Countdown: The Liberators-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  She sipped at the bourbon, laid her head back, and stared at the ceiling.

  The problem, Phillie told herself, is that I stuck am on a sliding scale. Right now, Wes is utterly attractive. Right now, as near as I can tell, I'm in love with him.

  She shifted gears to think about that. In love with Wes? Let's see, pitter-pattering heart when we near to being together, even if I saw him just that morning? Check. Ache with emptiness when we're not together? Check. Perpetual horniness? Check. Dreams about raising children together? Check. Me pleasing him feels better than him pleasing me? Check. Think about him all the time, even to distraction? Check. Swallow rather than spit? That one's a no brainer. Of course.

  Willing to go to jail for him? Harder . . . buuut . . . check.

  Willing to go to jail for him over something like this? Let's put that one off for a minute.

  Another sip of the bourbon. Another. Another. Jail? JAIL? Big long drink; glug-glug-glug.

  Phillie got up again. This time she stopped at the refrigerator first, to get ice, before going to the sink. When she returned to the sofa she brought the bottle with her.

  She was thinking much more clearly now, she was certain. Back to sliding scales. Sip. In three years the age of the men I'll find attractive is going to be about sixty. Sip. In eight years, when my biological time bomb clicks out, they'll be closer to seventy. Sip. And that's just impossible. I'll never have a baby if I wait that long. And I wanted THREE of them.

  Sip. Sip. Sip. Glug-glug. Pour some more.

  Not going to be a mommy if I'm shot, either. Sip. Sip, sip, sip.

  The warm caramelly taste of the bourbon filled her mouth. Would prefer it was Wes. A pleasant glow had spread across her body. Prefer that was Wes, too. But SHOT?

  Then again, it has been fun these past few days. Fun like the ER never is. Sip. And isn't a person entitled to at least one real adventure in life? Sip. And to have it surrounded by men like those Wes has collected? They would never let me be shot? Sip. What am I worried about?

  Sip. Well there's still jail . . . the chance of jail. No matter, I already agree that Wes is generally worth jail. Worth jail for this, though? Well . . . this thing he's doing makes him happy. And maybe that's enough.

  Phillie heard a key enter the lock of her apartment door. The bolt fell back with a clump. The door opened and in the doorway she saw Stauer. She nodded to herself, half drunkenly, then stood up and walked to meet him. One hand reached out and pulled him inside. She closed the door shut behind them.

  "Bridges told me you were-"

  "Shut up, Wesss," she slurred, turning the interior lock. She turned and put her hands on his shoulders, pushing him against the door. "Ah'm going with ya on this, so ya better get me fitted for armor. Meanwahls, we haven' ha' any tahm for this since your crew showed up . . . " Phillie's accent tended to revert to rural Texas when she'd had a few. Her hands fumbled at his belt as she began to sink. He thought she was falling and reached to hold her up. She shrugged his hands off and finished sinking to her knees just as the belt came undone.

  Phillie took him in hand and gave a few light flicks with her tongue. Then she looked up at him, smiled, and asked, "Did Ah evah tell ya Ah'm in love with ya, ya bad old man?"

  Phillie lay asleep and lightly snoring, her head on Stauer's chest and one long leg thrown across his. His right arm cradled her head and wrapped around to cup one breast. With the left hand, he stroked her cheek.

  A man is only as old as the woman he feels, Stauer reminded himself. But I foresee the day coming fast when I'll have to mainline Viagra.

  And why are you here with a woman-hell, she's nearly a girl-half your age, you dirty "bad old man?" She's not just a convenient port in a storm, so to speak. Never has been. Been with her longer, too, two years now, than any woman I can think of.

  Okay, so why?

  Well, it isn't just the sex, as good as that is. Process of elimination maybe? The fact that women my age or near it rarely look good, while women much younger than Phillie, or even her age, are usually, to be brutally honest, just airheads? Or, even if that's not fair, and it probably isn't, we just don't, even can't, share world views?

  Yeah, all right. Maybe that's part of it. Phillie because so many others are just poor fits. But that's not the whole story.

  His eyes jerked in Phillie's direction. I wonder if you'll ever guess I told Bridges to give it to you with both barrels, to see if you'll scare off. Kind of confirms my judgment, generally, that you didn't. Was it a dirty trick? Well . . . yeah. But, on the other hand, you didn't scare off. So we'll be fitting you for armor tonight, and tomorrow morning you report to Terry's people down in Somerset for the quickest basic combat training course in history.

  Not that I intend for a New York minute letting you fight; but you have to become part of the team. Course, if Terry downchecks you then you're not going past Brazil.

  D-119, Somerset, Texas

  The sun was just peeking over the horizon as Phillie pulled up to the lodge in her car. Terry Welch was there to meet her. She didn't really know what to expect. She knew she was scared, and that a lot of that fear came from ignorance. Yet what she thought she did know about scared her still more.

  But I said I'd go through with it. So, God damn it, I'm going through with it.

  She looks half terrified, poor thing, thought Terry, as he watched her car pull up to the lodge. He had his doubts, more about himself and his team than the woman. She . . . impressed him. I've never tried to teach basic training. And I've never trained a woman. Neither have any of the boys. This ought to be . . . interesting.

  Terry had considered and rejected the time honored method of inflicting hell on the new recruit. It wasn't that he or his boys objected in principle; after all, they'd all been through it so many times and so many ways that most of them had lost count. Rather, it was just that to get any good effect from a hell week simply took time, a week or two. And they didn't have it.

  Instead . . .

  "Fifteen minutes to get into running gear, Miss Potter," Terry said. "The boss said you were probably fit enough. I want to make sure. You can change in the house."

  When Phillie finished throwing up, about one hour (plus the six minutes' changing time) and seven miles later, one of Terry's teammates was standing by with an assortment of guns, some of them taken from Stauer's little armory, but rather more than that from the boys' own collections.

  "Miss Potter," announced the very broad shouldered and very black Master Sergeant (Ret.) Robert "Buckwheat" Fulton, "there is no time to make you a marksman. Instead, I am going to familiarize you on these weapons, to include assembly and disassembly, cleaning, and use in close quarters battle. It is unlikely you will have to use any of these, or anything like them, except in close in, personal defense. Pay attention . . . "

  Phillie's ears were ringing, despite the earplugs Fulton had insisted on, and every nail on her fingers was broken but for one. She was dirty, greasy, and pretty sure she smelled bad. It didn't seem to bother any of the men at the lodge, however. And she was so tired.

  "This is a GPS, Miss Potter," said former warrant officer Jose "Little Joe" Venegas, standing perhaps five feet, five in his boots. Little Joe laid the device on the table in front of her. "You may have something like it in your car. This will be different." He next picked up a map, announcing, "This is a one over fifty thousand scale map of this area." Replacing the map on the table, he picked up a green cylinder with some projections. "And this is a compass . . . "

  D-118

  They'd finally let Phillie get some sleep, sometime after three in the morning. And awakened her at five-thirty.

  "This is a protective mask, Miss Potter . . . "

  "All clear . . . GAS!"

  "This is a knife, Miss Potter . . . "

  "This is body armor, Miss Potter, and these are the ceramic inserts that supplement it. Put it on . . . "

  "These are practice hand grenades, Miss Potter . . . "

  "Miss P
otter," said Sergeant First Class (Ret.) Rob "Rattus" Hampson, a Special Forces Medic, "you are already medical personnel. I won't waste time, but you need to know how to do some things that are the same as done in an ER, but without the ER's facilities, and with a lot more injured folks than there are people to help them . . . "

  D-118, San Antonio, Texas

  " . . . the Magellan's surveyor is already looking the ship over," Ed Kosciusko explained. "It's fairly new; I don't expect his crew to find any problems."

  "You're absolutely certain you can get the landing craft down into the water with the just the one crane?" Stauer asked.

  "It's technically a gantry, Wes. And, no, when you have one of anything then there's always the chance of failure. But every other ship Gordo and I came up with that had more than one was suboptimal for launching aircraft. Those things get in the way. This is the only one we found that was available, at a reasonable price to lease, for a reasonable time, that was also long enough to create an airstrip atop the containers."

  "Crew?"

  "Gonna join me in Hong Kong," Ed replied. "And no, they don't know anything except that I asked them to crew for me."

  "Okay. Scares me, though, just one . . . "

  The door to Stauer's apartment flew open, showing darkness lit by streetlights beyond. In walked Phillie. She was dirty. Her face had several abrasions. Both knees of her pants were ripped, and the left one hung down several inches. Reilly, standing near the door made a waving motion under his nose, so apparently she stank, too.

  "Fuck you all," she said, loud enough to be heard over the entire place. Without another word, she began walking straight to the master bedroom. The sound of running water began and didn't stop for a long time.

  "How'd she do, Terry?" Stauer asked as Welch followed her in by about a minute behind.

  Welch smiled broadly. "Not bad for the time we had. Give us a few months and she could find a place on a B Team. She's a good girl."

  "Thanks, Terry. You're boys ready to move out to Myanmar?"

  "Yeah, all set. I was concerned about evacuation, but Cruz is going to get the best Hips, piloted by him and his Russian pal, sitting on the Thai side of the border until we call. If Inning's lawyer will play along-and I am betting that Victor picked his lawyer based on his utter lack of principle-then it should be okay."

  Ralph Boxer took Terry's hand and placed in it a card. "Memorize this and destroy it. It is a valuable contact within Burma."

  Stauer was waiting when Phillie finally came out of the shower. She seemed like a sleepwalker. He stood, being a gentleman and all, and said, "I'm told you did pretty well. To the extent it was a test, and it mostly was, you passed."

  She shambled over to him, put her arms around his neck, laid her head against his chest, and began to cry. "Oh, Wes, it was awful."

  CHAPTER TEN

  There is another huge structural problem for UNHCR,

  for every agency, and that's the relief budgets.

  The emergency budgets are always easier to get than

  development. So you can get the emergency money

  with hardly any trouble. Development funds are much

  more difficult to get. So, the temptation is to keep

  everyone in a perpetual emergency situation rather

  than to work towards their integration.

  -Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond, OBE

  D-147, Abéché, Chad

  Abéché wasn't the middle of nowhere, but you could see the middle of nowhere from there. That is, you could if the dust had settled enough to see much of anything. That only happened, though, in July and August when the town got most of its annual nineteen inches of rain. The rest of the time? Forget it.

  It was the kind of place that in a travel guide discussing nightlife, things to do, places to see, places to stay, etc., there would be zero entries. Even the airport only operated in the day.

  For all that, to Labaan the most disappointing part of the town was that somehow-inexplicably, impossibly-Lance was waiting for the party near the airport parking area when they arrived. They found him by the plane they'd last seen in N'Djamena, reclining on a folding lawn chair, with a reflector held under his chin to help get that perfect tan.

  "Dude," Lance said, "the day after I saw you I tried to crank it and it just started to work. Maybe a vapor lock in the engine. Dunno. But good to see ya, dude. You ready to head on out?"

  Labaan resisted the urge to shoot the idiot American. But only because we need him for now.

  "Vapor lock? In a turboprop?"

  "Dude, I dunno; I just fly 'em. You want me to take you to Kosti or not?"

  With all the humanitarian aid and human rights workers flooding eastern Chad, nobody much cared about a single Pilatus PC-12 leaving with a human cargo. Lance told the control tower he was leaving. Nobody answered. With a shrug, he gave a little power to the plane's sole, nose-mounted, engine and taxied to the runway. There he turned left, heading west. At the western end he did a one eighty, waiting for a flight from Care to clear off.

  "Dude," he called to Labaan, "open the hatch and look behind us to see if anyone's trying to land." When Labaan didn't move, Lance added, "Dude, I'm serious."

  Sighing wearily, Labaan did just that. Having looked from directly behind to directly overhead, he closed and dogged the hatch and shouted over the engine's roar, "You're cl-"

  He couldn't finish before Lance had given the engine full throttle and was racing down the runway, shouting, "Kawabungaaaa!" The plane's deck moved out from under Labaan's feet, tossing him off the bulkhead rearward of the hatch and then to the floor.

  I will kill this man, Labaan thought to himself, as he crawled along the deck to his seat. Not all the lives saved by America around the world are enough to justify his continued existence.

  "Hey, dudes," Lance called out over his shoulder, "Look down below. Refugee camp." He twisted the control yoke and tilted the Pilatus over on its port side to give his passengers a view.

  "There are twelve of these," Labaan told Adam, "all spread more or less in an arc east of Abéché. At least, there were twelve. There may be more now. And they keep growing. Someday, I suspect, the entire population of Africa will be in refugee camps where well-meaning Europeans and Americans can feel good about themselves for all the wonderful things they do on our behalf."

  "You don't much like the whites, do you?" Adam said.

  Labaan shrugged. "Whites in themselves? I've no strong feelings one way or the other. But the ones who come to help us? The twenty-year old diletantes who come to teach our people how to farm land they've been farming for five thousand years? The ones who then give out so much food that it doesn't pay to farm anymore? The ones who ensure that both sides to our innumerable and interminable civil wars are fed, thus ensuring that the wars will go on forever? I despise those whites.

  "Worse, though, are the ones who brought us Marxism, or brought some of our people to their lands to teach them Marxism. Imperialism never did us the harm that that one miserable European pseudo-philosophy has.

  "Worst of all, though, are the ones who bring money, lots and lots of money, that feed our kleptocrats and give them both the means and the motivation to retain power. Always for good purposes does that money come," finished Labaan. "Always for evil purposes is it used."

  "Imperialism did us plenty of harm," Adam objected, heatedly.

  "Did it?" asked Labaan. "Ask anyone in a position to know, anyone old enough, if they'd rather things stay as they are or if they would, if they could, go back to the old days. Not one in a hundred wouldn't rather have the Euros back in charge. Unless we could talk the Americans into taking the job."

  Adam went silent, turning his head and eyes to the front of the plane.

  Labaan wasn't letting go, though. "Of course there are some people who like things as they are, especially the kleptocrats like your father who could never steal as much while the imperialists were in charge. Like my own chief, for that matter. And the people in the
former French Empire couldn't go back, since there's nothing to go back to; the French kept their empire in everything but appearances."

  ***

  The sun was well behind the Pilatus now, shining in thin streaks through the port side windows and painting those in bright lines on the seats and walls. Adam asked, "So what is our problem, then?"

  Labaan shook his head. "Countries. Countries that mix tribes and clans."

  "How so?"

  "Because when you're a minority-or even something less than an absolute majority-in countries such as we have, and you're in a position to steal, then you're only stealing from other tribes on behalf of your own. Why, it's immoral not to steal then, before someone else beats you to it and disadvantages your own tribe."

  "Well, yes, of course countries are wrong," Adam said. "Someday, when all of Africa, and all of mankind, live under a single roof . . . "

  Labaan started to laugh. The laughter grew and grew, filling the plane with sound even over the sound of the motor. "Is that the nonsense you learned in school, boy? I suppose it must be; since they tried to teach me the same things when I was there. Family of Man, is that it?" Again, Labaan broke down in howling laughter. "Join in the Family of Man, boy? Those people running those refugee camps back there? They joined the Family of Man, and they're doing very well by doing little good, too. And the people that supervise them from plush offices in New York, and Paris, and London? They're in the Family of Man, which only means they've no moral connection to anyone but their own blood.

  "Family of Man, my ass! You create a Family of Man, and one government, and the whole world will become Rwanda or the Congo writ large. And you know what, boy? There'll be no escape from it, either."