My Airman Boss

SitRep 1. Jungle Heat

- The General -

"So, what's the situation?"

I walked into the war room, taking my usual seat at the corner. It had been quite a while since this group had assembled in the flesh, and quite frankly, I considered that a good thing. The Crisis Comms group had its own online messenger, and for Manny to have called us all together... something must be afoot.

Manny shifted uneasily in his seat at the head of the table, in the cramped war room he surreptitiously kept at the end of a rarely-used corridor in the Department of Security and Defense building. Only a select few knew about this room, and at present its battalion of high-tech server computers and radio scanners were manned by two members on Manny's staff.

"I don't exactly know, Bok. Kazuya's still compiling the data, but as far as I can tell, they've already broken Philippine soil," Manny replied, peering at me over a thin, tabbed folder he was perusing by way of greeting. His face betrayed a lack of sleep, the circles under his eyes a bit swollen, and ruddier than the rest of him. His lion's mane of greying hair seemed to glow in the relative dimness of the room, reflecting the multicolored displays of the  LED monitors running down both sides of the long table.

I must've looked taken aback, because Manny quickly followed it up with "But you know what these social media posts are like, right? You can barely tell if it's real or staged. Kazuya claims to have seen Philippine-endemic plant species in the videos, though."

"Just how much evidence has Kazuya compiled?" I asked. I looked nervously at my watch. The tiny grey hands on the white dial told me that the meeting should have officially started ten minutes ago. The others were late. Couldn't they have predicted Manila traffic by now? I thought with a hint of impatience.

"Sorry I'm late!" Colonel Hoban chimed in as he entered the war room. The Ground Defense Force Public Affairs chief took a seat right across from me, his face flushed from running. "Traffic from BGC was especially bad today."

Manny pressed a small button on the console in front of him and spoke into the conference microphone. "Estrada."

"Sir?"
"Please bring the general and Colonel Hoban some water."
"Right away, Sir."

A few minutes later, the girl named Estrada let herself in, bearing a tray with three glasses of water and saucers of cookies. I thanked her as she set my glass down. So this one, with the messy bun and happy smile was Estrada. This meant that the other one--

A loud crash from the ante room sent me and Hoban running, our hands instinctively reaching for our empty holsters. As we entered the ante room, we saw Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lim helping Manny's other staffer who was sprawled on the floor. She seemed to have run a little too hard into Ed, and I tried to suppress a smile as I imagined what must have happened.

So this was Kazuya.

I rushed to help the poor girl to her feet. Truth be told (and at the risk of seeming a little sexist), I had imagined that the person Manny trusted to analyze the information environment would be a bespectacled young man, probably a military geek to some degree. She had started working for him more than a year ago; and he had managed to keep her identity from us until now. He had good reason to, as the level of depth in some technical details hinted at a deeper understanding of the situation than some of our best open-source intel agents in the Armed Security Forces. That the information came from this short, chubby creature with wavy brown hair and pleasant face admittedly was quite a surprise.