Countdown: The Liberators-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  Again Stauer turned the ATV, heading north this time, towards the other outlying camp. "You remember the speech?" he asked.

  Wilson sighed. "'Your job, Chaplain,'" he quoted, "'has nothing to do with spreading the word of God. You are not here to comfort the afflicted. Your function is not the saving of souls. You, like me, like the doctors, the lawyers, the everything else, have one true mission: You are here to serve the ends of military effectiveness and efficiency. What you do toward those ends is good. Anything else you can shitcan.' Did I get it right, Wes?"

  Stauer laughed aloud. "Pretty good," he admitted, "considering it's been what? Twenty years?"

  "Well," Wilson grimaced. "It wasn't like I didn't hear it once a week until I got it through my skull."

  "Very true," Stauer whispered. "Very true." More loudly he said, "I called you, as opposed to someone else, Jim, because out of dozens and scores of chaplains I knew in the Army, you were one of maybe three who could understand that speech, one of a very few I thought was worth a shit.

  "Join me in my quarters this evening for a drink, why don't you?" Stauer asked. "Be a good chance for you to get to meet the staff and the chain of command. Some of them you'll already know."

  "Like Reilly back in San Antonio?"

  "Well, him you already knew, of course. He'll be down later on. What did you think of him?"

  "Hasn't changed a bit," Wilson replied, without further comment. Again, Stauer laughed.

  "Hey, what's that sound," the chaplain asked.

  Stauer listened for a moment, then breathed a sigh of relief. He answered, "With any luck that sound is three LCM-6s that unloaded at Manaus a couple of days ago and are just making it up the river to us now."

  D-98, San Antonio, Texas

  Phillie had never seen the expression "ROFLMAO"-rolling on the floor laughing my ass off-given life in quite the way Seamus Reilly managed. Reilly was, literally, rolling on the floor, occasionally rolling over onto his belly to beat the rug with his fists. And all she'd asked was, "Why can't you be a little kinder, a little more considerate, like Wes is?"

  Even Cazz, normally a fairly cold fish, had to smile at the question. Sure, Stauer had been a different service, but they'd worked together enough to know that neither kindness nor consideration were words that really quite fit. To Reilly, who knew the man very well, the idea was uproarious, even preposterous.

  Eventually, after a long and humiliating time of being laughed at by the adjutant pro-tem for the expedition, Phillie sniffed and then walked off in a huff. Once Reilly saw her ass swaying through the door that led to the bedroom, his laughter abruptly cut off. He sat up and brushed himself off, saying, "Kind and considerate," as if they were curses. He did curse, then, as he saw that he'd spilled his drink when the woman's silly comment had hit him. "Kind and considerate."

  Cazz shrugged. "She's only seen the dead-inside side of him, bro. She'll see the rest soon enough. And did you have to lay into her quite so hard over chalk seventeen having their shots delayed? She's a girl, you know."

  "I noticed," Reilly agreed. "And yes, I did, and yes, I did. That little show was for her benefit, mostly. So when she does see Wes in full fury, or icy exterior, she won't freak over it."

  "Man can chew some ass, can't he?" the Marine agreed.

  "Sure as shit can when he wants to. Now about chalk seventeen . . . "

  "There's a company, Passport Health, that arranges these sorts of things. At least that's the one I know about. I think we can use them, since Phillie ran short temporarily."

  "Yeah, go ahead and set it up. But she shouldn't have run out. Bad planning. Inexcusable."

  "Maybe," Cazz conceded. "Oh, and just FYI, the first sergeants departed Georgetown a few hours ago for base. They should be touching down about now."

  D-98, Assembly Area Alpha-Base Camp,

  Amazonia, Brazil

  George and Webster never saw the landing lights on the airfield. They wouldn't have seen them, in any case, because they were all infrared, visible to the pilots in their goggles but not to the casual observer. Even if they'd not been infrared, however, the strip was so narrow that they wouldn't have seen them, anyway, until landing.

  "What's this Joshua like, George?" Webster had asked on the flight down.

  "Hard ass," George had answered. "Very strong on what he considers the highly limited role of a sergeant major. We never really got along. The man was the senior sergeant major in the old Twenty-fourth Infantry Division and just flat refused to be division sergeant major or even a brigade sergeant major. He thought his effectiveness, any sergeant major's effectiveness, ended once he let himself be pulled above battalion level, or pushed into any kind of battalion than the kind he grew up in. He and Reilly have a mutual admiration society going back better than twenty years.

  "Which makes perfect sense," George added, "since Reilly is bughouse nuts. Love the bastard like a brother, mind you, but that doesn't change that he's insane. He was insane as a private and age and experience"-George sighed-"have not mellowed him."

  ***

  "I would not have picked you, George," Sergeant Major Joshua said, in a Caribbean accent gone nasty, as he drove the two first sergeants to their company areas. "That Reilly likes you is the only black mark I hold against what is otherwise one of the finest commanders I've ever known."

  "Everyone has some major failings, Sergeant Major," George answered. I, for example, am having a hard time getting over the fact that while you stopped at being a battalion command sergeant major, I was sergeant major for a brigade and I should probably have your job now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The cruel-tyrant-sergeants . . .

  -Kipling, "The ‘Eathen"

  D-91, International Airport, San Antonio, Texas

  By dint of sheer hard work, Cazz, Reilly, and Phillie Potter had gotten the hundreds of men ready and moved from scores of different locations around the United States to Georgetown, Guyana. (And by dint of much harder and hotter work in Georgetown, Harry Gordon and his assistant-with a considerable assist from the aviation company-had gotten them all moved onward to Base Alpha.) Now it was time to close shop and move on. Cazz was heading straight to Brazil, as was Phillie, the latter having a container of inoculations on dry ice in her baggage, for anyone who was missed. Reilly had one more stop to make, to an old Titan missile base not so very far from Spokane, Washington. He'd promised Gordo that he'd see to getting the assembled light aircraft containerized and moved to port. Gordon basically didn't trust aviators to get anything right except the actual assembly and flying. And he, rightly, considered Reilly to be almost as good a loggie as he was, himself.

  Reilly wasn't quite so skeptical about the Air Force but, since he did speak Spanish, since all the aircraft assemblers were Mexican, since it was a potential failure point for the mission, he'd agreed to go. Besides, he wanted to get to know some of the pilots who would be provided recon, close air support-sorta, kinda, maybe-and medevac. And those were all up in Spokane, at a long since abandoned, sold, re-sold, and re-re-sold Titan missile base, helping the Mexicans.

  They could have flown the CH-801s out of the former airbase, now Grant County International Airport, to the port. Or they could have built them at widely divergent places. But the former-having eight "homebuilt" aircraft with a hell of a lot of Fieseler Storch in their ancestry, all leaving from the same place, then landing on the same place, then being partially broken down and packaged to sail on the same ship-might have attracted a little too much of the attention they'd built the things underground to avoid. And building them dispersed would probably have meant quality control problems, to say nothing of the not inconsiderable cost of redundant tools. Of those two factors, only the former had really counted as the cost of the old Titan complex dwarfed the cost of eight sets of tools.

  And the other thing, thought Reilly as he sat with Cazz and Phillie waiting for their flight to board, is that, although Wes never said a word about it, I'd be really surprised if h
e's going to be willing to let the group we've assembled just disintegrate once this mission's done. No . . . he's too desperate never to be a civilian again for him to let that happen lightly. Building the thing in Washington state, with the title being in Wes' name, gives us an asset we can use later on.

  Then, too, he was a lot more intimate with the special operations community than I ever was. I looked up ‘Grant County International Airport' and the unusual thing is that nobody flies out of it. Staging area for Special Operations Command for the Pacific region? It's possible, anyway.

  I could see that, could see our little group getting a contract to provide long term support to a staging base. Might even be kind of fun.

  Unlike most, Reilly hadn't come mostly out of boredom or mostly to find some adventure. Oh, he let on that he had, because that was what everyone else let on. In fact, his reasons were much stronger. God, I was so lonely, all these years. Nobody I cared about and nobody who gave a shit about me, either. And if Stauer can keep us together, I'll never be alone again. Not that I'm ever going to let anyone see that, of course.

  The loudspeaker nearby boomed, "Continental Flight One Seventy-eight for Houston-Hobby, now boarding."

  Reilly immediately stood, made the most cursory of nods, and said, "Cazz, Miss Potter, see you at base." With that he turned and pretty much marched down a dozen or so waiting areas, before taking his seat to wait for his own flight to Spokane.

  "I'm not sorry to see him go off on his own," Phillie said, once the plane had settled into smooth flight.

  "Reilly? A lot of people feel that way," Cazz said. His voice didn't sound as if he was one of them. Phillie said as much.

  "He's pretty harsh," Cazz said. "But if it helps any he's at least as hard on himself as he is on everyone else. He's Athenian, so to speak."

  Phillie looked confused. "Athenian? I thought he was Irish."

  "Oh, he is. And if you don't believe it pour a few drinks into him." Cazz almost giggled, a most unMarine-like thing to do, and added, "He does a pretty good rendition of Rising of the Moon, as a matter of fact. Along with any of about another thousand Irish rebel songs . . . and a fair smattering of American Civil War, Russian, German-heavy on the German, Italian . . ."

  "He sings?"

  "Pretty well, actually, but generally only when he's drunk." That, or in training, or in action. When he's happy, in other words.

  "Yes, well, ‘Athenian,' I believe you said."

  "Oh . . . he was born into the world ‘to take no rest himself, nor to give any to others.' That's why he's so harsh. He just can't understand for a moment that someone might slack off, take a break, miss something important. Worst workaholic I've ever known."

  "If you're telling me he's inhuman, I already knew that," Phillie said.

  Cazz frowned. "He's human enough." He then laughed. "I'll admit, though, that he's pretty far out on the spectrum of ‘human.'"

  "Well, I think he's obnoxious."

  Cazz looked over at Phillie's face, then couldn't keep from a quick glance at her chest. He looked away and started to laugh.

  "What's so funny?"

  "Well . . . if you weren't Wes' girl, Reilly would have been very charming-he can be very charming, you know, when he has a reason to be-in the hope and not unreasonable expectation of getting you into bed. Since you are Wes' girl, hence untouchable, in perpetuity, he treats you like everyone else. Which is to say, like shit."

  Phillie looked shocked and a little insulted. "Bu . . . bu . . . but he has a wedding ring on."

  Cazz lifted an eyebrow at her. "Such innocence. What would that have to do with anything?"

  Phillie, having a few secrets here and there in her past, didn't comment further.

  "Frankly, he never talks about his wife. He might be divorced and bearing a torch, or he might be a widower. Dunno. Never thought it was my business to ask."

  D-90, Grant County International Airport (ex-Larson AFB),

  Moses Lake, Washington

  The senior of the CH-801 pilots, John McCaverty, met Reilly outside the main entrance to the old missile complex. This was no surprise; it certainly wouldn't have done to have one of the Mexicans standing guard. All kinds of issues with that.

  McCaverty put out his hand as Reilly emerged from the rental car. "Just call me ‘Cree,'" he said. "All my friends do."

  "Cree, it is," Reilly said, shaking the pilot's hand. They'd never met before. Cree was a bit taller than Reilly, intelligent looking, and fit. They were about of an age, though Cree's hairline had receded a bit more than had Reilly's. "What did you fly in the Air Force?" Reilly asked.

  "I didn't fly for the Air Force," Cree answered. "For them, I was a surgeon."

  Reilly looked confused for a moment. "Then why-?"

  "Never been in action, air or ground. If you don't count dustoffs. Want to be."

  Well that I can understand, Reilly thought. "Fair enough. Your planes ready to go?"

  "Ready, containerized, awaiting the trucks," Cree replied. "But there is a little issue."

  "Issue? What issue."

  "I want to take seventeen of the Mexicans with me, two per plane plus a chief." Cree looked defensive. He explained, "They're the best workers. Couple of ‘em speak fair English, too. Otherwise, we'd never have gotten the things assembled in time. We can't hope to keep these things in the air without these guys."

  "Have you asked Stauer or Cruz? Have you explained what the job involves to the Mexicans?" Reilly was being seriously disingenuous here. He'd prepared the manning table and already knew the Mexicans, some of them, were supposed to come along. Why this Cree hadn't gotten the word he didn't know. He saw no pressing need to rectify the error. Maybe Cruz was testing this man. So I'll play ignorant.

  "I dropped a message to Cruz's email, but he hasn't given me an answer," the pilot-surgeon said. "And I don't know Stauer so I don't know what I can get away with. The ones I want to keep think we're going to smuggle drugs and have no problem with that, so I kind of doubt they'll have a problem with what we're really going to do. Whatever that is.

  "I did have to promise their headman, Luis Acosta, that I'd personally sneak every one of them back into the United States if they had to leave here. He says it's expensive getting into the States."

  "Well," said Reilly, "I know Stauer. Stauer knows me. He'd be surprised, maybe dangerously so, if I didn't do something, at least, that fell into the category of ‘easier to obtain forgiveness' for. Show me the packaged planes and then let me talk to your Mexicans."

  "You speak Spanish?"

  "Moderately well."

  "How will you get them down there?" McCaverty asked. "Assuming you agree, of course."

  Reilly thought about that for all of five seconds. "Ordinarily I'd go to one of the services that deal with passenger service on merchant vessels. That won't work in this case, since we want them to go with the planes they built. So . . . I suppose I'll have a chat with the ship's captain. Your Mexicans may be crammed in like rats, but some merchant ships have some open cabins for passage. Or we can simply put everyone in a couple of containers, and ship food with them. The captain most likely wouldn't object to a little under the table cash." He thought some more. "You've got a good relationship with these guys? They'll follow your orders?"

  "Yes."

  "Then-assuming I can make the arrangements-you will be going with them on the ship while the rest of your pilots fly south to Guyana with me. It will probably suck."

  "Fuck," McCaverty scowled.

  "Possibly that, too. Your pilots up to this, Cree?"

  McCaverty hesitated for a moment. "We've all Army fixed wing and Air Force or Marine light plane pilots, except for me and one other guy. I'm least concerned about him, Smith, because he's our only honest to God carrier pilot. It's going to take some work and some practice getting the rest of us used to landing on a ship."

  D-89, Assembly Area Alpha-Base Camp,

  Amazonia, Brazil

  Well, thought Phillie Potter, laying
on her back on a narrow cot, lonely and, as near as she could see, forsaken, I expected to be staring at a tent roof but not all alone. Bastard.

  Stauer had met her and Cazz, along with eight other late arrivals, at the airstrip. The tall, skinny black, the one she knew of as Sergeant Major Joshua, had been with him as had another, shorter and stouter black man. The shorter of the two and Cazz had wandered off conversing heatedly on some issue she had not a clue to. Joshua had taken the other eight in hand, marching them off into the jungle gloom. The sergeant major had given Stauer a very odd, almost pitying look over one shoulder as he'd departed.

  Stauer had held one hand up to keep her from throwing herself into his arms, pointing at an odd vehicle with the other hand. "Jump in," he'd said.

  Wes Stauer wasn't the subtle type, nor the hesitant sort who beats around the bush. "There's no romance between us until the mission is over," he'd said. "Unfair to the troops, if I'm the only one getting his tail wet."

  "But what about me?" she'd asked. "I've got my needs, too, you know."

  "So?" Stauer's voice had really sounded as if he hadn't understand the issue, or even that there was or could have been an issue. "You have a job. Fulfilling that is the only need you have for the next several months."

  Bastard, she thought again, moving her hands up behind her head while continuing her upward stare. Now I understand why you like that asshole, Reilly. You're just the same.