Sudden Threat

by A. J Tata

  McAllister patted Zachary on the back, grabbed his radio operator, and moved out.

  The news traveled through the company like a lit fuse. After talking with Buck on the radio, Zachary went back to his CP, lay down, and went to sleep. Buck would have a meeting in the morning.

  Looking at the letters from Riley, oddly enough, he thought of his brother, Matt, wondering where he could be. Sure would be nice to get him in here to help us out, Zach thought to himself.

  Where can he be?

  The thought slipped away from him though, as he spiraled into a much-needed sleep.

  CHAPTER 70

  Near Fort Magsaysay, Luzon Island, Philippines

  It had been twenty-four hours since Rathburn had been snatched from their cell, and Matt wondered if he would ever see the man again. Maybe Mick Jagger had saved him, who could tell?

  “You’re sure you never saw Zachary?” Matt said, stepping toward Barefoot.

  “Yes, for the tenth time. I got there and the place was vacant. Looked like a hell of a firefight had taken place, though. Spent ammo everywhere. Bloodstains. No bodies. It was weird. I started snooping around the barracks and got waylaid by a bunch of little zipperheads,” Barefoot said.

  “Roger,” Matt replied, dismayed. For twenty-four hours they had tried breaking the door, picking the lock, and screaming to get a guard, but it appeared they were all alone.

  “Wait, I hear something,” Barefoot said, holding up his hand.

  The outer lock rattled, and the door opened, casting a bright yellow sunlit square across the green slime on the floor. Rathburn’s body fell with a thud, his head smacking the wet concrete.

  Matt slipped behind the door while Barefoot stood in the middle of the small cell. Sturgeon was reaching into his boot for a Velcro-pocketed knife that his captors had overlooked as he squatted in the other corner. They had been over this as many times as Matt had asked Barefoot about Zachary.

  “You all go next, Joe. Let’s go,” a different Filipino voice said.

  Matt moved closer to the door, which began to open slowly, casting a brighter spotlight onto Rathburn’s body like some eerie floor show.

  “Hey, Joe! Time to go!” the eerie voice called out again. Matt saw one shadow fall atop Rathburn’s body. Then another. They both appeared to have something in their hands.

  The first guard stuck his head around the corner of the door, unable to see in the darkness.

  “Hey, Joe!” he screamed. “Where Matt Garrett? You number one customer today!”

  Matt stood slowly and rapidly wrapped his belt around the short Filipino’s neck, pulling the ends in opposite directions.

  An errant shot escaped from the Chinese pistol, ricocheting off the wall and leaving a spark in its trail. The second guard responded immediately, pulling at Matt’s arm.

  Matt punched the guard in the face and heard the clank of pistol metal striking the floor. Sturgeon moved on cue stood from his crouched position.

  Matt snapped the neck of the first guard as Sturgeon leapt across the splash of light that separated him from the fight and drove the knife into the back of the second guard.

  The guard, shorter than Matt, turned toward him as Matt pulled the pistol from the man he had just strangled, placed it against the advancing guard’s neck, and fired two bullets.

  “Let’s haul ass,” Matt said, looking at the two dead Filipinos lying next to Rathburn’s body in the box of light that framed the bodies like a large coffin. He stripped the Filipinos of weapons, handed Jack a Chinese Type 67 pistol, and said, “C’mon” to Barefoot, who followed.

  For the first time in days, Matt saw daylight as they exited the structure. They had been in the basement of a small adobe building. Leaving the cell, they found themselves surrounded by a high wall and a dirt ceiling, as if the cell had been cut into the ground. They were facing a stairwell carved into the dirt that led to the open skies. Matt carefully ascended the steps, then hesitated as the full brightness of the morning sun entered his dilated pupils.

  He looked back at Jack, who was holding his own hand, almost doubled over in pain. Matt pulled a rag from his pocket and wrapped it around Jack’s hand.

  “I don’t see anyone, but it’s full daylight so we’re gonna have to run. There’s a truck about twenty meters to the right. It’s running for some reason. Our best bet is to get in that mother and go.”

  Matt stopped as they were nearing the pickup truck and said, “Rathburn. Never leave a fallen comrade.” He ran back down the stairwell and reemerged moments later with Rathburn’s body slung over his back in a fireman’s carry. It was the right thing to do.

  “Let’s go,” Matt said. The three men ran across the hardstand to an olive drab pickup truck. Matt flipped Rathburn’s body into the back as Sturgeon opened the passenger door for Barefoot, who slid across the torn cloth bench seat. Matt quickly slammed the automatic gear level into drive and sped along the only road he could see.

  The sun was to their backs, so he knew they were heading west if it was morning. To his front was flat or rolling countryside. He passed a series of buildings and saw a sign that read fort magsaysay. He sped past a gate onto a cement road that led off the gentle slopes onto a plain. It was an area of rice paddies, some terraced into the hills behind them and others lying low beneath the flat, flooded ground.

  “What’s all that shit bouncing around in the back of the truck?” Matt asked, looking in the mirror. Barefoot turned and looked.

  “That’s my film and commo gear. Remember, I was supposed to do a satellite linkup and conduct a live interview of your brother?”

  “Zachary,” Matt whispered. “We’ve got to find my brother.”

  Matt maneuvered around the patches of drying rice that farmers had laid on the cement road. He felt the noose that had been around his neck since landing in Manila slacken just a bit. .

  His new mission: find Zachary … and they could join forces to fight their way out of there.

  CHAPTER 71

  Manila, Luzon Island, Philippines

  Takishi rode atop the bridge of the lead ship as it approached the port of Manila. He watched in the darkness as the captain adroitly maneuvered the large commercial tanker alongside the international port just south of the Pasig River delta. The pier was 150 meters wide and 450 meters long.

  Looking over his shoulder, he saw the huge rock outcropping of Corregidor Island, which guarded the mouth of Manila Bay. His countrymen had fought valiantly there. There would be no such fight again. American airborne forces would not come descending from the sky as they had almost sixty years ago to secure the mouth of the bay. He saw the second ship steaming past Corregidor and made a mental note that the other two should be docking at Subic about then. He wondered in amazement how his countrymen had developed such an awesome supertanker, and had actually converted ten of them to roll-on-roll-off military transport ships and even an eleventh to—well, he did not want to think about the Shimpu.

  The Shimpu was an entirely different matter altogether.

  Mizuzawa had made the decision to launch four ships, each carrying a nine-thousand-man Japanese combined arms division consisting of tank, infantry, and attack helicopter maneuver battalions after Talbosa had failed to cooperate on the three American hostages. He had planned to introduce force into the island of Luzon at some point in time, mostly for control purposes, but he believed that the situation could get out of hand rapidly if Talbosa turned on them. Control of the Philippines was absolutely vital to the remainder of the plan.

  Takishi had flown in his Shin Meiwa to Mindanao to find Commander Talbosa in a small thatch hut in Cateel, recovering from wounds received in combat.

  “When you told me about Garrett being in Magsaysay prison, I ordered them all executed,” Talbosa had told him. He had been shot and nearly fatally wounded. Only his familiarity with the Cateel area had allowed him to get to the beach, where some of the peasants had provided medical care and escorted him to Takishi’s airplane.
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br />   Takishi’s medical team had patched up Talbosa during the flight, and Takishi had a security team take Talbosa to the Presidential Palace, placing him “in charge.”

  “You will respond to my every order, do you understand?” Takishi demanded.

  Talbosa gave Takishi a long look and nodded. Weak from being wounded, he walked quietly into the Presidential Palace, where he was greeted by fellow warriors, who had executed their portion of the coup expertly.

  “I thought I was close to your Matt Garrett until you told me where he was,” Talbosa said.

  Takishi had looked at the weakened warrior and said, “Slippery son of a bitch.” Stone had contacted Takishi too late for either saving Keith Richards, Rathburn, or killing Matt Garrett. Takishi shook his head at the irony. There were minute degrees between life and death. If only he had gotten the word a day or two earlier, he could have saved his friend, Rathburn, and eliminated a major thorn in the side of the Rolling Stones, Matt Garrett. For the first time a jolt of sadness coursed through him as he realized his Harvard classmate, Bart, was dead … because of him.

  After dropping Talbosa in Manila, he had flown to the location of the oil tankers north of Luzon in the Philippine Sea, landing his seaplane amidst the collection of ships. There he boarded the command and control ship, Ozawa, and radioed the prime minister with the news about the death of Rathburn.

  Mizuzawa reacted sharply, fearing American intervention for the sake of revenge if nothing else. He had been pleased with the American president’s speech. They had guessed right. The Americans were focused on Iraq and stymied by an unexpected variable, the Philippines, for which they had no plan.

  But protecting American lives was another issue. Would the Americans respond with military force and try to restore the democracy, using the deaths of a dignitary and the women as an excuse? It was possible. He was not willing to take the chance. They had been one step ahead of the Rolling Stones and needed to act before the Americans could foil their gambit.

  If they could move immediately, gain a military foothold on Luzon, they would have checkmated the Americans, once again. They would appeal to the United Nations for a response to the situation. Mizuzawa knew the United Nations would not do anything about the revolution in the Philippines; they never did anything meaningful anyway.

  Takishi felt the ship nudge the side of the cement pier. There was no activity in the large port area. The fighting had served to halt most of the commercial shipping. What was in the docks at the time of the revolution, the peasants had pilfered. The insurgents had not yet organized the Philippine naval vessels, though they had sunk several of the ships during the revolt. A few Corvette attack boats were still operational, yet were of no use to Talbosa until he could train some men how to operate them.

  It was all coming together smoothly Takishi thought, and he sent Mick Jagger a text message.

  we are achieving satisfaction.

  Stone did not need to know just yet that the Japanese were attacking the island of Luzon with the equivalent of four infantry divisions, about the same size force that the U.S. was planning on using in Iraq. Charlie Watts had played his part for the Rolling Stones, but his role had always been a means to an end, and he was going solo.

  Takishi’s highest priorities were to his country and his prime minister.

  While Mick Jagger had the money and the ideas about how to stoke the dying embers of nationalism around the globe in order to crush rampant Islamic fascism, his other contact in the American government was equally influential.

  And on that thought, he sent a text to that individual:

  tanks are rolling.

  It was fun to be a chess piece and control the board. Takishi found it rather easy to out-maneuver the thinly veiled machinations of the Americans.

  Momentarily he received a text in return:

  beautiful.

  Then almost immediately after the first he received another:

  perfect.

  He heard the captain tell him they were prepared to unload the ship. He stepped down from the bridge, and heard the first Model 90 tank roar to life.

  This will be easy.

  CHAPTER 72

  Pentagon, Washington, DC

  It was a close call, letting the Japanese move ships into the harbor.

  Sewell looked at Stone. Meredith was sitting next to him. She was distraught, fighting the notion that Matt might be dead and that she might have sent him to his death in that airplane.

  They sat in the National Military Command Center. CNN played on a large screen to their front. The Joint Chiefs of Staff flanked them. Each was wearing a headset that tuned him in to the operations of their respective services. In actuality, the commander of Pacific Command in Hawaii was orchestrating the operation through his joint task force commander, Admiral Dave Jennings, who was on the USS Carl Vinson command and control ship in the Celebes Sea.

  The service secretaries, though, kept the SecDef up to date on force provider movements in order to allow the war fighters to do their job unimpeded.

  Frank Lantini was updating them from his CIA office in Langley, Virginia, over video teleconference.

  Lantini said, “Two oil tankers have passed Corregidor and are currently unloading tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, attack helicopters, trucks, jeeps, and large numbers of personnel. There appears to be a crew for every weapon system. Two others have entered Subic Bay Naval Base and are conducting similar unloading activities.”

  “Frank, how did we miss hundreds, if not thousands, of Japanese soldiers getting on these ships in Japan?” Stone asked Lantini.

  Lantini stared at the video camera a moment and then said, “Turns out they loaded in Suruga Bay at night. There’s a Japanese training area just north of there called Gotenba in the Shizuoka Prefecture. They supposedly had some big exercise there, Yama Sakura, something like that, in January and just kept mobilizing troops in the wake of Nine-eleven under the guise of anti-terror training. We’ve got information that during that time they infiltrated from the training area onto troop transports that took them out to these ships.” He paused a moment, then volleyed back to Stone. “We missed it because we were watching Taiwan and China.”

  Stone shook his head. Kaitachi, that bastard.

  “We’ve got two SEAL teams checking those ships out,” General Sewell said, bringing the discussion back to the point. “Both are using SCUBA gear, swimming freely around the ships, inspecting hull dimensions and giving us spot reports on the unloading operations. They’re ready to act when we are. The Rangers are ready as well.”

  General Rolfing, the Marine commandant, said, “Our Marine expeditionary force is now three full brigades and is positioned to the south of Manila Bay, well offshore. They’re ready now also.”

  General McNulty’s Ninetieth Fighter Squadron from Guam was on standby alert with F-15s, A-10s, and F-16s. The B-52s from Diego Garcia were also ready.

  “Andersen is so packed with aircraft and people, you couldn’t land a glider, so let’s be reasonable here,” McNulty said. “I don’t think we can fit any more troops in this corner of the world.”

  This is exactly what we’re looking for, Stone thought.

  The Army chief of staff, General Wilson, said, “The lead battalion of the rapid deployment brigade from the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division has landed safely and undetected, we believe, on the island of Luzon, thanks to some Air Force Pave Low helicopters and MC-130 Combat Talons. They have linked up with the company commander there and are prepared to continue operations.”

  “We’re all relieved that the young commander is no longer alone, but what about the absence of the Special Forces team in Mindanao. Any word?” Stone asked.

  “They have not communicated for over two days. No change,” Sewell said.

  “What kind of force are we showing near Korea, Admiral?” Stone asked Admiral Simmons, the Chief of Naval Operations.

  “Sir, we’ve got an entire carrier battle group steaming there now.”r />
  “Good. The president has a meeting with the Japanese ambassador in an hour. I’ll give him the information.”

  “What did he say about the hostages?” Murphy asked. Meredith lifted her head.

  “They weren’t on the last plane. We’ve checked the three thousand names over and over. Rathburn and the other two aren’t on any of the manifests.”

  “Could they have used other names?” Meredith asked, knowing the answer.

  “They could, but probably not. Someone would have recognized them,” Stone said.

  The evacuation procedures had gone well. No other Americans who wanted to leave the islands were there except the hostages. Many chose to stay for a variety of reasons.

  Stone walked with Meredith the short distance back to his office and closed the door behind them.

  “Meredith,” he began, “I know you’re worried about Bart and your friend, Mark—”

  “Matt, sir.”

  “Yes, of course, Matt. Anyway, I’ve got a meeting tonight at my home in McLean. I need you to come over and assist me with this thing if you’re free,” Stone said, looking out of his window.

  “Well, sure, I guess,” said Meredith. After all, how could she say no to the secretary of defense?

  CHAPTER 73

  “Now, would you accompany me to the president’s office again? I must brief him.”

  “Certainly, sir. Do I need to prepare notes?”

  “No. I might need your brain, though. Ready?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said, looking down at her dress. She had bought two new dresses since she started reporting to the secretary of defense every day as a special assistant. Her official title was still as Rathburn’s assistant, but Stone had elevated her status temporarily for the crisis.

  Stone enjoyed rubbing legs with Meredith again in the back of the staff car on the short trip to the White House.