Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  Wagner laughed madly with the satisfaction of revenge, then ceased fire, scanning to his front for a worthy target.

  Every tank’s cannon was firing high explosive as fast as the loaders could sling in rounds and the gunners could find a target. Even so, the amount of steel falling on the Venezuelan line lessened as the mortars lifted off and shifted their fires farther to the northwest. The general area of the defenders’ line was draped with thick, black smoke.

  Glass nosed the tank into the smoke, then farther into it. It was hard to see in any detail, but he made it a point to run over any bodies he spotted lying on the ground. He couldn’t see the results, but could easily imagine them bursting like grapes as the tracks pressed out any semblance of life. Once he thought he heard a scream from one of the grapes.

  The tank lurched over a fighting position, then bounced down as the logs that made that position’s overhead cover gave way, snapping and collapsing themselves and the dirt they’d carried. Fifty meters on, the smoke began to thin, revealing a disorganized flock of uniformed Venezuelans fleeing, mostly weaponless, for their lives. Over the driver’s head the tanks’ coaxial machine gun began to chatter, sweeping rounds across the panicking enemy, chopping them down like scrub brush.

  Reilly’s voice, calm—or perhaps a bit jubilant—came over the battalion net. “Reconfig; armor, Alpha. Scouts, you’re attached to Charlie. Charlie?”

  “Scouts, roger.”

  “Here, sir; Charlie.”

  “Green, you head for the airport. Smash them. Alpha?”

  “Company, rather Team Alpha, over.”

  “You’re with me. We’ll cut west and sweep. Peters, give Alpha and Charlie back their mortars. Sergeant Major, they’ve got tanks, light ones anyway, hereabouts, somewhere. There’s going to be a gap opening up between Alpha and Charlie. Take battalion’s AT platoon and Alpha’s and Charlie’s sections. Move the AT guns northwest and find a firing position to cover Alpha’s open northern flank and Charlie’s western. Also round up Peters and battalion mortars and get them into position to support both Charlie and Alpha.”

  “On the way.”

  “Battery?”

  “Here, sir,” Bunn answered.

  “Out of action. Displace toward the airfield behind Charlie. Set up to fire to the north.”

  “Wilco.”

  Only once was Sergeant Wagner moved to pity. As the tanks rolled forward, cutting down and crushing everything in their path, they came up the wire-topped, chain link fence that surrounded the airport. Some of the Venezuelans had already climbed the fence, hopped to the ground, and were legging it trippingly through the airport’s southeastern outbuildings, for the north and a spurious safety. More, though, were still trying to climb the chain link and get over the wire. His tank’s coax wasn’t the first to begin sweeping the fence. But he felt nothing until he saw that coaxial machine gun begin firing from the left, chopping right as the gunner traversed to butcher the men—and a few women, it seemed—trying desperately to stick thick boots in narrow, diamond openings. It didn’t seem precisely wrong to shoot them down like dogs; after all, they hadn’t tried to surrender. The butchery was still distasteful to the point of being pitiful.

  When the last of the fugitives lay broken and bleeding amidst the linear heap of them at the base of the fence, the company commander called, “Through the fence. Just knock it down. Then on to the airport.”

  Wagner’s platoon leader asked, “Prisoners?”

  “No time, unless they go very far out of their way to indicate the desire to surrender. Very far.”

  “Roger.”

  Laying at the base of the fence, staring upward, Private Emilia Sanchez couldn’t feel her legs, or anything below her abdomen. This was just was well; if she’d been able to feel them, she’d have felt only bare bone and meat and leaking blood, along with tortured, exposed nerve endings.

  She could feel the ground vibrate, though, under her head and shoulders. She closed her eyes tightly and began to pray. She was calm now, panic and screaming over, as she waited for the end. It was on her third Ave Maria that the tank called “Charlie Three-three” crushed her skull and then her torso, mashing her bloody remains down into the dirt below while, above, a dog howled mournfully.

  She felt that, but only for a moment.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  In the fields the bodies burning

  As the war machine keeps turning.

  —Black Sabbath, “War Pigs”

  Soesdyke-Linden Highway,

  South of Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

  Mao was everywhere, encouraging, exhorting, and—yes—threatening where required. Two of the gringos’ armored vehicles—not tanks, unfortunately, but nearly as dangerous—flickered their souls to the wind, south of Second Platoon. They stood eloquent witnesses to his skill and fortitude, to say nothing of his willingness to shoot down any soldier he found shirking his or even her duty.

  He knew it was hopeless. If he’d believed differently, the blasts, the constant chattering of machine gun fire, and the balls of fire rising above the airfield to the north disabused him of the notion.

  Lying beside a machine gun, directing its fire onto one of the armored vehicles that had pulled back out of RPG range, Mao felt something, someone flop to the earth beside him. He turned to see Larralde, pale and breathless. A stream of tracers tore the air above the major, indicating that someone had been tracking him for death.

  “They’re …held up,” Larralde sputtered, “ …about five hundred …meters north …east …of …the new line …waiting …shooting.”

  “Afraid to close, sir?” Arrivillaga asked.

  Larralde shook his head. “Don’t think so …waiting …for …the terror …to build.”

  “Fuck ’em; we’re not surrendering and we’re not bolting.” The sergeant major’s face was a study in granite determination.

  Larralde, still out of breath, still gave a warm smile. You’re a better soldier than I’ll ever be, Mao. He turned and began crawling away to the east, back to the other two thirds of the company.

  “Any word on air support?” Mao called out.

  “Few hours,” Larralde answered. “Supposedly brigade’s tank company is moving to our support.”

  “About fucking time!”

  That was when the mortars began to pummel them with intent. A blast came from behind Larralde, from precisely where he’d just spoken with his top NCO. Unthinking, ignoring the steady blasting, he lunged to his feet and raced back. Stopping and looking down, Larralde saw the ruin a shell had made of Mao Arrivillaga.

  His face, once granite, was charred, and half torn off. Blood leaked from a dozen or more ragged holes. One arm was missing. With a grief-stricken cry, Larralde fell to his knees and began to weep over his fallen comrade.

  Word passed quickly from man to man to woman to man: “The sergeant major’s dead.” Even then, they didn’t begin to bolt until those terrifying armored vehicles began to assault.

  Sergeant Major George lay between a pair of fairly new 60mm high velocity guns mounted on old 57mm gun carriages, concealed by some tall grass with more, recently plucked, grass breaking up the outline of the gunner’s shields. The other six guns, also in sections of two, formed a ragged line, with two guns amidst a small copse of trees to the north, two in the shadows of some warehouses, set to fire under the abandoned commercial trucks parked there, and a final pair just peeking over a drainage ditch, not far to George’s south. The vehicles, Land Rovers, all, he’d sent back to hide among the mortars. The guns and their crews, fairly hidden in their hasty positions, waited.

  “Stupid fucking quasi-wogs,” George muttered. “Get your heads out of your asses and send in your tanks. Quit your dawdling; I’m a busy man and have other things to be doing than nursemaiding …”

  “Tanks, Sergeant Major,” one of the gun captains called out.

  “How many? What kind? SALUTE report, you shithead!”

  “I count ten, repeat ten, ta
nks, moving south from the airport. Probably the parachute brigade’s tank company. Like right this second. AMX-13’s.”

  “That’s better.” George reared partway up, resting on his elbows. The grass was thinner toward the top, and he could just barely make out the tops of the enemy light tanks. “Now, c’mon …don’t be chickens about this …get a little closer …yeah, that’s the ticket …closer …closer … .FIRE!”

  Eight lances of flame leapt forth from the line of guns. Three torrents of fire, topped by leaping turrets, geysered up from the line of enemy tanks. It was both a feature and a flaw of the AMX-13 that anything up to ten rounds might be sitting exposed on the twin rotary drum racks for the autoloader. It gave the tanks an awesome short-term rate of fire, but could, and in this case did, prove disastrous if the turret was penetrated.

  Two more AMX-13’s simply stopped dead, in their tracks as penetrators from the 60’s found drivers or engines or transmissions. The remaining five turned and practically leaped off the road to shelter behind the embankment. They then began a race to the northeast.

  “Chickenshits!” George sneered. “Just when it was starting to get fun.”

  Frowning, the sergeant major thought, Okay, so that’s not entirely fair. So anyone might break when they take fifty percent losses, from an enemy they didn’t see, in a fraction of a second. But so what? Screw fair.

  Carlos Villareal dragged Lily by one arm. In the other she retained her rifle, as did he in his free hand. No one, least of all Carlos, knew who had given the word to bug out. One minute, they were holding their temporary line—terrified, yes, but still facing the enemy armor that seemed content to keep their distance and toss shells at them—while the next that armor was moving forward at a walking pace, firing, accompanied by a small horde of shrieking infantry and some godawful terrifying music. Thatwhen Carlos heard someone put out the shout to fall back.

  Shells were falling everywhere. More than once, Carlos had to drag Lily to the ground as a shell storm passed over them. Running through the low, clinging smoke, the pair stumbled across Major Larralde and, both were sorry to see, what remained of Sergeant Major Arrivillaga.

  “Sir, come on!” Carlos implored. “Everyone’s falling back to make a stand at the river.” That last was, at best, supposition on his part.

  Larralde looked up and shook his head. “No …no. I’m going to stay here with Mao. You two go on.” Everything was lost save honor. It was Larralde’s intention to stay with his chief noncom until the gringos came and killed him.

  Alpha and Bravo were busy chivvying the Venezuelans in the general direction of Low Wood, by the Essequibo. They didn’t really need Reilly, at the moment. Neither did Charlie, currently pursuing the fleeing remnants northward to Georgetown and destruction.

  He saw a lone Venezuelan man, left behind when the mass of the Venezuelans had retreated. The man rocked back and forth, in obvious grief.

  Tapping Duke on the shoulder, he pointed in the direction of the Venezuelan. Duke began traversing his machine gun to kill the man, until Reilly put a restraining hand on his arm. Shrugging, Duke relaxed his grip on the gun and verbally directed Schiebel over.

  Reilly dismounted from the side hatch, walked the few short steps, and sat down heavily next to the mourning Venezuelan. The Venezuelan stiffened as soon as Reilly sat down.

  Reilly’s Spanish was at least fair. “Your man?” It was a stupid thing to ask but he couldn’t think of much else.

  “My sergeant major,” Larralde answered, in English.

  “What was his name?”

  “Arrivillaga. Mao Stalin Arrivillaga. Yeah, we sometimes go in for creative names in Venezuela.”

  “You speak pretty good English,” Reilly commented.

  “So did he. We had to learn it to go to your Ranger School, back before Chavez took over the country.”

  “Good man, then, I take it.”

  Larralde nodded. “The best. Best goddamned NCO in the whole Venezuelan Army. ” The major smiled then, in remembrance, and added, “Though if he’d ever claimed I said that I’d have denied it.”

  “I see. Wait a minute,” Reilly said, then held a hand to one ear, thumb and pinky outstretched, to indicate he wanted a radio. One of the RTOs in the back of the vehicle popped out of the hatch and brought him one. He held the microphone just far enough from his ear that the Venezuelan could hear without straining too badly.

  “Sergeant Major? Reilly. You busy?”

  “Not since we brushed off their tanks, no, sir, not really.”

  “We’ve got one of ours here,” Reilly said, “from the other side. An ‘Oh, Ranger Buddy’ deal.”

  “I see. And?”

  “Earliest reasonable convenience; can you arrange a burial detail, with honors?”

  Deliberately, George pressed the button on the radio before beginning to speak, just so Reilly could hear his exasperated sigh. “You’re a fucking romantic, you know that, boss? Yeah …send me a ten digit. I’ll arrange the detail. Though it won’t be for a couple of hours. That work?”

  Reilly glanced at the Venezuelan, who nodded.

  “That works.” He handed the mike back to the RTO and stood up. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Larralde, Miguel, sir. Major.”

  “Miguel,” Reilly said, gently, “your side’s lost here. The only question is how many of your men”—he glanced at an obviously female corpse and added—“and women, too, are going to survive. You can affect that number.”

  “By doing what?” Larralde asked, though in his heart he already knew.

  “By telling them to surrender …‘whilst yet my soldiers are in my command.’”

  Larralde broadcast over the loudspeakers on Reilly’s APC, the vehicle skirting behind the line of armored vehicles pinning the Venezuelans against the river. The message was short. “Drop your weapons. Come in. Surrender. You won’t be harmed.”

  It worked with most of them, who were, after all, barely trained and generally quite young. But it didn’t work with everyone.

  Behind an immense large tree, one of the few of this size in the area to have survived the depredations of the loggers, Lily Vargas cradled Carlos Villarreal’s head on her bloodied lap. Carlos was very dead, killed, uselessly and impersonally, by a mortar shell. As Larralde had before, Lily rocked with her grief. There was no one with her, however, to offer any sort of comfort at all.

  Lily heard it before she saw it. One of the strange, ad hoc-looking mercenary armored personnel carriers pulled up about two hundred meters away. She could only barely make out the outline through the brush. A couple of men dismounted. Within a few minutes she saw some smoke rising, and heard a peal of very social sounding laughter.

  The laughter infuriated her. My Carlos is dead and they tell jokes? Not for long.

  After stopping the APC, Schiebel dismounted and built a small fire to brew up some coffee. Duke stood, still, manning the machine gun and scanning for danger. Two of the RTOs likewise hung over the sides, weapons facing out. There was firing in the distance, but not much of it. Under the POW major’s calls, it seemed that the Venezuelans had lost their heart for the fighting.

  Can’t really blame them, Duke thought, as he watched a thin line of them walk south under an even thinner guard. You go up against Reilly, you go up against the best.

  The prisoners seemed awfully young to Duke, who was well into middle age himself. Indeed, he was seven full years older than Reilly. Again he looked at the downtrodden line of demoralized prisoners. Poor sorry bastards.

  He looked toward the fire as Reilly gave a hearty laugh. This prisoner probably never heard of an Irish wake, Duke thought. But Reilly sure as shit has and he knows the reason for them: Get people to remember the best of their dead loved ones, and laugh, and, in the laughter, keep the good memories alive while letting the grief die.

  “. . . so there we both are,” Larralde said, “crossing some godforsaken stream that fed the Yellow River, on a rope, and the rope’s underwa
ter, stretched out like overcooked spaghetti, and Mao and I have our fingertips on it, kicking for all we’re worth to keep our noses, just barely, above the water.”

  Laughing, Reilly beat the ground with his left fist. “Been there …done that!” he chortled. Recovering, he asked Schiebel, “Hey, Schieb, we got a bottle to …um …fortify that coffee.”

  “It’s on the PC, sir, in my pack.” Schiebel knew his colonel pretty damned well by this time. “Bushmills.”

  “Good choice.” Reilly stood and said, “Hey, Duke, rifle Schieb’s belongings and retrieve the bottle he has, purely without authorization, mind you, secreted there.”

  Chuckling himself—Yup, he’s giving the boy the full Irish wake treatment; bloody damned nice of him. Then again, it’s not like the battle isn’t over here, either—Duke let go of his machine gun and turned. He disappeared for a moment then emerged with a bottle, surprisingly unopened, clutched triumphantly in one hand. That’s when they heard the shots, two of them, close together, and then a third, all from close in.

  Lily gently lifted Carlos’s head and wriggled out from under it. Just as gently, she laid it to the ground and bent to lightly kiss his cold, bloodied lips. “Revenge,” she whispered to her lover’s corpse.

  Taking her rifle across the crooks of her arms, just as the sergeant major had shown her months before, she began to crawl from her sheltering tree, across the dirt and sparse grass that the trees hadn’t quite eliminated. Her head she kept tilted down, with white barely showing through narrowed eyes.

  Spotting a small patch of brush, growing where a gap in the trees let the sun through, Lily aimed for that, squirming like a snake but keeping her rifle’s muzzle up above the dirt. Reaching the brush, she lifted her head to peer through it. She saw a man, standing beside the enemy armored vehicles, with his left arm raised. There were two others there, but low, plus three more actually inside the vehicle. Not good targets.