Countdown: H Hour by Tom Kratman Page A

Inanity for editing, then published that.
    Terry’s team had none of those luxuries. In the absence of actionable intelligence, the standard was, “Develop some.” That’s where Aida’s pilfered list came in. That, and a box of goodies brought by Graft as baggage aboard his aircraft.
    As he inspected them, the sergeant clucked over his charges like a mother hen. Slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes, the GPS trackers—two dozen of them—each came with a piece of covered tape attached, for when the integral magnet just wasn’t enough. Once the covers were removed, the user had only to slap them somewhere unobtrusive—oh, and not too dirty—and they’d stay there till long after the batteries ran down. They were slightly rough surfaced, more or less pebbly, the better to allow dirt to build up for improved camouflage.
    “I don’t know where we’re going to get more of these once this supply’s gone,” Graft mourned.
    “Mail order?” Semmerlin suggested.
    “Nah . . . the company that made them got sued into oblivion by a class of outraged adulterous and soon-to-be-ex wives and husbands who convinced a court that the things infringed their privacy.”
    “Surely there are other makers.”
    Graft shrugged as he deftly fingered a battery into its receiving well. “You would think so, but the others saw the writing on the wall and have eased out of the market. And I don’t think the regiment can make them on its own.”
    “So we use them sparingly and recover them if we can,” Semmerlin said.
    Shaking his head dubiously, Graft answered, “That’ll only extend the time until we run out.”
    “Dude, that ’s all we do as an organization; extend time.”
    “Yeah . . . that, and hope the horse will learn to sing.”

    Ermita, Manila, Republic of the Philippines

    It wasn’t every country where it could be said that the American embassy and one of the major red light districts were in close proximity. Ermita, however, was at least one such. Some of the local inhabitants, perhaps, found a certain poetry in that, or at least a degree of symmetry.
    Occasionally, some local political poobah or another would make an effort to move the hookers elsewhere. It never mattered for more than a short time. They always returned. En masse. A cynical observer would have said the embassy operated as a hooker magnet. A more observant cynic would have answered, “No . . . it’s not the embassy. It’s the sundry humanitarian organizations that have clustered close to the embassy.” The wisest and most observant cynic would have said, “It’s both.”

    If nothing else had improved since the Second Great Depression, at least gas was cheap. The air was full of fumes, from myriad taxis. Under that lay the aroma of garbage that was just a few days past the time it should have been disposed of. Through the stench, Mrs. Ayala’s man, Pedro, wound the taxi through crawling traffic, a sea of lightly clad professional ladies, not all of whom were necessarily female, and the usual collection of half- or entirely drunk foreigners—some with round eyes, some with slanted—looking for a bargain. There was a continuous cacophony of beeping, interspersed with a great deal of mostly good-natured cursing from both drivers and girls. Pedro cursed, himself, from time to time.
    If the locals found symmetry in embassy and street walkers operating so closely together, so did Welch, Lox, and the other two members of Welch’s advance party, Graft and Semmerlin. Semmerlin spat in the direction of the embassy as Pedro drove past it. There was precisely no love lost between the Department of State of the United States and virtually any member or former member of America’s armed forces.
    Even as Semmerlin spat, Graft caught the eye of a short but still fairly leggy, and otherwise quite delicate looking, Filipina hooker dressed—to the extent she was dressed—mostly in red. The old soldier whistled a few bars of an old tune by Chris de