Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  For the Countess, however, the next stop would be Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. Where we shall promptly develop engine difficulties, get towed to the southeast corner, and begin to pile up demurrage, no doubt much to the joy of Venezuelan port authorities. While that joy lasts.

  For Kosciusko knew, as the port authorities at Point Fortin did not, that the cargo containers coming aboard, marked with such innocent labels as “Ocean Buoys,” “Consumer Electronics,” “Acoustical Sensors,” and—unintentionally, because all too suggestively—“Deep Mining Adapters” was, in fact, a mix of purpose built, heavy duty, naval mines, heavy mortar shells, naval mine sensors and detonators, explosive-filled barrels, and adapters

  Which is why I am burying them as deep in the hold as I can get them.

  Watching the loading, Kosciusko frowned and pressed a button on the intercom.

  “Mrs. Liu, here, Skippah,” came the accented answer.

  “Little rough on that one, Mrs. Liu.”

  “Felt like cargo shift inside, Skippah. Dumbasfuckinglockscunts who packed it not know what they cocksucking doing, me think.”

  “All right, but watch it next time.”

  “No next time, Skippah. Last one being hauled aboard by Number Two clane now. But think bettah check that container I did. Maybe damage, you know?”

  “I know. We will.” Any real damage and we’d likely have wrecked half the port.

  “I start bulying new containahs undah o’d,” Mrs. Liu said.

  “Fine, Mrs. Liu,” Kosciusko answered. “Just make sure the ‘lumber’ stays near the top.”

  The legal and open captain, though effectively Kosciusko’s first officer, was Mrs. Liu’s husband. He clucked disapproval. “She not ta’k rike that in Chinese,” said Captain Liu. “We mally fo’ty fuckin’ years ago and she nevah ta’k rike that. You fuckin’ Amelicans contaminate nice gir’.”

  Mrs. Liu was over sixty, perhaps four foot, eleven in height, fairly rotund, gray, and—except in the eyes of her doting husband, not nearly a “girl.”

  “Yeah,” Kosciusko agreed. “But, you know, it’s not like she doesn’t have a natural talent for vernacular.”

  “Mebe so,” Liu conceded.

  “Did you get the package from Victor?” the captain asked.

  “By boat, via Fedex, twenty minutes ago. Boat come arong po’t side. Give me. I open and rook. Got instluctions for mines, adapters, bombs. Evelything. Must study awhire, though.”

  “Should have a few days.”

  San Francique, Trinidad

  This time the Bertram Sport Fisher, still under Baluyev’s command, came loaded for bear. This time, too, Lada came with them. She was still pretending to be a whore—not that it’s much of a pretense, she thought—but had agreed with Timur that it would be only a show. No, she wasn’t his girl, she was …We’ll talk more, and get to know each other, and think about it. But we will talk. I promise.

  Baluyev had, of course, a somewhat different take on things. Mosin, the best of my men, is happy. Better still, none of us have to eat Kravchenko’s personal campaign of culinary sabotage directed against the masses. Lada, along with whatever vices and virtues she may have, can cook.

  Still, I wish Konstantin were here. Then it would really be like old times.

  Airfield, Camp Fulton, Guyana

  There was a single, unarmed observer plane, a CH-801, almost hovering overhead in the updrafts. Two men manned it, an observer and the pilot, Warrant Officer Harley. It wouldn’t do anything to interfere with an attack, but might provide a minimum of warning.

  Konstantin paid no attention to either the early warning plane above, or to the nearby ground as four heavy transporters pulled up to the strip, behind the two hangar-parked Antonovs, painted in bright, civilian colors. Each heavy truck bore on its back a twenty foot container. Even as the Russian drove in the direction of the half dozen MI-17 helicopters being refueled on the other side of the strip, an engineer crane was lifting one of the containers from the back of the truck that bore it, while a backhoe waited to drag the thing into the shelter of the corrugated metal hangar.

  The MI-17s waited in a widely spaced and staggered line—technically it was called, “Staggered Trail Left”—as two fuel trucks leapfrogged around the formation, filling the tanks. Crew chiefs and maintenance personnel crawled over the helicopters, under the supervision of the Chief of Aviation Maintenance, Luis Acosta, walked from one bird to the next, sometimes asking a question or two, sometimes peering in.

  Acosta held the rank of chief warrant officer in the regiment (and, incidentally, Chief of Maintenance of AirVenture, Inc.) A former illegal immigrant to the United States, he’d been enticed into serving as part of what he’d thought at the time was a drug running scheme. Nearer to forty than thirty now, he was short, stout, and brown. Stiff hair, black in the main but shot with gray, jutted straight up from his hairline before rolling back over his head. When he’d decided to stay on, he’d convinced the other sixteen Mexicans who had worked for him to stick it out as well.

  Manuel, Acosta’s number two man, much taller and much lighter skinned than his chief, was deep in conference with the squadron commander, Mike Cruz, when Acosta reached them at the front of the helicopter formation. Manuel’s collar sported the silver bars, each with a single black square, of a much more junior warrant. Behind Cruz stood another man, a master sergeant, with the deep set lines of worry that said “loggie” written across his face.

  “I was just telling the colonel,” Manuel said, turning to Acosta, “that I don’t think number five’s going to make two trips; not without we break out the engine and figure out what’s causing it to run rough.”

  “Have we got a replacement engine?” Cruz asked Acosta.

  Luis nodded and said, “Yessir. But we’d have to do the switch out here. Be a lot faster and better than trying to do it where we’re going.”

  Cruz’s head turned to ask the master sergeant, “What have we got on number five, this lift, and what are we planning on carrying next?”

  “Mostly fuel pods, this time, sir,” the sergeant answered. “Armament packages and troops next lift. Gonna seriously fuck with the plan unless we have the fuel at the holding area to lift forward to Aguaro-Guariquito national park. Especially since we’re losing a lift to bring Colonel Boxer and an escort to Georgetown.”

  And, thought Cruz, despite Boxer’s protestations to the contrary, we’re really not sure how much time we have.

  Cruz knifed a hand toward Acosta. “Chief, get everything set up here to do a quick switch on the engine. She flies this lift, then we’ll break her down on the return.”

  Patrol Boat Number One, The Drunken Bastard,

  North of Tobago.

  The guns were stowed away below, while a purely nominal superstructure had been built up out of cheap lumber and styrofoam. Even the bow had been camouflaged, in an attempt to disguise the rakish lines that would have told any knowledgeable observer that this was no innocent fishing boat. In order to preserve the illusion, the old, eighty foot and change, ex-Finnish torpedo boat kept her speed down to a sedate twelve knots. A couple of fishing chairs and a railing completed the mask. None of that would take five minutes to undo.

  Cramped down below were Ryan and his entire team, minus the two left to guard the equipment at the safe house in Colombia. Also hidden below was a truly outrageous stockpile of arms, explosives, and other equipment. The real crew, mostly Chinese under Captain Chin, with Chong reverting to Chief of Boat, was also mostly hidden. The short and swarthy enough to be genetically indeterminate Bronto, and a few others, remained above.

  Chin consulted his GPS and then took a quick glance at the chart laid out before him. “Set course for two-eight-five,” he told the helmsman.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Bronto replied, “Our course is two-eight-five. He spun the wheel, cutting it hard left. Like a ballet dancer—a Margot Fonteyn in her later, but still graceful, years—the old girl twisted practically on her tail, heading away
from the rising sun.

  “Not so nimbly, Mister,” the Chinese skipper counseled. “We are a sporting boat, not a warship.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again.”

  “See that it does not.”

  Wineperu, Guyana, on the Essequibo River

  Stauer, possibly the only man in the regiment busier than Reilly and Gordo, stood in the early morning shade and wondered. Looking up, he thought, No, nothing to see from above. All is as innocent as a newborn baby. Never mind the mines—and mine fixin’s—we unloaded last night. His eyes dropped down to ground level as his head and body turned to scan the entire area. Nothing to see on land but those half dozen metal sheds, a few workshops, the chain link fence surrounding and a couple of watch towers. But those are normal and manned, as normal.

  Walking forward, toward the river and the rushing sound coming from Head Falls, to the south of the settlement and base, Stauer came to the boat line, holding a number of the LCM-6s that had brought the mines from Urisirima the previous night. There was a gap in that line, courtesy of the one boat heading to the Philippines. In the gap sheltered Namu, the killer minisub. Next to those, toward the falls, was the single Dvora Class patrol boat, which was altogether the wrong shape and size for a quick camouflage job to hold for very long. Boat crews puttered about with the landing craft and the Dvora, as usual for a warm but not yet hot morning. On the Dvora, the engine cowling was fully open with a pair of legs sticking up nearly vertically. That would be Kehre. Let’s hope he’s right about that engine.

  They’ll scatter on warning. A sudden chill went up Stauer’s spine. If we have warning. I wish Morales and Lada hadn’t been compromised.

  North, in the opposite direction from the falls, past the line of landing craft, and farthest from the settlement, more shed space jutted out over the water.

  Under the shed sat the ex-Yugoslav, ex-Montenegrin commando sub, Naughtius, on the surface of the stream. She could be seen from the land, if not the sky. Still, a landsman’s view wouldn’t have shown much. For, much like the Bastard, the Naughtius had received a face lift. They’d shortly—as soon as Naughtius and its disguise moved off—be moving one of the unserviceable hulls they’d gotten as part of the Naughtius deal into its place and putting in it a few fuel cans and twenty pounds of explosive.

  Around the upper portion of the hull, concealing it and the sub’s small sail, was built up a simulacrum of a cabin cruiser, prepared a couple of weeks prior and thrown up last night. It was, like the Bastard’s, a light construction, though unlike the patrol boat’s camouflage job, this one used merely lumber and painted canvas. It wouldn’t hold up in a storm, of course, but it wasn’t expected to, either. For that matter, the disguise was unlikely to hold up under close inspection. Still, all it had to do was survive the gentle voyage downstream, the coastal trip to the mouth of the Waini River and then about twenty-five miles up that course, to where Biggus Dickus Thornton and his former SEALs were building a hide for the submarine.

  Concealed on deck but within the canvas were half a dozen purpose-built seabed mines, and three times that in 240mm mortar shells. Four more mines and a half dozen shells were stowed below, along with the adapters, sensors, and detonators for all twenty-four shells.

  Won’t close the Orinoco indefinitely, but then again, we couldn’t win a long war.

  Airfield, Camp Fulton, Guyana

  The Antonovs lumbered down the strip, one at a time, then lifted and pulled to the west. They’d cross Brazil and then Colombia, staying as far the hell as possible away from Venezuela. Each of the planes carried a precisely equal load in their cargo bays. This consisted of four ex-Yugoslav M-70 naval mines, eight thirty-gallon barrel mines, and eleven 240mm mortar shells, plus the detonators, sensors, and adapters for the barrels and shells, and a hundred and twelve flat steel plates. Everything was strapped down tightly, and nothing was armed yet. Indeed, the barrels and mortar shells wouldn’t even have their suites put in until the planes eventually took off from their interim destination.

  “So where the fuck are we actually going, sir?” the copilot of Number One in the flight asked.

  “Well, since we’ve taken off, I can tell you,” the pilot replied. “We’re heading for the Isla del Rey, in the Bay of Panama. There’s a—”

  “There’s an old abandoned airfield there, big enough for us. But, Chief, I’ve looked at that. There is nothing there but the airfield, a couple of tiny villages, and some rich gringo vacation housing. No control tower. No refuel facilities—and we’re going to need that to get off again. Nada.”

  “Fuel will be provided,” the pilot assured his second.

  “By what? By whom?”

  “Guy named Leo Ross. One of ours, First Battalion, from way back. Got invalided out of the regiment, took his rehab in Panama, and settled down with one of the local girls. He’ll deliver about ten tons’ worth, on call, by boat. “After that, we wait.”

  “And where do we live, in the interim? If I’d wanted to sleep in the jungle I’d have joined the Army.”

  The pilot jerked his head back. “We live back there. If that’s all right with you, I mean.”

  State House, Georgetown, Guyana

  The State House, which was the name given to the official residence of the president of Guyana, was more a collection of additions than a cohesive structure on its own.

  Still, not exactly a hovel, thought Boxer, descending down the left side door of the MI-17 that had brought him to the grounds of the presidential palace. Behind him, eight mufti-clad men of one of von Ahlenfeld’s teams slept, or read, or stared at the opposite side of the helicopter, as the mood took them. They had no rifles or other, heavier, arms, though each man carried one pistol under his light, dress jacket.

  Boxer was pleased to see that the captain who met him by the edge of the helipad was in battle dress, rather than the comparatively garish and useless white jacket and green trousers of the Guyanan Defense Force dress uniform. Boxer was reasonably certain that the battle dress was because of the still ongoing rioting, sniping, arson, and not infrequent simple crime that was still consuming the capital.

  Turning his attention back to the State House, he thought, In fact, the white walls and green tile roof are really quite attractive.

  “The president will see you immediately,” said the captain, holding on to his soft jungle hat lest it be blown away by rotor wash. Boxer had his own, not dissimilar, headgear clenched in one hand.

  “Interesting that you should say that,” said Guyana’s current chief of state, Mansour Bharrat Paul, resting his chin on interlaced fingers. “Yesterday, the Venezuelan ambassador’s secretary called mine, requesting an appointment ‘at my earliest convenience.’ I begged off until next Tuesday. Was that a mistake, do you think, Colonel Boxer? Was he trying to warn me?”

  A coup d’etat in the offing he’ll believe, Boxer thought, and look to us to save him from. If I’d told him of an invasion from Venezuela, the corrupt, soulless son of a bitch would be legging it trippingly for the Venezuelan embassy, trying to bargain for a good price for his ownership interest in the country.

  Boxer shook his head. “I don’t know, Mr. President. It could have been innocent enough. Or he could have more solid information than I do. In any case, that’s another reason why I’d …or why the regiment would …like to supplement your security forces with some of our people. Nothing too ostentatious, just a dozen or so …mmm …security specialists, plus a cook. Enough to give you a modicum of protection against any form of military coup. After all, our mutual association has been quite fruitful, ever since your election.”

  Which is bullshit; it’s been fruitful ever since you discovered you needed us to keep you from having to learn to speak Dutch. But that’s all right, I bullshat you about the possibility of a domestic military coup; why balk at a little politeness?

  “Where are your people, your ‘security specialists’?” Paul asked.

  “Eight of them came with me, Mr. Pr
esident,” Boxer replied. “They’re in the helicopter, waiting for word to dismount. The other four—actually five, counting a cook—are coming by surface road, and should be here sometime this evening. The eight are civilian clad. Their uniforms and equipment will be coming in the Land Rovers that are currently on the road. Do you have quarters for them?”

  The president’s dark brow wrinkled. “No place that wouldn’t be inconveniently mixed with my own guard force. Could they, perhaps, squeeze into an apartment?”

  “A thousand square feet and at least one bathroom and kitchen with refrigerator would suffice, sir.”

  “Ah. Well, they can have the former First Lady’s quarters. They’re almost twice that size and they’ve been open since I evicted the useless, self-absorbed bitch.”

  Baylor Rehab Center, Houston, Texas, United States

  One of the better features of using a woman, especially an attractive one, to perform physical therapy on a badly injured man was, I’ll be damned if I show how much this hurts. I’ll be doubly damned if I quit, or even ask for a break, in front of her. Especially since she’s been pretty curt with me ever since Panama. Hell, it’s not my fault she got enticed into a slave coffle, even if I am a man.

  The first thing they’d done with Kemp’s spine, after arrival, was subject him to enough noninvasive scanning, X-raying, etc., to make him glow in the dark. At least he thought so. This was followed by a long session where the surgeon, an Indian chap from Mumbai, explained the options and gave his recommendation: “We’d be best off by going in and fusing the vertebrae. No, it’s not without risks but it’s the best chance, in your case, for an approximately normal and active life.”