Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  Morales thought back a bit. “Hmmm. Last time we were here they were putting a fresh coat of paint on the things.” He shrugged, then added, “That’s kind of a never-ending thing in the Navy. Anybody’s navy, really.

  “Now, though, there are some biggish patches where there’s …ahhh.”

  “Yes?” she prodded.

  “I understand it now. Before, they were painting over rust. People do that when they really either don’t or can’t give a shit. Now they’ve chipped off the paint and removed the rust. They’re a lot more serious than they were.”

  “I could see that,” the woman agreed. “The odd thing, though, is that if they are planning on annexing Guyana these ships are nearly useless. Guyana—to include our regiment—has nothing to stand up to them. And the United States—if the current regime were to object …unlikely, I agree—is so powerful at sea that these ships would be scrap in minutes.”

  Morales nodded, seriously, then said, “They do have five inch—okay, okay—127mm guns. Useful to support a landing.” His eyes darted around then turned west to where a ship with the designator “T-62” was turning around the headland that jutted north into the harbor. “And there is one of the landing craft now. Essequibo, if I remember correctly.”

  “We’d best get back to our room and report,” Lada decided.

  “That,” Morales agreed, “and rehearse our bug out plan.”

  Orinoco River,

  Fifteen Kilometers West of Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela

  Baluyev’s Bertram sport fisher passed almost quietly between the distant riverbanks. Other boats and ships, some commercial and some sport, passed to either side. On rare occasion, the otherwise invisible highway to the south showed up in the form of large trucks moving east or west.

  The boat stayed away from the busy central lanes, the ones where the freighters and tankers plied their trade, bringing food, manufactures and iron ore out of Ciudades Bolivar and Guayana, and other goods in. Those shipping lanes, and their depth, was a matter of great interest to the team, of course. It was not, however, necessary to oversail them to map them.

  There were two depthfinders cum fishfinders aboard the Bertram sport fisher. One of these, by far the less sophisticated of the two, was mounted next to the wheel at which Baluyev sat. The other, which was order of magnitude better (and orders of magnitude higher in price, too; a civilian model side-imaging sonar unit with all the bells and whistles) remained below.

  While Praporschik Baluyev steered, slowly, Litvinov provided camouflage by fishing off the stern. Below decks Kravchenko prepared his latest culinary crime against the people. Forward of and below that, Timer Musin monitored the sonar.

  That was arguably the best place for Musin, since he’d been irritable almost to the point of fisticuffs for weeks. On the other hand, since the side imager recorded everything on its own, and only needed him in case there was a power outage, equally arguably it was the worst place to put him, since it gave him limitless opportunities to brood.

  I might as well admit it, Tim thought, if only to myself. I’ve got it bad for the girl, quite despite what she’s done—what I’ve seen her do—and what she does.

  He sighed helplessly and hopelessly. Love isn’t just blind; it’s deaf and dumb and stupid, to boot.

  But she’s up north with someone else, sharing a hotel room and pretending to be married …Tim felt a sudden agony, a wrenching in his gut at the unwelcome arrival of an altogether too graphic image of Lada and Morales, wiling away the hours at Puerto Cabello. The pain was etched on his face, though none could see it. He tried to push the image from his mind. That just made it stand out in sharper focus.

  And I’m an idiot; she’s never made me any promise, never treated me as anything but an older brother.

  But I can’t help being an idiot. Can anyone?

  * * *

  Baluyev looked through the glass shield above the wheel with keen interest. Orinoquia Bridge coming up, he thought. Love to drop it, if we could …if we should or must. But …way above my skill set. Hmmm …Krav’s been to the course.

  The praporschik shouted down to the galley, “Kravchenko, you black-hearted enemy of the masses, get up here and give me your professional opinion. No, do not worry about burning that capitalist plot you call ‘food.’ Burning could only improve it.”

  “Yes, Chief?” Kravchenko asked when he arrived topside, wiping his hands on a semi-clean cloth.

  “How would you drop that bridge?” Baluyev asked. It wasn’t necessary to point; the bridge was both huge and solitary.

  Kravchenko looked at the massive structure, stretching four kilometers from bank to bank, supported by cables held up by four massive, H-shaped pylons, and whistled. He cocked his head at an angle, calculating even while taking it the sheer extent of the problem.

  “Be a bitch to drop one of the pylons, Chief. Probably more explosive than we could carry in this thing. The best bet would probably be to use a big—and I do mean big—shaped charge to cut one of the cables, either at the anchor points on the ends or at the top of one of the pylons. Might have to cut two of them, even. And …might have to cut them on top because there were too many to cut at the bridge level. That said, it’s a close question that would depend on a lot of non-demolition factors.” Kravchenko looked more carefully and said, “On second thought, I don’t think those cables join on top, so we’d have to cut them at the base.”

  “Why a shaped charge?” Baluyev asked.

  Kravchenko wrinkled his nose, answering, “However tightly wrapped a cable might be, there’s always some air in there between strands that prevents the shock from being passed on properly. The plasma jet from a shaped charge just cuts through pretty much evenly.”

  “How big a charge, then? Or charges, if we would have to cut them at the bridge level.”

  Shaking his head, Kravchenko answered, “I’d have to crack the books for that one. Those I had to leave behind. And I’d need a pretty precise measure of the diameter of the cables, the material, and the method they used to weave the things together.”

  “Fair enough,” the warrant answered. He adjusted the throttle slightly, and said, “I’m going to drop anchor a little ways up the river. As soon as the sun drops, I want you and Litvinov to start getting ready to recon the thing. Assuming we survive your cooking of course. And tomorrow I’ll want you to look over the structures supporting those power lines.”

  “Don’t sweat the electric tower, Chief,” Kravchenko said. “I can tell you from here what I’d need to drop that. Easy. And I didn’t ask to become the cook for this mission,” he finished.

  “It was you or Litvinov,” Baluyev replied, “and as bad as your cooking is, it is usually survivable. The same cannot be said of his.”

  Seated after, fishing pole in hand, Litvinov smiled to the city receding sternward. Pays to think ahead. Pays to really fuck it up sometimes when someone tasks you with something you would rather not do.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Theory has, therefore, to consider

  the nature of means and ends.

  —Clausewitz, On War

  Camp Fulton, Guyana

  Victor Inning, ethnically a Great Russian who had, once upon a happier time, “served the Soviet Union,” lay abed next to his gently snoring and equally Russian wife.

  Damn, but I miss the old man, he thought, meaning by that that he missed his wife’s late father, an old cold warrior, a very high ranking officer of, first, the KGB and than the FSB The old man had died, in harness, in the Lubyanka, as he’d have wanted to go. Even so, Damn, but I miss him. Not only was he a voice of sanity in a world that should be institutionalized, if we could just find an asylum big enough, but I could have gone to him for the fucking mines Boxer and Stauer want.

  So Boxer and Waggoner figured out roughly what we need and where I can’t go to get them. “No place in Latin America,” they said. “Some places love Chavez and some hate his guts; but they’re all potentially infiltrated, to include
Brazil. No place in North America. None of the core EU states. Not North Korea. Not Vietnam. Not China. Not Russia.”

  Most of that I could have come up with on my own.

  Where, where, can I get them and in the quantity needed? They didn’t have to forbid me from going to the EU; no member of the core of the EU will sell. I can’t ask Russia even if I didn’t think they’d pass it on. Even my old comrades in the FSB are pissed at me—some of them to the shoot on sight level—for joining the regiment.

  “Though I still wouldn’t have,” he whispered to the darkness. “I still wouldn’t have if the old man hadn’t told me to take his daughter and get out while we still could. And this was the only place that would take me and not arrest me.”

  The United States is …well …right out. Besides, while they’ve got mines, they seem to prefer modifying aerial bombs to turn them into “destructors.” Or sometimes purpose building mines to be dropped from aircraft. And I don’t have any contacts there anyway, not to speak of, not that I could use. And even if I did, we don’t have any aircraft for which the purchase of even the bombs, let alone the destructor kits, would make sense.

  Canada? Well, emotionally they might as well be part of the EU.

  Guyana could get them from us, openly, and from nearly anybody that has or makes them. But what Guyana buys for us, Guyana knows about. And what they know about, Chavez will know about quickly. So says Boxer, anyway, and I’ve learned to trust him on these things.

  I’d go to Iran or Iraq, but not only are they back at de facto war with each other, they’ve both got civil wars going on. What they make, they use on each other and themselves. Kind of pointlessly, too, since oil’s a glut on the market and nobody cares all that much if they export any or not.

  Singapore makes a good series. So does Taiwan. But Taiwan is busy mining the approaches from China and will have few to spare, while Singapore is just plain touchy about selling arms under the table. Not that they hesitated about selling us five thousand rounds of new 105mm, mind, once I put them the offer. But that was aboveboard.

  South Africa has a shitpot of old ones, dating back to the Great Patriotic War. But that’s really old. I wouldn’t trust them to do the job. Maybe they could recondition them. Wouldn’t hurt to ask ARMSCOR, I suppose. Or maybe even skip them and go straight to Pretoria Metal Pressings-Denel.

  Damned pity it is that that bad lot of 105 is just too low in explosive filler to make a good mine for anything but …

  Hmmm. Now isn’t that an interesting thought. Partial solution? Maybe.

  “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” (SCIF), Camp Fulton, Guyana

  The SCIF, which served a lot more functions than merely being a facility to hold and discuss highly sensitive intelligence, was, as usual, silent. Oh, there were possibly as many as a hundred people working there, but the nature of the work suggested librarylike levels of quiet.

  “You want what?” Gordo asked incredulously.

  Victor smiled. “I want about five or six hundred of those four thousand and change artillery shells, the ones condemned for having the questionable propellant. Oh, and money. We’ll need some money.”

  “What for? For both, I mean.”

  “The shells to become naval mines,” Inning answered. “The money to buy fuses and have a factory somewhere else mill out connectors to screw regular influence fuses—we’d need a mix of them, pressure, magnetic, and acoustic—to turn them into mines. We can drop them over the side of frigging canoes, if that’s all we have left.”

  “To use where?” Gordo asked.

  “Here in Guyana. If a 105 had more explosive, we could maybe use them somewhere else. As is, I don’t see a lot of value in using them anywhere but to mine Georgetown and the Demerara River, and maybe the mouth of Puerto Cabello. Even so, that’s one or two of five targets taken care of.”

  “They’re not ‘taken care of,’” Gordo corrected, “until they’re armed and laid.”

  “Not my problem,” Victor answered, then primly countered, “Moreover, ‘an action passed on is an action completed.’”

  “You’ve spent way too much time around Americans, Victor,” Gordo observed.

  “Pshaw. It was the same in Russia and the Soviet Union. It’s the same everywhere.”

  Gordo considered that, then decided, Yeah, it probably is. Sad, ain’t it.

  “So can I have the money and the shells?” Victor asked.

  Nodding, Gordo replied, “Yes, you can have the shells certainly and I’ll hold the comptroller upside down by his heels and shake until the money falls out. But what about the rest of the job? And where are you going to get the fuses in the first place?”

  “Working on it,” Victor answered as he turned to leave.

  “Working on it,” Victor repeated to himself, as his footsteps echoed down the tile-floored and concrete-walled corridor, heading for his office.

  “It’s times like these,” Victor muttered, once seated behind his desk, “that I wish the Czech Republic had access to the sea. They may be part of the EU, but the Bohemians will still sell anything they make. Unfortunately, they don’t make anything that isn’t useful to them. And they’ve got no use for naval mines. Pity.

  “Still, the idea of using shells for mines isn’t a bad one, even if I do say so myself. So I wonder what they’ve got for shells.”

  Victor twirled his chair around to face a bookcase. From that he selected a large blue-bound volume, fingering it out of the tightly packed shelf. Kicking his chair back to face his desk, he opened the reference. Then he laid a legal pad next to the book, set a pen next to that, and began thumbing pages.

  Hmmm, he thought, that’s interesting. Though the fuse wells are different sizes, what we can do with 105mm shells we can do with 240mm shells. Those, the Czechs have. Let’s see about …aha …roughly forty kilograms equivalent high explosive in a 240mm shell. That ought to be good for medium depths—say, sixty meters or less—for other than first class warships. Death to a medium merchie or landing craft, probably for a tanker, too. Still, to get those shells without the mortars that fire them would be suspicious. The Czechs only have …Victor thumbed some more pages. Ah …they’ve a grand total of four tubes. They won’t sell. So …have to add …um …two, I think …yes, two M-240s …that’s the minimum for testing, all from Russia. No, let’s make it four. And might as well have Guyana order the shells from there, too. That should allay any suspicions in that regards. Hey, Boxer said we couldn’t go to Russia for mines; he said nothing about going to them for shells or guns. And they won’t go to waste; the line battalions can use the mortars to present a better opposing force for the U.S. armed forces that come here. Also, they’re fairly cheap since the Russian Army has gone to the self-propelled version and put the towed ones in depots. The comptroller shouldn’t bitch much.

  “Okay, so how many would we need?” Victor picked up the pen and began to tap it against his cheek. “No, that’s not the right question. The right question is how many can we deliver.” He started some calculations on the yellow pad, while thinking, Let’s see. Maracaibo Area? Mission for the Antonovs and two Antonovs can carry, say, fifteen tons between them. Each shell is a pubic hair over one seventh of a ton, so we need …call it …one hundred and …five. No, that’s not right. We’ll want to drop ten or twenty flat steel fakes for every real mine. And at least a few serious, purpose-made mines; if I can find any. Sooo …drop the number deliverable to a maximum of an even hundred and probably more like eighty. That’s totally inadequate, of course, to actually block the Gulf of Venezuela, but it’s probably enough to frighten anyone out of using it. At least if we can supplement them with something better.

  Then there’s the Orinoco River. Call it …oh …thirty shells for that.

  Outside the mouth of Puerto Cabello? Maybe another fifty. And to mine the waters north of each port east of there …two hundred more? Make it three hundred.

  And, for here? Seventy ought to do for Georgetown and to help block the Demerara />
  All righty, then. Let’s factor in P for “plenty.” Four mortars and a thousand big shells takes care of a lot of the problem. Well, with the 105s and assuming I can get the influence fuses and have fuse well adapters made, it does. I wonder if Pretoria Metal Pressings can handle that many. Hmmm …maybe not. Shit, I hate making things more complex than necessary. Shit. And where do I get the fuses? Israel? Would they sell the fuses?

  The thought of fuses sparked another thought. How do I throw my old comrades off the scent? How indeed? I could order some Smelchek fuses. Then they’d be sure I wanted the shells for mortars, rather than mines. Okay …kind of a waste but we’ll do that. Now let’s see about Israel and destructors.

  Victor reached for a different, blue-bound volume, nearly indistinguishable from the first. Ah, yes. They make destructor kits now. They’ve found a need to use them off the coast of Gaza. Would they do the adapters? Surely they could. Less certain they could hide the destructor kit sales, though, and they’d insist on hiding them. And the two together raise too many questions, anyway.

  Notes to self: send my Hassidic outfit to the cleaners, today. Start work to get Guyanan Defense to order the mortars and shells, tomorrow. Travel arrangements to South Africa and Israel, soonest.

  And …um—his finger came to rest on a different passage of the first book—side trip to Montenegro. They like me well enough. As well they should, since I was the instrument of them unloading the Naughtius on the regiment.

  Victor felt a sudden shiver of anticipation. It had been a while since he’d really had the chance to practice his true calling, which was clandestine arms smuggling, not mere procurement. It was a good feeling to get back into the saddle again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  He was the most theatrical of men, busy at all times