by Tom Kratman
“What are you looking for, Benson?” Welch asked.
The sergeant was on two knees and one hand, bent over the first of Welch’s targets, the one Benson had heard addressed as “Crisanto.”
“This,” Benson said, with great satisfaction, holding up a wicked looking combat knife he’d just taken from the still breathing, and possibly conscious, body. The knife’s blade glowed cruelly, reflecting the flames of the van.
Benson shifted to straddle the chest and lock Crisanto’s arms on the inside of his knees. Then he arched up. One hand grabbed Crisanto’s hair and tugged it towards him, pulling the head to near vertical. The ex-Marine’s eyes opened in confusion. Benson tossed the knife lightly into the air, catching it in a stabbing grip.
“Go to Hell blind, mothahfuckah,” the sergeant cursed. Then the knife dove once, followed by a twist. Crisanto screamed. His hands struggled to find his face but were stopped by the body straddling his chest and the knees pinioning his arms. The knife dove again. Again Benson twisted it. Another scream arose; the hands became more frantic still in search of the bloody face.
“When you get to the waiting room, tell Zimmerman I said, ‘Hi.’”
Then Benson spit once, before letting go Crisanto’s hair and rising to his feet. He left behind two bloody orbs, resting on the TCS criminal’s chest.
Welch had only one comment. “Make sure you cut his throat before we leave the area.” Then he hit the send button on the cell.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
—Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
MV Richard Bland, Wharf at Barangay 129, Tondo,
Manila, Republic of the Philippines
The bridge and the control station for the RPV erupted in cheers when Welch reported, “We’ve got our people. No losses. All tangos dead.” Precisely to avoid cheering that somebody might hear, coming from several hundred throats, Pearson kept the news to himself and those few who already knew, for the nonce. What he passed on instead was Welch’s order, “Have the RPV pilot bring his aircraft back to cover Tondo. And tell Warrington that, as soon after it gets there as he’s comfortable with, he’s to execute Schrecklichkeit.”
Lox waited for the RPV to return to overhead and for Warrington to start moving his men and Stocker’s up before he said, “Aida, do your stuff.”
The policewoman had been waiting for the command. Her cell phone was already set to the number she intended to call first. There were four more in a queue, waiting their turn.
She nodded and pressed the dial button. It took six rings before the deep-voiced answer came, in English, “And what can I do for you tonight, sexy? You finally decide to take me up on that employment offer?”
Aida smiled. There were criminals you just hated, and then there were criminals you couldn’t help liking, even as you tried your best to bust their asses into hard time.
“Sorry, Nicasio,” she answered, “you got the wrong girl for that one. If I didn’t think you were joking, I’d be insulted.”
“I’m joking and I’m not,” came the answer. Coming from a known cutthroat, the voice was surprisingly warm, Lox thought.
“Yes, the offer’s always open—you know that—but, no, if I thought for a minute you’d take me up on it, I’d go immediately to church and make the priest hear my confession if I had to make him hear it at gunpoint. See, I’d know then that the world was about to end.
“What can I do for you, Aida?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “I’m calling to do you a favor.”
“Oh?” The voice turned immediately suspicious.
“Oh, yeah. See, in about an hour TCS is going down hard. You’ll know it’s happening by a level of gunfire like you’ve never heard in your life. Wait until the shooting’s over, then go in and stake your claim.”
“How do I know it’s true?” he asked. “Take on TCS? That’s not a light decision.”
“Well . . . old friend, that’s up to you. You can always sit on your haunches and let Balingit, Honey, Manuel and Javier stake out all the territory. Though that would drop your gang from what? Maybe number two of six now? To about fifth of five?”
“How are they going to know, Aida?”
“Why, sweetheart, because I’m calling them as soon as I get off the phone with you”
“Bitch!”
“That’s me” Aida replied cheerily. “Oh, one word of warning: If your boys go in before the gunfire pretty much clears, or if they try to take on some folks who look and act a lot like Kanos? Fifth out of five would probably be more than you could reasonably hope for. I’m telling you that as an old friend, Nicasio.”
“Still, shit, Aida, even all of us together don’t have the guns to take on even a quarter of TCS.”
“Oh, that’s the other favor I’m doing you, Nicasio. If you wait about an hour and fifty minutes and go to the intersection of Marcos Highway and Bonifacio? There should be sixty or so rifles and enough ammunition for . . . well, for a while, waiting there for you. They’re Moro rifles but the Moros don’t need them anymore. Some friends of mine will be dropping them off. Don’t let your people fuck with my friends. Think: Not even fifth out of five.”
“Why now?” Nicasio asked.
“Good question,” Aida said. “Not sure I understand completely but a friend did mention to me that, when you have a problem and the law can’t work, then you have to make war instead.”
Aida hung up and asked Lox, “What was that tribe of Frenchies you said Julius Caesar called in all the neighboring tribes to exterminate?”
“Belgians, actually,” Lox corrected. “Labaan told me they were called the ‘Eburones.’ ”
Welch had taken most of the Whispers for the rescue, leaving only two for Warrington and the rump of the A Company left aboard ship.
Which is actually plenty for what I have to do, thought Warrington. Kill a couple of tattoo-faced motherfuckers on the wharf, to let two columns of Stocker’s men debark and move up the street, offing any security on the way, silently. And, with the cooks, I have just enough people left for that, to deliver five packages of small arms to five different locations, and to take down the grid.
Sergeant Major Pierantoni, head still wrapped, stood on the bridge facing the operations maps. He was mostly recovered, at least for something like this, which allowed Kiertzner to resume duties as C Company’s first sergeant.
From his perch on the bridge Warrington watched his two sniper teams do a bent-over walk to the gunwale nearest the wharf. One went to a point roughly amidships, the other went to the rear deck. On the way that latter one passed by five two-wheeled gurneys borrowed from TIC Chick, loaded with arms and ammunition, sitting on a pallet hooked to the aft crane. The snipers took seats at the gunwale, backs flush against it and rifles held across their laps. Their suppressors looked like nothing so much as four Fosters Lager cans, taped end to end and pained black. Atop the rifles were thermal scopes.
While the snipers hid themselves, the mufti-clad spotters stood upright and marked the positions of TCS’s “Customs agents.” One of them waved and a spotter waved back.
One of the snipers put a hand to his headphone and looked up at the bridge, directly at Warrington, as if to say, “Anytime this eon, boss.”
Warrington used his own radio to send, “Stocker? Warrington. Your boys ready?”
“In ranks on the mess deck, ready to come up and rumble on your command.”
“Yeah, fine. Just remember, no rumble until you get to the target area.”
“Well, duh?”
“Lox,” Warrington asked, “what have we got on the RPV?”
“Same three ‘customs’ dudes walking the wharf,” Lox replied. “Two two-man patrols around the target. There are scattered armed men all around the town, but they seem to be moving in a sort of Brownian motion. No guard plan or schedule I can discern. I suspect a lot of them are just bored and looking fo
r trouble. We’ll have to call it case by case as Stocker moves up.”
Looking for trouble? Warrington mused. I wonder if they’ll just luck out this very early morning and find some.
“Skipper, you ready to pull out?”
“At a moment’s notice, Major,” Pearson replied.
Warrington nodded again. The ship wouldn’t have to leave anything like that quickly, but it was nice knowing she could.
“Okay . . . snipers; on one. Four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”
All three of the pseudo customs men lay sprawled and dead on the wharf. Warrington had watched the killing from his perch on the bridge. He didn’t have any feelings for the dead men, one way or the other. His hate was entirely reserved for the masters of the gang. And it was pure hate; he, the rest of A Company, the ship’s company, the aviation people, and Stocker’s boys, had all watched the video of Zimmerman’s hanging.
On the other hand, however many minions we can kill is all to the good, since our objective is to make the gang functionally extinct. When the law ceases to function, the only recourse is to make war.
“Stocker?”
“Here.”
“The wharf’s clear. Move out.”
Pearson and Warrington exchanged a glance. Shall we? By all means.
“Crane Three?” the captain queried.
“Ready.”
“Hoist the rifles over the side and set them down on the wharf.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper.”
“Crane One?”
“Standing by.”
“Get those Elands down to the wharf.”
C Company’s Gurkhas really didn’t have the right build to blend in, being much stockier than the local norm. But they had the right height, approximately the right skin tone, and the epicanthic fold. That would have to do. The Gurkhas, each bearing a suppressed submachine gun, and several hundred rounds of subsonic ammunition, with holstered pistols under their mufti, led off.
Also in mufti, and trailing the Gurkhas quite closely, was one team from A Company. They were similarly armed and had the mission of shutting down that part of the electric grid that served Tondo. The main transmission lines that served this part of the metro area ran north to south, from Paco to Doña Imelda to Quezon, on a line well east of the target. Only a single line ran into Tondo because, despite having a large population, its people, barring the gangs, were dirt poor and couldn’t afford the expensive light bulbs caring and sensitive westerners and Japanese insisted upon and barred anyone else from making. There were plans for improving electric access, and for running new lines from Pinas in the south to Marilao in the north, but none for reducing the cost of a light bulb back to what it had been in those less caring and sensitive days of incandescents. Even the existing plans, pending the money coming available, would remain nothing more than high hopes.
Hopes in Tondo, regarding electric or any other utility service, or pretty much anything, weren’t particularly high. It had been a big day way back when, when the government had caused the garbage dump cum landfill just east of Barangay 129 to stop burning. Any progress beyond that was just about inconceivable, and certainly too much to ask for.
For that matter, deep down, the Tondoese expected Smokey Mountain, as it had been known, to start burning again any second.
“What’s that bloody stench?” whispered one of the Gurkhas, his given name was Nawang, to Sergeant Balbahadur, as the team stopped momentarily at the corner of Magellanes and Marcos Highway.
“Which one?” Balbahadur asked. “I smell rotten fish on the one side and rotten . . . well . . . I don’t know what it is, on the other. It’s pretty fucking awful though.”
“Yeah, it is.” Nawang got down on his belly, sticking his head around a corner. He scuttled back, rather like a very confused snake, and said, “I see nothing on the other side of the bridge. You would think . . . but.” The Gurkha shrugged eloquently.
“Okay,” Balbahadur said. “You and Thapa, go. Gurung and I will cover.”
Smiling, Nawang took off at a sprint, with Thapa close on his heels. At the bridge that spanned the Binuangan River that separated the northwest corner of Tondo, proper, from Navotas, to the north. A few meters short of the bridge, the two Gurkhas stopped and proceeded to walk across, calmly, chatting in Nepali. They figured, not unreasonably, that with a hundred and seventy-odd native languages in the Philippines, there was a fair chance for anyone to take Nepali as just another language they didn’t know.
On the far side they stopped and waved. What could look more innocent?
Then, with Balbahadur and Gurung following close, themselves followed by the two Whisper-armed snipers and their spotters, plus the antielectricity team, that followed by the mass of C Company, and C company trailed by three of the five gurneys loaded down with rifles and ammunition, Nawang and Thapa walked calmly forward, toward TCS headquarters. They stopped only once, when a drunk sporting a face full of tattoos stopped them, demanding something they didn’t understand.
He didn’t understand, either, when Nawang shot him down like a dog on the streets of Navotas.
CHAPTER FIFTY
For the low, red glare to southward
when the raided coast-towns burn?
(Light ye shall have on that lesson,
but little time to learn.)
—Rudyard Kipling, “The Islanders”
Navotas, Republic of the Philippines
There was a long, long trail of dead men with tattooed faces all along Marcos Highway and Lapu-Lapu Avenue. The Gurkhas didn’t actually keep count; they just weren’t that kind of people.
The route was right at a mile, a twenty-minute walk. Taking a bit of care about it, though, had driven the time up to over an hour. Setting up, again with considerable care, had taken the better part of another hour and a few more tattooed faces rapidly turning pale.
Finally, everything was ready. Overhead the RPV circled, silent and, if not itself deadly, conveying information that would turn into sheer deadliness in just a minute or two. The two sniper teams from A Company were stationed in a multi-story parking garage just east of the Marcos-Lapu-Lapu intersection. A Company’s antielectricity team—“Team Juice”—was just off Circumferential Road three and the Binuangan River, ready to cut service.
Stocker’s First Platoon was tucked in against some warehouses, southwest of Marcos. Second had moved up almost to North Bay and Lapu-Lapu. Third and Weapons, the latter having left their mortars and reconfigured as infantry, were stretched out in little knots along Lapu-Lapu, between Bangus and North Bay. The two Elands, freshly, even ostentatiously, painted in Philippine Army colors, idled for the nonce to the northeast side of Marcos. Farther out, three of the “Arms Distribution Teams”—at the bridges by the Navotas bus terminal, at Lapu-Lapu, and at Circumferential three—waited, guarding the presents.
This is going to be so much fun. Stocker inwardly giggled. He had a loudspeaker borrowed from the Bland clutched in one hand. He wanted TCS to know, there at the very end, why they were being destroyed.
“Team Juice?”
“Juice,” reported the antielectricity team.
“Cut power.”
There were more or less subtle ways to take down an electric transfer station. Juice wasn’t big on subtlety. They’d just wired the thing “for sound.”
Boom. The explosion was, no doubt, loud. It still wasn’t really all that much louder than when a transformer blows on its own.
Ah, music to me ears, thought Stocker, from about half a mile away. Eh?
All the lights in the area went dead. Now only A and C companies could see a bloody thing. Yeah . . . fighting fair is stupid.
“Sniper teams?”
“Standing by,” came the answer.
“Be some good lads, if you would, and start taking out any TCSers on the grounds around their headquarters, eh?”
Stocker could neither see nor hear either the suppressed shots or the subsonic bullets. Enough time passed for him t
o ask, “Are we quite finished yet?”
“One sec . . . aha, gotcha, motherfucker. We’re finished now, sir.”
“Very good. Now, First Platoon, move forward to North Bay. Get in position for the assault. And remember, boys, no prisoners and no survivors.”
It was the dogs that awakened Diwata, dogs howling in the slums to the west. She immediately reached for the light on the night table by her bed. Several taps on the controlling base produced nothing.
“Funny,” she said, softly and sleepily, “I wonder what’s killed the power. I wonder what set those dogs to howling. Might be the electric outage, I guess. Stupid dogs . . . ought to be shot . . . ”
At that point two ninety millimeter explosions shook the building, throwing Diwata from her bed to the rug below.
MV Richard Bland, Wharf at Barangay 129, Tondo,
Manila, Republic of the Philippines
Maricel nearly fainted when the light came on and the door to the container holding her cage opened. She’d been sure she was for death, and had been dreading every minute since she’d been taken aboard. When she saw the man who’d so brutally tortured her, she didn’t faint, quite, but her legs, refusing to hold her up, collapsed under her, letting her fall to the corrugated metal deck.
Cringing, looking around clasped hands held in front of her face, she begged, “Please, no. I have a baby. Please . . . I’m so sorry. Please don’t. Please, please, please?”
A small woman, Filipina, Maricel thought, entered the container after her tormentor, closing the door gently behind herself. That woman made a subtle get to your feet gesture.
Cringing back even more, Maricel couldn’t form words. Her head shook back and forth violently. Nonononononono!