Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  But, “No, they’ve nobody south of Saint Cuthbert’s,” Byng had assured them. “Beyond that,” the captain had shrugged, “I can’t tell you. I’ve got better commo with the regiment than I do with 242 Company.”

  They’d followed the edge of the marshy ground the Mahaica fed, staying just west of it, until their GPS had told them they were in the right area. From there, they’d hidden their equipment and found an enormous tree, with a thicker trunk than its neighbors and towering over them by as much as ten meters. They still couldn’t see the Cheddi Jagan airstrip, itself, but they could see the space above it. Indeed, they could see planes taking off and landing by night and day.

  By night, Che made a hide of woven branches, in among the tree’s own. They’d actually uprooted entire plants, wrapped the root balls in plastic and bound those to the main tree. Some kinds of photography could detect the presence of chlorophyll, hence its absence. Dead branches, even if they looked green to the naked eye, could have served as a marker for, “Blast the ever loving crap out of this.”

  When they were ready, Morales lowered a rope. Then he and Simmons hauled the laser, sans tripod, up to it, securing it with bungee cords to the trunk, just loosely enough to aim and track a target that would be following a fairly precise line. One of the batteries, too, was hoisted up. That, however, was tied tightly to the tree and wedged down into a spot where a branch grew off to one side. Finally, Morales put in a rope sling so that he or his comrade could lean back to aim the thing, since it was configured like a heavy machine gun rather than a rifle.

  Then they settled down to wait, taking turns in the firing position until just the right kind of target showed up: a big, fat, civilian, chartered cargo carrier.

  Morales let his binoculars rest by the strap around his neck, calling out, “Simmons, we got one. Big fat blue and white Boeing, with a red belly and tail.”

  Simmons didn’t say anything. Che shrugged, thinking, Yeah, so it’s dirty? So what? Orders are orders.

  Morales powered up the laser emitter, which came to life with a soft whine. Then he slipped into the rope sling and let himself rest back. Pulling a set of goggles from a breast pocket, he slipped those over his eyes. They’d been made expressly to guard against backflash from the frequencies the ZM-87 fired on. Sighting down the barrel of the thing, both hands gripped on the spades, Morales fired.

  Rutaca Boeing 737-2S3, YV-216C,

  Over Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

  The pilots were bored.

  Which is good, thought Captain Mueller who, quite despite his name, looked approximately as darkly Venezuelan as Hugo Chavez did. Nice easy loading, with disciplined troops from the army. None of them sniveling; though their collective sense of humor is a little odd. The stews are happy. And as soon as we refuel, it’s back to Caracas where Stefania is, as usual, going to suck me off right here on my own chair before my wife comes to pick me up.

  Mueller flicked a switch, causing the landing gear to whine its way down to locked position. He made a quick glance at his altimeter, then eyeballed the approaching field because, like all good pilots, he really never entirely trusted sophisticated electronics.

  Glancing down again at the instruments, then back up, Mueller pulled back on the yoke and …

  Suddenly, his vision ended, replaced first by a green flash that seemed to come from everywhere and then by utter blackness as his overloaded optic nerves gave out for the nonce. He swore something unintelligible over the agonized scream of his copilot. Then the pain struck, causing him to clasp his hands over his eyes even as his legs spasmed in sympathy against the pedals. Unconstrained, the yoke went off on its own.

  It hurt too much, far too much, for Mueller to even note the alarmed shouts of the passengers and his flight crew as the plane heeled over to port. He didn’t even sense it heeling over.

  Fortunately, it was only a couple of seconds between the blindness and the agony, and the wing digging into the tarmac of the field. It was even less than that before the nose of the plane jackhammered in, killing Mueller and starting the Boeing spinning end over end down the field, before it erupted in a great fireball.

  Four Miles North-northeast of Agricola Village, Guyana

  Che couldn’t see the plane actually impact, though he’d seen the movements that indicated there was no way it wasn’t going to crash. He also saw the fireball rise, and then the column of smoke that followed it.

  “We’ll call that one a kill,” he muttered.

  “I take it you killed it?” Simmons asked from below.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Do we move now, or wait for another one?” Simmons shouted up.

  “I don’t think we can risk one more shot from here,” Morales judged. “We’d better do the bugout boogie.”

  Morales shook his head, mostly in regret. No doubt it went down. Poor bastards. And, if we don’t have sharks, I suppose SEALs will have to do. And it feels every bit as dirty as Simmons said it would. Shitty way to fight a war.

  Tumeremo Airfield, Venezuela

  It wasn’t very likely that more than a dozen of his men heard Cazz’s warning shout. On the other hand, he wasn’t the only one shouting, and for any that missed those, the rising rattle of just about anything the battalion had that would shoot—antitank weapons excepted—generally sufficed to get their attention. For any that might have missed either of those, the impact of ten S-13OF rockets, two pods’ worth, fired by the lead Sukhoi and impacting along the field about a half a second apart, was probably enough to catch their interest. And if that failed, there was the three-ton truck, spinning as it arose into the air, after one rocket went off directly underneath it.

  Cazz had thrown himself to the dirt as soon as he saw the flash from under the attacker’s wings. The explosions that followed felt like they were picking him up and slamming him back to earth, repeatedly. Even before those bludgeons ended, he heard chunks of metal buzzing overhead. Someone screamed in agony; one of his Guyanans, he thought.

  Soon enough, that first scream was joined by so many that it wasn’t possible even to guess at the source. Men cried out for medics. Some of those cries were in Spanish, so at least some of the fragments must have struck among the POWs. Someone—Cazz thought it was his sergeant major, Webster—shouted, “Get a fucking missile on that son of bitch!”

  Rolling over to his back and looking up and around, Cazz saw two of the aerial attackers circling overhead, and the one that had just attacked pulling up to join the circle.

  That leaves … .oh, fuck!

  The next plane came in at the airfield crossways, and pointed almost directly at the battalion commander. He rolled over and scrambled first to hands and knees, then to his feet as he raced to get out of its path. He fell twice, rolling back to his scrambling feet with an agility that belied his age. The whole time—a seeming eternity—Cazz kept throwing glances over one shoulder.

  The plane was low and parallel to the ground when Cazz saw it release two silvery cylinders from the hardpoints under its wings. He had one thought, voiced as soon as it came to his mind:

  “NAPAAALLLMMM!”

  Cazz ran for his life, parallel to the plane’s line of flight. His back suddenly felt intensely hot, even as he felt the hair on the back of his head crisp and curl. He also felt, cutting through his soul, the heartbreaking shrieks of the dozen or so of his troopers caught in a fiery, agonizing death.

  The planes had barely departed before the noncoms and junior officers began bringing a little order out of air strike-induced chaos. It was something one could expect with a good battalion.

  And these boys, Cazz thought, my Americans and my Guyanans, both, are good.

  “Thirty-seven dead, sir,” Sergeant Major Webster reported. Normally that would have been the battalion adjutant’s job. He, however, was one among a small group of charred corpses, their arms and legs burned into fetal positions, on one side of the airfield. “That we know of. Thirteen more missing. Thirty-two more or less wounded, mostl
y from Headquarters Company. We don’t know how many of the POWs got plastered. Scores, anyway, since they were all grouped together. Our heavy mortar platoon took it particularly bad.”

  Cazz nodded, saying, “I thought it would be worse.”

  Webster shrugged, the classically imperturbable primus pilus. “Everyone expects that kind of aerial attack to be worse. Still, it was bad enough. The worst thing is it cost us time. And they’ll be back, them or their buddies. Soon.”

  “Yeah,” Cazz agreed. “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here, fast.”

  “All the trucks, at least, are fueled, sir,” the S-4 said. The loggie sounded infinitely weary. His uniform was speckled with drops of blood that had come from someone else “The ammunition we captured is still enough to do us for a while, but it’s mostly not loaded yet.”

  Cazz rubbed a hand along the back of his head, brushing away the burnt stubble. His other hand fished in a leg-mounted cargo pocket for his map. He unfolded that and measured the distance to his target by eye. “About a hundred and twenty miles,” he said. “Two hours, maybe. Maybe less if we really haul ass. If they come back and catch us on the road, we’ll get hurt. If we stay here, eventually we’ll cease to exist as an organized force.”

  “Once we’re in Ciudad Guayana, sir,” Webster said, “they’ll have a hard time using air on us for political reasons. They’ll have to dig us out by hand. These are good boys; that won’t be easy.”

  The S-4 added, “Sir, they’ll probably leave us alone here once you start rolling north. I’ve got a better chance of loading the necessary supplies with them concentrating on you than if they’re able to concentrate on us, here, as a group. If you move out, I can probably get you enough by this evening, before midnight, anyway, assuming you make sure the road’s clear.”

  “So we say, ‘fuck it and drive on’?”

  “Boot, don’t spatter,” Webster replied.

  “You’ve been listening to Reilly,” Cazz accused.

  “It’s not a crime.”

  Cazz shook his head. “Some places it is. Anyway, Sergeant Major, have the bugler sound the fucking charge. We’re going to Ciudad Guayana.”

  “Good,” Webster said, then added, “You know, we really need something to take care of the air. The missiles just don’t cut it. I’m thinking lasers.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  War, war, is still the cry, “War even to the knife!”

  —Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

  Mahdiana Eagle Mountain, Guyana

  Sergeant Michaels handed a written message to his radio bearer. “Encrypt this and get it to the TOC”—the Tactical Operations Center, basically the First Battalion command post—“immediately.” The message contained the locations and composition of every Venezuelan unit Michaels had seen emerge from the jungle to set up housekeeping in and around Mahdia, Guyana, over the last several days. The message would go out compressed and over a half-rhombic antenna, just to be sure. There were, after all, about eight hundred Venezuelan troops within five miles, by Michaels’ best estimate, and he really didn’t want them to learn they were being watched from above.

  At that, Michaels was by no means content with the information he’d been able to gather. He had rough positions—“estimated company digging in across road two kilometers north of Mahdia”—for example. “Heavy mortar platoon, believed 120mm, one thousand meters southwest of Mahdia Airport,” for example. “C-12 Huron or Beechcraft King Air, landed Mahdia airport, 0621 hrs, believed unloaded Class IV, to include mines,” for example.

  It was all good, but it wasn’t quite enough.

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

  Boxer outranked Reilly, both when they had been a part of the United States’ forces and, here and now, in the regiment. If Reilly cared about that, it was tolerably hard to see as the fist from his uncasted arm pounded Boxer’s desk and his voice made George Washington and his boat crew, hanging on the concrete walls, shake.

  “I”—bang—“don’t”—bang—“give”—bang—“a”—bang—“good”—bang—“flying fuck about the welfare of your fucking RPVs!” Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. “I need two of them over Mahdia!” Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. “Tomorrow!” BANG!

  Boxer smiled. Reilly was basically all right, in his book, but took certain techniques to handle. And you couldn’t back down to him, not even once.

  He smiled and said, “Calm down, asshole. Or take your theatrics somewhere else.”

  Reilly shrugged and smiled back. He wasn’t even deflated. Instead he said, “Well, it was worth a try. But, no shit, Ralph, I need real time intelligence tomorrow morning.”

  “Yeah,” the Chief of Staff agreed, “you do. But you won’t get it if our RPVs just go out of our control and crash, will you? Like they started crashing over Kaieteur Falls.”

  “But this isn’t Kaieteur Falls,” Reilly insisted. “It’s thirty miles to east and we’ve got no indication that Hugo’s set up anything to interfere with radio control.”

  Boxer agreed, nodding very deeply, and then pointing out, “We didn’t see any special radio electronic equipment around the falls, either, but our scout birds still went out of control and crashed.”

  “Static electricity from the water?” Reilly offered.

  Boxer raised one eloquent oh-that’s-such-bullshit eyebrow.

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know,” Reilly conceded, “but, look, the MI guys didn’t lose control until the things were within twelve miles of the falls, right? Alternatively, they didn’t lose control until the things were about fifty miles from the control station. But the control station’s rolling with me, and the RPVs won’t be more than twenty miles ahead of us, if that.”

  “Well …okay, yes, that’s true.”

  “So take a chance, Ralph. Or, rather, have Bridges take a chance. It could mean life or death for my people.”

  Boxer’s face twisted a bit. He tapped his intercom and said, “Bridges? Come see me in twenty minutes.”

  After Bridges answered, “Yessir,” Boxer turned his attention back to Reilly. Pointing, he said, and his voice was not genial, “You get out of here. Go find your wife and fuck her while you and she can. But …if you ever think you can come in here and pound on my fucking desk again, I’ll have you in the same jail where nobody speaks anything you do, the one where you sent those three assholes from Brazil—Kamarang, wasn’t it?—so goddamn fast you won’t know what hit you.

  “And I’ll get back to you about the RPV’s.”

  Which means I get them, Reilly thought. Shame to have to act like a spoiled brat over it, but I didn’t make the world, or the human race; I just have to deal with them as I find them.

  Field Hospital, Camp Fulton, Guyana

  Ordinarily, the best protection for a field hospital, in time of war, was to be out in the open, and plainly marked. It might have been here, too, but, since the Venezuelan Air Force had crumpled the permanent hospital in the initial attack, they couldnassume it. Thus it was scattered about the jungle, in several score tents, those laying a long arc roughly paralleling the Kaburi River.

  It wasn’t convenient. It wasn’t nearly as sanitary. And people died from both of those factors, in retail fashion. But that was still better than risking wholesale deaths to another airstrike.

  Reilly had one of his battalion’s Land Rovers, rather than his own. Fortunately, this one had an automatic transmission. For all he knew, and he strongly suspected, his old one was still sitting in the ditch. Reilly drove himself to a parking area, under some netting and with the thick, interwoven jungle canopy above. After stopping at a likely looking spot, he beeped twice, then spun the wheel and began to back up. When he got out he dragged with him a piece of a green tarp, which he draped over the windshield. Rather, he tried to drape it. One arm just wasn’t a very effective means to do the job.

  He was almost ready to give up when he heard a familiar voice from behind him, “Oh, Ranger buddy.”

  There is a
God.

  Reilly turned around, a corner of the tarp still clutched in his left hand. “First Sergeant Coffee,” he asked, “could you give me a hand with this motherfucker?”

  “I’ll do better than that,” Coffee said. “I’ll drape it on myself. You, on the other hand, can do me a big favor by going to the medical company CP”—Coffee’s left hand indicated a direction—“finding my company commander and your lovely, albeit somewhat fat for the moment, wife, and screwing her silly. Or whatever it takes to get her to stop acting like a loon.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  Coffee rolled his eyes. “You have no …okay, well maybe you have some idea. Seriously, boss, she’s climbing the walls. Maybe it’s the hornies; maybe it’s the hormones. Maybe—and I think this likely, although frankly inexplicable—she’s been worried about you, too.”

  Coffee took the tarp and began draping it properly. “But do something, would you?”

  Lana, Reilly thought, holding his wife tightly, albeit one-armed, crying on my or anyone’s shoulder? That’s just not like her.

  She’d met him at the tent flap door with a gasp, a huge smile, instant tears despite the smile, and a slightly erratic, waddling gate. The waddle wasn’t so much from being all that front heavy, as that she was normally so slender even a small offset to center of gravity was enough to throw off her stride. After a few moments of being held, while crying, she pulled away from his for a moment. The sobbing stopped. Then she looked up, and said, “You son of a bitch! I’ve been worried sick about you, about the baby, about everything. And do you call? No. Stop by to check on me or the baby? No. Bastard!”