shrugged. “He probably wasn’t too happy. But you were right. It needed to be done.”
“So,” he said and sipped at his tea again. “As a teacher, it is difficult to know when a student is ready to hear something, neh?” I nodded in agreement. “This is perhaps one of the hardest things to gauge.” He held up a thick hand and balled it into a fist. “When to give,” he opened the fingers of his hand toward me, “and when to withhold,” the fist formed again.
“How do you know when the time is right?” I asked my teacher.
He smiled. “Sometimes, you sense it. Or see it in a student’s movements.” He looked at me for affirmation. I nodded. We had both experienced this with trainees. Then Yamashita smiled. “Other times, you guess.”
“Do you think he was ready for that lesson?”
“Time will answer that question,” he said. Then he grew solemn. “Time . . . ” he said, and appeared ready to go on, but the phone interrupted him. I got up and went to answer it.
“Hello?”
“You makee lice?” a screechy voice demanded.
“What!” I said, momentarily flustered. Yamashita looked up inquiringly at the tone of my voice.
“Yeah,” the voice continued, “I’m interested in kung-fu lessons.” Then the evil cackling started.
“You idiot,” I told my brother Micky.
The voice on the phone became normal, more recognizable. “Yeah, well, I tried your apartment and got no answer. I figured you’d be there.”
“What’s up?”
“You comin’ tomorrow?” Micky asked. It was his wife Deirdre’s birthday and the entire family would descend on his house like a cloud of Mayo locust.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I told him. “Why?”
“No reason,” he told me pleasantly. Which was a lie. Micky was a cop and when he asked questions, it was for a reason. His conversation had all the subtlety of a chain saw. I promised I’d be there and we hung up.
“Your brother the detective?” Yamashita said. His eyes glittered in the lamplight. I nodded. “He wishes to see you,” he stated in reply. It was not a question. He sat there quietly, watching me.
I lingered over the last of the coffee, but Yamashita never picked up the thread of the conversation that had been interrupted by Micky’s call. I knew my teacher well enough to know that it wasn’t that he had forgotten, rather that he did not wish to pursue it right now. My sensei doles out knowledge on a timetable known only to himself. I had learned to accept it. I finished my drink and then I said goodnight. None the wiser about what was disturbing him, I returned home tired, but uneasy. Off in the distance, muted thunder rolled across the heavens and the air pulsed with an energy that, although unseen, made the skin along my shoulders and neck tingle in trepidation.
First Sergeant Warren Cooke had been thinking that he wished he had more tape. This was the middle of his third tour with the Special Forces and in his experience it was the little things that tripped you up. Careful preparation could mean the difference between bringing your people home safe or in pieces.
He knew deep down that the team he had been training was almost ready to go operational. Almost. And that nagged at him. When the orders came down to get the team saddled up, he was surprised, but obeyed. He was, after all, a soldier. But he still worried.
He had taped his equipment down and secured his pants legs and sleeves so that there would be as little noise as possible when he moved through the underbrush. In an operation of this type, noise was your enemy. Battle rattle was as dangerous as any bad guy. He had been checking his people out as well. They had tried to emulate his actions, but needed a bit more practice. He wished he had more tape.
His A-Team had been working with the Filipino Special Forces for months now. It was the sort of training assignment that was nothing new for Special Forces troopers, but the rules of engagement in a post-9/11 world had made the work more interesting. Typically, you worked with the locals on things that were second nature in the Special Forces: stealth and fire discipline, careful planning, and cold precise execution in even the hottest of free-fire zones. Depending on where you were, the raw material you worked with varied greatly. In the Philippines, the soldiers Cooke worked with were bright and motivated, which was half the battle. There were rumors that their senior officers sold off some supplies on the black market, but that had little impact on Cooke and his daily job. The Filipinos were relatively small men, wearing jungle pattern camo and baseball hats that made them look like eager teenagers. But Cooke had to concede; they had the potential to develop into an effective fighting force. If they survived the mission.
The new rules of engagement meant that the A-Team members now had more opportunity to work directly with their Filipino counterparts in anti-terrorist operations. From Cooke’s perspective, this was a good thing. He had worked too long and hard with these troops to see them wasted. His presence might help them live long enough to learn their trade. Besides, whatever his reluctance, he knew that they would have to face the test of fire sometime— you could do all the practice drills you wanted but there was no substitute for what you could learn in actual combat. And, in cases where targets were confirmed terrorist elements—what they called CTEs—Cooke and the other SF troopers were authorized to use deadly force at their discretion.
So Cooke and two other Americans from the First Special Forces Group—Abruzessi and Barnes—were going along on this operation. Technically, they were observers and advisors, but any time he went into the field, he did so with the expectation that he’d be in a firefight. He had a silenced nine-millimeter automatic strapped to his leg, a combat knife on his harness, and three concussion grenades. A twelve-gauge combat shotgun hung, muzzle down, from his back, and an M-4 carbine with a folding sock was clipped to his front. It was the older model, with a rate of fire selections for single fire and short bursts. Cooke liked it that way. He knew troopers in Afghanistan with the newer, fully-auto option on the M-4 and they said it tended to overheat. Cooke liked to stick with what worked. His load was completed with ten, thirty-round magazines of ammunition, a radio transmitter that fed into an earplug, chemical sticks that glowed when twisted, and field dressings that made his harness pouches and the pockets of his fatigues bulge. A soft camelback canteen hung down his spine. Each time you went into an operation, the gear you carried seemed to multiply exponentially. It took a while to figure out what you really needed and how to stow it. Invariably, you ended up not using something or wishing you had something else. The trick was to strike a happy medium.
This operation had two objectives: the disruption of a terrorist cell affiliated with Abu Sayeff, and the collection of any intelligence regarding plans and personnel. But the data snatch was decidedly secondary. The Philippine government was looking for a dramatic strike against Muslim insurgents. This op was as much about PR value as it was about anything else. Filipino intelligence had been sniffing around a remote farmhouse on the northern Mindanao coast. Over the last few months, they’d verified its use as a center for local terrorist training. When a tip came in regarding a meeting that was to draw in the heads of local cells, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
Yet, tonight’s mission made him uneasy. The planning felt rushed, particularly with the team just beginning to get its act together. Cooke had raised the issue of a delay to get some better intel, but he
