Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  He looked over his situation map. Still, it’s not looking so bad. Sergeant Major Zamora says the companies at the bridge are holding firm. Says it was iffy until he shot the battalion commander and told the executive officer to take charge. Note to self: that incident will not be reported.

  The artillery is finally doing some good. Should I tell them to drop the bridge, or try to? No; we’ll need it ourselves, when the order comes to move on the mercenary base.

  I wish I knew what was going on to the east. But …Trujillo’s a good man. His last report said he was holding. He’ll not let me down.

  “Have we got that medevac flight from Kaieteur, yet?” Camejo asked aloud.

  “In bound, sir,” one of the command post rats reported. “Two fixed wing. They’ll be here in about five—”

  That report wasn’t finished, as a rain of fire began to fall onto the town. One nearby shell blew in the windows of the building Camejo had taken over for his command post, though nobody was badly hurt from it.

  After that first deluge, the rate of fire slackened to about a round every five seconds. Still, for a good thirty minutes, Camejo, the one company of infantry in the town, and the bulk of the support troops from both battalions and brigade combined, were shaken, rattled and rolled by a steady stream of high explosive.

  “They can keep this up all day, gentlemen,” Camejo said. “They can …” he chanced to glance out a shattered window as a swarm of troops ran by, emerging from the cattle trail that ran to Konawaruk and Trujillo’s company, all the fleeing men heading west “ …oh, shit.”

  As if to punctuate the words with an exclamation point, several streams of fifty caliber punched through the air, mostly over the fleeing troops’ heads.

  “To arms!” the brigade commander shouted. “The gringos are upon us.”

  What should have been for Snyder a ten-minute drive, in peacetime, took three times that, what with the need to rout the enemy to his front, then collect his own troops and reform them. Pursuit, except by fire, hadn’t really been possible.

  Besides, thought Snyder, shooting fleeing men in the back is distasteful, at best.

  The scout platoon, in the lead, reported to him, “We’re off the trail and at the outskirts of the town. Recommend lift and shift fires.”

  Snyder passed that on, along with his control over the battery. Then he said, “Right through the fucking town, gentlemen. Kill ’em all, before they get away.”

  “Die like a man,” Camejo silently quoted. And what the hell? Hugo will have me shot anyway. He made that clear enough when he came to visit us at Kaieteur.

  He bent down and took a rifle from a soldier who had more interest in hiding than fighting, then walked out into the street. Facing east, the colonel began walking forward. Hot explosive gasses burst out the shattered windows of a building to his front. He saw a small knot of soldiers begin to enter the building, their point men firing. The soldiers wore strange uniforms but helmets not unlike his own. Raising his commandeered rifle to his shoulder he fired at the last of the soldiers, bringing the man down in the dirt street. Letting the rifle relax to a waist level carry, he moved onward.

  From a cloud of red dust, ahead of him, an armored vehicle emerged. It stopped on the road. Camejo saw the machine gun aim low. The gunner called out, in Spanish, “Arriba los manos!”

  Camejo shook his head and began lifting his rifle back to his shoulder. The last thing he saw was the muzzle flash of the machine gun. He was dead before his body hit the ground.

  “Brave bastard,” Snyder muttered, leaning back from the gun. “The courage of your enemy honors you.”

  South of Potaro Landing, Guyana

  In the nature of things, when animals, or people, flee a disaster they don’t always flee directly away from it. Some will follow low ground, some roads and trails. Some will run off in directions that make no sense to themselves or anyone else. Panic and rout are not exactly intellectual exercises or events.

  On the intersection of the roads that led east to the Garraway Stream Bridge and north to Potaro Landing, Sergeant Major Zamora was standing like a rock as the first of what looked to be a small trickle of terrified men reached him.

  Zamora took one look at the man’s filthy, terrified face, eyes wide in utter panic, and thought, Oh, shit.

  “Soldier! Halt where you are!”

  The man ignored him, but kept running north, glancing behind himself every few seconds at a threat that wasn’t there.

  “It’s not there yet, anyway,” Zamora muttered. As the soldier reached him the sergeant major straight-armed the boy, knocking him ass down on the dirt. Then the sergeant major crouched down and asked, “What happened?”

  The soldier shook his head and started to rise. Zamora palmed the boy’s face, knocking him back again.

  “I asked you what happened.”

  “Dead …all dead,” the panting troop managed to get out.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “My squad leader …the brigade commander …everybody else. They’re behind us …with tanks.”

  Nodding his head, Zamora asked, “And Sergeant Major Zamora? Is he dead, too?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “And Hugo? Did they get Hugo Chavez?”

  “They’re all dead,” the boy insisted.

  With his left hand Zamora took a firm grip on the terror-stricken troop’s uniform, then stood up dragging the boy with him. With his other hand, he reached for the pistol at his belt.

  “Son,” he said, “I’m Zamora. I’m not dead. But unless you calm down, right the fuck now, you will be.” He then shook the boy like a rat in a terrier’s mouth. By the time he was done, he’d lined the pistol up on the soldier’s head. Two eyes crossed, staring straight at the muzzle.

  “I …I …I …”

  Zamora spoke firmly, in a way that would brook no argument even without the pistol. “Calm down, son. Everybody else panicked, so you did, too. No shame. No crime. Nobody’s going to hurt you if you will remember your duty, now.

  “Now, are you all right?”

  The boy drew several shuddering breaths before answering—gasping, really—“I …I think so, Sergeant Major.”

  “Good.” Zamora released the lapel. “Now come with me.”

  The mountain guns were still firing, somewhere off to the southwest, when Zamora led the boy into the battalion command post. To one side of the lightly beaten path a body lay. The body wore lieutenant colonel’s insignia.

  Zamora announced to the major now in command, “Sir, you’re the senior officer I can find at the moment. We are fucked and it is up to you to get us unfucked.” In as few words as possible, be briefed the major on what he’d been able to glean from the bits and pieces of information the soldier in tow had known.

  “I see,” answered the major. “And your recommendations. Sergeant Major?”

  Having soldiered for better than thirty years, Zamora already had his answer. “We’ve lost here, sir. Consolidate whatever we can in an arc around Potaro Landing. Pull the troops on the bridge out last. Screw the mountain guns; order the gunners here and save them. We’ll escape and evade across the river tonight, and then back up the mountain to Kaieteur.”

  The major nodded, then began barking orders to the staff to set the troops in motion.

  Once that was done, the major asked, “How did we lose?”

  Zamora gave a bitter smile. “That’s easy, sir. We didn’t have the vehicles to support one battalion here and one at the other crossing. So we dug in close to the airport, for ease of supply. And, one of our companies did the exact right thing, taking a reverse slope defense, but it turned out to be wrong under the circumstances.”

  “Shit,” said the major.

  “Yes, sir,” Zamora agreed, “‘shit.’ Oh, and sir? Get a message to Caracas. Maybe the Estado Mayor can get some air down here to take out the bridge. At the very least, our people at Cheddi Jagan need to know the road’s open and that they’ve got company coming.”

/>   Garraway Stream Bridge, Guyana

  The Venezuelans had pulled out by the time Bravo Company showed up at the bridge. It still wasn’t clear to move across.

  Trim heard Vic Babcock-Moore’s voice rise above the din, “Pop and drop! Pop and drop!” This was followed by the sounds of footsteps thumping across the span.

  Scrambling up the bank, Trim watched two of his engineers, each carrying a satchel slung across from the right shoulder to the opposite side. They ran forward to where Trim guessed the surface laid mines had to be. As a mine was reached, one of the engineers would pull a small charge with a fuse and pull igniter from the satchel. Pulling on the rings of the igniters, they set the fuses to smoldering. The assembly was then dropped on top of or right beside a mine, before each man scurried on to the next one.

  “Good old Vic,” Trim said, just before remembering that he’d better duck before one of the mines took his head off.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  All the gods are dead except the god of war.

  —Eldridge Cleaver

  Mahdia Airport, Guyana

  “Look at all the damned loot!” Gordo exulted. He was particularly pleased about the several score, mostly pretty healthy, mules, as well as the couple of hundred rounds of 105mm.

  Look at all the damned bodies, Stauer thought. Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit after all.

  The loot consisted of the mules, a few light trucks, all classes of supply including ammunition, eight mountain guns, a couple of dozen mortars in 81mm and 120mm. There were also a couple of hundred prisoners, though they were not, properly speaking, “loot.” They were also being escorted back toward Camp Fulton by some of the walking wounded. And Venezuela’s walking wounded? They just walked, helped by their buddies, where needed.

  As for the rest of the Venezuelans, maybe as many as a thousand of them, Reilly had them pinned up against the Potaro River. He sincerely hoped they’d escape during the night, because he neither wanted to attack them there, nor wanted to leave them behind where they could threaten his future communications with base. Indeed, though he could have closed off the crossing over the Potaro, below Kangaruma, he’d deliberately left it open as an inviting door to safety. Even so, Reilly was having the mortars throw a very limited amount of H and I—harassing and interdicting—fire at them, just to keep them feeling defensive.

  The bodies, on the other hand, were twenty-one of the regiment’s own. And more were still coming in, in dribs and drabs. They were laid out in nylon body bags, in a neat row, in the shade of a building. The shade wasn’t consideration for the dead, but to delay the time until they began to stink. Hopefully, they could be evacuated to the cemetery at Camp Fulton before that happened.

  Stauer and Gordo, driven by Hosein, had bullied their way into the order of march, just before the first of the tanks tried to make it across. Since there was some chance that the bridge would collapse under the tanks’ weight, they were the very last in order. Even the artillery was already on the south side of the river.

  A weary looking sergeant, heavily laden with all the accoutrements of a scout, walked up to the Land Rover and asked Hosein, “Have you seen First Battalion’s scout platoon?”

  Hosein glanced at the name tape and rank, pointed a finger to the east and said, “I saw some Ferrets that way, Sergeant Michaels.”

  “Thanks, Corp.”

  “Sergeant,” Stauer asked, “have you seen your battalion commander?”

  Michaels shook his head. “No, sir, but I did see Sergeant Major George thataway”—Michaels hooked a thumb in a general southward direction—“and where he is, my colonel’s probably in the area.”

  “Thanks, Sergeant. Good job with the recon, I understand.”

  Michaels shook his head. “Not so good, sir, missed a lot of shit I should have figured out or seen.”

  Stauer and Gordo met Reilly, Snyder and George roughly three klicks south of the airport. The latter three were hunched over a spread-out map on the hood of Reilly’s Land Rover. Stauer and Gordon stopped a distance away to listen.

  “What took you so long?” Reilly demanded of his subordinate. Neither in facial expression nor in tone did he seem to be even remotely happy.

  Snyder answered coolly, “There were two companies up there, not one. They were understrength, I think, but still there were two of them. We found it out the hard way and had to go smash the second one, too.”

  Reilly considered this. Finally, relenting, he said, “Fair enough. Well done then. However …“I need four things from you, Snyder,” Reilly said. In tone, the statement was an order. “I need you, the scouts, Third Battalions Elands, and two ADA guns plus four missile teams I’m cutting to your company to move out in thirty minutes. Sooner would be better. Second, grab us the bridge over the Essequibo at Awartun Island. Third, when you get the bridge, secure it; secure it from ground and air attack, both. Yes, that means the quad 23mm guns stay there …”

  “How long do they stay there, sir?” Snyder asked. “And what can I expect in the way of an enemy there.”

  “Bare minimum, expect aerial interdiction to start in about four hours. It will take Hugo that long to call his aerial dogs off of Third Battalion and redirect them against us. I expect that to start with your company. How long do you secure the bridge? Until the sun runs out of hydrogen or Gordo gets the ferry from Rockstone up and running and can supply the battalion that way.

  “Sir, I can’t be there in four and a half hours,” Snyder objected. “Eight would be more like it …”

  Reilly snarled. “Screw security. Haul ass. Four hours.

  “Fourth, I want you to push north past Linden, and preferably all the way to Vryheit, then screen the line Demerara River to St. Cuthberts. We’ll be along about three or four hours after you get there, assuming the bridge at Awartun is still standing.

  “Assuming you make it to the screen line, and if the paratrooper brigade at Cheddi Jagan comes boiling out, you can fall back as far as a line running from Dalgin, eastwards.” Reilly traced on the map with a twig. “Now you’re going to want to ignore me in that case, and fall back behind this river, north of Linden. I don’t want you to do that, I want you to hold—if it comes to that—north of that river. Clear?”

  “Clear, sir.”

  “Good. Go. You now have only four hours and twenty-seven minutes to get to the Awartun Island bridge.”

  Snyder saluted and walked off, shaking his head. It was only then that Reilly and George noticed the regimental commander and S-4 standing and listening.

  The two walked up to the laid-out map. Stauer didn’t bother using a twig as he tapped it by the junction of the Essequibo and Cuyuni Rivers.

  “We’ve still got some landing craft,” Stauer said. “Gordo’s going to start shunting Fourth Battalion across the Essequibo River, tonight. However, all Fitz’s boys can do is parallel the Essequibo north, than cut east along the coast, pinning in Georgetown from that side. I hope, but can’t guarantee, that that will force Hugo to pull the paras out of Cheddi Jagan and consolidate on Georgetown.”

  “I was rather hoping to bait them out of the airport and crush them somewhere between there and Linden,” Reilly said.

  Stauer nodded. “So we overheard. And, yes, it would be nice if it happened. But I think they’re going to fall back to Georgetown.”

  “Why, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  A broad smile lit Stauer’s face. “Well, you know we didn’t, in fact, have anybody set to mine Georgetown harbor. Oh, yes, we intended to, but had never gotten it set up when they caught us with our pants down.

  “Interestingly enough”—the smile grew broader still—“Biggus and the Naughtius had a couple of mines left over so—”

  “They’ll figure that out quick,” Reilly interrupted. “A couple of mines won’t do.”

  “Ahem …if I can finish without being interrupted?”

  “Sorry, boss.” Reilly really did look chastened.

  “There are no m
ines off of Georgetown, nor in the Demerara River. And the Naughtius had no limpet fuses. But, they did have underwater fuse. So they slipped under an outgoing ship, somehow managed to attach a mortar shell to the hull, and lit the fuse as soon as the ship started to leave harbor, then skedaddled. So it went boom, and Hugo’s boys think the harbor is mined, too. I understand Eeyore barely made it into the sub in time for the sub to get out of the effective underwater blast radius.”

  Reilly looked skeptical. “And we know this because …”

  “We know what happened because Naughtius radioed us and told us. We know what the Venezuelans think happened because Hugo went on the air to condemn our mining and Bridges’ signals intercept people picked up a transmission from Georgetown matching Hugo’s tirade.”

  Reilly cast his eyes downward for a moment, thinking. At length, he asked, “So there are probably going to be six battalions in Georgetown? I can’t handle that, not even with Fitz’s battalion to do the detailed work.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Stauer answered. “Just pin them in the town; starvation will do the rest.”

  “As it seems to be in Venezuela as a whole,” Gordo added. “By the way, you need to go easy on the 105mm. What we still had, plus that eight hundred rounds we got in, and the bit you captured, is it until this campaign is over.”

  “We didn’t use any of that,” Reilly said.

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “We didn’t use any of it. Every round we fired crossing the bridge was from condemned stocks. Yes, some shells may have fallen long or short, but the enemy was mostly on the gun-target line. Over was usually still on them. So was short.”

  Harry Gordon rubbed at his eyes. He was something of a cheapskate, all in the job description, of course, and, “You mean I ordered thousands of shells destroyed and I didn’t have to?”