Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  Then, too, it might have been the funeral march Balbahadur was playing on his pipes that was the final straw.

  Sergeant Feeney didn’t care. Though his taste in women was of the “one hole’s as good as another” variety, as far as he was concerned she was a lot closer in moral importance to jelly than to human. He applied a boot, perhaps a little harder than was strictly necessary, propelling her out onto the deck, face first.

  Pearson had a modicum of his crew, all that weren’t needed for other duties, standing by, in ranks. The few soldiers and airmen present just sort of milled about, until Warrington called, “Fall in.”

  “Get up, cunt,” Feeney said, his voice cutting into her like a serrated knife, “or I’ll kick you all the way to the gangway.”

  Sobbing loudly, with snot running down her face and across her mouth, then dripping from her chin, Jennifer rose to all fours, then to her knees. She recognized no one aboard, except for the two, Pearson and Warrington, who had sentenced her to death. Pearson was the closer of the two.

  Whence the strength came, Jennifer was not quite sure. But wherever it came from, she found it. She propelled herself forward, from knees to feet, then pushed her feet into a near blur, racing for Pearson. Her run, and the jiggling of her jowls, caused runny snot to fly from her chin in all directions.

  At the vessel’s master, she fell to her knees again, wrapped both arms tightly around his thighs, and begged, “Please don’t throw me overboard. I’ll do anything. I’ll sign anything. I’ll be your ship’s slave. But don’t kill me.”

  “Major Warrington?” Pearson called out, though the other was a bare twenty feet away.

  “Captain?” Silly custom.

  “I believe this person has requested the hospitality of my ship. She promises to be a good girl—isn’t that right, madam?—if we just refrain from granting her request of only a few minutes ago. I have my doubts that she can be trusted. Will you take responsibility for her?”

  “Jeez, Captain, I dunno . . . ”

  That last burst of strength had been all Duke had. She crawled the 20 feet to Warrington, clasping him around the ankles, still begging.

  Warrington sighed, loudly and impatiently. That was for her benefit.

  “Puh . . . puh . . . puh . . . puhleeze?”

  He sighed again. “Oh, very well. But this is your very last chance to behave.

  “Sergeant Hallinan?”

  “Sir!”

  “Take this woman to . . . oh, the clerk’s office will do, I suppose. Have her write out, in her own hand, a request to be permitted to stay aboard ship and her appreciation for our making room for her, even though we can’t bring her to port yet.” Warrington mused for a moment, then added, “Oh, and an earnest desire to help us in our good work, in any capacity for which we find her suitable.”

  Hmmm . . . harpoon practice, maybe.

  “Sir!” Hallinan broke ranks and walked over, then helped Duke to her feet. “Come on, ma’am, I’ll help you to the clerk’s place.”

  “Th . . . th . . . th . . . tha..a . . . a..ank you.”

  “Sergeant Feeney?”

  “Sir.” The sergeant sounded vaguely disappointed.

  “Go get another one.”

  “Sir!”

  “Are we going to have to pull this fucking charade with all fifty?” Pearson asked. “It’ll take hours, maybe even days, if we start having to drag them all the way. I’m a busy man.”

  “Nah,” Warrington replied. “Relax. Another half dozen or so and I’ll have the acting sergeant major ask generally if there is anyone who doesn’t want to walk the plank. They’ll all take the offer; depend on it.”

  “And what if one of them refuses to back down?”

  Warrington looked over the stern, contemplatively. “Then the sharks get a free meal. But it’s not very likely. You very rarely have to carry through on a threat when it’s really obvious that you can and will.”

  MV Richard Bland, Sunda Strait

  Though it was a bit out of the way, and more than a bit more treacherous to navigate, Pearson had chosen the Sunda Strait, rather than the Straits of Malacca, to make Bland’s passage into the waters around Malaysia. It had been a close call. There were still some very hungry pirates infesting both passages, but the Indonesian Navy did a rather better job controlling them in the Sunda Strait, which was much closer to the capital of Jakarta. In some ways, the world’s current economic circumstances helped there; Indonesia no longer had the money to pay for running and maintaining big, flashy, and essentially useless major warships. They had kept their corvettes and patrol boats, as well as a couple of the newer and more economical Dutch-built Sigma Class frigates. These were, in every way, more suitable to Indonesia’s real security problems.

  Of course, there were pirates and then there were pirates. The Indonesian government didn’t object to merchant vessels being armed, not anymore. Even the blue hulled megayacht following the Bland had obvious armed guards fore and aft, as well as along the sides.

  Still, Indonesia might have objected to a de facto assault carrier traveling its waters without declaring itself as such. Fortunately, to object the government had to know. To know, their own inspecting officials would have to tell them. To tell them, the inspecting officials would have had to feel that the bribes offered to keep their noses out of the hold were insulting.

  Captain Pearson never gratuitously insulted anybody, and, hence, made sure that those officials’ unofficial gratuities were adequate, plus a little . . . all in the interests of international chumship, freedom of the seas, and recognition of the very fine job done by Indonesia’s gallant navy—where fine job was partially defined by several score crosses on Sumatra’s coast, to the north, almost all of which bore the cold body of a pirate who had died, oh, a very hard death.

  It had become a rather hard world. That was, in fact, why many people had turned to piracy. That was also why many others had turned to more traditional methods to combat piracy.

  Sweeping the southern tip of Sumatra with a pair of very powerful binoculars, Pearson muttered, “Damn, that’s a hard way to go. Two of those poor bastards are still writhing. Oh, well, so far as I know, Sura Five of the Koran doesn’t require breaking the legs after three days.”

  Hmmm . . . there’s a lesson there, I think.

  Feeney stood almost unblinking and very nearly motionless in front of the container the humanitarians had been placed in for the passage. It just wouldn’t do to have one of them find his or her way to the superstructure and drive up the bribe required by the Indonesians. Not even the doctors and RN’s, who had been given almost the run of the ship after their enthusiastic—where “enthusiastic” meant scared shitless—conversion to the cause. They were scared shitless now, too, with that ogre standing watch over them.

  Feeney wasn’t precisely annoyed that he hadn’t been really allowed to make any of them walk the plank, but it wouldn’t be quite right to say he was happy with the officers’ charade either.

  Nothing showed on his face either way. In its way, that was more terrifying to the humanitarians than an expression of sheer hate would have been. Feeney simply didn’t see them as human beings and they knew it.

  Hallinan knew better than to startle Feeney when he was in the zone. From just to one side of a hatchway, behind a metal bulkhead—in other words, safe from a spraying shotgun—he coughed loudly enough to get Feeney’s attention.

  “What is it, Hallinan?” Feeney asked impatiently.

  Hallinan showed himself in the hatchway. It was safe enough now that Feeney knew who he was. Even so, he unconsciously kept himself a little to one side of the opening, just in case.

  “Skipper asked me to bring three of the aid workers up to the bridge. The Indonesians cast off a little while ago and there’s something he wants them to see. Also, he said that the others can be released to their assigned duties.”

  “Who does this skipper want?”

  “Duke, Zink, and Bourke.”

 
“Right.” Feeney pointed a thumb at the hatch. “You three. Go with Hallinan. Now!”

  Jennifer Duke turned a ghastly white at what she saw through Pearson’s binoculars. Bourke and Zink looked, if anything, worse. And Zink, in particular, looked a likely enough candidate for vomiting that Pearson had had one of his bridge crew guide him to stand over a trash can.

  Duke couldn’t stand to look very long. She pulled the glasses from her eyes and asked, meekly, “Why did you want me to see that, Captain?”

  “Oh,” Pearson replied, “I just thought it might help you understand the world as it has become, Ms. Duke. Being kidnapped and almost sold as slaves didn’t seem to help but, then . . . humanitarians wouldn’t feel their own pain and fear as well as someone else’s, would they?”

  “I’m sorry for those men . . . ” she began, before the captain cut her off.

  “Why? You should feel sorry for their victims, for the raided villages and the girls from those villages kidnapped, raped, and sold at public auction. You should feel sorry for the boatloads of people trying to get away from starvation in their homelands, caught on the high seas, robbed, and killed. Except, of course, for the young girls, who join their village sisters on the auction block.”

  “But that . . . that atrocity. No crime should . . . ”

  Again the captain cut her off. “Should and ought are mere meaningless fantasies, Ms. Duke. ‘Is’ and ‘real’ and ‘works’ are what matter. I suppose you can’t quite see that.

  “No matter, Ms. Duke, what you see or don’t. It’s become that kind of world. Best ask yourself why?”

  Warrington entered the bridge, saying, “No more time for fun and games with the tranzis, Skipper. Terry just sent us the final op order. There aren’t a lot of changes from the preliminary, but we’ve still got some work to do.”

  “What kind of changes are there?” Pearson asked.

  “For the navy and air, nothing, really. For the ground . . . well, apparently Terry lost half of the team he had with him. And that’s a whole other story, one we don’t know the ending to. I’ll fill you in later.”

  MV Richard Bland, Celebes Sea

  A full dress rehearsal just wasn’t possible aboard ship. This handicap was mitigated, at least partially, by the effective—if general—full dress rehearsal they’d done for Bajuni. Thus, while they couldn’t go through every planned step on actual ground, they did have the kinks worked out of close air support, using the gunships, loading the landing craft, slinging it and the armored cars over the side, dusting off the wounded, etc.

  And that’s a lot better than nothing, Warrington thought, looking over the leaders as they moved counters on a sand table constructed on the mess deck. It was probably worth even what Bajuni cost us, not even counting the medicines we grabbed.

  Two toy gunships circled on wires attached to platforms over a very accurate scale model of the island where Lucio Ayala was being held. Below them, several green toy soldiers stood, plastic faces toward the north.

  Though a lower rating, Kirkpatrick, the coxswain of the landing craft, had a big part in the sand table rehearsal, as he was going to have a big part in the operation. It might fairly be said that, without him, nothing was going to happen.

  Reaching down, he moved the toy LCM representing his craft, to the shore of the target island.

  “I am ashore,” he announced. With a flick of a finger, the toy’s ramp dropped.

  Immediately the chief of the armored car section reached down to the toy LCM and moved from it to the shore the two models of Elands. “De armored car section has debarked.” He then moved the toys to the right, as he faced the scale model island. “We’s turning to de right, to cover de unloading of de troops.”

  Stocker’s turn came. Setting a black painted toy soldier ashore, he said, “Company headquarters has debarked and established itself fifty meters inland from the landing beach.”

  The new First Platoon leader, Moore having moved up to take over the company first shirt slot, vice Kiertzner, placed a toy soldier, red colored, to the right of Stocker’s, hard against the model island’s “shore.” “First platoon is ashore and moving north . . . ”

  Yep, better than nothing, Warrington thought.

  “Second Platoon is falling in to the left of first . . . I am bringing the landing craft back to the Bland . . . We have reloaded . . . We are at the beach . . . De mortars . . . guns up . . . T’ird Platoon, droppin’ off six shells per man wid de mortars, then swinging right . . .”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  For when the gallows is high,

  your journey is shorter to Heaven . . .

  —William Maher,

  “The Night Before Larry was Stretched,”

  Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

  Republic of the Philippines

  Aida had been asked to stand by; she had a lot more experience in this kind of thing than did anyone in Welch’s command. She sat, silent and listening, nearby, with a pad of paper and a pen to hand. She had no idea whatsoever about the girl imprisoned below.

  “I need more time,” Terry said into the cell phone. The phone’s address panel said, “Benson.” “The banks are being difficult. Don’t hurt my people, just give me a few days.”

  Diwata’s voice was hard and pitiless. If there was any soft and yielding femininity in it, it was hidden under a layer of iron . . . cold iron. “I gave you enough time,” she said. “I warned you what would happen if our demands weren’t met. Your time is up. So is the time for one of your people.

  “In about an hour, if you’re curious, you can go to uglystuff dot com and see for yourself.

  “Now call me again when you have the money. In another week, you can check that site again to see why there are only two of your people left, and why the price for those two remains four million dollars.”

  “Jesus! Wait . . . wait . . . ” The phone was dead.

  TCS Headquarters, Tondo, Manila, Republic of the Philippines

  There were half a dozen small cages, just big enough for a short man to lie down in, not big enough to sit or stand, in the basement. They were suitable for animals, not for men. Two were empty. The other four held Benson, Perez, Zimmerman, and Washington.

  Diwata looked over the supine and cramped figures in the cages, judging, weighing. Let’s see . . . Terry sounded like a whiteass. He might not care about losing the hispanic or the black. And the “sarge” is probably the most important. He might not pay at all for the others. So . . . it’s . . .

  “Take that one,” she said, pointing at Zimmerman.

  Zimmerman fought back, kicking at the hands reaching inside the cage for him. He was by no means a weakling, either. Eventually, though, Crisanto had had enough. Pushing a cattle prod through the mesh of the cage, he shocked Zimmerman senseless, while another man got a rope around one ankle. Then, their victim trembling from the electric shock, they dragged him by his ankle out onto the bare concrete floor.

  Benson called out, “No, take me.” Perez and Washington swore in every language they knew between them. The kidnappers ignored them all.

  “I’m tired of the trouble these fucking Kanos cost me,” Crisanto announced. “Tie the motherfucker’s hands behind him. Then beat the shit out of him. Just don’t kill him or knock him unconscious. He needs to be awake to do his little dance for the camera.”

  Though her face remained hard and stiff, Diwata smiled inside. The worse he looks the better the threat. So long as he can still dance.

  After fifteen minutes or so she decided, “Enough. Get on with it. Oh, and take his clothes. There are a few details to this his friends ought to see.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” her ex-Philippine Marine said, drawing his knife to cut away the shirt from the bound hands.

  Beaten half to a pulp or not, Zimmerman began to struggle again as soon as he saw the rope and its menacing noose, dangling from a pipe overhead. It didn’t matter; Crisanto, with a fair degree of training, himself, twisted one of Zimmerma
n’s hands, bending his wrist, in a “come-along,” then marched him to the rope. This was slipped over the victim’s head, despite every effort on his part to twist out of the way.

  Crisanto released the hand then, reaching up to tighten the noose. This wasn’t easy; he’d tied the noose himself and he’d tied it tight. Once the noose was not quite snug about the neck, with the knot just under the left side of the jaw, in front of Zimmerman’s ear, Crisanto backed off. He directed his followers, “Get on the rope.”

  Zimmerman thought of a line he’d read once, When you’re going to die, anyway, style counts. Spitting a bloody gob onto the concrete floor, he said, “cocksuckers.” Then he began to sing an old, old song. He’d never hated Filipinos, or any brown folk, until this minute. But, this minute, he sang, “Damn, damn, damn . . . ”

  Diwata, who had followed the execution party at a safe distance snapped her fingers at a man standing with a home video camera. The light on the camera said it was recording.

  She snapped them again at Crisanto. He and his crew began to haul on the rope. Zimmerman had just gotten to, “ . . . with a Krag,” when he felt the hempen cord bite into his neck and the ground fall away from his toes.

  One of the oddities of various reforms to capital punishment, exacted around the western world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, was that the reforms—outside of outright prohibition—were always presented as a more merciful, less painful form of killing, but always had as their real objective the sparing of the witnesses from sights more unpleasant than strictly necessary. Thus, for example, hanging—which, properly done, killed instantly—gave way to gas, which could take quite a while, to electricity, which basically cooked the victim, and ultimately to lethal injection. Some of the cocktails used in lethal injection caused the victim to suffocate slowly, over a period of ten or twelve minutes. But, since it appeared less painful, since the slowly suffocating victim couldn’t call out for help, and since that appearance spared the witnesses psychic pain, it was simply assumed to be less painful.