pain.
Quietly except for some hopeless sniffling, Maricel forced herself to stand.

Lox and Aida guided the unsteady, swaying girl out of her cell, through an open area with a bunch of tables and the smell of food, then through a hatch and up several flights of stairs. The hopeless and helpless weeping never quite stopped. Indeed, it grew louder and still more hopeless, the closer she came to deck.

Once on deck, Maricel heard gunfire. A girl couldn’t grow up and work in or around Tondo and not recognize the sound. This, though, was way out of line with anything she’d ever heard in her life. And she had no clue what those bright green lines arcing across the sky were.

Suddenly, the green lines all disappeared as great flames began billowing up to the sky. It hadn’t quite registered before then that she was very close to home. It took a moment or two more to realize the flames were coming from TCS headquarters.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, “all my friends.”

They led her to the gunwale.
This is where they put a bullet in my head
, she thought.
God, please let it be over quickly. I don’t want to be shot then drown.

They stopped her just before she reached the ship’s edge. The woman spoke then.

“Do you know why we band together into nations, girl?”

The question seemed so totally out of the blue that Maricel didn’t really even comprehend it. She shook her head, a gesture that meant, in this case,
I don’t understand
.

Aida took it wrongly, assuming the girl meant she didn’t know why. She answered the question herself. Pointing towards the flames, she said, “We band into nations for just that reason. In the real world, little tribes like TCS are destroyed. They can’t compete against determined bands of raiders. It takes more power than that to defend yourself against people like yourself, people with no law above themselves.”

Ah,
now
Maricel understood the question. She wasn’t sure she understood the answer and, given that she was going to die, the answer didn’t really matter anyway.

“It’s the flaw in some utopian schemes,” the woman continued. She looked at Maricel’s uncomprehending face and said, “You don’t understand that word, do you?”

“No.” Sniffle.
Just get on with it, will you
?

“Never mind; here’s the truth, a truth I’ve been trying to find for the last . . . well, for the last good long while. People band into nations, real nations—not travesties like TCS, gangs that fancy themselves nations—to defend themselves. It requires an emotional commitment. The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can. People with tiny hearts, people like TCS, can never reach very far, can never gather enough similar hearts together to defend themselves. Only real people, and real countries or causes, can do that. That’s why TCS is going to die tonight.”

Maricel lifted her chin. As death came closer, and her own resignation to it grew, she found a little spark of pride in herself.
If I couldn’t live well, at least I can die well.

“Are you telling me this so I’ll know why you’re going to kill me? I already know why.”

“Nobody’s going to kill you, girl,” Aida said.

“I got the story from Malone. They took a vote, Zimmerman’s closest friends. At first they were going to do to you what was done to him.”

“Peter asked them,” Aida said, her head inclining towards Lox, “which one was going to haul on the rope. None of them would volunteer. Then they thought about it some and took another vote.”

Lox spoke then, softly and gently. Aida suspected he was ashamed.

“What it came down to, Maricel,” Lox said, “was that when we thought about it, we really couldn’t blame you. We—all of us—prostitute ourselves. And after . . . questioning you . . . I was pretty confident you didn’t expect anyone to be killed, certainly not the way Zimmerman was.”

The girl broke down again. Chin on her chest, she cried, “I didn’t. I
really
didn’t. I’m so sorry.”

“We know,” Lox said. “I’m sorry, too. About . . . well . . . you know.”

Lox reached a hand into his pocket, pulling out a thick envelope. “We were all given a few thousand dollars worth of Philippine pesos before we came here. That’s pretty routine in our work; never know when you might need some getaway money, after all. One way or another, we never give the getaway money back. It’s
always
‘expended.’

“Anyway, the boys kicked in what was left and asked me to give it to you.

“It’s about seven hundred thousand pesos,” he said. “It’s not a huge amount but . . . maybe it’s enough for you to start over. I dunno . . . go to school . . . start a business . . . Or you can just waste it. Get drunk and forget about what we . . . what I . . . had to do to you. Your choice.”

He handed the envelope over. Maricel took it wonderingly, her grip loose as if not believing it was real. She’d never even seen that much money in one place at one time. Even so, it didn’t seem right to look in the envelope. Instead she asked, “You’re not going to kill me? You
forgive
me?”

“No and yes,” Lox answered. “Well . . . almost yes. We don’t ‘forgive’ you so much as we can’t find it in our hearts to blame you, not entirely. And, yes, you’re free to go. We only held you this long so you couldn’t warn TCS.

“We’re really . . . ” Whatever Lox was about to say was lost as the
girl
really started to cry.

Lox asked, “When I was . . . questioning you, and just now, you said you had a baby. Where is he, or she?”

Through her sniffles, Maricel answered, “He. I always leave him with my mother when I have to work. My mom lives well north of Tondo. My baby’s safe.”

Navotas, Republic of the Philippines

“All rounds expended,” said the leader of the Eland Section. The dozens of holes in the walls of TCS headquarters sat as smoking testimony to that.

“Roger,” said Stocker. He crouched behind a wall about a hundred meters up Lapu-Lapu from North Bay, enjoying the spectacle thoroughly. “Still need your machine guns for a few minutes. Break. Platoons, commence your assault.”

There was hardly any fire coming back at the troops. At first there had been, as TCS’s several hundred armed “soldiers” in the building rushed to the windows. They, however, couldn’t see in the dark. Stocker’s machine guns, RPG-29 Vampires, machine guns, some rifles, snipers, etc.
could.
It had been a matter of only a few minutes work to beat down the TCS’s attempt at defense, leaving the windows clear and a not inconsiderable number of bodies on the inside floors. Whatever TCS was doing inside—and Stocker suspected that was mostly praying for deliverance—it wasn’t inconveniencing their attackers in the slightest.

A new machine gun—or perhaps two of them, it was hard to tell with Pechenegs—joined in the shooting somewhere on the other side of the building.

“Captain,” transmitted Moore, now back with his own platoon since Kiertzner was back with company, “They’re trying to get out the back.” Moore chuckled. “We’ve demonstrated what a bad idea that is.”

“No prisoners, no survivors,” Stocker repeated.

“Well, duh, sir.”

In Stocker’s field of view, three teams of four raced forward to the building’s walls. Two of the teams ran toward the southern wall, One disappeared around the corner where the wall turned north. He wasn’t worried about them; steady machine gun fire directed at that wall gave testimony that they were well supported.

In each team two men were riflemen. One carried a double satchel charge, twenty pounds of C-4 in two bags, tied together, with a length of fuse and a friction igniter hanging out. A fourth man humped one of the Russian flamethrowers that had been drawn from
Bland
’s well-you-never-know-what-might-turn-out-to-be-useful stocks. Stored empty, they’d been in behind the little toe-popping mines.

Focusing on the nearer team lunging at the southern wall, Stocker saw the riflemen lash at the windows as they ran. Short bursts, but enough to frighten anyone from peeking out. When they reach the wall, all flattened their backs against it. The riflemen, one after the other, took out grenades, armed them, released the spoons, and—after a brief delay—tossed them through the nearest windows. Smoke, dirt, and the remnant shards of glass flew out, pelting the asphalt. There were also a couple of screams. Then the flamethrower man stepped back a few paces. A long tongue of bright orange flame, mixed in with blackish streaks, lanced out and through the window. Some of the liquid fire splashed against the window frame, but most landed inside. The screaming coming through the windows grew very loud. More flames lanced out, before the tank petered out, leaving the nozzle dripping a mere few drops of liquid agony. The continuing, and apparently growing, flames suggested there was plenty more burnable material inside than the flamethrower had sent there.

Fuel exhausted, the flamethrower man raced back across Lapu-Lapu to his initial assault position, a smoldering building on the TCS side of the road.

Now it was the turn of the trooper carrying the satchel charge. Before moving to throw, he pulled the ring on the friction igniter, then stopped and watched for emerging smoke and bubbling plastic on the fuse. Yes, it was lit.