Countdown_ The Liberators Part 57

Reilly checked his map against his GPS. Then he glanced half to the right and said over the radio, "Scouts and ant.i.tank: That's the tank lager over there to your right. Go shoot it up . . . and have fun storming the castle, boys."

D-Day, East of Buro, Ophir

It had been said that a stern chase was a long chase. This chase must have seemed very long indeed to the pirates pursuing Eeyore and Morales.

Not long enough, though, thought Antoniewicz. Not nearly long enough.

Antoniewicz was crouched down almost under the s.h.i.+p's wheel. This didn't give a lot of cover, though it gave some. He steered by feel, mostly, supplemented with occasional risky glimpses forward.

Morales was crouched as well, though he was in the stern, holding one of the team's utterly inadequate underwater a.s.sault rifles. He was bleeding, the result of a side hit, not terribly serious in itself, from one of the bullets the pirates had been throwing their way infrequently and at random. The hit hurt, but, thought Morales, probably not as much as a full day at BUDS.

The pirates surprised the team, at first, by not firing continuously until the boat was a sinking colander. It took a while for Eeyore to guess the reason. f.u.c.kers don't want to damage the boat too badly. They're probably only shooting at all to try to entice us to surrender-like that's gonna happen-followed by a few deft throat slices and then over the side with our corpses. I'll turn and ram the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds first. Try to, anyway. I'll be d.a.m.ned if . . .

Eeyore's thought was cut off by a . . . well . . . if not an "Earth-shattering kaboom," at least a sea-shaking one.

"What the f.u.c.k?" he asked, risking a look up and a glance backwards.

What he saw when he looked to the stern was the boat that had been pursuing, on its side, taking in water, while pieces of the hull-crew, too, most likely-sailed up and up.

Morales started to laugh, the laughter bordering on hysteria. Eventually, he managed to get out, "I guess we mined that one, too, Eeyore."

Antoniewicz scratched his head, then rocked it side to side for a moment. "Five second fuses always last three," he said. "Maybe, on the other hand, twelve mile limpets always last for seventy-five. Or maybe it was a Friday afternoon limpet. Or-"

"Should we pick 'em up?" Morales interrupted.

Now it was Eeyore's turn to laugh. "Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds? f.u.c.k 'em. The sharks can have 'em."

D-Day, Bandar Qa.s.sim, Ophir

Biggus had made sure Wahab and Fletcher boarded the other armed CH-801, before he got on the last one. By the time that was done, and everyone was airborne and approximately safe, the long night was pretty much over and Rosy-fingered Dawn, the child of Morning, was doing her thing.

She was doing it pretty well, in fact. The harbor was lit up brightly and was amazingly- "Empty," Biggus announced. "The b.i.t.c.h is practically empty. They sortied every small and medium boat they had."

He used the radio to inform the Merciful just how much trouble he thought it, and everyone, was in.

"What have you got left?" asked the disembodied voice he thought he recognized as belonging to Waggoner.

"Just the machine guns," Thornton answered.

"Mmmm . . . that's not a lot," Waggoner observed. "And if they s.h.i.+pped shoulder-fired SAMs aboard any of the boats, they'll outrange you."

"Yeah, tell me something I don't know," Biggus answered.

"No," Waggoner said, "you tell me something I don't know, like what's your fuel status?"

The pilot answered that one. "We've got enough to get back. If you haven't moved too far south."

"Roger . . . hold a sec."

Biggus was pretty sure Waggoner was bent over a map, protractor in hand, trying to figure out a way and a place to get all four armed birds onto the so-far-unseen pirate flotilla. Or extract everyone and head south before that flotilla showed up on the Merciful's doorstep. Biggus was pretty sure that with two companies still on the ground, and probably two special operations teams, including the Russkis, none of that fancy s.h.i.+t was likely to work out.

"What's to work out?" he asked of Waggoner. "I know the map as well as you do. Most we can do is make a single pa.s.s and f.u.c.k with them a little. a.s.suming they don't f.u.c.k back worse."

"Ma.s.s is nice," Waggoner answered.

"Ma.s.s is nice when it's possible," Biggus countered. "Here and now, it ain't. Maybe later today it might be."

The voice on the other end changed from Waggoner to Stauer. "Biggus, forget f.u.c.king with them. I'd rather know how many they are, and their general layout, than have you bust caps on them to no good end and maybe lose two planes in the bargain. Stay out of potential SAM range. Swing by. Observe and report. Then come home."

With Stauer there was no arguing, not about operational matters, at least, and at least unless you could pin him between running a mission and his personal feelings.

"Roger, sir," Thornton answered.

"Won't argue with those orders," added the pilot.

D-Day, MV Merciful Merciful, off Bandar Cisman, Ophir

"Options, ops?" Stauer asked of Waggoner.

"We've got a few," the latter said. "One is, have the Marine company a.s.sault Bandar Cisman, now, before Reilly and A Company can reinforce. Having the Ophiri chief's brother and his family on board might be enough to dissuade the flotilla from attacking."

Stauer made a quick mental calculation of the cost of that option, both in terms of his Marines and in terms of the likelihood of losing some of the captives he needed to the a.s.sault.

"No," he said. "Bad option."

Waggoner shrugged. "Didn't like that one, anyway. Second choice: Send Chin and The Drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d north."

"Death ride? Oooo . . . that's hard."

"Third choice: Kill the air support we've got going now, retrieve whatever we've got out there, refuel and rearm, convert the dustoff planes back to strikers, and hit them"-his finger traced a section of the eastern coast- "somewhere about here. But that's going to take a while to prep."

"Send Chin."

"Remind him that his crew's families are aboard?" Waggoner asked.

"He won't need the reminder."

D-Day, The Drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d The Drunken b.a.s.t.a.r.d

"Captain, call for you," said Chief Petty Officer Liu, he of the wife with the amazing skill with the gantry.

Chin stepped up from the charthouse to the bridge and took the radio's microphone.

"Chin here," he said.

"Captain, this is operations. We've got thirty-odd boats coming, we think, most smaller than yours and probably none as fast or as well-armed. Still, it's thirty or more. We need you to move north and stop them."

"One against thirty, eh? I like that," the Chinese skipper said. "Wilco." He handed the microphone back to Liu.

Liu took it, smiling, then said. "You style yourself a communist. Harrumph. You fool no one. You're no communist, Skipper; you're a romantic."

Chin didn't refute the charge. Instead, also smiling, he said, "a.s.semble the men, Chief." To himself, after Liu had begun shouting for the a.s.sembly, he whispered, "This is going to be glorious."

D-Day, fifty-four miles east of Bandar Qa.s.sim, Ophir

With having to concentrate on his flying, the pilot saw nothing. With the drone of his plane's motor, the pilot heard nothing. That is to say, he heard nothing until he heard Biggus d.i.c.kus Thornton begin to snicker in his headphones. The snicker became a laugh. The laugh a bellowing cacophony of sheer joy.

"They're alive!" Thornton shouted, lowering the binoculars he'd had pressed to his face. "They're alive!"

"Who? What?" the pilot asked.

"My team: Eeyore, Morales, Simmons. They're alive!"

"How do you know?"

"Look left," Thornton said, handing the binos forward before resuming his boisterous laugh.

The pilot took the field gla.s.ses, held them to his eyes, and did look. "What the fu . . . "

In his view, a large plume of wood and metal and bodies flew into the air, some distance out to sea. That was the first and obvious thing he saw. Rotating his head a few degrees to the left, he saw twenty or thirty boats. All of them stood stock still, no wakes, no bow waves, no white-churned water behind.

Even as he watched another boat disappeared in a flash of light, a cloud of smoke, and a deluge of spray.

"They did mine the f.u.c.king boats," Biggus said. "And if they mined them, and the boats went out anyway, it means the boats' crews hadn't a clue. If they hadn't a clue, it means my boys got away."

"Sounds reasonable," the pilot agreed. "But why are the boats still blowing up?"

"f.u.c.k, I dunno," Biggus said. "Quality control at the factory, I imagine. Who cares, anyway? My boys are alive.

"Now let's go find 'em."

"As long as the fuel lasts, I'll try," the pilot concurred. "Don't expect a lot of circling."

Thornton took the radio, and sent his report to the Merciful. About halfway through, another voice, speaking English but with a Chinese accent, interrupted, saying, "You have no idea how this news distresses me."

D-Day, Rako, Ophir

In his hands, Reilly had the photos taken by Buckwheat Fulton and Wahab, weeks prior, showing who was to be taken from the town, once the people surrendered, or were crushed. He turned one over and muttered, "Circles and arrows, and paragraphs on the back of each one, telling what it's about."

The company surrounded the town, with a brace of tanks each to the northeast and southwest, infantry platoons northwest and southeast, and the gunned Elands interspersed by sections of two to the north, the east-southeast, and the west-southwest. Reilly's own personnel carrier stood on a small copse overlooking the town from the south. He spoke through his translator as his translator spoke through a set of loudspeakers attached to the Eland's sides.

"I'm not here to negotiate," Reilly said, the microphone picking up and echoing both his words and the translator's from the hills around the towns. Machine gun fire from the tank lager echoed, adding its own bit of punctuation.

"Whether you live or die matters not a bit to me.

"It should, however, matter to you. Surrender, then, all the people of this town, before I release my soldiers onto you.

"Or don't. And in the failing, watch your town burn. See your screaming daughters dragged out and raped before your eyes. Watch dishonor be heaped taller than a mountain upon your family names, forever. See your last little suckling baby tossed on the bayonets of my killers. Witness your stumbling old men and half blinded old women run down and pressed out like grapes to make a red wine of your dusty streets.

"You will not even be a memory, so completely will you and yours be erased.