Countdown: H Hour by Tom Kratman Read Free Book Online Page A

the bridge lights made the captain’s scowl seem even more fierce than usual. Pearson still hadn’t been able to remove that scowl from his face, nor to get over the embarrassment of one of his reefers—and the most important of the lot—failing. “Regiment says we can pick up a new supply at Capetown or, failing that, Tuticorin.” He shrugged. “At least they’re more or less on our way. I don’t think they’ve thought that one through.”
    “I’d feel a lot better about it,” said Warrington, “if they had some other ship make the pickup and deliver it to us at sea. We’re supposed to be fucking secret , after all.”
    “None available,” Pearson replied. “They’re all either committed to home base defense, or too far out of the way.”
    “Yeah . . . well . . . I’m thinking we’re going to have to retrieve them by air.”
    “That has its own problems,” Pearson pointed out. “We’ll not only have to erect the flight deck again, but we’d risk being spotted by ground-based radar. And neither the South African nor the Indian navies are organizations to be sneered at. Neither are the air forces. At least not when you’re a big fat freighter.”
    Below, on the temporary flight deck, the first of the CH-750’s had disappeared as the container doors were closed. Even as the crane whined the container into the air to move it to stowage, Number Two touched down.

CHAPTER FIVE

    Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is
    suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his
    destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death,
    but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him
    something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state
    of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.
    —Jean Baudrillard

    Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,
    Republic of the Philippines

    Lucio Enrique Ayala scratched absentmindedly at something itching his leg. Insect or jungle fungus, he didn’t know. His ancient back rested, if that was quite the word, against the center pole of the hut in which he’d been imprisoned. His posterior and the back of his ancient, skinny legs rested on dirt rapidly turning to mud. From one leg led a rusty iron chain, triple looped about his ankle and running off to a rock bigger and heavier than he could have lifted as a young man.
    He’d tested the rock, shortly after being chained to it. I sure as hell can’t budge it now.
    Old Man Ayala didn’t have a clue where he was, except that it was mostly jungle and not too far from the sea. Big help, that is. No place in this part of the country is too far from the sea . He recalled that his captors had said something about “Basilan,” shortly after his capture, but whether he was actually on that island, or on one of the more than seven thousand islands, greater and lesser, that made up the province he couldn’t know.
    Probably not Basilan Island, though , he thought. Too many very nervous Christians, there, too mixed in with the rest, and the army takes too much interest in the place for my “hosts” to be as comfortable as they plainly are . . . some one of the other islands completely owned by the Moros . . . probably one the army’s given up on.
    He looked down at his tightly chained ankle and felt a surge of despair, thinking, Not that it makes a lot of difference; the army could be half a mile away and they’d still not have a clue I was here. And they’d be as likely to bring down artillery on this hut as to make any effort to see what was inside, first. Can’t say as I’d blame them.
    Ayala had done his military time as a young officer, long, long ago. A signals man, he’d been. And, like everything else in his life, he hadn’t let the experience go to waste. Briefly, he mentally chalked off what he did know, even if he thought the knowledge useless. I’m not all that far from the sea; I can smell the water and, when the wind’s just right, hear the surf. I’m either in or near a major Moro base. I think I’ve seen as many