Countdown: H Hour (13 page)

Moreover, this tore wasn’t laced with opium.

At the other end—though not far away; it wasn’t a big table—was a computer, with the best map Lox had been able to find of the Pilas Group of islands. In the center of the image was one island labeled “Caban Island,” blown up as far as it would go before it turned fuzzy.

“That’s it,” Lox said. “Everything matches. Nothing else in the area really does. Two piers, the cliff south of the beach, the layout of the huts. Can’t see the bunkers but I imagine the Harrikat have learned a thing or two about camouflage by now. On the other hand,”—Lox reached out and tapped the screen with his finger—“if you look closely you can see the smoke coming up out of the ground in lines. That’s the mess tent Kulat and Iqbal identified. He’s there—on that island—if he’s anywhere.”

“That’s going to be a pure bitch,” Welch observed. “We’ve got no good ins. We can’t lift enough people to matter with the two gunships. And, even if we could, there’s no LZ big enough to get more than one bird in at a time. If we land on the beach, by boat or, if we had them, helicopters, he’s dead before we’ve gotten to the first huts. Not sure that a whole bunch of ours wouldn’t be dead, too.”

“We’ve got to get someone in there,” said Graft, “to find and secure him while the rest of the force lands, however they end up landing.”

“Suggestions?” Welch asked.

Graft shook his head, but the gesture had more of despair to it than negation. His finger tapped the map at the southwestern edge of the island. “Two men,” he said. “That’s all we can get in with the two SeaBobs. They go in underwater to this cliff. Then they free climb up the cliff—yeah, it’ll be a bitch. They take out the guards—there have gotta be guards there; it’s the highest point on the island—to clear the way for follow-on forces to come in by Zodiac. If they can find Ayala and get him back to that point, with plenty of gunship support the company can hold the Harrikat off until we get the infantry company ashore.

“Shit.”

“Why ‘shit’?” Welch asked.

“Because I’m the best free climber in the company, that’s why ‘shit.’ And I am
not
looking forward to this.”

“It’s something to study, anyway,” Welch said, noncommittally.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Australia wanted the Gurkhas in 1990. Even today, Australia recruits Gurkhas who have served as much as 15 years with the British forces, which shows how highly they are regarded. It’s possible they, or other nations, would be interested if Britain no longer wanted us.

—Chhatra Rai, Gurkha Veteran

MV
Richard Bland
, South of Mauritius

The ship functioned well enough, still, but only as a kind of a floating prison. The various military contingents lived separately and messed at separate times, with armed guards from the aviation detachment, the landing craft crew, headquarters and support, and the
Bland
, itself, ensuring peace. They got an hour a day, more or less, to exercise and breathe fresh air on the containers, topside.

There were a few exceptions, the Gurkhas who’d tried to keep peace during the riot, and the officers and senior noncoms, other than most of the senior non-coms from the spec ops company, almost all of whom had been in the thick of it.

Having nothing much else to do today, what with his troops locked down, Sergeant Balbahadur mostly stayed on deck, practicing with his pipes. After all, war pipes, in the close confines of the ship, tended to be kind of. . . .
loud
.

“Sergeant Hallinan, Sergeant Feeney, it’s your time to go topside.”

There were two armed guards, both naval. Warrington had been insistent. “One might tempt them.”

Hallinan nodded and stood. “C’mon, Feeney, we’ve got our daily break from staring at the corrugated walls.”

Hallinan felt miserable and had ever since the riot. Deep in his bones he was sure, absolutely
certain
, that it was all his fault.
I could have just put the goddamned rifle on safe, then taken it up with the chain of command later. But
nooo,
I had to be a wise ass. And now the whole fucking mission is up in the air. Jesus, fuck me to tears; I never expected anything like this.

A baker’s dozen of them—A and C companies, both—slowly assembled on the mess deck, just in time to see fourteen others marched down from topside and returned, still under guard, to their quarters. The men who’d escorted Feeney and Hallinan turned them over to four other guards, then went back for a couple more. It took fifteen minutes, at least, to round up the entire party. That hour’s break tended to be less than that. Once they were all present one of the guards opened up a hatch at the high end of a ladder—actually a set of stairs but it would never do in naval circles to call something by its everyday name—and motioned them up. The men climbed four ladders before reaching the level of the top containers. There another hatch was opened. As it was, Hallinan heard the strains of what he thought he recognized as
The Black Bear
. . .

“On the pipes? Who’s paying the pipes? Who for the love of God even
could
be playing the pipes, here?”

“One of the Gurkhas,” replied a petty officer, Kirkpatrick, normally in charge of the LCM and now bearing a loaded shotgun. The petty officer rolled his eyes, adding, “He’s been at it all fucking day, too.”

By the time Hallinan reached the Gurkha, the tune had changed from “The Black Bear” to “Scots Wha Hae.” That one, Hallinan knew. He stood there, perhaps a bit dumb
looking
, but definitely not dumb as he sang along:

“Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,

Scots wham Bruce has often led,

Welcome tae yer gory bed . . . ”

Sergeant Balbahadur could hardly smile, what with the blowpipe stuck in his mouth. He did take his right hand off the chanter—screwing up a note in the process—to encourage Hallinan to sing along, but louder.

“Now’s the day and now’s the hour.

See the front of battle lour.

See approach proud Edward’s power.

Chains and slavery . . .

. . . Let us do or dee!”

The Gurkha finished the piece with a couple of flourishes, then let it die away with a sound not entirely dissimilar to what one might hear from three cats caught in a blender.

“Where did you learn the song?” Balbahadur asked. His English was replete with received pronunciation, something unusual in a Gurkha.

“From my grandmother, who got it from her mother,” Hallinan said. “Where did you learn the pipes? And to speak English like that. I heard the others speaking once and they have a pretty strong accent.”

“I learned from Second Battalion, Gurkha Rifles,” answered Balbahadur. “Both things, I mean. We—the Brigade of Gurkhas—picked up the pipes from Scots regiments, in India. Oh, a long time ago, it was. I picked up the English because, well, I was a line boy, born within the regiment. The others aren’t. And they tell me
I
have a terrible Brit accent in Nepali.

“My father was Gurkha Rifles. So was his father and his grandfather. And I was born in the UK, at the Royal Victoria Hospital, in Folkestone.”

Balbahadur held out his hand to shake, giving his name—“Or just Bal, for short”—and asking, “And you are?”

“Hallinan, Alex, Bal. Are you sure you want to shake
my
hand? I mean, this”—Hallinan indicated the guards and quasi prisoners with a wave of his hand—“is all my fault.”

“Oh, bullshit,” the Gurkha said. “You think that little thing with the safety—oh, yes, we
all
heard about it—caused all this? Nonsense; you’re not that important, Al.”

“No,” Balbahadur insisted, “you didn’t start this. It started over pay.”

“What?”

“It started with the pay differential between Euros, Americans, and honorary westerners like me and the other Gurkhas, and the Guyanan locals. Yeah, they make two-three-four times what they could expect to make in Guyana, if they could even find a job. And, yeah, the pay index holds out the promise of making the same pay as we do, eventually. Though it doesn’t hold out the hope, ever, of making the same cost of living allowance because there
is
no cost of living allowance for Guyanans. It’s all based on having to support a family in America or Europe. Which is, frankly, bullshit, because almost everyone with a family has that family in corporate housing, right around Camp Fulton.

“That’s okay when they’re home, and it should be okay now, for the ones still back there, when they’re home fighting for their home against Venezuela. But when they get shipped overseas, while their families are in danger, at home, it’s just not enough money. No, not even with the combat pay, which they’re going to get two or three months of for maybe an hour’s fighting.”

“But we
can’t
pay them to U.S. or Euro scales,” Hallinan objected. “If we did, we couldn’t support the entire regiment with the Euros and Americans. And without the Euros and Americans, nobody would hire the regiment for anything. Then there’d be no regiment, no jobs, and
no
pay.”

Balbahadur grinned. “You know that. I know that. Logically
they
should know that, too. And, logically, they
do
. But it’s not about logic; it’s about how they
feel
. And the pay differential makes them feel like second class citizens. Which is why they’re so goddamned resentful.”

Hallinan shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. Above my pay grade. I don’t suppose you have a solution?”

“Above my pay grade, too,” Balbahadur admitted. “But that’s where it all started. Add in that no Guyanan has yet been allowed to buy a share in the regiment . . .”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” Hallinan agreed.

“Oh, it’s fine for me and mine,” Balbahadur said. “Fine for you. But it sucks for them. And this is what wrecked the Brigade of Gurkhas, you know.”

“Huh? How so?”

Balbahadur looked heavenward, as if asking the gods why his regiment had had to be mostly dismantled. “Well . . . used to be the Gurkhas got paid a pittance; it was set by treaty between India and the UK. But as the Empire closed down, and the Gurkhas had to be moved home, or to Hong Kong, or Singapore, or Brunei, the British Army found it
had
to start paying fairly. They hid it as cost of living allowances for quite a while, so as not to violate the treaty with India. Eventually, though, it was simpler to just make for pay parity and to hell with the treaty.

“This got pushed by the courts into parity for retirement pensions, right to live in the UK, a whole bunch of things. Very quickly it became obvious that Gurkhas weren’t such a bargain after all. Oh, we were good, yes, but no better than a good British regiment. And we couldn’t be used for some things; try, for example, putting a Gurkha whose English was, at best, pretty marginal out on the streets of Belfast or Londonderry to keep order. Not such a good idea? Ministry of Defense didn’t think so, either.

“So, in a time of tightening budgets, they let the Gurkhas go, for the most part. One battalion is all that’s left, plus a few demonstration troops at Sandhurst. And we’re mostly line boys now. The British Army takes in less than eighty new Gurkhas a year, and Nepal’s share is about twenty. And Gurkha pay sent back to Nepal used to be really important to a damned poor country.

“So a loud-mouthed actress, whose father was an officer in the Brigade, did some good for a few, for a while, and damaged an infinite number, forever.”

Balbahadur laughed lightly. “You’ve heard that two wrongs don’t make a right? Well, sometimes two rights make an infinite wrong.”

“I’m wiring base,” Pearson said to Warrington. The captain stood on the bridge, facing forward over the deck where Hallinan and Balbahadur were talking, the guards dutifully standing over them and the rest. “This mission is a failure from the word go. There’s no way we can proceed.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Warrington said. “I really do. We’ve still got three weeks or so to turn this around.”

Pearson snorted. “I’m a Christian. I believe God made the Heavens and the Earth in seven days, whatever a ‘day’ may mean to God. But I’m not a fool. I
don’t
believe you can make a combat effective force out of this mutually hostile rabble in the three weeks or so we’ve got left.”

“So what have you lost by letting me try?” Warrington pleaded. “We can’t go home anyway. The worst that happens is you burn up fuel. So?”

“No,” Pearson said. “The worst that happens is that the next riot gets completely out of hand and somebody gets killed.”

“Ah, but I have a cunning plan . . .”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“By the way,” Warrington asked with a grin, “what’s illumination going to be like for the next few nights?”

“All right, you cunts; you want out of durance vile? This is your route.”

The moon was up, but presented only a thin sliver of weak light, not enough to illuminate more than the grossest outlines of the ship, its structure, and the containers. In that nearly three-feet-up-a-well-digger’s-ass-at-midnight darkness, four lines and four knots of troops, all mixed in as randomly as Warrington, Pierantoni, and Stocker could deliberately make them, waited for the word to start assembling the flight deck from the perforated steel planking. The lines were for the drudgery of moving the sections of Marsden Matting from the containers to where they were to be assembled. The knots, and each of those contained both line infantry and special operations types, were to do the actual assembly.

A bare minimum of the tiny, 4.5mm, chemlights marked the edges of the ad hoc airstrip and special danger areas. The greenish spark and faint glow they gave off was barely adequate to the purpose.

“The standard is one hour for a field of sixty feet by three hundred,” Warrington reminded them. “Now
GO
!”

With a collective groan, the men of A and C companies began. Although they’d rehearsed the procedure in a small way first, in the light, down on the mess deck, dark multiplied the problems to infinity.

“Oooowww . . . you’ve got my fucking finger stuck . . . Back off! Back off! . . . Goddamnit, ease it over! . . . Get off my foot, asshole!...Where’s the half piece for the edge? . . . Shit! Get a medic; I think my leg’s broken . . . End piece here! End piece here! . . . Mediiiccc! . . .”

“Sergeant Major P?” Warrington called out.

“Here, sir.”

“Take charge of this shit. Don’t let ’em kill each other. I’m going to go see how Blackmore, Cagle, and the landing party are coming along.”

“Sir.”

When Warrington reached the mess deck, Cagle, who—having a contact on the ground was effectively intel officer for the mission—was giving the situation brief. Behind him, on the big TV screen, was a Google satellite image of the objective area. Cagle pointed at it.

“That’s the city of Bajuni,” Cagle explained. “My contact tell me it doesn’t look much like that anymore. Mostly it’s ruined and burned. It would be more burned except that there was never much wood in its construction, being mostly mud brick.

“There is no civil order there; there is no law, not even Sharia. Rule is broken down between about nine different gangs, some pirates, some not. There used to be a ruling clan, the Marehan. That’s over; they’re just another one of the rival gangs. Rather, they’re several of the rival gangs since even that clan broke up.” Cagle pushed a button and the screen changed to superimpose the rough boundaries of the gangs that ruled the city and the surrounding countryside.

“The NGO’s mostly gave up on the place a few years ago. The press has long since pulled out. Now nobody cares about it.”

With another push of the button a rough oval appeared, encompassing a set of docks, some warehouses, and a ship rather smaller than the
Bland
. “That’s our objective area. It’s entirely within the sliver ruled by the rump of the Marehan, so, as long as we don’t wander, we shouldn’t have to fight more than one gang. They’ve no armor; just some technicals. For indirect they’ve a fair number of mortars, heavy and light, but few of those have sights and ammunition is limited.

“Mind you, the other gangs could, in time, summon about five thousand fighters. So speed is going to be very goddamned important.”

“And there’s another thing.” Cagle looked directly at Warrington, standing behind the mass of men seated on the floor and at the mess tables. “The price for the medicines we need is fair, but it includes evacuation of fifteen people, twelve men, a woman, and two children. One of those is the current chief of the Marehan, who wants out before it’s too late. The rest are his family and close advisors and guards.”