Countdown: H Hour by Tom Kratman

nobody ’s going back.”
    Whatever the mostly American and Euro crew of the aviation detachment and spec ops company thought of that, they kept to themselves. The, for the most part, Guyanans of the line company didn’t. They were unhappy, pissed off, disgusted, and—based on some of the fallen faces—demoralized.
    Based on some of the ugly glances directed at both Warrington and the Spec Ops company, some of them blamed the First Worlders.
    And , thought Warrington, since this sort of thing is normally our job, I suppose I can understand some of that.

    Headquarters, True Cinnamon Siblings (TCS), Manila,
    Republic of the Philippines

    The building was an old, multistory batching plant, just north of the intersection of North Bay Boulevard and Lapu-Lapu Ave. TCS had acquired it for pretty much a song, having made the previous owners one of those traditional “offers you can’t refuse.” It wasn’t actually within the boundaries of Tondo, but then, the gang had been growing for some time. Culturally, it was Tondo. It was TCS.
    The building served the gang well enough, having storage space, offices, and room—once a few modifications were made—for fairly decent living quarters for some of the higher ups in the organization. Diwata Velasquez, for example, the senior member of TCS’s management committee, lived there.
    In some places, the news of the kidnapping of a very rich man would have gone stale by now. Lucio Ayala, however, was so very rich, and the Philippines so insular in so many ways, the kidnapping was still number one headline material, as often as not.
    “Tsk,” said Diwata, at seeing the news for the umpteenth time. She then repeated, “Tsk. Damned politicals. They’ll ruin everything for everyone.”
    She had been, so it was reported, quite a beauty in her youth, before being deported from the United States—San Diego, specifically—and before running to fat. The years since had not been especially kind. The tattoos didn’t help, though they were de rigueur in her little (rather, not so little, anymore) social group.
    In her right hand Diwata held a small black box, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. In the other, she held an actual cigarette from which she occasionally flicked an ash onto the concrete floor of her gang’s headquarters.
    “Got to admire the balls of the thing, though,” she admitted.
    “That you do,” agreed her—male—assistant, Lucas, recently back from collecting a not-insubstantial ransom from a family in Singapore. “And just imagine what we could do with that kind of money.”
    “That kind of money,” she corrected, “also means bringing a ton of shit down on you. The Ayala family isn’t especially noted for rules and law, any more than we are. Whoever grabbed Ayala is in for a shitstorm.
    “No . . . we’ll keep in business the way we always have—retail. On which subject,”—she held out the small black box—“I want this attached underneath Ben Arroyo’s new business van. Anybody he’s making deliveries to, I want us to know about.”

    Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,
    Republic of the Philippines

    There were a number of choices when one had zero actionable intelligence to drive or support a critical mission. A popular choice, in some circles, was to throw one’s hands up in despair, wail over life’s difficult lot, curse fate, slam doors, and then crawl into a consoling bottle of the good stuff. Politicians had it easier. Though few of them even knew the difference between actionable intelligence and the wish for same, for just about all of that breed it was sufficient to puff and preen and make pompous pronouncements. The clever press either found a smart corporal and asked him or her for a spare clue or, and this had become an increasingly popular choice over the years, bewailed the sheer impossibility of the mission. The idiot press, conversely, wrote up something inane, ran that through their bureau’s Department of Enhanced