Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  “Yeah,” chimed in Rohrer. “Don’t you know how much people pay for the privilege of driving one of those expensive toys?”

  “Then you do it,” Bronto answered.

  “Nah. I mass too much. Bad test.”

  “Now go,” Ryan ordered. “And conserve power.”

  “Fuck,” Bronto muttered, before emplacing his mouthpiece, lowering his mask, rotating the eyepiece, and swimming the few short strokes to the SeaBob.

  “So what are we going to do, Chief?” Rohrer asked. “Since we can’t—no how, no way—do what we came to try to figure out a way to do?”

  “Maybe we can do half of it,” Ryan said. “Maybe we can hump SCUBA gear over sixty miles of mountain, river, swamp and jungle to get to the lake to plant limpets on a few ships at Maracaibo. Maybe. As for the rest …” He looked off generally to the east, in the direction of Venezuela’s Puerto Fijo. He shook his head and admitted, “I don’t know. Maybe we get a small stockpile of mines in Colombia, so we can reseed the bay. Maybe. But the more I think about it, the more I think we’re pissing up a rope with that one, too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because once the initial mines are laid, any one of them might get set off at any time. What if one of them goes off while one of us is within a klick of it?”

  “World class case of the bends?”

  Half seen in the flash of the Relámpago del Catatumbo, Ryan smiled mirthlessly. “We’d get bent, in any case.

  “I mean, it would be different if we could base over on that side. But we’re really obvious in a sea of Latins.”

  “So what then?”

  “I’m thinking a one time, direct action. Cross from Colombia. We can get Zodiacs, I think. So we cross on those, low, slow, and quiet. We land. We attack. And we basically smash the shit out of the oil storage facilities, refineries, and maybe the pipeline. Then we get the hell out of dodge and maybe get ourselves interned in Colombia.”

  “Arms and explosives?” Rohrer asked.

  The team chief shrugged. “Buy ’em off FARC? Bribe someone in the Colombian Army to shit us some? Get one of the teams from the U.S. Army working in Colombia to get them for us, on the sly? Have them landed by night by a passing ship? Not really my problem. Yet.”

  “You know,” Rohrer said, “if we did that there’s no saying that a couple of us couldn’t SCUBA to Puerto Fijo and put limpets on a couple of random ships. While the main attack was going on, I mean.”

  “Even if we didn’t do it but said we would, that would have one distinct advantage,” Ryan replied.

  “What’s that?”

  “The asshole—whoever it was—that came up with the idea of using limpets to supplement the real mines wouldn’t be embarrassed, so would be less likely to fight us over it.”

  “I could see that.”

  The rope leading to the mine simulator tugged at his waist.

  I can’t see shit in this muck, thought Bronto as he moved forward under the power of his Cayago SeaBob. He was perhaps a fathom below the surface. Even with the frigging night vision device in front of my eye I still can’t see shit. Well …that’s not entirely true. I can see the control panel. But only because the SOB is illuminated and right in front of my face. And I can see the surface. But only because of the lightning flash reflecting from the clouds.

  Slow, the man said. Bronto’s left thumb pushed a red button, causing the SeaBob to slow to comparative crawl. The tug of the towrope immediately lessened.

  A combined compass and GPS was strapped to the SeaBob, just below the control panel. The GPS was useless enough down here, but the compass was critical. Bronto paid attention to that to keep himself on a due east bearing.

  In the Gulf of Venezuela, one of the larger specimens of Crocodylus acutus, the American crocodile, rarely worried about his bearings. Where food was, that was a good direction to head in; where food wasn’t, wasn’t. Since he couldn’t see any better than Bronto could, and in the absence of any particular notice of food, one direction was pretty much as good as another.

  This particular crocodile—his mother had never bothered to name him, of course, though he usually thought of himself as “Buz,” from the sounds made by the flock of winged minions who followed him adoringly whenever he was on land—was moving generally westward in a slow, sinuous, almost snakelike, swim. Buz was a particularly handsome specimen of his sex and race. All the girl crocodiles said so. At least they would have said so, Buz was sure, if they could have said anything.

  Of course, in crocodile terms, handsome was somewhat relative and largely driven by the concept of BIG. And Buz, at nearly seven meters, and just at a metric ton, was quite large indeed.

  Buz was also quite hungry.

  While Bronto couldn’t see much beyond his control panel, he couldn’t help but notice both the shadow passing above and the turbulence that shadow created. Still keeping his hands on the control levers, he lifted his head as far back as he could without risking the current tugging off his mask.

  And Bronto saw …and he saw some more …and he saw …

  And then his mind screamed, DINOSAUR!

  Buz was somewhat distantly aware of the strange creature passing a tail or so below him. It didn’t sound like food. It didn’t smell or taste like food. And, since it didn’t run, like nearly any sensible food creature would have, Buz assumed, not unreasonably, that it probably wasn’t food.

  He intended to ignore it. But then it took off like a …Well …Buz dunno. But run like food; must be food.

  Buz was not only big for his species, but also a veritable genius. That’s how he’d gotten to be so big. He pointed his snout down and made a twisting lunge for what seemed to be the tail of his prey.

  Bronto’s right thumb frantically worked the green button to get to top speed as fast as possible. Sadly, a SeaBob hauling a man and a dummy mine are not necessarily faster than a dinosaur that didn’t know it was supposed to be extinct. Before the machine could get up to speed, Bronto was literally pulled off of it by the rope around his waist. Worse, he felt himself being tugged backwards in sharp, skin-ripping jolts.

  Desperately, on autopilot, his right hand sought the knife he kept strapped to his leg. It had to be done on autopilot, since his mind was screaming, Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, it’s gonna eat me!

  Terror lent speed. While the dimly seen reptile in front of him worried at the dummy mine, Bronto’s knife cut, cut—cut, you bastard!—through the tow rope. Once free, he began swimming—Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, it’s gonna eat me!—away as fast as he could stroke and paddle.

  Fortunately for Bronto, the SeaBob was designed for human error as well. As soon as he’d been pulled off of it, and his hands from the controls, it had automatically stopped dead in the water. He almost swam past it, mesmerized, looking backwards at the gigantic twisting shadow in the water, so great was his fear. Fortunately, the control panel was still lit and, seeing that from the corner of one eye, he lunged for the sled.

  Hands sought the controls. Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, it’s gonna eat me! Right thumb pounded the green “Go” button, and the thing took off at its top submerged speed of just under ten miles an hour.

  Sadly, a crocodile can swim faster, at least in the short term.

  Whereas Buz had been hungry, therefore a little grumpy, before, now he was positively angry. The damned unfairness of the thing. It acted like food; he struck; he caught; and then the damned thing refused to taste like food. All that was bad enough, but he’d broken a tooth—possibly two of them—in the process and it or they hurt.

  Somebody’s gonna pay!

  And I know who.

  Bronto’s teeth were so tightly clenched on his mouthpiece, and his hands on the control sticks, that both hands and his jaw would have looked white had it been possible to see them.

  Of course, he wasn’t looking even at his hands. Instead, his head was turned around almost one hundred and eighty degrees where, with the combined aid of lightnin
g flashes from the distant mouth of the Catatumbo, and his mask’s integral night vision monocular, he could just make out the dinosaur—Gotta be a dinosaur—pursuing him. Rather, he could just make out a head that seemed longer than he was and twin serrated rows of teeth.

  Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, it’s gonna eat me! was way too complex a thought at that point. Instead, his mind yammered, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!

  A sudden slush of turbulence and a sudden heavy pull on his right foot told him that the beast’s maw had closed. Since he didn’t faint from pain, and since his foot, once encased in rubber, now felt water rushing over it, he assumed the creature had just missed the foot, tearing off, instead, one of his flippers.

  Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!

  He pulled up a bit, bending his body to lauch the SeaBob for the surface. Aiaiaiaiai! Make better time on the surface. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!

  He broached like a small whale. Immediately he spat out his mouth piece, screaming, “Rrryyyaaannn! Rrrooohhhrrreeerrr! Helllppp meee!”

  Then he splashed back into the water, the crocodile in hot pursuit.

  “Did you hear something, Ryan?” Rohrer asked.

  “Something like what?” the team chief responded.

  “Dunno. Odd sound. Like a …long, drawn out shriek of terror. But not from anything necessarily human.”

  Ryan shook his head. “Your hearing’s better than mine. Too many loud booms over the years, doncha know?

  “You sure you heard something?”

  “Pretty sure,” Rohrer replied. He went silent for a moment, listening carefully. “There it goes again. Maybe we oughta go look.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  But good horses with competent riders will

  manage to escape even from hopeless situations.

  —Xenophon, On Horsemanship

  Posada Santa Margarita, Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

  Lada carried her own large handbag, into which she’d stuffed their GPS unit.

  “You drive,” Morales said, tossing Lada the keys to their rental car. She snatched them from midair and started for the door. Morales then took their bags, not because the contents were particularly valuable in themselves as that anyone leaving bags behind in a hotel, not too very far from where a secret policeman was killed, was likely to come under suspicion. And they needed at least some time to put some distance between themselves and the probable investigation, and possibly as much as twelve hours to get closer to one of the prearranged extraction points.

  Leaving openly but in a hurry is suspicious, too, Morales thought. But not as badly.

  They walked with remarkable calm down to the front desk, chatted for a few moments with the matron at the desk, mentioned a death in the family, and then paid their bill. Calmly, they strolled out the garish door and round back to the parked rental. The bags were quickly stuffed into the trunk.

  “Which direction?” Lada asked, as she slid in behind the wheel.

  Morales whipped out a cell phone and began to type a message. “Just get us out of town while I see who’s available. It’ll be either Ryan’s team or the Spetz on the boat.”

  Port of Spain, Trinidad

  “Message from Lada,” Kravchenko announced. Musin was standing over his shoulder in an instant. He read off the screen quickly, it was a simple coded message: “What’s for dinner? I’m famished.”

  “They need an extraction,” Musin said to Baluyev, as the latter descended into the lower, darkened cabin. “Quick as possible.”

  “Who’s closer?” Baluyev asked. “Us or the team at the Gulf of Venezuela?”

  “Them,” Kravcheko said, “but it doesn’t really matter. Lada and Che have a car, or they’re supposed to. So they can move to meet either of us. And we know we’ve got the message. The Americans haven’t answered yet.”

  Baluyev considered that. The whole crew is aboard. We’re not terribly suspicious, ourselves, not as suspicious as some more obvious special operations types in a small boat would be. So …how long to get to one of the linkup points? Figure at least eighty kilometers an hour for Lada and Morales, twenty for us. Sooo …Ideal linkup would be at Carupano. He looked at the map mounted on the bulkhead and said, “Send back, ‘Borscht,’ ‘at Chez Colombo.’”

  Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

  “Head toward Valencia,” Morales said, after seeing the message pop up on the screen of his cell. “When we get close, start looking for the highway east.”

  Lada nodded. “Where’s the pickup?”

  “Carupano. It’s about two hundred and fifty miles east of here on the coast.”

  “Sea or air?” she asked. She knew there was an airstrip at the town.

  “Sea.”

  “Damn!”

  “Why’s that?” Morales asked.

  “Tim Musin,” she replied. “And I don’t know what to do about him.”

  Gulf of Venezuela

  Rohrer was steering from the small outboard motor at the stern. Ryan, kneeling forward, had placed a set of night vision goggles over his face. He pulled them away from his eyes for a moment, blinking and not quite believing what the eyes and goggles told him.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Gedidawayfrommeee!” Bronto screamed, still punching the green “Go” button for all he was worth.

  “What is it, Chief?” Rohrer asked.

  There was disbelief in Ryan’s voice when he answered, “Biggest fucking alligator—or maybe crocodile—you ever saw. Bigger than this boat. Too big to fuck with.”

  “Man,” Rohrer said, “we can’t just let it eat him.”

  “No …no.” The team leader pushed the goggles back on his head, then turned and began rifling through a small kit box, mounted amidships, that came with the rental. He emerged holding a 26.5mm flare gun in one hand, and three flares gripped in the spaces between his fingers.

  “Gemmeoutaherrre!”

  Snivel, snivel, snivel, Ryan thought as he used a thumb to break open the pistol at the breech. He slid one of the flares in, then bounced the barrel off of his left forearm to lock it back in place. The same forearm then served as a brace to push the goggles back over his eyes.

  “Aiaiaiai!”

  Shit, Ryan thought. I’ve never actually fired one of these things before. The Army only used the self-contained jobbies. Shit.

  Using both hands, he attempted to aim the thing at the grainy crocodilian head showing in his goggles. No good, the things focus far or near, but not both. Crap. Have to rely on instinct. I hate that.

  Keeping his vision on the croc, Ryan, kneeling again, aimed the pistol as best he could guess at it, and squeezed the trigger. The recoil was something immense, compared to the .45 caliber and 9mm pistols he was used to. It rocked him back off his knees and onto his back, the sharp corner of the emergency kit digging into his flesh. Gah, that hurts. He scrambled back in time to determine that he’d missed the thing completely. The remnants of the flare were burning on the surface of the water, far past his man and the croc.

  “JesusChristRyanyouasshole! Youalmosthitmeee!”

  Blow the mission or lose one of my men? Screw it; the mission’s impossible anyway. Turning backwards, Ryan shouted, “Stand by to put us near alongside the croc, then to make a run for Bronto.”

  Ryan flipped the goggles off his head and let them fall into the bilge. Screw them, too. Again he broke open the flare gun and inserted a round. He pointed the thing up and pulled the trigger. This time he was ready enough and balanced enough not to be knocked over.

  The flare flew reasonably straight and true before blossoming into a bright red sun. While it was flying, Ryan reloaded and waited. As soon as the flare lit off, he shouted, “Hard left,” to Rohrer, and, “ahead, slow.”

  As the boat turned, then steadied on a course roughly parallel to Bronto and the croc, the team chief took aim again. He delayed for a few seconds, judging the rocking of the boat. Just as the light overhead began to die out, he pulled the trigger.

  “No
w sprint it for Bronto!”

  Buz might have been a genius among crocodiles. This still made him a fairly dumb creature. When he felt the impact of the flare in the water, and saw the bright red flame, he snapped at it.

  What he thought, when his jaws closed on the solid fire, was impossible to translate into English, and unprintable if it could have been.

  “Left …left …right …left …straight.” Ryan perched himself, just back from the bow, and waited as the boat drew near the bucking SeaBob. The croc was writhing in a pretty good simulation of agony as they passed it. Ryan thought he saw red light gleaming from between the creature’s rows of teeth.

  “Match speed!” Ryan shouted, then reached out and grabbed Bronto by the regulator of his tank. He pulled the man off the device, which dutifully stopped. Then, bending low, he pulled Bronto to the side of the hull. “Get in, godammit,” he commanded, as he helped haul the man over the side. Screw the SeaBob.

  “Now get the fuck out of here! To shore! Fast!”

  Now Buz was really annoyed. He saw the boat screaming away to the west. I’m tired and it’s moving too fast, he thought. The frustration was really more than a crocodile ought to have to bear. Then he saw the SeaBob, sitting there on the surface unmoving. Hah, it must be more tired than I am. Well, I’ll sure show it a thing or two.

  Savoring the prelude to his revenge, the croc swam in a leisurely fashion. As he neared, he opened his massive jaws wide to encompass the sea sled. At precisely the right moment, he slammed them together, smashing the SeaBob and incidentally letting water at the batteries.