Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  “So the aircraft will have to take care of Maracaibo. And they’re only going to get one bite at the apple unless Colombia joins the war on our side. But that’s a distant hope, which is not a plan. All we can plan on is one sortie from each of two Antonovs, before they land themselves—probably in Colombia—for internment.

  “We’ve also got the Naughtius, once it comes out of routine servicing, that we can use to either make a mine barrage somewhere—probably damned slowly—or to reseed anything they clear. The problem with the Naughtius is it has to be based out of somewhere. It’s slow and short ranged. We can’t count on using any settled part of Guyana. Columbia would, for the same reasons as the aircraft, be touchy, the Dutch hate our guts over Suriname, so Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles are right out. That leaves either Trinidad and Tobago as a base or we could use a ship. And using another ship is also touchy, for much the same reasons. Or we have to set up a base for Naughtius somewhere not too far from the middle of nowhere.

  “That last is probably what we’ll have to do.”

  Meredith said, “I wouldn’t be too worried about the Orinoco River; it’s within easy range of even our small craft. For that matter, we could fly the helicopters in, nap-of-the-earth, and mine it that way. Hell, we could fly them into the hinterland where nobody but a few Indians live and float them downstream on timers.”

  “Not helicopters,” Boxer disagreed. “We’re likely to need them for something else.”

  Gordo asked, “What’s the fifth target? That was only four.”

  “We need to be able to shut down sea transportation to here, too,” Boxer answered. “And we need to be able to do it in a way that doesn’t have to be made known to the Guyanan government because, if they knew, Chavez would certainly find out, and if he found that out, he’d start thinking about where else we might mine.”

  “That’s all well and good,” Victor said, “but until I know what you need I can’t do much.”

  Boxer smiled without a trace of mirth. “Yeah. Let’s try this approach; start tracking down anything you can get your hands on, any way you get your hands on it that doesn’t lead back to us.

  “And, in the interim, I’ll be sending some folks to try to figure out what we really do need. The S-3 and I will give you a better picture when we’ve figured it out.”

  And I need to get an e-mail off to Wicked Lasers, to see if they can fill a need. Or get something for us from Norinco.

  River Orinoco, Venezuela

  There were any number of ways to introduce a reconnaissance team into hostile territory, some sophisticated, some simple, some safe and some quite dangerous. The regiment’s theory on the matter could be summed up as, “We’re old and fragile. Simple and safe will do, wherever it will do.”

  “Well enough,” muttered Praporschik Baluyev, as the fishing boat turned generally south to enter the river’s mouth. Shortly, they would turn east, toward Curiapo and from there probably as far as Ciudad Guyana and, if their luck held, as far as Ciudad Bolivar. Sailing a Bertram fishing boat, albeit at some fifty feet a fairly large and noticeable one, along the coast from Georgetown and up the river had the advantages of simplicity and safety. That suited Baluyev just fine.

  Other recon teams would be going in other ways. Morales and Lada were flying commercial to Caracas, for example, thence to set up housekeeping in Puerto Cabello to keep an eye on the major part of the Venezuelan Navy. Another team, of twelve, from Second Battalion, was also flying commercial, but to Ernesto Cortissoz Airport, near Barranquilla, Colombia.

  Nobody was going in by parachute, hang glider, submarine, or tunneling, swimming, or overland. Not yet anyway. There was a team preparing to HALO—High Altitude Low Opening—insert by parachute near the major training areas for Venezuela’s Fifth Division. Likewise, a few individuals and a couple of groups of two or three from Second Battalion and Biggus Dickus Thornton’s platoon of former SEALs would be looking at other targets: airfields, small ports, bridges, oil platforms, and the like.

  That, however, was for the future. They weren’t going in—nobody was going in—unless the regiment also had a way to get them out again. And for Baluyev’s crew, for now, there was a river to navigate, currents to measure, depths and hazards to confirm, open areas by the banks to scout, and ship traffic to analyze. There were also crocodiles, watching from the banks and from the very surface of the stream, to be avoided.

  “Pull in to Curiapo,” Baluyev ordered. “Let’s see what we can pick up from the rumor mills. And I’m told you can get a good meal at the Hotel Orchidea.”

  “Got to beat Kravchenko’s cooking,” observed Timer Musin, sourly.

  “What’s eating you, Tim?” Baluyev asked.

  Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

  The COPA flight from Tocumen, east of Panama City, had been reasonably pleasant. The taxi ride from Arturo Michelina International Airport, in Valencia, had been unreasonably not. Still, Morales and Lada had arrived. Eventually.

  “Odd,” he’d said to her, “that a place this economically depressed still has more cars on the road than, say, San Antonio.”

  “Not zo ztrange,” she’d answered. “Zey haven’t yet gotten around to tryink to mandate a particular government design of auto here. And gas is cheaper zan drinking vater.”

  “I suppose,” he’d agreed.

  There’d been any number of quite decent, even luxurious, hotels in Valencia or to the east, in Maracay. None were close enough to conveniently accomplish the mission.

  Puerto Cabello, on the other hand, had nothing in the way of high rise luxury, inn-wise. Instead, it had a few lower end establishments, suitable perhaps for merchant sailors in port, military or naval types on temporary duty, whores, and mid-level businessmen and party bosses taking their secretaries for a little afternoon dictation.

  Lada, bearing a parasol, had taken one look at each of the available establishments and announced to Morales, “Zey’re being vatched by local zecurity vorces.”

  “Damn,” he answered, “and the Venezia was in a perfect spot to keep track of the port.”

  “Zat’s vhy zey’re being vatched by local zecurity vorces,” she replied.

  Morales nodded. He may have been a highly trained pinniped, but she was an operator, quite probably of world class, from an intelligence service justifiably famous for its thoroughness and paranoia. If she said the place was unsuitable, that was good enough for him.

  “Plan B?” he asked. “The bed and breakfast with the tower?”

  “Let’s see how it looks.”

  The inn, the Posada Santa Margarita, looked pretty good, actually, if a bit garish. The façade was painted blue, with a white, studded double door framed by gold. Lada was fairly indifferent to the aesthetics of the thing, though, aesthetics having no bearing on mission accomplishment. She more or less sniffed and said, “Good. No zecurity here,” she said, in English.

  “Probably also no internet,” Morales countered.

  She shrugged, then switched to Spanish, saying, “We didn’t expect to be able to use the net locally. Chavez has long since pulled most of his electronic warfare people to internal security work. We need to get the room with the tower above it. I don’t fancy our chances of getting the SatCom to work unless we have uninterrupted line of sight.”

  Morales nodded. “Supposedly, we have reservations.”

  “Indeed,” she agreed. “And since our reservations are for a married couple …”—she transferred her parasol to her left shoulder, sidestepped over to him and put one arm around his waist—“we had better look the part.”

  Ernesto Cortissoz Airport, Barranquilla, Colombia

  There was really no disguising the dozen men who landed at Barranquilla, despite coming in on three separate flights, taking rental on three separate autos, and intended to rooms in at least two different hotels in a city to the east, Santa Marta. They might have been, indeed were, much older on average than the special operations norm. Yet a lion still looks the part, even in his w
inter.

  “Exactly twelve of them I saw go through here,” said the customs agent, a second sergeant, to his boss, the captain.

  “Twelve what?”

  “Twelve guys, gringos—oh, most of them were about as dark as us but they were gringos all the same. Almost all older, with arms the size of my legs and legs that don’t bear thinking about, short hair, stick-up-their butts postures, and an aura that said ‘do not fuck with me.’ That’s what.”

  Something about the number twelve bothered the captain. “Diplomatic passports?” he asked.

  “No, all normal, private documents, with civilian visas.”

  “Did they say why they came?”

  “One group said they wanted to do some scuba diving. Another that they came for the whores. The third I never got the chance to ask anything.”

  “So what do you think, then?” the captain asked. “Drugs? Personal security for some rich bastard? Training our army? Training FARC or ELN? Wait a minute …twelve, you said?”

  “Si, twelve.”

  “Ah,” the captain said, with sudden understanding, “a U.S. Army special forces team. They’re not here to run drugs or help the rebels. What that leaves is …” The captain thought furiously for a moment before continuing. “What that leaves is you didn’t see a damned thing.”

  “But—”

  “You saw nothing, Pedro. Clear?”

  Neptune Dive Shop and Resort, Taganga, Colombia

  The dogs began barking and wagging their tails joyfully as soon as the team leader, Sergeant Ryan, stepped through the door. The three men who followed him in just increased the dogs’ frenzy.

  “Sepp! Franz! Quiet!” said Ryan to the pooches. They stopped barking and sat, tongues lolling, as if expecting a treat.

  “Buy you both dinner later, boys,” Ryan said to the dogs. They seemed content with the promise.

  The woman at the desk, shapely if a bit coarse-featured, stood with a delighted squeal, then stepped around her desk and launched herself at Ryan, wrapping well muscled arms around his waist. “Mike, you bastardo! You never call. You never write. You never even e-mail! Where the fuck have you been?”

  “Been busy, Kati,” he answered, picking her up and giving her a couple of spins for old time’s sake. He set her down, then asked, “Is Max in?”

  “No,” she answered. “He’s out with a group of students. Don’t expect him back for maybe two …three more hours.” Just then Kati, the secretary, noticed the three other men with Ryan.

  He noticed that she noticed. “Oh, sorry, Kati. These are my …friends. I told them about this place and they insisted on coming here for some diving.”

  Ryan pointed in turn at them, announcing a name with each. His finger first went to a tiny little guy, seemingly as broad in the shoulders as he was tall. “This one goes by ‘Bronto,’ on account of his being so big.” The finger moved to a more normally sized sort, slightly olive-tinged, with something of an intellectual look about him. “This is Bob Fail. He gets touchy if we call him ‘Failure’ so we call him ‘Loser,’ instead.” Again the finger shifted, this time to an older man, with a narrow hatchet of a nose. “The last is Ted Rohrer. He doesn’t have a nickname, yet. We’re working on it.” The finger dropped. “Guys, meet Kati, the woman responsible for keeping the establishment in business.”

  “Don’t you say that to Max,” she warned. “He’s touchy, you know. Typical Boer.”

  “Kati,” Ryan said, “Max is the only Boer you’ve ever met.”

  She cocked her head as if puzzled. “Which makes him completely typical in my experience then, doesn’t it?”

  Ryan sighed. There was no arguing with logic like that

  “You should get some lunch,” Kati advised. “Los Baguettes is always good.”

  “You get a kickback or something, Kati?” Ryan asked.

  She shook her head. “No, but Max says to always recommend Los Baguettes de Maria. He says his home boy, Arthur, is the only one he can speak Afrikaans with, so he needs to watch out for him.”

  Ryan shook his head. He’d met Arthur, a black South African, married to a white Colombian, and found it immensely funny that half Arthur’s business referrals came from a Boer. But then, maybe culture and country trump race, the more so as you’re surrounded by people different in all three.

  “You need a place to stay?” Katia asked.

  “Nah. We booked rooms at the White House.”

  “Beats the Blue Whale,” she admitted, her nose curling into a sneer, “but you should have stayed here. Or at Maria’s.”

  “I’ve got eight more friends coming, Katia. Can you make arrangements …”

  “For how long?” she asked.

  “Here? Just a few days,” Ryan answered. “In the medium term, we’re better finding an apartment or two to rent.”

  “Consider it done,” she answered. “Half here, half to Maria’s. Now go get lunch while you wait for Max. I’ll send him over when he gets here.”

  “And my stuff?” Ryan asked.

  “Max has it; still locked up for you. What is all that stuff anyway?” Katia asked.

  “Oh, just some specialized diving gear. No big deal.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  If the general remains silent while the statesman

  commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he

  shares culpability for the results.

  —LTC Paul Yingling

  Bolivar State, Venezuela

  “Mao, would you please knock it off?” Larralde asked.

  “Knock what off, sir?” the second sergeant major queried as his legs pumped, keeping himself running in place.

  Larralde sighed from where he sat, releasing the foot he’d been inspecting to point at his subordinate’s thumping feet. “Knock that off; there’s no reason to show off.”

  “But I’m not …oh, all right, sir.” Arrivillaga stopped his running and went to sit next to his captain. From where they sat both could see the long, line of the new privates, to where it straggled off in the distance. The sergeant major looked, shook his head, then let his chin sink to his chest.

  “We’re so fucked,” he muttered. “There’s no chance we’ll ever get these people jump qualified in time. Zero, zip, zilch, none, nada. This wasn’t even that long a road march and look at them. Just look at them.

  “This is stupid, you know,” Arrivillaga continued. “Brigade set us to do this march not because they’re going to have to march much, but because they can’t prioritize. Dumb asses.”

  Sighing again, Larralde agreed, “Even if we could—and I agree that we can’t, not with all the time lost to the inoculations—I shudder to think what would be left of them after the training and the qualification jumps. We’d be pushing people down the ramp in wheelchairs. Half of them would be hopping to the doors on one leg with a pair of crutches strapped to the other.”

  “Do we have to jump, sir? Really? Surely there’s a better way, one that might give us half a chance to use the extra three weeks to make soldiers of them.”

  Larralde stayed silent for a few moments, as he pulled a sticky sock back on, then reseated and laced up a boot. As he began unlacing the other, he said, “I’ve been thinking about that. I’m not convinced that the general staff wants us to jump in for any better reason than that it just looks ever so cool. We really don’t have to. We could airland. Hell, we could maybe even airland in the regularly scheduled civilian flight.”

  Arrivillaga thought about that for all of thirty second before saying, “So why don’t you bring that idea to Hugo?”

  Larralde scoffed. “Me? Go direct to Chavez? I’d find myself assigned as an assistant division vector control officer, counting flies on flypaper, before I got two feet inside the palace. I don’t know anyone—”

  “I do,” the sergeant major interrupted.

  The captain looked incredulous. “You do?”

  “Yeah,” Arrivillaga insisted. “I do. Hugo fucks my cousin Marielena sometimes. And I’m her f
avorite cousin. I could get you an appointment. Or …she could.”

  Larralde’s eyes squinched shut as his mouth half opened. His head tilted and shook, slightly. “And why is this the first I’m hearing about this?”

  It was the sergeant major’s turn to shrug. “It’s not like it’s something to brag about, sir.”

  “Well …put that way …I suppose not,” Larralde agreed. “Even so, I’m just a lousy captain and—”

  Again, the sergeant major interrupted. “In the first place, no, you’re not a ‘lousy’ captain. I’ll deny it if you ever say I said this, but you’re one of the better ones. Besides, Hugo likes junior officers. He’s really one, at heart, himself. It’s generals he can’t stand. Or our generals, anyway.”

  “Shit, I don’t know, Mao.”

  “I’m not saying it’s a sure thing. You’ll have to have your ducks in order. But if you go to Hugo with a better plan than the one the Estado Mayor came up with—and how hard is that likely to be?—Hugo will give you a fair hearing.

  “It’s gotta beat jumping with crutches and pushing people in wheelchairs down the ramp of an Antonov, sir. So shall I give my cousin a call?”

  Again, Larralde went silent, as he and Arrivillaga watched the still mostly civilian-at-heart rabble they were supposed to transform into soldiers stagger past in little driblets of twos and threes.

  Larralde chewed his lower lip, thinking, Hell, most of these kids ought to be on bedrest still. And still they’re at least trying. I owe them more than to let them be sacrificed to a shitty plan that’s doomed to failure already. What was it the gringo lieutenants used to say in Ranger School? Oh, yeah: “Bet your bar time.” Wonderful phrase. Sooo …