Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  This, thought Trim, is going to be a lot harder than it looked on the map. I wish we hadn’t had to give up Sergeant Collins to the naval arm; he’s one of the best builders we have.

  Middling short, clean cut, slender and generally fit, Trim held the rank of major. This was not because that was the regiment’s preferred rank for a company commander. Neither was it because it was the normal rank in his previous army, the British. Rather, the Brit was a major because he held a dual hat as both CO of engineers and regimental engineer. The other engineer, from the early days, Nagy, also a major, currently held the position of Combat Support Battalion Executive Officer.

  “Brilliant,” announced Trim’s first sergeant, Victor Babcock-Moore, a Jamaican émigré to Her Majesty’s realm, and later to the Royal Engineers. “Brilliant” was one of those words whose meaning could change entirely with intonation. Looking down at the impossibly steep slope of the Tiboku Range, north of the falls, Moore said it in a way that meant, more or less, “What the hell were they smoking when they told us to build a ramp to get around the falls?”That he also managed to put into his pronunciation an studied accent considerably more respectable than the one Trim grew up with alternatingly amused and irritated the Brit officer. At the moment, he was so irritated at the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of the mission that the accent was amusing.

  “What’s the maximum slope the hovercraft can take?” Trim asked.

  Babcock-Moore shook his head, replying, “Empty, maybe seven degrees …about sixteen or seventeen percent. Fully loaded, sir, not more than four and possibly as little as three degrees. We cannot dig that far down. Not this decade anyway.”

  “So we’re just fucked, as the Yanks would say?”

  The noncom shook his head. “Not necessarily, sir. They told us we could go to either side. There’s a small river on the other side that feeds into the Mazaruni just below the falls. Let’s go see if it’s wide enough to fit the hovercraft.”

  His commander in tow, Moore began a painful limp—he’d taken a very bad hit in the leg, in Punt, some years before—downhill toward their waiting air cushion vehicle.

  * * *

  “Maybe,” said Trim, loud enough to be heard over the hovercraft’s whine. In the distance, perhaps a mile away, could be heard the muted roar of the falls. “Maybe,” he repeated, “if we can clear away the rocks and widen the banks in two spots.”

  “Three spots, sir,” answered Moore. “That place where the river turns appears wide enough for the width, but will not handle the length.”

  “Fine,” the officer agreed, “three spots, then. Can we do it?”

  “Not without explosive,” the noncom replied. “Some of those boulders are huge and very well entrenched.”

  “No explosives. Orders.”

  “Forgiveness is often more easily obtained than permission. Besides, I brought the explosives anyway.”

  Trim gave Moore a dirty look. “The bloody Americans have contaminated you.”

  Babcock-Moore looked remarkably unrepentant as he responded, “I can’t deny the charge, sir.”

  South of Hill 890, Guyana

  In their own terms, they’d been well paid, the Indians who had paddled and poled Gordo and his three guards to Oranapai, a little spot of not very much on the Mazaruni, south of Hill 890 If they thought it strange that the men wearing too much clothing were also bearing frightful firepower, the Indians said nothing. Not our business, the chief had said, and who were they, humble fisherfolk, slash and burn agriculturalists, and hunter-gatherers, to question their chief Besides, people wearing the same kind of odd—and altogether too extensive—clothing had come to the village from time to time to treat the sick.

  “Stauer is out of his everyloving mind,” Gordo said, as he and his guards trekked afoot along the cattle trail leading from the river to the hill. His entire face curled into a sneer. “Well …maybe not …if I hire every healthy bloody man in Oranapai, and add in everyone living at The Sands, maybe then I can move seven days of food—ten tons, a couple of days of high quality grain ration for the mules—maybe two tons, two days of water, fourteen thousand liters—sixteen tons, to Hill 890. Shit, twenty-eight tons with about one hundred and thirty men, uphill, fifteen or sixteen miles as the trail winds Um …three tons, call it, every other day; these Indians look pretty scrawny. Eighteen days? Not a lot of time, but maybe.

  “But what the hell do I store fourteen thousand liters of water in?”

  “Get the engineers to dig a big hole and line it with plastic, sir?” suggested the chief of his guard, Corporal Cuddy, an Afro-Guyanese of imposing dimensions …which was why he’d been picked to guard.

  “Decent idea, Corp,” Gordo agreed, “except they’re already overtasked. I think, if any holes are to be dug, we’re going to have to do it.”

  Me and my big fucking mouth, Cuddy cursed. “Or maybe we could have the Indians port up some large water bladders,” the corporal suggested, in a last ditch effort to avoid excavating fourteen cubic meters.

  “No,” Gordo said. “Oh, I’ve got some, but we need those for several other projects. No, I think your first suggestion is well taken, Corporal Cuddy. A BFH it is. Consider yourself commended.”

  Ah, fuck me to tears.

  Tatiana’s Residence, Honey Camp, Guyana

  Under a broad sun hat, behind her Dolce & Gabbana shades, Tati’s face was blank, a complete mask to her inner feelings. She sat on the porch of her not insubstantial home, staring off at the trees that shielded it from the more wretched areas of the town.

  “Something troubling you, ma’am?” the white-jacketed Arun asked.

  Still, she said nothing, just shook her head slowly.

  “Well,” the Bihari continued, “if you need me for anything, I’ll be at the silver.” He turned to go.

  “Wait,” Tati said. The major domo paused and cocked his head expectantly.

  Tati chewed her lower lip for a moment, then said, “Please cancel all my appointments for today, and put tomorrow’s clients on notice that I might not be available tomorrow.”

  “Not feeling well, ma’am?” he asked with concern.

  “That’s not it, exactly,” she replied. “I just need to think.”

  “Very good,” he agreed. “Shall I have one of the girls bring you a drink—a nice gin and tonic, perhaps—and instruct the staff to leave you alone after that?”

  “You’re a treasure, Arun,” she replied. “Yes, a drink would be most welcome.” She stood and announced, “I’ll be in my own quarters.

  Tati’s house was, frankly, a five bedroom, not counting staff quarters, one woman, bordello. Three of those rooms were for short time appointments only. A fourth, somewhat larger and more ornate than the first three, was for use when someone hired her for an entire evening. The last, however, largest and best of all, she never used for business. That room was hers.

  And Joshua’s, she thought, as she entered it, if the silly man would ever come to me.

  Before sitting, Tatiana went and opened both sides of a louvered closet. She sighed, then went to sit in a chair facing that closet. On the left side, the regimental patch’s diving raptor facing outward from the left sleeve, were her dress whites. Just to the right of that were two pair of khakis, without shoulder insignia, cut generously in the chest to match her bosom. To the right of those were five pair of camouflaged, jungle-cut, battle dress. Past that were a like number of hospital whites. Below, on the floor, were her sensible shoes, running shoes, boots, and a fully packed rucksack. In between, on a shelf, lay her load-carrying harness, helmet, beret, broad-brimmed jungle hat, and a very old fashioned brown leather shoulder holster containing a .45 that the regiment had snuck away from her and inscribed, then presented back to her at her discharge party.

  At all of these she stared, sometimes focusing on one item, sometimes on the history implied by the entire group. Sometimes the memories raised brought a smile; at other times, tears.

  So tightly did Tati concen
trate that she didn’t hear the knock at first. Arun had to knock again, louder, and then cough.

  “Your drink, ma’am,” he said, when she finally looked up.

  “Do me a favor, Arun.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Bring me the whole bottle, three of tonic, and a bucket of ice.”

  Tiboku Falls Bypass (under construction), Guyana

  The boulder only stuck up above the streaming water by perhaps three feet. Sadly, this was also a couple of feet too much. Upstream and down, at three places, sections worked with pick and shovel to widen the river at its banks. Trim could hear the steady plink-plink-plink of the picks at work, even through the roar of the falls.

  “Vic,” Trim said, “we are so fucked if we get caught doing this.”

  Babcock-Moore kept his attention on the shaped charge he was carefully aligning on that particularly recalcitrant boulder. The shaped charge, weighing fifteen pounds, was composed of three-fifths RDX, slightly under two-fifths TNT, and a half a percent of calcium silicate, plus a small, two ounce booster charge to get things going.

  “Never interrupt a master at his work, sir,” Moore intoned, placing a twig under the thin metal frame supporting the charge, thus making an infinitesimal adjustment to the angle. “Besides, the regiment’s thirty miles away; they’ll never hear a thing.”

  “It’s that bastard Reilly who’s contaminated you, isn’t it, Vic?”

  “Colonel Reilly? Oh, no, sir, he doesn’t even like me. See …he can accept someone who was born a Brit and simply stayed that way, like you. But a self-made Brit like me? He’s friendly enough, but I’m an insult to his universe and he doesn’t know quite how to deal with it. His sergeant major, on the other hand …” After fiddling with the twig, again infinitesimally, Babcock-Moore clucked approval.

  Finally satisfied, Vic began to back up, limping, to a thick tree, reeling demolition wire behind him. “Would you care to join me, sir?” he asked, politely. “Regiment won’t hear a thing but I expect the charge will ring your chimes rather badly.”

  “Well, that was just delightful,” said Trim, his ears still ringing from the fifteen-pound blast that had gone off less than thirty meters away.

  “Wasn’t it just, sir?”Vic agreed happily. “And now we get the top off this little beauty …Sir, would you be so kind as to fetch the demo charges while I clear the hole?”

  “Wait a moment, would you, Vic?” Trim asked as the former prepared to hook his blasting machine up to the wires leading to the soon to be defunct boulder.

  “What for, sir?”

  Trim pointed in the direction of the hovercraft, almost invisible a quarter of a mile away. “You know,” he said, “I’m not entirely uncontaminated by the Yanks, either. And I say that if there is any possible chance of the top of that boulder hitting the hovercraft, it will. I think we ought to move it another quarter mile away.”

  “Oh, suit yourself, sir.”

  “And that’s why we occasionally need officers,” Babcock-Moore muttered, staring at the still smoking top of the boulder, which was sitting precisely where the hovercraft had been a mere ten minutes before.

  Trim tried very hard to restrain himself from saying it, but, “I told you so.”

  Oranapai, Guyana

  The other hovercraft, which could now make it around Tiboku Falls, showed up every day carrying between them twelve tons of supply. Every other day, the party of hired Indians returned from the dump being established at Hill 890 and picked up three tons of that. There was an additional pile built up by now, sitting on pallets but under tarps, just outside the village.

  “The water can go later,” Harry Gordon told Corporal Cuddy, both sporting rather badly blistered hands from digging the water hole. “Just make sure it stays full, if you and the boys have to hoof down to the river yourselves. Once Third Battalion arrives, they can take what they want to carry. You and your men get down to the river, put on civvies, and wait for a hovercraft to thumb a ride home.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Cuddy. And if you will please get your overweight, altogether too white ass out of here so I and the boys can rest?

  Kartauri Falls, Guyana

  In Guyana, what the map often showed as a clearly defined river, perhaps broken by rapids or falls, often turned out to be a series of more or less deep streamlets, interspersed with fairly flat islands, with rapids or falls being forced into existence by the constraint of those islands. Cazz had been with the regiment since the beginning, and in Guyana as long as anyone. He already knew the form of the Mazaruni River at the place he’d been ordered to cross over to the west.

  Cazz stood, his orderly beside him, in knee-deep, fast flowing, muddy water. The sun was still too low in the east to do much more than slightly illuminate the jungle-clad gloom.

  “Shit!” he muttered, looking at the falls to his left, the island to his front, and more placid stream to his right, or north. “It’s all shit. One fucking piece of shit stream after another. Fuck.” He turned to a half dozen runners tagging along close by. “Pass the word,” he said. “Move out.”

  Those runners, in teams of two, trotted off parallel to the river to give the word. Cazz waited, glancing first upstream, then down, and then up again. The first sign of the runners having reaching their objectives came from upstream. Cazz held out one hand to his orderly.

  “Glasses,” he ordered. The orderly, a Guyanese Bihari by the name of Agal Singh, passed them over. Singh had already roughly focused them for the distance to the head of the waterfall to the south.

  Cazz placed the glasses to his eyes, did a minor focus of his own—hate admitting it, but the eyes aren’t what they used to be—and scanned across the waterfall’s head. Three quarters of the way across, the glasses showed the dim shadows of the upper torsos of the point of Company C, one squad laden like pack mules, stepping across gingerly. The squad crossed while shifting hands over a guide and safety rope that had been strung by the Scout Platoon the day prior. Another took its place, then another.

  Looking then north Cazz could see rather more, though the men were still little more than outlines. Satisfied, Cazz, himself, at the forefront of his Company B and Headquarters and Support Company, and with most of the battalion’s staff trailing along, lifted one hand over his head and made a knifelike jab to the west.

  Headquarters and Support went first, piling the half dozen boats they’d dragged to the river with heavier equipment and outsized packages of supply, then pushing the boats out into the stream. A few men waded out and jumped in, as coxswains started engines and backed water. The men would help unload on the far side, then stay there to help unload future ferries, which, having fewer men, would bear more in the way of supply.

  A series of rafts, already loaded, waited for the boats to be freed up to tow them across.

  Cazz heard the sound of a bell and, turning, saw one of the two bell mares from his attached mule train leading her charges to the water’s edge and on. The mule driver—Guyanese Sergeant Henry Daly, from Service Support Battalion—rode the mare, which was otherwise unburdened. The mules in the section, while fully loaded, also had flotation devices to help them stay afloat.

  Being a “Marine no longer subject to reveille,” even if he was still so subject, if not as a Marine, Cazz had understood the critical importance of first in, last out, logistics-wise. Indeed, he’d lashed his staff mercilessly until he was satisfied with the load and crossing plans. In this respect, a river crossing was not so different from an amphibious landing on an undefended shore. That is to say:

  “Jesus, it’s going to be a bitch unfucking all this shit on the other side. And this is the easy part.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Il nous faut de l’audace, et encore de l’audace,

  et toujours de l’audace.

  —Georges Jacques Danton

  Quarters One, Glen Morangie Housing Area, Guyana

  (Teahouse of the August Nooner)

  (Which was approximately what the Ka
nji-written sign said, over the small spa’s double door: てつだいかな )

  Constructed of Guyanan Greenheart—a wood so strong that standard tools dulled, boring insects gave up in disgust, and Amundsen and Shackleton had sheathed their exploratory boats in it to defy the ice—the spa had been built by local labor to a vaguely Balinese design created by a Canadian company. Reilly had personally selected the trees from which the wood had come from some forest that had needed clearing to create the Karl Marx Impact Area. The greener tinted wood had gone into the floors, while the walls were more tanned. All sections of the highly polished wood displayed a fine grain to them.

  Reilly had been up and mostly on his feet for days, supervising both the presentation of a full regiment from his own small fraction of one, dispersal of key equipment, and nighttime digging of carefully camouflaged fortifications and bomb shelters; to say nothing of overseeing the installation of air raid sirens where none had ever been thought to be needed. He hadn’t seen his wife, Lana, except in passing, for all that time.

  And I am getting too old for this shit, he thought, stepping from the back porch to the walkway that led to the teahouse. God, everything hurts, my back, my legs, my feet …and my hair’s gotten so thin my scalp is frigging sunburned.

  Reilly wore sandals and a bathrobe. He had a towel slung over one shoulder. Gingerly—my feet hurt!—he walked the fifty yards to the teahouse, not even stopping to admire either the sculptures that graced the walk at odd intervals, the tiny arch of the wooden bridge over the small creek behind the main house, or even the graceful form of the teahouse itself. All he really cared about at the moment was getting his aching body in hot, jetting water and—hope against hope—that Lana might make it home in time, before he had to get back to duty.