Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  “No, but I bought a throwaway cell phone and enough credits to call you. You’ll have to call me back before we get cut off. No one’s tracking this one, if that’s your concern.”

  Boxer thought, She’s never been given to panic . . . but there’s something that sounds a lot like panic in her voice. “Your number’s not showing on my caller ID,” he said. “Give it to me; I’ll call you back directly.”

  “I’ll bring it to the boss and the regimental council,” Boxer agreed, “but I’ve got to tell you, honey, that I’m going to recommend against. We’ve got a problem here—coming soon, too—that no amount of money can buy us out of. Frankly, we can’t spare—at least we can’t be sure of being able to spare—the force.

  “And, no, I’m not just setting this up to drive a harder bargain.”

  The voice on the other end didn’t answer for a minute. When Aida spoke, she said, “Well . . . ask your boss to consider the amount of trouble there’ll be for you and everybody if the worst sort of barbarian—these are the Harrikat, Ralph! Even Abu Sayyaf considers them vile—gets hold of the kind of money Ayala’s ransom would bring.”

  Abu Sayyaf was a different Moro group; and noted, itself, for extreme measures and inhuman ruthlessness.

  “Doesn’t really change anything, Aida,” Boxer replied. “We’ve still got a major problem of our own, right here and now. Who did you say grabbed Ayala? And how much are they demanding?”

  Terminal One, Ninoy Aquino International Airport,

  Republic of the Philippines

  It was nearly the hottest part of the local day. Air conditioned or not, Terminal One was muggy, the air thick with dampness and the cloying aroma of a sea of sweaty humanity. One of three international terminals, and one of two that also served carriers other than the Philippines’ own airline, the terminal was also the oldest of the lot and showed its age in ways both plain and subtle.

  Terry Welch—ex-U.S. Army Special Forces and currently Major commanding Company A, Second Battalion, M Day, Inc.—passed customs, then moved to a fairly open spot in the jostling human sea to wait for Lox. Big, even for an American, Terry towered over the tide of Asiatics passing him to either side.

  An elderly, gray-haired woman, lightweight business suit-clad, and sprightly for all of her gray, walked up and asked, “Terry?” Her mildly slanted, deep brown eyes looked both terribly inquisitive and also very intelligent. If she had any wrinkles on her café au lait skin, they were tolerably hard to see.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Terry answered, inclining his head respectfully. He already recognized Aida Farallon from his final briefing with Boxer. “I’m waiting for my—”

  “Here, Terry,” Lox announced. He’d started with the regiment as a sergeant, but now was rated and paid as a warrant officer. He handed Welch a cell phone purchased from one of the airport concessions. Then he turned to the woman, gave a short but polite bow of his head, and said, “Magandang tanghali po.”

  Aida cocked her head and smiled, saying, “Ralph told me one of you would speak Filipino with an almost perfect accent.”

  “With all due respect, Ma’am,” Lox answered, “my accent is perfect for certain parts of Luzon.”

  Aida considered that. Indeed, she seemed to be running through a cerebral file. At length, and not a very long length, she agreed, “Aurora, I think.”

  “Ooo, you’re good,” Lox admitted. Then he turned head and eyes away from Aida to focus on something in the middle distance.

  “Eh?” Aida shrugged. “Been around. Cop for better’n twenty years, doncha know? Still keep my hand in a bit, too.”

  “Where now, ma’am?” Terry asked.

  The old woman scowled. “Just call me ‘Aida.’ And now we go collect your bags. After that, I’m taking you to see the victim’s wife. And right after that, I’m out of your lives. Because, at heart, I’m still a cop, and I don’t want to have the first clue about what you’re doing, lest I feel duty bound to interfere.”

  Aida’s eyes locked on Lox who, instead of moving, was standing stock still with his eyes still focused in the distance. She followed his gaze to a suited man, his face ornately tattooed, apparently just off a plane and waiting impatiently for someone or something.

  “TCS,” she announced. “True Cinnamon Siblings. Use to be True Cinnamon Sisters, but then they took on men to add some muscle. And, yes, those titles are in English. There’s a reason for that; the gang, just like the Salvadoran MS-13, didn’t start here, but in the states, in TCS’s case in San Diego, California. They got their start in the States, got deported, and set up in business here. Big in prostitution. Medium in drugs. Heavy into kidnapping. They own a chunk of the city; the police won’t even go in there anymore and the politicians won’t let the army loose to clean it up.”

  “Like parts of Europe, with the Muslims?” Lox asked.

  “Sort of,” Aida agreed. “But they’re not Muslim. To the extent they’re anything, I suppose they’re Catholic . . . or maybe Christian Animist. Or maybe some kind of heresy I’ve never heard of. But Muslim they definitely are not.

  “What’s bothering you?” she asked. “The tattoos? I’m not sure what they mean—can’t read the code in any detail—but I’d guess he’s pretty high up in their chain of command.”

  Lox shook his head. “It’s not the tattoos,” he whispered. “He’s packing. He just got off a commercial airplane and he’s packing.”

  Aida looked a bit below the tattooed face and shrugged. “Yeah, he’s packing. Go figure: Filipino carrier and I’m sure he got himself enrolled as a reservist in our equivalent of the States’ Sky Marshal program. No surprise. Maybe some money but no surprise.

  “They call themselves a nation and they’re serious about it,” she said. “They’re their own nation, in us but not of us. And why not? They judge. They tax. They police . . . in the area they control they police better than regular police did. But they recognize no obligations to the rest of us. Citizenship is something they use when they get caught outside their own area to try to keep out of jail, a pure one-way street. Beyond it, being a Filipino means nothing to them.”

  Lox sighed and said, “Sic transit Nussbaum?”

  “Huh? Nussbaum?” Aida asked.

  “An academic and cosmopolitan philosopher of a few years back,” Lox explained. “Among other things, she insisted that the logic of nationalism and patriotism required the drawing of ever narrower circles of in and out groups. Seemed incapable of observing that, in the real world beyond her brainpan, it’s the breakdown of nations that causes people to fall back to ever narrower circles, while nations have so far proven the only thing—besides religion—capable of creating larger circles of acceptance. Silly woman tried to reason with a mob once, during the Great Chicago Ipad-9 riots. They tore her limb from limb.

  “He”—Lox pointed with his chin at the tattooed TCS leader—“is an affront to and refutation of her world view. Then, too, so was the mob that killed her.”

  Aida shrugged; the fantasies of the intellectual class interested her little. “I suppose,” she said, “based on some things that Ralph Boxer told me, that they’re a little like your organization that way.”

  “No, ma’am . . . Aida,” Terry replied. “We’re both symptoms of breakdown, yes. But M Day is only a symptom, not a cause of the breakdown. And even there, we’re more like the fever that helps fight off disease. Large criminal gangs owing no duties to anybody outside of the gang? They’re both symptom and cause.”

  “As are fuzzy minded intellectuals and academics,” Lox added.

  Aida’s auto stopped on the same narrow, palm-lined street, not far from the gated gap in the hedges that led to Paloma’s meeting house. Through iron gates Terry had caught glimpses of small, but well-kept bungalows, many of them raised on thick stilts.

  “Through that one,” Aida said, pointing with her chin as her hands were still tightly wrapped around the wheel. “Expect armed men on the other side, maybe three or four of them. Maybe only one or two,
too. Expect to be frisked.”

  Terry nodded, saying, “Thanks, ma . . . ummm . . . Aida.” Lox added in a Tagalog farewell in the polite form. From a shirt pocket Terry took out a thick envelope, which he handed over to the woman.

  “What’s this?” she asked, a hint of indignation rising in her voice. Gnarled fingers bent the envelope a few times, then squeezed it experimentally. “I didn’t strong arm Boxer for money!”

  “Officially,” Terry replied, “I don’t know. Unofficially, Boxer told me it was airfare to our base—Swiss Francs because who knows where the dollar is going—plus some, if you cared to join us someday. He said, ‘keep it, save it, use it when you feel the time is right.’ He said, too, to consider it a tentative signing bonus and that it would be subtracted from your real bonus if you actually did sign on with us. He also said that if there were some close relatives you thought might need a safe haven, then maybe a place could be found for some of them, too. Might be in a line battalion. Might be cutting grass. Or anything in between. But a place.”

  Aida nodded somberly, thinking upon the benefits of having a secure bolt hole. “Well . . . maybe then,” she agreed. “We’ll see.” She passed over a computer disk, explaining, “That is a bill of particulars for every at-large Abu Sayyaf and al Harrikat operative and sympathizer I was able to extract from police files. Both, because you never can tell when someone’s going to switch over. There’s also an intelligence summary from the army in there, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it authoritative. There’s no difference in the level of fighting, after all, between a province we’ve cleared of the enemy and one we’ve abandoned. In any case, it’s free, not something Boxer paid me for.”

  Both exited the car from the curb side. Lox dragged his bag after himself, dropped it to the street, then reached in to pull Welch’s out as well. The pair grabbed their bags, then walked to the gate. Aida’s small sedan was screeching a turn around the next corner even before they reached it.

  There had only been two guards, both of them on the gate, when Lox and Welch walked through. They’d been polite enough, but also firm. Nobody was getting in to see Madame until and unless they were thoroughly searched.

  Terry shrugged, saying, “Well, do your jobs then.”

  As the guard squatted to finger Terry’s ankles, the American thought, Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

  Search completed, one of the bodyguards remained on the gate, securing it and likewise the bags. The other led them to the bungalow, up the broad wooden steps, and into a living room furnished in wicker and cooled—inadequately cooled—by a large overhead fan. Terry still had the disk given him by Aida safely stowed in one pocket.

  “The two Kanos you were expecting, Madame,” the guard announced.

  An old woman, wearing a printed silk dress and with a string of pearls precisely sized for her age and station, was seated on one of the wicker chairs with her legs demurely crossed. Above the pearls, on a simple gold chain, was a crucifix. Quality told; behind the wrinkles—and there were surprisingly few of those—was a bone structure that boasted a past of rare beauty.

  She nodded and said, “Thank you, Pedro, that will be all until I summon you.” Her accent was pure New England. Her tone was pure command, as if by right.

  “Yes, madame,” the guard agreed, with a polite bow of his head. He withdrew backwards, then disappeared out the front door.

  “Please, gentlemen, be seated,” Mrs. Ayala said, indicating with a bejeweled hand a pair of wicker, padded chairs opposite her own. Terry thought the hand surprisingly youthful, if not precisely young. He also thought that the gold, rubies, emeralds and pearls detracted from that youthful appearance.

  “Radcliffe?” Terry asked, as he took his seat.

  “Mount Holyoke,” the woman answered, serenely. Weeping and shrieking time was over; this was business.

  Terry nodded. Old money. They’re different.

  “I have agreed,” she said, “which is to say I have agreed, tentatively, to your . . . your firm’s conditions. ‘Double or nothing.’ And ‘all you find, all you keep.’ I don’t care about the latter and the former appeals to me. An agreement, however, is not my husband back in my bed. Tell me how you intend to get him back when the police and the army cannot.”

  Terry liked—no, he admired—that kind of directness, and said so. He then added, “I trust you will not be offended if I am equally direct, Madame?”

  “Not at all,” she answered.

  “We believe,” Terry began, “that one of your children—”

  “Without proof of guilt,” Mrs. Ayala interrupted, “I cannot allow you to interrogate any of my children.”

  Terry shook his head in negation. “We don’t want to anyway, not as long as there’s a chance one of them would inform the kidnappers that we’re here, or if their disappearance would.”

  “On the other hand,” Lox asked, “if we obtain that proof?”

  “I’ll heat up the irons for you myself,” she said, old eyes flashing with young fire. The brief flash subsided; the eyes softened. “I have seven children, after all, but only one soul mate. There must, however, be proof before I will permit it.”

  “Fair enough,” Terry agreed. “That said, if we have the proof we also, most likely, have the location where your husband is being held. So it may not be necessary, anyway.”

  “Necessary or not, if one of my children is responsible, I want that one dead.”

  “We don’t have any problem with that,” Terry agreed. He had to work to keep surprise out of his voice. In his, admittedly limited, experience it was the rare wife who preferred husband to offspring. But, then again, she did use that word, “soul mate.” This does not make her more trustworthy, however.

  “Do you have any idea which of your children might be responsible?” Terry asked.

  “I do,” Mrs. Ayala admitted. “I will not tell you my suspicions, however. That will be one of my checks on whether you identify the right one. Please continue.”

  Terry nodded and tapped a pocket. “I have what I believe is a fairly complete list of people who may know something about your husband’s disappearance. Once the rest of my initial team flies in, we will analyze that and pick a list of likely lucrative targets.”

  “Your initial team will consist of?”

  Terry almost said, “Fourteen,” the true number coming in, including himself and Lox. He decided, all things considered, that it would be better to have some force available of which his employer was not aware. Not like I have reason to trust her, after all.

  “Eight,” he lied, adding another partial lie, “All intelligence specialists.

  “Once we have a narrow list of likely targets, we’ll kidnap, interrogate, and almost certainly kill them. We have to be a bit careful,” he added, “because if we start too low it may warn off those who are higher placed, while if we start too high, it may alert those actually holding your husband that someone is on their trail. This could cause them to move him to someplace no one has any clue to.”

  “I don’t see a solution to the problem,” Mrs. Ayala said.

  “We’ll try to restrict ourselves to the peripherals, the journalists and politicians who are in bed with the Harrikat.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?” she asked.

  “Then it would be hopeless,” Terry admitted, cautioning, “my organization never offered you more than a best chance.

  “In any case,” he continued, “we have to assume we have some success. So, assuming that we do, the better part of a battalion sets sail sometime in the next forty-eight hours from our base to here. They should be here in about five weeks. By then we should have Mr. Ayala’s location pinned down with some specificity. We recon; we plan; we attack to free him.”

  “You will need some assistance before then.” It was not a question.

  “Yes, Madame,” Terry agreed. “And we will do precisely nothing but analyze until the money is in escrow. Since you’ve acc
epted our offer of ‘double or nothing,’ that comes to seventy million USD. As for what we need; Mr. Lox?”

  Lox began to reach into a pocket to produce a shopping list of sorts.

  The Filipina put up that same bejeweled hand, palm forward, and said, “Don’t give it to me. I am leaving Pedro with you for the duration of your contract. He can get you anything you need, within reason. Think of him as our . . . liaison. He is one of only two of my bodyguards that I absolutely trust. The other one is at the gate. That one will accompany me to my home when our business is finished. Pedro has a car, a taxi I had him purchase—yes, it’s properly licensed; you never know—and will take you anywhere you need to go, or do anything you need done, that requires a degree of camouflage. In addition, there is an old estate in Hagonoy—Pedro will take you there—big enough to house the few of you coming initially in considerable secrecy. A small boat comes with the estate. It is also isolated enough—by which I mean very isolated, that no one is like to hear anything from a . . . shall we say . . . ‘rigorous’ interrogation. There is also a very small airstrip.”

  Lox sent Welch a glance that as much as said, I dunno about you, but I’m impressed.

  “Well, of course you’re impressed,” Paloma Ayala said. “My husband didn’t marry me just for my bygone looks.”

  “Madame,” Lox said, in Tagalog, “I assure you; you are just beautiful.” He meant it. Even great age could permit and retain its own kind of beauty.

  “And I didn’t marry him because of his flattery,” she snapped back.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve

  his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

  —Saint Thomas Aquinas

  MV Richard Bland, Georgetown, Guyana

  M Day, Incorporated, owned a dozen freighters of varying sizes. Only two of those had really mattered, so far. These were the MV Merciful and the MV Richard Bland, the latter named for one of Biggus Dickus Thornton’s boys, killed in action during a boarding mission. While the other ten had, typically, three members of the corporation (or members of the regiment, if they were alone among themselves) aboard; usually the skipper, his exec, and the engineering officer, the rest being hirelings from anywhere where manpower came cheap, Merciful and Bland were fully corporate crewed. They had to be for the kind of things they did.