Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  Boom.

  * * *

  “What the fuck was that?” Rohrer asked, as the explosion a hundred meters behind the boat roiled the water.

  “Dunno,” Ryan answered. “And who cares? Just get us to shore.”

  “Who …cares?” Bronto echoed, breathlessly. The poor bastard was still shaking. “And …I …am …never …getting …into …the water …near here …again. Not. Ever.”

  Can’t say I blame you, Ryan thought. But we’ll be back, even so. So I suppose I’d better leave two men at the apartment and pay a few months’ rent in advance.

  Highway 9, Venezuela

  Lada kept her speed down to just above the posted limit. There was no sense in attracting attention from the police, which both obeying the limit and flagrantly ignoring it might have invited. Caracas and its lighted skyline were well behind them now. The highway, beginning to need repair, rumbled below them.

  “What’s Tim’s problem?” Morales asked. “Does he blame you for what you do for the regiment?”

  “He would if he let himself think about it, maybe,” Lada answered. “But if he’d let himself think about it, he’d realize I’m poison in any dose. So he doesn’t let himself think about it.”

  Morales grinned. “Well …none of us do. Men, I mean. Frankly, we can’t stand being in the same room, maybe even on the same planet, as someone who’s had the woman we love. We are not entirely—which is to say, not at all—rational about matters of love and sex.”

  “I know,” Lada said. She shook her head, despairingly. “But Tim …ah, hell; he’s such a nice guy, so sweet. He deserves a lot better than me.”

  “He is a good guy,” Che agreed. “Good soldier, too.” He laughed.

  “What funny?” Lada asked, her hackles rising.

  Morales laughed again. “I spent a good chunk of my life training to kill people like him. I thought of them as good troops, but never as good guys. Strange what being in the same outfit will do to one’s perspectives.”

  “At least if I accepted his courting me, he wouldn’t have to worry about my screwing someone in the regiment.”

  “That would be a plus,” Morales agreed. He hesitated, then asked, “If you don’t mind a personal question …?”

  She didn’t wait for it. “I do it because I love the sense of power it gives me. For the sex, who cares? I usually feel nothing …well …nothing but weight. But when I can use it to control a man, and with the added benefit of doing my job? That’s better than a blinding orgasm. For one thing, the satisfaction lasts.”

  “Fair point,” Morales conceded. “Though it doesn’t help you with your Tim problem.”

  She nodded, dimly visible by the instrument lights glowing on the panel in front of her. “I know. I don’t know if there is, or even can be, any help there.”

  “Have you tried talking to him?” Before she could reply, Morales changed the question to, “Let me rephrase that; do you care enough about him to talk to him about it?”

  “I care about him too much to talk to him about it.”

  “Well …maybe even more so in that case; I think you should.”

  “Maybe,” Lada half-admitted. “Maybe I should. Ummm …Che, we spent quite some time in a hotel room together, both this trip and the previous one with Eeyore. Why didn’t you ever …?”

  “Come on to you?” Again, he chuckled. “I can’t say about Antoniewicz, but for me, while most men are hard wired to youth, you just look too young. Sorry, Lada, but everything about you screams ‘jailbait.’ Yeah, I know you’re not fourteen. But you still look fourteen, fifteen at the outside, and I just …couldn’t.”

  The light from the dash was too little to see her faint smile. She thought, You’re a good man, too, Che.

  Carupano, Venezuela

  A fifteen-foot Zodiac undulated in the waves next to the Bertram sport fisher, the latter being anchored perhaps six hundred meters from the beach. The inflatable rubber boat, itself, was a veteran of the first operation in Punt, some years prior. In shade, the boat was as black as a pawnbroker’s soul. A small electric motor was mounted to the stern. A midnight-clad Kravchenko sat in the Zodiac, ready to move on command. Musin and Litvinov, likewise in black, stood on the Bertram’s deck, scanning, waiting with Baluyev for the recognition signal from the shore. In both Musin’s and Litvinov’s hands were grasped pistols with suppressors, retrieved for the occasion from a very difficult to find hide that appeared to be part of the fuel tanks. You just never knew what might be waiting on shore. All three, Baluyev, Musin, and Litvinov, wore civilian model night vision goggles hanging by the straps around their necks.

  Lada twisted the wheel, then slammed on the brakes, at a parking lot parallel to and very near the shore. The sea was visible for a good distance out.

  Almost as soon as the car stopped, Morales dug the GPS out of Lada’s handbag, flicked it on, and waited for it to give a valid position. Time was more important than secrecy, this close to pickup. As soon as he had the grid coordinates he messaged it to Baluyev’s Spetz. An acknowledging message was returned almost instantly. Somewhere not too far out to sea, a marine engine growled to life.

  “Far signal,” he told Lada. Immediately, she flicked the car’s beams to high three times.

  He was about to get out of the car to retrieve the bags, when Lada put a restraining hand on his arm. “Kiss me,” she commanded.

  “Wha’?

  “Just do it. Cop.” She leaned over to him.

  With a resigned sigh, Morales went along. Maybe the cop will do the decent thing and disappear. And …it’s not …exactly … .ummm …unpleasant.

  “Go,” Baluyev ordered, as soon as he saw the lights ashore flash three times. As Litvinov untied the rope, Musin fairly sprang over the gunwale and into the Zodiac, causing it to shudder violently. Kravchenko started the near silent electric outboard, holding the craft against the Bertram while Litvinov boarded. Once everyone was seated, he reversed throttle and backed away, then returned to forward thrust, guiding the rubber boat around its mother and heading it to shore.

  Morales backed off just enough to leave space for the Holy Spirit. “Cop still there?”

  “Yes,” Lada whispered, moving her head as if still in full buss. “I think we need to get rid of him.”

  “How? I don’t want to kill him; he’s just a regular guy.”

  “Yeah,” she admitted, then commanded, “Lean back in your seat.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it.”

  Morales did as commanded. He wasn’t quite sure what Lada intended until she bent her head over his lap. Once she had, he was sure what she intended, but, I don’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed.

  He was wrong. She went through the motions, the simulated belt unbuckling, the head bobbing, but that was it. As her head bobbed, quite to no direct purpose, she whispered, “He either does the decent thing and goes away or he comes over here to arrest us where you can kill him.”

  And I still don’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed.

  Morales looked at the cop, standing a bare thirty feet away. One hand placed itself more easily to reach the pistol Lada had acquired. The cop looked back, sternly, then laughed, shook his head, and turned away to continue his stroll down the beach.

  “Lada,” Che said, “you can come up now.”

  “I’ll kill the son of a bitch,” Tim said, as the rubber boat scrunched its way up the sand. He drew his pistol, adding, “He’s dead.”

  “What are you talking about?” Litvinov asked.

  Musin launched himself for the shore, saying, “That fucking American. With Lada.” His feet churned sand as he raced for the car.

  “You’re being a fool, Tim,” Litvinov muttered, following at a brisk trot.

  Outside the rental car, Morales scanned around for the cop that had been there. There was no sign of him. Satisfied they were safe from arrest, he went to the trunk, opened it, and began unloading their couple of bags to carry down to the
shore. Lada emerged on the other side, her head twisting back and forth searching for both cop and rescue party. She walked back to join Morales at the rear of the car.

  Lada managed to get out, “I see them,” only a split second before Tim was upon them, and the fist bearing the pistol had lunged out, striking Morales to the asphalt below.

  “You son of a bitch; I’ll kill you,” Musin said, taking aim.

  “What the fuck?” Lada threw herself across Morales’ prostrate form and, over her shoulder said, “Tim, stop it. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I …” The muzzle wavered a bit.

  “Tim,” she said, sadness in her voice, “stop being an idiot. You and I need to have a long talk. A very long talk. But none of that is about him, because he and I did nothing. Understand? Nothing.

  “Now put away that pistol and get the bags.” Musin hesitated, though his pistol’s muzzle moved away from Lada and Morales. “Now!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side

  that employs airpower as it should be employed.

  —Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris

  Bolivar State, Venezuela

  It’s amazing, thought Larralde, what the words, “Hugo wants,” will do to move things along. “Hugo wants,” and I get an open area as big as Cheddi Jagan airport. “Hugo wants,” and I get nine maintenance tents. “Hugo wants,” and I get engineer support like I never dreamed of, to build us a pretty good mockup of the airport. “Hugo wants,” and I get chairs and lumber and damned-well anything else I want, and right fucking now, too.

  A series of Quonset-hut-shaped maintenance tents sat on elevated berms the engineers had thrown up. The tents were set up in groups of three, end to end. As such, they mimicked very closely the interior dimensions of the three transport aircraft—all American-built C-130’s—Larralde was going to use to move his reinforced company. Venezuela owned four of them but Larralde’s plan assumed that at least one would go down between now and M Day.

  The flight crews for the actual aircraft—all four of them—were currently sleeping. They had to be, since they’d spent the previous several nights practicing near-to-the-earth formation flying and rapid sequential landing.

  “Behind” each of the aircraft mockups were well-constructed wooden platforms, with cleats, also put together by the engineers to simulate the loading ramps. Inside each of two of the mockups were an AMX-13C tank—a French-built light job with a 90mm gun, while along each side of the hull, in chairs set up to simulate troop seats, an additional forty-four armed and equipped soldiers sat. The other mockup contained no tank, but one Tiuna utility vehicle, and ninety-two sardine-packed soldiers. That last mockup was one the left of the three.

  For operational security’s sake, Larralde had a number of vehicles parked around the area. It did, in fact, look a lot more like a maintenance facility than like three aircraft mockups set up for a rehearsal.

  Larralde stood in that central mockup, though in practice he would be belted in along with the troops. Beside him stood a member of the Bolivarian Air Force, a Captain Monegas—large and beefy and surprisingly Irish looking—with a hand-held loudspeaker.

  “Tell ’em,” Larralde said.

  “All right,” said Monegas. He lifted the loudspeaker to his mouth and announced, “Though you’ll all have had antiairsickness pills, we’ll be flying low and rough. So this is what the inside of the aircraft is going to look and smell like.”

  Monegas pointed at the deck with one hand. He waved the hand slowly, from one side of the mockup to the other, as if following some unseen tide.

  “There’s going to be a sea of vomit there, about an inch thick if it were even. But it won’t be even. Every time the plane banks right, that sea is going to turn into a tide that washes left before receding. When we bank left; it’s going to roll right. All over your boots and maybe up to your ankles.”

  The air force officer began swaying from side to side. “You might think you have a strong stomach. You don’t; not for that. No one does. Yeah, yeah, you’ll have air sickness bags. They won’t help all that much. And for those of you with really strong stomachs, no matter. That first heady whiff of puke is going to have you shooting the contents of your guts all the way to the other side of the plane.”

  Monegas laughed, jerked a thumb forward, and added, “Which, by the way, is why the hatch to the cockpit is going to be sealed. Trust me; you don’t want your flight crew barfing, too.

  “Now some of you might have the bright idea of using your gas masks to seal off the stench. And it is a bright idea. How-the-fuck-ever, if you get a whiff of the puke in there with you, you will fill up those masks with vomit before you can get them off. And, even if you don’t, ninety percent of you are going to hurl just from air sickness. The masks, if anything, will make that worse.”

  The flier looked around at the twin rows of faces and was quite pleased to see how many of them had gone pale already. Indeed, a couple of them looked ready to throw up at the thought alone. And one girl, perhaps with more imagination than most of the troops, seemed to be following with her head and eyes an imaginary wave, rolling back and forth across the deck.

  “We’ll give you a signal,” Monegas continued, pointing at a wall mounted light, “a red light, when we’re five minutes out. That’s not normal procedure, no. We’re modifying procedure for you folks.

  “If you think that the ride was rough before that, you won’t have seen anything yet. It’s gonna get worse, boys and girls. A lot worse.

  “And then we’ll give you another signal, a green light, when we start to descend. That descent is going to be fast and rough, too. The next thing you know, you’ll be bouncing down the strip, puke flying up in big globules. Then your pilot will have reversed engines to try to stop as quickly as possible. Expect that the puke will fly and roll forward.

  “At that point, it is not improbable that one or two of you will have shat yourselves …”

  Lily Vargas, balancing on her lap a rucksack that was almost bigger than she was, with her chin resting of the pack’s frame, looked seriously queasy. Her eyes fixed on the air force officer recounting the horror-story-to-be, watching with terrified fascination as the flier bounced and swayed and made projectile vomiting motions.

  “Never flown before?” Carlos Villareal asked in a whisper.

  She gulped, shaking her head “no.”

  “Neither have I,” he admitted, patting her thigh for comfort’s sake. “But how bad can it be, really? People do it all the time.”

  “Not usually like he’s describing,” she answered.

  “It’ll be fine,” Carlos insisted. “Don’t worry so much.”

  Lily forced a smile, glancing at her squad mate, sitting calm and confident or, at least, unworried. After a moment, and for a change, the smile reached her eyes.

  Mao Arrivillaga tried to hide his smirk as the air force lecturer on his mockup, Number Two, to the right of center, did his best to terrify the new personnel. He was saved by a beep from his belt mounted radio and the words, “XO, Sergeant Major, Larralde here.”

  Mao pulled the radio to his mouth, covering the smirk, and announced he was monitoring. The XO likewise answered.

  “Yeah,” Larralde said, “we’re about finished here with the air force’s terror session. You guys?”

  Mao replied, “I think they rehearsed it. From what I can hear, what your guy is saying there my guy is within a few seconds of.”

  “Same here,” agreed the XO.

  “Good …standby …all right … .he’s talking …he’s describing bouncing down the strip …and the ‘plane’ has stopped. Out, here.”

  “We’re down!” Larralde announced. Maybe the air force guy needed the loudspeaker but he, by God, was a soldier and could do without the gizmos. “Tank team and unbuckling team; Go! The ramp is coming down.”

  Immediately the three-man crew of the AMX-13 raced to their vehicle. The engine cranked, stalled, a
nd then growled to life. While that was happening, four others, two from each side, all of them medics or supply personnel, ran to the vehicle and began loosening the buckles to the straps that held it down. Those were attached to only a rough simulation of the actual deck arrangements, but they would do. A seventh trooper, bearing a radio in his rucksack, went to stand next to his commander.

  All the others, thirty-five of them, stood, recovered their rucksacks, and put those on.

  “Infantry sections, Go!”

  The remaining troops faced aft and began filing out at the double Larralde watched them break into teams and disappear around the sides.

  As soon as all four of the unbuckling team were standing, Larralde and his radio bearer jumped onto the back of the AMX-13. They helped the others load up, pulling the men and women onto the vehicle by main strength. Larralde then said to the driver, “Go! The terminal.”

  As soon as the tank bumped its way down the cleated mock loading ramp to the ground, Larralde’s eyes began searching the area. The other “planes” were already unloading, first Mao’s, then the XO’s. The other teams from his were hoofing it—maybe a little uncertainly—for their initial objectives. So far, so good …so far, so …shit.

  Mao was the first dismounted soldier off of his plane, right behind the churning tracks of the AMX-13. He stopped once his feet hit the ground and began encouraging the troops onward. Like his commander, Mao’s eyes, too, scanned the developing deployment.

  “That bitch,” Mao said aloud, as soon as he saw the presidential limousine. “Next time Larralde takes my cousin on a date, he has my express permission to fuck her …in the ass …without grease. Imagine the cunt not telling me Hugo was going to be here.” The sergeant major shook his head with disgust. “What the hell has happened to family loyalty in this country, anyway?”