'It's just a somewhat redesigned Storch,' Cruz said. He'd come upriver to camp from the Merciful on the supply ferry. 'Arguably not quite as good as those birds were. Considerably smaller wingspan, though, and that-' he glanced around at the trees towering over the strip '- counts. It'll count aboard ship, too.'
Under a tree, not five meters away, Cree, who'd come in first then taken over directing the landings, breathed a sigh of relief as he placed a radio microphone down atop the radio he'd propped up against the tree. The radio, as well as those aboard the CH-801's, was in the clear. There were encrypted radios available, but they'd been either in Brazil or in transit. The planes had had to make do with commercial jobs, all unencrypted. Everybody else on the base already had encrypted radios, Russian-made frequency hoppers; a bit heavy, but effective enough for all that.
In the dark, Cree's Mexican ground crew was already pushing the last of the light planes under the trees. More specifically, they pushed it under a camouflage screen they'd erected under Sergeant Major Joshua's tutelage earlier in the day. Mac was one of the denizens of the camp who spoke rather excellent Spanish, the result of spending many years as an instructor at the jungle school at Fort Sherman in the old Panama Canal Zone; that, and having married a girl from Colon, Panama. Sure, the accent was substantially different, as was much of the slang. Even so, he'd spent enough time around Mexican Spanish speakers to more than get by.
'So what's left?' Joshua asked Waggoner. The latter started; he hadn't even been aware the former was still in the area . . . and Mac had never learned to smile in the dark to let people know he was around.
'Bring in the half dozen or so translators Wahab is rounding up,' Waggoner answered. 'That's it . . . well, that and finish training here and then load the Merciful. Not a bad job, all things considered,' he added. 'From a standing start to a joint-combined battalion size task force in fifty-six odd days.'
'Nope,' Mac agreed. 'Not bad at all. Course, all of our own people are already basically pretty well trained. And even some of the foreigners.'
'That was a help,' Waggoner said. 'I wonder if it's ever been done before.'
'It has,' Joshua replied. 'Many times, if not in exactly the same way or for exactly the same reasons.'
'Really?' Waggoner asked. 'Where? When?'
'Depends on what aspect you mean. The minutemen of 1775 mustered from unmobilized and fairly untrained militia in a matter of literally minutes to hours. The Massachusetts militia then began a siege of the British in Boston within days. The Continental Army assembled in mere weeks. None of them had nearly the level of training most of our people came to us with.
'From Hitler's order to begin planning the invasion of Norway to the first German troops setting foot on the ground was about ten days less time than we've planned on and if the Germans already had a force in existence, the scale of the thing was much greater and the anticipated opposition much more ferocious. Eben Emael and the associated bridges were more on our scale, and if those took a little longer to prepare, from Hitler's order to Student to the actual assault, the Germans were also doing something rather new and, again, against worse opposition.
'Then there were the filibusteros, or the Texian Army under Sam Houston . . . Go back to how quickly the Romans not only trained a fleet to face Carthage, but actually built one from scratch. And let's not forget-'
'I'm talking about creating a mercenary force of roughly battalion size, very quickly, from scratch,' Waggoner interrupted. Sometimes I wonder if the colonel isn't exactly right about the sergeant major, his ancient ancestor, and legions of Rome.
'Fifth Commando, Congo, 1964.'
'Oh.'
D-69, Kamarang, Guyana
'Ohhh, my fucking head,' moaned Montgomerie, seated against a brick wall with his rear end on a filthy floor. He'd been out of it for over a day and was just now coming to his senses. When he wasn't puking from concussion. When Corporal Schiebel decided to knock someone silly, that someone would stay silly for a while. 'Where are we?'
'I don't know,' said Adkinson, standing and staring out the open, unscreened bars of their common cell. It was dark outside, with just a hint of morning's light in the east. Adkinson's forearms were through the bars, with his hands grasping them. 'Guyana, somewhere.'
'You don't know?' Slade asked, voice dripping with contempt. Slade sat on the one, narrow, mattressless bunk in the cell. 'But you know everything, I thought. You sure fucking acted like it and talked like it.'
'Fuck you, Slade,' Adkinson said. 'You didn't have to listen to me.'
'And I wish to hell I never had, asshole. I needed that money.'
A jailer came in. At least they thought he was probably a jailer. He looked old, if not exactly feeble, and either entirely or at least mostly Amerindian. He wore no shirt and only cut-off trousers, remnants of what might once have been a police uniform. A canvas belt and rusty pistol hung at his ample waist. The jailer set a tray of something down on the floor and then, using a pole, pushed it through a small opening at the base of the cells bars.
'Let us the fuck out!' Adkinson said, turning from the barred window. The jailer answered with some language that didn't seem to have any Indo-European roots whatsoever. Naturally, innately sure that he'd be listened to if he just spoke loudly enough, Adkinson raised his voice. The jailer just shrugged and turned away.
Slade stood up and walked over to the tray, bending and picking it up. He sniffed at it. 'Food,' he announced. 'But I'm not sure what kind.'
Adkinson was about to give a smart answer when he felt a sharp prick in his neck. He slapped at it. 'Son of a bitch!'
'Ohhh, my head,' Montgomerie repeated.
'Hey, does it seem to be getting hotter in here?' Slade asked.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Once a Chekist always a Chekist;
Chekists cannot be former or corrupt.
- General Vladimir Smirnov, FSB
D-69, near Lubyanka Square, Moscow
Russia, at least, had gasoline freely available. The thick and fearsome traffic outside the old headquarters of the Cheka and its progeny said as much. The noise, of horns, of badly tuned engines, and of cursing drivers and pedestrians, was equally fearsome.
'I like it,' said Yuri Vasilyevich Chebrikov, to Ralph Boxer, in a little cafe down a side street off the square, not too very far for an old man to walk from his daily travails. As tired as he looked, indeed the skin around his neck and eyes, and along both sides of Chebrikov's face sagged, he still managed to make his daily walk, rain, shine, or- commonly enough-deep slush.
Both Ralph and Victor visibly relaxed, now that Victor's father-in-law, who was also a deputy director for Russia's Federal Security Service, had given at least this much of a verbal blessing to the project. Victor had given
