Countdown: H Hour (9 page)

CHAPTER NINE

All the news that fits.

—Jann Wenner

Captain’s Quarters, MV
Richard Bland
, South Atlantic

Pearson looked half in shock, sitting his captain’s chair, left elbow resting on the chair’s arm and the underside of his nose on his index finger. In his right hand, hanging low across the chair’s other arm, he held a piece of paper. This he passed to Warrington wordlessly as soon as the other entered the cabin.

“So they really did it,” said Warrington, after he’d read. “Then again, it isn’t like we weren’t expecting it.”

The captain shook his head,
No, it isn’t as if we weren’t expecting it
.

“Still,” continued Warrington, “they could have told us something about casualties beyond, ‘Heavy but not crippling.’ They could have said something about civilian casualties.”

“I asked,” the skipper replied. “They told me, ‘When we know; you’ll know.’ I think maybe they’re still digging in the rubble. And that’s going to take a back seat to—”

Stocker’s grim face appeared at the hatch. “You wanted me, Skipper?”

Warrington waved him in and passed him the decoded message.

“Crap,” said the Canadian ex-pat. “Not many of my men are married with families on base, but they’ve all got family out in the country, out where the Venezuelans are occupying. They’re not going to be happy over this, not a bit.”

“Not happy over the attack,” Warrington asked, “or not happy that we’re sailing away from it.”

“Both.”

“Yeah . . . both. Question is, how do we tell them what we know and, worse, what we don’t know?”

“I can make the announcement,” Pearson offered Warrington, “But they’re mostly your men.”

“Actually,” Warrington replied, chin pointing at Stocker, “they’re mostly his. But I’m senior; I’ll tell them.”

“Do you want me to have the mess deck TV turned on?” Pearson asked.

“After I finish talking,” Warrington agreed. “But can you show me what CNN’s saying before I go face the men?”

“Easy,” Pearson answered. “
My
television isn’t on a kill switch.”

Stocker shook his head with disbelief. “A peacekeeping operation? Those CNN assholes are billing it as a peacekeeping operation? The jets that bombed the shit out of Camp Fulton, the housing areas, the fucking post hospital were keeping the fucking peace?”

Pearson made a scissors motion with two fingers. “Oh, it’s just a misspelling, I’m sure. See, from Venezuela’s and Chavez’s point of view they
are
just keeping a
piece
.”

Mess Deck, MV
Richard Bland
, South Atlantic

“At ease,” Warrington ordered, after the senior noncom for the expedition, Sergeant Major Pierantoni, had reported and walked off to one side. Though there was an elevated and railed balcony of sorts, sternward, he stood at the same level of the mess deck as the assembled men. Most of them were in formation, five blocks for the infantry company, a single block for the rump of the special operations company, and a couple of double ranks for the naval crew and aviation detachment. Only the cooks, standing forward, weren’t in ranks and they, after all, had a pressing job to do.

“No,” Warrington amended, making come hither motions with the fingers of both hands, “fuck ‘at ease.’ I hate raising my voice. Break ranks and cluster ’round. And you spoons in the back; set your burners to simmer and get your butts on over here, too.”

Waiting a few moments for the men to gather, he made a patting gesture with one hand and ordered, “First five . . . ranks, take a knee. Or sit; I don’t care.

“About twelve hours ago, the war started back on . . . in Guyana, I mean.” Again Warrington waited a few moments, not only for the news to sink in but for the muttering to die down.

“As far as I know, it began with an aerial attack on our base. Regiment reports that casualties are ‘heavy, but not crippling.’ Exactly what that means I can’t be sure of. I’d
guess
—and it’s only a guess—that ‘heavy but not crippling’ means somewhere between fifty and a hundred military dead, and two or three times that in wounded. I have no idea what there might be in civilian dead. I do know that some of the housing areas were hit and that the hospital was mostly obliterated. If –”

“Jesus!” shouted someone from the line company portion of the mob, “Mah wif due to delivah de baby ’bou’ now! We gotta go back!”

“Nobody’s going back,” Warrington said. “Just get the notion out of your heads. We couldn’t if we wanted to. The Venezuelan navy’s not much, but it’s a lot more than this barge can take on. And they’ll be all off the coast. Again,
nobody
’s going back.”

Whatever the mostly American and Euro crew of the aviation detachment and spec ops company thought of that, they kept to themselves. The, for the most part, Guyanans of the line company didn’t. They were unhappy, pissed off, disgusted, and—based on some of the fallen faces—demoralized.

Based on some of the ugly glances directed at both Warrington and the Spec Ops company, some of them blamed the First Worlders.

And
, thought Warrington,
since this sort of thing
is
normally our job, I suppose I can understand some of that.

Headquarters, True Cinnamon Siblings (TCS), Manila,

Republic of the Philippines

The building was an old, multistory batching plant, just north of the intersection of North Bay Boulevard and Lapu-Lapu Ave. TCS had acquired it for pretty much a song, having made the previous owners one of those traditional “offers you can’t refuse.” It wasn’t actually within the boundaries of Tondo, but then, the gang had been growing for some time. Culturally, it was Tondo. It was TCS.

The building served the gang well enough, having storage space, offices, and room—once a few modifications were made—for fairly decent living quarters for some of the higher ups in the organization. Diwata Velasquez, for example, the senior member of TCS’s management committee, lived there.

In some places, the news of the kidnapping of a very rich man would have gone stale by now. Lucio Ayala, however, was so very rich, and the Philippines so insular in so many ways, the kidnapping was still number one headline material, as often as not.

“Tsk,” said Diwata, at seeing the news for the umpteenth time. She then repeated, “Tsk. Damned politicals. They’ll ruin everything for everyone.”

She had been, so it was reported, quite a beauty in her youth, before being deported from the United States—San Diego, specifically—and before running to fat. The years since had not been especially kind. The tattoos didn’t help, though they were de rigueur in her little (rather, not so little, anymore) social group.

In her right hand Diwata held a small black box, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. In the other, she held an actual cigarette from which she occasionally flicked an ash onto the concrete floor of her gang’s headquarters.

“Got to admire the balls of the thing, though,” she admitted.

“That you do,” agreed her—male—assistant, Lucas, recently back from collecting a not-insubstantial ransom from a family in Singapore. “And just imagine what
we
could do with that kind of money.”

“That kind of money,” she corrected, “also means bringing a ton of shit down on you. The Ayala family isn’t especially noted for rules and law, any more than we are. Whoever grabbed Ayala is in for a shitstorm.

“No . . . we’ll keep in business the way we always have—retail. On which subject,”—she held out the small black box—“I want this attached underneath Ben Arroyo’s new business van. Anybody he’s making deliveries to, I want us to know about.”

Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

Republic of the Philippines

There were a number of choices when one had zero actionable intelligence to drive or support a critical mission. A popular choice, in some circles, was to throw one’s hands up in despair, wail over life’s difficult lot, curse fate, slam doors, and then crawl into a consoling bottle of the good stuff. Politicians had it easier. Though few of them even knew the difference between actionable intelligence and the wish for same, for just about all of that breed it was sufficient to puff and preen and make pompous pronouncements. The clever press either found a smart corporal and asked him or her for a spare clue or, and this had become an increasingly popular choice over the years, bewailed the sheer impossibility of the mission. The idiot press, conversely, wrote up something inane, ran that through their bureau’s Department of Enhanced Inanity for editing, then published that.

Terry’s team had none of those luxuries. In the absence of actionable intelligence, the standard was, “Develop some.” That’s where Aida’s pilfered list came in. That, and a box of goodies brought by Graft as baggage aboard his aircraft.

As he inspected them, the sergeant clucked over his charges like a mother hen. Slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes, the GPS trackers—two dozen of them—each came with a piece of covered tape attached, for when the integral magnet just wasn’t enough. Once the covers were removed, the user had only to slap them somewhere unobtrusive—oh, and not too dirty—and they’d stay there till long after the batteries ran down. They were slightly rough surfaced, more or less pebbly, the better to allow dirt to build up for improved camouflage.

“I don’t know where we’re going to get more of these once this supply’s gone,” Graft mourned.

“Mail order?” Semmerlin suggested.

“Nah . . . the company that made them got sued into oblivion by a class of outraged adulterous and soon-to-be-ex wives and husbands who convinced a court that the things infringed their privacy.”

“Surely there are other makers.”

Graft shrugged as he deftly fingered a battery into its receiving well. “You would think so, but the others saw the writing on the wall and have eased out of the market. And I don’t think the regiment can make them on its own.”

“So we use them sparingly and recover them if we can,” Semmerlin said.

Shaking his head dubiously, Graft answered, “That’ll only extend the time until we run out.”

“Dude,
that
’s all we
do
as an organization; extend time.”

“Yeah . . . that, and hope the horse will learn to sing.”

Ermita, Manila, Republic of the Philippines

It wasn’t every country where it could be said that the American embassy and one of the major red light districts were in close proximity. Ermita, however, was at least one such. Some of the local inhabitants, perhaps, found a certain poetry in that, or at least a degree of symmetry.

Occasionally, some local political poobah or another would make an effort to move the hookers elsewhere. It never mattered for more than a short time. They always returned. En masse. A cynical observer would have said the embassy operated as a hooker magnet. A more observant cynic would have answered, “No . . . it’s not the embassy. It’s the sundry humanitarian organizations that have clustered close to the embassy.” The wisest and most observant cynic would have said, “It’s both.”

If nothing else had improved since the Second Great Depression, at least gas was cheap. The air was full of fumes, from myriad taxis. Under that lay the aroma of garbage that was just a few days past the time it should have been disposed of. Through the stench, Mrs. Ayala’s man, Pedro, wound the taxi through crawling traffic, a sea of lightly clad professional ladies, not all of whom were necessarily female, and the usual collection of half- or entirely drunk foreigners—some with round eyes, some with slanted—looking for a bargain. There was a continuous cacophony of beeping, interspersed with a great deal of mostly good-natured cursing from both drivers and girls. Pedro cursed, himself, from time to time.

If the locals found symmetry in embassy and street walkers operating so closely together, so did Welch, Lox, and the other two members of Welch’s advance party, Graft and Semmerlin. Semmerlin spat in the direction of the embassy as Pedro drove past it. There was precisely no love lost between the Department of State of the United States and virtually any member or former member of America’s armed forces.

Even as Semmerlin spat, Graft caught the eye of a short but still fairly leggy, and otherwise quite delicate looking, Filipina hooker dressed—to the extent she was dressed—mostly in red. The old soldier whistled a few bars of an old tune by Chris de Burgh, then vocally supplemented the tune with the letters “L-B-F-M . . . ”

“Everything in its own time, Sergeant Graft,” Welch said, thinking to avoid offending Pedro. Welch had seen the girl, too.

“Yessir.” Graft, taking the hint, shut up.

“Don’t bother me,” said Pedro, with a shrug. “She little. She brown. She not much more than machine for fucking.”

Welch sat up front, beside Pedro, with Lox sandwiched in the back between the other two. Lox had an open folder on his lap. Welch had a laptop with integral GPS on his.

Pedro had managed to fill about nine tenth’s of the shopping list. For the rest: “Working on it. Few days.”

Everybody had a hidden pistol, with suppressor, and a fairly legal
appearing
license to carry it. Everyone but Lox likewise carried a knife and a TASER pistol. Everybody had a local cell phone. (Actually, everybody had two of them, one provided by Mrs. Ayala’s man, Pedro, which they didn’t trust, and another obtained by Lox, which they didn’t let Pedro see.) All of them wore light cotton suits. In the trunk were a couple of sets of night vision goggles. None of the heavier weapons Pedro had acquired were there. It wouldn’t be too hard to pass off a pistol, with license, as legal, should a cop stop them. It might take a substantial bribe, of course, but still not too hard. Machine guns, submachine guns, and assault rifles, however, were an altogether different story.

In his right breast pocket Graft kept a sub-cigarette pack-sized GPS tracking device, suitable for attachment to a vehicle. The tracking device operated off of a long life battery, good for at least two weeks. It could be attached directly to a vehicle’s battery, for more or less infinite operational life. Two weeks, though, was thought more than sufficient life expectancy for this particular job.