Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  Kemp had answered, “I laugh at risk,” but then spent a very lonely night worrying about the prospect of permanent, and below the injury, total, paralysis. Finally, he decided, What the hell; if it doesn’t work I can always eat my gun.

  Fortunately, the surgery worked, with no more side effects than quite a lot of pain, since Kemp insisted on keeping the painkillers to the bare, tolerable minimum. But following the surgery …

  That’s when the real pain began.

  I don’t know what kind of connections Dr. Joseph had here, Elena thought, to set this up for me, but they must have been simply awesome. That, or the regiment is stroking one amazingly large check to Baylor to get them to give me all this personal attention.

  Not that it isn’t hard, too.

  Hard barely began to describe it. Afternoons, she studied and practiced here, for her morning supervised sessions with Kemp or, less often, one of the other patients. Weekends, she drove to Fort Hood to take classes there. Nights, she took more classes here.

  Tiring, yes, but I’ll get my degree in under two years. Joseph said he’ll go to the wall, after that, to get the regiment to commission me. I believe he will, if I do my part.

  The proof of which will not be just the degree in physical therapy, but Sergeant Kemp back on duty.

  Today’s date with the Grand Inquisitor involved the use of two canes. This wasn’t for his back, though it wouldn’t hurt that, but to keep his legs from atrophying. It was a struggle maintaining such an artificial balance while moving.

  And it’s a bitch, thought Kemp. I never thought I’d be using even one cane, ever. To have to use two, and badly, at my age …a bitch. A goddamned fucking …oh, oh …

  * * *

  “Shit!” exclaimed Elena, as she shot from one side of the small therapy suite to the center to catch Kemp before he fell over completely. She deftly dodged the one wildly waving cane on her side, before tucking herself up under Kemp’s shoulder. She grunted at the strain of holding up a man who probably weighed two and a half times what she did.

  “Thank you,” Kemp whispered, in lieu of what he really wanted to say. He used the girl’s temporary brace to get the cane set firmly on the theoretically nonskid floor. When he was confident he wouldn’t fall over immediately, he told her so.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Enough for one day, anyway. You wait and don’t move while I get your chair set up behind you.”

  HQ, Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS),

  Bogot·, Colombia

  The DAS had odd responsibilities, ranging from foreign intelligence, to immigration control. Though it had a number of branch offices, the main office, the headquarters, sat in Bogot·, not far from the intersection of Carrera 27 and Avenida Calle 19.

  The building, itself, was some twelve stories high, exclusive of basements, and composed of largely undecorated, pale concrete and banks of glass windows. The building had once been subjected to a drug cartel ordered bombing attack—over a half ton of high explosives, hidden in a bus—which attack had killed or injured more than six hundred people. Security around the place remained tight, even decades later.

  In the bowels of the place, behind secure gates and armed guards, in a small, cramped and overstuffed office, a military officer, one Lieutenant Colonel Baretto Gomez, went over a partial intelligence summary from the day prior The folder containing the summary was labelled, “FARC.”

  It’s always a day late, fumed Barreto, a day late getting here and a day late getting disseminated. I’ve told them I need more space. I’ve told them I need a larger staff, but “nooo, the budget won’t support it.”

  Resigned to what could not be helped, Barreto closed the folder he’d been working on and opened another, labelled, “ELN.” Three folders beneath that one lay another. That one was marked, “Venezuela.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night,

  and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  La Linea, Venezuela

  There were fifteen unarmed men in the party, along with twice that many armed ones, plus one. Among the unarmed men, twelve were black and wore the field uniforms of the Guyanan Defense Force. The other three were brown and wore Venezuelan camouflage. Half the armed men, significantly, carried an extra weapon.

  The hands of the armed men were free. The unarmed were bound, hands behind them. Frightened, with reason, they’d been hauled from cells in Yare Prison two days before, brought by boat to the coast, then disembarked by night. The next morning, unfed but dressed in odd uniforms, their guards had marched them through the jungle, along narrow trails, to the little town of la Linea. Only one man had tried to break away. When the guard had run him down and dragged him back they’d beaten the man unconscious, then draped his body over the shoulders of the largest and the strongest of the prisoners.

  From la Linea the group had moved south three or four miles, carefully skirting the Guyanan frontier. The leader checked a GPS to make sure that the incident would take place on their side of the border.

  At the final stop—which would prove very final for fifteen men—they’d split up, two guards and one prisoner to a team, while that extra man, the leader of the group, positioned them exactly as he wanted them. Each prisoner was forced to his knees once that position was reached. The still unconscious prisoner was laid on the ground.

  “Back off a little,” said the leader, to two of the guards. He waited until they were far enough away to be sure that there would be no powder residue on the prisoner’s GDF uniform. When he was satisfied, the leader said, “Good, now kill him. Aim for the stomach first, then the heart.”

  “Please,” the prisoner begged. “No.” The guard, chosen, like the rest, for that special mix of Bolivarian fanaticism and sociopathy, ignored the plea. He raised his rifle and fired, bending the prisoner over with the first shot, then stretching him out on the ground with the second.

  With the jungle reverberating with the sounds of sustained fire, the monkeys set to howling even as brightly colored birds flocked into the air, and helpless men fell dead.

  “But why?” asked the last of the prisoners.

  “So Hugo can make a speech, turning some of you into aggressors and others into martyrs, to support his plans,” answered the leader of the party. “Now kill him.”

  “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” (SCIF), Camp Fulton, Guyana

  The night was growing old, even the monkeys were tired of howling. Boxer entered the SCIF, got himself passed through by the guards, and headed for Bridges’ office. Then again, normal working hours were pretty much in abeyance for the time being. Boxer’s boots click-click-clicked past offices, most of them full. Halfway, he met Warrant Officer Corrigan. And, Sure as hell, her smile does light the world.

  And, speaking of lighting up the world, my new toy from China is here. Give it to the air defense folks? Nah, there’s only the one for now, not even enough time to test it and have a couple of dozen more built. And for what the chinks demanded for that one-off job …scary. Well, the price will go way down if we order fifty or sixty, as I’d like to.

  There being no immediate contracting or legal problems to deal with, Bridges was wearing his S-2 hat this evening. Truth be told, that had been his most pressing duty for a couple of months now. For the moment he was worrying about an odd discrepancy in the reports from Colombia.

  Though I’m going to have to consider suing the United States for cancelling the rotation that’s supposed to be here about now. Close call; never really considered the possibility of an unpredictable riot amounting almost to an insurrection being sufficient cause to cancel. And the contract is ambiguous. Hurricane, flood, or earthquake? Good cause. Is a riot a natural disaster? Force majeure? In a place like this it just might be. But if they cancelled because they know we might be hit …

  “Any new word from Colombia on when we might get hit?” asked Boxer, walking unannounced into Bridge
s’ office.

  Bridges suppressed a mild annoyance. Boxer’s abruptness was something one just had to get used to. He shook his head, no, then added, “But I’ve found something odd, a chronological mismatch. Took me a while to catch it,” he added, a bit embarrassed.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well …Colombian Intel told you we would have any pertinent information ‘as soon as available,’ right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they define ‘as soon as available’? Because I think they’re defining it as ‘as soon as we get it and massage it for a while.’ At least, I can’t understand the discrepancies between when they’re reporting a couple of things and when they actually happened.”

  Boxer raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

  “Remember when Ryan’s team was attacked by a big croc in the Gulf of Venezuela?”

  Boxer chuckled in an ‘All’s well that ends well’ way. “Sure.”

  “Well, we know that there was an explosion, and that there had been a number of distress flares fired, right? The Columbian border folks duly reported that to higher. But it didn’t get disseminated for a full forty-eight hours. I didn’t catch it because it was old history, by the time you got their agreement. But, you know, paranoia is all in the job description so I started digging back.”

  “Then, once I found that, I looked at a couple of other things. Morales reported a test sailing of one of their frigates. Colombia noted that …two days later. Some jets, Canadair-built F-5’s, moved from their normal base to Ciudad Bolivar. I found that one on line, in a chatroom. Colombia Intelligence reported the move, again, about forty-eight hours later than it happened.”

  Boxer swallowed, nervously. “You mean they might …”

  “Yes,” Bridges confirmed. “It’s entirely possible that the Venezuelans have a forty-eight hour head start on what we think we know of them.”

  Tomas de Heres Airport, Ciudad Bolivar

  There were military police thick on the ground, Larralde was pleased to see, all around the loading area. The C-130’s were parked in a line but at an angle. Under the lights of the airfield, something over a dozen F-5’s were being prepared and loaded with ordnance. For a wonder, all four of the Bolivarian National Air Force’s C-130’s were working and waiting, with engines running, while the busses pulled up with Larralde’s troops. Behind the busses came the tank transporters, hauling the two AMX-13/90 light tanks going with them. The tanks’ crews rode the busses.

  Shit, thought Larralde, stepping out of his Tiuna and looking upward to read the numbers, “4951,” just in front of the tail, I never expected so much good fortune or I’d had asked for another tank and more engineers.

  “You know, sir,” said Mao Arrivillaga, “if you had planned on this, we could have maybe brought another couple of tanks, or some more engineers.”

  “Well, who would have expected …” Larralde began, then stifled the thought. Instead, he said, “No matter, Sergeant Major, the plan calls for bringing in several additional pallets of supply, mostly wire and ammunition, and another Tiuna, if there were to be an extra bird.” Hah, gotcha.

  Carlos Villareal stood and pulled his own pack over his shoulders, then lifted Lily’s off her lap, reversed it, and held it out for her while she stood. She smiled, gratefully, then turned around herself to slip her arms through the straps. She couldn’t help but grunt with the strain as Carlos released the thing to rest on her shoulders. He gave an affectionate laugh and then patted her on the rump, a move that earned him a dirty look.

  “Come on, querida,” he said, turning toward the front where a gap had appeared as those nearest the door moved out in a sort of reverse spring. “Mao will skin us and roast us if we slow down the load.”

  One after the other, they filed down the bus’s narrow central aisle, then faced right at the stairs to dismount. Laden like mules, as they were, the walk down the few steps to the ground was more of an awkward stagger. The load had formed up outside, even as part of another bus load filled in from the left. And air force sergeant was waiting in the darkness with a lit light wand—a flashlight with a translucent conical projection attached—held in each hand.

  And then Sergeant Major Arrivillaga was there, shouting, “You faggots! Get your asses into two—count ’em, two, lines, in exactly the order you’re supposed to load in. That’s right, just the way we rehearsed.”

  El Libertador Air Base (AKA Palo Negro Airport),

  Maracay, Venezuela

  By the direct airbase lighting, as well as the more diffuse light coming from the city of Maracay, less than a kilometer to the north, many more than a dozen SU-30’s—“Flankers,” in NATO parlance –waited in lines while being serviced and armed at this, Venezuela’s largest and most important aerial base Fuel trucks passed the line of jets, one by one. As each was filled it moved off to the ammunition area to be loaded with anything up to eight tons.

  The first four jets to be fully prepared moved via the taxiway to one end of the thirty-one hundred and seventy meter concrete strip. There, to save fuel and wear and tear, they shut down engines. They would restart in time to launch and launch to time their arrival over central Guyana with that of the F-5’s and with the touchdown of the C-130’s at Cheddi Jagan airport. The Flankers had a particular mission, though, in contrast to the general support the F-5’s were to give to the Army and Marines. They were, so the wing commander had told his pilots, to “smash the clandestine imperialist outpost one hundred and forty kilometers southwest of Georgetown, the place the gringos called, ‘Camp Fulton.’”

  Tumeremo Airport, Tumeremo, Venezuela

  The town had never been large enough to justify the roughly three kilometer long airstrip that had been laid out, and partially constructed, roughly three miles south of the town center. Nor was there anything inside Venezuela within any reasonable range to have justified that kind of expense. The place could only have been intended as an advanced base for an invasion or occupation. And, had Chavez not felt pushed by events, the invasion probably would have waited until the completion of the strip.

  No matter, what there was, finished, would do. So, at least, thought the commander of the air force’s single squadron of Brazilian-built Embraer 312 Tucanos. Since, at max load, we need only three hundred and eighty-one meters to take off, and less to land, this will more than do.

  And the Army’s helicopters, he thought, looking north to where two—hmmph, should have been three—MI-26’s and thirty-two MI-17’s had already begun loading troops from the 5th Infantry Division. The MI-17’s, except for markings, were indistinguishable from those owned by M Day, Inc. The MI-26, though getting to be an old design, had begun life as, and still was, the most capable heavy lift production helicopter in the world. Only one helicopter, also Russian, had ever beaten it and that one had never made it into production. Each of the 26s was loading not one, but two, Cadillac-Gage armored cars.

  Those helicopters were in two groups of an MI-26, sixteen MI-17’s, and two pair each of late model Hind gunships. These last were updated with the latest in western avionics, and were fully night fighting capable.

  The squadron commander consulted his watch. H minus three. Another two hours and fifty-four minutes. I hate waiting.

  Tomas de Heres Airport, Ciudad Bolivar, Guyana

  Strapped in to a starboard side bench seat, swaying as the heavy bird lumbered down the strip with its engines straining for its takeoff run, Larralde took his eyes from his watch and did some quick calculations. H minus two hours and seventeen minutes. That meets the standard.

  The plane gathered speed quickly. In a few brief moments he found himself pressed down into the bench, his heart beating fast, not with fear but with the adventure. Then they were airborne, and on the way.

  MV Manuel de Cespides, Demerara River mouth,

  by Georgetown, Guyana

  In the east, there was not yet the first glimpse of dawn.

  The ship was docked about three hundred meter north of Stabroek M
arket, by a very large open-sided metal structure, full of the kind of equipment—forklifts, carts, small tractors, one would expect to find somewhere near docking facilities. Conde’s mission, and that of his Marines, included securing that structure and the equipment. He didn’t need it for himself or his people—they were all lightly equipped. But follow on echelons would need it.

  Those follow on echelons, Conde knew, would be about a day’s sail behind. He didn’t much like the idea of being out here, on his own, for an entire twenty-four hours.

  On the other hand, I like the idea of a contested landing even less. Everything is a tradeoff, I suppose.

  Lieutenant Colonel Conde was standing on the bridge, in sailor’s clothes, when the customs man from the port came alongside and aboard. This was not unexpected. Nor had Conde failed to prepare; two of his beefier noncoms, with hidden pistols, were waiting with him.

  Drake barely got two words out before Conde ordered, “Take him. Don’t hurt him if you can avoid it.” Turning back to Mr. Drake, he said, “There is no reason to be hurt, señor. My men will take you below until you can safely be released.

  “And viva the Bolivarian Revolution, señor, which, after long centuries, has come to liberate her lost sons!”

  Looking at the barrel of a pistol stuck in his face, and hearing Spanish spoken authoritatively, Drake’s first thought was, O, dis be de bad t’ing, quickly followed by, Elizabeth, meh gyal! Her people; they got be warned!

  Even as Drake had the thought, the masses of Marines previously hidden in the hold and in containers began emerging and descending the gangways. Under the streetlamps he saw them begin to split up into squads, platoons, and in one case, a full company. That last, arms at high port, began to trot in the direction of Camp Ayanganna, on the northern quadrant of the city, their sergeants calling out the cadence punctuated by their booted feet.