Countdown: H Hour (2 page)

“Make ready,” he ordered again, lowering himself to take maximum cover behind the desk. His minions were expendable. He was not. The four followers present obeyed. On their own they shouldered and leveled their submachine guns at the elevator doors, tensing as they did so.

Ayala stood at the rear of the elevator, stock-still—but for some trembling—and wide-eyed, as his assailants stepped over the ruined bodies of his former guards. Two of them slammed his back to the wall, mostly to stun him, then twisted him down to the floor. The other two took care to make sure that all three guards were dead with single bursts:
brrrp . . . brrrp . . . brrrp
. Still more red mist arose, even as chunks of bone and bits of gray matter flew to ricochet off or stick to the elevator’s walls and floor. One largish chunk of brain hit the wall, then began a slow, sliding descent, leaving a bright and thin red trace behind it.

The first two then spun Ayala to his belly, pressing his face into the blood, bone, and flesh. He felt his arms pulled back behind him, then crossed, then finally taped together at the wrists.

His brain barely registered the sight of the floor passing below him as the two took him by his arms, just under his armpits, and dragged him out. Then let him fall once he was out of the elevator, caring little that the old man’s face smashed into the floor. The four then gathered around, taking either an arm or a leg each, and picked him up. They began a trot then, carrying him out of the lobby briskly.

Ayala barely noticed the shrieking of tires as two vehicles pulled up to the building’s entrance. He did notice when he was propelled into the back of one of the vehicles. Rather, he noticed that his head struck something hard. After that he didn’t notice much for a while, neither the changeover to a different vehicle, nor when he was bodily carried from that second vehicle to a small boat putt-putting in a deserted inlet along the coast, south-southwest of Manila.

CHAPTER TWO

Change and decay in all around I see . . .

—Henry Francis Lyte, “Abide With Me”

Bonifacio Global City, Manila, Republic of the Philippines

Blue lights flashed, whipping across concrete, shattered glass, and marble. Manila’s police were on scene, as were several quite useless ambulances, and a medical examiner.

For the life of them, neither ambulance crew nor medical examiner could understand the rush. These guys, three guards in the elevator, a driver and another guard in a nearby limousine, and one now unfolded concierge in the lobby, were deader than chivalry, especially the former, they having done a numerically inexact but otherwise fair reenactment of Bonnie and Clyde at the ambush.

There were more guards there now, living ones. These belonged to Old Man Ayala’s eldest son, Luis, sometimes called “Junior,” despite not bearing the same given name. Surrounded by their close and tight cordon, Luis stood, hands clenched behind his back, head down, teeth clenched; a study in personal sorrow.

In a small gap on the cordon, yet kept outside of it, a police detective faced inward toward the younger Ayala. The detective’s beige suit wasn’t nearly the caliber of that worn by the younger Ayala. For that matter, it couldn’t have matched those of his guards, nor of the dead guards, nor even the concierge, prior to their being ventilated. Generally speaking, police work didn’t pay. In any sense.

“Who
did
this?” demanded the son and heir apparent.

“It’s impossible to know at this point, sir,” the policeman patiently explained to the younger, but infinitely wealthier, man. “The fact that your father wasn’t killed suggests very strongly a kidnapping for ransom. The . . . thoroughness with which the others were killed suggests more than a criminal enterprise. You can expect a ransom demand, probably within the next couple of days. We will monitor—”

“You will
not
!” Luis exclaimed. “Maybe for western missionaries and journalists you can invoke the law to prevent payment of ransoms. My father and his family are above that. What they want, whoever took him, they shall have, and any interference that threatens my father’s life, from any source whatsoever, will be crushed.”

The policeman said nothing except, “As you and your family wish, sir.” He thought, instead,
The golden rule . . . who has the gold makes the rules. That any money paid may be turned into the means of kidnapping or killing thousands means nothing . . . who has the gold makes the rules.

Oh well, I didn’t make the world; I just have to get by in it, as it turns to shit. I have to get by in it, for me and my own family, as well as I can.

Another police vehicle pulled up to the curb. With a short but polite bow, the police detective backed up, faced away from Luis, and walked to the newly arrived squad car, then around to the passenger door. There, from the rolled down window, with air conditioning turning to steam in the hot, moist air, a grandmotherly—in fact a grandmother’s—face peered out.

“Six dead, Aida,” the policeman said to the grandmother, who was also an inspector, once semi-retired and now called back from retirement. “And old man Ayala kidnapped. The eldest son has told me we’re to keep our hands off.”

Aida Farallon—something of a legend in the Philippines, though undeservedly obscure elsewhere—scowled, too much the lady to curse the storm she felt.

“Unusual circumstances?” she asked of the detective.

The plainclothesman shrugged. “Maybe not. They knew when he’d be here, but in itself that’s no big deal. The old man was something of a creature of habit. His girl, up on the twenty-first floor is . . . well, frankly, not bright enough to lie well. She knows nothing.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“Ten years ago I’d have instantly blamed the Moros,” the detective answered. “Now? Now, it could be anyone out for a fast buck.”

Aida, skilled in reading people, shook her head. “You don’t believe that for a minute.”

Shaking his head, the detective answered, “No. No, I don’t. Moros or Huks. This thing reads the kind of organization and precision ruthlessness criminal gangs—besides maybe TCS—can rarely muster. It smells political. Moreover”—the cop held up a brass-washed steel casing between thumb and forefinger—“this is not your normal ammunition. Russian 7N31. Sure, it
looks
normal. But try to fire this from a normal pistol or submachine gun and the thing will likely blow up in your face; Plus P Plus Plus. Designed to pierce body armor.”

Aida took a pencil from her pocket and held it, eraser end first, toward the detective. He placed the casing carefully over the rubber end. Aida then flicked on the dome light in the police car, and held the brass close to her eye, examining it closely.

“Looks normal enough,” she said.

“Sure,” the detective agreed. “But it isn’t. Not only does it have
much
higher pressure, the bullet’s a steel penetrator in a polymer frame. Weighs very little, a bit over half of a normal 9mm. It moves
fast
, hits armor, leaves the polymer behind, then the steel continues on.

“Fortunately, it’s rare.”

“Any chance of tracing it?” she asked, holding the pencil out for the other to retrieve his evidence.

The detective shook his head, taking the casing back and slipping it into a plastic bag. “Not really. This travelled only through black channels. The blackest. Even if the Russians could help, they won’t.

“I’d wonder if it wasn’t Victor Inning who put these into the stream of commerce. But he’s been so out of the picture for the last several years that I seriously doubt his involvement.”

The cop smiled, a bit ruefully. “Some ways, I wish Inning were still in business.
He
, at least, had
some
scruples.”

“Some,” Aida agreed, “but not all that much.”

The old woman leaned back in her chair and flicked off the dome light. Staring upward, through the windshield, she rocked her head for several long moments.

“
Cui bono
?” she asked, of no one in particular. Then she sneered, saying to the detective, “To hell with what the boy wants. I want the Ayala mansion and its communications monitored twenty-four, seven.
And
everyone in the entire clan’s cell phones.”

Still sneering, Aida nodded in the direction of the cordon around young Ayala. “Silly rich-boy turd thinks he can intimidate
me
? I’m a grandmother. I’ve got more important things to worry about than a career.

“Besides,” she added, “I know the boy’s mother.”

“Potentially a lot of trouble,” the detective said, “and I don’t just mean our efforts.”

“Trouble?” she asked. “Let me tell you about trouble. Trouble, real trouble, happens when a bunch of ideological or religious lunatics get their hands on enough money to buy a nuke, or some new bug, or to set up a serious lab to make serious gas.
That’s
trouble.

“I’ll handle the mother.”

Off Fort Drum (
El Fraile
), Manila Bay,

Republic of the Philippines

It wasn’t the mother of all coastal fortifications. Rather, it was the multi-great grandchild . . . on steroids, with two twin fourteen-inch turrets, topside, and reinforced concrete ranging up to thirty-six feet thick around the sides. As much as fifteen of those feet, though, had been blasted away by bombardment during the early and late stages of the Second World War.

From a distance, and if the light were poor, one might almost have thought the forward turret, Battery Marshall, still capable. The rearward one, though, Battery Wilson, gave that the lie; of its two guns, one had fallen back completely inside the turret while the other only stuck out a few feet from the glacis, and that at an angle that said, “ruin.”

Fort Drum, the old concrete battleship with its wrecked and rusted steel turrets and casemates, passed to port doing its fairly routine three knots. That is to say, while the ruined fort never moved, never had, and never could have—at least short of a world class earthquake or asteroid strike—the flowing tide, pushing through the narrow entrance to Manila Bay, tended to give it a wake just as with any ship moving at about that speed, said wake having fooled sundry aviators into believing the thing was moving.

The little motor launch into which an unconscious Ayala had been laid
was
moving, and at rather more than three knots. It was also bobbing and weaving with its forward movement, the natural waves, and the somewhat unnatural ones caused by, among other things, Fort Drum and the tide. Between the rap on the head and the motion, the old man began to throw up into the shallow bilges of the launch.

“Pull his head out of it,” Janail ordered. There was little sense in kidnapping the old tyrant only to lose him to drowning in his own vomit.

Dutifully, one of the team members grabbed Ayala’s thinning gray hair and held it up, forcing him into a purely face-down position to allow the puke to drain.

“Bastard stinks,” the guard commented.

“So might you . . . or I, in the same circumstances,” Janail countered.

“Wha . . . ?” whispered a frail old voice.

“Ah, he’s coming to. Very good. If he’s conscious, he’s unlikely to die on us.

“How are you feeling, Mr. Ayala?” Janail asked, most politely.

“What . . . what do you pirates want of me?”

“Not pirates, old man,” Janail answered, “freedom fighters.”
As in the freedom I’ll have when I have your ransom.
“And what we want is money to continue the struggle.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“No reason for you not to know, I suppose,” Janail answered. “We’re going to rendezvous with a larger boat just west of Corregidor. To which destination”—Janail uttered something in Cebuano, which language Ayala didn’t understand—“we’re now turning.”

The launch began a sharp turn to the right. Without being able to see anything, Ayala couldn’t hope to place the direction. Still, he saw no reason to doubt that he was heading toward Corregidor.

“From there we’ll sail to Mindanao. You’ll be there a while, until we can finalize transportation to elsewhere.”

“Why me?” Ayala asked. “Who put you up to this?”

Janail laughed. Then, relenting, he said, “Why . . . why
Allah
put us up to this, old man.”
Whatever I do—or don’t—believe, that’s for the benefit of the troops.

Malate, Manila, Republic of the Philippines

Under an early morning sun, Aida pulled her own automobile—a tiny red conveyance, none too new—up to the curb fronting a row of carefully trimmed hedges that almost completely concealed the stilted house set back from the street in this quiet neighborhood west of Taft Avenue. Magnificent palms grew from gaps in the sidewalks here, lining both sides of the street. The shade they provided was minimal, though the ambience was considerable.

Before stepping out of the vehicle, she considered flipping her sun visor down to reveal the police symbol that would let any patrolling cop know that hers was not a car to be ticketed.

“But . . . nah,” she muttered. “Better a ticket than to reveal where I’ve been and who I came to see.”

She stepped out, cursing softly that arthritis was finally catching up with her old bones. Walking the half dozen steps to the break in the hedges that led to the house, she stopped and announced, in Tagalog, “You know I’m armed, Pedro. Madame knows I’m armed. And you and she also know I’m not giving it up. So just forget about the search; open the gate, and get out of the way.”

Aida thought she heard a faint snickering from the other side of the wooden gate slung between the hedges. If so, though, the man on the other side, Pedro, Madame Ayala’s chief bodyguard, showed only his usual iron face as the gate swung wide.

“She’s expecting you, Aida,” Pedro said, also in Tagalog. He swung his head backwards and over one shoulder indicating that Aida was to proceed on into the house. “She’s also expecting you to be armed. ‘Forget it, Pedro,’ she told me; ‘Aida’s not giving up her pistol.’ ”

“Thanks, cousin,” Aida said, brushing past Pedro and another man whose face she didn’t know. The other guard carried a submachine gun. That this was strictly illegal bothered Aida not a whit. The old rules, after all, the manmade rules, weren’t working anymore . . . and no one knew it better than she did.

Though she shouldn’t have been, Aida was surprised to discover there were lights on in the sitting room in which Paloma Ayala awaited her. The surprise wasn’t the daytime light, per se; Aida had grown up in a more civilized time when that was quite normal. No, the surprise was that, since worldwide mandates to stop the manufacture of old style incandescent bulbs had kicked in, most people in her country could no longer afford the green bulbs, a single unit of which cost between three and ten percent of a person’s
annual
income. Thus, the old incandescents, cheap and reliable, were being hoarded because they could not be replaced.

Of course the cost of an LED bulb isn’t even pocket change to the likes of the Ayalas, even if it’s beyond the reach of everyday people. Well . . . maybe somebody will actually start making the old bulbs again and to hell with the Eurotrash and
Kano
greenies. Maybe.

Aida’s eyes swept past the glowing bulbs. As they did, for a brief moment she felt contempt. That passed away with the thought,
We could take all the Ayala’s money and pass it out. Then what? Apart from a couple of years of rampant inflation, the common people still wouldn’t be able to afford the westerners’ feel-good fantasies.

If the lights surprised her, Aida was positively shocked when her eyes came to rest upon Paloma Ayala’s face.
Damn! I didn’t think she had a tear in her entire body, and here she looks like she’s cried rivers of them.

It was true enough. Madame Ayala, like many an Asian woman, showed her age but barely. And that bare little bit she had covered with expensive makeup by cheap but skilled local labor. The expensive makeup was runnelled and seamed by tear tracks. One false eyelash hung, half off. The woman’s hair was frizzled, as if she had been tearing at it without cease. Her eyes were red and puffy in a way no amount of skill and no expense could fix.