Countdown: M Day

by Tom Kratman

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  A man shall and must be valiant;

  he must march forward, and quit himself like a man,

  —trusting imperturbably in the appointment and choice

  of the upper Powers; and, on the whole, not fear at all.

  Now and always, the completeness of his victory over

  Fear will determine how much of a man he is.

  —Thomas Carlyle,

  On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History

  Miraflores Palace, Caracas, Venezuela

  Marielena, the late Sergeant Major Arrivillaga’s cousin, had a room at the palace. That was one of the major reason’s Mao had mistakenly assumed she was one of Chavez’s mistresses. True, she was only a secretary, but she was a personal secretary, and Chavez always wanted his personal secretary kept very close.

  She’d drifted off to sleep worried sick about her favorite cousin and at least mildly concerned with his commanding officer, Larralde. She knew the mercenaries had crushed and routed the brigade of paratroopers—she was too close to the center of power not to know—but of personal word there’d been none. Certainly Hugo had been too proud to establish communications with the mercenaries and they, themselves, had shown no interest so far in communicating with Caracas. And the normal routes for such things, the Red Cross or the Swiss government, were still keeping to a hands off approach.

  Somebody, though, the woman had thought before sleep took her, had better start talking to somebody or this thing will never end. We should never have started …

  Her dreams were fitful and disturbed, full of images sounds either partially or wholly misunderstood. Thus, when the sounds of the helicopter over the palace, coupled with those of several more moving to spots around it, awakened her, she thought for a moment that she was still dreaming.

  Cruz felt his stomach leap up as the chopper fell.

  The tail rotor was the first thing to hit the tiled roof of the palace. It shattered, throwing its fragments for the most part into the southern wing. The tail boom then sheared, but stayed attached just long enough to push the nose somewhat downward. This caused the five blades of the main rotor to strike at the roofs of the other three sides of the palace and to begin chopping down the palm trees that graced the courtyard on those sides. With sounds partially composed of breaking tiles and chopping wood, but more of self-destructing transmission and shattering fiberglass, the rotor blades mostly disintegrated, sending deadly shards of ragged composite through everything in their lines of flight. More than a few ricocheted back, making jagged holes suddenly appear in the hull. From outside of the helicopter someone screamed with heartbreaking agony, a Venezuelan guard chopped in two by a piece of flying blade.

  Descending at a speed that was, oh, way the hell out of anything the designers had had in mind, the landing struts collapsed. Before they did, one tire burst with a sound like a cannon shot. The helicopter began to roll to one side before the spinning rotor struck at the columns and then the ground, forcing it upright again. Still more chunks of deadly spinning debris flew through the air, to clang off walls and careen back. The already perforated hull of the helicopter began to resemble a colander. Someone inside cried out with pain.

  Cruz smelled spilled fuel. Fuck it; I’d rather be chopped or shot than burned. He half stood and shouted, “Getoffgetoffgetthefuckoff!”

  Hampson was next up. From his prone position on the deck he leapt to his feet and charged down the ramp, rifle in both hands and muzzle forward. “Move it, people!” he shouted.

  Through his NOD’s Hampson saw a single guard, shaking in shock. He felt sorry for the man, even as he cut him down with a burst from the hip. The Venezuelan was tossed against the wall by the impacts. Before the dying guard slid to the floor, leaving a bloodstained section of wall behind him, the sergeant major was on one knee, aiming outward, rifling swinging first this way and then that, seeking a threat.

  Behind the sergeant major a small flood of soldiers poured forth over the ramp, boots ringing on the metal. Two of them dashed under arches held up by square columns. Their boots pattered across the tile and then they were into the palace and moving on to the southwestern corner, under a tower. This was to prevent both escape and reinforcement from outside. Two more teams of two did the same for the southeastern and northeastern corners. Out of Hampson’s vision, a fourth pair emerged from the forward door, scurried past von Ahlenfeld, and made for the northwestern corner. Automatic rifle fire drummed the air as those forward teams killed anyone in their path. With the flash of grenades, windows shattered from shrapnel and concussion. This was the strikers making sure of their posts before taking them.

  Hampson mentally counted the men off and, coming up one short, added that to the earlier scream and came up with, One wounded inside. He turned and bounded back inside the collanderized hull, emerging a few moments later dragging a wounded trooper by his combat harness.

  You can make a Delta a sergeant major but he’s still a Delta, Hampson thought, as he began cutting away cloth to get at a ragged wound.

  Of the remaining nineteen men, including Hampson, the wounded man, and the three flight crew, a dozen, in three teams of four, followed hot on the heels of the men seizing the corners, barring those who had gone for the northwestern one. Once there, they stormed upward, then began cleaning out the upper floors of the building, in a counterclockwise fashion, with bullet, bayonet, and hand grenade. Shocked men screamed out in Spanish with their fear and pain. So did more than a few women: maids, cooks, mistresses, secretaries, and a bureaucrat or two. A Spanish speaker with each team shouted out, repeatedly, “Assemble in the courtyard. Keep your hands open and above your heads. Armed persons will be killed on sight. Assemble in the courtyard …”

  Cruz and his flight crew, supplemented by one Second Battalion man, took charge of the prisoners as they emerged from the palace, pale, fearful, and—often enough—weeping. Each was roughly and rudely searched before being flung face down to the dirt. There, deadly serious troopers pulled hands behind backs and flex-cuffed the wrists. Objections were slapped down and resistance met with tortured joints. The shots and explosions coming from the upper stories helped ensure cooperation even as they set the prisoners to more trembling and weeping.

  Bolting upright, half awake, Marielena thought at first that the helicopter crash was part of her most recent dream. Only when she felt the blast of a grenade coming from some room down the corridor did she realize that, no, this was far too real to be any dream. Bit by bit, information fought its way through to her mind—the sounds of many helicopters, the shouted commands in English, the stream of tracers that seemed to pass by her bedroom window, unidentifiable explosions coming from outside the palace.

  Oh, God, we’ve pissed off the United States and the gringos have come to spank us like naughty little boys and girls!

  That thought was followed by a more frightening one. Hugo! “Regime change.” Imperialism. They’ve come to kill or capture Hugo! He, he above all, must be saved.

  Lack of loyalty was not one of the woman’s failings, if, indeed, she had any. She jumped from the bed and took a robe from where it lay, folded over the back of a chair. Pulling it on, Marielena ran the few steps to her door and listened for a moment. The sounds of fighting—or perhaps of massacre—she heard did nothing but frighten her from opening the door. As they intensified, she thought, The longer I wait, the harder it is. She opened the door and stuck her head out.

  To her left, someone shouted in Spanish, commands to move to the courtyard or be killed. Near the shouter, two men—big men; in Venezuelan terms, huge ones—kicked open a door. Another, leaning back against the wall, tossed something into the room thus opened. The door kickers flattened themselves against the wall to either side as a cloud of thick black smoke erupted on the wave of a blast. Then they went in, firing.

  They won’t shoot a woman, not if she’s not doing something offensive. Be the woman they expect, girl; scream and run with you
r hair flying! Save Hugo.

  It didn’t require any great acting skill for Marielena. More than anything except to save the head of her country, she wanted to run, screaming, with her hair flying. She did; out the door and down the corridor towards Chavez’s suite, the whole time shrieking like a madwoman, hands raised to the sky, with her hair and robe, both, trailing behind her.

  Almost at the far end, a beefy arm reached out and yanked Marielena out of the main corridor and into a side one. She sucked in air to begin to scream. Then she saw who had pulled her off of her course.

  “Mr. President,” she said, as calmly as she could manage, which wasn’t very, “the gringos are here and they’ve come to kill you! You must get to safety.”

  Where Marielena had had to awaken from a dream, Hugo Chavez had been fully awake and pacing his rooms when the helicopter had stopped overhead and begun its crashing descent. The president had been alone, having sent his mistress of the day to her own quarters lest his pacing disturb her rest.

  Hearing the crash, Hugo’s first thought had been, Coup. Those bastard generals and admirals are trying to get rid of me. But …no …no I know how a coup sounds and that’s not it.

  He’d raced then for the ornate and gilded pistol he kept in the drawer of his nightstand. Tucking that in his belt, he knelt down and reached under the bed for the rifle he habitually kept there. He took care to jack the bolt as slowly and quietly as he could, consistent with feeding a round.

  Standing, Chavez hesitated in indecision, trying to make some sense of the sounds that seemed to come from everywhere. No, no coup. That would have come by ground, surrounded the palace openly, and presented an ultimatum He listened closely at a series of bangs, whooshes, and serious blasts coming from somewhere to the northwest. And it wouldn’t be preemptively rocketing the honor guard’s barracks across the street, since the guard itself would hesitate until its commander figured out who was going to win out in the coup. If, indeed, they weren’t at the heart of the thing.

  No, that’s not fair. The Honor Guard is loyal, even if no one else is.

  Unmistakably English commands rang from the courtyard. So, the United States or the mercenaries based in Guyana that have been such a pain in the ass? No, probably not the United States; their government loves me the more I shit on them and the more I bash America in public. It’s the mercenaries. And they’re going to want me dead.

  So …run or fight and die? Hugo walked to the window that looked east. There, at the intersection of Urdeneta and Eighth, a Hip, the same model his own forces used, was disgorging a thin stream of troops. Those troops ran as if they were in heavy armor, something his own people rarely wore.

  Most likely, the others I hear are doing the same, in between bouts of shooting up the town. The palace is surrounded and there is no practical escape above ground. Is there a place to hide? Yes …or at least maybe …down below …but can I get to it? If I can get to it, can I get to the tunnel that links with the metro station? If I can, is the exit inside or outside of the attackers’ perimeter? Are they down there in the station? I’ve got to risk it; If I can get to the people and speak to them I can assemble a militia of a hundred thousand to drive the invaders off. Then, with some gringo bodies to display, I can pin the blame on the United States for everything, to include the fiasco in Guyana. I don’t even have to make logical sense; everyone likes to blame the gringos. And then, maybe, just maybe, I might politically survive.

  The palace was hardly a maze of secret passages. Yet, given that Venezuela has seen its share of coup and countercoup, it was the rare chief of state who hadn’t taken some effort to make an escape possible. That’s why there was a tunnel on the lowest level. Indeed, that tunnel had helped foil Chavez’s own coup, back in 1992. It was also why it was possible to move from some rooms, at least, to others, without using the colonnade surrounding the courtyard. From his own quarters, Chavez went into a closet and emerged in the adjacent room.

  I’m willing to bet that one was only put in so some president past could sneak a maid in for a quickie without her being seen. And probably maintained by most presidents past for similar reasons. Mentally, Hugo sneered. I’ve got my failings, but at least I don’t exploit the women of the poorer classes. Fuck them, yes, and why not, since I’m of the same class? But exploit them? No.

  From that trysting room, Chavez opened a door to a narrow service corridor. He listened for a moment, straining through the sounds of helicopters, muzzle blasts, grenades, and commands shouted in hateful English. No …no one’s in this corridor yet. He walked along it until it bent inward, toward the courtyard. Here, the sounds of the gringos were strong. He waited, in indecision, until he heard a shrieking woman—Marielena, I think—fleeing down the colonnade. Wondering if it was the right thing to do, let alone the smart thing, Chavez snaked out an arm, grabbed her, and spun her into his temporary shelter.

  “Mr. President …”

  “Hey, where’d that woman go?” asked the grenadier who tossed the last grenade.

  “What woman?” asked his team leader, Sergeant Emanuel Casavedes, nicknamed “Santa Ana” or “Auntie,” for shorts.

  “The one who ran off screaming from two doors down. She was there, and loud, and then she was gone, and quiet.”

  “Dunno. Was she armed?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Then ignore her. Next room; standard entry.”

  The third member repeated his shout. “Assemble in the courtyard. Keep your hands open and above your heads. Armed persons will be killed on sight. Assemble in the courtyard …”

  “Mierde,” Chavez muttered under his breath, “the bastards are everywhere. There’s no going forward until this section of the upper colonnade is free.”

  “What are we going to do, Mr. President?” Marielena asked, in a hush.

  Hugo smiled, though the smile came hard under his very hard circumstances. He took the gilded pistol from his waistband and handed it to her. “Miel,” he whispered back, “under the circumstances, just call me ‘Hugo.’ Now back up and stay put unless and until I call for you. Shoot, but only if you’re absolutely sure the target is a threat to us. Understand?”

  She nodded and took the pistol as if frightened of it. Chavez folded her hand around it and carefully placed her trigger finger inside the guard. Then he pushed her gently backwards. He slid up to the very corner of the walls and took a knee. The president’s rifle pointed for the moment at the ceiling.

  The door down the corridor resounded with a double kick. Four or five seconds later came the blast, followed in a small fraction of a second by automatic fire.

  That last grenade blast, coming from this side of the palace, was his signal. It was also a reminder of the reason he hadn’t decided to wait until the gringos passed the small corridor in which he sheltered; before passing, they’d have donated a grenade and a stream of fire to it, too.

  In a motion remarkably smooth for someone so heavyset, Chavez shifted one foot forward, and leaned forward as well, while bringing the rifle down to horizontal. Even as the rifle was swinging down, as close to the corner as he could keep it, Chavez continued to lean forward. By the time the rifle reached vertical, it was lined up as nicely as one could expect on the gringo shouting out in Spanish. Chavez fired, center of mass. At this range, he couldn’t miss. Nor did he. The bullets struck where aimed; the gringo ceased his shouting and went down, arms and legs flying, to the floor.

  Hugo then shifted his aim to the gringo nearest him, with his back pressed to the wall. He fired again and that gringo toppled over with his feet toward Chavez.

  Chavez felt a hard punch on his right side. It forced him backwards, exposing more of his body to the first gringo he’d hit, now, unaccountably, sitting up with his rifle to his shoulder. Again he was punched, just as the first turned from a blow to a blood-gushing internal inferno. He flopped back to his rear end, rifle still held loosely in his arms. Again he was hit, though his solid construction kept him upright. Marielena
screamed, though he heard it only distantly and distorted, as if through a waterfall.

  Shit, Chavez thought, looking straight up, all I wanted to do was to uplift my people. Was that so wrong, God?

  The next bullet smashed through the right side of Hugo Chavez’s jaw, changed direction slightly, then passed through his brain, knocking a piece of his skull flying.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  All who served the Revolution have plowed the sea.

  —Simon Bolivar

  Miraflores Palace, Caracas. Venzuela

  “You all right, Auntie?” asked Casavedes’ teammate. The other door kicker was out against the colonnade railing, his rifle aiming at the corridor from which the unidentified and now very dead assailant had sprung.

  “To hell with me; check Rogers.”

  “I did,” the door kicker answered sadly. “He’s deader than chivalry.”

  Remorse swept over Casavedes. “Fuck; I didn’t want to lose anybody.”

  “Shit …”

  Whatever that door kicker had been about to say was lost as the other one opened fire on a pale shape emerging from the same little hallway. He didn’t care if that shape had been womanly; fire had come from there and one of his teammates and friends was dead. Anyone else coming out was not going to get the chance to shoot. The woman was tossed back like a rag doll.

  “Check ’em out,” Auntie ordered, his chin pointing at the two bodies as he struggled to his feet against the pull of his arms, armor, and equipment. I will never again bitch about the weight of the armor with inserts, Casavedes swore to himself. Never.