D-Day,
'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, 'Assemble the men, Chief.' To himself, after Liu had begun shouting for the assembly, he whispered, 'This is going to be glorious.'
D-Day, fifty-four miles east of Bandar Qassim, 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 Dickus 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 glasses, 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 fucking 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?'
'Fuck, 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.
'Come out now, all of you, toward me, and unarmed, or commend your souls to your god.'
Never underestimate the benefits of a classical education, Reilly thought.
In one of the two T-55's to the northeast of the town of Rako, Lana Mendes sat in the driver's compartment. Behind her, in the turret, hands on a Russian .51 caliber machine gun, Schiebel-face painted black still, though the black was dusty and streaked now-watched the scene. He had a much better view than she did, though she could hear as well as he could.
'He dudn't mean id,' she asked, through her smashed nose, 'dud he?'
'No,' the little grunt said, biting back a laugh. The poor girl sounded so funny, and her nose was such a mess, that not laughing was hard. 'He's just saying it to frighten them into surrender. He wouldn't let any of those things happen. We wouldn't do any of them, even if he wanted us to.' Schiebel hesitated, then added, 'Well . . . except for destroying the town. We'd do that.'
Even as he said it, hundreds of people, big and little, young and old, male and female, began to emerge from their shacks to trod, fearfully, to the south and Reilly.
