As promised, original pilots show up right away.
Maxwell House
Mogadishu, Somalia
Thanks to Duo's wise foresight of designing a detention center within the warren beneath his stadium-sized dome, Trowa had the perfect setting for interviewing one of the strong men Cathy and the Ringmaster had detained.
Townsend, Trowa recognized, also had enough sense to set things up here; separating the two and letting them sweat in the dark until things came under control around the city. But the time for sweating is over, and now the mournful returns to roll some heads.
"Il meurt de soif," Trowa spoke to an unknown out the door, before sidestepping for the Ringmaster, who set a pitcher of water on the table before the detained strongman.
"Ne le frappez pas de votre baton," a circus ringmaster always carries a stick, but rarely do they hold it threateningly. As justification for using it, however, the bearded elder reminded Trowa of the lingering threat within the city.
"L'ennemi est dans la ville. Que pareille conduite ne se repete a l' avenir!" The captive noticed Trowa start. Apparently, 'never again' has a special meaning to this contentious soldier.
"Send in Rashid Kurama as my second, will you?" The ringmaster resigned, quickly rotated out for way of Rashid, the hulking Arab with the bandaged head.
"Are you up to it, my friend?" No cloudy mind interfered with the man's thoughts.
"I am fully capable of proceeding with the interview." Trowa accepted this amiably.
"Bon. Now, my fellow, because we do not know you, we aren't properly informed enough to determine your status. All I know is," he digitally counted, "you don't wear a military uniform, so you aren't eligible for status as a prisoner of war," one, "you have not yet given us proof of citizenship, thus you aren't yet entitled to the basic rights of a citizen of the World Nation," two, "you happened to employ violence in this city while the Preventers conducted a raid on the Noventa Cannon, and I'm not one to believe in coincidences," three, "that means I'm inclined to perceive you as a plain-clothed combatant. That means, by definition, I can consider you a terrorist. Would you like to know how many laws and international treaties give rights to terrorists?"
The prisoner sipped his water.
"I've spoken English and French to you, the two languages recognized by the Olympic Committee, the oldest existing international organization dedicated to peace. Do you understand either tongue?"
A pause. Trowa hoists a laptop terminal on the table.
"You spoke English earlier, so their's no sense denying that. See how I'm already answering the questions, tying in all the dots?" Trowa's dry lips cracked as he smiled.
"It's really arid out here. Come on Buddy. You don't get any rights if you're a nobody. Share with me your SIN." Trowa laughed at his pun. He wanted a Social Identification Number.
"You look like you were born within the timeframe of the Earth Sphere Alliance. Zechs Marquise captured the Alliance mainframe intact, so we still have every datum collected, under Preventer control. Would you like to make a statement? If you do give me identification, you're then entitled to an attorney of your choosing." Trowa creased a thin line of hope on his normally expressionless face.
"So?" He still held out hope, eroding hope. The strongman marshaled his fingers in file, and battered the nails on the table.
Rashid, groaned, Trowa breathed, and the man fidgeted.
"I won't punish you if the ID turns out to be forged: I don't have a borne identity. Come on, fork over one."
Now the mysterious detainee sees hope, and opens his mouth.
"Try Richard Gordon, SIN 911-2001-1943, born on Jersey Island, duel Irish-English citizenship. My school records will place me in Brittany during my childhood. My father lives retired in Nice, France. Would you like his phone number?"
Sounds like a distant family of merchants or fishermen, Trowa thought. The man's "father" is probably spending his last few days alone in retirement home, and probably wouldn't know his son well enough to recognize this man as a phony. Really not a bad way to setup an identity, with a few real relatives existing to cover for you. The Trowa Barton identity works much the same way. Still, he ran the background through Interpol.
"How about that? You keep liscenses on boats and cars up to date. Your passport is stamped regularly, you use the Chunnel a great deal. You fly frequently, perform business transactions, brazenly practiced some questionable tax breaks. Hey Rashid, do you know what a LILO is? You got a tax break for gambling in Monaco? I'll be right back, Sir. Stay here, Rashid."
"Cathy, could you quickly call this number, and ask for a Jack Gordon?" In the main corridor of Duo's detention area, the Ringmaster and Catherine leaned against that world famous one-way window common in police precincts around the world. The female circus acrobat dialed the phone, and started at seeing the downcast face of Duo Maxwell and his priest collar.
"Hey Girl, I promise I'm not the hologram!" What?
"Not even a second ago, I swear you looked ready to bury yourself in cynicism!" He scoffed at that, and swept his ponytail over one shoulder.
"What gave you that idea? Sure, I don't like it when everyone's shot, but I came here to thank my buddy here for patching everyone up like that!" And the orbits realigned, and the nonreligious Gundam priest took a new interest in his shoes.
"Any of us coulda died without ya, clown, 'specially Hill. Gotta thankya fur that." Trowa gulped, and kept his gaze level.
"No gratitude is necessary, Duo. Just do me a favor and don't slur your words so much."
Duo thought that was incredibly humorous, and cracked up.
"Cool, sure thing, good buddy. Man, I'm psyched about fixing the last few ends that need tied in. What can I do, Trowa?"
Barton had been out of the hospital for quite some time, and Duo acknowledged that the clown most have reasoned through everything by now.
"Well, Cat and I have this end wrapped up pretty well, but the Preventers could use your help stonewalling the lawsuits in a bit. Unless you're too wound up, however, I'd like you to quietly sit in and monitor just how I'm going to unravel this lead. Your testimony could be handy in court."
"Sure, after you."
Richard Gordon sat idly staring at Rashid, who returned the favor with cold malice.
"Mr. Gordon, this is Mr. Maxwell, he owns the establishment you caused so much trouble in." Duo motioned to shake hands, remembered his condition, and sat apologetically.
"That's right, Mr. Maxwell was hurt in the violence," Trowa theatrically swept his hand toward the priest-collared youth.
"I have some good news concerning your father. It so happens that he successfully described all your features as those belonging to his son. I told him you're a valuable witness, and he seemed to understand."
Gordon affirmed with a nod.
"Well," the clown stretched out lazily, "I don't see why we can't just save you some grief," Trowa rested a small phone inches away from his subjects fingers.
"You have the right to legal representation, bucko, and you have the right to phone any legal aid you wish."
Being detained is a very stressful condition. Richard Gordon, fisherman displaced to Somalia somehow, eyed the phone like a snake, inched toward it, and made a decisive snatch.
"Go on, make any call you want." Gordon's demeanor shifted. He viewed Rashid, then Duo, then finally Barton, like he was trying to communicate through telepathy.
"The law doesn't say anything about the right to a phonebook," Barton quipped. Venom remained, buy Gordon dialed a long list of numbers, and waited for a pickup.
"I'm sorry, service is temporarily offline-"he terminated the call. The operator sounded authentic. He cursed the shoddy service.
"No good?" The reply was vulgar.
"Never mind. Rashid will show you into a cell more befitting a legal citizen. Come on, Duo."
When the two Gundam pilots reintegrated with the circus troupe, Trowa's mood became more upbeat.
"So who'd he call, Catherine?" His circus family sat at Duo's gumshoe desk, leafing through an electronic file.
"Well, obviously, a law office."
The other Diego, Madagascar
The basic idea comes from a navy technician addicted to Gene Roddenbury's classic Star Trek spin-off, The Next Generation. Under the technician's plan, the Preventer patrol boats rest completely still in a wide skirmish line along the thirtieth parallel, connected by a series of "barrier arrays," optical tripwires that are interrupted when submarines and submerged mobile-suits pass through them. Photoelectric detectors figure out where the target passed through the barrier and gives the flotilla a reasonably accurate judgment of where the target is.
The fleet Admiral is a healthy skeptic, but has enough faith in the technician's judgment to stake the fleet's safety on the practice of this new hunting technique, though several risks are posed.
The ships are all lined in a row, with a second echelon and some flanking vessels closing a box, and all ships have their engines idled down to nothing, meaning the ships are stationary and lined up as expendable hulks, much like those used for demonstrations of one navy's strength.
This has the crew on edge, and scuttlebutt has it that things will go down just like a military demonstration; with their own butts being seated in the antiqued hulks.
Actually being in ships that predate the existence of mobile-suits doesn't help matters, either, though it's perfectly natural for even the most powerful navies to use ships dating twenty-five or more years old.
Crewmembers rested their full body weight on the questioned bulkheads, as if testing to see if these steel walls had the integrity to withstand a sailor's mass. Everywhere in the fleet, the same test came back with positive results, but not in one case did that ease any apprehension.
"Ensign, you say the Enterprise was on a customs mission in the frontier between the Klingons and the Romulans?"
"Correct," the dirty blond tech told his captain, "Picard had the unwelcome task of locating some cloaked Romulan vessels suspected of supplying a terrorist group bent on destroying the Cardassians. While Picard and Riker had no love for the Cardassians..." He rattled off some more drivel, but the captain, Admiral Heidi Revere, Preventers Sixth Fleet, tuned him out, while politely letting him finish.
"Okay, this had better work," she had told him, "Make it so." She remembered vaguely that Jean Luc Picard always said those three words to sum up an order, and decided that the Ensign would feel encouraged by those same words.
She instructed her XO, Harold Dent, for a summary of the aerial search.
"Admiral, Our heliborne search units are topped off with fuel and combing the projected sub tracks mapped out by the Arab looking over the hydrophone data. We're clearing the datum to begin a fresh search, but we don't have the faintest contact. Looks like the search plane's sonarman was right to call this a Darwinian game, Ma'am."
"Don't editorialize, Mr. Dent." The Executive Officer apologized and moved on.
"The Maguanac search flight is being serviced on the Victorian tarmac and the Cape Town replacement has covered the sea in sonar buoys. Our ships are all in formation, and oddly, everything's working for once. The Maguanac identifying himself as Abdul is resting his eyes, and has an assistant from borrowed from intelligence looking over the hydrophones. The terrorists at Suarez are confirmed dead. The story from the gunboat about the Bufors 40mm cannon taking out the trucker pans out, and the one attacking from the gate ran into a police special team after legging away. Bloodhounds are following the guys that attacked from the west flank, and patrol cars are blockading the logger roads around the location of the mortar. Damage assessment doesn't look rosy, but the port facilities relevant to running a navy are in tact. That's the good news. The bad is that the attacks were successfully carried out against the populated portions of the base: barracks, mess, guard shacks, recreation. Current estimates are higher than the Lake Victoria Massacre."
Admiral Revere's expression didn't change. Few tools have made the job easier for the terrorist than the coupling for laser guidance and fuel- air explosives to the legendary Russian rocket mortar. With it's proper use during a barrage, modern base security can do little to keep a truck and gunman team from planting a high-yield slurry bomb into a hardened target. In all, the effect is usually worse than the detonation of a fizzled nuclear weapon.
"All right. Once identities of the dead start coming in, let me know. You have command, while I take on the grim task of drafting some letters."
Dent saluted.
"Ma'am!"
Columbia
"From time to time, God cause men to be born- and thou art one of them- who have a lust to go ahead at the risk of their lives and discover news. Today it may be far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountains, and the next day of some nearby man who has done a foolishness against the State [Colonies]... When he comes to the Great Game, he must go alone- and at the peril of his head. Then, if he spits, or sits down, or sneezes other than as the people do whom he watches, he may be slain." Heero Yuy, Gundam Pilot, Quoted the anthem written by Rudyard Kipling long ago, as taught by the late Doctor J. Heero has recited this mantra many times, but this is the first time he could remember himself voicing it without amending a portion. Normally, he added the caveat that no god existed to create a soldier such as him. Other times, the pilot mentally filled in an asterisk, and edged in "and when I pass the trials of the Great Game, Trieze will be the one slain." Doctor J loved Kipling, and tried to teach the values of the Anglo-Indian writer to his young charge. Heero came around eventually, and appreciated Kim, the poem If, that mongoose tail, and even The Jungle Book. These stories were his recreation, but as Operation M ebbed closer, his thoughts became haunted by another medium, film. Specifically, the final minutes of The Seven Samurai. It preoccupied me for so long, how in the end, those weak villagers were the true winners. I never wanted to be like those samurai. Living past my usefulness with only sporadic outlets offering opportunity to exercise my trade. The sewer's access tunnel doesn't run under any dwellings, it runs beneath streets, and a retaining wall and the soil under a public sidewalk separates Heero in the sewer tunnel from the warehouse's foundation. Heero reaches his mark, and applies an adhesive on one side of the tunnel, and sandwiches it with a twenty-pound shaped charge consisting of ammonium picarate and aluminum mixed with iron oxide (rust) fillings, for a devastating shattering effect. He repeats himself three times, and finds the runoff pipe. He quietly un-spools a legitimate plumbing tool, grips it in the left hand, and un-pockets another type of charge with his right. This explosive is a typical single pound brick of Composite Explosive #4, popularly called C4. The plastic explosive feels like molding clay, and Heero has no trouble jabbing his blasting cap in it, but that's the easy part. Next, he must plumb the demolition block up the tube with the pipe snake, tedious work, and the boy must navigate it through the plumbing by feel.
Finally, the charge makes crests from a warehouse toilet bowl, and he can evacuate the site. Hopefully, eighty pounds of explosive will successfully rip through the dirt and twelve inch foundation, and juice out hot gases into the warehouse at a stunning velocity, but even if the ground is firmer than Heero Yuy gives it credit for, and it probably isn't, the single pound brick of plastic he put upstairs should antagonize a secondary explosion from the poisonous chemicals stored for cooking.
Chances are, such a secondary blast shouldn't generate enough pressure to spill out into the streets and take innocent life, though the pilot is ready to accept that responsibility if that scenario plays out. It's more likely, however, that Heero's tampering with the foundation will be a larger public hazard, though even that scenario holds little possibility of being a tragic outcome, for the short structure has little potential for spilling over a wide area.
Ideally, this should be a true victimless crime.
Forty-five minutes later, four twenty-pound shaped bombs crash shockwaves through the floor of a warehouse packed with volatile chemicals, igniting a chain-reaction of gaseous shockwaves, followed instantly by the detonation of Heero's small bomb, which actually disrupts very little in the diameter it wastes. Pipes break, and cascading water sweeps out loose crumbs like fiber in the body, and continues as the storage building lists into the air. Weight of the displaced edifice buckle the street, and the access tunnel ruptures, breaking into a massive sinkhole, quickly filled by the debris once used for manufacturing designer drugs.
Burning putrid chemicals saturate the pooling water, heating it until boiling builds up enough to cause yet another explosion. This one ejects the shrapnel Heero had been sure wouldn't be thrown.
The pilot had miscalculated by not factoring in the effects of ruptured water pipes on erosion. This miscalculation made the attack much dirtier than he'd accounted for even in his worst-case estimate. The wounded are everywhere, collateral damage is everywhere. Even his apartment window would be broken, had he remembered to reinstall it. And he knows it, because Heero's pulling himself from a manhole in a secluded back alley beside a community dumpster shared by several local businesses.
In Columbian cities, shop owners aren't afraid to smoke in their own buildings, so he doesn't have to worry about being spotted by shop employees taking a smoke break in the alley. The place is deserted.
Heero Yuy has everything worked out. He merges with the crowd coming out to see the damage, and like them, he motions closer, just as others are doing. People of every age and all the likely ethnicities gawk as one. No one cares that he ducks into an apartment building after a short spell of looking. Everyone loses interest eventually, and they go about their business.
In his room upstairs, he makes a change of clothing and transfers to the bus stop he'd scheduled to meet at the appointed time, and found the cabbie waiting.
"Good day, swing me to the bookstore." He makes frequent stops at this bookstore, but it's such a point to drop by. This is the first and last time he plans to take a cab to the parking lot.
This time, he bleeds off any possible suspicion by venturing in and buying the local paper, after mingling through the aisles. Then he strides to the supermarket to retrieve his bike and ride home, after casually spying the scene.
He isn't followed, but he knows he can't stay ahead of Bartista's agents for long, even as good as he is.
Maxwell House
Mogadishu, Somalia
Thanks to Duo's wise foresight of designing a detention center within the warren beneath his stadium-sized dome, Trowa had the perfect setting for interviewing one of the strong men Cathy and the Ringmaster had detained.
Townsend, Trowa recognized, also had enough sense to set things up here; separating the two and letting them sweat in the dark until things came under control around the city. But the time for sweating is over, and now the mournful returns to roll some heads.
"Il meurt de soif," Trowa spoke to an unknown out the door, before sidestepping for the Ringmaster, who set a pitcher of water on the table before the detained strongman.
"Ne le frappez pas de votre baton," a circus ringmaster always carries a stick, but rarely do they hold it threateningly. As justification for using it, however, the bearded elder reminded Trowa of the lingering threat within the city.
"L'ennemi est dans la ville. Que pareille conduite ne se repete a l' avenir!" The captive noticed Trowa start. Apparently, 'never again' has a special meaning to this contentious soldier.
"Send in Rashid Kurama as my second, will you?" The ringmaster resigned, quickly rotated out for way of Rashid, the hulking Arab with the bandaged head.
"Are you up to it, my friend?" No cloudy mind interfered with the man's thoughts.
"I am fully capable of proceeding with the interview." Trowa accepted this amiably.
"Bon. Now, my fellow, because we do not know you, we aren't properly informed enough to determine your status. All I know is," he digitally counted, "you don't wear a military uniform, so you aren't eligible for status as a prisoner of war," one, "you have not yet given us proof of citizenship, thus you aren't yet entitled to the basic rights of a citizen of the World Nation," two, "you happened to employ violence in this city while the Preventers conducted a raid on the Noventa Cannon, and I'm not one to believe in coincidences," three, "that means I'm inclined to perceive you as a plain-clothed combatant. That means, by definition, I can consider you a terrorist. Would you like to know how many laws and international treaties give rights to terrorists?"
The prisoner sipped his water.
"I've spoken English and French to you, the two languages recognized by the Olympic Committee, the oldest existing international organization dedicated to peace. Do you understand either tongue?"
A pause. Trowa hoists a laptop terminal on the table.
"You spoke English earlier, so their's no sense denying that. See how I'm already answering the questions, tying in all the dots?" Trowa's dry lips cracked as he smiled.
"It's really arid out here. Come on Buddy. You don't get any rights if you're a nobody. Share with me your SIN." Trowa laughed at his pun. He wanted a Social Identification Number.
"You look like you were born within the timeframe of the Earth Sphere Alliance. Zechs Marquise captured the Alliance mainframe intact, so we still have every datum collected, under Preventer control. Would you like to make a statement? If you do give me identification, you're then entitled to an attorney of your choosing." Trowa creased a thin line of hope on his normally expressionless face.
"So?" He still held out hope, eroding hope. The strongman marshaled his fingers in file, and battered the nails on the table.
Rashid, groaned, Trowa breathed, and the man fidgeted.
"I won't punish you if the ID turns out to be forged: I don't have a borne identity. Come on, fork over one."
Now the mysterious detainee sees hope, and opens his mouth.
"Try Richard Gordon, SIN 911-2001-1943, born on Jersey Island, duel Irish-English citizenship. My school records will place me in Brittany during my childhood. My father lives retired in Nice, France. Would you like his phone number?"
Sounds like a distant family of merchants or fishermen, Trowa thought. The man's "father" is probably spending his last few days alone in retirement home, and probably wouldn't know his son well enough to recognize this man as a phony. Really not a bad way to setup an identity, with a few real relatives existing to cover for you. The Trowa Barton identity works much the same way. Still, he ran the background through Interpol.
"How about that? You keep liscenses on boats and cars up to date. Your passport is stamped regularly, you use the Chunnel a great deal. You fly frequently, perform business transactions, brazenly practiced some questionable tax breaks. Hey Rashid, do you know what a LILO is? You got a tax break for gambling in Monaco? I'll be right back, Sir. Stay here, Rashid."
"Cathy, could you quickly call this number, and ask for a Jack Gordon?" In the main corridor of Duo's detention area, the Ringmaster and Catherine leaned against that world famous one-way window common in police precincts around the world. The female circus acrobat dialed the phone, and started at seeing the downcast face of Duo Maxwell and his priest collar.
"Hey Girl, I promise I'm not the hologram!" What?
"Not even a second ago, I swear you looked ready to bury yourself in cynicism!" He scoffed at that, and swept his ponytail over one shoulder.
"What gave you that idea? Sure, I don't like it when everyone's shot, but I came here to thank my buddy here for patching everyone up like that!" And the orbits realigned, and the nonreligious Gundam priest took a new interest in his shoes.
"Any of us coulda died without ya, clown, 'specially Hill. Gotta thankya fur that." Trowa gulped, and kept his gaze level.
"No gratitude is necessary, Duo. Just do me a favor and don't slur your words so much."
Duo thought that was incredibly humorous, and cracked up.
"Cool, sure thing, good buddy. Man, I'm psyched about fixing the last few ends that need tied in. What can I do, Trowa?"
Barton had been out of the hospital for quite some time, and Duo acknowledged that the clown most have reasoned through everything by now.
"Well, Cat and I have this end wrapped up pretty well, but the Preventers could use your help stonewalling the lawsuits in a bit. Unless you're too wound up, however, I'd like you to quietly sit in and monitor just how I'm going to unravel this lead. Your testimony could be handy in court."
"Sure, after you."
Richard Gordon sat idly staring at Rashid, who returned the favor with cold malice.
"Mr. Gordon, this is Mr. Maxwell, he owns the establishment you caused so much trouble in." Duo motioned to shake hands, remembered his condition, and sat apologetically.
"That's right, Mr. Maxwell was hurt in the violence," Trowa theatrically swept his hand toward the priest-collared youth.
"I have some good news concerning your father. It so happens that he successfully described all your features as those belonging to his son. I told him you're a valuable witness, and he seemed to understand."
Gordon affirmed with a nod.
"Well," the clown stretched out lazily, "I don't see why we can't just save you some grief," Trowa rested a small phone inches away from his subjects fingers.
"You have the right to legal representation, bucko, and you have the right to phone any legal aid you wish."
Being detained is a very stressful condition. Richard Gordon, fisherman displaced to Somalia somehow, eyed the phone like a snake, inched toward it, and made a decisive snatch.
"Go on, make any call you want." Gordon's demeanor shifted. He viewed Rashid, then Duo, then finally Barton, like he was trying to communicate through telepathy.
"The law doesn't say anything about the right to a phonebook," Barton quipped. Venom remained, buy Gordon dialed a long list of numbers, and waited for a pickup.
"I'm sorry, service is temporarily offline-"he terminated the call. The operator sounded authentic. He cursed the shoddy service.
"No good?" The reply was vulgar.
"Never mind. Rashid will show you into a cell more befitting a legal citizen. Come on, Duo."
When the two Gundam pilots reintegrated with the circus troupe, Trowa's mood became more upbeat.
"So who'd he call, Catherine?" His circus family sat at Duo's gumshoe desk, leafing through an electronic file.
"Well, obviously, a law office."
The other Diego, Madagascar
The basic idea comes from a navy technician addicted to Gene Roddenbury's classic Star Trek spin-off, The Next Generation. Under the technician's plan, the Preventer patrol boats rest completely still in a wide skirmish line along the thirtieth parallel, connected by a series of "barrier arrays," optical tripwires that are interrupted when submarines and submerged mobile-suits pass through them. Photoelectric detectors figure out where the target passed through the barrier and gives the flotilla a reasonably accurate judgment of where the target is.
The fleet Admiral is a healthy skeptic, but has enough faith in the technician's judgment to stake the fleet's safety on the practice of this new hunting technique, though several risks are posed.
The ships are all lined in a row, with a second echelon and some flanking vessels closing a box, and all ships have their engines idled down to nothing, meaning the ships are stationary and lined up as expendable hulks, much like those used for demonstrations of one navy's strength.
This has the crew on edge, and scuttlebutt has it that things will go down just like a military demonstration; with their own butts being seated in the antiqued hulks.
Actually being in ships that predate the existence of mobile-suits doesn't help matters, either, though it's perfectly natural for even the most powerful navies to use ships dating twenty-five or more years old.
Crewmembers rested their full body weight on the questioned bulkheads, as if testing to see if these steel walls had the integrity to withstand a sailor's mass. Everywhere in the fleet, the same test came back with positive results, but not in one case did that ease any apprehension.
"Ensign, you say the Enterprise was on a customs mission in the frontier between the Klingons and the Romulans?"
"Correct," the dirty blond tech told his captain, "Picard had the unwelcome task of locating some cloaked Romulan vessels suspected of supplying a terrorist group bent on destroying the Cardassians. While Picard and Riker had no love for the Cardassians..." He rattled off some more drivel, but the captain, Admiral Heidi Revere, Preventers Sixth Fleet, tuned him out, while politely letting him finish.
"Okay, this had better work," she had told him, "Make it so." She remembered vaguely that Jean Luc Picard always said those three words to sum up an order, and decided that the Ensign would feel encouraged by those same words.
She instructed her XO, Harold Dent, for a summary of the aerial search.
"Admiral, Our heliborne search units are topped off with fuel and combing the projected sub tracks mapped out by the Arab looking over the hydrophone data. We're clearing the datum to begin a fresh search, but we don't have the faintest contact. Looks like the search plane's sonarman was right to call this a Darwinian game, Ma'am."
"Don't editorialize, Mr. Dent." The Executive Officer apologized and moved on.
"The Maguanac search flight is being serviced on the Victorian tarmac and the Cape Town replacement has covered the sea in sonar buoys. Our ships are all in formation, and oddly, everything's working for once. The Maguanac identifying himself as Abdul is resting his eyes, and has an assistant from borrowed from intelligence looking over the hydrophones. The terrorists at Suarez are confirmed dead. The story from the gunboat about the Bufors 40mm cannon taking out the trucker pans out, and the one attacking from the gate ran into a police special team after legging away. Bloodhounds are following the guys that attacked from the west flank, and patrol cars are blockading the logger roads around the location of the mortar. Damage assessment doesn't look rosy, but the port facilities relevant to running a navy are in tact. That's the good news. The bad is that the attacks were successfully carried out against the populated portions of the base: barracks, mess, guard shacks, recreation. Current estimates are higher than the Lake Victoria Massacre."
Admiral Revere's expression didn't change. Few tools have made the job easier for the terrorist than the coupling for laser guidance and fuel- air explosives to the legendary Russian rocket mortar. With it's proper use during a barrage, modern base security can do little to keep a truck and gunman team from planting a high-yield slurry bomb into a hardened target. In all, the effect is usually worse than the detonation of a fizzled nuclear weapon.
"All right. Once identities of the dead start coming in, let me know. You have command, while I take on the grim task of drafting some letters."
Dent saluted.
"Ma'am!"
Columbia
"From time to time, God cause men to be born- and thou art one of them- who have a lust to go ahead at the risk of their lives and discover news. Today it may be far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountains, and the next day of some nearby man who has done a foolishness against the State [Colonies]... When he comes to the Great Game, he must go alone- and at the peril of his head. Then, if he spits, or sits down, or sneezes other than as the people do whom he watches, he may be slain." Heero Yuy, Gundam Pilot, Quoted the anthem written by Rudyard Kipling long ago, as taught by the late Doctor J. Heero has recited this mantra many times, but this is the first time he could remember himself voicing it without amending a portion. Normally, he added the caveat that no god existed to create a soldier such as him. Other times, the pilot mentally filled in an asterisk, and edged in "and when I pass the trials of the Great Game, Trieze will be the one slain." Doctor J loved Kipling, and tried to teach the values of the Anglo-Indian writer to his young charge. Heero came around eventually, and appreciated Kim, the poem If, that mongoose tail, and even The Jungle Book. These stories were his recreation, but as Operation M ebbed closer, his thoughts became haunted by another medium, film. Specifically, the final minutes of The Seven Samurai. It preoccupied me for so long, how in the end, those weak villagers were the true winners. I never wanted to be like those samurai. Living past my usefulness with only sporadic outlets offering opportunity to exercise my trade. The sewer's access tunnel doesn't run under any dwellings, it runs beneath streets, and a retaining wall and the soil under a public sidewalk separates Heero in the sewer tunnel from the warehouse's foundation. Heero reaches his mark, and applies an adhesive on one side of the tunnel, and sandwiches it with a twenty-pound shaped charge consisting of ammonium picarate and aluminum mixed with iron oxide (rust) fillings, for a devastating shattering effect. He repeats himself three times, and finds the runoff pipe. He quietly un-spools a legitimate plumbing tool, grips it in the left hand, and un-pockets another type of charge with his right. This explosive is a typical single pound brick of Composite Explosive #4, popularly called C4. The plastic explosive feels like molding clay, and Heero has no trouble jabbing his blasting cap in it, but that's the easy part. Next, he must plumb the demolition block up the tube with the pipe snake, tedious work, and the boy must navigate it through the plumbing by feel.
Finally, the charge makes crests from a warehouse toilet bowl, and he can evacuate the site. Hopefully, eighty pounds of explosive will successfully rip through the dirt and twelve inch foundation, and juice out hot gases into the warehouse at a stunning velocity, but even if the ground is firmer than Heero Yuy gives it credit for, and it probably isn't, the single pound brick of plastic he put upstairs should antagonize a secondary explosion from the poisonous chemicals stored for cooking.
Chances are, such a secondary blast shouldn't generate enough pressure to spill out into the streets and take innocent life, though the pilot is ready to accept that responsibility if that scenario plays out. It's more likely, however, that Heero's tampering with the foundation will be a larger public hazard, though even that scenario holds little possibility of being a tragic outcome, for the short structure has little potential for spilling over a wide area.
Ideally, this should be a true victimless crime.
Forty-five minutes later, four twenty-pound shaped bombs crash shockwaves through the floor of a warehouse packed with volatile chemicals, igniting a chain-reaction of gaseous shockwaves, followed instantly by the detonation of Heero's small bomb, which actually disrupts very little in the diameter it wastes. Pipes break, and cascading water sweeps out loose crumbs like fiber in the body, and continues as the storage building lists into the air. Weight of the displaced edifice buckle the street, and the access tunnel ruptures, breaking into a massive sinkhole, quickly filled by the debris once used for manufacturing designer drugs.
Burning putrid chemicals saturate the pooling water, heating it until boiling builds up enough to cause yet another explosion. This one ejects the shrapnel Heero had been sure wouldn't be thrown.
The pilot had miscalculated by not factoring in the effects of ruptured water pipes on erosion. This miscalculation made the attack much dirtier than he'd accounted for even in his worst-case estimate. The wounded are everywhere, collateral damage is everywhere. Even his apartment window would be broken, had he remembered to reinstall it. And he knows it, because Heero's pulling himself from a manhole in a secluded back alley beside a community dumpster shared by several local businesses.
In Columbian cities, shop owners aren't afraid to smoke in their own buildings, so he doesn't have to worry about being spotted by shop employees taking a smoke break in the alley. The place is deserted.
Heero Yuy has everything worked out. He merges with the crowd coming out to see the damage, and like them, he motions closer, just as others are doing. People of every age and all the likely ethnicities gawk as one. No one cares that he ducks into an apartment building after a short spell of looking. Everyone loses interest eventually, and they go about their business.
In his room upstairs, he makes a change of clothing and transfers to the bus stop he'd scheduled to meet at the appointed time, and found the cabbie waiting.
"Good day, swing me to the bookstore." He makes frequent stops at this bookstore, but it's such a point to drop by. This is the first and last time he plans to take a cab to the parking lot.
This time, he bleeds off any possible suspicion by venturing in and buying the local paper, after mingling through the aisles. Then he strides to the supermarket to retrieve his bike and ride home, after casually spying the scene.
He isn't followed, but he knows he can't stay ahead of Bartista's agents for long, even as good as he is.
