Countdown: M Day

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by Tom Kratman


  not merely being a general but doing it in the most

  dramatic way possible, the Great MacArthur, who played

  in nothing less than the theater of history—as if life were

  always a stage and the world his audience.

  —David Halberstam,

  The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

  Bolivar State, Venezuela

  It had been a bright afternoon when Chavez finished his inspection of the parachute brigade and ordered the brigade commander to summon all his officers to a huge mess tent set up under some trees and a net. The sun was long down and the mosquitoes having a feast and he was still talking.

  I know he likes to talk, thought Larralde, like the rest of the commanders and staff of the battalion, standing at attention as Hugo Chavez went into his third hour of continuous tongue lashing with no sign of flagging. He likes to talk, but this is getting fucking ridiculous. Get to the point, Mr. President; an hour spent listening to you would be better spent training my people. Sure, they’re all …we’re all …lacking in true Bolivarian revolutionary spirit. So fucking what? Maybe I should never have …

  “And in conclusion,” Chavez said, glaring out over the heads of the officers assembled, “I am sorely tempted to fire the lot of you for your lack of military ability, lack of initiative, and lack of the spirit of Bolivar.

  “So now I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.” Chavez pointed at Larralde and demanded, “Who are you, Captain?”

  Larralde braced to a stiffer attention and answered, “Captain Larralde, Miguel, Mr. President. Commanding Company B, Second Battalion.”

  Chavez nodded, causing his jowls to shake. “While I’ve been talking and the rest of these pussies have been quaking in their all too shiny boots, you’ve at least looked like a man. Here’s what I want from you. I want you to take your B Company and just forget the idea of parachuting. It was a silly idea in the first place and there’s no way you’ll be ready to do it.” The president’s eyes swept around the crowded tent. “That goes for the rest of the brigade, too. Prepare, instead, for an air landing.”

  Turning back to Larralde, but speaking to the crowd, he asked, “Now what do you need besides your company?”

  Larralde parroted the force list he’d given Chavez at Miraflores Palace. Chavez nodded, turned to the brigade commander, and said, “Get it to him. No later than tomorrow.” Chavez went silent for a moment, then said, quite despite what Larralde had requested, “A captain is too junior to command a force that size. Consider yourself a major, effective right now. And tell your second sergeant major that he is now a first sergeant major. Brigade commander?”

  “Mr. President?” that colonel aske, nervously.

  “Shuffle your officers around as much as necessary to build up Larralde’s unit to full commissioned strength. And get him the attachments he needs.”

  It was late and all of the other officers and non coms had left the mess tent. Larralde and his new—and unwitting—first sergeant major sat across a table from each other, with a bottle of cola and another of rum with the number 1796 printed boldly on the label. There wasn’t any ice but one couldn’t expect everything.

  “Where did you get this shit, sir?” Arrivillaga asked, sipping his cup straight.

  “Hugo insisted I take a couple of bottles back with me. I’ve been saving them.”

  “Ordinarily, I prefer bourbon,” Arrivillaga said, sipping again. “But this”—he twirled the glass contemplatively—“this isn’t bad.”

  “Figured you could use the moral fortification before I lay out what we have to do.”

  Arrivillaga drained the metal cup, slapped it to the table, then announced, “Okay, sir, I’m ready.”

  Larralde then proceeded to tell his senior sergeant about both his own and the sergeant major’s promotion, the new troops they’d be getting, and the change to the plan. He neglected to mention that Chavez’s orders were, mostly, his own idea. Mao already knew that, anyway.

  “The promotion is nice, of course,” said the newly promoted First Sergeant Major Arrivillaga, totally unfazed by the news, “but you realize, right, sir, that you’ve made us a perilous amount of work.”

  “Win a little, lose a little, Mao,” Larralde shrugged. “At least this way we have a chance.”

  “So how are we going to do it? To prepare, I mean; you’ve already told me how we’re going to take the airfield.”

  “We’re going to prepare for it by preparing for it,” the new major answered.

  Arrivillaga scowled. “You’re not a general yet, you know, to be coming up with that kind of mindless, self-serving bullshit.”

  Larralde laughed and bent his head to scratch behind an ear. “I’m actually serious. We don’t have the time to prepare everyone for general combat. But they don’t need to know how to do a deliberate attack, or a movement to contact, or an ambush. They don’t need to march forty kilometers at a whack. They need to know how to use their weapons and the basic soldier skills. And they need toughening. But they’ve got to be able to board and debark from a particular airplane, specifically, to move fast once they debark, to clear certain specific buildings at the airfield, and how to do a hasty defense. And, whenever we can scrape a few minutes or hours from teaching the basic soldiering they need, we’re going to be rehearsing the actual operation. They’ll learn the collective things they need to do based on what they really need to do.”

  The sergeant major looked dubious. He held up one hand, the middle and ring fingers pointed at Larralde, the index finger raised and the little finger lolling a bit. The hand moved just enough to give an element of warning to the shaking of the index finger.

  “I can see that working, sir, as long as everything goes well. But if we’re not training them for the general problems they might face, and then they must face them, we’ll be in trouble.”

  “Yeah, Mao,” Larralde agreed. “I know. But it’s an either-or proposition. You, yourself, were the one who pointed out that spending a bunch of time road marching was simply bad prioritization.”

  “Well, sure,” the sergeant major said. “That’s my job, to point out silly shit so you can tell me to fix it. But spending a lot of time that we don’t have, learning to put one foot in front of the other, is one thing. Skipping core missions …color me skeptical.”

  “Skeptical? That’s a color formed by mixing Bolivarian red and shit brown, isn’t it?” Larralde joked. “With just a hint of shiny?”

  “As long as the shiny is thin and flakes off easily,” Arrivillaga replied, with a tight smile.

  There was a rustle of canvas by the tent door. Mao looked up, then quietly announced, “Your other officers are here, sir. And they look a little scared. I’d better go get some more cups.”

  Ah. Time to meet my “public.” Again.

  As Arrivillaga stood and walked in the direction of the kitchen, Larralde smiled and turned halfway around in his folding metal chair. “Gentlemen,” he said, beckoning with one hand, “Come. Sit. We have much to discuss. Because we’re going to have much great fun together.”

  * * *

  “‘Fun’ the son of a bitch called it,” muttered Lily, sprawling under some wide shade trees at the back end of the rifle range, facing away. Behind her, came the steady poppoppop of Kalishnikovs peppering—or at least lightly sprinkling; they weren’t the most accurate of rifles—paper targets downrange.

  Lily, Villareal, and the rest of the platoon were covered with mud, scratched, and sweaty from the individual movement techniques they’d been put through by Sergeant Major Arrivillaga every spare moment they’d not actually been engaged in marksmanship training. Likewise muddy, but disassembled for cleaning, were their rifles, spread out on plasticized ponchos on the grass before each man and woman.

  Carlos Villareal, using a toothbrush to pick caked-on carbon from his rifle’s bolt, said nothing and carefully kept his face blank. There was no sense in offending Lily, after all. But, to him, it had been fun,
possibly the most fun he’d ever had with his clothes on. What was a little mud and sweat for that?

  On the other hand, he thought, to the girls this has not been fun at all. What was that old gringo song? Oh, yes: “I don’t like spiders and snakes.” And they don’t. Different …

  Carlos’s thoughts were interrupted by someone calling out, “Attention!” He dropped the toothbrush and bolt onto the poncho, getting to his feet and snapping to attention along with the rest of the platoon.

  I hate Kalashnikovs, thought Mao, bitterly, as he sauntered up to the gaggle of rifle cleaners. Oh, sure, they’re simple and easy to train on …to train people to miss, that is. I want my goddamned FNC back. I want these ever-so-far-from-soldierly rabble to have FNCs. I want to dump these fucking stamped pieces of shit in the nearest river. I want …ahhh, fuckit.

  The FNC, for which Mao pined, was a Belgian design, in the NATO standard caliber of 5.56x45. It impressed nearly everyone who used it. Moreover, Venezuela had many FNCs in its depots, better than fifty thousand of them. The Kalashnikov, specifically the folding stock AK-104s that the troops had been issued, had its virtues. Fine accuracy was not among them.

  The reason Larralde’s command, indeed none of the invasion force, had FNCs was …

  Mere fucking appearances, fumed Arrivillaga. The fucking communists—freedom fighters, one and all, of course—use them so we have to use them, too. To look the same. Bah.

  Mao glared around at the stiffly braced recruits and shouted, “Go back to what you were doing, you crawling shits. Your rifle is more important than I am.”

  Still, silently cursing, Arrivillaga went to find the company commander.

  Larralde sat comfortably, or as comfortably as the open top allowed under the glaring sun, in his command vehicle, a Venezuelan-made Tiuna. Behind him, on the seat, rested a charcoal-colored plastic case, about four feet long and a foot or so wide.

  Larralde patted his command vehicle. The Tiuna, at least, had worked out reasonably well.

  Better than that fucking abortion of a tank rebuild Hugo’s cronies foisted on us, thought the major. On the other hand, it’s even more expensive than the gringo Hummer, and probably not as good. Oh, well.

  Larralde sensed his first sergeant major’s arrival before he saw him. He looked over at the scowling noncom, smiled, and said, “I can read you like a book, you know.”

  “Bullshit, sir.”

  “Well …” the major half-conceded, “I can read you at the moment. You came to bitch—for the umpteenth time—about the Kalashnikovs, didn’t you?”

  “So?” Arrivillaga answered. “Is there a decent soldier in the army who knows any better that wouldn’t bitch about them? No mind reading required.”

  Mao scowled. “You know, sir, it wouldn’t be quite so infuriating if the assholes-that-be hadn’t also left us with our Belgian-made light machine guns. I could see the logic, maybe, if we had ammunition commonality. But we don’t. We’ve got rifles in 7.62 short, light machine guns in 5.56 and machine guns in NATO 7.62. Makes no fucking sense at all.”

  “Going to get worse, too,” Larralde said, “at least it will if we don’t make a few adjustments. He nodded his head backwards in the direction of the charcoal gray case behind him.

  Arrivillaga shrugged his shoulders and muttered something unmentionable, then took the couple of steps needed to stand next to the Tiuna. He leaned over, unsnapped the latches to the case, and flipped it open.

  “Ooo …shiny,” the first sergeant major whispered as he pulled a long, almost spindly, rifle out. “Dragunov. Me like.”

  Then Mao’s shoulders slumped again. “But another fucking caliber. What the hell are they thinking?”

  “Not exactly,” Larralde corrected. “In the first place, that’s in 7.62 NATO, so it will match our MAGs.” The MAG was another Belgian machine gun, a general purpose gun, in that caliber. “And, in the second place, I called Hugo’s office to make a date with your cousin and had her put me through to him. We’re dumping the other Belgian guns and getting RPK light machine guns to match our rifles.”

  “That makes a little more sense.” Mao’s scowl deepened, as he said, “You better not even think about screwing my cousin, sir.”

  Larralde shook his head in puzzlement. “You didn’t seem to mind when you thought Hugo was fucking her.”

  “You’re not Hugo,” the sergeant major answered, turning abruptly to walk back to the firing line.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Mines are equal opportunity weapons.

  —Murphy’s Laws of Combat Operations

  Russian Embassy, 3 Public Road, Kitty, Georgetown, Guyana

  It was ten in the morning and already beastly hot. And with the Atlantic just the other side of the seawall, and that just the other side of the road, it was drippingly muggy, to boot.

  Major Sergei Pakhamov, military attaché for the Embassy of the Russian Federation to Guyana, loosened the collar of his shirt and cursed. The air conditioning was down again, and the town’s thick heat oppressed him greatly. Sweat crawled down his back, itching and tickling on its way. He cursed that, too.

  And cursing the one will have just as much effect as cursing the other. Oh, well, let’s see what business there is—damned little, I’m sure—to amuse me in this otherwise make-work-while-the world-forgets-you-exist little spot of limbo.

  “Anything interesting, Katya?” Pakhamov called out through the open door to his office.

  “Request to purchase arms for testing, in your otherwise empty in box,” “Katya” replied.

  The woman, over fifty and turning plump was actually named Catherine Persons. While dark of hair, skin, and eye, she was ethnically indeterminate, as with many Guyanese, being a thorough mix of at least six groups, from Arawak to Hindu, Iberian to Irish. She’d been a sufficiently dedicated communist that she’d been affiliated with, if not officially an employee of, the embassy back when it had been the legation of the Soviet Union. The permanent job had come shortly after that empire’s collapse. How she felt about the whole dictatorship of the proletariat now she kept to herself. From her reaction to some of his ribbing, Pakhamov was reasonably sure she remained a communist and, like most such, a very disappointed and frustrated one.

  “What arms?”

  “Local forces want to buy four heavy mortars for testing, along with a package of ammunition and laser guidance packages,” she replied. “Along with two laser designators. It’s bullshit, by the way. I have it from my cousin in Defence that our people don’t want the things; they’re for the Americans up river. Officially a ‘reserve of the Guyanan Defense Force.’ Which is also bullshit.”

  “Can you think of any reason not to recommend approval, Katya?” Pakhamov asked.

  “Other than general distaste, no,” she admitted.

  “Neither can I. And it would be nice to have something to do. Take a letter, Katya,” Pakhamov said, rising from his sweaty seat and moving out of his own stuffy office into his secretary’s only marginally better one.

  Tivat Arsenal, Gulf of Kotor, Montenegro

  Victor Inning could, in theory, have flown in. The town of Tivat had, after all, its own airport, with a fair number of convenient connections to other spots of Europe. Moreover, he was good with disguises and had any number of false passports to see him through customs. The one he was currently using was American, under the name of “Victor Turpin.”

  He’d decided against flying directly in, going instead via Athens, Greece—“If it’s good enough for half the terrorists in the world; it’s good enough for me”—and renting a car there, then driving across the border to Montenegro. Once at the marina—for the old naval arsenal had been mostly converted to the uses of the very wealthy—Who somehow, thought Victor, never seemed to suffer from, nor to alter their extravagant lifestyles merely because of, the fact that the world’s economy is in the tank—he’d checked into a small hotel and waited for his best contact in the old Yugoslav, later the Montenegrin, Navy to arrive.
>
  Feels like old times, Victor silently exulted, as he nursed a scotch in the hotel’s tiny bar, waiting for his contact to arrive. Even if it’s a lot safer for me, here and now, than it sometimes was in other places, at other times.

  Victor was on the verge of consulting his watch when he heard and felt the stool next to his being pulled back. He looked toward it and said, in English, “You’ve put on weight, Lazar, since last I saw you.”

  The Montenegrin, Lazar Toldorovic, late captain of the Yugoslav then the Montenegrin Navy nodded a half-bald head, answering in the same language, “So my wife tells me. Every fucking day. I don’t need to hear it from you, too, Victor. Finish up your drink. I’ll wait.”

  “Yes, I have mines,” Toldorovic said slowly, as his car wound through the darkness and the sharp turns and steep hills above the town. “Not many. Definitely not new. But I have some. M-70 acoustic-induction jobs.”

  “Define ‘not new,’ please,” Victor requested. He already had the basic statistics on the weapons: twenty-one inches across, one hundred and eleven inches long, a ton in weight, exclusive of dunnage, of which seventy percent was explosive.

  Toldorovic nodded. “‘Not new, is pretty old, Victor. Decades old. Worse, not maintained. Sitting in a bunker at the old naval arsenal for a long time before I picked them up, along with anything else that wasn’t nailed down. I’ve sold off most of the rest. Frankly, I’d like to get rid of the M-70—assuming, of course, that your offer is fair—and just retire from this little sidelight. The reason why I’m fat is that I eat too much. Oh, and drink, of course. The reason I do that is stress because my house is sitting on twenty fucking tons of high explosive. There have been nuclear weapons that didn’t pack so much punch.”

  Victor tsked, commiseratingly, then asked, “How many have you got?”

  “Thirty-two, plus a testing kit for the fuses and wiring. The mines are mostly still in their dunnage. I doubt they were much maintained even before the old federation fell apart.”

 

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