Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  So what’s that mean? At least a big company, the way we’d think of it, or maybe a small battalion in Moro terms. I’d guess a small battalion. And that’s just what I’ve seen. Could be five times as many within a half a mile. Shit.

  The old man sighed. Ah, Paloma, pearl of my heart. I wish you hadn’t been such a stickler for appearances. I’d much rather have been in bed with you, comfortably, than with any number of young bimbos. And I’d sure as hell rather be in bed with you now than here, with this band of pirates.

  Smiling, Ayala thought, Ah, my very dearest, what pirates we were, together, in our youth.

  Zamboanga International Airport, Mindanao,

  Republic of the Philippines

  It was one of the world’s amusing little incongruities that, no matter how much technological sophistication had grown in matters of communication, the most secure form of communication remained what it had been in Caesar’s day and before, the human messenger. For what Janail needed, no mere message carrier would do; he had to go himself and he had to fly out of this nothing much airport.

  The “International” part was usually more wish than reality. Oh, there’d been any number of international flights over the years—not even including American and Japanese fighters and bombers, circa 1942 to 1945—but the service never seemed to last. Zest Airways or South East Asian Airlines or Nocturnal Aviators would give it a whirl, then eliminate the service after a few months or years. It was simply a loser, and no one really seemed to know why. This, perhaps, helped explain why different air lines kept trying.

  The sucker airline du jour was Royal Brunei, the sultan’s finances being in a parlous state, what with the Allah-help-us, rock bottom price of oil in a world rapidly sliding into the poor house.

  Not that the sultan was willing to bet a great deal of increasingly scarce money on the venture. No, no; not when he’d already had to add fifty percent to the number of Gurkhas he kept on hand, the Gurkhas being affordable where keeping up the oil welfare state was becoming increasingly unaffordable.

  No, there was no money to spend on new aircraft for a new service. The sultan—or, rather, a cousin running the airline on the sultan’s behalf—had brought a couple of Fokker 50’s out of retirement and put them to work.

  Which works out conveniently for me, thought Janail, trudging up the ladder to the Fokker’s cabin, because I really didn’t want to go through Manila, even if I’m reasonably sure the authorities don’t have a decent picture of me.

  ’Course, I’d have preferred the complete anonymity of travel by sea. Sadly, too many pirates who answer to nobody. Too many pirates, too many hungry pirates, given how little trade there is lately. Especially down by Sulu.

  Kudat, Sabah, East Malaysia, Island of Borneo

  Flight, airport, and civilization were all well behind Janail now. With the lights of Kudat glowing dimly to the west, aboard a narrow skiff, putt-putting between the overgrown green banks of the inlet jutting south from the Sulu Sea, Janail slapped absently at a buzzing mosquito. Maddeningly, the damned thing refused to stay in one place long enough to be killed, moving from ear to neck to face and back to ear, without ever once settling down for a meal.

  “Fickle bastard,” the kidnapper muttered. Note to self: When I’m sultan, mosquito eradication program. High priority.

  Seated beside Janail, his companion, the Pakistani Mahmood Abdul Majeed, gave a victory grunt. He’d succeeded in killing one of the little winged Satans. “Il hamdu l’illah,” the Pakistani muttered, in a language not his own.

  Odd, thought Janail, that this fat little scientist retains all the faith I’ve long since cast aside. Not that he needs to know that, of course, but playing along with his religious carping since we met in Brunei is getting wearisome.

  Where Janail traveled on a single, not very large bag, tucked under his seat, the Pakistani’s baggage took up most of the forward third of the skiff, from just ahead of their legs to just behind the man at the machine gun at the bow. Mahmood’s assistant, Daoud al Helma, sat in the sodden bilges, just behind that.

  First pointing his chin at the baggage, Janail then inclined his head toward his companion and asked, “And you’re certain that you can tell if the devices work with your instruments?” He spoke in English, their only common tongue.

  “Yes,” Mahmood answered, eyes automatically trying to follow an unseen flying pest. “At least insofar as anyone can tell without actually detonating one. I can check the quality of the nuclear material, judge the serviceability of the conventional explosive, determine the quality and serviceability of the switches and detonators. All that.”

  “You’re certain you can’t be fooled?”

  Mahmood shook his head. “No, another scientist with the right backing could perhaps fool me with a counterfeit. And the man we’re going to see could easily buy that scientist and give him that backing. But you shouldn’t worry, even so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because some things can’t be counterfeited and, given the raw materials, I can make a bomb, or two of them, no matter what the pirate ahead may think.”

  Ahead loomed a massive yacht, well—even

  ostentatiously—lit and very, very unconcerned with the infestation of pirates in the area. If the light had been natural and external, the yacht’s hull would have shown as blue. As was, it seemed a black to match the night.

  Janail couldn’t make out the details, despite the lights, but he was reasonably certain that the yacht was so thoroughly armed, and its occupants so willing to open fire on the slightest provocation, that the yacht’s master considered pirates the least of his problems.

  No more does the fully grown great white shark fear the hammerhead.

  Yacht Resurrection, between the coast of Kudat

  and the island of Pulau Banggi, South China Sea

  Physically unprepossessing, balding, very rich, and with the paunch that usually went with that, Valentin Prokopchenko sipped an almost incredibly ancient Dalmore from a chilled glass. He considered vodka a drink for peasants. And I am not a peasant.

  Born into an hereditarily highly placed—one may as well say, “aristocratic”—Communist family, in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as a young man Prokopchenko had seen the writing on the walls. “Let others try to salvage this house of cards,” he’d said to himself, back then, as Soviet communism had begun to crumble. “I’m looking out for me and mine.”

  And who could blame him? Even his parents—dedicated Communists, to be sure—hadn’t been so dedicated as not to watch out for the futures of their ever-so-precious children just a little more than they tried to ameliorate the plight of long-suffering mankind. Their wisdom in this was amply shown when son Valentin had, indeed, taken care of them, keeping them from the grinding poverty of the collapsing Soviet Union’s final and worst days.

  At least we thought they were the worst, Prokopchenko thought, then took another sip of his scotch. We lacked imagination. The worst days are now, except for the days to come.

  Where Boxer, back at Camp Fulton, in Guyana, kept a map on his wall which could have been labeled, “Advance of Barbarism across the Globe”—it was actually labeled, “Marketing”—Prokopchenko had a very large plasma screen. His organization, moreover, was larger and considerably better funded, than M Day, Inc., if not quite so well armed, conventionally. Minions fed the computer that fed the plasma screen with data ranging from trade routes and volume, through corruption indices, through influence of the intelligentsia, through drought, through the rise in certain communicable diseases, through mass migrations, through per capita wages, taxation, life expectancy, the price of food, through inflation levels and the skyrocketed price of precious metals . . . through . . .

  Suffice to say, if there was a phenomenon or trait of intelligence importance, Prokopchenko’s screen showed it, both individually and in composite form. And in the composite?

  We’re fucked.

  Everything, every indicator, is for a
near total collapse of civilization within twenty years. A couple of relatively strong city states might survive the fall. Singapore has a chance. Maybe Panama, which might as well be a city state already. Maybe a couple of dozen others will make it. But every form of organization above the level of a city or, at best, a not too large province, is crumbling under the weight of corruption, deindustrialization, demonetization, breakdown in law, and every man or woman for him or herself. And the only cities I expect to survive are the ones that break away from their larger states soon; those, and the few that have no larger state to suck them dry.

  And, yes, I had my shortsighted part in all that, not that my contributions were decisive and not that it would have made any but the slightest difference if I’d been a model of communist propriety throughout the old empire’s collapse. I doubt if anything I did hastened the fall by five minutes. “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” after all. And our tide is going out.

  If I didn’t expect the United States to break up I’d move my family there. But they’ve devolved into two big groups—and a whole bunch of little ones—that hate each other beyond words. Ripe for a breakup, that’s what Panarin said, and though I didn’t believe it then, I believe it now. So he was off by a few years? The essence of the thing he pegged perfectly. Beirut in the 1980s would have been safer than the United States in twenty years.

  So why am I here, vending things that will surely hasten that fall and by rather more than five minutes?

  Because in the days that are certainly coming, when no man can turn to or trust anyone but himself and his close blood relations, solid, material, universally recognized and accepted wealth will be all that will see one’s family through, all that will buy the private armed force to keep unruly strangers away. Well . . . those and a large spot of the Earth’s surface to call one’s very own.

  I can’t save global civilization; no one can. So I have to do the next best thing and save some of it—a larger chunk than this boat—for me and mine.

  “It’s not the biggest yacht in the world,” Janail said doubtfully as the skiff thumped against the Resurrection’s eighty meter hull.

  Mahmood shook his head, visible now in the brighter light from the ship. “Most of Russia’s nouveau riche went for more ostentation, yes. Prokopchenko, though, is old aristocracy and privilege. He doesn’t need the display. He needs speed, security, a helipad, and a fair amount of computing power. This gives him that.”

  “And you trust him?” Janail asked, not for the first time.

  “Not even remotely.”

  “You’re the one who put me in contact with him,” Janail accused.

  Again Mahmood shook his head. “I trust me. I trust you. I trust him only to put his own interests first. Since we—you—have or will have something he badly wants, I trust that.”

  “Money? From the old man’s ransom?” Janail scowled doubtfully and, again, not for the first time. “He has money. Lot’s more than he can get from us.”

  “He has less than he used to,” Mahmood answered. “Much less. And, of what he has, there is probably little that cannot be traced to him. What he will get from us will not be traceable, I think, and so he can use it for whatever purposes he has that he may think good, but that others would not.

  “And, too,” Mahmood added, “he is in his own way a pious man, like ourselves. I think he thinks to serve Allah, even if by another name.

  “But I still don’t trust him.”

  Valentin glanced up at the knock on his seaborne lounge’s entrance. Automatically, he looked up to see a guard wearing the white tropical uniform he’d had issued to the company he kept aboard.

  “Your guests are here, sir,” the guard corporal announced.

  Valentin’s eyes glanced over the uniform, inspecting it from the shako, with its double-eagle and reversed swastika insignia, down to the shoes. He, himself, had never served. Family connections had seen him well out of the Soviet Union’s draft. But, like other Russian boys, and girls, he’d had a healthy chunk of what the West would have called, “Basic Training,” while still in elementary through high school. Thus, though never a soldier, he could hum the tune well enough to maintain the respect of the ex-soldiers he employed for security. He hummed an even better tune for the old orthodox priest he kept on retainer, half for the benefit of his guards and half for public image. And that was sheer hypocrisy.

  “Very good, Corporal,” Prokopchenko answered. “See that they’re searched and brought down.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  In war, the real enemy is always behind the lines. Never in front of you, never among you. Always at your back.

  —Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints

  Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

  Republic of the Philippines

  “Search the house for bugs,” Terry ordered Lox, a scant three minutes after Pedro had left for the airport to pick up a few more members of the advance party. He gave the order as far from the house or any manmade feature as possible. One just never knew.

  Lox raised an eyebrow. “And if, rather when, I find some?”

  “Leave them for now. Put up standard markers to warn off the rest. I just want to know where we can and can’t speak freely.”

  Lox turned to get his baggage, sitting on a concrete pad just outside the entrance to the main house. He turned and said, “I don’t like having a single safe house and that provided by an employer I am by no means sure we can trust.”

  Welch nodded. “As soon as Semmerlin, Graft, and Franceschi get here, you and one of them are going to go find us our own, along with a car that won’t have a watcher attached.” Then he changed his voice to just above a whisper. “Because, pleasantries aside, I don’t trust the bitch, either.”

  “There’s three more waiting at the airport,” Pedro announced, half in, half out of his “taxi.” Behind it, clustered at the open trunk, three more of Terry’s advance party unloaded their limited baggage. These were Master Sergeant Graft, the team leader, medium height, stocky, and rather more than half gray; Semmerlin, maybe early thirties, tall, slender, and blond; and a new troop, Ferd Franceschi, who looked vaguely Balkan, if anything. Franceschi was fairly new, though his background had seemed to the regiment most promising.

  “They’ll probably be the last until the main force gets here,” Welch answered. To one of the three newcomers, Graft, he said, “Let Semmerlin and Franceschi worry about the bags. I want you and Lox to go back to the airport with Pedro. Your escort. He has a lead he needs to check out in a not so good spot. You’ll be gone two to three days. Stop at a tailor and get some suits made.

  “Speaking of which, Pedro? Guns? Permits?”

  “Guns tomorrow,” the Filipino answered. “Permits . . . maybe three days. Criminals efficient, but even with bribery, bureaucrat only works so fast, ya know?”

  Once the tail of Pedro’s taxi had turned behind the main gate, Terry held up his hands to stop the remaining two in place. “The house is bugged,” he said. “Presumably by our principal. We’ve shunted the furniture around a little, enough to place one flat surface by the right side of the door to any bugged room. Some already had tables. There’re a couple of crossed pencils on the tables of any room that has a bug.”

  Semmerlin nodded, unsurprised. Franceschi, new to the regiment and the team, but formerly of Australian SAS, looked a little nonplussed. In a reasonably understandable accent, he asked, “Our own employers spy on us?”

  “Usually,” Terry replied, with a grin. “We tend to work for the very rich. They don’t trust us peasants for beans. And with good reason. Hell, you’re one of them, or you were. You should know that.”

  “Hey,” the Aussie objected, “I’m trying to rise above my roots. Besides, ‘Australia, as everyone knows, is inhabited entirely by criminals.’ ”

  “Fuck. Next you’ll be quoting Monty Python at us.”

  “I have a vewy good fwend in Wome . . . ”

  “Fuck.”

  EDSA,
Pasay City, Manila Metro Area,

  Republic of the Philippines

  The EDSA, the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, was the major highway and ring road encircling Metro Manila. It was just off of there that Pedro let off his two passengers.

  Lox waited until the taxi had disappeared into traffic before asking, “First question; did any of you mention how many of us were coming?”

  Graft thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No; we mentioned ‘the team’ but not how big it was.”

  “Good. Just FYI, we don’t have a lead and, at the moment, I’m not looking for one. We’re going to get another car, buy a dozen throwaway cells, contact a realtor, and buy or rent us a safe house for the other half of the team.”

  “Bad principal?” Graft asked.

  “Let’s just say a different class from us, and to her we’d be pretty expendable. Let’s also say that Terry thinks better safe than sorry.”

  “Fair enough,” Graft agreed. “Gotta love a paranoid CO. But it’s going to be a bitch to find a safe house here. It’s not like the old days, when this place was crawling with flyboys and squids. The other half of the team is going to stick out.”

  “Wouldn’t help if they were still here; we’d stand out among them, too. And an expat suburb won’t do for the same reason.”

  Graft shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose so. So we need a cover story for why there are half a dozen unusually well built gringos in one house in Manila.”