the sea. The men who had been on their feet suddenly found themselves tossed to the side and then rolled over as their prison rolled over. Above their own screaming they heard a high pitched whistling sound as water rushed into the air holes drilled by Eeyore a couple of days prior, and supplemented more recently, forcing the air out. At that point, even drowning rats wouldn't have bit and clawed their mates quite so much for a mere few more minutes of breathing time.
'Set course two-seven-two for Narssarssuaq, Greenland,' ordered the chief with warm smile. 'And, since this isn't the US Navy, break out a bottle of the vodka Victor so thoughtfully put in the cache.'
'Hey, Chief?'
'Yes, Mary-Sue?'
'How long to the base?'
'About three weeks.'
'We have to stop for fuel, right?'
'Sure.'
'Well . . . since we're not dry, can we get something besides vodka when we do stop? And what about the girls?' These latter were below, wrapped in blankets and badly needing new clothes. Only Antoniewicz's and Morales' uniforms came close to fitting, and they needed those.
'The booze we'll see about. I don't know about the girls, except to go shopping when we get the chance. We can't release them anywhere we're going and can't release them, period, until the operation's over.'
'Can we-?'
'Lay a finger on them, Mary-Sue, and I'll cut your balls off.'
PART II
CHAPTER TWENTY
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
-Tennyson, 'Ulysses'
D-106, Assembly Area Alpha-Base Camp,
Amazonia, Brazil,
The sergeant major hadn't put in fossa and agger, of course. He hadn't even set up the camp like a Roman legionary camp. 'No straight lines in nature, sir.' Instead, he'd established a central camp, for most of the headquarters, containing tents for Stauer and staff, plus the rest of the headquarters company, except for the mechanics who would be closer to the river, and a few guest tents for the naval company, should it have to send some people in. The rest of the groups were to be in clusters from there, A Company (Armored) to the northeast and B Company (Marine) to the southwest. The aviation company, such as would billet here, was about a kilometer to the northwest, near where about half of Nagy's engineers were clearing out jungle and rubber trees and putting in the airstrip. Eventually, once the rest of the detachment of engineers showed up, they'd be putting in a dock and linking the camps with corduroy roads.
They'd need the corduroy roads. Already, under the frequent heavy downpour, the trails linking camps and tents within camps were approaching the state of morass, and that was under very light foot and vehicle traffic, all of that having been generated by the original advanced party of twenty-two, plus the twenty-five later arrivals.
With a light rain that foretold of a soon-coming downpour tapping gently on the canvas roof, Stauer looked out into the jungle from the operations tent. It was already quite dark, and the netting that ran from the edge of the tent's roof to the dark soil below further reduced vision. Add in that the trees kept even most sunlight out and-
'Darker than three feet up a well-digger's ass at midnight.'
'Except for the few tents we allow to be fully lit, of course,' Boxer said. 'Did you expect different, Wes?'
'No. I'm still not certain about letting some tents be lit while others have to stay pitch black.'
Boxer shook his head. 'The Brazilians know we're here, at least in the abstract and even if they don't know what we are, how many we are, or how many we'll be. If we light everything up they'll get suspicious; a small battalion is way out of line for what we're allegedly doing here. By the same token, though, no lights would also be suspicious.'
Stauer shrugged. 'I suppose.'
'You don't seem very upset that the boy wasn't on the Galloway.'
