Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  Miraflores Palace, Caracas, Venezuela

  Hugo was livid. He stormed around his conference room cum command center, swearing, throwing things, kicking over chairs, verbally abusing the staff.

  His didn’t stop with mere verbal abuse. Throwing a book at Admiral Fernandez, he cursed, “You fat little bung boy; it was your job to stop this. I am a laughing stock and it is all your fault. Piece of shit!”

  Hitting Fernandez in the head with a book wasn’t quite satisfying enough. Chavez stormed to the admiral’s chair, lifted him bodily from it, and began slapping his face. “Why”—slap—“didn’t”—slap—“your overpriced”—slap—“fucking navy”—slap “stop this before it happened?” Slap, slap, slap. Chavez let go of the material of the sailor’s uniform, letting him fall back, stunned and humiliated, to his chair.

  “What the fuck happened, anyway? How did someone put mines in our waters?”

  The intelligence chief, an air force general, raised a hand timidly. “I think I know, Mr. President …some of it, at least.”

  “So spill your guts, you incompetent faggot!”

  The general went down the list of what he did know, two aircraft that had done some complicated maneuvers over Lake Maracaibo and the Gulf, a gringo-born boat pilot who had materialized in Trinidad and phoned in an appalling story.

  “But I don’t know what mined the Orinoco, Mr. President. The Coast Guard has been watching that and they report nothing.”

  “The coast guard reports nothing,” Chavez parroted, with a sneer. “And that tells us precisely what? They used a submarine. But you air force pussies told me both of the submarines in Guyana were destroyed, didn’t you?”

  “The pilot said it went up in a blast, sir,” the intel chief insisted. “Maybe the gringos …”

  “Bullshit!”

  Chavez turned his attention back to the pale and trembling admiral. “And what about the ship that mined us?”

  “Interned in Trinidad, Mr. President. Out of our reach.”

  “And the airplanes?”

  The intel chief gulped. “Interned in Colombia.”

  “I want those fuckers! I’ll personally give the commands to the firing squads that shoot them.”

  Nicholas—the pre-hanging Saddam Hussein lookalike—coughed and spoke up. He wasn’t shy about it; after all the fiasco with the ports was none of his doing.

  “I checked with the legal department, Hugo. Both Trinidad and Colombia are perfectly correct in not turning over those people to us.”

  “I don’t give a shit about the law,” Chavez snarled. “I just want those pirates dead.”

  Nicholas shook his head. Not going to happen. Not without another war we can’t handle.

  Chavez nodded, forcing himself back to a degree of calm he really didn’t feel. “How,” he asked of Fernandez, “are you going to get the ports cleared?”

  “I don’t have a single minesweeper, sir,” the admiral answered, gulping. For the moment, fear of being stood against a wall and shot overcame rage at the treatment Chavez had meted out to him. “And divers are not good risks for this. We have considered just filling a hull with wood and driving it back and forth to clear lanes. The problem is that we think—really, we’re sure—that these mines are on counters. Just because a ship goes over a stretch of sea and there’s no explosion doesn’t mean there isn’t a mine still there, waiting.”

  “Who does have minesweepers?”

  Again, Fernandez gulped. “Cuba, and they’ve promised to send us whatever they have …in a month or two when they can get one, maybe two, ready for sea.”

  “We’ll start to starve before then, Hugo,” Nicholas said. “We’ll start to starve long before then. Oh, Hugo, we’re sitting on more oil than we could ever use ourselves, and we refine enough gasoline to export three or four hundred thousand barrels a day …but we can’t eat it.”

  Chavez sneered. “Fuck your doom-mongering, Nicholas. “Now here’s what I want. General?” Chavez looked at his army chief, Quintero.

  “Sir?”

  “I want you to move substantial forces to the Colombian border. Everything that’s not in Guyana or scheduled to go. Heavy on the tanks. And I want them to look threatening, but I don’t want them to cross.”

  General Quintero shook his head, not understanding.

  “What I want them to do, General, is provide cover for the FARC freedom fighters on our side of the border. But to them, once the troops are all in position, I am going to say, ‘Go fuck with the Colombian army, or these tanks will destroy you.”

  “See how the bastard Colombians like it when we punish them for sheltering those pirates.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The human factor will decide the fate of war,

  of all wars. Not the Mirage, nor any other plane,

  and not the screwdriver, or the wrench or radar

  or missiles or all the newest technology and electronic

  innovations. Men—and not just men of action,

  but men of thought. Men for whom the expression

  ‘By ruses shall ye make war’ is a philosophy of life,

  not just the object of lip service.

  —Ezer Weizman, On Eagles’ Wings

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

  “You’re late,” Stauer said.

  Morales nodded, without any appearance of remorse. “We had to duck some of those nimble little fucking attack aircraft they use, about a half a dozen times between here and Wineperu.”

  “Fair enough,” the colonel agreed, then explained why he’d wanted them to risk coming, what he wanted them to do, and with what.

  “What’s the wind pattern like at the airport?” Che Morales asked of Stauer. With them were Boxer and, because of his legal background, Bridges. Between Morales and Simmons, and the three regimental officers, on a table sat something that looked like a cross between a tripoded, short barreled heavy machine gun and a refugee from a science fiction movie set. The something was a Chinese-made ZM-87, a laser blinder.

  “Easterly,” Boxer replied. “You two are going to have to work your way around to the east, to catch the transports as they come in.” His mouth twisted up on one side. “You may have to work your way back around to the west, again, once they decide to screw ease of landing and come in from a direction where they don’t know there’s a laser waiting. For that matter, the shorter cross strip may require some attention. You’re going to have to give the impression of being four or five laser projector teams, rather than one diligent one.”

  “I dunno,” Simmons muttered. “Seems …dirty to me.”

  “It would be illegal,” Bridges said, nodding, “if you were to use it to try to permanently blind someone. But, since you’re going to use it at a range that will only temporarily blind them, so that they crash and become permanently dead, I think it’s fine.”

  To Morales, no less than Simmons, the whole idea of attacking a man’s eyes made him literally queasy; this, from two men who had no real objection to taking human life for a good purpose. But eyes? The idea of being blinded was so much more objectionable than the thought of being killed to them that that objection extended even to the enemy.

  “You can’t just give us some missiles to backpack?”

  Stauer shook his head. “We could, but you couldn’t carry enough to matter and no shoulder-launched missile has the range this does, or is as hard to spot the launch of as this thing is. The Venezuelans aren’t going to see much, if anything.”

  Morales’ lip curled with distaste. “Where did you come up with it?”

  Boxer replied, “There were, supposedly, twenty-two of these made by NORINCO, back in the Nineties. So far as I know, that was, in fact, how many were made. But they made more parts than that, before shutting down production.

  “I went to Wicked Lasers—those are the guys who make the really dangerous laser ‘pointers,’ some of them by disassembling laser projectors—and asked them to get hold of enough of tho
se parts to build us anywhere up to fifty of the things. They got one thrown together, tested, and sent to us, along with some extra power packs, before the invasion started.”

  “They’ll start wearing shades,” Morales objected.

  Boxer shook his head, no. “This thing fires pulses on two different frequencies. A set of glasses that protect the eyes from both …you couldn’t see through them anyway.”

  “Oh.” No salvation there, I suppose. “What about civilian chartered flights?”

  “It’s a war zone,” said Bridges, “and a blockade has been declared. If they fly, they die, and it’s all on them.”

  Stauer harrumphed. “Your objections are noted, Che. If you have no more questions …?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Fine. You and Simmons are to take this thing, along with your usual gear and anything else you deem necessary and can port. You will be transported by surface to the Essequibo River, west of Mount Arisaru. Your transportation will have a rubber boat to take you across to the east bank. If you think it might be useful, we’ve got a couple of bicycles you can have. From there you will hump or cycle—avoiding all contact with anyone, friend or foe, and moving only by night, until you link up with a Captain—you guys might know him as Sergeant—Byng, at Dalgin on the Demerara River. From there, Byng will lead you to a point approximately four miles east of Cheddi Jagan Airport. There, you are take whatever actions are required to shut down the airport to all cargo traffic, displacing as appropriate. Byng does not know what you will be carrying and is not to be allowed to find out before you have used it.

  “Good luck and Godspeed.”

  Simmons, still disgusted, answered, “God’s not gonna smile on us for doing this.”

  Intersection Issaro Road and Bartica-Potaro Road, Guyana

  Because Reilly’s location was as secret as they could make it, they really couldn’t broadcast via radio. For the troops, this meant landline communications from regiment, to battalion, and then on down to company, platoon and squad. To Reilly, it was highly suboptimal from a command and control point of view, but …

  “It beats the shit out of the Venezuelan Air Force pounding the shit out of us night and day. And we’re physically close enough to intervene if they ever do try an airmobile assault on what’s left of base.”

  Reilly’s First Battalion had been reinforced with Cazz’s battalion’s armored car section, two platoons of engineers plus the engineer company’s headquarters and bridging troops, the entire twelve-gun artillery battery, a platoon of air defense troops with a mix of missiles, towed light ADA guns, and all four of the self propelled guns, plus their normal attachments from the service support battalion, and a remotely piloted vehicle section flown by the intelligence types. Those last were attached to Reilly, but not co-located. Rather, they were back at a bunker by the Camp Fulton airfield.

  For that matter, most of his trains, plus the headquarters and support troops, were back at Camp Fulton and its environs, doing their damndest to look like an entire combat regiment for the Venezuelan Air Force. The VAF still evidenced an interest, daily, in what was going on there. They also took a certain interest in killing whatever could be seen amidst the ruins. The job of being bait had never been an easy one.

  The RPVs provided much less of a clear picture than one would have hoped for. Initially, they’d been just fine, providing real time intelligence on the build up at Kaieteur Airport and the area around the falls. But after losing two—and the supply was quite limited—to no discernable reason, the MI commander had suggested that the Venezuelans were interfering with electronic controls. It might or might not have been true, but, since the supply was so limited, they’d adopted a different approach. Now, instead of flying the things around, they sent them out preprogrammed to fly a particular route, and record what they saw, then return to base. At base, control for the landings was resumed, but with very low power settings on the control stations. This meant more or less lengthy delays.

  Not a problem though, Reilly thought, studying his maps and comparing them to the images brought back by the RPVs and hand carried to him by one of the intelligence rats Not a problem because nothing moves really fast in the jungle. We know there are two understrength battalions, plus support, at the Falls, and another one strung out in little penny packets all the way back to Venezuela. I can’t get at them; no frigging roads and the terrain and vegetation are impossible for my vehicles. And they don’t have the transportation to support any more than a company near the road to Lethem.

  “I’ll start to worry when I see one of those planes unload a few hundred mules,” he muttered.

  “What was that, sir?” Sergeant Major George asked.

  “Huh? Was I thinking out loud?”

  George smiled. “You might say that. But what was it you said?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking that they can’t support any force big enough to worry about at any distance from Kaieteur Falls unless they get animal transportation.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” George disagreed.

  “How’s that?” Reilly asked.

  “Well …Brazil’s taking a pretty neutral, hands off approach, no?”

  Reilly shrugged. “Sure. So?”

  “What’s to prevent Venezuela from renting every private Brazilian truck that’s for rent within five hundred miles of Lethem, then taking them across the border, full of food and Class IV?” Class IV was milspeak for construction and barrier materials.

  “Now there’s a scary thought,” Reilly said. “But I haven’t read anything in the intelligence summaries to suggest it’s happening.”

  George shook his head. “Neither have I. And it may not be—operative word—yet. But eventually?”

  “Yeah. Crap. What do we do about it?”

  “Not a lot we can do,” George said. “But were I you, I’d go see Stauer and have him try to get a team from Second Battalion somewhere along that road, with a shitpot of mines. That, or enough explosive to drop the Lethem Bridge. Or, better, both.”

  “Mines, maybe,” Reilly replied. “If things work out, we’ll need the Lethem bridge.”

  He shook his head over a lost opportunity. “You know, if we’d thought of it in time, we could have had Gordo stockpile that shit somewhere convenient, just like he stockpiled food for the dependents. Ah, well, can’t think of everything.” Reilly shuffled through his stack of maps until he found a large-scale one of the Lethem area. “Tell me again why you decided to stay in the NCO ranks?”

  “Couldn’t deal with being numbered among the idjits, sir,” George replied, straight faced. “Besides, even the Marine officer corps didn’t want me, as my parents were married …to each other.”

  “A terrible handicap,” Reilly agreed, trying very hard to keep a straight face as he did. “You really do have to be born a bastard to make a first class officer.”

  “Exactly, sir,” George agreed, mock solemnly.

  Reilly grunted, rather than formulating a reply. I don’t really know what I’d do without this guy to keep me entertained. And humble.

  Growing serious again, Reilly said, “Okay, fun’s fun, but tell me about the patrols to Mahdia Eagle Mountain and Twasinki Mountain.”

  “Left this morning, sir, uniformed, armed, and on bicycles. Michaels’ recon team is going to Mahdia; Martinez’s to Twasinki. Their vehicles are unmanned now. I was going to suggest turning them over to the Gay Avengers …”

  “Nah,” Reilly cut off his sergeant major. “We’ve got plenty of light recon from having most of Third Battalion’s gun section Viljoen and Dumisani are a lot more important keeping the vehicles up than pulling recon, even if they’d be good at it.”

  Chaguaramas, Trinidad

  The base had been constructed by the United States, back in 1940, under the Destroyers for Bases Agreement with Great Britain. This was the same agreement that had seen to the construction of the airfield at Timehri, now called “Cheddi Jagan.” America had abandoned most of these in 1949, tho
ugh Chaguaramas had lasted longer. With the dissolution of the British Empire, the bases had, for the most part, been taken over by local defense forces.

  Kosciusko, Liu, Collins, and crew had nothing really to complain of about their treatment at the hands of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force. After turning themselves in at Port of Spain, and informing the authorities of what they’d done to Venezuela’s northern ports, they’d been duly put under guard and incarcerated in one of the unused buildings of the base. Captain and Mrs. Liu, naturally, had their own suite.

  But when the guard, mused Kosciusko, the sergeant of the guard, their commanding officer, and his commanding officer all insist on shaking your hands when they arrest you, you know life isn’t going to be bad. That their Chief of Defense Staff showed up to make sure we were being well cared for, and brought us a case of—gotta admit it—some of the finest rum I’ve ever had …well …life is good. And why shouldn’t they like us? It’s not like these people aren’t a lot closer culturally, linguistically, and historically, to Guyana than they ever could be to Venezuela. Or that any sympathy they have isn’t for their brothers across the waters.

  Seated under an awning, with Liu and his wife, the latter waving a fan to keep off the flies, Kosciusko sipped at a little of the rum—straight up, it was too good to ruin with coke—when one of the guards came up and saluted.