I turned to Brook. "And, Lieutenant Brook, are you here for anything other than my money?"
Brook shrugged. "Not seeing much action in the SAS these days, sir. Britain cut back pretty far during the recession of ‘23-‘26. Not as lively a job as it used to be. If I just let World War III go bye, what stories will I have for the kiddies?" Brook's eyes clouded. “Of course, I won't want to tell them everything I've done.”
The mood turned somber. Brook continued, “I don't think I'll ever be able to look at another child without seeing that poor Chinese moppet in that apartment building.”
My heart sank. “Lieutenant, you were acting under my orders. What you and the other men accomplished that night is more important than one life.”
Brook stared off in the distance. “Maybe, sir.”
At around noon the next day, Fei called us together for an intelligence update. The operation wasn't due to begin for another nine hours, when we would raise the stealth motorboat from its underwater container for the three-hour trip into the Strait to intercept the ammunition ship.
Fei wasted no time. “The latest satellite imagery shows a number of PLA, estimated to be twenty to thirty in total, boarding the ammunition ship.”
Douglas said, “So, they were tipped off about our raid?”
Fei shook his head. “We don't think so. The troops are category C reservists. Category C units are mostly worn-out old men or young kids who couldn't qualify for better units.”
Frowning, Douglas asked, “Why would they have crap soldiers guarding this particular ship when it’s so important to the war effort?”
“We don't know,” Fei responded.
Priest suggested, “They have a lot more potential logistical choke points than this one ship. Maybe they're just running short on good troops. They've got most of their category A and B units in Taiwan already, preparing for the offensive.”
Douglas mused aloud. “We should be able to handle a few extra guards. We just have to take a little more manpower along.” The original plan had called for five team members: McCormick, Priest, Volodya, Grant, and Brook, the best shooters we had. “I can go as well, and so can Dietrich, Taleb, and Jed.”
Priest opined, “Still a bit dicey, Colonel. The Chinese reservists aren't terribly impressive, but if there are twenty or thirty on board, we're going to be hard-pressed to secure the whole ship and make sure none of them gets away on the motorboat.” He looked right at me. “We need more men on the operation.”
“What do you suggest then?” Douglas asked.
I, of course, understood what Priest meant. Excitement and fear shot down my back, surged into my stomach. “I can go. ”
Volodya snorted. “No offense, boss, but that's a terrible idea. You don't have weapons training. You're not a soldier.”
I waved away the concern. “I've shot guns before at ranges. Rifles, shotguns, pistols, you name it. And my job will be easy. I don't have to be a commando to sit in a boat and make sure no one comes aboard.”
Volodya looked uncomfortable. “That's not the only issue, sir. What if you're killed? What happens to the Lafayette Initiative? What happens to the war?”
That question gave me a little more pause. “Colonel Douglas will take charge. His company isn't getting paid until the end of the war, so he will have to stay on and fight even in my absence. All of you are working under contracts with Douglas's company, except for Fei, Lian, Priest, and McCormick, and I suspect I don’t need to be paying them to be here. The Lafayette Initiative is bigger than me now. It doesn't need me to continue.”
No one offered more objections. “Alright then, it's settled. Everyone but Fei and Lian is going on the mission. Now, I suggest we all get some rest. It's going to be a long night.”
I don't know about the others, but I certainly didn't sleep. Some of the experienced guys like McCormick, Douglas or Volodya might have been able to ignore the upcoming operation, but I had never faced deliberate, direct violence. True, I had been along for the ride for the rescue of McCormick, but I was in the van, blocks away from danger. This time, I'd be attached to a ship filled with dozens of PLA soldiers.
I thought about whether I wanted to write any “just in case” letters. I never knew my father, and my mother died of lung cancer when I was twenty-one. I had no regular girlfriends, nor close male friends to speak of. Oh, I could have written something nice to my assistant, but, truth be told, it would be purely for politeness.
So, I just lay there and thought about why I didn't have anyone to write to. Should I have married one of the girlfriends? Started a family? Perhaps then there would have been someone to write to.
After a couple hundred iterations of that thought pattern, it was finally time.
Under cover of darkness, Jed and Priest, our two best swimmers, swam out a few hundred feet into the ocean. Using a GPS tracker, they found the container dropped off by a Pelican the previous day. Jed dove down and triggered the surfacing mechanism on the container, and it slowly broached the surface. Priest opened the doors of the container and out floated a sleek, black-hulled boat. Inside the boat were a half-dozen containers packed with weapons I had requested for the occasion.
We all swam out to the vessel, the cold dark water chilling me even through my wetsuit.
When I grabbed a handle to pull myself on the boat, I couldn’t help noticing the odd feel of the material. It was a carbon composite frame, covered in radar-absorbent black paint. Everything about the vessel was oriented toward stealthiness. It even had a pump-jet engine design to suppress noise, an idea stolen from submarines. The plans for the vessel had been sent by a Taiwanese defense manufacturer to my support crew in Australia. The 3D printers had gone to work, and inside a day, the brand new boat was ready to be shipped via Pelican to the Lafayette Initiative.
Once we were all on-board, Douglas whispered, “Away we go, lads.” Priest pushed a button on the seat mounted control panel, and the boat’s on-board computer lit up. Priest engaged the boat’s automatic pilot, which was programmed to bring us into the middle of the Strait. Over the course of the next two hours, it did just that. The night was clear, the moon bright, and the ocean still as we pushed our way east.
Volodya, McCormick and Taleb talked, doubtlessly exchanging old war stories over the sound of the air whipping past the boat. Even in the dark and under a layer of camouflage paint, Dietrich looked seasick. Everyone else just looked intensely out at the water or the sky.
Douglas came over to me and said, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the onrushing air, “Excited, Ding?”
I shook my head. “Just ready to get it over with.”
Douglas gazed out over the moonlit water. “You'd never have made it in this business, Ding. You have to be sad that it'll end, not ready to get it over with. You have to want the adrenaline, want to test yourself in the only completely honest way to test anything in this world. See if you can do it better than the other guy, see if you can outsmart him, beat him with your training or strength.”
“Sounds primal,” I replied.
Looking back at me, Douglas said, “It is, Ding. People have been fighting as long as there've been people. If it wasn't sort of fun, we wouldn't do it. Oh,” he waved his hand, “I know we're not supposed to say stuff like that. The shrinks and boffins would lock us up for just thinking it if they could. But, until they change people, we'll always fight.”
I asked, “So you're just as happy here as you would be in the jungles of Venezuela, or wherever your company gets hired?”
Douglas gave a half-grin. “It’s like eating, Ding. I like eating, as my wife can testify. But just because I like to eat doesn't mean a shit sandwich tastes as good as filet mignon. The stuff we're doing — it's the filet mignon of war. The three most advanced, most important countries in the world, two radically opposed systems of government, all focused on an island less than half the size of Scotland. Hell, we've even got the moral high-ground!”