Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  The other ships might run the odd questionable cargo. They might, even, with a little switching of crews, support an underwater demolition team to, say, mine and sink a large number of boats and ships bringing fortification material, rockets, and mines to Gaza under the guise of humanitarian aid. Typically, Bland and Merciful launched armed attacks from ship to shore. Of course, they also carried innocent cargoes frequently enough to disguise their purpose.

  Though about of a size, each carrying just under twenty-eight hundred TEU, and a bit over thirty thousand gross registered tons; where Merciful had a single gantry that moved fore and aft, Bland had three cranes, one forward to port, the other just abaft the beam, to starboard, and a third, centered, just behind the superstructure that housed the crew, overlooking the eighty-foot rear deck. It just wouldn’t do to have to give up the use of one, once compromised, because it looked too much like the other.

  The paint helped there. Merciful was painted up in a montage of clasping hands, olive wreaths, and doves, suitable for the purely fictive humanitarian organization that, so far as a records check would have showed, owned it. Bland’s hull above the waterline was a straight gray, though darker than Navy gray, with the superstructure painted white. Both hull and superstructure showed enough streaks of rust to ensure the ship didn’t stand out as a combat vessel.

  The rust bothered the crap out of Bland’s new skipper, Captain Tom Pearson, even if he understood and agreed with the purpose. Standing a couple of inches under six feet, broad in the shoulders, balding, Pearson looked at a minor rust stream marring his command’s white superstructure and scowled.

  Pearson, new to the ship, didn’t know yet what the vessel’s problems might be. He was still trying to locate all the property alleged to be there on the secret manifest. Bland hadn’t been used as an assault carrier in some twenty-nine months; there just weren’t that many missions that called for a complete naval invasion. It had gone through the number of skippers, and had had at least one complete crew change because of the Gaza flotilla mission.

  Still sneering at the rust, Pearson thought, Maybe it’s necessary, but it’s just not right. Ah, well, at night, at least, it doesn’t show much. Which is . . . ah . . . important, what with the fucking Army showing up. Though if that were the only problem . . .

  Though the regiment was just the regiment, members of its air and naval squadrons still tended to think of themselves as “Air Force” or “Navy,” and the ground components as “Army.” The two exceptions were Cazz’s Third Battalion, which thought of itself and was thought of as, “Marine,” and Biggus Dickus Thornton’s team of former SEALS, who were in the “Army” portion—Second Battalion—but generally worked with and for, and still thought of themselves as, “Navy.”

  Though, at least, we’ll be getting Charlie Company, Third Batt, which ought to know its way around a ship.

  “Ahoy de Bland,” Mr. Drake called up from his small Guyanan Revenue Authority watercraft. The boat was, of course, intended to help him improve Guyanan revenue. Perhaps it did. From Drake’s point of view, though, its major purpose was helping him do a pretty good side business on his own. This had gone way past turning a blind eye to M Day’s activities for a little financial consideration. Since his daughter, Elizabeth, had married into the regiment, the customs officer had become an unindicted coconspirator.

  Not dat de regiment don’ pay fair for meh trouble, Drake mused, while waiting for an answer from the deck of the ship, looming above. But it not so important as watchin’ out for meh little girl . . . even indirect.

  A dozen people, none of them uniformed, sat the boat behind where Drake stood at the wheel. These were three each from the Aviation Squadron and Charlie Company, Third Battalion, plus four from Alpha Company, Second, and two from the regimental medical department. Drake’s next lift was to bring out the first four cooks, a couple more each medics and nurses, two aviation maintenance crew, and A and C companies’ armorers.

  Still seated on a none-too-comfortable bench, A Company’s exec, Captain Tracy P. Warrington, tall, slender, mustached, and graying, looked up at the Bland with distaste.

  My whole fucking family, for about a dozen generations back, was Navy. I joined the Army to avoid it. So where am I? About to board a ship to sail to points not particularly well known. Fuck.

  Bastard Welch, sticking me with this shit while he goes gallivanting to the Philippines to do something I’m better at—Human Terrain Analysis—and ducking what he’s better at.

  Still . . . I suppose politics intrudes and, given the client, we had to put highest rank forward. Oh, well; I didn’t make the world—or make it start falling apart. I just have to live in it.

  Warrington let out an audible sigh. And with the people in it.

  “Stand by, Customs,” called a voice from above. “We’re lowering a ladder.”

  Warrington heard a scraping, followed by a splash. When they say ladder; they mean ladder. Oh, my aching, weary bones.

  Glancing in the direction of the infantry company commander tasked to support the operation, Warrington asked, “Cazz brief you people on shipboard customs and courtesies?”

  “Yes,” answered Andrew Stocker, late of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, now commanding—pending an anticipated change in the personnel system—an A Team of C Company, Second Battalion, which team provided the leadership of C Company, Third Battalion, M Day, Inc. The team itself tended to be Commonwealth: Canadian, Brit, British Gurkha, Aussie, and Kiwi. Supposedly, that anticipated change would come sometime soon, with a break in the command relationship between the teams and Second Battalion, with the teams falling directly and permanently under the battalions of the companies they led. The current system had seemed promising, but had never quite worked out.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know shit about them,” Warrington answered. He pointed his chin at the general direction of the splash. “That means you go first.”

  The ship had been modified in a couple of significant ways. For one thing, there were reinforcements built into the deck and gunwales to allow the crew to set up landing pads for helicopters. For another, the two bottom levels of containers contained nothing but food, cots, bedding, arms, ammunition—to include one container labeled “APERS mines”—and equipment for a strike force. Of those levels, the lowest was only partial, leaving a substantial open area—roughly nine hundred square meters—with containers held on steel beams above it, to allow for a mess and planning area for the embarked force. Since the area also served as a sort of recreation center, one wall—actually just the ends of forty-foot shipping containers—held a wide screen TV which was turned on only at night or at the commander’s discretion. Currently, the television displayed one of the more attractive female talking heads from CNN, though the sound was turned all the way down.

  “The message I got was cryptic, at best,” Pearson said. “What are you bringing aboard and what’s the mission, Major?”

  There can be only one captain aboard ship.

  Stocker smiled wickedly at Warrington, seated across the table in the expansive mess hall down near the bilges. You can send me up the ladder first, but you’re in charge and you get to brief.

  Warrington shrugged. To Pearson he answered, “The mission’s a hostage rescue. Under the circumstances, we can’t grab counterhostages which, frankly, blows. We don’t know yet where the hostage is being held, except that he’s probably still somewhere in the Philippines. We don’t know what kind of force the people holding him can muster. Our advance party is trying to answer those questions, even as we speak.

  “As for what’s coming aboard . . . a lot less than I’d like. One infantry company; Stocker, what’s your strength?”

  “One hundred and eighty-six officers and men, including three armored car crews with vehicles, two mechanics, seven cooks, and a six man medical team,” the Canadian answered. “Three armored cars and crews are what they gave us. But with only a single LCM, that c
an only carry two, one of them is probably useless.”

  Warrington had already known that; the answer was for Pearson’s benefit.

  “In addition,” Warrington continued, “I’ve got thirty-eight from A Company, Second Battalion. The rest are already forward or moving there. We’re also taking on one UAV, two helicopter gunships and two CH-750 STOL fixed wing aircraft—”

  “So we’ll need to assemble a flight deck?” Pearson interrupted. “Which means we’ll need to practice it. A lot.”

  “Yeah,” Warrington agreed. “The flyboys will include fourteen flight crew and eighteen ground, including for the UAV, which is something less than generous. We’re getting one LCM-6, with a crew of five. Yeah, just one, so I hope your stash of rubber boats is adequate.”

  “I’ve got eighteen Zodiacs,” Pearson replied. “Ought to be enough. Yes, with motors. At least I’m supposed to have eighteen. I’ve only found seven so far. My predecessor in command was possibly not as organized as one might have liked.”

  “Which possibly has something to do with why he got moved to staff,” Warrington said. I hope to hell all eighteen are there.

  “Lastly,” Warrington continued, “regiment is sending us with a seven-man medical team, three more cooks, and a four-man intelligence cell. All told it comes to two hundred and seventy-five. You have space and rations for that many?”

  “For twice that many,” Pearson said, “though that would be a little cramped.” A trace of doubt clouded his features. “I was hoping for a patrol boat to defend the Bland.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” replied Warrington. “My boss asked for it. Regiment said, ‘Fuck off.’ Along with a couple of troop carrying helicopters. Also, ‘Fuck off.’ And one of the mini-subs. Likewise, ‘Fuck off.’ Be a bitch if it turns out we need them.”

  “Be a bitch if we had them and lose our home base because of it,” Stocker said. “Eh?” And my local boys are not even a little bit happy about being dragged out of their own country, which everyone suspects is about to be attacked, to sail to some other country about which they know nothing, to do something they really don’t give a shit about.

  Through multiple decks, through the sound insulation provided by five to six layers of forty-foot containers, Warrington could still feel the vibrating whine of the central, starboard side, crane, lifting some cargo—Probably one of the Elands—aboard. That, or maybe the troops’ baggage. No matter, that’s the “Navy’s” problem so long as it all gets aboard. My problems, on the other hand . . .

  Warrington turned his attention to A Company’s chief medic: Gary Cagle, short, very nearly as wide in the shoulders as tall, and with only one good remaining eye and a pronounced limp, both injuries the result of being shot down in a helicopter, somewhere over Chalatenango, El Salvador, in the late Eighties.

  “Fuck . . . fuck . . . fuck,” Cagle said, small drops of sweat flying from one quivering hand, said hand pointing at the contents of what was supposed to have been a twenty foot refrigerated container. “Fuck.”

  “It’s all bad, Gary?”

  Cagle’s head and hand dropped simultaneously. His hand “silenced,” the quiver moved to his voice. “It’s been sitting there, in oven temperatures, for anywhere from two weeks to six months. I just can’t tell. Would you want us to shoot you up with any painkillers or antibiotics that have been sitting in an oven for up to six months?”

  Warrington shook his head. “Put that way, no. What do we do about it?”

  “Incinerate it and get more,” answered Cagle’s wife, Beth, standing slightly behind Warrington in the passage formed by containers. She went by the handle of “TIC Chick,” for Toxic Industrial Chemicals, and knew whereof she spoke. She was also chief doctor for the enterprise, and, where drugs and medicine were concerned, her word was law.

  “That, and get a storage reefer that works. Or get this one fixed. I’ll see if regimental medical has sufficient to spare, but I can tell you now that they really don’t. Neither does Guyana, all things considered.”

  “Here’s the really messed up part,” Warrington said. “Before I came here I checked up on the mess stores. Three dozen forty-foot reefers, every one of which is humming. We’ve got twice as much food as we need. And this one, the one key one, has gone tits up . . . ummm”—Warrington’s face reddened—“pardon me, TIC Chick.”

  “I’ve heard the word before,” she said.

  “Yeah . . . I suppose. Anyway, this one, the one we really need, is fucked . . . ummm –”

  “Heard that word before, too.”

  The bridge was lit only by a faint red glow as the first of two CH-750’s allocated to the mission touched down on the temporary angled flight deck constructed atop the topmost layer of containers. The pilots and ground crew had had a lot of practice by this time. A light touchdown and two bounces and the thing was stopped, not more than a couple of feet past the flight deck’s midpoint. Three minutes after the engine stopped, its wings were folded; its propeller oriented upper left to lower right; its tail was turned around; and a four-man ground crew was easing it, ass end first, into the container where it would reside until needed. Unseen, two of the ground crew tied it down to half-rings welded to the inside of the container.

  The red glow of the bridge lights made the captain’s scowl seem even more fierce than usual. Pearson still hadn’t been able to remove that scowl from his face, nor to get over the embarrassment of one of his reefers—and the most important of the lot—failing. “Regiment says we can pick up a new supply at Capetown or, failing that, Tuticorin.” He shrugged. “At least they’re more or less on our way. I don’t think they’ve thought that one through.”

  “I’d feel a lot better about it,” said Warrington, “if they had some other ship make the pickup and deliver it to us at sea. We’re supposed to be fucking secret, after all.”

  “None available,” Pearson replied. “They’re all either committed to home base defense, or too far out of the way.”

  “Yeah . . . well . . . I’m thinking we’re going to have to retrieve them by air.”

  “That has its own problems,” Pearson pointed out. “We’ll not only have to erect the flight deck again, but we’d risk being spotted by ground-based radar. And neither the South African nor the Indian navies are organizations to be sneered at. Neither are the air forces. At least not when you’re a big fat freighter.”

  Below, on the temporary flight deck, the first of the CH-750’s had disappeared as the container doors were closed. Even as the crane whined the container into the air to move it to stowage, Number Two touched down.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is

  suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his

  destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death,

  but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him

  something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state

  of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.

  —Jean Baudrillard

  Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

  Republic of the Philippines

  Lucio Enrique Ayala scratched absentmindedly at something itching his leg. Insect or jungle fungus, he didn’t know. His ancient back rested, if that was quite the word, against the center pole of the hut in which he’d been imprisoned. His posterior and the back of his ancient, skinny legs rested on dirt rapidly turning to mud. From one leg led a rusty iron chain, triple looped about his ankle and running off to a rock bigger and heavier than he could have lifted as a young man.

  He’d tested the rock, shortly after being chained to it. I sure as hell can’t budge it now.

  Old Man Ayala didn’t have a clue where he was, except that it was mostly jungle and not too far from the sea. Big help, that is. No place in this part of the country is too far from the sea. He recalled that his captors had said something about “Basilan,” shortly after his capture, but whether he was actually on that island, or on one of the more than seven thousan
d islands, greater and lesser, that made up the province he couldn’t know.

  Probably not Basilan Island, though, he thought. Too many very nervous Christians, there, too mixed in with the rest, and the army takes too much interest in the place for my “hosts” to be as comfortable as they plainly are . . . some one of the other islands completely owned by the Moros . . . probably one the army’s given up on.

  He looked down at his tightly chained ankle and felt a surge of despair, thinking, Not that it makes a lot of difference; the army could be half a mile away and they’d still not have a clue I was here. And they’d be as likely to bring down artillery on this hut as to make any effort to see what was inside, first. Can’t say as I’d blame them.

  Ayala had done his military time as a young officer, long, long ago. A signals man, he’d been. And, like everything else in his life, he hadn’t let the experience go to waste. Briefly, he mentally chalked off what he did know, even if he thought the knowledge useless. I’m not all that far from the sea; I can smell the water and, when the wind’s just right, hear the surf. I’m either in or near a major Moro base. I think I’ve seen as many as two hundred of the bastards at one time. And it is a major base; regular huts for barracks, rifle ranges, big kitchens and mess halls, a more or less regular hospital, though I didn’t note any doctors. I saw that much, at least. And they’ve got some heavy weapons, too. Mortars certainly. And I thought I saw a recoilless rifle on someone’s shoulder the last time they walked me like a dog for exercise, two days ago.