Countdown: H Hour (10 page)

“Ahead, on the right,” Lox said, pointing his chin in the direction of a
kei
, or bantam, car. Welch turned his eyes only to glimpse a blue Suzuki bearing the license plate, JBB 806. Between the numbers and letters was the image of a monument, an obelisk surrounded by statuary, appearing between the numbers and letters. A motto, “MATATAG NA REPUBLIKA,” was inscribed below. The Suzuki was one identified in Aida’s file as belonging to a journalist—if that was quite the word—apparently in deep sympathy with various Moro groups, likewise with the remnants of the Huks, and, it was believed, often enough in close contact. In addition to the name, the car model, and the license number, the file also gave the locale of the journalist’s little piece on the side, along with a few other possible addresses.

Pedro’s taxi slowed to a stop about fifteen yards shy of the Suzuki. “Gentlemen,” Welch announced over his left shoulder, “your show. Pick you up four blocks down and right one.”

Graft, Lox, and Semmerlin formed in just that order, left to right, and began a slow walk down the sidewalk, stopping occasionally to let Lox chat up the streetwalkers in Tagalog.

“Damned shame we don’t have time to sample the merchandise,” Semmerlin observed.

“Maybe later,” Lox replied, turning briefly from the girl he’d been talking to. He returned his attention to the girl, then quoted a price calculated to be insulting. Infuriated, she said, “
Jackol
,”—go jerk off—then turned her nose up, spun on her heel, and stormed off.

It wasn’t more than a few more steps after that that they’d reached the blue Suzuki. Semmerlin stumbled on the uneven pavement. Oddly, the pavement was no more uneven here than it had been for the last fifteen yards. Still, Semmerlin went down to hands and knees. Lox and Graft both bent to assist their comrade, though Lox angled right while Graft turned just slightly left.

Lox assisted Semmerlin back to his feet, providing a barrier to vision with their legs. After a few moments, Graft likewise stood.

Lox asked, “Any trouble getting it attached?”

“Nah,” Graft replied. “It’s tighter than a houri’s hole.”

“Good. Let’s step it up, gentlemen, and get back to the taxi. We’ve got two more to peg tonight.”

Safe House Bravo, South Green Heights Village, Muntinlupa City, Manila Metro Area, Republic of the Philippines

For certain kinds of deliveries, Ben Arroyo preferred the night. It wasn’t that there were fewer police out, and certainly not that there were fewer criminals. But the beat cops could be more easily bribed with no one watching—if a bribe were even necessary; he was, after all, a reserve cop himself—while the criminals could be more easily shot and their bodies disposed of.

’
Course, the criminals who are after my merchandise can also more easily ambush
me.
But that’s just one of life’s little chances. And, anyway, Peter did insist on a discreet delivery.

Initially, Ben headed homeward on the not entirely indefensible theory that a criminal gang, looking to grab his merchandise, would figure he’d be much less likely to be carrying anything worthwhile from his business to his house. About half way there he was confident enough that he wasn’t being followed to turn off that route and head in the direction of the address Lox had given him.

Tondo, Manila, Republic of the Philippines

“Eighty Suliven Alvendia Ave, Muntinlupa,” Diwata read off from her computer screen. “Gotta love modern technology, while it lasts.” Looking up from the screen, she asked Lucas, “Got it?”

He repeated it back to her, then asked, “Sure, but what about it? And what do you want us to do with the information?”

“Ben doesn’t make night deliveries to just anybody. And that’s a rich fart area. Whoever moved in and bought from Ben has money.

“Find a house nearby, not too cheap, not too expensive.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “A kidnapping job? We can do that. Rich Kano, maybe? The house is to recon the place? A secure place to assemble a kidnapping team?”

“Yes to all that, but”—she turned her attention back to the screen, typing in a job search—“Ha! They’re looking for a cook and maid. Get one of our working girls, one of the better looking ones, without any tattoos, to go apply for the job. An English speaker who can cook. Use one with a kid and take the kid for insurance.”

Lucas thought about that briefly, then said, “Maricel or Lydia; we’ve kept both of them clean and tat free, for higher end work.” After another few moments, he’d decided. “Maricel; Lydia’s English is marginal and Maricel’s is almost native.”

CHAPTER TEN

For the lips of a strange woman drop
as
an

honeycomb, and her mouth
is
smoother than oil.

—Proverbs 5:3, King James Version

Safe House Bravo, Muntinlupa, Republic of the Philippines

The other half of Graft’s ODA—Sergeants Baker and Malone, Staff Sergeants Perez, Washington, and Zimmerman, under Sergeant First Class Benson—had a mission list that, for the nonce, amounted to housekeeping. That word—housekeeping—tended to mean a somewhat different thing to the military. Oh, yes, they’d swept the place, in more senses than one, dusted a bit, set up their rather Spartan personal quarters. But day-to-day mopping and dusting? That was a bit beneath them. And cooking was right out, if it could be avoided. Sure, there was a security issue. But there was also a security issue, as in being way too glaringly different, to not having domestic help.

Malone had the job of finding a live-in housekeeper/cook, though Lox had put the ad up for them, since he spoke Tagalog. They’d weighed the odds between going to an agency and putting up an ad. An agency might have produced a woman with a background check. Just as likely, in this degraded day, however, that background check would have been purely fraudulent. Moreover, it might have accompanied a police informer, or a gang member. You just didn’t know anymore. All things considered, they’d decided there was a little more, a very slight bit more, security in randomness.

Malone thought the job interview was going exceptionally well, especially since this one, Maricel, swallowed.

He looked down at the woman, who in turn looked up hopefully, and said, “You’re hired.”

Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

Republic of the Philippines

The estate, though it came with a small boat, was not on the sea. Rather, it was several miles upriver, in a triangular valley of about a kilometer on a side. A stream from a spring ran through the valley, joining the river by a small boathouse. What the land had once been used for, Welch and his men couldn’t be sure. There were both jungle-covered terraces running up the sides of the surrounding hills and some indicators that a portion of the valley, at least, had once been quarried. Most of the land was treed. It was every bit as isolated and quiet as Mrs. Ayala had said. To add to the isolation, the perimeter was surrounded by upright sheets of partially buried perforated steel planking that had once been intended to form an ad hoc airstrip. Because of the manganese in the steel of the PSP, it hadn’t even rusted noticeably, though it appeared to have been up for a long time.

The main building, erected on stilts, was about forty feet on a side and built into the side of one of the surrounding hills. The stilts were there not as a precaution against flooding, but to reduce the access of crawling insects and snakes. In this it was only partially successful, possibly because the house wasn’t completely on stilts. Towards the back, and below the main level, there were more rooms, more than half underground. The walls of some of those had some odd graffiti, apparently Japanese, that no one in the party could read.

Semmerlin had taken one look at the stilts and felt an immense wave of satisfaction.
Good. Keep the snakes out, too. I hate snakes.

There were also a number of outbuildings, which Graft, Semmerlin, and the rest were busy turning into interrogation chambers.

Pedro brought the morning papers, daily, to the room the men had dubbed, “operations.” Those papers Lox poured over, also daily, for anything of intelligence value. Two televisions, one tuned to CNN and the other to local news, supplemented the written word. From all of them Lox scrawled notes on a yellow legal pad. There hadn’t been much to scrawl. The kidnapping had been announced, and a video statement from the victim released, but only that.

It’s interesting though,
Lox thought,
and just possibly significant, that the byline in the paper lists one of the reporters we put a marker on.
Of that he made a note.

The laptop noted and recorded the movements of the seven cars that the team had placed tracking devices on, over three days and nights. So far, though, there’d been nothing untoward. One of the cars, owned by a politician, went from home to the legislature to an apartment building presumed to hold the pol’s mistress and then home again. The vehicles of the two “journalists” likewise had done nothing too terribly suspicious. One car, belonging to a high mucky-muck in an international humanitarian NGO acted a bit oddly, but a check of addresses and Aida’s report suggested that that had more to do with the drug trade than terrorism. From the others? Nothing.

The laptop didn’t need to be monitored; it kept track of the movements automatically.

At the sound of the old wooden floor, creaking under the walk of someone substantial, Lox looked up from his work with the morning papers.

“Anything?” Welch asked.

“Nothing.”

“Crap.”

Lox smiled. “We knew this way would be slow and difficult.”

“Yeah,” Welch agreed. “But I hate just sitting around on my ass. What are we going to do if these guys we marked are clean?”

Lox shook his head. “Kiss seventy million bucks goodbye? Watch while Mrs. Ayala pays twice that to her husband’s kidnappers? Maybe watch a city go boom?”

Lox’s voice grew contemplative. “I think,” he said, “that given a choice between her husband safe in her arms and a city going boom, Mrs. Ayala wouldn’t hesitate to let a city be destroyed. And that would be true even if it were a Philippine city, let alone a western one.”

Terry looked around the room, then bent over, took Lox’s pen in hand, and wrote on the legal pad,
If all else fails, we could do a rescue at the moment of transfer.

Lox took back the pen and wrote,
Not a chance that old woman will let us anywhere near a transfer. Besides, whoever in her family set this up would tip off the Harrikat if we get close to them.

Welch nodded, then muttered, “I suppose so.” Turning away, he walked to the windows fronting the place. From there, one could see over the PSP fencing toward the front of the estate. Not that one could see much; the jungle that lined the river began not far from the fence.

I
truly
hate to fail
, Terry thought, staring out the windows at the seemingly solid jungle past the fence.
If I’d known how unlikely it was going to be that we’d succeed here, I think I’d have bowed out. Thrown my weight, such as it is, behind Boxer’s attempt to derail the project. And I’d be comfortably at home with my woman.

And I really don’t see how we’re going to pull this off.

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

One of his guards, a surly looking Moro with a scar that ran from the right side of his forehead, across a clouded eye, and then down his brown cheek, tugged at Lucio Ayala’s chain.

“Up old man,” said the guard, giving the chain another painful tug. “The chief wants to talk with you. After that, you have an appointment with some news people.”

Slowly, unsteadily, Ayala arose to his feet. Already, and it hadn’t been so very long since his abduction, what fat he’d had was beginning to melt off, the result of bad food and not even enough of that. To add to his misery, the chain around his leg had created running sores, one which might already be infected. The old man felt weak, and tired, and pretty much hopeless.

The guard gave a vicious tug to the chain, causing Ayala to cry out with pain as he fell to the mucky floor of the hut. The guard stepped up, taking up the chain’s slack as he did, and rolled the prisoner around with his booted foot.

“Nothing personal, old man,” the guard said. “But we have a choice of beating you up to make the right impression to your family on television, or covering you with muck. The chief thought muck would be better, since you probably couldn’t take a beating.”

Old man Ayala stumbled along, as slowly as he thought he could get away with. His head was down even while his eyes searched frantically for some flower or leaf unusual enough to identify the island on which he was being held.
It doesn’t matter whether
I
know what it is, or where I am. As long as somebody can identify it.
Sadly, there was nothing that struck him as particularly unusual.

Nothing. Shit. I’d try Morse Code from my army days if I knew where I was, and remembered it. “Basilan,” they said. But this is too small—it feels too small—to be the main island. Still . . . it might cut down the search area. What are those codes? What letters would I need? I can skip vowels. N and R, for near. B, S, L and N, again, for the area. N is . . . ummm . . . What was that mnemonic. Ah . . . N for November . . . AU- tumn. Stressed, unstressed; a dash and a dot. Yes, that’s it. R is . . .

“In there, old man,” the guard said, pointing at the entrance to a grass hut.

 . . . ro-MER-o. Dot-dash-dot. I think. Hard to remember. B is Bravo. What the hell was Bravo? Something with clapping in it.

Mohagher Kulat, a television journalist, and his cameraman, a Mr. Iqbal, made some final adjustments to the second of two video recorders. “We’re ready, boss,” Iqbal announced.

Kulat was only notionally a Moslem. He did have the name and the ancestry, but as far as he cared, Islam could go to hell. Oh, sure, he mouthed the pieties when it seemed useful, as it had seemed useful for this. And he had the preference for family, though that was a cultural issue, by no means unique to the Philippines, and not a religious one.

Mostly, as with most journalists, he just wanted to make a name for himself, and took what risks were required for that.

Standing up from the log on which he’d sat while Iqbal did the final focusing, Kulat walked the three steps to another and sat down beside the leader of the group, Janail Hapilon. Janail had a pair of pruning shears at his feet.

“You are planning something dramatic?” Kulat asked, his fingers loosely waving in the direction of the shears.

Janail nodded, without a word.

This is good
, thought Kulat.
Good for ratings, good for me, hence good.

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

There were two TV cameras set up on tripods when Ayala entered the hut. Lights accompanying those ensured that his eyes didn’t have to adjust to the gloom. His guard, still holding the chain with one hand, pushed him roughly in the direction of a horizontal log.

“Sit, Mr. Ayala,” the kidnapper he knew only as Janail commanded. Janail wore a scarf, more or less a modified keffiyeh, over his head and across his face. Beside him, on the ground, was a pair of what looked like pruning shears.

“This man”—Janail’s head nodded in the direction of a clean cut young Filipino, wearing bushtrousers and an open-necked shirt, seated between the cameras—“has come to interview you. Answer his questions.”

Ayala nodded his understanding and agreement. Sighing, he reached both hands up to his temples, as if to massage away a headache.

The interview was long, much longer, really, than an old, sick and frail man’s constitution could readily stand. Trying to send a message while chained and guarded, too, sapped some of Ayala’s stamina.

Still, eventually the questions ended. When they did, the guard took Ayala’s left arm in his own hands, grasping it tightly at the wrist. Then Janail picked up what were, in fact, pruning shears, and snipped off the old man’s left little finger, between the knuckle and the joint. The finger fell to the hut’s dirt floor, curling and uncurling a few times under its own direction. Ayala, likewise, clutched the tiny spurting stump and fell over, screaming. Over that screaming, Janail announced to the camera, “A piece a month until our righteous demands are met. We will be in contact.”

Safe House, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

Republic of the Philippines

“Terry! Terry! Come quick; I’ve got something.”

Welch burst into the operations room a few moments later, dripping and wrapped in a towel. “This had better be—”

Lox cut him off with a wave of his hand, then pointed at the television screen that carried the local news.

“So they made a propaganda tape?” Terry said. “So what? It’s routine. And routine that the press helps them.”

“Watch the fingers of his right hand,” Lox replied.

Terry did watch for a few moments. “So what? So he’s nervous?”

“Nope. He’s sending Morse.”

Welch looked carefully. “I don’t see it.”

“Look again; three fingers rubbing versus one tapping. He’s sending ‘NRBSLN.’ ‘Near Basilan,’ would be my guess.”

Again, Welch looked closely at the screen. At length, he agreed, “Okay, I can see that. Still, so what? We figured he was somewhere in that area.”

Whatever Lox was about to say was lost as a shrieking Madame Ayala burst into the house. At that same time, the camera homed in on Mr. Ayala’s right hand, then followed his snipped off, twitching finger down to the dirt.

“I want those motherfuckers
crucified
!” It was at an amazing volume, given the tiny source.

“Bet she didn’t learn
that
at Mount Holyoke,” Lox muttered.

“An extra twenty-five million if you bring me that bastard
alive
!”

“And, interestingly, only one of the cars we’ve been tracking went to either the docks or an airport in the last few days.”

“More if you can get me his
family
!”

Still speaking softly, Lox added, “So I think we have an initial target. Finally.”

Mrs. Ayala stood then at the entrance to operations, her dainty, bejeweled hands clutching either side of the door. Her face was inhuman in its fury, which was all the more disconcerting because that face rode above a frame that could make five feet only in high heels.

“
Blllooooood
!”