Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

  Republic of the Philippines

  After a long night of fighting and fear, the first hint of sun was beginning to peak over the horizon. Everything under the jungle roof was still dim and indistinct, the distant light being further scattered by the canopy overhead.

  Warrington flipped open his compass, checked direction, then made a knife hand in the direction of the beach. The point man of one team nodded acknowledgement, then turned and began walking in that direction, his eyes darting left and right as he advanced. His team leader was behind him, with the other ten members of the team stretched out in a deep V, to the rear. The other whole team—though it wasn’t very whole, being minus a couple of wounded, and four litter bearers—formed another, shallower V to the rear.

  Warrington, a part of company headquarters, the rump of Graft’s team, and Cagle, took center, Cagle holding an IV bag above the small frail form on the stretcher borne by two of Graft’s men.

  I don’t know, thought Warrington, but that maybe we should have rigged up to lower the old man down the cliff on a litter and taken him out by Zodiac. I don’t know and I probably never will. Once the shooting started they might have had someone watching out for just that. Or they might not have. It was a gamble, like everything else in life.

  The point man passed a thin line of scattered Harrikat bodies, not far from where the front line had been. Pointing at one, he snapped his fingers. Transferring his rifle to his left hand and drawing a knife, one of the men in the team trotted out, took one knee, bent the Moro’s head to expose his throat, and slashed it.

  That was a war crime. Everyone knew it. No one cared. Nobody paid attention to the law of war anymore, at least when fighting those who themselves didn’t. The idea that one should not finish off terrorist prisoners—at least after interrogating them, if that seemed worth doing—had become as laughable as the notion that a twelve-year-old should never pick up a rifle to defend his mother and sisters from rape and enslavement, or that a group of them couldn’t join under an elder who knew what he was doing to provide a common defense to each boy’s mother and sisters. It had become as laughable as the idea that a man, or a village, couldn’t put out mines to provide early warning and defense.

  So the notion that one should spare the lives of those who feigned, or even might be feigning, death or incapacitating wounds—itself a war crime—had died. It had been laughed to death.

  There was just enough light filtering through for Warrington to see the killing. He mentally shrugged. Go ahead, indulge your intellectual fantasies without paying the slightest attention to the final result. Stretch the law of war past the breaking point and that’s what you get; no respect for it, no respect for a law that only runs one way.

  It was a better world we had then than we have now. Pity those that killed that world couldn’t have seen what they were doing.

  Ampuan could see now; no more fear that with every step someone was tracking him in a rifle scope he couldn’t match. No, instead each step was dogged with fear that someone was tracking him with iron sights.

  He’d reformed the two companies into a single one, a very small single one. They were moving north, in a column of platoons, even as Warrington’s little group was moving to the east-northeast. Ampuan’s command had grown a bit as stragglers, a half dozen of them or so, from the various knots of fighting, had gravitated toward him. No doubt there were still others out there, alone or in twos and threes, lost, dazed, confused and waiting for death to find them.

  Fortunately, they hadn’t met any American or Filipino troops on the way north. Maybe they got what they came for and left, Ampuan thought. But . . . no, I can still hear their aircraft. They’re out there.

  Somewhere back by the cliffs, Camana’s company had lost its radio. That left Ampuan’s. But the shot that had killed his RTO had also passed through the radio, itself. It was deader than chivalry. The datu could talk to no one who wasn’t right near him.

  But the silence, it talks to me. It tells me we have lost, totally. I hear no gunfire, none. Where is Janail? He should still be fighting, if anyone is. Is he destroyed, along with the last of the men with him? Has he surrendered? Ampuan mentally scoffed. Hardly anybody surrendered anymore. No, not Janail. He is not among those who would give up.

  Janail and Ampatuan’s company were a quarter of a mile from the northern tip of the island when one of the little infidel aircraft spotted them. The plane had fired only two rockets—maybe all he has left, Janail suspected—but lashed the company with machine gun fire, even so. He wasn’t hitting much, But, then, we aren’t moving much either.

  Where is Ampuan and why doesn’t he answer the radio? I need his men there to make the threat to kill all the slave women and their spawn credible.

  With the very tip of the sun rising to port, Kirkpatrick eased his landing craft in to shore. There was no beach here, no place to drop the ramp. If the area wasn’t quite the imposing cliffs found to the southwest, it was also no place to land vehicles, which was the major reason why the landing point selected for Stocker’s company had been to the southeast.

  As soon as the top edge of the ramp nosed into the steep but low slope, Lox, Kiertzner, and four sailors armed with rifles swarmed up. Two other sailors stayed in the well deck, to help people down. A further two manned the heavy machine guns port and starboard of Kirkpatrick’s wheelhouse.

  The climb wasn’t too hard. Even if the inside of the ramp was wet, it was also cleated to provide footrests and handholds, while the lip of the not-quite-cliff sat only a couple of feet above the top of the ramp.

  Overhead and somewhat to the south, one of the CH-750’s—Jake’s, thought Lox—lashed at something uncomfortably close. Lox began calling out in Tagalog for the people there to come to him.

  First to appear was a little knot of seven, four women, one of them little more than a girl, and three ragged children.

  “I never thought . . . ” one of the women began to say, in English, before breaking down in tears. Lox pointed in Kiertzner’s direction, since the latter was waiting only a half dozen meters or so from the boat’s ramp.

  “It’s okay, miss,” Kiertzner said, very gently, taking the woman’s arm and pointing her directly at the ramp. “We’re here to take you home. Just walk that way; someone at the boat there will help you, help you all, down.”

  More people came, some seeming to rise from the ground, others to appear as if by magic out of the thin morning mist. Most of the adults spoke at least some English, but there were some children, unaccompanied by any adults, who spoke either Tagalog, or Cebuano. For the latter, Lox had to make do with sign language aided by the fact that people are herd animals, too. Some of the women helped, having picked up enough Cebuano during their captivity to make do.

  There were only two men there. Neither was armed, not with so much as a penknife; the sailors searched them thoroughly for anything like that. They gave their names, in really excellent English, as Mahmood and Daoud.

  Kiertzner wasn’t sure what it was, though it might have been a vague recollection from his time on the fringes of Her Majesty’s intelligence community. It might just have been the oddity of two obviously Muslim, and just as obviously not Moro, men among a bunch of mostly Christian slaves. Whatever it was, as soon as Mahmood and Daoud were down in the well deck, he ordered, “Tie those two up.”

  Janail didn’t hear the boat at first, partly because of the lay of the land, partly because of the flailing aircraft overhead, and partly because he was preoccupied with his predicament. When he did hear it he acted decisively enough.

  “On your feet,” he shouted, rising himself. “The enemy are trying to steal our slaves! We must stop them. Follow the sound of the boat engines.”

  Whatever their fear of the aircraft might have been—and, again, the Moros were a people brave to a fault—the prospect of having their property stolen was much, much worse. As a single man, Ampatuan’s company arose t
o their feet and began a mad dash for the sound of the LCM’s diesels.

  Lox’s first warning was an infuriated mass shout, coming from slightly to the south. One of the sailors fired first, but if he hit anything it was impossible for Lox to see.

  Crap, he thought, and we almost had them all loaded.

  “Run for the boat,” he cried out, then repeated the command in Tagalog. “It’s your only chance!”

  The women, dragging and carrying children, swarmed past him in a rush, heading for the boat, for freedom, and safety.

  Jake saw the wave of Moros rise up. He swooped again, delivering two long bursts from his gun pods. No fucking good that was, he mentally cursed.

  “Where’s the gunship?” he asked over the radio.

  “Rearming,” came the answer. “And Stocker still has priority.”

  “What about the other CH-750?”

  “Sitting on flat part of the beach, waiting for the package to be delivered for a dustoff. And, before you ask, the RPV is being refueled.”

  “Crap! Well, fuck you all, then.”

  Pulling the odd, V-forked stick all the way back, practically into his shoulder, Jake climbed to the vertical, then continued on into a loop. Looking through the upper part of the windshield, as the loop continued on into an upside-down dive, he aimed by sight, feel, and experience alone, lashing the ground around the Harrikat with everything he had left.

  “Ballsy bastards,” he muttered, as the Moros continued their rush, despite his having apparently hit several of them.

  Lox pulled his cheek away from his own rifle just long enough to see Kiertzner easing the last woman down the slope. Then he took the very last child and tossed it to someone waiting below.

  “Lox, you and the bloody sailors, MOVE!” Kiertzner shouted.

  Putting his eyes back to the front, Lox fired three more times before shouting, “You squids; get the hell out of Dodge.”

  The sailors didn’t need any more encouragement. Brave enough, surely, this was still not their jobs, they weren’t that good at it, and they knew it. All four of them emptied what remained of their magazines and began to race back to the boat.

  Again, Kiertzner shouted, “Peter, move it.”

  Lox nodded, to no real effect, then emptied his own magazine and joined the race. Bullets struck the trees around him and tore up the dirt at his feet. He felt a bullet strike his back plate on his body armor, which threw off his balance. Almost immediately thereafter he felt a hot burning pain flash through his right thigh. I don’t think I want to look at that. His run quickly turned into a very fast moving fall.

  “Oh, shit!” Kiertzner cursed, still in his RP accent. Rushing, himself, he reached Lox about a quarter of a second after he’d nosed into the ground.

  No time for a fireman’s carry, thought the Brit, before grabbing Lox by his combat harness and simply dragging him along the ground. Kiertzner ran with his own torso almost horizontal. This was a good thing, as bullets still cracked the air around both of them, even as others brought down a shower of vegetable matter from the trees, above.

  If I get shot in the ass, I’ll never hear the, no pun intended, end of it.

  Reaching the boat, Kiertzner cut left to bring Lox’s body perpendicular to the edge of the ramp. Then he just rolled him over and in, before practically diving in himself.

  The informal command, “Unass the bloody AO,” sounds funnier in received pronunciation.

  Kirkpatrick, head above the wheelhouse, had his own crew push and prod the freed slaves forward, toward the ramp. Besides his own, lightly armored, station, it was the best protected, the thickest, steel aboard. Moreover, its height provided more cover for more of the well deck, while pulling straight away, than any other part of the boat.

  The machine gun on his starboard side spoke, with its ponderous, heavy, thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk. Half a second later its twin to port joined in.

  “We just might make this,” he said to no one in particular. “It does a body good when you can do some good in the world. Even when it’s not really your job.”

  Enraged beyond measure, but not beyond reason, Janail crept on his belly up to the crest of the steep slope from which his property had been stolen. A few of his men, the stouter hearts, joined him to either side. The rest, more demoralized at the loss of the slave women than frightened of the machine guns, hung back. What’s the use? Allah has turned his face from us.

  Being an atheist, Janail was quite unimpressed with the notion of divine favor or disfavor. It was a superstition to be used by the clever, no more.

  From some bushes which had, so far, kept him out of the machine gunners’ view, he pushed his rifle out, seating it against his shoulder. He couldn’t be sure what chain of events had led him to this, not in any detail. He thought, though, that the man who steered the boat with his head stuck about the little square in back was as much to blame as anyone he could find right now. He lined up his sights on the head, for the moment turned away from him and shielded by a helmet that, Janail suspected, his bullet would not penetrate.

  The head turned; Janail fired.

  It came to Kiertzner on the boat ride back, while sitting to one side of the wheelhouse. He was looking at Mahmood. He was sure he’d seen him before, but where . . . ?

  He’d helped the crew remove Kirkpatrick’s body from the wheelhouse and lay it out in the well deck, to make room for one of the other crew to steer. They’d been careful to leave the coxswain’s helmet on to keep his brains from flowing onto the deck. Some Filipino women had gathered there, in a loose oval around the body, weeping and keening. No, they hadn’t known even so much as Kirkpatrick’s name. But they were a gracious and grateful people, in the main, and felt that no man who had had a part in delivering them from slavery should go unmourned.

  He’d heard similar sounds before, of course, at other men’s funerals, in all corners of the former British Empire, wherever Great Britain still felt it had an interest. Among those places was Pakistan.

  Kiertzner looked very intently at Mahmood’s face. Aha! Gotcha, ya bastard.

  Come on in, thought Simon, waiting hidden in the bushes as the Harrikat probed cautiously forward. Come on in, you bastards; the water’s fine.

  The RPV, before it left to refuel, had told him they were coming. A quick look at the map . . . a little intuition for just how the lay of the land would direct them . . . and here I am, with a full platoon, in a shallow C, two dozen claymores, three Pechenegs, and them not having a clue.

  The claymores had been daisy chained on site, using det cord, with only the end mines primed with wire. Simon held both clackers, one in each hand. If one failed; the other would work.

  Firing burst out in the distance well behind Simon, a combination, he thought, of small arms and heavier machine guns. Someone among the Harrikat to his front shouted something, which shout was repeated up and down the line. Whatever caused it, they threw caution to the winds, and surged forward, maybe fifty-five or sixty of them.

  Smiling, Simon squeezed the clackers. A tsunami wave of pellets rolled outward, propelled on the blast wave of the explosives. Like light trees and buildings caught at the front of a tsunami, the leading—and more than a few of the following—Harrikat were simply bowled over and washed under.

  And then the machine guns and rifles kicked in.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “I’m Spartacus!”

  —Tony Curtis, in Spartacus

  MV Richard Bland, east of Caban Island

  Mr. Ayala was still unconscious. Even so, under the care of TIC Chick and one of the humanitarian doctors, he was improving. Whether he’d make it or not was still on the iffy side, but that iffy needle was slowly edging over toward, “Yes.”

  “I’ll better my previous offer,” Paloma Ayala said. “Half a million for every one of the filthy, butchering swine you bring me over sixty.”

  Welch shook his head. “No, Ma’am. That’s very generous, of course”—and I am so going to take a
massive amount of shit back at regiment for losing one of our only two helicopter gunships, at about fifteen or twenty million a copy to replace—“but a deal’s a deal. We’ll bring you all we can capture for the price you previously offered. Matter of fact, Captains Stocker and Warrington are still on the island, aided and guided by the aircraft, hunting down the last of them now. I’m afraid we’ve killed most of them already.”

  Mrs. Ayala tsked with disappointment, then brushed that aside, saying, “I’ve sent for some of my own people to join me by boat to help me deal with the ones you present me.”

  “Your people?” Terry asked.

  “Well . . . not technically,” Mrs. Ayala admitted with a scrunch of her aged, but still nigh perfect, nose. “Technically, they’re a company of Philippine Marines. But their colonel has been on my . . . our payroll for many, many years. They’ll do what I want done.”

  Terry shrugged. “That’s up to you, ma’am. There is one thing, though.”

  “Yes?” She couldn’t help sounding suspicious. She’d never had a good reason to trust anyone but her husband, not even her own children.

  “How are your connections with the Philippine government and general staff?”

  Madame laughed.

  A video camera recorded as Daoud screamed from the electricity coursing through his body. Before the current jolt, he’d simply moaned, from the set of vice grips tightened around his left testicle.

  Lox, seated, leg heavily bandaged over his sewn-up wound, supervised some of the Marehan in the process. None of them, barring Adam and Labaan, had ever so much as seen a science fiction book. But, by God, they knew how to inflict pain. Moreover, they’d all asked to join. After all, they’d lost their old homes and needed a new one. This was part of the price of joining.