Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  Even with hanging, it was often assumed that the neck-breaking drop was more merciful than simply suspending the victim without any such drop. This, too, was false, or at least not necessarily true. A thin cord, as in the Austro-Hungarian pole-hanging method, for example, caused essentially instantaneous unconsciousness, by cutting off the blood supply to the brain. True death might take a while after that, but the hanged weren’t feeling anything. Oh, yes, the legs might kick and the body shudder and writhe, but that was all automatic and meant, basically, nothing. Still, it looked cruel, and that was what mattered.

  On the other hand, it was certainly possible for a suspension hanging to be very cruel indeed. Just tie the noose very tight, use a thick rope, make sure the knot is placed to give as much freedom to blood flow through the neck as possible, and hoist gently.

  Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

  Republic of the Philippines

  Nobody cried, they just weren’t that kind of men. But every man who watched the horrific drama play out on the monitor screen felt sick, and hopeless, and worthless, and helpless . . . and very, very hate-filled and angry.

  They didn’t swear or curse, none of them. Nobody vowed revenge; that was a given. M Day would repay this, with usury, if it took a hundred years. But they watched their comrade of years, Zimmerman, dance and kick and slowly turn blue as the noose tightened. They saw him lose bladder control, his penis jetting a stream of piss onto the concrete. Though he was turned toward the camera for most of his ordeal, they could tell when he lost sphincter control by the dark, runny lumps that ran down his legs and plopped to the floor.

  In the end, his swollen, blackened tongue jutting out from a gasping mouth, Zimmerman’s kicking and trembling ceased and all that was left was a lifeless body, twisting slowly in the air.

  The men couldn’t cry. Though few of them had ever given a thought to Andrew Jackson’s mother, all would have understood completely her words to a very young future Old Hickory: “Girls are for crying; boys are for fighting.”

  Aida could cry and, though she didn’t know the victim, she did, whimpering through her tears, “What a shitty world . . . poor, poor man . . . what a shitty, shitty world . . . ” She finished with, “Those are not my countrymen. They are not!”

  “The odd thing,” Graft finally said, “is that Zim was one of the nicer ones among us.”

  Terry Welch felt he ought to say something, anything, but no consoling words came. In the end, he gulped, took a few breaths, and settled for, “Excuse me, I need to go study a map.”

  Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

  Republic of the Philippines

  The doctor—that was all anyone on the island ever called him—wasn’t really a doctor. Oh, he’d begun medical school, right enough, at Manila Central. He’d even gotten through three of the required four years, with fair grades, too. Then—the doctor shook his head at his own foolishness—he’d gotten involved in a little local politics, of the Moro Liberation variety. One thing led to another and the other thing led to a bank robbery, in which he’d agreed to serve as a medic. The robbery had led to a police chase, a gun battle, and—

  Why did I ever get involved with that crap?

  He’d barely made if off of Luzon with his life. From there it had been several years with the Moro Liberation Front, then a spot of trouble (where trouble is defined as pissing off the head of movement and again having to flee for one’s life), then finally with the Harrikat. They’d been desperate for a medico, even one without a license. And, since he’d had to flee anyway, and they were willing to help . . .

  I should have stayed there. All the MLF would have done is killed me. They wouldn’t have put my soul at risk.

  The leader might be an atheist—the doctor suspected he was—but the doctor was emphatically not. That’s what had led him into trouble in the first place.

  Sitting on the dirt floor of the prisoner’s little shelter, the doctor glanced from the medical text he’d been searching through to his quivering patient.

  Poor old man’s life is hanging by a thread. Maybe I did the wrong thing by persuading Janail to leave off after the toe and two fingers. The reason I gave, that he’d never make five cuts if they did four, was probably true.

  Ayala moaned, delirious.

  “And, old man, that might have been better for you.”

  The doctor had the infections in Ayala’s foot and hand under control. That was a result of lots and lots of experience with dealing with jungle infections. The lungs were iffy, though. The doctor didn’t have access to even fairly low medical technology; he was about at the level of Hippocrates, diagnosing by inference. He’d tried two types of the highly limited store of antibiotics he had on hand. They hadn’t cured the almost cardboard like crackling the doctor could hear in Ayala’s lungs, but at least it hadn’t gotten any worse.

  It might even have gotten a little better. He is, after all, a tough old bird, however sick, or he’d have been dead by now.

  The lungs might be coming around or they might not. But that eighty-five year old heart? He’d had to administer CPR twice already, and he was still sure the old man had suffered some pretty severe ischemia.

  Lucky, or maybe unlucky, that I saved that bottle of nitro pills I never thought to see a use for.

  Alaya began a spasm of coughing. The doctor dropped his text, much less carefully than he should have, considering how nearly irreplaceable it was, and raced to his patient’s side, taking one knee beside what passed for a bed.

  The old man was breathing fast and shallowly. The doctor felt Ayala’s skin. Cool, but that might be the downswing from the pneumonia I’m pretty sure he has. Maybe another aspirin . . . but what if he starts bleeding again?

  That might kill him, the doctor thought. But if he’s having a heart attack it will kill him.

  PART IV:

  H Minus

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I hate mankind, for I think myself one

  of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

  —Joseph Baretti

  Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

  Republic of the Philippines

  Not far from the main house, Maricel, trussed up like a chicken and certain she was for the chop, lay on one side next to a small, linear open area she distantly understood to be a dirt airstrip. Welch stood above and beside her, saying nothing.

  She’d been left like that, on her side with no neck support, for the last half hour while a bunch of big strangers—nine or ten of them, she thought—busied themselves on all sides of the airstrip. None of them had said a word to her either, not even the one she recognized, Malone. There also seemed to be a couple of women, little ones, smaller than her, standing by.

  For the most part, she couldn’t see what the men were doing. She could see that lights had begun to appear along what she guessed were the edges of the strip. In the distant glow of those lights, barely, she made out one man—maybe the one who hurt me—hunched over something or other.

  Oh, God, please, please don’t let them kill me. Please.

  Maricel was pretty sure they were going to take her up in a plane and then throw her out, maybe over land, maybe over water.

  Water, she decided. Why tie my feet, too, unless they want me to drown? She began to cry, until the big Kano ordered her, “Shut up.”

  The men had discussed what to do with her and the notion of paying the girl in kind for the death of their friend, and in precisely the same coin, had come up. Welch had squelched that, for the nonce, at least, not because he didn’t think that, in a just world, it was appropriate. No, what saved her was the knowledge of what her interrogation had done to Lox, on the inside. He didn’t think the men’s condition would be improved by watching her choke, either; rather the opposite.

  What we are going to do with her, I’m just not sure, he thought, standing there in the dark, waiting for his flight. What I am sure about, though, is that we can’t leave her here
, unguarded, I need every man for the mission, and we can stow her away on the Bland until we figure it out. Besides, if we decide to kill her, I need a few more officers to constitute a court-martial. The men still won’t like it, no matter what a couple of them might have said, but they’ll be a little more accepting if the whole thing has at least the trappings of law.

  Fact is, though, that I don’t want to kill the poor little shit anyway. Yeah, she was part—a big part—of a criminal conspiracy. Yeah, that conspiracy murdered two of my men. But . . . well . . . what the hell choice did she have? What the hell choice did she ever have, in her whole life?

  The man who was hunched over, the one Maricel thought had tortured her, straightened. She heard the voice—Yes, it’s the same one—call out, “The first plane’s two minutes out, Terry.”

  Maricel heard the engine, a sort of anemic buzz, approaching. With each second, and each little increment of increase in the buzz, she prayed a little more fervently. Then, almost before she understood what had happened, the plane—tiny little thing—was on the ground, right before her eyes. A team of four, she thought, was actually picking up the tail to turn the thing around.

  Two men—neither of them Malone—picked her up and carried her to the plane, her head hanging like a dog’s. Neither of them was particularly gentle. Then again, neither of them had any reason to bear her good will.

  What Maricel found particularly frightening was that neither of them took the chance to cop a feel or squeeze her ass.

  I’m not even a woman to them. They’re gonna kiiilllll me.

  At the plane, the pilot had already tossed the door open. One of the men carrying Maricel, the one by her feet, said something she didn’t quite catch. Then he let go of his end, letting her feet fall to the ground, while he fiddled with the chair inside the cabin. When he had that out of the way, the other began feeding her head first into the luggage space behind the passenger seat. Then both men forced her lower half in, apparently not much caring that the space was designed for light freight, not people . . . not even slender and not really so very tall people. Just being stuffed into position cost Maricel a few bruises and scrapes. Then they put the chair back into position. That cost her a little pain, too.

  She wasn’t thinking particularly clearly—and who could blame her for that? Had she been, she might have realized that there was no good way to get her out of the cargo compartment to dump her over water. The big Kano entered the plane, ass end first, sat back, and buckled himself in. From the dash he pulled a set of headphones with a boom mike, placing them over his head and adjusting his mike to sit about three fourths of an inch in front of his mouth. Somebody tossed him a bag from outside, then closed the door.

  The plane shuddered and hummed as the pilot gave it some gas. Maricel felt it move, bouncing as it covered the rough strip.

  The CH-750’s were normally flown without a copilot. Not only wasn’t there enough room for three—not comfortably, as Maricel could have testified if she hadn’t been on the verge of pissing herself with fright—but the light planes normally carried a fairly heavy load of ordnance. Another pilot could have cut into that, considerably.

  “You sure we’ve got enough lift for this thing, Jake?” Terry asked of the pilot.

  “Close, sir, but yes. Two hundred and five for you. Forty for your bag. Maybe one hundred and ten for the girl. Hundred and forty-five for me. Leaves us about sixty-five pounds. That’s good because the air is hot and wet, so a little thin.”

  “Okay, just checking.”

  The pilot jerked a thumb to the rear, asking, “That the bitch that set up half of the team you had with you?”

  “Yeah . . . that’s her.”

  Using a falsetto stolen from an actress in one of the many films about Robin Hood, Jake said, “I likes me a good ’angin’, I do.”

  “Might come to that, Jake. It just might come to that.”

  Jake chuckled, then adjusted the throttle. The engine began to hum, shaking the plane as it moved it. The lights the men had set up to either side passed slowly at first. Still, Terry counted only two on his side before Jake pulled the stick and the thing was airborne.

  “Now let’s hope we can get over the trees,” Welch observed.

  “Piece o’ cake,” the pilot replied.

  The CH-750 was almost as capable of flying nap of the earth—that was when you were flying and could look up and still see trees—as a good, modern helicopter. There had been arguments at the club—sometimes rather severe ones—between helo pilots and the CH-750 pilots who insisted that they could do it better.

  From Terry’s point of view it didn’t much matter; both sets of pilots were certifiable maniacs. This opinion wasn’t reduced in the slightest when the CH-750’s tricycle landing gear did, in fact, scrape the trees at one end of the strip. He didn’t attribute that to pilot error so much as that night vision goggles tended to rob depth perception.

  “Sorry about that, sir.”

  The pilot couldn’t see Welch’s nod. He did hear him say, “Any one you can walk away from. As long as you can get us all to the ship . . . however many lifts it takes.”

  The pilot pushed on the stick, causing the plane to lose height as it followed the trees. At that point, Maricel did lose bladder control.

  You could hardly blame her for that, either. After all, she’d never in her life flown before.

  One of the tough parts of flying this area was that, as a former bastion—in every possible and historic sense—of the U.S. Armed Forces, the place was inundated with radar. While the U.S. was long gone, the Philippines’ forces—who were certainly doing the best that could be expected given the economy—Air Force and Navy, in particular, kept up as much as possible. For example, while the former Naval Base at Subic Bay had been given up to civilian enterprise, San Miguel, to the northwest, was still a fully active naval station. That—not just San Miguel but all the active radars in the area—was why Jake had to keep so close to the trees that he’d be picking bark and leaves out of the landing gear for a week.

  Fortunately, Jake had been stationed here before, with the Navy, and pretty much knew the radar patterns by heart. That’s why he turned his tiny command to fly between the mountains of Bataan Natural Park and Mount Mariveles before slipping down to wave-top level for the trip out to the ship.

  Thank God, thought Jake, for what remains of the Global Positioning System.

  MV Richard Bland, South China Sea

  The ship was heading due north, but going very slowly, just fast enough not to appear suspicious.

  Pearson had better radar available than the one he was using. The problem was that that radar was military grade. A military grade radar, suddenly lighting up the world, close to an area hotly contested between the Philippines, China, and Vietnam, would have been like a nun, dressing up as a tart, wandering Times Square. It was bound to attract the unwanted and unwelcome attentions of all the wrong sorts of people.

  Instead, his radar people worked with what they could, a not so very splendid civilian outfit, that wouldn’t be noticed by the local authorities even if it could be picked up, but which also hadn’t a prayer of picking up an itty bitty sport plane flying almost between the waves.

  “Pity,” said Warrington, standing on the bridge, looking forward over the deck of containers.

  “What’s that?” the skipper asked.

  “Huh? Oh, I was thinking out loud . . . that it was a pity we couldn’t modify these things so that there was a flight deck that ran all the way through, down below. Then we wouldn’t have to bust people’s asses setting up the PSP flight deck. We’d just open some doors, fore and aft, and there it would be.”

  “Harder than it sounds,” Pearson replied. “You don’t notice it so much because you’ve gotten used to it, but this vessel jumps around quite a bit. That might pitch an incoming plane up in the air but, what the hell, the sky is big. Pitch a plane up with something that has a roof over it? No, thanks.”

  “Good poi
nt,” agreed Warrington, cheerfully.

  Pearson noticed the cheer. “What’s got you so happy.”

  “Oh, I don’t care for command, particularly. I like being in charge of a given mission, mind you, but the bullshit of legal and technical command is not my cup of tea. Welch is welcome to it.”

  The speaker on the bridge squawked with Jake’s voice, saying he thought they were about three minutes out. One of the bridge crew, on a huge night vision scope, announced, without taking his eye from the rubber eyepiece, “I see them, bearing Green-Zero-nine-seven.”

  The captain automatically looked over his right shoulder but, of course, couldn’t see damned thing.

  Picking up a mike, Pearson ordered, “Give me a signal, Jake.”

  “He’s wagging his wings,” the observer announced.

  “I see your wagging wings,” said Pearson.

  “That’s me.”

  “C’mon home, honey, dinner’s waitin’. But circle for a couple of minutes.”