1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  “Now we’re almost doing the opposite,” I mused. “We’ve gone to war with the Tevynians for the benefit of the Helta, and we don’t even have the Helta government’s official help yet.”

  She laughed, short and sharp and humorless.

  “And again, what else could we do? Turn down star travel and fusion and the cure to cancer and old age?”

  “You think we’re in another no-win situation?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer to that, given how entangled my fate had become with all of this.

  “Like Mexico? No. If Joon-Pah isn’t exactly Clausewitz, he’s not actively working against us the way the Mexican Marines were.”

  “What about this mission? You and I are going to have to come up with an op order en route. Any ideas?”

  She rubbed a hand across the back of her neck, looking as tired as I felt. “I’d rather wait to come up with something definite until we get some real time intelligence, but I think it’s going to be pretty straightforward. We drop down there and kick their asses, knock them back long enough to get this Fen-Sooyan and his group out. It shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “You just said we don’t have any idea how many soldiers they have,” I reminded her.

  “We don’t. But one thing we do know is that none of these fuckers, not Helta nor Tevynian, could lead a dozen sailors into a whorehouse. If we hit hard and get out quick, they’ll never know what hit them.”

  Famous last words.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard their like. Some things never changed.

  Chapter Seven

  “If they ever straighten this hellhole out,” Gunny Moore judged, nodding at the verdant mountains surrounding the base camp, “I might have to come back here on vacation.”

  I had to agree. The plateau we’d landed on loomed over Caracas, close enough that I could see the sunlight twinkling off the glass of the buildings, but far enough away that we could have been on another planet. This far away, I couldn’t see the destruction, the violence, the ever-present smoke from burning tires. In the other direction, there was nothing but the slopes of the Cordillera de la Costa Central mountain range climbing into the azure sky.

  The unmarked, dull-green Blackhawks spoiled the illusion, their blades still winding down, great scythes swooping with deliberate menace. The platoon had exploded out of the side doors, prodded by well-trained squad leaders, and fell into a security perimeter around the aircraft, their rucksacks like curved turtle shells sticking out of the tall grass. The Delta team was standing, clumped together at the center, watching their textbook reaction with amusement.

  “Where’s our welcoming committee?” I asked Jambo.

  He breathed in the mountain air and smiled.

  “They’ll be here presently,” he assured me. “You ever been here before, Andy?”

  “Can’t say as I have. But I’ve probably seen it a hundred times from down there.” I pointed toward Caracas. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were in Hawaii.”

  “El Avila National Park,” he informed me, sounding like a tour guide as he swept a hand at the lush growth closing in around the clearing. “The lungs of Caracas, they call it.” He shrugged. “Used to call it. I don’t know that anyone here thinks much about it anymore.”

  “Vehicle,” Moore said, his whole touristy vibe going out the window, his M27 going to his shoulder as he went down on a knee. I heard the engine noise a moment after his announcement, a growling diesel.

  “Steady, Gunnery Sergeant,” Jambo told him, leaving his weapon dangling from his neck. The rest of the team took their cue from him, but I noted they spread out behind the lines of my platoon’s defenses, just in case. “Let’s not have an incident. We’re all friends here.” He sniffed. “Theoretically.”

  The Ford F250 could have rumbled straight out of a showroom and onto the dirt path to the clearing. Its metallic blue finished glittered in the sun, its spotless windshield still beaded with the droplets of a fresh hand-wash, and I wondered if that had been done for our benefit, to impress the Americans with how well the locals treated their equipment. I couldn’t see the driver through the reflection from the windshield, and I let my finger slip out beside the trigger of my weapon despite Jambo’s reassurance, noting that the vehicle had yet to slow down.

  The driver hit the brakes at the last second, sending the pickup into a fishtail, spraying loose dirt in an arc that came just shy of our perimeter.

  Fucking show-off.

  Cowboy boots as highly polished as the pickup hit the ground first, the blue jeans tucked into them as crisp and sharp as if they’d just come off the shelf at the Wal-Mart. The belt buckle completed the refractory trifecta, large and gaudy enough to serve as the championship trophy for any professional wrestling tournament. His shirt was checked white and red, fastened with pearl buttons, and the leather ends of a bolo tie dangled across his chest. I could have predicted the white Stetson cowboy hat before I actually saw it, but the face between the hat and the bolo was younger than I would have guessed, younger than me, his black mustache spotty, with no attempt at a beard to accompany it, likely because the result would have been embarrassing.

  A leather holster rode high on his hip, the cocobolo grips of a stainless 1911 .45 sticking out at an angle as if he fancied himself a gunfighter.

  “Is one of you Jambo?” the kid asked, his English unaccented. He had, I was sure, either been born in the States or spent much of his youth there.

  “That’d be me,” the Delta operator volunteered.

  The kid looked him up and down, the corner of his lip curling in what I interpreted as skepticism.

  “You come with me,” he said, jerking a thumb at the truck. “The others stay here.”

  “Andy comes with me.” Jambo said flatly, hooking a thumb at me.

  The kid frowned.

  “He said just you.”

  “Andy comes with me, or I don’t come.” Jambo folded his arms and waited in stubborn silence.

  Why was he insisting on this? I would have been happy to stay right here, where the helos could provide a quick getaway. Jambo added a coda, perhaps sensing the kid was going to dig in his heels.

  “He’s the commanding officer for these Marines. He has to go with us, or we get back in the birds and your boss can try again with someone else.”

  The kid looked as if he wanted to argue the point, but finally, he threw up his hands and turned back to the truck.

  “Fine. Just get in. He’s waiting.”

  Jambo motioned for me to come with him and I turned back to Gunny Moore.

  “Keep the platoon in one hundred percent security,” I told him. “I’ll call if there’s any problem.”

  “Copy that, sir.” He cast a leery look at the pickup truck and the kid driving it. “Be careful with these yahoos.”

  I let Jambo have the front seat while I climbed into the passenger’s side rear, pushing aside a pile of MRE wrappers. The interior of the Ford smelled like cigarettes and stale beer cut with freon. The kid spun a tight U-turn and headed back up the dirt road, the path tinted green by the lush overhang of branches. I couldn’t have named the trees that grew in this park if I’d had a gun to my head, but they were pretty, a nice change from the desolation in the city. I was still wary, because I wasn’t stupid, but Jambo seemed fairly relaxed, his carbine propped up on the seat beside him, and I figured he would know if things were going to go bad, so I allowed myself the luxury of staring out the window at the trees passing by on the mountain road.

  The seatbelt alarm started chiming thirty seconds into the drive and the kid glared at Jambo balefully. He snorted and pulled the strap across his body, but I left mine off, safety regs be damned.

  “You’re Ricky, aren’t you?” Jambo asked the kid. It almost sounded like an accusation. “His nephew?”

  “Yeah. What about it?” Ricky, the kid, scowled.

  “You grew up in Miami, right?”

  The kid’s jaw worked as if he were chewing on some
thing distasteful. “Weston.”

  “Close enough. Why’d you come back here? You had it pretty good in South Florida. No one would have looked down on you if you’d stayed there.”

  “I would have,” he said, his lips pressing together in mulish stubbornness. “My dad died fighting for this place, for our home, when I was just a kid. Now it’s my turn.”

  Jambo grunted noncommittally, then twisted around to shoot me a look.

  “This here is Ricky Martijena, Andy. Nephew of Generalissimo Carlos Martijena.”

  “No shit,” I blurted. I knew the name, of course. Maybe not every Marine in Venezuela would, but I would have wagered every officer would.

  “Just ‘general,’ not generalissimo,” Ricky insisted. “He doesn’t like being called that.”

  “I’ll refrain,” Jambo allowed, “but I doubt the US press will.”

  “They should be fucking grateful.” The kid’s eyes flashed with anger when he finally looked away from the narrow dirt road. “He kept the Communists under control while you and your people sat on their asses. Now your president won’t even allow him to fight beside you.”

  “Policies come and go, kid,” Jambo said, sounding unmoved. “Presidents, too. Your uncle has a power base and he knows we’re going to have to deal with him on an official level sooner or later. And until then, well…we’re dealing with him unofficially.”

  We are? It was news to me. But now I thought I had a good idea as to why this whole thing was so top secret.

  The first sign I had that we were getting close to our destination was the guards. They tried to blend in with the trees, and if they’d just been setting up an ambush for a few minutes, they might have managed it. But they’d been sitting in their overwatch positions for a while, maybe since dawn, and they’d gotten sloppy. A boot sticking out between tree limbs here, a flash of reflected light off the face of a watch there. Still, it was a good try.

  Past the supposedly concealed positions were the overt ones, sandbagged fortifications by the road, protected by M240B 7.62x51mm general purpose machine guns. Men in a mixture of civilian clothes and camouflage uniforms sat behind the guns while others stood out in the open, M16’s slung over their shoulders. The choice of weapons was significant, more a political statement than a tactical choice. Those were US weapons, our weapons, if older and no longer issued. These people were choosing to visibly align themselves with us rather than the old regime or the EPV.

  Then we reached the actual camp.

  “Damn,” I said. “How’d all this shit get here?”

  I’d expected a few tents, maybe some rickety buildings nailed together out of plywood. What I got instead was a small town. The buildings were small and simple, built from brick, brightly colored and cheerful in sharp contrast with the men and women filing in and out and around them, who wore serious expressions and even more serious hardware, all of it made in the USA.

  “It’s called Galipan Village,” Jambo said. “It’s been here for over two hundred years.” He shrugged. “Well, it used to be a village, before everything went to shit. The original inhabitants got their asses out of the area back three or four years ago and the Citizens’ Militia moved in.”

  “No use letting a perfectly good setup like this go to waste,” Ricky said, shrugging. “If we can free this place, if we can make our country whole and stable once again, the villagers might come back. Someday.”

  “Let’s keep the good thought.”

  The Ford crept between the houses and what had once been shops, pulling up in front of a structure bigger than the rest, what might have been a visitor’s center or an administrative office. The soldiers guarding the entrance were better equipped than the rest, dressed in full ACU’s, which were complete, if obsolete, and carrying M4 carbines with under-barrel grenade launchers.

  They eyed us with something between doubt and resentment when we exited the truck with weapons in hand, and one of them stepped in Ricky’s way, speaking quietly enough that I didn’t catch the words even though I spoke the language.

  “Tio dice que eso asi,” Ricky replied sharply, loud enough that I could make it out. Uncle says it is to be so.

  The big man with the M4 clearly didn’t want to hear that, but he moved out of the way just the same, and we stepped past. Jambo threw the soldier the ghost of a smile, just a twitch of his mustache as we passed, and the big man’s shoulders tensed as if he wanted to punch the operator.

  Whatever touristy posters and wall art had once adorned the interior walls of the admin building were gone now, replaced by propaganda posters with the face of an older man with stern eyes and a hard expression, wisps of grey hair sticking out from beneath a beret.

  Viva Tio Carlito, they read. Long live Uncle Charlie.

  He was waiting for us in what had probably been the office of the director of this place, which was spacious as minor bureaucratic offices went but a bit on the cramped side for the leader of the second-largest organized army in Venezuela. Still, he had somehow managed to acquire several OLED wall monitors and a treadmill desk, so I guess there were some perks to being the CIA’s golden boy.

  “Gentlemen!” he exclaimed as he stepped off the treadmill, his voice an operatic baritone. “I welcome you to the headquarters of the Citizens’ Militia.”

  The propaganda posters, I had to admit, were fairly accurate. He was perhaps a shade older now, with a few more lines in his hard-edged face, but the eyes were the same laser-sight sharp, the jawline just as firm. His hair had gone grey, but time hit us all, eventually. And his shoulders still filled out the ACU’s, broad and powerful enough for me to believe the man could be dangerous with or without the SIG 9mm holstered at his waist.

  “General Martijena,” Jambo said, nodding respectfully. “Please allow me to introduce Lt. Clanton. He’s leading the Marine platoon we brought along for support on this operation. I have experience serving beside him under fire and I can vouch for his steady nerves and decisiveness.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Lieutenant,” Martijena said, oozing sincerity in that way only a politician can manage. And generals, I had found, definitely qualified as politicians.

  I shook his proffered hand, his grip firm and dry.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, sir,” I said, crafting the words like a fragile, intricate statue that could collapse with a single ounce of pressure on the wrong spot.

  Martijena saw right through it, though, and laughed deep in his chest, jabbing a finger toward me.

  “This one is crafty, Jambo,” he said, grinning. “He knows better than to lie, yet he has the sense to couch his real feelings in a compliment. What you mean to say, Lt. Clanton, is that I am infamous in your country, portrayed by your press as a radical reactionary, the modern incarnation of Augusto Pinochet, ready to throw the Communists out of a helicopter and rule Venezuela with an iron hand.”

  He shrugged, striding around to the office door. He gave a nod to the guards outside, then pushed the door shut, leaving only the two of us, the general and his nephew.

  “And perhaps Venezuela needs an iron hand at the moment, for she is falling apart at the seams and it may be that a firm grip is required to pull her back together. But the truth is, I have no wish to be the dictator of this land. My only desire is to see her united and stable enough for her citizens to again choose their own leader in a fair election.” His lip twisted into a sneer. “Which is why I risked my career, my family and my life to try to overthrow the dictator Chavez so many years ago. Why I gave up my home and went into exile in your country for so long, without hope that the time would ever come when I could once again step foot in my homeland. But now my beloved country calls and I must answer, whether or not your current administration wishes to acknowledge my place here.”

  “What the government is willing to acknowledge publicly,” I suggested, again very carefully, “and what they support covertly are often far different things.”

  “Which is why you’re here.” His mouth thinned
into a grim line and he stalked to a cabinet in the far corner of the room, throwing it open to reveal a collection of liquors and a small refrigerator. He grabbed a bottle of what looked like Grey Goose and poured himself a shot, then stopped with it halfway to his mouth. “Forgive my manners, gentlemen. Would either of you care for a drink?”

  “I wouldn’t turn down a beer, if you have one,” Jambo said.

  “And you, Mr. Clanton?”

  I badly wanted a shot of that vodka. All we could get even in the FOB was local moonshine, and it was harsh enough to take off paint. I felt like I hadn’t had a decent drink in months. But I was on duty, and I wasn’t confident enough in my ability to think clearly after a shot or two of vodka to take a drink this early in the day and on a mission.

  “I’d kill for a Diet Coke, sir,” I said. Which was also true.

  “Is Pepsi all right?” he asked, and I immediately decided I hated him.

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”

  Because what was I going to say? No, you asshole, if I’d wanted Pepsi, I’d have asked for it! I wanted to say that, but I wasn’t going to.

  “I have,” Martijena went on once beverages had been distributed and tops popped, “a personal issue which I find I cannot trust any of my own people to handle. Something embarrassing that would lessen my status in their eyes. My ex-wife Laura has been living here in Galipan for the last few months, since it became too dangerous for her in her old neighborhood. She had a house where she was raising our son, Paulo. He’s only eight and I thought it best he remain with his mother, so long as it was safe. Here, I could visit him at my leisure, see to his needs.” He set his shot glass down on top of the cabinet loud enough I half-expected it to shatter. “Until last week, when she fled in the night.” He licked his lips, cleaning off the remnants of the vodka. “I interrogated her servants and determined she intended to go to her parents’ house with our son. She’d often asked about this before, but they live in an area that is far too violent. I offered many times to bring them to live here, but she insisted they would never agree to it.” He sighed, the muscles in his neck loosening as if he were forcing himself to calm down. “Still, I sent my people after her, to retrieve her and Paulo, and if need be to bring her parents with them. But her parents had not seen her. They had never shown up.”