Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  “Sir,” said Corporal McLean, “there’s someone who wishes to speak with you. He says you’ll know him, sir, a Mister Baluyev.”

  Kosciusko sputtered out a little of the rum. Baluyev? Here? He was supposed to have …well, apparently he didn’t or couldn’t. Therefore, hell, yes, I want to see him.

  “Please, Corporal, if you could pass him through the gate.”

  “Surely, sir,” said McLean, like most of his people very polite and, frankly, veddy British. “Shall I send one of the cook lads over with some more ice?”

  “If you would be so kind, Corporal.”

  “I’ll leave you a little privacy, sir,” McLean said, saluting and stomping off to resume his guard post.

  Baluyev watched the stout black corporal stride away, then said, “I don’t get it.”

  “They like us, Mr. Baluyev,” Kosciusko explained. “Now, why are you here, and why is the bridge at Ciudad Guayana still standing?”

  “It’s still standing because we’re here, sir,” Baluyev replied, “and we’re here because we couldn’t get the boat up the river. They were searching everything. So I came, once we heard you had all been”—Baluyev looked around at the very decent surroundings—“put into durance vile. And I must say, sir, it sure seems vile to me. Ahem.

  “Sir, you know the big plan, whatever’s left of it. I only knew the little one. Sir, I need orders. Or guidance, anyway.”

  “Regiment isn’t communicating via the e-mail drop?”

  “No …I mean, yes, they are. But they’ve got no orders except ‘hang loose.’ What kind of orders are those, sir?”

  Kosciusko, who was much more in-briefed than Baluyev, thought about the sea between the Netherlands Antilles and Venezuela, and said, “Well …why don’t you and your people just hang loose. Get in a little fishing, maybe. Something useful for you to do will come up; I’m certain of it.”

  Ferry, San Martin de Turumban

  (on some maps marked as “Anton”), Venezuela

  Cazz’s boys had grown thin, no doubt about it. Oh, rations hadn’t been all that short, not yet—though they’d had to stretch them out a bit toward the end—but a man lost weight in the jungle, no matter what. A lot of that came from serving as a grazing ground for swarms of mosquitoes. Some of it was water loss. Some of it was burning off fat as they worked like the mules that supported them. Indeed, they’d worked harder; men weren’t really built to carry the kind of loads they did, not the way mules were. And a mule would quit, eventually. A man?

  Cazz grinned. Mules wouldn’t put up with it. Men will hump until they die.

  Since leaving their temporary log base, inside the Werushima Mountains, they’d moved at night and slept in the day, if “sleep” it could be called. Two men from A Company and half a dozen mules had drowned crossing the Cuyuni River, northeast of the Maugaru Mountains. All Cazz could hope for was that, if the bodies were found, they were found someplace where there was no phone or radio to report it.

  At least, Cazz thought, looking up at the light beginning to filter through the interwoven trees, at least for the next ten minutes.

  Last night the troops had moved painstakingly to their final positions before the attack. Two days prior Cazz had sent two companies across the Cuyuni, one to set up an ambush position on the road between Carrizal and San Martin, one to wait in an assault position to the west of the ferry. He hardly needed that level of force for the short platoon the Venezuelans had posted there. What he needed it for was to take the ferry quickly, once he committed to the attack, to set up a defense on the far side, should the ambush fail. And he needed the ferry taken intact, so that he could get his bloody mules and mortars across without losing any more. If they could strike so hard and so fast that they managed to grab a couple of the trucks waiting with the Venezuelan troops, so much the better.

  They wouldn’t even have the ferry manned, if they weren’t using the two airfields as supplementary positions to resupply forward. Me, I wouldn’t have bothered with the airstrips.

  More trucks he expected to grab from the ambush, a couple anyway. Still more were waiting at the Venezuelan forward base at Tumeremo. Austin and one scout team had made it that far and reported it as a potential paradise—pandemonium, anyway—of destruction and loot. There were trucks by the score, fuel by the bladder, food in mountains, ammunition by the crate, and—best of all—about two thirds of Venezuela’s helicopter fleet being serviced at any given time. To say nothing of a small fleet of light, fixed wing aircraft. For defense, the scouts had seen one company of light armor, maybe a company of fairly lackadaisical infantry and—based on the number of tents and latrines the scouts had counted—“about eight hundred REMFs.”

  “And, sir,” Austin had said, via a directional antenna, “them light strike craft the Venezuelans use. I saw the last of ’em fly out heading east a couple of days ago and they never came back. Figure they’re in Guyana, sir.”

  Which makes sense to me, Cazz thought.

  “I can’t fly the choppers,” Cazz muttered, in the gloom south of the river, “but I can sure as shit burn them so no one else can either …them, and any fixed wing birds we find on the field. Gonna be fun.”

  For the battalion’s main force it had been radio listening silence all the way, with only a few exceptions permitted, and those only after midnight, this morning In very short bursts of electromagnetic traffic the mortars had reported up and ready to fire, A Company, Captain Lott, commanding, had said they were occupying the ambush position. B Company, Captain Newman, commanding, reported that it was ready to assault the ferry from the east and D Company, Captain Jarrett, commanding, confirmed that it was ready to charge the southern end. The engineers hadn’t had to report; they were with Cazz. The bulk of the scout platoon—Master Sergeant Austin and one team still keeping their eyes on Tumeremo and its airfield—was overlooking the airfield on the friendly side and radioed, “Ready to attack.” Assault wasn’t really their job, of course, but, Needs must when the devil drives.

  Cazz made a gimme gesture to Singh, carrying the battalion radio for the festivities. Singh passed over the microphone.

  With his heart beginning to race, not with fear but with excitement and anticipation, Cazz pushed the microphone’s button and ordered, “All companies, this is Six, actual. Attack.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Strike—till the last armed foe expires;

  Strike—for you altars and your spires;

  Strike—for the green graves of your sires;

  God—and your native land!”

  —Fitz-Greene Halleck, “Marco Bozzaris”

  Airfield, Etering-bang Falls

  The scouts opened up first, by a matter of seconds. Each of the three teams present carried one Pecheneg machine gun. These had been grouped under Sergeant Ahern, with his other three scouts in support.

  The Pecheneg was, at core, simply a PKM. The PKM was generally a decent gun, at least until it came time to change the barrel. It had, arguably, the worst barrel change mechanism in machine gun history, requiring that the gunner lift the feed tray cover, and use a block of wood—sometimes a block of wood and a hammer—to pound a sliding piece of half-moon-indented metal out to one side. Only then could the old, overheated barrel be removed.

  The Pecheneg, conversely, had taken a step forward by taking a step back. Inspired, quite likely, by the Great War’s Lewis Gun, it had a shroud, or jacket, around the barrel with oval windows or slots cut toward the rear. Blast at the muzzle drew air in through those windows, which air cooled the barrel enough that, as a practical matter, barrel changes weren’t needed. Indeed, changing the barrel was a depot-level job; gunner, keep your grubby fingers off.

  Ahern had spent a good part of the time between about two AM and sunrise sighting the guns in via image intensifying scopes to cover the field properly One gun he’d had aimed in at the sole tent, a medium job capable of holding no more than a dozen men comfortably. The other two he’d directed onto the one known
guard post, in one case, and to fire straight up the short field, south-southwest to north-northeast, in the other. There were no aircraft at this field, though one had landed on the field on the opposite side, during the night. Once this one was clear, the scouts would have to cross the river on foot to clear out the larger strip.

  In any case, whether an ambush or, as this was, a raid, one opened fire with the greatest casualty producing weapons available. That was Ahern and his trio of machine guns.

  His radio attuned to the battalion sequence for frequency hopping, Ahern heard the order, “Attack,” and immediately gave the command. The Pecheneg nearest to him, the one sighted at the tent, opened up. In the gloom, its muzzle seemed like a strobe light.

  What was inside the tent none could tell. Still, it was the dry season now and the tent, itself, was dry. One or more of the green tracers passing through caught it alight. A small horde of screaming and cursing men tumbled out, pulling on equipment even as they tripped over each other. The machine gunner shifted fire imperceptibly, cutting them to pieces. Most went down with looks more of disbelieving shock than fear.

  Each blast from the muzzle was like a blow to Ahern, but it was the kind of blow he’d learned to take and not, in any case, nearly as bad as those falling upon the Venezuelans.

  Bare milliseconds after that first gun opened fire, the other two joined in. Green tracers danced up the airfield, lengthwise, while others cut across it, slaughtering the lone guard post on the eastern side After a minute’s worth of that, the platoon sergeant ordered the gun firing up the field to cease fire and accompany him. He, with the Pecheneg gunner and the remaining eight scouts, assaulted up the field, following it to the north-northeast. At that point Ahern ordered his other two guns, “Out of action,” and, with his own squad, followed in the footsteps of the platoon sergeant.

  He met them at the riverbank, where the scouts were busily shooting up a few Venezuelans, attempting to swim for safety, in the back.

  “Teach de muthafuckahs a lesson,” was Ahern’s comment.

  “Cross, you bastards,” the platoon sergeant shouted. “KP for the last man to make it to the other side.”

  San Martin de Turumban Ferry, Guyana side

  The Venezuelan cooks had apparently delivered chow via the ferry to their troops on the south bank. At least, that was the only good reason any of the men in Delta Company could think of for the enemy to just line up like that, with only a minimal guard.

  The river, past where D Company lined up, a hundred and fifty meters south and east, was brown and about two hundred meters wide. The town, past the river, was within easy small arms range of the south bank. Most of the ground in between the far bank and the town was open and low, and probably flooded regularly. Past the open ground, hidden in a moderately sized stretch of woods, east of the town, was Company B.

  “Nothing fancy,” Cazz had told Jarrett, the D Company commander. “Speed matters more; I want a straight up, on line, marching fire attack. Fast!”

  What he’d asked for, he got. Delta’s commander had stretched his troops, with about two meters between men in the three forward platoons, in a long, mostly straight, line. His RPG gunners were going to be worthless for this, so Cazz had stripped them off, days ago, along with Delta’s weapons platoon sergeant, and given them over as a complete section of six launchers and fourteen men to Alpha.

  At the company commander’s order, Delta had stood up, opened fire, and begun trotting forward, their steps preceded by a wall of copper-jacketed lead.

  They didn’t hit much; Cazz hadn’t expected them to. What that wall of fire did—he later estimated they’d put out about ten thousand rounds in the single minute it took to close to the friendly bank—was scare the unsuspecting Venezuelan troops, waiting for breakfast, shitless, causing them to drop their weapons and scurry for the river and a hoped-for safety.

  At the river, Delta’s commander ordered his men into a hasty defense, even while shouting, “And kill the bastards; don’t let a one get away!”

  The men took him at his word; little spurts began erupting from the water as they took aim at the swimming, fleeing backs. One by one the fleeing troops gave off cries of pain as the bullets found them. Body by body they began to float, face down and dead, downstream.

  Then, from the south bank, Company D began a slow, desultory fire toward the town.

  “Master Sergeant Austin, sir,” Singh announced, handing Cazz the microphone.

  “Six, here. Whatcha got?”

  “The tank company, sir. I count a dozen …nooo …make it thirteen Scorpions, and half a dozen trucks loading up with infantry. They’ll be moving out soon.”

  “Good,” Cazz said. “Break …Alpha, you copy?”

  “Roger,” answered the A Company commander. “Ready.”

  “Bravo, remember to hold your boys in check. I want the garrison of the town to be screaming bloody murder for help against an attack that those tanks could defeat. You hit them too soon, and the bait will be gone.”

  “Roger, sir,” Bravo agreed. “We know the plan.” There was a tone in the words that suggested, Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, sir.

  Cazz kept his answering voice neutral but firm. “Good. Stick to it.”

  “They’re leaving now,” Austin advised. “Heading south. They’re moving fast, too, tanks and tracks intermixed. No real order; they look like they’re in a hurry to save their buddies.”

  “We’re ready,” A Company said.

  Southeast of Carrizal, Venezuela

  Nine miles north of San Martin, the road to Tumeremo took a sharp, ultimately approximately ninety degree bend, southeast of the town of Carrizal. That was where A Company’s commander had aimed for, and that, thanks to GPS, was where he’d put his reinforced company into an ambush position.

  He’d gone for a simple “V” shape, based on the lay of the road, with one platoon, reinforced by two of Delta’s RPGs, right at the bend, and the other two flanking that, parallel to the road as it ran before them. The rightmost, or westernmost, platoon had further kicked a team of riflemen even more to the west, by about half a mile, to provide early warning.

  All three platoons, plus the reinforcements, were to the east or north of the strip of dirt, with their fires oriented such that nobody should be firing on any friendlies. In total, the ambush position stretched over roughly seven hundred meters. Second Platoon, on A Company’s left, had wanted to lay a half-dozen antitank mines across the road, during the night. Rather, they’d wanted to lay more than that, but one of the blasted mules that had drowned, crossing the Cuyuni had been carrying the other half of the load.

  Cazz had nixed that, anyway. “No. We need the road clear for us to move up it, quickly, after we capture some vehicles, and I don’t want to have to waste time waiting for the mines to be cleared.”

  The mines, thus, remained on the back of one very unhappy mule, about nine hundred meters to the rear.

  Tumeremo, Venezuela

  “Breakfast, sir,” said Major Rojas’ batman, pushing aside the mosquito net over the opening to the tent and entering to lay a paper plate on the major’s field desk. From the operations tent next door came a dull chatter and the occasional static of an unimportant radio message.

  Major Rojas, Fifth Venezuelan Infantry Division, hadn’t been left behind for incompetence. He hadn’t been left behind because he was lazy, or because he was a bad leader, or for any other negative reason. He’d been left behind because he was in charge of the tanks and there was no good way to get Fifth Division’s light tanks to Guyana, yet, or to support them once they were there.

  And, thus, Rojas fumed, for the third time since awakening and approximately the twenty-five thousandth time since arrival at Tumeremo, whatever the objective truth of the matter, I feel like a lazy, incompetent, shitty, useless insult to the memory of Bolivar.

  I so want to be down there, where the action is, and I so don’t want to be here, nursemaiding a bunch of aviation and logistics puss
ies, my own tanks, a marginal company of infantry, and an even more questionable company of MPs. How will I hold my head up in the club after this? What will I say to my grandson—assuming my daughter produces one—when he asks me, “Abuelo, what did you do in the liberation of Guyana?”

  I’ll have to tell him, something like that gringo general supposedly said, “Grandson, I shoveled mierde in Tumeremo.”

  Shit. I …

  “What the hell was that? On the radio?” Rojas asked.

  A runner from the Ops tent pattered up the grassless strip in front of Rojas’s tent. He managed to tangle himself up in the mosquito netting strung across the door. Eventually, he gave up on the stuff and simply passed over his message. “Major, sir, the troops down at the ferry are under attack.”

  There is a God, Rojas exulted, leaping up and leaving his breakfast behind and the runner still tangled in the netting.

  As Rojas reached the flap to the Operations tent he heard the message, heartbreaking and infuriating, both, “They’re …they’re shooting my men in the back as they flee over the river.”

  “Two things,” Rojas said to the officer on duty, “in this order: Assemble the tanks and the infantry, with enough trucks to carry them, then tell higher what’s going on. But not until we’ve left here, understand?”

  An adrenaline rush coursing through his veins, Rojas looked skyward and said, aloud, “Thank You.”

  San Martin de Turumban, Venezuela

  Insignificant, Cazz sneered as the return fire chipped bark from trees and dropped the occasional twig from overhead. With a grin he said, aloud, “These fuckers are never going to know what hit them. At least they won’t if Lott in A Company does his job.”