Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  Quietly, the girl put her left hand on the pistol grip and pulled the rifle—slowly, slowly, Don’t let them see—out of the crook of her left arm and up against her shoulder. The left hand automatically moved to grasp the wooden grip behind the muzzle, her left elbow finding a spot on the ground for steadiness.

  Pressing her cheek against the stock, Lily took aim. Once satisfied, she stroked the trigger, once, twice, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, when her target failed to fall, a third time.

  Reilly felt the first blow, in the back, not far above his kidney. It staggered him but did not knock him over. The second hit on the right side, passing through his lung. That hit as the pain from the first shot raced up his nerves to his brain. His eyes widened in surprise and shock, his mouth opening slightly as if to say something.

  His left arm reached out, though to Duke it seemed as if his commander was reaching for him, not for the bottle he held.

  The third bullet passed through his jungle hat and through the bone of his skull, from behind and high, exiting several inches around from his right eye. The hat and a four-inch piece of the skull shot upward and to the right. The shock wave liquified a substantial chunk of his brain, and irretrievably damaged most of the rest.

  Reilly dropped like a sack of potatoes, dead before he hit the ground. With a horrified cry, Duke threw himself behind the KORD machine gun and began throwing heavy rounds at the source of the fire. Still, his return fire could only kill the assailant; nothing was going to bring his colonel back.

  Then his eyes lit on Larralde, sitting, horror-struck, no great distance from Reilly’s body.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Though all the bright dreamings we cherished

  Went down in disaster and woe,

  The spirit of old is still with us

  That never would bend to the foe.

  —William Rooney, “The Men of the West”

  Field Hospital, Camp Fulton, Guyana

  The word passed fast, but not before the sun had gone down. Lana looked over some paperwork, laid out across her desk, under a crank-powered light. A noise, the shuffling of several pairs of feet, caused her to look up. As soon as she saw Stauer, Joseph, McCaverty, and Coffee enter her tent, worse, saw their faces, Lana gulped. Her stomach heaved as her heart sank.

  “No,” she pleaded. “No, it can’t be.”

  Stauer had thought he’d known what to say. Faced with the woman’s horror and pain, whatever he’d been about

  Leaving McCaverty standing alone by the tent door, Stauer took the couple of steps forward and then went to one knee in front of her desk.

  “His APC crew said it was quick, Lana. Sudden. He didn’t feel much pain, if any. I don’t know if that helps.”

  Tears running freely down her face she shook her head. No, that didn’t help much.

  “There’s another problem,” Stauer continued. “Except for C Company, which is out of the area, just south of Georgetown, First Battalion’s fallen apart at the news. A lot of them knew him a lot longer than you did. They want revenge. The XO and Sergeant Major George are trying to get control of them, but the troops won’t listen. The RSM is there and one of them took a shot at him when he tried to bring them back to discipline. They want to kill all the prisoners and build Seamus a pyramid of skulls. George thinks they’ve already shot some people, maybe more than a dozen, though he says he can’t prove it. And they just won’t listen to anybody.” to say was lost. After a long, silent moment, he managed to get out, “I’m sorry, Lana.”

  She screamed then, a long, inarticulate cry of pure anguish. Coffee and Joseph rushed to her side, wrapping arms around her and trying to comfort her, or at least calm her a bit. Eventually, they succeeded in the latter.

  Lana shrugged, and shook her head, uncomprehendingly.

  “You’re carrying his child. You’re his wife. You’re all they have left of him. They’ll listen to you.”

  Another shrug.

  Stauer stood up and took one of Lana’s hands in both of his own. “I need you to go get control of First Battalion. Doc McCaverty here will fly you to the main airport; the Venezuelans aren’t flying much at night anymore. George will meet you there. Get control of them and keep them from doing something that will blacken your husband’s memory through the ages.”

  Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

  It was Joshua, rather than George, who met Lana at the airfield, by the southeastern tip of the major runway. He drove himself in a blacked-out Land Rover. Without a word, he helped Lana down from the aircraft and then assisted her to walk to the automobile. “George had to stay with the troops,” Joshua explained. “Otherwise they’d have run riot.”

  “Take me to Seamus, first,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Joshua agreed. If the delay cost a few Venezuelan lives, well …so what?

  They drove south, Lana’s hands clutched protectively over her swollen belly. She thought she spotted bodies littering both sides of the road, but couldn’t be certain. Even if it hadn’t been darker than sin, her eyes still overflowed with tears. She was certain when they passed five wrecked Venezuelan tanks, since Joshua, cursing, had to slow down and weave his way around them. Some of the tanks still smoldered, leaving the heavy smell of charred flesh in the air. That made the tears worse.

  Through the trees, off in the distance, she thought she saw fires burning. Joshua turned off the main road onto a dirt trail and set his course for those fires. As he closed, she was able to make out that there were four of them. They looked evenly spaced as, indeed, they proved to be.

  The troops clustered around the body split to leave a path. Joshua pulled up between the pyres and stopped. Reilly lay before them,

  “He always hated cots in the field,” Lana sniffled. “He just hated them.”

  “I know,” Joshua said. “I told his headquarters crew that, just this once, he wouldn’t mind.”

  Lana’s head jerked a few times. No, just this once he wouldn’t mind.

  A woman knelt beside the temporary bier, gently stroking Reilly pale cheek. Lana couldn’t see her face, but even through the loose-fitting battledress the shape shouted, “Tatiana Manduleanu.” Her first impulse—to scream, “Away from him, whore!”—was uncharitable. It made Lana feel deeply ashamed.

  She walked forward, herself, and likewise knelt. Tatiana stopped her stroking, leaning back to rest against her upturned heels. “I didn’t want him to be alone,” she said to Lana, softly. “Without a woman nearby to mourn, I mean.”

  Even more ashamed now, Lana whispered, “Thank you.”

  “It was too late when I got here,” Tatiana said, then added, “It was too late when I got the call. I’m sorry …so sorry.” Rocking further back for balance, Corporal Manduleanu stood, straight up. Even so, she took the trouble to just stand, rather than to blossom. This wasn’t the time or the place for charm. She turned away and, likewise sniffling, walked over to Joshua, placing her arms around him and pressing her face to his chest. After a moment’s uncertain hesitation, and a shuddering sob, the RSM wrapped one arm around the girl, patting her sympathetically, if awkwardly.

  Lana stared at the corpse for long minutes. Whatever expression had been on Reilly’s face when he died, someone had taken the care to close his eyes and massage his features. He looked at peace. Lana suspected that that somebody had been Tatiana, though it was possible someone else had done the service. Someone, probably not Tatiana, had replaced the hat on his head, covering the spot where, so Dr. McCaverty had told her, he’d received the wound that had killed him.

  A single shot, coming from somewhere to the north, reminded her of the official reason she was here. Was that someone killing a prisoner, husband? I hope not. You were ruthless enough, but if someone surrendered in good faith, I can’t quite see you killing him out of hand for any reason.

  Stauer wants me to put a stop to it. In my heart, I don’t want to. I want that whole country plunged in the grief I feel.

  But you woul
dn’t want that, either, would you? And so, this one last time, I’ll do what you want.

  For just a second, she laughed inwardly. Not that I didn’t do lot of things that you wanted. But that was just our business. And I enjoyed doing them, too, if you never guessed.

  How do I do this, Seamus? How do I take command of a battalion run amok? “Don’t think about it. You already know what’s right; just do it!” I can hear you say that. And so I shall.

  She stood up, pausing only a moment to stroke her man’s cheek, as Tatiana had.

  “Sergeant Major George?”

  “Here, ma’am.”

  “Where is it worst?”

  He knew precisely what she meant. “Alpha Company, then Bravo. Charlie’s camped out along the road to Georgetown and doesn’t have many prisoners.”

  “Bring me to Alpha.”

  Camp Fulton, Guyana

  “Colombian Intelligence confirms Chavez is at Miraflores Palace,” Boxer said. “And this time, there’s no fucking forty-eight hour delay while some flunky at that headquarters confirms it and decides about the bureaucratic implications.”

  Stauer looked skeptical. “How do we know? They’ve failed us before.”

  “CNN, actually,” Boxer said.

  “Oh, well, that’s different.”

  “No, really. He’s scheduled to speak from Miraflores, tonight. The cameras and newsies are all there. More importantly, his favorite mistress is there. CNN caught her on camera.”

  “You sure enough about it for me to order Lava’s boys in?”

  “War’s gotta end sometime,” Boxer said. “We can invest Georgetown and New Amsterdam—at least, if First Batt will calm down under Lana’s influence, we can—but we can’t take them, not at any cost that’s acceptable to us. And eventually they’re going to figure out that the mouth of the Demerara’s not mined. Once that happens, we won’t even be able to starve them into surrender.”

  Stauer thought of Reilly and his new-made widow. “The cost’s already been too high.”

  “So you see my point?”

  “I suppose. What did you tell the Colombians we were planning?”

  Boxer grinned, sheepishly. “I didn’t tell them, exactly. I suggested we had cruise missile capability at sea. Since we’ve obviously been fucking with Chavez unmercifully by sea, they didn’t seem to have any problem accepting that.” Boxer shrugged. “And I figured, if Hugo’s got a mole in Colombian intel—and he well might—it could hardly hurt if he’d found something that caused him to orient his air defenses north toward the Caribbean, right?”

  Stauer raised an eyebrow. “Not until they try to egress.”

  “Well, I don’t have any proof that they’ve done that, anyway.”

  Holding Base Snake (SF and MI-17’s),

  Twenty-two Miles South of Jonestown, Guyana

  In the gloom, the men shuffled on board silently, in two files per helicopter. As much as they’d griped and bitched about the forced delay, they were scared enough now. Oh, no, they weren’t shit-your-pants, “no, Sarge, I ain’t a gonna go” scared. But they knew it was going to be tough and they were reasonably sure a number, possibly approaching all of them, were not going to be coming back.

  It was too dark by far for Von Ahlenfeld to judge their mental state by their faces. Instead, he listened, watched their posture, and looked for any sign of hesitation in boarding.

  Scared they might well be, he thought, but they’re still willing. No, that’s not right; they’re eager, eager for this shot at history, for the adventure, for the glory of the thing. They’re just a little nervous about it. So …we can do this. If they don’t catch us in the air.

  Lava had more strikers than he needed. Indeed, he was going to have to leave several dozen behind. What he lacked was helicopters, that lack arising partly from the limitations of those he did have and partly from the loss of one critical HIP back on the Camp Fulton airstrip, in the beginning.

  Like most things in war, this one had boiled down to a logistic problem. The Hips, MI-17’s or, as the Russkis called them, “MI-8MT’s,” could not carry enough fuel to get themselves quite to Caracas. Even with extra tanks, and flying the straightest route, they ranged about sixty miles short of the target. With the route they were going to take, nap of the earth, snug in against the mountains that stretched from Canaima National Park, Venezuela, westwards, they’d fall closer to two hundred miles short.

  That route was necessary because there weren’t any ground radar stations aimed that way that ranged, and anything airborne would have a sad time of it, sorting them out from all that junk on the ground. Even so, almost two hundred miles short of the target was still short of the target. It was failure, in other words.

  Sadly, too, there weren’t going to be any BP stations on the way for a quick fill up

  They’d actually kicked around, early in their planning, the possibility of grabbing an airfield, midway, and refueling there. That, however, made their prospects for an interception-free flight drop from “problematic but possible” all the way down to “no fucking way.”

  So, if they were going to refuel on the way, they’d have to carry it with them. If they were going to carry it with them, by the utterly sound military that that, “if you need one, you must start with more than one,” two of von Ahlenfeld’s five precious helicopters had to go to carrying fuel and little but. The “but” consisted of six rocket pods, with a mere sixteen 55mm rockets each, and a like number of machine gun pods, between the two of them, all stowed internally for the nonce. Normally, the rockets weren’t good for much but indicating that the firer considered the target rude and boorish. These, however, had the Ugroza upgrades, making them precision guided and quite accurate. The machine gun pods were of the Russian four-barreled, gas operated, GshG-type, which the troops insisted on calling miniguns, quite despite that the only thing the two systems had in common was multiple barrels.

  Since it was entirely possible that they’d lose one of those two “gas trucks,” enroute, each had to carry enough fuel for everybody. That left only three for troop carriers, and nobody for dedicated troop carrier escort on the first leg. For that matter, the three troop carriers couldn’t even bolt on a few rocket pods each because, at least initially; they had to carry extended range fuel tanks or the two “gas trucks” couldn’t have carried enough fuel for them to make it to Caracas and onward to internment. Since they were going fuel heavy, the number of troops they could carry had to be kept down.

  The troop carriers were loading twenty-four heavily armed and armored men each. With the limited rockets and machine gun pods, and one machine gun per bird, mounted sideways, manned by the Hips’ engineers, that was going to be it for fire support.

  Ah, for the heady days of AC-130’s on demand, mused von Ahlenfeld, who had also spent quite a few years in the group formerly known as “Delta.” Hell, for aircraft carriers on demand. Dammit.

  Moreover, for the last phase of the operation, the egress, they already knew they were going to be one chopper down, and possibly three. A goodly chunk of their rehearsal time had been spent practicing dropping their gear and running like hell for anything smoking and air-moveable.

  On the plus side, if both “gas trucks” made it to the refueling point, there’d at least be enough gas for both of them to make it to the target. For the men in the assault force, this was not a huge plus, given the small amount of firepower they would carry. For those in headquarters, back at Camp Fulton, it was no plus at all.

  Camp Fulton, Guyana

  “Boss,” Gordon said, “I think you ought to cancel this and call the Second Battalion back. Or not ‘back,’ but to stay in place. They haven’t lifted off yet.”

  Meredith, the comptroller, nodded his head in agreement and said, “Lahela, show them the figures.”

  Electricity in the camp had been spotty from the beginning of the war. She briefed them the old fashioned way, from butcher paper clipped to an easel. The story on the butcher paper was frightenin
g.

  “Sirs, almost half of our capital purchases are lost or interned. And most of our ammunition stocks are down to critical levels. Between aircraft destroyed or about to be destroyed or interned, about twenty-seven million dollars, assuming we can still find good, used. Ships …assuming we don’t get back the Walewska or the Bastard, about as much.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Meredith said. “We can’t get another Drunken Bastard; they don’t exist outside of museums and some virtual wrecks in Virginia. We’d have to buy another Dvora Class, and that would cost more than the Countess. Plus the landing craft. Plus Namu, most likely. We’re looking at having to replace more than thirty million dollars’ worth of naval equipment. I won’t even talk about training replacement crews for the men we’ve lost.

  “Thank God we haven’t lost the Naughtius. That, we’d have to have a replacement custom built for.”

  Victor, sitting with his head resting on folded fingers, said, “Buying another Dvora might not be that bad. Israel’s replacing some of them, at least, with Shaldags. They might be willing to part with one of the replaced units at a fair price.”

  Meredith shrugged. “Even so …fair is expensive for one of those.”

  Victor’s nod conceded the point. “Though I wonder,” he said, “if Norway still has those Hauks for sale. I’ll check into that before we do anything.”