Standing in the cockpit doorway while Desai ran up the engines to test for takeoff, I scanned the faces of our task force, or whatever we were. We truly had an international, multiracial rainbow group. In addition to me, there were nine US Army, which included Major Simms, a Sergeant, three Specialists and four privates.  Staff Sergeant Adams was our lone US Marine, and we had one US Air Force Sergeant who handled Buzzard maintenance on Paradise, I figured he may come in handy if something on a ship needed fixing. Four Chinese including Lt Colonel Chang. Three Indian Army including our only pilot. Four Brits including a Sergeant; one of the British privates had taken flying lessons in a single engine plane, so logically I assigned him as copilot to Captain Desai. He had looked terrified when he took the right-hand seat in the cockpit. Oh, and one French Army, a Lt. Renee Giraud. Giraud was attached to a parachute commando unit, and was kind of like a French version of an Army Ranger. I’d worked with French special forces in Nigeria, and those guys are serious bad-asses, I was happy to have Renee on the team. When he signed up, he told me he wasn’t sure whether my speech was a complete line of bullshit, but he wanted action and there wasn’t any on Paradise. I appreciated the honesty.

Twenty four people, hastily pulled together. Five women, nineteen men.  Five officers, five sergeants, fourteen enlisted. Five nationalities, which in some cases was a bit of a vague definition. One of our US Army Specialists was an Indian American named Randy Putri, and if you looked at him you’d think he belonged to the Indian Army contingent, but he spoke zero words of Hindi, and he talked with the Cajun accent he’d grown up with in New Orleans. Our US Air Force Sergeant was named Chung, and she was Chinese American. Chung did speak a bit of Chinese, but the little she knew was Cantonese, not Mandarin, so she couldn’t communicate with the Chinese nationals any better than I could. Sergeant Reginald Thomson of the British Army had the dark skin of his Kenyan grandparents, but when he opened his mouth he spoke like Sherlock Holmes or one of those upper-crust royalty on a BBC TV show. One of the other Brits had an accent so thick I wasn’t sure at first that he was speaking English at all; their slang is totally incomprehensible. Captain Desai for some bizarre reason seemed to understand his accent Ok, she could act as interpreter if needed. On the subject of interpreters, Lt Colonel Chang and one of the other Chinese spoke English, the other two were going to rely on their zPhones as translators. Skippy, of course, spoke every human language perfectly, that annoying little beer can.