Countdown: H Hour (42 page)

The demo man only moved away from the sheltering wall a few feet, and that at an angle, before cutting in again to stand right next to the window. He took the satchel’s straps in both hands, then twisted his torso away from the window. Centrifugal force lifted the satchel to about waist level. As it started to fall, the man whipped his torso in the other direction. The satchel charge swung wide, then entered the window. The straps bent at the window frame. Where the satchel was going now—except that it was definitely inside—was anyone’s guess.

Even across the sound and fury of battle-approaching-massacre, Stocker heard, “Let’s get us de fuck outa here!”

Then, in the few seconds before the blasts began, Stocker lifted his loudspeaker to his lips and spoke the message that was the point—or at least the exclamation point—of the exercise. The words, electronically amplified, echoed across the scene of carnage. “Before you cocksuckers decide to hang somebody, you really need to find out first just exactly who his friends are.”

Everywhere Diwata turned was fire and death. The concrete of the floor was nearly covered with blood. If she hadn’t been asleep, if she hadn’t gotten up with bare feet, she’d have slipped in it.

She could see now, despite the lack of electricity, but that was far more curse than blessing. Everywhere were the dead and the dying. Some, caught by some kind of liquid fire, burned alive before her eyes, screaming and clawing at the fire that would not go out.

Flames were licking up the walls and across the roof. A stuffed chair in the open storage area to the west suddenly flashed into flame, disappearing in a cloud of smoke almost completely. The smoke reached her and she began to choke. Covering her mouth and nose with both hands, she turned and fled back toward her own chambers.

She opened a door, then passed through.

She heard someone speaking in English in an electronic voice: “Before you cocksuckers decide to hang somebody, you really need to find out first just exactly who his friends are.”

Oh, God, no. For that
?
They did
this
for
that?
What kind of monsters . . .

She never quite completed that thought. Faster than her mind could register it, there was a blast and a shockwave that collapsed a wall upon her, pinning her down. The wall was already on fire. Flame touched her hair crisping it in an instant. Her face began to char. Down below, she could feel the fire eating into the flesh of her legs and torso.

No, no . . . not burning...no, not burning . . . not that . . . don’t let me die like that . . . don’t . . .
“Aiiaiaiaiaiai!”

MV
Richard Bland,
Wharf at Barangay 129, Tondo,

Manila, Republic of the Philippines

All kinds of boats and ships were pulling out, streaming away from Manila, Tondo, Navotas, and anything to do with battles in what had been a peaceful, if gang-controlled, port.

Neither police nor fire department had come to help yet. They probably wouldn’t. This was unsurprising; after all, Tondo and the rest of the area held by TCS had been a “nation,” a no-go area. The fire burned merrily and probably would until long after sunrise.

There were still firefights going on all over the area as the five remaining gangs, armed by M Day with captured Moro weapons, duked it out for dominance. Every gang member dead had to be counted as a plus. And every gang member with a tattooed face was soon going to be dead.

“Everyone aboard, Sergeant Major?” Warrington asked Pierantoni.

“Yessir. And the Elands back aboard and stowed in containers.”

“Casualties?”

“Light,” the sergeant major answered. “Lots to be said for surprise, you know.”

“Not even any really badly wounded from this go-round,” said Cagle. “There
is
a lot to be said for surprise.”

Kiertzner, also standing by, quoted, “Americans; they’ll cross an icy river, in the middle of the winter, in the dark, to kill you in your sleep. On Christmas.”

“Well,” Warrington countered, “in this case, Her Majesty’s subjects got to do the killing.”

“I’d better be going,” Aida said. “If you folks are leaving now I . . . well, the truth is I hate the sea.”

“You won’t take us up on that job offer?” Pearson asked. “Lox says you’d be a boon to the regiment. And you wouldn’t be on Third World pay scales, you know; you’d be on ours.”

“I’ve got to think about it,” she replied. “Yeah, it’s a lot of money compared to my pension. Still, it’s not a light decision. And I have to consult my children and grandchildren. And, too, this is my
home.
”

“I understand,” the captain said.

“What about Welch and the rest of the company?” Pierantoni asked.

“We’ll be sending the LCM in to pick them up at Calatagan. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Okay.”

“What about the fucking tranzis?” Stocker asked.

“Already ordered their tickets, at our expense,” Pearson said. “In gratitude for the help they gave—maybe not too willingly but they still gave—with our wounded. We’ll drop them at Singapore and they can fly out from there.”

“Singapore?” Stocker sneered. He was still on an adrenaline high from dealing with TCS. “Ho Chi Minh City would be more appropriate. And I still think walking the . . . ”

“Andrew!”

“Oh, all right. Let the shits go.”

Warrington chuckled. “Anyway, let’s give Aida time to debark and then let’s get the hell out of here and head for home.”

EPILOGUE

I

Camp Crame, Quezon City, Republic of the Philippines

Aida wasn’t really all that sentimental about the desk she’d been given and allowed to keep even after her semi-retirement from the police. Even so, cleaning it out was a break with the past. That was hard.

One of the younger men in the office stopped by, leaning on the door. “You’re not leaving us, are you, Inspector?”

Aida shrugged. “Got a good offer elsewhere,” she said. “And you people don’t give me enough useful work to keep even a grandmother occupied.”

“Where you going?”

“Guyana,” she said. “That’s over in South America.”

“You speak the language?”

“They speak English. I can speak that.”

“Well, we’ll all miss you. And don’t forget, ‘Home is where the heart is.’”

“I never will forget,” she said, heart beginning to break. “But sometimes you have to go away to protect what matters to your heart.

“
Magpakailanman dito sa puso ko
.” Forever in my heart. “Now go away before I start going all sentimental.”

II

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

Janail hung now only by the nails. His cramped legs had no more strength to support him. Suffocation and death would follow soon.

The funny thing was that it didn’t hurt anymore. He was past pain and past cares. He only wanted to get it over with. He was almost bored.

The funnier thing was that the pain had gone away sometime in the night, about the time he’d decided—surely a devout atheist would have called it a delusion—that he’d been wrong, all these years, that there was a God, that Mohammad was his prophet. After all, hadn’t a vision of God, sitting in judgment over him, come as clear as revelation in the night?

He still had that vision engraved on the synapses of his brain, the stern-faced Allah, in boundless glory, surrounded by all the beings of the universe, his slaves, saying in a beautiful voice, “You have greatly sinned, Janail.”

Then the Moro had wept, not with the pain but with the shame.
How could I have been so wrong? How could I have been such a fool. My God, forgive me.

He felt death hovering near. Janail had been waiting for this moment. Using up the last of his strength, he lifted his head high, then rested it against the stirpes of his cross. “I . . . testify,” he tried to shout, though it came out as little more than an inarticulate croak. “I testify that . . . there is . . . no god but Allah . . . I..I . . . tes . . . tes . . . I . . . Mohammad . . . is . . . messenger . . . of . . . ALLAH!”

“And there went the last one,” thought Paloma Ayala, with vast satisfaction. Her Marines were already taking down the other crosses. Indeed they were mostly already down. The wood formed a great pyre, assembled nearer to what used to be the Harrikat camp. The pyre was covered already with the bodies of men who had died, oh,
very
hard. Beside it was a great, hand dug ditch. The Moros would be burned in a few hours, and their ashes dumped, scrambled, and then buried. The other two hundred and twenty or so, the ones killed in action, would be left out for the vultures of the press to feast upon.

As vast as was her satisfaction, Madame still fumed.
I offered to spare one of them, if he’d tell me who in my family set up my husband. None would, the filthy swine. I suppose that was my mistake for admitting that I wouldn’t spare them anyway, earlier. Silly me.

But it doesn’t really matter. I’ve had the girl my husband was with questioned. It
was
a lovely little book Peter loaned me. Pity the tramp didn’t survive. So I
know
it was Junior. And Pedro and his partner should be dealing with that little tumor from my own womb very shortly.

III

Yacht
Resurrection
, Gulf of Thailand

All the money in the world
, thought Valentin Prokopchenko,
will not save me from this.

Even down here, down in the lead-lined compartment over the pool, Prokopchenko could hear the fighting ranging below decks. And that sound grew closer by the minute. Daria, seated on the deck, whimpered with fright, occasionally crying out at particular explosions.

I wonder how Vympel defeated my yacht’s radar? It must be Vympel; it’s their job. That they could do so I never doubted. I’d like to know exactly how, though.

Who betrayed me
? he wondered.
Who even knew, besides prospective customers? And there were few of those. I doubt it was the Harrikat. Maybe Shedova from Kazakhstan. He, certainly, still had close ties with the FSB.

Not that it will change anything, the knowledge. They’re going to capture me, and then I’m going to envy the ones who died in Beria’s prisons and camps.

I still remember throwing up as a boy at what my father told me his grandfather told him: The days on end without sleep, the beatings. And those were only the start, the old man said. After that they went to work on the fingernails. Then the whippings . . . the burning . . . the hanging by the wrists with the arms tied behinduntilyourshoudersdislocate . . .

Daria present or not, Prokopchenko leaned over and vomited on the floor.

“I can’t let that happen,” he said. “No . . . not to me. That can’t be allowed.”

Why did I come down here? What was I thinking
? In his terror, Prokopchenko’s mind went fuzzy and confused. For a moment he could barely remember what was going on above him. A hand grenade that shook the ship served as a reminder.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember now.” He looked down at the control box he’d brought from a safe in his quarters. “Yes, I remember.”

Control box in hand, Prokopchenko walked to the hatchway that led into the bombs. Twisting the latch he eased it open, then walked through.

“Valentin,” Daria cried, “don’t leave me!”

IV

Lawyers, Guns, and Money (SCIF), Camp Fulton, Guyana

Boxer was white faced as he reported to Stauer, the commander, which was to say the CEO, of M Day, Incorporated. They were both at least fairly good sized men, but Stauer topped Boxer by several inches.

“There’s been a nuclear detonation in the Gulf of Thailand,” Boxer said. “Nobody’s claiming responsibility.”

“Your contacts?”

“Won’t say a word. Not a word. And I think they know who’s responsible. This is . . . worrisome, Wes. I mean really worrisome. I’m scared. I knew things were bad, but . . . ”

“Yeah, whole other order of bad. Can we do anything about it?”

Boxer shook his head, saying, “Nothing I can think of.”

“Then we worry about what we
can
fix.”

The sound of hammer and saw was everywhere, a symphony of buzzing and banging, with accompaniment from the cement mixer chorus and the jackhammer percussion section. The natural sounds of bird, insect, and reptile had little chance to be heard, even had those creatures elected to stick around. Barring only the mosquitoes, they generally had not.

Little by little—aided by labor from Venezuelan prisoners of war; at least until the final reparations payments were made—Camp Fulton was rising from the ashes left in the wake of weeks of air strikes. Even down in the concrete-shrouded depths of Lawyers, Guns, and Money, sometimes one could feel the vibrations through the ground and air.

Rising, however, wasn’t quite the same thing as risen. The place was still largely a ruin, and would remain so for some months. Most of the troops were in tents, plus a few shacks and shanties. It said something of the corporation’s degree of organization and discipline, that those temporary shelters were at least dressed right and covered down, close by their ruined former barracks and offices.

The corporation, which is to say, “the regiment,” was in better shape, but by no means in good shape. Casualties had been severe, and in the worst hit units, crippling. They’d ended up by losing almost all their air assets, most of their little combat and amphibious flotilla, a frightful number of armored vehicles, and—between killed and seriously wounded—almost fifteen hundred men; which was more than a quarter of their starting strength.

One does not take on a major regional power with a single regiment and not pay for it . . . exorbitantly.

And yet the boys are happier than I’ve ever seen them
, thought the Regimental Sergeant Major, RSM Joshua, as his boots clicked and clacked up the corridor’s bare concrete floor, between the bunker’s entrance and the major conference room. He spent most of his time in among the troops, after all—judging, gauging. Except for First Battalion—the regiment’s mechanized force, still hurt and bitter over the loss of their commander—everywhere he’d gone since the end of the war it had been nothing but bright white smiles shining from faces either tanned or naturally dark.
Then again, why shouldn’t they be happy, and proud, too
?
We
won,
after all.

Joshua found himself smiling, as well, not least with pride, as he turned the knob to the conference room, opened the door, and stepped in. As he did, he could
feel
the pride, right in there with no little fatigue, bordering on exhaustion.

About half the required people were there already. Among these very prompt ones were Lana Reilly, nee Mendes, born a Jewish South African and late of Tel Aviv and
Tzahal
. Great with child and nearing her term, Lana was, by popular acclaim, commanding her late husband’s First Battalion. She was no more comfortable with the one than she was with the other, but at this point had little real choice about either.

Lana glanced down and put protective hands over her distended belly
.

Joshua caught the movement and the glance. When Lana raised her head and lowered her hands, he gave her a confident, co-conspirator wink.
You’ll do fine
, the RSM thought.
The men worshipped your husband and, bitter and hurt or not, would die supporting you rather than let down the memory of him. And, if you’re younger than most of your privates . . . so what? Received divinity counts for more than age. And, sister, you have done been
injected
with it.

Joshua, himself, steel hair topping black, leathery skin, was well into his sixties. Indeed, most of the regiment, or at least that portion of it made up of Americans and Europeans, were pretty long in the tooth.

Joshua’s eyes left Lana Reilly and swept the room. There was Chavez—no relation to the late and unlamented Hugo Chavez—head of the regimental recruiting detachment, looking grimly and intently over some spreadsheet or other. Chavez’s normally highly intelligent face was drawn and weary.

Yeah
, thought the RSM,
I don’t know for sure where we’re going to make good our losses from either, let alone expand to the almost ten thousand men Stauer and Boxer are thinking of.

On one side of Chavez sat the Adjutant, DeWitt, while the other flank was held by Dr. Scott Joseph, the chief medico of the regiment. Both stared just as intently at Chavez’s spreadsheet as he did, himself. Lahela Corrigan, Comptroller’s office, “she whose smile lights up the jungle,” looked over Chavez’s shoulder at the same information.

“No, sir; we can’t afford anything like that,” she said, definitively. “Not long term; not even with Venezuela’s reparations payments.”

Chavez scowled, even as Joseph deflated and DeWitt turned away.

“What’s the problem, gentlemen,” Joshua asked, taking a seat at the long mahogany conference table, opposite the other four.

“We need to add about six thousand, five hundred people to the rolls,” Chavez explained as his fingers absently drummed the spreadsheet. “Guyana just doesn’t have them; it’s neither that populous, nor does their culture turn out huge numbers of prime military material. And if we actually found whatever Guyana does have, and tried to recruit them, this place wouldn’t even run in the half-assed fashion it does. Not after the divergence of all that human capital.”

DeWitt shook his head. “And we can’t recruit any substantial numbers of Latins. They’re not bad soldiers, properly trained, but we’re talking
highly
incompatible cultures, and that’s even worse because we just stomped the shit out of one of their sister countries.”

“Even worse than that, Sergeant Major,” said Lahela, “by our own rules we’d end up paying more for the Latins than we pay the locals, as long as the cost of living increment of pay is indexed to home country. That would be
bad
internal politics.

“And if we tried to fill the new table of organization with Americans and Euros, we’d just go broke, because their pay is
also
indexed to the cost of living in their home countries.”

Joshua thought, with exasperation,
Officers
!
And the bloody warrants are not better.

“Look north,” he said. “There are a bunch of islands out in the Caribbean with economies that aren’t a lot better off than Guyana’s, and have similar cultures. Maybe even look as far as Belize, which is dirt poor, or along the Carib coast of Panama and Costa Rica which, just like the islands and here, are mostly descended from English-speaking slaves. Just like me,” the RSM added with a smile.

“I have it on very good authority,” said Doc Joseph, “that you are descended from some African who wandered north to Egypt and enlisted in the legions, eventually rising to senior centurion.”

“Both sides, I suspect,” the RSM said, agreeably, “since my mother was even more of a hardass than my father.”

“The other Caribbeans; they decent military material?” Doc Joseph asked.

“Some are; some aren’t,” Joshua replied, with a shrug. “But I’ll tell you, one of the finest soldiers I ever met in my life was a black, English-speaking,
Colonense
from Panama. And, if that fails, look to South Africa for Zulus or Zimbabwe for Matabeles. Or both. And most of them speak English, too.”

He turned his attention back to Chavez, gesturing with a waving finger. “Between the Caribbean coastal areas, the poorer islands, and some Latins, plus—if we have to go that far—Zulus and Matabele, you can find your six and a half thousand. And our prestige in the Carib has grown to amazing heights. I don’t know if it has in southern Africa but it wouldn’t surprise me.