Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  Hugo finished up with operations, put that section aside, then picked up the Logistics annex. He was about halfway through this, and on page twenty-seven of his note-taking, when he realized, Those fucking assholes. They’ve got this plan done in a vacuum. Where the hell is their plan for secrecy? Why haven’t the silly shits made a plan for securing the embassies—especially the gringo embassy—in Georgetown?

  They’ll have plans—and they’d better be good—three days from now or I’ll have new commanding generals …and an admiral …for all three services, plus a new minister of defense.

  Chavez looked up from his papers to the antique map of Gran Colombia on his private office wall. Because Bolivar and I share a dream.

  CHAPTER SIX

  If everything were to be discountenanced in

  peace by which an accident might possibly occur,

  soldiers would be greatly sinned against, since they

  would be enfeebled and rendered inept for war, the

  chances of losses being doubled at the same time.

  —Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz,

  The Nation in Arms

  Camp Fulton, Guyana

  Trees, close together this close to the open, asphalted strip and the free ambient sunlight, passed by in a rattling blur. Although the road was less than four years old and had been well-built to begin with, the jungle, aided by heavy vehicle traffic—heavy in both senses—took a severe and continuing toll.

  “Day after tomorrow is assumption of command?” von Ahlenfeld asked.

  “Zero nine hundred,” Stauer answered as he twisted the Land Rover’s steering wheel to guide it around a sharp, jungle-shrouded curve “Don’t be fucking late.”

  Past the curve, on the straightaway, the Rover passed a small and abandoned trailer park, with about a third of the lots still filled with empty mobile homes. A dark skinned man in a white suit argued with another, white and so probably American, or at least Euro, in pixilated tiger stripes. The white’s hands remained clasped behind his back, while the brown’s moved frantically. Von Ahlenfeld searched his memory for where he had seen the white suit.

  “Tatiana’s major domo,” Stauer answered, after being asked. “Arun …mmm …shit; what the fuck was the rest of his name? No matter. The other one was Gary Trim, our regimental and facilities engineer and commander of the combat engineer company. He’s a Brit.”

  “We had to start out with mobile homes and tents,” Stauer explained. “But we got the last family into decent permanent housing about a year and a half ago. Little by little we’ve been selling off the mobile homes, usually at about fifteen or twenty cents on the dollar. If Arun is there, odds are Tati’s trying to buy one …or more.”

  “Why would she do that?” von Ahlenfeld asked.

  Stauer shook his head. “With her, you never really know.”

  “You really don’t, boss,” piped in a voice from the back seat. The third passenger in the Rover was the sergeant major for the Second Battalion, Rob “Rattus” Hampson. His voice was full of humor as he spoke.

  “Rattus” was still very much an unknown quantity to von Ahlenfeld. He knew the sergeant major was a medical type, a “Delta,” in Special Forces parlance. This was something he found rather suspect, even from Special Forces where medicos were nearly as much trigger pullers as was anyone else in a green beanie.

  Still, even with SF, their attitude is often just a little off. But Stauer says he’s a good man …so we’ll give it a chance.

  The Land Rover passed a group of mostly Guyanan troops, singing while marching in the general direction of the impact area to the west.

  “They look decent,” von Ahlenfeld commented.

  “Yeah …kinda,” Stauer half agreed. “We’ve got an internal problem though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Pay disparity,” Stauer answered, briefly turning his head to see von Ahlenfeld’s reaction. The latter has a single quizzical eyebrow raised. “Unavoidable, really, though we’ve done what we can to mitigate it.

  “See, we have to pay our Euros and Americans a certain amount, just to keep them. Most of them are retired, so with retired pay, equivalent regular pay, and a not insubstantial cost of living allowance based on the States, they’re happy enough and they provide the leadership to make the whole regiment fairly effective. Oh, sure, there are some of those who would pay for the privilege, but in the main? No. It’s as much a prestige thing as anything.

  “The Guyanans, on the other hand—and it makes not a whit of difference whether they’re brown, black, yellow, white, or red—can be had for beans.

  “It’s a poor country. Real income here is about one thirtieth that of the States. Purchasing power parity is better, about a tenth. So in a purely rational world, we’d pay, say, a Guyanan private with the regiment maybe forty dollars a month and found, or at most a hundred and twenty-five or so. A Guyanan staff sergeant—of which we’ve raised a few, so far—might be worth a hundred and sixty or, again at most, five hundred.

  “That’s great money, here, but not so good when they look at Americans, Euros, Israelis, Brits, South Africans, etc., making ten or twenty times more …

  “We couldn’t afford to pay them the same and still keep Americans and such on hand, and without them, there’d be no regiment and, hence, no place for the Guyanans at all.”

  Von Ahlenfeld had seen the same problem, repeatedly, in his prior position. There, the company had simply dumped using any group that demanded pay parity, and gone with cheaper, elsewhere.

  “How’d you handle it?” he asked Stauer.

  “Few different approaches,” Stauer replied. “In the first place, we took what total non-Guyanan pay would be, then split non-Guyanan pay into two increments, basic pay—which is rather less than American standard—and a much larger than standard United States-based cost of living allowance. We did the same with Guyanan pay, except we split it into basic pay and local cost of living allowance, of which there isn’t any for troops living in the barracks or in regimental family housing. Though the latter get separate rations.

  “Also, the original members of the regiment—which, by the way, includes a helluva lot of non-Americans; we’ve got South Africans, Israelis, Brits, Germans, Russians, Mexicans, and Chinese—each own one or more shares in the corporation. Holding those requires membership in the regiment at or above a certain rank. Those almost always pay a good dividend.”

  “Then we indexed Guyanan pay to non-Guyanan pay, but with a multiplier of between one and point one. Sergeants major, of which we have no Guyanans and won’t for about twenty years, get an index, a multiplier, of one. Privates, of which we have many, get an index of point one, for recruits, or point two-one for trained privates. Staff sergeants, of which we have some, and to take a median figure, get a multiplier of point six-six, which, minus the U.S. cost of living portion, works out to just under twelve hundred a month. Locally, that’s princely.

  “It’s not perfect, but we can at least hold out to the Guyanans the chance to have what looks like equal pay, eventually. Sort of, because there’ll still be a big chunk that’s cost of living indexed and, for them, indexed to here. And they still need to be platoon sergeant or above before they can buy a share of stock.

  “They still resent it, but on the other hand, since they can lord what they do get over their mostly unemployed peers, and get well fed, clothed, and housed, their resentment isn’t so bad.

  “We also have a uniform combat or danger pay kicker that, while fairly trivial from an American or European perspective, about doubles the pay of a trained Guyanan private. They spend about one year in four overseas doing personnel security, so that’s a big factor.

  “If you need a more detailed explanation, see She-whose-smile-lights-up-the-jungle.”

  “Huh?”

  “Warrant Officer Lahela Corrigan, sir,” Rattus Hampson supplied. “She runs the finance section in the comptroller’s office. If you’re in the jungle at midnight, and
it suddenly lights up but you can’t see a chemlight, much less the moon or stars? That’s Lahela, smiling. You won’t see her, of course, because she’s about five foot, even.”

  “She’s good folks,” Stauer added. “A pro.”

  “My battalion has how many locals?” von Ahlenfeld asked, considering the political and morale problem Stauer had probably mostly elided over.

  “Forty-three in headquarters, sir,” Rattus answered, “and forty-five in Delta Company, which handles internal training for the regiment. The latter are almost entirely promising young NCOs. Every one’s a graduate of the Jaeger Course—”

  “Jaeger Course?” von Ahlenfeld interrupted.

  “Ranger School,” Stauer answered, shrugging slightly. “Hey, we needed a name. And if you’ve got a Ranger tab, you have the option of wearing either one. Your Delta Company runs our own, twice a year, plus a primary nocom’s course, twice, and an advanced noncom’s course, once. Wash-out rate’s pretty high for Jaeger.”

  “No OCS?”

  “You figure out for yourself whether we need one and should have one,” Stauer said. “For various reasons, the regimental council is against it. This, despite the fact that, without one, there’s no good way for me to commission Tatiana’s cousin, Elena, who ought to be an officer.”

  “What is the rationale?”

  “Same reason we wouldn’t accept any first generation Guyanan-Americans, of any race, even if they’ve got serious military backgrounds; it complicates the pay scheme and is likely to lead to what is really political trouble. Sucky, I agree, but I didn’t make the world; I just have to live in it.”

  Regimental Hospital, Camp Fulton, Guyana

  Things only begin to need names when there are two of them. Things may also acquire names if someone is to be memorialized. Since the regiment only had one hospital—a sixty bed, but quite up-to-date, facility—and had not yet lost a medical trooper in action, it was known, both inside the medical company and to the regiment at large, simply as “the hospital.”

  Although respectable, neither the hospital itself nor its staff could be considered large. Indeed, oversized for the work it had to do, normally and routinely, it proved necessary to send the medicos out to treat the locals, on a pro bono basis, just to keep their skills up. Nurses, of course, were always too few and too overtasked, for their numbers, even with the regimental hospital’s routine caseload, and even counting that half of the dozen Romanian girls remaining had their RNs. Still, surgeons did much of their cutting and pasting in one or another of Georgetown’s main hospitals; Georgetown Public, West Demerara, or Saint Joseph’s. Medics spent about one week in nine attached to one or another of Georgetown’s or Bartica’s ambulance services. The aeromedical evacuation section had sometimes been volunteered to fly as far as Amaruri to keep their hand in.

  And yet there were days …

  Karl Marx Impact Area, Guyana

  The dirt road wound ahead, between two ridges that had been largely cleared by fire of their lesser natural vegetation. Some of that fire over the last three years had been of the burning variety. Some, however, had been of the explosive sort. The latter had often driven the former as the former had burned off all but the stoutest trees along the ridges.

  Overhead, a steady stream of freight-train rumbles shook the sky, almost but not quite drowning out the muzzle blasts of the 105mm guns driving those forty pound freight trains from ten miles to the east. Ahead, the ground shook as a round came in nearly every second to one side of the road or the other. Nearest the road, the four guns firing had set their fuses for delay, thus letting the shells drive themselves into the ground before detonating and sending great plumes of earth and rock skyward. Farther out, another four guns had set their fuses to explode on contact, further slashing what vegetation remained and adding to the exercise the piquancy of an occasional shell splinter coming just that little bit too close.

  The bombardment had only begun four minutes earlier, at a time when Reilly could say with a straight face that the point of the battalion was within antitank missile range. After those four minutes, there were still monkeys leaping through the trees as they shat themselves, while loudly and indignantly crying macaws winged over the treetops.

  Reilly had some decidedly odd views on training. One of these was that, if the training didn’t contain a moral component, it was hardly worth doing, most of the time.

  But I’m half full of shit, he thought, riding forward in the back of his own Eland toward the wall of explosions wracking the two sides of the narrow pass to his front. Sure, the moral component is critical. But if there were a way to condition men chemically against the dangers and stress of war, I’d still do it this way. Why? Because I need the danger and the excitement. And the boys do, too.

  He thought of them as “boys,” or, more commonly, “my boys.” In fact, while the average age had dropped substantially since the African operation, it was still considerably north of thirty. No matter; they were still his “boys,” to include his sixty-two year old sergeant major, George, and all of his roughly equivalent-aged first sergeants.

  For no other reason than to exercise the system, Reilly keyed the microphone by flicking a switch on his combat vehicle crewman’s helmet and ordered, “Battalion, this is Black Six. Reconfigure, companies balanced, now.”

  C Company, the tank company, which had been leading with two platoons of tanks and one of infantry, slowed their pace slightly. Rather, the Third Platoon did. Those tankers slowed their speed not by taking their feet off the gas but by zigzagging. Meanwhile, Second Platoon, also tanks, peeled off to the right and, likewise zigzagging, moved rearward, though in no particular hurry. The infantry platoon, Alpha Company’s First, attached to Charlie, on the other hand, picked up the pace to close the gap filled by Second Platoon’s leaving of the column. Somewhere in the rear, Bravo Company’s Second Platoon of mechanized infantry began to race forward to their new posting with C Company.

  I love my job, Reilly thought, ducking down behind the armor to avoid being splashed as the wheels of Bravo’s Second churned through the mud at a breakneck pace, toward the still growing and thickening wall of smoke, dust, and fire ahead.

  First Sergeant Pete Schetrompf—who was also Command Sergeant Major (Retired) Pete Schetrompf—tended to be of a somewhat philosophical bent. In his thirty-five years with the United States Army, he’d been to two major wars, where “major” is defined as “half a million troops committed …on our side,” along with any (mostly classified) number of (classified) in (classified), (classified), and, of course, (classified). Oh, and (really classified). That sort of experience tended to give one a certain perspective, a degree of detachment, so to speak.

  For example, a less experienced soldier would have been hard pressed to determine anything from the three steady sounds coming from the artillery. For that less experienced soldier, it would likely have proven impossible to consciously figure out the meaning of any given oddity in the mild and repetitive thumping coming from the distant firing position, the passage of the overhead freight trains, and the explosions coming from fairly close up ahead. In his own detached way, Schetrompf’s mind kept track of all three.

  On the other hand, it’s kind of hard to maintain detachment when that lunatic …

  Suddenly, Schetrompf rolled his eyes in his Marty Feldmanesque face and began to dive into the safely of the Eland’s compartment. He’d sensed something wrong, an off key note in the artillery symphony. Later on he would figure out that it had probably been the absence of one freight train that had keyed him.

  “DUCK, MOTHERFUCKERS!” Schetrompf shouted loud enough to be heard over all three artillery sounds, over the roar of tank and Eland engines, through the muzzle blasts of C Company’s tanks, firing at targets as they broke past the two ridges, and even through the ear-encompassing crewmen’s helmets and the enveloping armor. Even two or three vehicles away.

  Staff Sergeant Dan Kemp barely fit inside the Eland. He was just too bi
g, a huge bear of a man. He was also fairly new in the regiment and corporation, having only taken his retirement and punched out of a billet with Third Battalion, Five-O-Second Infantry about fifteen months prior. He’d arrived here several months after that, having found civilian life degrading to the point of disgusting. Sadly, from his point of view, he’d missed the Suriname dustup. Fortunately, however, next month he’d have completed his years’ probation, at which point they’d jump him up to Sergeant First Class and let him buy a share in the regiment’s owning corporation, M Day, Inc. Then, he’d truly belong.

  About armored vehicles he’d known little at the time, beyond avoiding the bastards, though he’d since learned quite a bit. The mindset had come tougher, learning to think while moving not at two and a half miles an hour, but at anything up to forty or, on a good road, about sixty-five.

  This, of course, was barely a road at all, so speed was not a lot over ten miles an hour. Kemp appreciated that, as it gave him the chance to review the mission and make some educated guesses at the follow-ons Reilly would toss the battalion’s way once they passed the ridges.

  Behind and ahead of Kemp’s vehicle, the machine gunners were letting loose with their pintle-mounted guns, Russian-made KORDs in 12.7mm. These were not only considerably lighter than the American M-2, they fired at a much higher rate. Even with that higher rate, though, they weren’t really expecting to hit anything, but—just as in combat—fast flying lead, especially if it had an audible crack to announce its passage, was just the thing to keep an RPG gunner’s head down until you were past his defense and eating his, and his unit’s, vitals.

  Kemp thought he saw some targets, or perhaps just a badly camouflaged or artillery-uncamouflaged fighting position, up on the left side ridge’s military crest. He reached out to tap the machine gunner, Wilkes, to grab his attention and direct his fire when the world went bang. And bang. And Bang. And BANG.