Landing craft plied the waves, back and forth, bringing both the prisoners from Rako and Bandar Cisman, as well as recovering the troops and armored vehicles. The latter set included over a dozen tanks, not all of them precisely pristine, that Reilly indicated he was willing to throw a serious tantrum over if he couldn't keep.
'We know where the boy is now,' Boxer said. He could barely restrain the laughter in his voice. 'Shortly after the attacks began, the Ophiri chief and his minions started burning up the air waves by radio and cell. We were able to monitor and record those calls, though it took us a little while to filter through them. A set of them went to Suakin. They wanted to know if the ‘special prisoner' was still there and healthy. That's our boy.'
'Suakin?' Waggoner asked. 'As in, ‘He cut our sentries up at?''
'That's the place,' Boxer agreed. 'It's nothing now but ruins . . . correction, knowing where to look and having looked, some of those ruins were recently refurbished . . . on an island in the Red Sea connected by a causeway to Sudan.
'So the question is,' Stauer said, 'what do we do?'
'We've been running the helicopters hard,' Cruz said. 'Not just mine, but also the MI-28's that are due in shortly with Konstantin's people; both sets need a serious bout of maintenance before they'll be trustworthy for another operation. The CH-801's are in better shape-fixed wing is always easier to keep flying than rotary wing-but they're something less than ideal for the purpose.'
'Of special operations people,' Welch said, 'we've got or will soon have nine of mine, ten counting me, including my remaining translator but not Venegas. Little Joe's not up to it and won't be for a while. Plus Biggus will have five, including himself, and assuming no losses. Then there's Rattus and Fletcher. And Konstantin is coming in with five, inclusive, assuming he's willing to go. That's twenty-one, plus a translator who's proven he won't run around like a chicken with his head cut off when the bullets start flying. We might profitably add in two engineers, maybe Nagy and Trim. Twenty-four heavily equipped men is a fair load on a Hip.'
'How soon until we can get the ship into strike range?' Stauer asked Kosciusko.
'It's eleven hundred miles sailing to fair strike range,' the ship's captain said. 'At max speed, that's still sixty-one hours. That's a long time for word to get around about who did what, where, to whom.'
'Yeah, boss,' Boxer said. 'Secrecy is probably an unattainable ideal at this point.'
Chin gave a little cough. 'Without getting into details I am sworn not to reveal, let it be noted that there is a lot of regular, old, gray paint stored in one of the containers below. Sprayers in another.'
'That's true,' Kosciusko said. 'If we weren't in a terrible hurry and could head to sea, there's no pressing reason we couldn't repaint the ship underway and just sail up the Red Sea once the paint's at least tacky.
'We'd have to seriously reconfigure to hide everything,' the skipper added, 'given what's gone down the last twenty-four hours and all. Might even have to dump some shit. And we sure can't have the flight deck assembled, or the loading and unloading platforms.'
Stauer clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace.
'The problem is,' he said, 'and Boxer, you'll agree, that Sudan is an altogether different kettle of fish from Ophir. It's a real country. Maybe a fucked up one but a real one. With a real military.'
'Their navy's for shit,' Boxer said. 'Their air force, on the other hand, is impressive for numbers if only a fifth of them worked. And their ground forces could walk over us with a rock in each hand and still beat the shit out of us. Not that they'd use rocks, given their very large tank and artillery park.
'I don't think we want a war with Sudan.'
'No,' Stauer shook his head. 'Here's what I think. Our best bet at this point is what we planned on, ‘diplomacy.' Sorta. But that might not work. So here's what I want: Terry?'
'Sir.'
'Collect your people, Biggus Dickus's pinnipeds, the Russians when they get here and assuming they agree to sign on, any other attachments you need, and Cruz. Waggoner, Boxer and Gordo, you go along, too. Plan an operation using nothing but helicopters and perhaps The Drunken Bastard, to go to Suakin, ‘cut their sentries up,' and retrieve our boy. Kosciusko, as soon as we're finished loading take us out to sea and reconfigure us to look like a normal, innocent merchie. Do the camouflage thing as Captain Chin suggested.'
Chin's chest swelled a bit. While he was always 'the captain' to his own crew, it was rather warming for the Yankees to agree.
'Meanwhile,' Stauer said, 'I'm going to try the sweet light of reason. Cruz, get me a CH-801 ready to go before we take down the flight deck. And I need a volunteer pilot. Shouldn't need a translator. Gutaale allegedly speaks good English. And Boxer? I need a group portrait of all of our captives.'
'Don't sweat the runway,' Cruz said. 'The two medevac birds are outfitted either for runway or water landings. We'll just have Mrs. Liu hoist one over the side when the time comes.'
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
George Clemenceau made the remark that ‘War is too
serious a business to trust to generals.' Well, judging
from the one he made at Versailles in 1919, peace is too
serious a business to trust to statesmen.
-H. Beam Piper
D+1, Bandar Qassim, Ophir
The more he'd looked at it, the more his men had looked at it, the more Stauer thought that a hostage rescue at Suakin was a forlorn hope, to say nothing of an excessive risk to both his men's lives and his ultimate objective. He still had them planning it, back on the ship, even as Kosciusko's people repainted the hull and Mrs. Liu worked overtime to reconfigure the containers to look purely innocent.
Stauer mused, If we'd known the boy was at Suakin, we could have done the job with a sixth of the manpower and at a tenth of the cost. He smiled. Damned good thing we didn't know.
The pilot, McCaverty, now that the wounded were stabilized, tapped Stauer on the shoulder and pointed down at a port devoid of floating ships. There were a couple of larger ones-tied up, mind-but those were sunk.
Stauer could not help but laugh with pride at a job well done. Be nice if we could get the fucking sub back, though, he thought. Hmmm . . . I wonder . . .
'You sure they're willing to parley and not just string us up from the nearest lamppost?' McCaverty asked.
Stauer hesitated a moment before answering, 'I'm sure they'd like to string us up from the nearest lampposts. But I'm even more sure that their chief doesn't want his entire family to feed the sharks. We should be
