Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  “Thanks, gentlemen,” Kirkpatrick heard, as the man’s feet touched the sloshing steel deck. Yep, the Brit.

  He saw the lieutenant—What was the boy’s name? Oh, yeah; Blackmore—turn and put his attention to helping the next boarder safely down off the net. The boat’s crew assisted. Satisfied, the coxswain put all of his attention into keeping the LCM as flush as possible against the hull of the Bland. It wasn’t easy, what with the waves coming from bow on.

  Bajuni, former Federation of Sharia Courts, Africa

  The firing was getting closer now, Adam could hear, a tide of fire coming in. Though it’s coming from everywhere but the sea. My troops are beginning to abandon me, I think. I can’t blame them; after all, I’m abandoning them. Not that I have any choice, not if I’m going to save my own family.

  “There was a time in Europe, an event, long, long ago, where somebody invited in every neighboring tribe to exterminate a tribe he didn’t have time or inclination to obliterate himself. What was that, Labaan?”

  “Caesar, with the Eburones,” the older and better educated man said. “But this isn’t the same. These scavengers weren’t invited by anybody.”

  “I suppose not,” Adam conceded. “But they’re coming in the same way, anyway.”

  “They won’t come fast,” Labaan said. “Half the gold in the clan treasury has been scattered out, in little birdseed trails that lead to one another, with trip flares to make sure they see it. If they’re not already, they’ll be fighting among themselves soon.

  “But I do hope our rescuers get here in good time.”

  MV Richard Bland, Coast of Africa, off the city of Bajuni

  About half the passengers for the LCM were loaded when the wave struck. The ramped bow had ricocheted off the steel hull, leaving an angled gap between them. It only moved about a foot and a half, Kirkpatrick later recalled, but that was enough.

  In the funnel formed between the landing craft and the Bland, the wave raised itself higher than it would normally have been. This caused the LCM to roll slightly to starboard, even as it was pushed another foot or so away from the hull. The net, folded over the gunwale of the LCM, but with its bottom still in the water, was pulled by both the sea’s drag and the top, which was still attached to the mother ship. At the same time, the half dozen troops climbing down swung inward, pulling on the net enough that, with the various other tugs, it came completely free of the landing craft, unfurling into the water and swinging toward the ship.

  A soldier from C Company, a Guyanan, had one of his feet resting on the net, not far above the landing craft’s gunwale. The other foot was searching for purchase on a lower section. As the net unfurled from where it had been gathered, it fell with a whizzing sound, then hit, flat and wet, against the Bland’s hull. It slammed that soldier into the hull, knocking him half silly. Even so, he managed to keep his hands and the one foot on the net.

  Kirkpatrick reacted automatically to the surge, swinging the LCM back in. Unfortunately, in the way of waves, following the rise there was a dip. This made what would have been an economical shifting into just that little bit too much. The LCM, at full load displacing about sixty-four tons, slammed back against the Bland. The loose leg was caught and neatly severed.

  Knocked silly or not, the soldier screamed his agony and let go the net. He fell backwards. Had anyone been expecting any of this, they might have caught him . . . if they’d seen him. But, no, it was too quick and far too dark. No one was ready; no one moved quickly enough to catch the flailing, shrieking trooper. With the LCM bouncing off the mother ship again, a space opened up. Into that space the trooper fell, beginning to pinwheel, striking his helmeted head on the hull, pinwheeling the other way, and then making a single splash before disappearing under the waves.

  Simon didn’t know exactly what had happened, or to whom. But he dropped his rucksack and armor, began shedding other equipment, and then started to weave his way through the obstacle course of heavy equipment and men, toward the net.

  “What?” He shouted, over the roar of wind and engine and rising hubbub from the men. “Who?”

  Sergeant Balbahadur cupped one of his hands to speak into his officer’s ear. “One of the men, sir. Went down in between the ship and the boat. Lost. We don’t know who.”

  “Fuck!” Simon didn’t bother to strip off his shirt. He began climbing the gunwale, clearly intending to dive in for his lost trooper.

  Balbahadur dropped his pipes and tackled his officer to the sodden deck. “I said, sir, ‘lost.’ He’s gone, and there’s nothing to be done about it. By now, loaded as we are—as he was, he’s fifty or a hundred feet down. Lost, sir. Gone. Now carry on, sir.”

  Bajuni, former Federation of Sharia Courts, Africa

  A sudden firefight erupted to the southeast, too far away to be any of the thin—and ever thinning—line of defenders. Labaan laughed, pointing in the general direction of skyborne tracers.

  “Heh; money well spent, that was,” he chortled.

  Adam said, “I wonder if we couldn’t have bought them off with the gold?”

  Labaan shook his head. “We’d only have whet their appetites for more, and more, and finally still more. They’d never had stayed—”

  “Labaan!” called out one of the dozen remaining faithful security guards, this one sitting between a generator and a small satellite dish, his face lit by a laptop’s glow. “Message. They’re coming. Twenty minutes.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  There’s no point in being Irish if you don’t know

  that the world is going to break your heart, eventually.

  —Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

  Off Bajuni, former Federation of Sharia Courts, Africa

  Finally loaded and underway, the landing craft wasn’t so much plowing through the waves as wallowing in them, rocking from side to side in a beat just arrhythmic enough to set almost every nonsailor aboard to hurling chunks over the side or to the deck. Of course, crowded as they were, even if a suffering footsoldier intended to hurl onto the deck, as often as not the space was covered with the body of another troop. The boat reeked.

  That was perhaps the only advantage to the men from Second Battalion in the rubber boats trailing the LCM. In smaller craft, being tossed about more violently, those men were as sick as or sicker than the landing craft’s passengers. But they, at least, could be certain of being able to vomit over the side.

  Blackmore would have felt sick, even if the waves weren’t inducing most of the men to vomit over the side or, if slow or unlucky, or standing next to someone unlucky, on the deck. More or less. Simon had other cause to feel ill.

  Losing a man like that? Before we even pulled away from the ship? Jesus, what a waste. And I don’t know what unit he was from, what with all or parts of five platoons and sections aboard. The platoon leader, Sergeant Moore, hasn’t a clue yet, either. In any case, I’m not looking forward to explaining to either Warrington or Stocker what happened. Even if it wasn’t anybody’s fault.

  The only man aboard who had actually seen and understood what had happened was Kirkpatrick, the coxswain. And, even though at an intellectual level he understood what had happened and knew it was just one of those things, at an emotional level he was eaten up with guilt from the crown of his head to his waterlogged feet. Unlike most of the grunts, he wasn’t seasick; he was heartsick.

  Zigged when you should have zagged, dumbass . . . all your fault . . . that poor bastard . . . food for the fish . . . my fault . . . oh, God, all my fault . . . why, why, WHY couldn’t I have just held steady for a few seconds . . . fuckfuckfuck . . .

  Still, as Doctor Johnson said, there’s nothing like a sentence of death—even if only potential—to concentrate the mind. As the craft neared shore, both Simon and Kirkpatrick realized that they had more pressing issues than waste or personal guilt.

  Bajuni, former Federation of Sharia Courts, Africa

  The tenth ounce gold coins scattered about could only do so much. Whoever had b
een fighting over them scant minutes before; someone had apparently won. There’d been a few lesser skirmishes, but those had apparently settled quickly.

  Ashore, Labaan and one assistant strained to hear the approaching motors. So far, there was nothing.

  Or maybe, thought Labaan, we just can’t hear it over the other sounds.

  They had no high tech, barring only the old laptop and its appurtenances, left a few hundred meters behind. Certainly they had none of the night vision gear M Day’s troopers did. But they had a couple of things going for them. Neither Labaan nor his assistant were, strictly speaking, city boys, even if cities were not entirely strange to them. Having grown up outside of cities, and being, of late, in a city that was one in name only, both their hearing and their eyes were keen.

  The assistant, being younger, had the keener of both. He tapped Labaan and pointed out to sea. “There. Maybe a kilo and a half. I wouldn’t see it at all except that the waves are tossing them around so much.”

  Labaan nodded, not in agreement—he didn’t see a thing yet—but in understanding and trust. “Light the beacons,” he ordered.

  There it is, thought Kirkpatrick, swinging his wheel slightly to the starboard. To two of his crew, standing to either side, he ordered, “Standby on the fifties.” “Standby,” in this case, meant lock and load. Locking and loading their Degtyarev-built KORD machine guns meant lifting the feed tray covers and inspecting by touch, laying down the belt of ammunition, then reseating the covers, and jerking the charging handles rearward. Once the handles were released, the bolts slammed home with an audible clang.

  The troops in the well deck felt the craft change course slightly even over the rocking and pounding of the waves. A couple up by the ramp shouted back to the others that the beacons were in sight. The six men of the armored car crews bent to unbuckle their charges, pulling the releases to loosen the straps and then unhooking the ends from the shackles on the Elands. Then they climbed aboard, leaving the hatches open and their heads or heads and torsos sticking out above. The infantry all backed away as far as they could.

  Simon’s RTO, or radio telephone operator, tapped him with the handset. “It’s the ship,” he said.

  “Blackmore.” When there’s nobody else it could be, and the radios hop frequencies more than six thousand times a minute, things like code words and call signs become unnecessary to the point of silly.

  “Simon,” said Warrington over the radio, “the choppers just took off. They should be passing you in about a minute, minute and a half. They’ll contact you in the next forty-five seconds or so. The fixed wings are standing by. You secure something that will do for an airstrip and they can be there in about two minutes.

  “Have you figured out yet who you lost while boarding?”

  “Roger, roger, and no.”

  “Damn . . . all right. Too late to worry about it now. Until you get back, just concentrate on the mission.”

  “Roger.”

  The two gunships passed overhead, one to either side. They churned through the air, moving about four hundred meters past the shoreline, then split to search out the perimeter. In his own headset he heard first one pilot, then the other, confirm to Blackmore, “Few armed men, no more than expected. But there’s a serious knot of what look like women and kids. Low level fighting pretty much everywhere else.” The crews of the gunships were Russians but, after this many years in the regiment, their English was pretty good.

  “Roger,” Blackmore answered. “Keep moving. Keep low. They’re not supposed to have any MANPADS”—Man-portable Air Defense Systems, Stingers and Strelas—“but you never know.”

  “Roger.”

  The Old Port was defined by a thick, south-jutting peninsula, from the tip of which ran a west-southwest running breakwater. This peninsula, mostly bare with just some scrub and a couple of palm trees, passed the LCM to its left. Aiming for the eastern shoulder of the spit of land, Kirkpatrick throttled back as the craft neared shore, letting momentum and the waves carry it in for the most part. He felt the grinding of sand under the hull, slowing the craft. He waited until all forward motion was gone, then flipped the lever to drop the ramp. He gave a little more gas to the engines—well, diesel, technically—to keep his craft firmly hugging the shore.

  Grunts began spilling out the front, splitting into three files and the little knot of headquarters and the portage squad. One or two stopped briefly, bent over and painted the shore in dull vomit. More infantry, or technically special operators, from the rubber boats joined them. The HQ types, under their lieutenant, collected off to the right of the ramp—right, rather than starboard, since they were on solid ground now. The mortar section staggered to the left under the weight of their guns and a frightful amount of ammunition.

  As soon as the foot soldiers were out of the way, the Elands launched themselves forward, wheels initially spinning on the wet deck until friction had evaporated the seawater. Momentum, once gained, carried them bouncing over the lip of the well deck and onto the ramp. Momentum, gravity, and diesel saw them to the sand and rocks. At the shore they split up, one left, one right, inching forward while the turrets slowly traversed. Inside, the gunners’ eyes stayed glued to their sights, peering into the greenish images, looking for armed strangers with hostile intent.

  Two unarmed strangers with their hands up approached the headquarters cautiously.

  “You’re Labaan?” Blackmore asked.

  “Yes,” the African answered in accented but very clear English. “Cagle told me you would be Lieutenant Blackmore.”

  “I am. What’s with the group of women and children? I understood we were to evacuate only a few, but our aviation people tell me there’s a substantial number.”

  “The families of the few loyal men leaving with us,” Labaan said. “Did Cagle misunderstand?” he asked ingenuously.

  “I don’t know . . . wait a minute.” Blackmore made a gesture to his RTO, who passed over the handset.

  “Captain Warrington, Blackmore. We’ve got a much larger number of civvies than I was led to believe. What do you want me to do about them?”

  “Taking them is a condition of getting the medicine you need,” Labaan interrupted. “The medicines don’t go unless my chief goes. My chief won’t go without his wife and children. And his wife, the saucy bitch, won’t leave without the others.”

  “I think we have to take them,” Simon added, into the radio. He asked Labaan, “How many?”

  “About a hundred and twenty.”

  “Wait, over.”

  MV Richard Bland, Coast of Africa city of Bajuni, Africa

  Cagle shrugged. “He didn’t say a word about any others.”

  “Trying to pull a fast one?” Warrington asked.

  Shaking his head, Cagle answered, “Probably not; he’s not really the type, unless it’s his job to be sneaky. On the other hand, maybe it was his job. Even so, probably miscommunication.” But I’m going to have a few choice words with the fucker, anyway.

  “We can fit them,” said the captain. “And there’s plenty of food.”

  “There’ll be some dietary laws issues, I suppose,” said Cagle. “But we can figure something out on that.”

  “I could care less about all that shit,” Warrington said. “A lot more important and immediate is that we were supposed to get in, grab the meds and the few passengers we were expecting, and get out. One lift. This will take . . . what?” he asked Pearson.

  “The LCMs can handle eighty combat equipped troops. So one lift for all the extra passengers. Range is theoretically a hundred and thirty miles. Realistically, about two-thirds of that. Still, it’s only adding ten or twelve miles, so there’s plenty of fuel.”

  Warrington grimaced. “How do we unload them in the dark? We lost one of our own and he was trained for this shit.”

  “We can rig up a cargo net around a pallet and use a crane as an elevator. That’s too slow for equipped troops, at maybe a dozen men per lift, but we can probably stuff fo
rty or fifty women and kids in one lift. Add maybe twenty to thirty minutes to the problem.”

  “Right.” Warrington picked up the handset. He thought, “Order-counterorder-disorder.” How do I reduce the disorder?

  “Simon, go ahead and shunt the civvies into the LCM– all of them, at one time, and I don’t care if they have to breathe by the numbers. Your operational cycle is put in abeyance for the duration of one boatload of civvies. Everything else goes as planned, except establish a defensive perimeter, just in case.”

  “Already doing that, sir.”

  Unseen in the far distance, Warrington smiled. Stout lad.

  “I think we ought to launch the RPV,” Pearson said. “This crap is starting to get out of hand.”

  “No, Skipper,” Warrington said. “I’ve got two of everything else, and three of the Elands, one more than I need, so I don’t mind risking the loss of one. But I’ve only got the one RPV, so I can’t risk it.”

  “Your call,” Pearson conceded.

  Bajuni, former Federation of Sharia Courts, Africa

  Simon’s mind raced to formulate a plan to suit the change.

  “We’ll take your people,” he told Labaan. “Get them down here, quickly.”

  Labaan spoke a few words in the local language. His assistant went running off farther inland.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Simon asked, “how did that relief ship that provided the medicine get here?”