Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  Not so far back from the front, close enough, in fact, for the odd tracer to reach that far, Reilly took a report from Green, the Charlie Company commander.

  “I let ’em see who and what we were, sir,” Green said. “I let ’em get a good look before calling in the smoke. We’re pelting the bejeezus out of the far bank. Time for the engineers to check the bridge, I think.”

  “Roger,” Reilly replied. “Break, break; Ditchdigger Six”—Trim—“into the water and check out that bridge.”

  Mahdia, Guyana

  Military Intelligence was often, and in more armies than one, called a, “self-propelled oxymoron.” That wasn’t entirely fair. Certainly it was not a case, as many a pacifist, self-righteous antimilitarist, and the occasional outright coward put it, of “soldiers showing their stupidity by their choice of profession.” Rather, it was that both sides to a conflict were usually quite bright. Thus, they went to considerable pains to fool each other. The Venezuelan commander who had set up his forward command post at the podunk town of Potaro Landing hadn’t known until it was too late how close the gringos were until they lunged south.

  Conversely, despite Michaels’ reports and the more timely ones from the RPV’s, Reilly hadn’t known, for example, that his opponent’s name was Camejo, that said opponent was not a lieutenant colonel but a full colonel, that he commanded a brigade of which not one but two infantry battalions were present, or that those battalions were accompanied by a battery and a quarter—eight guns, with more on the way, eventually—of 105mm mountain howitzers.

  There had been indicators, of course. One flight that Michaels had not been able to see unloaded had brought in more communications wire than a single battalion could have used in two wars, for example. Two, larger, planes, landing at Kaieteur Airport, had brought in eighteen Oto-Melara 105’s, and enough mules to, interestingly enough, move eight of them. Being mule-ported, they’d stayed off the road until reaching a point about three kilometers south of Potaro Landing. Hence, Michaels had missed them.

  Moreover, and this was by no means Michaels’ fault, alone, since the use of the laser had shut down most air traffic at Cheddi Jagan, and since the cargo planes were still available, they had to go somewhere. That somewhere was generally Kaieteur Airport, which had improved the logistic position of the brigade there immeasurably.

  The key thing Michaels missed, though, was none of that merely technical detail. What he’d really missed was that one of the planes that had come in to Kaieteur had been an Airbus, carrying none other than Hugo Chavez, who had proceeded to browbeat Camejo into moving to and past Mahdia, even while promising him the means to do so.

  On the other hand, there are some things one really can’t expect a sergeant, leading a small team, to pick up on. A field marshal would likely have missed it, as well.

  Camejo picked up the chattering field phone. “Yes, I’m not deaf,” he said. “I can hear it perfectly well. What are you facing? God damn it, Colonel, calm down!”

  Angered, Camejo broke communication, slamming the phone back into its cradle. “Sergeant Major!”

  “Here, sir,” answered that worthy.

  “I can’t get a stinking clue about what’s going on at the bridge from the battalion commander there. Get …”

  But Sergeant Major Zamora, the commander’s second set of eyes and ears, had already slung a portable radio over one shoulder and was already racing for one of the autos the brigade had commandeered on entering the town.

  Good man, thought Camejo. “Somebody get me those useless sit on their asses artillerymen on the line!”

  Garraway Stream Bridge, Guyana

  The bridge hadn’t been “wired for sound,” something Trim and the one squad of engineers he’d taken with him had figured out very quickly. The rest of the platoon was waiting, belly down behind the tanks, to be called forward if and when needed.

  What they hadn’t figured out yet, and perhaps never would, was how to get back to the friendly side of the river. Rather, shortly after entering it, they’d been chased all the way across by an enthusiastically pumped Venezuelan machine gun. That gun, or maybe its cousin, still had them pinned on the far, and very unfriendly, bank. The occasional hand grenade that exploded in the water just past them, along with the steady stream of tracers cracking back and forth overhead, were proof enough of how unwelcome they were there.

  “On the other hand,” Trim muttered, as the first of a number of artillery shells exploded in the trees on the far side, “maybe we don’t want to be on that bank.”

  Konawaruk-Mahdia Cattle Trail, Guyana

  Snyder’s first notification that he’d perhaps let the point of the company, a scout platoon Ferret, get a little too far was when that Ferret came apart at the seams as a result of three or possibly four hits from largish antitank warheads. The double flashes suggested to Snyder that they were 84mm Carl Gustavs, a system he was familiar with from his time in certain units of the United States Army.

  And bad news, at this range.

  “Back off! Back off!” Snyder called over the radio. “Redleg, this is Bravo Six, over.”

  “Redleg, over,” came the instant answer. One of the implications of “priority of fires to X” was that the fire direction center would wait very expectantly for any request from X.

  “Fire target set Bravo One Zero Four through Bravo One Zero Eight, over.” One through Three had been, respectively, Tumatumari Landing, Tumatumari, and Konawaruk. They’d not been needed.

  The predawn sky to Snyder’s north immediately lit up with what looked like a number of very large strobe lights, as the guns and the heavy mortars began firing to their own south at maximum rate. Snyder guessed that the guns and mortars were firing, between them, about four rounds per second.

  “Shot, over.”

  I can see that. “Shot, out.”

  “We’re giving you a shake and bake,” the artillery announced. “Shake and bake,” usually reserved for use on fuel and ammunition dumps and carriers, was mixed high explosive and white phosphorous. Even without that ideally inflammable target, it had some extra moral effect beyond the mere weight of shell. All men fear being badly burned.

  “Roger,” Snyder acknowledged, “break …break, Third Battalion’s Eland Section; you’re attached to Third Platoon. Third, start working your way around to the enemy’s left. Don’t attack until I give the word.”

  “Roger …Roger; at your command.”

  The obvious reason defenders take up a reverse slope position was to prevent their enemy from seeing them until it’s too late for the sight to do them much good. There were other, equally valid, reasons. For one thing, normally the slope itself tends to exaggerate the normal artillery and mortar range-probable-error, such that more shells fall short, more long, and fewer strike around the line of the defense.

  Captain Trujillo, commanding a company facing east, just behind the slope, had mostly been concerned with the first advantage and had been only dimly aware of the second. This was, in some ways, just as well as, with the artillery engaging him coming from the north, the second advantage had ceased to operate. Rather worse, from Trujillo’s point of view, was that his troops were now on the gun-target line. Thus, the normal dispersion of artillery and mortars—usually long and short rather than right or left—meant that even those long- or short-falling shells landed either on his men, or close enough to be dangerous. And the rate of fire, averaging a heavy shell per second on each of his platoon, was quite outside his very limited experience. Perhaps worst of all, the screeching and blasting shells drowned out the sound of the enemy armor. He no longer could tell where they were or what they were doing from the sound alone.

  It was no small risk to stick ones’ head up to see, under the circumstances; every blasting shell was followed by a horde of metal shards, whining omnidirectionally through the air. Indeed, the air seemed full of them. Still, no coward, Trujillo had his responsibilities and high among those was to see, that he might command.


  And at least it’s getting light enough to have a chance to see something.

  Unfortunately, he picked the same moment to lift his head from the shallow scraping that a 105 shell picked to land about fifteen feet in front of him. One particular shard, razor sharp and about nine inches long, buzzed through his face, just under his helmet’s rim. It sliced off the top of his head, leaving his cranium and most of his brain still in the helmet, which flew off independently.

  The worst thing of all though, from Trujillo’s perspective, and the best, from Snyder’s, was that the guns were firing parallel to Snyder’s line. Thus, he could move forward quite close to the Venezuelan troops, in fair safety.

  Leading with his own three gun-armed Eland’s, Snyder moved his company up to just past the topographical crest—the very top, in civilian parlance—of the hill that had separated him from the enemy. Smoke from the ruins of the shattered Ferret arose from off to his left. He wasn’t too worried about incoming antiarmor fire at this point, as a dozen 105mm guns and half a dozen 120mm mortars were making a living hell out of the reverse military crest along which the Venezuelans had lightly dug themselves in.

  Better still, he thought, with the rising sun at my back most of them can’t stand to look in my direction, except at an angle.

  On their own, without command, his own company’s three Elands began donating 90mm shells to likely targets, interspersing those with bursts of coaxial machine gun fire. The machine gunners of his turretless Elands, the ones the battalion used as armored personnel carriers, added to the din with the KORD fifties.

  Snyder watched calmly for perhaps half a minute, then radioed, “Third, are you in position?”

  “Roger, we got delayed and lost a vehicle to an OP”—observation post—“we didn’t count on. But we’re ready now. Nobody dead, two hurt that we can keep with us. Two more need evacuation. We’ve called for Medevac. It’s on the way. Not moving until you call off the artillery, though.”

  “Roger,” Snyder replied, “break, break, Redleg, lift fire from Target One Zero Four, over.”

  “Roger,” the gunners replied. “Give it sixty seconds for the last shells to impact. They’ll be four white phosphorous, all together.”

  “Roger. Third, did you copy.”

  “Got it, Six. Four Willie Pete and then we go in.”

  “Affirmative. Do it. Break, break; Redlegs, be prepared to shift onto Target Bravo One Zero Nine, at my command.”

  “Roger …your Willie Peter just left the tubes.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Since when has the doctor of medicine and

  dentistry become such a pantywaist as to require that a

  bald responsibility others accept with good grace must

  be diked out with certain frills before he will buy it?

  —RADM Lamont Pugh, USN,

  Surgeon General of the Navy, 1952

  First Battalion Aid Station, Bartica-Potaro Road, Guyana

  The battalion aid station was set up just north of the road, flush against the trees that lined it. It wasn’t much, just some tarps pulled out from vehicles and suspended on poles, then staked down. No more of the equipment had been unloaded and set up than required for immediate needs. After all, the battalion had quite a long, running fight ahead of it, even assuming they could force the bridge.

  Since there wasn’t a whole lot of flying to be done, McCaverty had volunteered his services to Reilly, that being as close to the action as the good doctor was likely to get, at least until the Venezuelan Air Force finally went away for good.

  The work he was doing now, treating the thin trickle of casualties from Garraway Stream, wasn’t the kind of high end surgery for which an absolutely amazing amount of money had been spent training him. Rather, it was cut and paste and stitch and splint, along with the occasional transfusion and more than a little doping against pain, before shunting the wounded back to the field hospital at Camp Fulton.

  McCaverty smiled evilly at his next patient, a seated thirty-two year old half-Chinese, half-Hispanic corporal named Chin—no relation to Captain Chin of the naval squadron. A shell splinter had torn across Chin’s shoulder, ripping the skin roughly but not doing much damage to the underlying meat. The skin was currently held together by two clamps that reminded the corporal of nothing so much as curved scissors.

  Holding up a curved needle from which a black filament dangled, he said to Chin, “This is really going to hurt. You sure you don’t want that shot?”

  “I need to get back to my vehicle and my gun,” Chin replied. “Just do it, Doc.”

  “Okay,” McCaverty agreed. “Your funeral. Just so you know, I may have to turn this over to one of the orderlies, midway through, if someone more serious gets carried in.” The doctor leaned over and grasped the sides of the wound, causing the corporal to wince slightly. And then the needle went in.

  “Oh, fuck!”

  “Not too late for the shot,” McCaverty said.

  “Just …do it.”

  Outside the covered-over area in which McCaverty did his work, someone shouted out for a medevac to retrieve two badly wounded troopers from Bravo Company.

  “I’m up next,” Corporal Tatiana Manduleanu announced, grabbing her aid bag and beginning the short jog to the Land Rover she’d been assigned. “Come on, Brewer,” she shouted to a private who was the entirety of her little command.

  In moments Tatiana and her assistant were bouncing merrily down the road, headed for the ford at Tumatumari Landing.

  And why, she asked herself, do I feel so much happier doing this than I ever felt leading off a client for a shitpot of money?

  Garraway Bridge, Guyana

  Reilly had had his vehicle driven to within about a hundred and fifty meters of the riverbank. This was behind the tanks, but forward of where he’d let Alpha Company move its own vehicles. From there, he’d dismounted, taking one RTO—radio-telephone operator—with him. There’d been a little fire on the way, but nothing close enough he couldn’t classify it as “light and random.”

  Now, he sheltered behind a tank, low, with his head barely peeking out from around one of the tank’s treads. He’d made very sure beforehand to use the telephone mounted to the tank’s rear to tell the crew, “Under no circumstances, to include your imminent death, are you people to back up. I’m right behind you.” The RTO, standing in the tank’s lee, had a microphone to one ear, the tank’s phone to the other, and his rifle slung over one shoulder.

  Reilly looked, but couldn’t see a whole lot. Trim and a few engineers were somewhere in the water; he knew that much. Whether they were still alive, and whether the bridge was clear, he didn’t know. Still, he didn’t see any odd blocks attached to the span, or otherwise inexplicable wires leading from it, so he assumed the best.

  He crawled backwards—no easy maneuver with his arm in a sling—and then stood up. Making a gimme gesture to the RTO, he took the microphone and said, “Bravo, this is Black Six. When are you people going to get off your dead asses?”

  “Six, Bravo, moving in now,” Snyder’s voice replied.

  The machine gun fire had stopped zinging the water behind him. Likewise the grenades hadn’t come in a while. It could be the other side is out of grenades, Trim thought. It could be they’ve decided they have bigger problems. It could be they think we’re dead. Or it just might be they’ve forgotten about us.

  The squad with him had only lost one man, so far, and that one about half an hour previous. The sapper, blinded by a grenade that had gone off above water and all too near, had staggered off, shrieking, into the open until a machine gun found him. A dozen small geysers had erupted around him, even as other bullets found their way to and through his head and torso. With a piece of his cranium flying almost straight up, the screaming had abruptly ended as the sapper had been spun around and cast off, broken and ruined. The body, facedown and leaking brains from a huge hole, had floated away downstream, spinning slowly in the current and painting the river pink in
a spiral.

  One …one’s not so bad. Could be worse. Could have been all of us. But I wish Reilly would get off his dead ass and clear the river.

  Konawaruk-Mahdia Cattle Trail, Guyana

  As a large cloud of smoke erupted from his right, Snyder heard from that flank the chattering of fifty calibers interspersed with the deeper booming of the 90mm cannon.

  “Redlegs, shift to Target Bravo One Zero Niner.”

  “Roger. The mortars won’t range Mahdia; we’re cutting them back to battalion control. Your last shells will be twenty-four rounds of white phosphorous, over.”

  “Losing the mortars. Understood. Willie Pete, out,” Snyder finished. He watched forward intently. There would be a moment of risk when the shells lifted, if the Venezuelans recognized their window of opportunity.

  Buuut . . . Snyder saw what he took to be a half dozen uniformed men, no weapons in evidence, running from his right to his left, fleeing the attack of Third Platoon and its attached Elands. A couple were cut down, sprawled in undignified death. Aha, there they go.

  “Bravo, this is Bravo Six …” He waited until he saw huge white flowers blossom across the front. “Into the assault …” The machine guns atop the vehicles picked up their fire. Infantry formed up on line, two or three to either side of each APC. “Forward!”

  Mahdia, Guyana

  Colonel Camejo didn’t waste his time radioing Kaieteur for resupply or reinforcement. It was three days travel away by foot and muleback. He’d either win here, with what he had, or lose here, alone.