Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  “Sounds like Cuba,” Castro commiserated, “except maybe that we still put on enough pretense to ensure poverty.”

  “Eh,” Chin shrugged, “the American embargo hasn’t helped you any, either.”

  “That, alone, doesn’t account for it,” the Cuban replied. “We trade freely with everyone else in the world, but we make nothing anybody wants. All we had, once upon a time, was something the Russians wanted, a dagger at America’s breast. It wasn’t much to trade, once the Russians lost the strength to push that dagger.”

  “I must admit,” Chin said, “it was rather short-sighted of the Castros …the other Castros …to make an enemy so close and so powerful, when their friends were so far away.”

  “Not just an enemy,” Castro said, “a vindictive enemy, and one not particularly constrained by principle when they feel threatened. Even so, though, whatever may be said, communism was a failure there, a total, complete, and utter failure.

  “By the way, what’s going to happen to us?”

  Chin thought about that and admitted he didn’t know. “You might be interned, as we’re supposed to be. You might be returned to Cuba—“

  “Good God, not that!”

  “Well …it’s a possibility.”

  “I can’t go back to that hellhole!”

  “Does your crew feel the same way?”

  “Not all of them, I think,” Castro replied. “Most, though.”

  “Hmmm …there might be a way to prevent it,” Chin said. “C’mon, let’s go up on deck. You’ll need to translate.”

  “And so,” Captain Castro translated for to his crew, “there is one way for us to avoid being sent home. Everyone who wants to enlist for the mercenary company of which this boat is a part, please stand and raise your right hands … .”

  “Not bad, Skipper,” Chin’s exec said to him. “We go out with a crew of fifteen, and come back with a crew of forty-seven. And the five who didn’t want to join us …well, they’re Aruba’s problem, now.

  “Speaking of which,” the XO pointed his chin at a small boat approaching from portside, “here come the authorities now.”

  “All the codes destroyed?” Chin asked.

  “Yes, sir. And the hard drives boiled in salt water for good measure, before we dumped them.”

  “Any last messages on the e-mail dump?”

  “Just that Sergeant Ryan is going in, sir. Tomorrow night. And that Second Battalion is still standing by.”

  “Wish we could have been there for that,” Chin sighed. “For either of those.”

  Punto Fijo, Venezuela

  The target was the largest refinery in the world, though it was split between three locations and had sundry subsidiary facilities, notably Ryan’s target, the enormous tank farm at Carirubana, north of Punta Fijo.

  Navigation, even across the fifty miles of open water between the northeast Colombian coast and the Peninsula de Paraguana, was easy. Not only were there permanently burning flares atop the refinery from wastage of some of the refinery’s byproducts, but the Venezuelan Navy and Coast Guard had essentially ceded the local waters to anyone brave or foolhardy enough to chance the mines In effect, the three rubber boats with Sergeant Ryan, each holding four men and a frightful quantity of explosives, plus four folding mopeds, each, had the Gulf of Venezuela to themselves.

  At least I hope it’s to ourselves, thought Bronto, crouching in the front of the boat, peering frantically down into the water, from side to side. But there’s a dinosaur that doesn’t know it’s supposed to be extinct somewhere down there. And he has my number.

  Bronto could care less about the mines; at least that would be quick and probably painless. Becoming an entree, however, is right out.

  Ryan, night vision goggles on his head and one hand on the throttle of the boat’s electric—hence supremely quiet, especially as compared to the roar of the industrial towns to the east—motor, snickered as he watched Bronto’s head turn frantically from one side of the boat to the other, his fingers fiddling with his own NVG’s focus ring.

  Can’t say as I blame him, though. That fucking croc was big.

  Ryan checked his watch and then his GPS. He looked left to where one of the three boats was already veering off toward Amuay and its refinery complex. And I didn’t even hear them change speed. This is good.

  There were about a hundred distinct subtargets in Ryan’s major target, the Carirubuana tank farm, ranging from smaller tanks, almost not worth the bother, to five that were just outrageously huge. There were also a number of good sized tankers, five at last count, tied up to a floating wharf west of the tank farm, where they could be filled by pipeline. The tankers had been there, unmoving except for the up and down of the tides and the rocking of the waves, since the day of the mining, early in the war. Ryan didn’t intend to do anything about them; getting the tanks would put a big enough dent in Venezuela’s long-term economic prospects, all on its own.

  Passing the docked tankers, Ryan reduced power and pulled the throttle cum steering handle toward himself, causing the inflatable boat to turn to starboard. There was enough artificial light around the tank farm, this close, that the NVGs became superfluous. He turned his off and pulled them from his face to hang around his neck.

  As a practical matter, we couldn’t possibly prep every tank for demo, Ryan thought, as the rubber boat coasted in toward the gravel and rock shoreline. Besides there being about a hundred of them, they’re lined up along about thirty miles of roads, in more than a square mile of area. So instead …

  As soon as the boat touched down, Bronto sprang out of it, almost as if he had a huge crocodile on his tail. The short, stout operative carried a silenced submachine gun in one hand and dragged a spike with a rope attached by the other. As soon as the rope grew taut, he laid the weapon down, turned and began to pull with all of his not inconsiderable strength, using the impetus and lift of the waves to haul the thing as far onto the shore as possible. The other three slid off the rubber gunwales and into the surf, then lent their own strength to the job of getting the heavily laden boat firmly ashore.

  When Bronto judged that done, he used both arms to drive the spike through the gravel into the soil below. Then he picked up the submachine gun and returned at a trot to the boat. There Ryan, Rohrer, and Loser were already unloading the cargo, mostly mopeds and explosives, onto shore. They laid the cargo low, not piling it, on the off chance a guard might pass by. The explosives were already packed, four sets each, in some highly expendable civilian backpacks.

  “Rohrer, Loser, head thataway,” Ryan ordered, pointing to the east-northeast. “Bronto, you’re with me.”

  As the first two puttered off, Ryan and Bronto unfolded their mopeds. Hoisting heavy packs onto their backs, they mounted and then began the jaunt to the south. Ryan in the lead, they passed up and over a ramp that surmounted the pipeline leading to the floating wharf, then turned generally east, passing between two linear cuts filled with greenish water. Sixty meters past those, they came to a small section of four tanks, two of them LNG tanks. A large pool, black as midnight and polluted as sin, stank just to the east. Ryan raised a fist to call a halt.

  Both dismounted. While Bronto took one knee, facing toward the center of the complex, Ryan trotted to the nearest of the LNG tanks. He had to climb over a low berm, intended to control fire, to get close to it. Once there, he dumped his pack and removed a roughly twenty-five pound shaped charge. Unfolding the thing’s integral wire legs, he aimed it center of mass at the tank, but low, then flicked a switch to arm it, and another to set it for radio detonation. A small LED shone red, indicated the charge was now armed and dangerous. A green LED, the one for the radio-controlled detonator, flashed green. From the pack, Ryan pulled out a white phosphorous grenade. He pulled the grenade out of its protective cylinder just enough to remove the safety clip. Then he partially pushed it back in, grasped and yanked out the ring. He set the grenade, still in the tube, right in front of the shaped charge.

 
Holding the pack by one hand and one strap, he pattered over to the next tank and repeated the process, then did the same for the next two, these being oil or gasoline tanks. The smell said, “gasoline.”

  This is going to be better than the best Fourth of July …ever.

  That task done, and his pack now empty, Ryan left the pack and hoofed back to the mopeds and Bronto. “Let’s go.”

  The mopeds carried them around another midnight-black, stinking pool, to the next set of targets, some sixteen tanks, two very small, three large, and eleven of medium size. They were only interested in the three largest, plus the centermost of the mediums.

  They stopped by the centermost medium and ditched the mopeds. This time—in part because, unburdened, he could, and in part because the target area was much more open than the first one—Ryan accompanied the heavily laden Bronto.

  When Bronto was done, and without another word, both men remounted their mopeds and returned to the shore by the boat to pick up eight more charges.

  “What the fu—!” Bronto exclaimed, as he tripped over the reclining form of a man, fast asleep inside one of the berms that surrounded a particularly large tank. There was a shotgun next to the sleeper, something he apparently forgot as he bolted upward to a sitting position. As the man sat up, Bronto continued his fall to the ground, landing with an oof and a thump.

  “Quien es?” the roused guard asked. “Julio, is that you?”

  “No, it isn’t Julio,” Ryan whispered, as he aimed his own submachine gun at the shadowy form still half on the ground. “Sorry about this.”

  The only sound made was the chattering of the weapon’s bolt, the tinkle of spent casings hitting the gravel, and the surprised grunt of an unoffending security guard as five 9mm rounds tore his life away.

  Ryanconsulted his watch, once again. Quarter to four. Almost time for us to be getting out of here. He made a series of quick radio calls, first to Fails, then to each of the two teams that were aimed at one of the refinery complexes.

  “Almost done here,” Fails answered. “Had to kill two security guards,” said the leader of the team at Amuay. “Otherwise, ready to go.” “Already loading up to head to sea,” said the last group.

  “Sergeant Ryan,” Bronto asked, returning from setting his final charge, that aimed at one of the two huge LNG tanks nearest the southern edge of the complex, “why didn’t they guard this shit better? This was almost too easy.”

  “Because they’re fundamentally unserious about war, Bronto,” the team leader replied. “Most people on the world are. And because they’re not serious, they don’t—didn’t anyway—give it serious thought.

  “Let’s go.”

  A mile or a bit more west of the arms that defined the opening of the harbor, three rubber boats, all close together, rocked with the gentle waves. To the east, both within the harbor and stretching north and south from it, the coastline was still brightly lit by the lights of the civilian communities that served the refineries. The boats, now without their burden of explosive charges, rode higher than they had.

  “There are going to be a lot of widows and orphans in those towns in a few minutes,” observed Rohrer. “There are still crews manning the refineries.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan sadly agreed. But fewer than you think. “Nothing much to be done about it. When you make war, you have to assume war’s going to be made on you in return.” He keyed his microphone and said, “Team Amuay, detonate your target.”

  “Roger.”

  Ryan and his boat’s crew glanced slightly northward, to where the beacon fire above the refinery burned in the night. They saw a single bright flash, and then the beacon went out. Four seconds, plus a little, later, the sound of the explosion reached them. A few seconds after that, a fireball formed and began to rise above the refinery. It was too far away to hear any screams from the workers who were, without a doubt, being burned alive in the inferno. The waters around the boats lit up with the flames from that inferno, reflected from the bottom side of the dark cloud forming above the wreck of the refinery.

  “Fire the other refinery,” Ryan ordered.

  “Roger.”

  The flash came quickly, and the sound of the blast reached them, this time, before the fireball could form. This one was closer, close enough that they just might have been able to hear the screaming, intermixed with the roar of burning oil.

  “Our turn,” the team leader said to nobody in particular. He set the detonation control board on his lap, and turned a key. Now the armed charges were ready to receive their commands, as he was ready to send them. He flicked a switch. Another great flash told of several charges, probably four, assuming everything worked, going off as one. The tank farm was the farthest target, about two miles away. The flames leapt upward long before the sound of the blast reached them. Another switch was thrown, then another, and another. Each set still more Hells alight. He hesitated over the last switch; that was the one that was set to fire off two very large LNG tanks, which were also unfortunately close to Creolandia, the urbanization to the south of the tank farm.

  “Nothing to be done about it,” he said, softly, as he flicked the final firing switch.

  Carirubana Tank Farm, Punto Fijo, Venezuela

  Fire and smoke were everywhere In the guard shack there was panic. The sound of sirens filled the air, as firefighting equipment rushed to the scene of the disaster.

  So far, the blasts hadn’t done all that much damage. The shaped charges, as planned, had burned their way into the tanks, causing some to split at the seams and gush oil in all direction, while others merely began to leak rapidly until the gushing fluid hit upon a piece of burning white phosphorous. Still, the flames were mostly contained inside the protective berms that surrounded each tank.

  Then the two shaped charges by the largest LNG tanks went off, along with another two aimed at, in one case, a gasoline tank, and in the other, a simple oil tank. The LNG tanks’ charges had been set to hit center of mass, rather than at the base. Their jet streams punched right through the exterior wall, the several feet of insulation, and then the interior tank. At the same time, the explosions pulverized the cardboard cylinders holding the grenades. In one case, this also shattered the grenade body, released the white phosphorous. In the other, the grenade didn’t shatter, but was thrown out to release its spoon and detonate normally, the shards of white phosphorous forming a flaming flower, brilliant even against the backdrop of burning oil.

  LNG, with considerable energy release merely from conversion from liquid to a gaseous state, jetted out of the holes thus formed and began to spread. In milliseconds, the first gas touched the white phosphorous and began to burn. The flames quickly sped back to set the gas alight as it exited the holes formed. This, too, increased the heat inside the tanks. And with the heat, so increased the pressure. Quite quickly. When the first tank exploded, and all that gas went off, it simply leveled the town of Creolandia, killing more people than would be accurately counted for weeks. Indeed, the heat was so great, and the radius of that heat so large, that the town was destroyed, and its people incinerated, even the bones, along with every piece of firefighting equipment, and their crews, that had reached the scene. Moreover, the blast was sufficient to knock over, to completely collapse and crush, dozens more tanks, which then spilled their oil and gasoline onto the ground in a series of floods. That, too, burned.

  It was Hell. It was war.

  From where he sat in the back of the rubber boat, Ryan watched the spreading flames. He felt …indescribable. Part of him was filled with satisfaction at a job well and truly done. The other part …

  I’m a murderer. I was always a killer …but this feels different than any other killing. How many people were there? Could I have done it differently? I confess, I don’t know how.

  Sighing, he started the ultra silent electric motor and spun the boat about, until the brightly burning and roaring flames were to his back. “Let’s go get ourselves interned, guys.”

  CHA
PTER FORTY-NINE

  Always look on the bright side of life …

  —Monty Python, Life of Brian

  Miraflores Palace, Caracas, Venezuela

  Hugo Chavez wept, openly and without shame, his shoulders heaving in great sobs. Even his military staff, quite despite the fact that most of them loathed him, felt sorry for him. The crowds, once buoyant and then grown sullen hostile, that had swarmed the area of the palace were dissipated as the news of the disaster sank in. Venezuela was ruined.

  “Make peace, Mr. President,” said Nicholas, the foreign minister. “It’s all that’s left. We don’t know how many more tricks the enemy has to play on us; we only know that he doesn’t seem to run out of them.”

  “No!” Chavez shrieked, through his unfeigned tears. “After everything they’ve done to us? No!”

  It wasn’t like we didn’t start it, thought Quintero, the general. That said, I’m inclined to agree with you, Chavez, you piece of peasant shit. Nobody should be allowed to do this to us and get away with it. Five thousand dead? Six thousand? Ten thousand? We may never know.

  That said, even if not said, we’re getting nowhere …

  “Make peace, Mr. President,” Nicholas repeated. “We’re stymied at Ciudad Guayana. The mercenaries—not even mercenaries, simple Guyanan troops under mercenary leadership—toss back every assault. Our troops in Guyana are starving. Soon, we’ll be starving here, too.

  “Basically, Hugo, we’re fucked.

  “And it’s not as if I didn’t warn you.”

  “The Cuban minesweepers aren’t coming, either, Mr. President,” Admiral Fernandez added. “The only way we’re getting rid of those mines is if we make peace and the enemy tells us how many went where.”