To Reilly, who knew the man very well, the idea was uproarious, even preposterous.
Eventually, after a long and humiliating time of being laughed at by the adjutant pro-tem for the expedition, Phillie sniffed and then walked off in a huff. Once Reilly saw her ass swaying through the door that led to the bedroom, his laughter abruptly cut off. He sat up and brushed himself off, saying, 'Kind and considerate,' as if they were curses. He did curse, then, as he saw that he'd spilled his drink when the woman's silly comment had hit him. 'Kind and considerate.'
Cazz shrugged. 'She's only seen the dead-inside side of him, bro. She'll see the rest soon enough. And did you have to lay into her quite so hard over chalk seventeen having their shots delayed? She's a girl, you know.'
'I noticed,' Reilly agreed. 'And yes, I did, and yes, I did. That little show was for her benefit, mostly. So when she does see Wes in full fury, or icy exterior, she won't freak over it.'
'Man can chew some ass, can't he?' the Marine agreed.
'Sure as shit can when he wants to. Now about chalk seventeen . . . '
'There's a company, Passport Health, that arranges these sorts of things. At least that's the one I know about. I think we can use them, since Phillie ran short temporarily.'
'Yeah, go ahead and set it up. But she shouldn't have run out. Bad planning. Inexcusable.'
'Maybe,' Cazz conceded. 'Oh, and just FYI, the first sergeants departed Georgetown a few hours ago for base. They should be touching down about now.'
D-98, Assembly Area Alpha-Base Camp,
Amazonia, Brazil
George and Webster never saw the landing lights on the airfield. They wouldn't have seen them, in any case, because they were all infrared, visible to the pilots in their goggles but not to the casual observer. Even if they'd not been infrared, however, the strip was so narrow that they wouldn't have seen them, anyway, until landing.
'What's this Joshua like, George?' Webster had asked on the flight down.
'Hard ass,' George had answered. 'Very strong on what he considers the highly limited role of a sergeant major. We never really got along. The man was the senior sergeant major in the old Twenty-fourth Infantry Division and just flat refused to be division sergeant major or even a brigade sergeant major. He thought his effectiveness, any sergeant major's effectiveness, ended once he let himself be pulled above battalion level, or pushed into any kind of battalion than the kind he grew up in. He and Reilly have a mutual admiration society going back better than twenty years.
'Which makes perfect sense,' George added, 'since Reilly is bughouse nuts. Love the bastard like a brother, mind you, but that doesn't change that he's insane. He was insane as a private and age and experience'-George sighed-'have not mellowed him.'
***
'I would not have picked you, George,' Sergeant Major Joshua said, in a Caribbean accent gone nasty, as he drove the two first sergeants to their company areas. 'That Reilly likes you is the only black mark I hold against what is otherwise one of the finest commanders I've ever known.'
'Everyone has some major failings, Sergeant Major,' George answered. I, for example, am having a hard time getting over the fact that while you stopped at being a battalion command sergeant major, I was sergeant major for a brigade and I should probably have your job now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The cruel-tyrant-sergeants . . .
-Kipling, 'The ‘Eathen'
D-91, International Airport, San Antonio, Texas
By dint of sheer hard work, Cazz, Reilly, and Phillie Potter had gotten the hundreds of men ready and moved from scores of different locations around the United States to Georgetown, Guyana. (And by dint of much harder and hotter work in Georgetown, Harry Gordon and his assistant-with a considerable assist from the aviation company-had gotten them all moved onward to Base Alpha.) Now it was time to close shop and move on. Cazz was heading straight to Brazil, as was Phillie, the latter having a container of inoculations on dry ice in her baggage, for anyone who was missed. Reilly had one more stop to make, to an old Titan missile base not so very far from Spokane, Washington. He'd promised Gordo that he'd see to getting the assembled light aircraft containerized and moved to port. Gordon basically didn't trust aviators to get anything right except the actual assembly and flying. And he, rightly, considered Reilly to be almost as good a loggie as he was, himself.
Reilly wasn't quite so skeptical about the Air Force but, since he did speak Spanish, since all the aircraft assemblers were Mexican, since it was a potential failure point for the mission, he'd agreed to go. Besides, he wanted to get to know some of the pilots who would be provided recon, close air support-sorta, kinda, maybe-and medevac. And those were all up in Spokane, at a long since abandoned, sold, re-sold, and re-re-sold Titan missile base, helping the Mexicans.
They could have flown the CH-801s out of the former airbase, now Grant County International Airport, to the port. Or they could have built them at widely divergent places. But the former-having eight 'homebuilt' aircraft with a hell of a lot of Fieseler Storch in their ancestry, all leaving from the same place, then landing on the same place, then being partially broken down and packaged to sail on the same ship-might have attracted a little too much of the attention they'd built the things underground to avoid. And building them dispersed would probably have meant quality control problems, to say nothing of the not inconsiderable cost of redundant tools. Of those two factors, only the former had really counted as the cost of the old Titan complex dwarfed the cost of eight sets of tools.
And the other thing, thought Reilly as he sat with Cazz and Phillie waiting for their flight to board, is that, although Wes never said a word about it, I'd be really surprised if he's going to be willing to let the group we've assembled just disintegrate once this mission's done. No . . . he's too desperate never to be a civilian again for him to let that happen lightly. Building the thing in Washington state, with the title being in Wes' name, gives us an asset we can use later on.
Then, too, he was a lot more intimate with the special operations community than I ever was. I looked up ‘Grant County International Airport' and the unusual thing is that nobody flies out of it. Staging area for Special Operations Command for the Pacific region? It's possible, anyway.
