Countdown: The Liberators-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  The open area that was normally used for a mess hall was packed. Only those absolutely essential to running the ship weren't present, and those Kosciusko had briefed separately. The men had listened quietly, as Stauer went through the operations plan. From their faces, he didn't detect any real problem with that side of things. Then he'd turned it over to Bridges for his part of the show.

  "And those are the legalities of the thing," Bridges finished, after briefing the company on just that. "Colonel?"

  Stauer stood up and walked back to the podium as the lawyer vacated it. "All right," the colonel said, "now you know. And now you've got a decision to make, each of you. It's too late for us to just let you go if you want out. You know too much, as they say.

  "So here's the deal. Anyone who wants out, who isn't willing to face the legal consequences or the combat can opt out now. We've got some reinforced containers, with running water and latrines, cots and all that shit. You'll go there and you'll stay there. You'll still be paid the base monthly rate until the operation is over, but you won't get the combat rate.

  "Make your decision, now."

  "Told you they'd stick, sir," Joshua gloated, as Stauer forked over a hundred dollars. "Gotta know people in our business. At this point, on the one hand, a lot of 'em want their combat pay. On the other, a lot of 'em feel that they were already as guilty as sin and actually going through with the thing won't add six months to anybody's sentence. That's not the big thing, though."

  "No?" Stauer asked.

  Joshua shook his head. "No, sir. Most of the men didn't really give either a second thought. They'd signed on for action, action was promised, and they, by God, intend to have what they signed on for."

  As the sergeant major put the money away, he felt a tap on his shoulder. George was standing there with his hand out. "I believe you owe me fifty bucks, Sergeant Major," he said.

  "Why's that, George?" Joshua asked.

  "Because she's moved into his quarters," the first sergeant said. "That's a tight fit unless he manages to occupy some of her very personal space, don't you know."

  D-28, MV Merciful, at sea

  The sea lanes were still pretty crowded here, far too much so to break out weapons to test fire, or rehearse the more complex dance of reconfiguring to launch aircraft and land grunts. Indeed, it was extremely important, for the nonce, to look and act as innocent as humanly possible.

  This didn't mean there was nothing to do. Below, among the hidden decks and compartments, groups of men clustered around sand tables holding models of men and boats, terrain features, buildings, towns, harbors . . . even a few fake trees made from lichen for those few places that trees were important. Stauer moved from table to table, listening, watching, occasionally offering bits of advice and less frequently giving directives.

  Some of the terrain boards and models were incomplete and always would be. Welch's team-himself, Grau and Semmerlin, snipers who would bear large caliber, silenced, subsonic sniper rifles, Graft, a machine gunner, Issaq Abay and Haayo Abdidi, Marehan tribe translators who had made it through jump and weapons training in Brazil, Pigfucker Hammel, Ryan, Little Joe Venegas, Buttle, Dalton, and Mary-Sue Rogers, detached from the SEALs-neither had nor could have had more than the slightest idea of the interior layout of the building that was their objective.

  Stauer watched Terry's team take turns moving the toy soldiers representing themselves across the features of a small scale palace built to a large scale model. Abay and Abdidi seemed fully integrated to the thing, even dropping out and taking on others' jobs as the rehearsal went into variables like people being hit.

  "You've got a problem," Stauer said, after calling Welch aside.

  "What's that, sir?"

  "Anyone can take over for anyone else on your team, correct?"

  "Yes, sir; everyone knows everyone else's job and weapons."

  "No they don't," Stauer corrected. "Your two translators are a potential point failure source. Yes, you have two to allow for a backup. But your plan has them both exposed to full risk, even after one of them gets hit. That, you can't permit."

  Terry thought about that for a second, then another fifty-nine or so. "So if I lose one, I've got to immediately wrap the other in thick bulletproof gauze before continuing."

  "I think so," Stauer said, "since there isn't and never was a chance of making your entire team conversant in the local language."

  "Right. We'll change the plan then."

  "Stout lad," Stauer said. "Be proud of you if you had figured it out for yourself."

  Across the deck, Konstantin's boys did much the same as Welch's. They had a related problem in that they really hadn't more than the most general written notes on the internal layout of the much larger palace that was their objective. No more than Welch's could Konstantin's team-himself, Baluyev, Litvinov, Galkin, Musin, and Kravchenko-know the rooms, corridors, and entrances of their target, in Yemen. The Russians had one advantage in this; they had a spy who was expected to guide them once they were on target.

  Though the Russian team hadn't changed since long before Myanmar, there'd been a number of minor personnel changes over the months, and more in the last couple of months and weeks. Terry had had to detach Buckwheat to accompany Wahab on strategic recon. A three man supplementary team had been built to send to those two. This consisted of Rattus and Fletcher, reinforced by Sergeant Babcock-Moore on the not impossible chance that some demolitions could be required for their mission. Terry, understrength even for Myanmar and freeing Victor Inning, had picked up two translators, plus a number of others to create one full strength team, droppable, depending on the equipment carried, in four to six of the light airplanes.

  The five men remaining to Biggus Dickus Thornton's team were two too many to fit in Namu, the Killer Sub. That's how Mary-Sue had ended up with the "Army." Biggus Dickus himself, redundant and not remotely happy about it, filled his time with drilling the shit out of Simmons, who would drive Namu, and, Morales and Eeyore, who were going to get to risk their lives to some Russian rebreathers.

  The mechanized and amphibious infantry companies, under Reilly and Cazz, had stayed fairly solid, as had the air and naval components. They were both too big, however, to get everyone around a sand table all at the same time. Thus, they rehearsed only with platoon leaders and sergeant, and section leaders and their assistants. Those people had scheduled time when they'd be able to bring up their subordinates and go through the entire thing, at least on a small scale.

  D-18, St. Helena, South Atlantic

  With GPS and radio, it was the easiest thing imaginable for two ships to meet in an otherwise unoccupied stretch of ocean. It was not, however, all that easy for two ships to transfer cargo in an open stretch of ocean. This depended on all kinds of powerful and unpredictable factors. Oh, certainly, warships of most of the major naval powers could conduct UNREP, UNderway REPlenishment, in some fairly heavy seas. They were built for it, had crews trained for it, had a lot of experience in it, and were, broadly speaking, equipped for such transfers.

  The Merciful was not a naval vessel; it was a merchant ship. Moreover, while some modifications, even some substantial modifications, had been made, they'd not been made with the intent of transferring cargo on the high seas. Neither had there been any substantial changes to the ship Victor used to bring the two MI-28's donated by his father-in-law, nor the flight and ground crews.

  In all, then, the operation was pretty damned early nineteenth century. This is to say, the two ships needed a sheltering bay, both to operate the gantry and to run the small boats that would bring over Victor, the flight crews, and the ground crews.

  "Which is, you know, oddly appropriate," Reilly said to Lana, as they watched the transfer while sharing a drink on the deck forward of the superstructure. George, Fitz, and the platoon and section leaders were there, too. Some, like Reilly and Lana, had their backs to the superstructure. Others, like the first sergeant and exec, formed a circle farther out. A couple of bot
tles of scotch were passed around the circle. Reilly considered war to be largely a social activity, thus social events, too, had their place in preparing for it.

  "Why's that?" she asked. She sat straight, head resting against white painted steel. She was near but not next to him. Really, she ached to slide over and lay her head on his shoulder. With all the others present, though, that just wouldn't do. And it wasn't that anybody didn't know, at this point, that they were sleeping together. It was that the others could comfort themselves with the illusion that it was just recreational sex, and that Reilly wouldn't care for her any more than he did for them, and wouldn't disadvantage them on her behalf. That required that they still be businesslike in public, with no obvious affection between them.

  You've never heard of this place?"

  "Don't think so, no. Should I have?"

  Reilly smiled. "Maybe." He lifted his right index finger and twirled it around at the surrounding cliffs. "This bay is called, ‘Prosperous Bay.'" I'm pretty sure nobody knows why. God knows, I don't."

  "And so?"

  He stuck the previously twirling finger in one ear, scratching more for effect than to relieve an itch. "Well, if you were foolish enough to climb those cliffs-and, yes, by the way, it's been done-and walk west-southwest for about, oh, maybe four kilometers as the crow flies, you will come to a house. Its name is Longwood."

  The expression on Lana's face changed. She had heard that name before . . . but wasn't sure exactly where or what it meant.

  Reilly wasn't about to give her any easy hints yet. "Maybe two and half kilometers past that, edging more southwest than west-southwest, is a grave. There's no one in the grave, but there used to be. Some Corsican guy . . . you probably never heard of him . . . "

  "Napoleon?" Lana asked, wonder in her voice. "Of course! Napoleon! Oh, we have to visit," she said. "We have to. Please? Pretty please?"

  "Wish we could, Lana, but we can't. No time. See, they've almost finished swinging over the last container."

  She looked at the gantry. Mrs. Liu, the Chinese adept on all things crane and gantry related, was easing the third of three containers over the Merciful's side; a small crew waited on the deck to help guide it into position.

  "Maybe on the return trip," George suggested. "Assuming, of course . . . " Assuming there even is a return trip.

  "Maybe, Top," Reilly said. "I'll bring it up to Stauer. ‘Assuming, of course'."

  D-15, MV Merciful, 397 miles west of Luederitz, Namibia

  Overhead and at a considerably distance, two unmanned aerial vehicles, which needed virtually nothing special to land on or take off from, circled at a distance of twenty-five to thirty miles, ensuring there were no ships that close to the Merciful.

  Among the other items brought from Base Alpha had been several tons of dirt in sandbags and a fair number of logs. The logs were laid out in two layers, crosswise, on top of five pairs of containers, thoroughly lashed and chained together. Above the logs were sandbags, layered five deep. Atop the sandbags were erected five Russian 120mm mortars, all set at very high elevation and aimed, generally, over the starboard side. The mortars, themselves, were along the port side. Aiming stakes, painted green but with a red and white strip bared once some tape put on during the painting had been peeled off, were laid out to the left front of each mortar, at twenty-five meter intervals. Getting the stakes stuck in had been a major pain in the ass, involving the use of both more sandbags and considerable finesse.

  Next to the mortars were three high-explosive shells each, plus a couple each of illuminating and smoke. Around each were five crewman, three crews of Marines and two of Soldiers. A joint fire direction center sat behind them.

  The mortars and FDC took up a good chunk of the main deck, which would become the flight deck. Behind that, the forward observers stood on the bridge, connected to the mortar FDC by land lines and field phones.

  Between the superstructure and the mortars, Mrs. Liu busied herself with dropping half a dozen sealed containers over the side. The containers would sink on their own, eventually. The mortars hoped to hurry the process.

  "Buuut," Peters said to his jarhead opposite number, "the odds of our hitting anything, even by direct lay, from a corkscrewing ship, are, at best, shitty."

  "Yeah," agreed the Marine, Sergeant Benevides, a stubby, stocky Ecuadorian immigrant to the United States. "But it'll be fun."

  As soon as Mrs. Liu dumped the last of the target containers over the side, Kosciusko ordered a long, wide and slow, one hundred and eighty degree turn. As soon as he was about two miles opposite the line of bobbing containers, he ordered the ship to come to a full stop in place and then turned to the senior of the forward observers, saying, "You may fire when ready."

  Flukes, much like shit, sometimes just happen. After missing by as much as five hundred meters, the eleventh round managed to actually hit one of the container targets. Better, it passed through the side above the water, through the side below the water, and then detonated a very short distance into the water. The container was blown skyward, spinning end over end before reaching apogee and beginning to plummet back to the sea.

  "You couldn't do that again if your life depended on it," Peters said.

  "Nope," the Marine agreed. "And, in light of that, I think we ought to retire the guns on a positive note."

  "I concur," said Peters. "Out of ACTION!"

  Kosciusko shook his head, watching the sundered container fly up and then splash down. Some people have all the luck.

  The chief observer announced, "Skipper, they're striking the guns."

  "Works for me," Kosciusko agreed. He jabbed the intercom and announced, "Reilly, get your Eland and antitank crews on deck to test fire. I'll have Mrs. Liu bring up the containers holding them and the ordnance."

  D-13, MV Merciful, 211 miles south of Cape Town,

  South Africa

  Mrs. Liu plopped a container on a section of deck covered with PSP. Immediately, the container was opened on both sides, and a small crew of men entered it, scrunched over, and began pushing out sections of the matting to other teams that waited to either side. She then moved the gantry to pick up and move another.

  A siren blared, then the loudspeakers carried Kosciusko's voice. "Cease work. Cease work. The time has run and we are not done. All decking teams, break down the flight deck. Gantry, replace the containers in their hide positions as they are filled.

  "We're going to work on this all fucking night and tomorrow night, too, people, until you can assemble the flight deck to standard and on time. Section leaders and company commanders, report when we are stowed and ready to begin again.

  "That is all."

  D-8, MV Merciful, 355 miles east of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

  Lana was squeezed in with Reilly on a single width, folding Army field cot. She awakened, startled by the horrific sound coming from the other side of the closed doors.

  Reilly listened, too, for a moment, then began to laugh. "The Boers or the Brits, do you figure?"

  "Huh?" She really hadn't a clue what he was talking about.

  He shook his head and said, "That sound you heard outside our little nest was a bugle." The call it was playing was, Dismount."

  "Fucking Viljoen."

  "That's Dumisani's job," he said.

  PART III

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Regard your soldiers as your children,

  and they will follow you into the deepest valleys;

  look on them as your own beloved sons,

  and they will stand by you even unto death.

  -Sun Tzu

  D-2, MV Merciful, fifty miles southeast of Aden, Yemen

  It wasn't a moonless night. Indeed, it would be a nearly full moon when that body arose. This, however, was not going to happen until just before one in the morning, local. Thus, barring the minimal lights permitted on deck and the red lights of the bridge, it was darker than the proverbial three feet up a well digger's ass at midnight.

 
"Yep; darker than three feet up a well digger's ass at midnight," pronounced Stauer with satisfaction. "A UAV we sent out about an hour ago says your landing area is clear. You and your boys ready, Konstantin?"

  The Russian breathed deeply then released a sigh. "As ready as we're going to be," he answered. "Assuming we can cut off the target from communication and take it down before any of Yemen's roughly two-hundred and eighty modern jet fighters and bombers come to take us out."

  "I wouldn't worry about it too much," Boxer said. "If one in ten of the things are working I'd be surprised. And if the Yemenis knew which ones in ten, I'd be amazed. And if there are pilots on standby for that thirty or so . . . and if they're fueled and armed . . . and if they don't need permission from echelons above God to launch."

  "No," Boxer summed up. "As long as you go in low, make it a ground rather than an aerial attack, and evac quickly you should be fine. Even if you have to call the choppers in for some close support to cover your egress, it should be fine. These people just suck."

  "It's that word ‘should' that bothers me," Konstantin said.

  "You don't have to do it," Stauer said.

  Again Konstantin sighed, this time with a fatalism that could only be Russian. "No. The old chief wants that man out of the picture. And I owe favors and have obligations from way back. We'll do the mission."

  Somehow, I was sure you would, Boxer thought. After all, he'd met the old man, Victor's father-in-law, and had sensed the kind of abilities that engendered long-term loyalty, to say nothing of everlasting fear.