Whatever Gods May Be Part 19

"This isn't a very good idea," Rhys said. But after a glance at Jamie's face, she stiffened into the position of attention, eyes front, att.i.tude visibly adamant. "Sorry, ma'am."

"Oh christ, Marty , please stop that. Please. " Rhys continued to stand at attention, but her eyes swung left to meet Jamie's. Beneath Rhys's sideways glare, Jamie finally looked away in defeat.

* 159 *

"I can't stop my commanding officer." Rhys stepped in front of Jamie. "But I can try to stop my friend."

"Your friend needs your help," Jamie replied hoa.r.s.ely. "I have to do this. I'm asking my friend to come with me."

"When was the last time you had something to eat?"

"I'm not hungry." Jamie started to pace in a tight, tense circle.

"How long since you slept?"

Jamie answered with a small shrug.

Stepping in front of her again, Rhys forced her to stop pacing and grabbed her shoulders. "Jamie. Why?"

They were alone in a corner of the Three-Eight's FOB, their privacy endowed by a pile of sandbags and a couple of supply tents.

"I have to do this. I have to." But Jamie lowered her head to avoid Rhys's steady gaze.

"And you want me to do what exactly?"

Jamie shrugged again.

"For G.o.d's sake, you've been cleared," Rhys said. "That means you didn't do anything wrong."

"According to the Corps. After what? A five-minute review of a few ops center videos?"

"According to the Filipinos, too, dammit."

"What if it was your kid, Marty?"

"s.h.i.t." Rhys kicked a sandbag.

"Okay. Never mind. Just forget about it." Jamie began walking toward the FOB's main gate.

"Christ, I can't let you leave the base by yourself, Gwynmorgan.

You're f.u.c.king dangerous." So Rhys followed several steps behind her.

Half an hour later, Rhys still a pace behind, Jamie knocked on the door of a modest concrete-block house in a well-manicured Narra neighborhood.

A woman in her late twenties answered. A head shorter than Rhys, her delicately featured face was shadowed and puffy, and her red-rimmed eyes flared as they swept down and back up Jamie's cammies, pausing at the pistol on Jamie's thigh, the rifle cradled in Jamie's arm.

Even so, she asked with preternatural calm in perfect Aussie-accented English, "May I help you?"

"My name is Jamie Gwynmorgan, and this is Marty Rhys."

* 160 *

Jamie's voice quivered and she had to struggle not to avert her eyes.

"We're looking for Angara Bulanadi."

"I am Angara Bulanadi."

"We'd like to speak with you, ma'am." Jamie tried to steady her voice but couldn't prevent her eyes from blinking. "Perhaps we can talk in your garden, in back?"

For a long moment, Angara Bulanadi said nothing. "All right," she said finally, and led them along the side of the house and through a gate to a small, very green garden. She closed the gate and turned to face Jamie. "Please tell me what this is about." Jamie handed her E112 to Rhys, looked again into Angara Bulanadi's tormented eyes, and tried to get her contracting diaphragm to allow a full breath.

"Ma'am, I'm the one who-"

"It was you? " Angara Bulanadi asked, immediately winded. "Oh my G.o.d, you killed my daughter?"

"Yes," Jamie said, looking away, then dragging her eyes back to this woman's shocked face. "I did. I-I've come to tell you that I'm sorry for- For what I did. I was aiming at someone else." Withering under Angara Bulanadi's stare, Jamie broke off to attempt another breath.

"But th-that doesn't m-matter. Your daughter is dead, a-and my life is forfeit to you."

With a trembling hand, Jamie unholstered the pistol strapped to her thigh. "I'll end my life now if you wish, or you can do it." Next to her, Marty said nothing, didn't move a muscle. Jamie gulped a breath, gripped the pistol hard to steady her hand, and offered the weapon to Angara Bulanadi, whose face was now savaged by rage and grief.

"My friend Marty will remove my body and see that you're not in any way involved if there's an investigation of my death." Jamie paused, lifting her jaw to help her breathe while she glanced at Rhys, who seemed to have been stunned into a kind of blank bewilderment.

She continued when Rhys didn't budge. "This is the safety." Jamie flicked the small lever on the pistol. "And now it's off. All you have to do is point this at me and squeeze back this trigger." Angara Bulanadi took the pistol from Jamie, who dropped to her knees, clasped her hands behind her back, bowed her head, shut her eyes. And waited. She shuddered once but didn't move again. Her mind * 161 *

offered up no words, no images-just the deep blood red behind her eyelids as the last seconds of her life stretched into an infinity of guilt and regret.

She thought she sensed the barrel of the weapon at her right temple.

Please. Just do it. And then Jamie heard the sound of the pistol's safety pushed back on.

"No," said a hushed voice. Angara Bulanadi's consummately gentle voice. "I don't want your life to end. Thank you for showing me that."

Jamie's eyes fluttered open to see the woman hand the pistol to Rhys, then walk serene and unhurried through the garden to her house and cross its threshold. Before closing the door, Angara Bulanadi turned around, her lovely face now at peace. She peered down at Jamie, who still kneeled, still sought release from a world bathed in blood.

"My daughter's name was Awa." Angara Bulanadi's voice lilted through the eerie quiet. "It means 'mercy.'"

* 162 *

Chapter seventeen.

darK and silent A waning moon still mostly full outlined the mountains rising before her and set off a wave of apprehension. How would she get there without a comlink? No comlink meant no satellite downlinks of close-up real-time imagery, no topographical details, no precision info about where she was or whether her path was the most optimal or how far she had yet to go.

Nervous about her visibility in the moonlight, Jamie crouched low and listened. Yes, she heard running water-a creek, maybe even a small river ahead of her, between her and the mountains she needed to reach.

Sooner than she expected, she found a river larger than she expected. She stepped nearer its bank, and without warning she was falling, her feet somehow flailing above her head, her back and shoulders colliding with a series of saplings that cracked under her weight until her body encountered one that resisted her. She rebounded off it, tumbling now, her hands unable to grasp anything to slow her down, and then blackness took her.

Jamie roused to dappled sunlight twinkling through trees that loomed over her. She lay on a moderate slope, one leg twisted under the other, her arms tossed lopsidedly above her head. Against the light, a shadow rustled, shifted-and uttered a small gasp.

"Oh." A child's voice. Then the shadow moved and Jamie saw a little girl's face, her dark eyes aglow with amazement.

"Awa?" Jamie asked.

The child scampered down the riverbank without reply.

* 163 *

"Awa! Wait!" By the time Jamie got herself up, the child had begun to wade into the river. "No, Awa, don't." On the opposite bank, someone waved at the child and shouted encouragement-someone dressed like a marine in cammies. Jamie gaped.

"Marty?"

Jamie ran into the water, which was deep, too deep, and it pulled her down. She fought to keep her head above the churning black water that had started turning red. "Marty!"

"Ow!"

Jamie lurched. Someone had grabbed her arms.

"Jamie, wake up."

Marty?

"Come on, Jamie, wake up."

Jamie's eyes opened to Rhys's bemused face and Rhys's hands grasping her wrists. "Unhh-w-what?"

Rhys let go of Jamie and backed away from her hammock. "You okay?"

"Uh, yeah." Jamie blinked, glanced around her hooch. EBC193.

"Weird dream. What's up?"

"Looks like some of us are gonna get a shooting mission again." v Rhys just wouldn't give up. "Jamie, I should do it," she said for the third time.

"No. I'm taking it."

"But-"

"No, dammit!" Jamie glowered. "Don't make me pull officer s.h.i.t, okay? I'm going. Me. Not you."

Rhys was undeterred. "Jeezus, Jamie, you're a G.o.dd.a.m.n mess.

You shouldn't be going anywhere, and sure as h.e.l.l not into the Mantalingajan Range-"

"I'm fine," Jamie snapped. She didn't want Rhys bugging her yet again with that taking-too-many-risks c.r.a.p. "Fifty-nine G.o.dd.a.m.n days from now we get on a plane home, Marty. Operation Repo will swallow more than half of that. It's our last major gig, and I'm gonna d.a.m.n * 164 *

well make sure Avery's people don't get pushed around by that recon commander."

It wasn't a Three-Eight mission, this effort to rescue some seventy or eighty American and Filipino prisoners of war from a site on the outskirts of Malihud, a Muslim fishing village deep in Chinese-occupied southern Palawan. Instead, elements of a Marine Reconnaissance Force company would spearhead it. Most of the recon guys would approach from the southwest across the Sulu Sea via several stealth helicopters deployed from Navy vessels many miles offsh.o.r.e.

But the mission planners also decided to send a second unit trekking down the spine of the island to pounce from the north. Together, the recon units would break into the camp and lead the POWs back to the helicopter transports and out.

Because of their six weeks of scouting deep into the mountains southwest of Narra, Gwynmorgan's ghosts had been drafted as guides to get that second recon unit into position, then provide overwatch during the rescue before withdrawing into the mountains and back to Narra. They'd have just twelve days to traverse 110 kilometers of the island's highest, most challenging terrain. To do it, the chosen squad would need the aid of their contacts among indigenous groups of Pala'wan, Tau't Daram, and the Tau't Batu, those cave-dwelling, swidden-cultivating "people of the rock" who spent part of the year high in the same mountains through which the snipes had to travel.

Hindering the snipes was the remainder of the annual southwest monsoon, which had only just begun to slowly recede. Yet it was only during the monsoon that the helpful Tau't Batu traditionally occupied their cliffside limestone caves. For the dry season, they tended to move down into the valleys. On this mission, like so many, timing would be everything.

The whole thing had an eleventh-hour quality to it that made Jamie's spine twitch. Although she had little chance to think through what might go wrong and devise contingency plans, she tried. Chief among her worries: Unlike the recon guys, who'd depart Malihud by helo with the POWs, her snipes would be staying on the ground, which would certainly attract Zhong attention. To get back to the Three-Eight's FOB west-southwest of Narra, they'd have to evade the Zhong for a hundred and ten mountainous klicks.

* 165 *

"Want to be a pack mule?" Jamie asked Rhys two days before departing with Avery and second squad.

"Huh?"

"I'll feel better about this if we go with an alpha strategy and stash some food and gear in a few of those caves along the way," Jamie said. "I'd like you to pick a couple teams and follow us into the mountains. You'll carry extra kits-you know, weapons and ammo, neutralized comlinks. Also MREs, hammocks, tarps, first-aid kits. Even some cammies-those new non-electronic pa.s.sive-identifier kind our satellites can see without them emitting signals the enemy can track. I want you to hide the stuff in empty caves. You'll stay a day behind us and I'll let you know as we go about which caves to supply." Rhys nodded eagerly. "Right And then we can catch up with you and-"

Jamie shook her head. "Uh-uh. Then you hightail it back to the FOB and keep your d.a.m.n heads down. Do not volunteer for anything.

This isn't over 'til everyone's on the plane going home."

"But-"

EBC204 and Jamie placed a finger over Rhys's lips, then enveloped her in a tight hug. "It'll be all right, Marty," Jamie said, not letting go. "Let's just figure out the details on this and wish each other luck, okay?"

Rhys returned the hug with a suddenly fervent grip. "Okay, Jamie.

Okay."

v Some of the indigenous groups Gwynmorgan's ghosts met with only a week earlier had already departed the mountains for the lower valleys. But others provided shelter, showed the squad paths that saved hours of trailblazing, and reported sightings of Chinese patrols in the lower valleys.

Rhys, Ramirez, and eight snipes followed. Jamie conveyed intel about the enemy and told them which caves to supply via a new short-burst splinter-noise commo technique that made anything picked up by enemy electronic signal detectors sound like random environmental noise.

The first two cave sites-one just north of Mount Calibugon, * 166 *

the other west of Mount Landargun-were uninhabited. The last, a Tau't Batu site already vacated for the season, lay south of Mount Mantalingajan and about twelve kilometers from the position where Gwynmorgan's ghosts would cover the recon units during the rescue mission.

When she showed her people the locations of the three stashes of extra kits and ordered them to memorize the coordinates, Jamie said, "Except for the weapons, ammo, and comlinks, we'll leave whatever we don't use for our local friends." Then, aware of the distinctive chill stippling her spine, she added, "But if we gotta split up on the way back, or if anyone's unaccounted for, then we leave everything in place that we don't need. Just in case."

v Operation Repo commenced on schedule at dawn on November sixth, EBC219, roughly an hour after a diversionary attack on Brooke's Point up the coast got under way. Despite low clouds and rain, the nine helicopters-three Shark transports and six Barracuda stealth attack helos-showed up as planned, the m.u.f.fled sounds of their arrival reaching Jamie's ears only as they appeared out of the quickly evaporating sea fog above a field next to the POW camp.