Countdown: The Liberators-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  "As are we all," Fulton agreed. While the chief's wives and daughters, modestly wrapped in accordance with their faith but not in the stifling burkas of more fundamentalist regions, served lunch, Wahab busied himself with taking pictures. Eventually, the girl being clitorectomized not so far away ceased her wailing and shrieking.

  D-77, Rako-Dhuudo highway, Ophir

  Wahab said exactly what Fulton was thinking, "We're so fucked!"

  "Why fucked?" asked the guard manning the machine gun.

  The reason for the exclamation was the column of dust-covered tanks-at this distance Fulton made them as being either Russian T-55s or the Chinese copy, the Type 59-passing across the road heading north to south. The tanks threw up a thick, linear cloud of dun-colored dust.

  "He just worries whenever he sees soldiers he isn't one hundred percent sure are harmless," Fulton lied. "I thought you guys didn't have any tanks,"

  "People you call ‘pirates' took them from ship," the guard explained. "Maybe . . . a month ago. Radio say we got . . . ummm . . . twenty-four. Me, I think the pirates didn't steal anything and there was a deal"-the guard winked- "under the table between our people and the Russians. But, hey, I'm just hired guard. What I know?"

  "I do know," said another guard, "that there are black men training the crews. I never heard of no black Russians."

  Fulton suppressed the chuckle that the line deserved, even if the speaker didn't know why it deserved it. Besides, having to face tanks, even T-55s, in armored cars is not a laughing matter. Shit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The reasons for the current overestimation of

  the importance of intelligence in warfare are twofold:

  the first is the common confusion of espionage and

  counter-espionage with operational intelligence proper;

  the second is the intermingling of operational

  intelligence with, and contamination by, subversion, the

  attempt to win military advantage by covert means.

  -John Keegan, Intelligence in War

  D-75, Assembly Area Alpha-Base Camp, Amazonia, Brazil

  "Shit," said Bridges when he saw the pictures Fulton had downloaded via satellite. He then added, "‘Dad, get me out of this'."

  "What is it, Matt?" asked Lox.

  Wordlessly, Bridges swiveled his laptop around to show his coworker.

  "Shit," Lox agreed. He filled his lungs with air and called for Boxer.

  Boxer came into the tent breathlessly, followed by Stauer and the operations officer, Ken Waggoner.

  "What the fuck was that in aid of?" Boxer asked. Just as Bridges had, Lox answered nonverbally by pointing at the screen.

  "Oh, shit," Stauer said, shaking his head slowly. "That I was not expecting. Oh, shit," he repeated, needlessly. "We should have asked the Israelis to mount their high velocity 60mm guns. Too late for that now. Shit."

  "Tanks?" Waggoner mumbled. More loudly, he added, "I didn't plan on tanks, boss. Not real ones. Not a bunch of them. Nothing you or this Air Force reprobate told me said we'd have to deal with tanks. Jesus! How the fuck do we deal with tanks in those numbers?"

  Boxer, less inclined to lose his head than most, asked, "Where were they spotted?"

  "On the road to Objective One," Bridges answered. He took back control of the laptop and scrolled down untill he came to some verbiage. This he read. "Well, just off it, actually. They're based right near there . . . Buckwheat says they're just T-55's or Type 59's . . . probably depot rebuilds . . . maybe night vision equipped . . . but no thermals. No add-on armor, either. Annnddd . . . the crews are barely trained. What he saw was driver training . . . he thinks. That, or he says ‘ they need driver training.' He also says that there are probably two dozen of them."

  "Why the hell didn't you see them?" Stauer asked of Boxer. "You're tapping all the NRO's shit!"

  "I looked. A few weeks ago. They weren't there then." Boxer sounded quite apologetic. "And there was nothing on the news or in the intel channels to suggest otherwise."

  Stauer suppressed an urge to unload on the intel type, but, No, sat recon is limited. And the press is not notably good about honest reporting in this part of the world. He did the best he could.

  "Chilluns," said Stauer, "this is what we in the trade call a ‘bad thing.' And we need a solution." He considered for a moment, then added, "Send to Buckwheat that he's to stay on station." He shrugged, "In country, I mean, not right there with the tanks. I need to know a lot more about those T-55's. Everything there is to know, as a matter of fact." Turning to Waggoner, he said, "And you start working on a plan to take them out, without compromising the rest of the operations. If we have to take some risks, elsewhere, then that's what we'll do."

  "Could we get some tanks of our own?" Waggoner asked.

  Stauer shook his head. "Maybe, but if so, so what? They won't be M-1's or anything our armor crews are used to, so they'd need training and there wouldn't be time to train. Even if there were time to train, the gantry on the Merciful isn't up to forty to seventy tons of steel. Even if it were, the LCM's probably can't carry an M-1 or equivalent. And even if they could, we couldn't conceal them in a container. And if that weren't necessary it would still take too long getting ashore when we'd have to ferry them in one per boat at a time.

  "No, we need to do something else."

  D-75, 90mm Range (subcal), Assembly Area Alpha-Base Camp, Amazonia, Brazil

  There was a steady pop-pop-pop, deeper than from a normal rifle, or even a normal .50 caliber. This was the sound of the modified spotting rifles being used for 90mm gunnery training.

  When Reilly returned to the range from a short but intense meeting with Boxer and Stauer, all three gun-armed Elands were on line firing. Downrange, in three deep zigzag trenches the engineers had dug, three teams of three soldiers each-the other crews for half the Elands-manhandled silhouettes of generic armored vehicles while the gunners tried to perforate the moving targets.

  Lana Mendes was half in, half out of the hatch of one of the armored cars. I'm not sure which view is better, Reilly mused. He didn't muse, or view, very long though. Instead he walked up and slapped her hard on the thigh. The stream of mixed English, Afrikaans, and Hebrew (really Arabic, since Israel had had to borrow) curses previously emanating from the vehicle let up momentarily, only to commence again with real fury as she withdrew her top half from the turret. Reilly tried not to notice when her shirt caught on the turret and began to ride high.

  As she was fixing her shirt, before she could even begin to lay into him, Reilly cut her off, abruptly, saying, "We've got a serious problem, Lana. Leave Green in charge. Round up Sergeant Abdan. Meet me at my hooch in half an hour."

  With that he turned on his heel and walked away. Lana thought, I like the other view better.

  When Lana and Abdan arrived at Reilly's tent, the other key leadership was already there, seated on Reilly's cot, folding chairs, or the ground. The first sergeant, George, the company exec, FitzMarcach, and the antiarmor section leader, Harvey, shared the cot. The two infantry platoon leaders, Hilfer and Epolito, sat on folding chairs. The mortar section leader, Peters, was already there and seated on the ground, as were Viljoen and Dumisani. Matthias Nagy, who would lead the team of engineers supporting Company A, was likewise in attendance, but standing. Nobody looked particularly happy but Harvey looked especially pale.

  The first sergeant and XO spread apart to make a little room on Reilly's cot for Lana.

  "As I've said, we have a problem," Reilly began. "The other side have tanks, and near enough to one of the key objectives that we can assume they'll pour out to fight once we show up."

  "How many?" Abdan asked. "What model."

  "T-55's and-we think-twenty-four of them."

  Lana looked instantly horrified. "You can't, I mean you can't take on tanks, even T-55's, in Elands and expect to survive the experience. They got no- "

  "Yes, you can," Viljoen interrupted. "I've done it twice. In Namibia. I'm not
saying it's easy but it can be done."

  "And were you outnumbered four to one?" Lana asked heatedly.

  "Well, no," Viljoen admitted. "We had the numbers, if only slightly, at the point of contact.

  "Boss," Harvey said, turning to Reilly, "My Ferrets are going to carry eight missiles loaded, between them, and another dozen stowed internally or on the back deck. That's twenty missiles, max. Sir, do you know why they call them ‘missiles?' Because they miss a lot more often than they hit. From my twenty, ideally, we kill seven or eight tanks. That still leaves sixteen or seventeen facing a half dozen Elands. And that's too much."

  "Don't count on me to whittle them down," Peters said, spitting tobacco juice into the can that he seemed always to have in his hand. "If I hit something much smaller than the Earth, with a mortar, it'll be a fluke."

  Abdan shook his head. "Sir, the boys are already griping about having to traverse the turrets by hand and have the commander double as a loader. If we had four M-1s, I'd take on your two dozen T-55s with a grin. As is . . . "

  "Yeah," Reilly agreed. He disagreed about the numbers, though. "Maintenance being what it is, and tanks being what they are, there's not much chance we'd have to take on all twenty-four. Think more along the lines of twelve to twenty." He turned his head toward Viljoen. "Tell us about taking on T-55s with Elands."

  "It's simple, Wes," Reilly explained later in the day. "I can handle maybe half of those tanks if they come after us. And they're close enough that we won't have seized our targets before they do come looking for us. They're also close enough to block our egress back to the sea and the ship. Are those targets all that key?"

  "Yes," Stauer answered.

  "Okay, then my options are A: Hit the tank compound first, before I do anything else, with everything I have, while the fuckers are asleep, killing everything that moves and taking time to thermite the back deck of each one. Understand, though, that the targets might get away.

  "If you don't like that, there's option B: Seize the targets: leave the vehicles behind; everybody goes out by air. I won't comment on what this does to the rest of your plan, even assuming we could do it before the tanks are ramming their barrels up our asses.

  "Then there's C: Reconfigure the light aircraft due in, in a few days, to attack the armor base. They'll have to linger there, shooting anything that moves, for several hours. My guess is that while they'd cause some delay, even get a few, they wouldn't stop the tanks.

  "Lastly is my personal favorite," Reilly continued. "D: Two to four aircraft-call it ‘three'-strike the place, along with the mortars, immediately following which I and the Elands roll in and shoot the shit out of it, while my XO takes the rest of the company to the objective to seize the targets. The aircraft can keep any survivors busy while the company links up and moves to the sea. This has some downsides in terms of the likelihood of meeting serious resistance at the objective, and people escaping through a thinner net. I was counting on those 90mm guns to cow the opposition. Oh, and I'm going to need the cooks to supplement my mortar section. In any case, even D has some . . . issues."

  Note to self, Stauer thought, bet with Sergeant Major, pay off, soonest.

  "How about dropping off your engineers to mine the road?" he asked.

  Reilly shook his head. "I've checked the maps. The road's a convenience, nothing more. With luck we get one tank that way and then the rest pull off road into the desert and continue the march. And there are no unfordable streams we could drop the bridges to, nor even any fordable ones we could mine the fords of."

  "What if I cancelled Welch's mission and sent his boys to take out the compound?"

  Reilly wrinkled his nose, this time. Despite that, he replied, "I've got no brief against special forces, but they're just as likely to alert the opposition as to take them out. Only so much shit can be back-packed, after all. And besides, you need them for the mission you've already got them on. The whole thing's kind of a waste, from our point of view, if they don't do that."

  And if Welch's mission doesn't go off, we can't stay together, and I spend the rest of my miserable life alone.

  "Yeah," Stauer admitted. "I'm willing to consider Option D. It's very close to what Boxer and Waggoner came up with, by the way."

  "Greats minds and all," Reilly said with a shrug. "That said, I've got another problem."

  "Which is?"

  "My tankers are maybe on the verge of mutiny over the limitations of the Eland. Sergeant Abdan's playing it down, for now, but it has me worried."

  "What are you doing about it?"

  "For now, I'm sending the two South Africans around to tell war stories. That should prove especially effective since one of them was Eland crew in their border war, and took out T-55's with them, while the other was on the receiving end, if not exactly in a T-55. I'm also going to have to have a long chat with Mendes about talking up the Eland. That's going to be tough, because she thinks we're suicidal maniacs for even thinking about it. And I don't know how good an actress she is. And while I like Option D better than the others, it's still a shitty plan. If they see us coming, we're fucked."

  "That's what I told Waggoner."

  The explosion had a metallic quality to it: Blang. The 90mm subcaliber device sounded and a target to the left front shuddered with the impact. A small puff of smoke told of the hit.

  The sound of the spotting rifles, as muffled by the 90mm barrels, was odd, flatter sounding than what the troops were used to in the .50 caliber Browning. Lana rode the back deck, with her head inside the turret. Twenty-one of the twenty-seven available subcal devices were loaded on this Eland, in the immediately accessible ready racks. The platoon leader, Green, commanded and loaded-a tough job in itself-while his gunner, face pressed to the gunner's sight, frantically spun the traversing and elevating wheels to line up on targets that appeared at random, ahead and to either side. The gunner's face ran with sweat from the effort, despite the air conditioning the Israelis had installed, clouding his eyes and fogging up the sight. The bouncing of the armored car on the rough ground made the gunner's job seem impossible.

  "Gunner, HEAT, Tank!" Green called out, dropping back to his seat and grabbing a round which he stuffed up the breech. "Three o'clock."

  Lana counted off the seconds as the gunner spun the turret to the right. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five, and assume you're dead, gunner, because at this range they can't miss. She thought it, but said nothing. Reilly wants me to act like I've got confidence; I'll act like it.

  The subcal sounded again. Lana didn't need to see the target; she knew it had been a miss from the way the gunner slammed his head against the sight in frustration.

  Green, however, having stuck his head up again, did see the miss. Once again he dropped down to his seat, screaming, "Gunner, HEAT . . . "

  Lana shook her head. Inside, she felt rising despair. Shit; it doesn't even matter. Their heavy antiaircraft machine gun can penetrate at this range.

  "Lana," Reilly said, after she confronted him with her fears and doubts, "don't sweat it so much. The tank commanders are not going to spend much time under fire with their heads above the hatch. That's why I have infantry. There will not be a manned machine gun capable of engaging except for the coax guns, and those won't penetrate. And while a slow traverse is fatal at close range, it doesn't matter as much at long range.

  "You just get my boys trained to engage and hit the targets. Leave the tactics of the thing to me." Now if only I could come up with something I had some confidence in, myself.

  "Is that confidence," she asked, "or just overweening pride?"

  Reilly laughed. "Maybe a little of both. Well . . . " he hesitated, then sighed. He looked her in the eye and said, "Look, Lana, this is the truth. As near as I can tell, it is, anyway. I'm not a good man. I'm sure not a nice man. I've got the morals of an alley cat . . . except that that's an insult to self-respecting alley cats everywhere.

  "But there are two things I can do better than anyone I kno
w . . . anyone I ever heard of that's living. I can train troops better and I can lead them in combat better.

  "So if you won't have confidence in your Elands, or my crews, have confidence in me. They're going to be about two to three times more effective than you think is even possible . . . because of the way I'll train them and the way I'll use them in action. Do you think these guys came here and are still trying because they lack confidence in me? And, remember, the core of them know me from way back."

  Mendes chewed at her lower lip while searching his face for the truth in his words. He believes it, she thought. He really does. Maybe . . . just maybe. And I do like him. Or worse. So . . .

  "Fine. You're that sure?" She glanced at his face again. Yes, he was that sure. "Then I want to come along. You need a maintenance chief anyway, to ride herd on the Boer and the Bantu. And I, at least, won't look askance at Viljoen and Dumi for doing things that I do myself."

  Reilly scratched at the side of his head for a half a minute before answering. "Let me ask Stauer if we can afford another . . . man . . . on the rolls." And did she just send me a hint? Did I suggest it to her with that "morals of an alley cat" line? Shit. "And if you can't believe we have a chance, Lana, can't you at least fake it, for the men?"

  She smiled then and, lifting her chin, answered, "I am a woman. Of course I can fake things for men."

  God, what a wonderful girl.

  ***

  "I see misery in your future," Viljoen said to Lana, later, over dinner.

  Dumisani, sitting next to Lana and opposite his lover began softly to laugh.

  Lana sniffed, "Why is that and why would it be any of your business?"