Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  The cantonment was surprisingly quiet, as Graft, sans most of his equipment, slipped from hut to hut, staying always in the shadows and trying to stay downwind. Fortunately, the camp remained quiet. If there were any dogs around—and there might well not have been since the Koran is not precisely a doggie fan book—they neither heard Graft nor caught his scent.

  Somewhere in the village Graft heard in his earpiece Lox’s voice, “I’ve lost you among all the other images. You’re on your own.”

  Gee, thanks.

  Well, it wasn’t like I wasn’t expecting it at some point. Now let’s see . . . there’s the mess area, I can smell the residual smoke and food. Hmmm . . . okay, past that and online, up the trail, is a bigger hut. That’s the Harrikats’ headquarters. So . . . Ayala is . . . there.

  Graft had two choices, neither particularly good. He could try to slice his way into the hut, through the wall. If he had the wrong place, and it was just possible he might have, and more possible that Ayala had been moved, and if anyone was awake or awakened by the sound, he was screwed. On the other hand, while the normal entrance had two guards as of the last report, a disadvantage not to be underestimated but also a pretty good indicator that Ayala was there, he could make a pretty good effort at killing them before they got the alarm out. He opted for the normal entrance.

  “Graft,” came the whisper in his ear, “if that’s you I see about fifty meters southeast of Ayala’s hut, the number of guards remains two. There are maybe a dozen more, lying down, unless a couple of them are fucking a couple of others, in the long hut across the trail. I’d suggest you jump around or something, so I can know, but that’s probably not such a great idea. For what it’s worth, Terry says the rest of A Company will be climbing the cliff in ten minutes, and half of C Company is almost at the point where the Harrikat will be able to hear the LCM’s motor anyway. He’s putting the aircraft into the air. You’re authorized to start the party.”

  Good timing. thanks. No, it’s a really bad idea. And I can hear them, chatting.

  Okay, now how do I do this? There’s just not a lot of room for subtlety and cleverness. If I edge around the hut’s wall, I’ll see one first. But if I shoot him I won’t have a shot at the other. If I expose myself to where I have decent shots at both, good chance they see me and raise an alarm. If I get in position to take one, and wait for the other to expose himself, good chance I get seen . . . like when the sun comes up, because I just might have to wait that long. And there’s no time for that anyway.

  If I were about five-four and skinny, I’d just walk right up to them. But I’m not . . . and there’s not all that much time.

  Brute force and ignorance it is, then. Oh, this is so gonna suck.

  In fact, that—brute force and ignorance—wasn’t precisely what Graft did. First, he got down on his belly and crawled to where he could see one of the guards. From its bandoleer, he gently took one of his two remaining claymores. This he set up on its legs, but without pushing them into the soil, and aimed at the guard. He then offset the aim almost entirely to the right, to make sure that none of the seven hundred-odd steel ball bearings in the thing went into the hut. Then he sunk the legs. Backing off, taking the clacker with him, he set the other claymore up at a safe distance from the first, and aimed at the guard shack across the trail . . . aimed low.

  This is not my first choice. But if I have to, then I have to . . . With that, Graft settled down in the muck among the shadows, pistol in hand and the clackers at his feet, waiting and hoping for both guards to appear at one time.

  That happened, but not in a way Graft would have chosen.

  The further guard announced to the other, “Man, I have got to piss.”

  “Just wait for the relief,” the other said. “You know what’ll happen to us if you go to the latrines and you get caught.”

  “Fuck that,” said the first. “I’ll just go piss over behind the hut. Won’t take a minute and if the datu comes by you can tell him I heard a suspicious noise.”

  “Oh, man . . . you can’t do that. Janail is death on pissing or shitting in the camp except in the designated latrines.”

  “Fuck him; he’s not Allah.”

  With that, the first guard left his post and began walking in the direction of Graft, undoing the buttons of his trousers as he did. That had him automatically looking down when his right foot caught on something that he really didn’t expect to be there. He stopped and bent over, feeling down.

  Oh, no, thought Graft, seeing the Moro undoing his fly. No, no, no; not again, not tonight. I’m all pissed out, frankly pissed off, and not going to get pissed on, again.

  When the Moro bent, he thought, Uh, oh, I’m in trouble. Well fuck it, I see them both now.

  The better target was the farther one. Still wearing his goggles—no time to lift them off—Graft fired three shots, hitting the Moro twice in the chest and missing once entirely. His left hand was raising his goggles even as his right was bringing the .45 down again. The clanking of his pistol’s slide brought the other Moro’s head up, just before he got his eyes close enough to see what had snagged his foot. At a range of under fifteen feet, Graft fired again, putting his bullet just off center from the bridge of the Moro’s nose. Brains, blood and bone flew out the back of his head, dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

  Instantly Graft was on his feet, racing for the now uncovered entrance. He didn’t bother finishing off the Moro who would now never get to take his piss. He did donate a bullet to the head of the other one. And then he was in the entrance, almost face to face with another stranger.

  While there is life there is hope, the doctor thought, in the near total darkness of the prisoner’s hut. The one candle added but little light, and that more concealing than illuminating. But as life flows away, so does hope. My patient will not last until morning. I have failed.

  It hurt, deep inside. Nearly weeping, the doctor thought, I don’t even have a decent needle for intravenous. Shaking his head with frustration and despair, the doctor wondered, Allah, why did You give me any skill at all in the practice of medicine only to deny me the means of using what skill I have? I confess, I will have questions of You in the hereafter.

  The doctor heard a couple of odd thumps and metallic sounds, then footfalls. He sensed a presence at the hut’s entrance. He turned to vent his anger at whichever one of the guards had interrupted—

  Oh, shit, the doctor thought, at seeing the very large, very plainly not Filipino man, in camouflage clothes and wearing some bizarre kind of mask over his face. Not . . .

  And that was the last thought the doctor ever had in this world.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  And when the thousand years are expired,

  Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.

  —Revelation 20:7, King James Version

  Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

  Republic of the Philippines

  The first thing Graft did, after downing the Moro standing over the small, reclined body of a man, was grab the candle and hold it up by the man’s face. The candle flickered, albeit not much, from the man’s shallow breath. So wan was the man that it took Graft a few moments to confirm in his own mind the message he sent the Bland: “I have the target. Alive. Not well. Really not well.”

  Next, Graft went outside and grabbed the two dead guards by their collars, dragging them inside the hut before anyone stumbled over them. One of the corpses caught on something. When Graft went to inspect he saw it was a chain. Looking left he saw a rock. In the other direction the chain led to Ayala. Shit!

  He followed the chain right to where he expected it, a locked shackle around the old man’s foot. The foot didn’t, itself, look gangrenous, which eliminated Graft’s first solution to the problem, severing the foot. Double shit.

  The chain? I’ve got nothing that can get through that big old iron bastard, not without a week to saw at it. How then . . . aha!

  Hmmm . . . that’s going to draw a
lot of attention, though. Well . . . I sorta planned for drawing a lot of attention at some point in time.

  Crouching low, Graft left the hut again and bent to retrieve the claymore that one dead Moro had upset, its clacker, and the clacker for the other, the other being left pointing at the guard shack across the trail. Keeping his pistol in one hand—Note to self: Change the motherfucking magazine, ya dumb ass—made the retrieval awkward. Graft dropped the claymore once on the way.

  Once back inside, after changing the magazine, he put down his pistol and pulled a knife, using the point to pry the claymore apart. After scooping out the C-4 from inside, being careful to retain as much of its flat form as possible, he placed the redundant body, plastic and ball bearings, aside. Reflattening the explosive as best he could by hand, he molded it into a V and placed the open end of the V down on the chain. There were formulae for that, but Graft went with Factor P, for plenty.

  A pound and a quarter of C-4 ought to be plenty.

  The C-4 was about equidistant between the rock and the prisoner. That was based on a crude, rather a purely unconscious, calculation, to keep as much of the blast away from both himself and the prisoner, while having to take no more of the chain than he possibly could avoid.

  Frantically, Graft unscrewed the plug that held the cap in place and placed it at the V’s very points.

  Hmmm . . . need something to absorb the shock; the old man can’t take much more. For that matter, I’m no fan of keeping close company with large booms. Oh well, nothing to hand besides some fresh meat. They’ll do.

  The doctor’s body—though Graft thought of it only as the body of the one he shot inside the hut—came first. Graft dragged it to the chain and bent it into a C, on one side of the explosive V. Next came one of the Moros, he wasn’t sure which one and didn’t much care, either. That one, with the doctor, formed an oval around the C-4. The last one went atop those two.

  “Gentlemen,” Graft whispered into his mike, “I am starting the party in a few seconds. SITREP, please.”

  “We’re coming up the ladders now,” said Warrington. “Rachel reconfirmed the guards weren’t replaced.”

  “Idling off the landing point,” said Stocker. “We hit the beach three minutes after the order.”

  “Aviation’s ready to go,” said the commo man on the bridge of the Bland.

  Okay, thought Graft, as he bent his own body over Ayala’s to provide what protection he could. And, Lord? For what we are about to receive.

  With that, Graft cupped a hand over his one open ear, tucked the other against his shoulder, and squeezed the clacker.

  Shaped charges, which was what Graft had formed from the C-4, are much misunderstood. They don’t, in the first place, really concentrate the explosion. In fact, the bulk of the blast goes outward. Conversely, a rather small percent of the total power is directed inward, at the focus of the cone. On the other hand, that relatively small percentage of the blast that is focused is very focused, enough so that the jet of hot gas and sometimes metal that it forms can get through a great deal of very tough stuff.

  That’s what the V of C-4 did, albeit less efficiently than the shaped charge norm; it sent a jet of gasses, effectively a hot knife, against the metal of the chain, which might as well have been butter. The chain was cut.

  However, there’s a price for everything. When the rest of the explosion hit the bodies Graft had placed around it . . .

  Jesus, Graft thought, pulling a length of smoking intestine from his shoulder. Fuck that was ugly.

  He wasn’t too badly stunned, and his hearing was still fairly good. He could thank the Moros for that. But I won’t.

  Graft pulled on the chain attached to Ayala’s leg. It moved lightly; the C-4 had done its job. Gathering the still fairly long segment of chain up, he placed it on the old man, then picked up and tossed the man over his shoulder. This was suboptimal but optimal required more time than he had.

  Jesus, he doesn’t weigh anything, hardly.

  Already there was shouting coming from the guard shack opposite. Looking around, Graft saw that the C-4 had tossed one of the Moros more or less bodily through the walls of the hut, at least, there was now a big hole there. Crouching with Ayala still on his shoulder he fought his way through the hole, breaking bamboo and branch, shredding leaves and grass.

  Once outside, Graft cut left, to the other claymore’s clacker. He stooped down—Oh, shit, my back!—and grabbed it. One squeeze and there was another explosion, this one aimed and propelling its seven hundred-odd steel ball bearings fairly precisely at the guard shack. What happened there, Graft couldn’t see. He could hear, however, a most satisfying chorus of screams and shrieks well blended with a lovely bass section of frothy coughing from bloody, violated lungs.

  Roughly thirty fragments and ball bearings per vertical square meter was enough to pretty much do a dam-dam on anything living, down range.

  Well, that gives me a little time.

  The hut nearest the claymore caught fire almost instantly, the flames leaping up the walls to the roof.

  Graft tossed his head back, flicking the night vision goggles up and away from his face. Firelight would do better for the nonce.

  “Ssseeemmmeeerrrllliiinnn!”

  Maria, the small, young, and much abused slave girl, lay in a fetal position, eyes tightly clenched and sucking her thumb for a change, on the floor of the guard shack when the claymore went off. She didn’t know what had caused it, but she could see the results once the blast shocked her eyes open and set the grass above alight.

  There is a God, the girl thought, watching her rapists bleed out by the light of the burning roof. There is a God, but I’d better get out of here.

  She didn’t know how to use a rifle, but knives were pretty much universally understood, She took one from one of the bodies, then fled into the night in the direction she’d last seen her brother.

  Once he heard the first boom, Semmerlin knew it was “weapons free.” He immediately jacked the bolt on his rifle, sighted on a likely man-shaped glow in the scope, and squeezed off a round. The stock jammed hard against his shoulder as the rifle coughed, lightly. There wasn’t a lot more sound than would have come from a .22 short.

  From off in the distance came another loud explosion, followed quickly by flames rising to the sky.

  Again he worked the bolt—click-clack; click-clack—launching a stubby brass casing up and to the right. Semmerlin sighted on a silhouette that seemed to be trying to pull on some trousers and squeezed. In both cases the big—forty-nine gram!—bullets moved slowly, at just over a thousand feet per second. But they passed through the light walls as easily as the thermal images had passed going in the opposite direction. And when they hit, they hit with about twenty-four hundred joules.

  Both targets went down, dead maybe, but for sure at least dying. Not only did the heavy projectiles hit with massive force; being so wide they dumped virtually all their energy into the flesh in an instant.

  Click-clack; click-clack.

  Semmerlin swung the heavy rifle left, then right, searching for targets. Someone was standing in the open, facing away and waving a rifle. He seemed to be shouting. Some others ran toward that one. Oh. A leader. Goody.

  Cough. The presumed leader, struck from behind, bent forward at the middle as he threw both arms out. His rifle was sent flying. The others gathered and stood around for just a moment, staring down at the body. If their leader had been shot why hadn’t there been a sound of a shot? This was not fair.

  Click-clack; click-clack. Cough.

  He heard, “Ssseeemmmeeerrrllliiinnn!”

  No need to whisper now, really, Semmerlin answered, “Bugs, Mr. Rico. Zillions of ’em. I’m a burnin’ ’em down.”

  Semmerlin swung right again. He saw Graft rounding a bend in the trail, feet a near blur. Looking more carefully, he thought, Uh, oh.

  Dipshit, Graft thought, as his legs churned through the meters between himself and Semmerlin. Fast as he was running,
he couldn’t simply run. His head swung left to right—fortunately, the old man on his shoulder was so thin he didn’t really interfere with the left view—looking for any threat to himself and his burden. Five times his pistol gave off its anemic cough, missing three times and hitting twice.

  Since he ran into three armed Harrikat along his route, this was not quite enough.

  In a mutual race to the death, Graft pulled his pistol down even as the Moro raised his rifle. Everything seemed to be in slow motion. The mercenary’s vision narrowed at the edges to nothing more than his—too slow, God-dammit—pistol and the little man who was determined to kill him.

  Then the Moro’s chest just exploded in a shower of blood and meat. Arms twitched as his body twisted obscenely to the ground. Graft heard in his earpiece, “You owe me big time, sucker.”

  “. . . sucker.”

  Semmerlin laughed inside. It wasn’t every day you got one up on Graft. It was a fine feeling when you could.

  He’d been counting his rounds carefully as he engaged. The magazine held seven rounds, of which he’d already fired six.

  Bullets were flying now from both sides though. Graft probably needed suppression a little more than he needed a .510 caliber guardian angel. Semmerlin set the rifle aside and pulled the Pecheneg toward himself, settling his shoulder into the stock.

  Yee haw! The Pecheneg spoke with considerable authority—about a hundred times—as he sent a long burst first to Graft’s left, then to his right, to both cause the Harrikat to duck and discourage pursuit. Brrrrrrrrppp. Brrrrrppp.

  “That was a little fucking close, shitbird.”

  “Bitch, bitch, bitch.” Brrrrrppp. “Never happy.” Brrrrrppp. “You’d complain”—Brrrrppp.—“if they were gonna hang you”—Brrrrppp.—“with a golden rope.” Brrrrrppp.