Countdown: M Day (14 page)

Larralde went silent for a moment, thinking hard. At length he answered, “Taking the airfield is really only a job for one company. Sure, it needs to be a bigger company than mine is but, still, just a company. If you really want me to lead this, detach me and the company from the battalion and give me first picks on drafting in some fillers. I’d need some anyway, if only for the airfield control party and engineers. You don’t even need to promote me for that. And I can fall back in on the battalion after it finishes forming at the airport.”

“You turning the promotion down?” Chavez asked.

“I’m saying it can wait, Mr. President. Anyway, you do everything up to relieving anyone. Chew ass as much as you’re comfortable with. Then you order me detached and direct that I get priority on anything I need. With that, I can get you that airfield.”

Chavez smiled. “And so all this remains our little secret then?”

“God, I hope so, Mr. President.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Time spent on reconnaissance

is seldom wasted.

—British Army
Field Service Regulations,
1912

Riohacha, Colombia

The city of about one hundred thousand had an interesting history, having been founded, improbably enough, by a
German conquistador,
Nickolaus Federmann, repetitively sacked by pirates, to include Sir Francis Drake, been a prime revolutionary recruiting ground for sailors to fight against Spain, and lately a port in the drug trade between Colombia, North America, and Europe. About the city’s history neither Ryan nor Bronto cared a whit. All that mattered to them was that it was big enough to procure several safe houses, cosmopolitan enough for a team selected mostly based on swarthiness to blend in, and close enough to—in fact, on—a beach to facilitate above- and underwater operations. Though it wasn’t a particularly touristy place, the beach on which the city fronted was still half-crowded with people, fully half of them women. They were very ostentatiously women, as a matter of fact.

“Sergeant Ryan,” said Bronto, tightening his harness, “I don’t see the point. We can’t swim to Puerto Fijo or Maracaibo from here. The SeaBobs won’t range nearly that far, not a quarter that far, even with the extra battery packs. And even if we could or they would, we don’t have anything—not so much as a firecracker—to do anything on the far side, anyway.”

“Have a little faith, Bronto,” Ryan answered, as he likewise donned his scuba gear. “What we need will be provided.”

“‘The check’s in the mail,’” the diminutive diver recited, his eyes rolling. “‘I’ll meet you halfway. It’s already laid on …’”

“‘And I won’t come in your mouth,’” Ryan finished, as he tugged at his Henderson Titanium tropical wetsuit. “Even so, the
Namu
, which Terry and von Ahlenfeld probably could use for the contract mission, isn’t going to them. And
Namu
can range. Our job, for now, is just recon, in part to see if we can effectively base
Namu
out of here, since good recon also includes the approach and the assembly area. So stop bitching and stand up where I can check your gear. You’re too fucking short for me to bend that far without risking a back injury.”

Bronto stood up.
Not that it makes all that much difference,
Ryan thought, as he bent at the waist to visually inspect.

“And another thing,” the short ex-Green Beret said, flicking his chin in the direction of the sun, “I don’t like doing this in the daytime.”

“So you think we should do this at night?” Ryan asked. “When we’d be the only ones on the beach? And obvious as tits on a bull? When we’re going to have to do it more than once?”

“Well, since you put it that way …um …no.”

“And look at the bright side,” the team leader added. “In the daytime you can see the girls strutting their stuff.”

“There is that,” Bronto conceded, his wandering eye taking in a trio of brown-skinned beauties in butt floss and bikini tops that were very nearly not there.

“Funny there aren’t any topless beaches here,” Bronto said.

“Pretty Catholic place, Colombia,” Ryan replied. “Or, at least, they tend to follow the forms. And get your eyes off of those girls; they’re too young for you.”

Bronto looked highly skeptical. “You sure? What’s the age of consent?”

“Here? Fourteen, and they’re still too young for you.”

Bronto did a double take of the girls. “Less than
fourteen?
No fucking way.”

“Less than fourteen,” Ryan confirmed. “And you do not want to spend time in a Colombian prison. Though at least you would be safe there from me, because if you compromise the mission by getting arrested for fucking a child, I
will
shoot you.

Holding his hands up defensively, Bronto said, “No problem, Sarge. I like women, not children.” Bronto shook his head, then picked up his SeaBob and fins and began walking across the hot sand to the water.

“But, Jesus; under fourteen? That’s just wrong on so many levels.”

Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

Sunglasses added five or ten years to Lada’s apparent age.

Morales and Lada stepped out through the Posada Santa Margarita’s gold-framed, studded, white double door and turned east, toward that part of the port devoted to maintenance. Morales walked on the right, next to some little projections rising from the curb that reminded him of nothing so much as hitching posts for Shetland Ponies.
Small Shetland Ponies
.

The former SEAL wore local dress, which was nothing too very different from his native Puerto Rico …or Florida, for that matter. Likewise, Lada wore conservative local dress for respectable women—which was a lot more concealing than the Floridian norm, and without any jewelry that might tempt a thief. Her hair was naturally dark and she wore brown contacts to color her bright blue eyes in case she had to doff the sunglasses. Normally milk-white, her skin was artificially well tanned; hopefully it was well tanned enough not to excite or invite comment from the locals. She’d put on a much oversized bra, and stuffed it well, on the theory that most men would never raise their eyes from her chest long enough to make a good identification of her face or to notice that her tan was a chemically acquired tone. Along with sunglasses to add to her age, she wore a broad, woven hat.

Her parasol, of course, was collapsed and partially disassembled, sitting the bottom of her suitcase. It just wouldn’t do to be carrying around their only satellite capable antenna.

“Those are mostly Russian workers around the ships,” Lada said, as she and Morales sat on a bench and watched some fairly large crews working diligently at two frigates marked “F-23” and “F-24.” They’d already identified the other four frigates, as well as the three “PORVEEs” already purchased from Spain, as still tied up to the military quay to the west.

“How do you know?” Morales asked, hastily adding, “Not that I don’t believe you.”

“It’s how we walk,” she answered. “Rather, it’s how we carry ourselves when we walk …as if we still had the burden of Mongols, Tsars, Bolsheviks, Nazis, and—now—organized crime perched on our shoulders. Nobody else has quite that burden of historic misery, though perhaps no one but ourselves can see it. They’re Russians, all right.”

Morales nodded, “Like I said, Lada, I believe you. Right now I’m trying to figure out how I know that that ship is about two hundred percent more ready for war than it was the last time we were here.”

The Russian woman shrugged. “Can’t help you. Not my specialty.”

“It is mine, or a part of mine. Last time Boxer accepted our judgment because it’s easier to accept decay and rot than it is to accept ‘Bristol fashion.’ This time, he’s going to want more to go on.”

“Well …I don’t know how you can tell any better, Ernesto,” she replied. Lada rarely, if ever, used his team name. “It’s not like you can get inside to do an inspection of the electronics.”

“That
is
one thing I can tell him,” Morales said. He gave a subtle little flick of his finger in the direction of the dry dock. Among other things present were half a dozen absolutely huge rolls of electronic wiring. “All that cable out there isn’t there for no reason. And the rolls are about a quarter empty, so they are putting it into the ships.”

“Okay,” Lada said, dropping into something like coaching mode, “what else?”

Morales thought back a bit. “Hmmm. Last time we were here they were putting a fresh coat of paint on the things.” He shrugged, then added, “That’s kind of a never-ending thing in the Navy. Anybody’s navy, really.

“Now, though, there are some biggish patches where there’s …ahhh.”

“Yes?” she prodded.

“I understand it now. Before, they were painting over rust. People do that when they really either don’t or can’t give a shit. Now they’ve chipped off the paint and removed the rust. They’re a lot more serious than they were.”

“I could see that,” the woman agreed. “The odd thing, though, is that if they are planning on annexing Guyana these ships are nearly useless. Guyana—to include our regiment—has nothing to stand up to them. And the United States—if the current regime were to object …unlikely, I agree—is so powerful at sea that these ships would be scrap in minutes.”

Morales nodded, seriously, then said, “They
do
have five inch—okay,
okay
—127mm guns. Useful to support a landing.” His eyes darted around then turned west to where a ship with the designator “T-62” was turning around the headland that jutted north into the harbor. “And there is one of the landing craft now.
Essequibo
, if I remember correctly.”

“We’d best get back to our room and report,” Lada decided.

“That,” Morales agreed, “and rehearse our bug out plan.”

Orinoco River,

Fifteen Kilometers West of
Ciudad
Guayana, Venezuela

Baluyev’s Bertram sport fisher passed almost quietly between the distant riverbanks. Other boats and ships, some commercial and some sport, passed to either side. On rare occasion, the otherwise invisible highway to the south showed up in the form of large trucks moving east or west.

The boat stayed away from the busy central lanes, the ones where the freighters and tankers plied their trade, bringing food, manufactures and iron ore out of
Ciudades
Bolivar and Guayana, and other goods in. Those shipping lanes, and their depth, was a matter of great interest to the team, of course. It was not, however, necessary to oversail them to map them.

There were two depthfinders cum fishfinders aboard the Bertram sport fisher. One of these, by far the less sophisticated of the two, was mounted next to the wheel at which Baluyev sat. The other, which was order of magnitude better (and orders of magnitude higher in price, too; a civilian model side-imaging sonar unit with all the bells and whistles) remained below.

While
Praporschik
Baluyev steered, slowly, Litvinov provided camouflage by fishing off the stern. Below decks Kravchenko prepared his latest culinary crime against the people. Forward of and below that, Timer Musin monitored the sonar.

That was arguably the best place for Musin, since he’d been irritable almost to the point of fisticuffs for weeks. On the other hand, since the side imager recorded everything on its own, and only needed him in case there was a power outage, equally arguably it was the worst place to put him, since it gave him limitless opportunities to brood.

I might as well admit it
, Tim thought,
if only to myself. I’ve got it bad for the girl, quite despite what she’s done—what I’ve
seen
her do—and what she does.

He sighed helplessly and hopelessly.
Love isn’t just blind; it’s deaf and dumb and stupid, to boot.

But she’s up north with someone else, sharing a hotel room and pretending to be married …
Tim felt a sudden agony, a wrenching in his gut at the unwelcome arrival of an altogether too graphic image of Lada and Morales, wiling away the hours at Puerto Cabello. The pain was etched on his face, though none could see it. He tried to push the image from his mind. That just made it stand out in sharper focus.

And I’m an idiot; she’s never made me any promise, never treated me as anything but an older brother.

But I can’t help being an idiot. Can anyone?

   *   *   *   

Baluyev looked through the glass shield above the wheel with keen interest.
Orinoquia Bridge coming up,
he thought.
Love to drop it, if we could …if we should or must. But …way above my skill set. Hmmm …Krav’s been to the course.

The
praporschik
shouted down to the galley, “Kravchenko, you black-hearted enemy of the masses, get up here and give me your professional opinion. No, do not worry about burning that capitalist plot you call ‘food.’ Burning could only improve it.”

“Yes, Chief?” Kravchenko asked when he arrived topside, wiping his hands on a semi-clean cloth.

“How would you drop that bridge?” Baluyev asked. It wasn’t necessary to point; the bridge was both huge and solitary.

Kravchenko looked at the massive structure, stretching four kilometers from bank to bank, supported by cables held up by four massive, H-shaped pylons, and whistled. He cocked his head at an angle, calculating even while taking it the sheer extent of the problem.

“Be a bitch to drop one of the pylons, Chief. Probably more explosive than we could carry in this thing. The best bet would probably be to use a big—and I do mean big—shaped charge to cut one of the cables, either at the anchor points on the ends or at the top of one of the pylons. Might have to cut two of them, even. And …might have to cut them on top because there were too many to cut at the bridge level. That said, it’s a close question that would depend on a lot of non-demolition factors.” Kravchenko looked more carefully and said, “On second thought, I don’t think those cables join on top, so we’d have to cut them at the base.”

“Why a shaped charge?” Baluyev asked.

Kravchenko wrinkled his nose, answering, “However tightly wrapped a cable might be, there’s always some air in there between strands that prevents the shock from being passed on properly. The plasma jet from a shaped charge just cuts through pretty much evenly.”

“How big a charge, then? Or charges, if we would have to cut them at the bridge level.”

Shaking his head, Kravchenko answered, “I’d have to crack the books for that one. Those I had to leave behind. And I’d need a pretty precise measure of the diameter of the cables, the material, and the method they used to weave the things together.”

“Fair enough,” the warrant answered. He adjusted the throttle slightly, and said, “I’m going to drop anchor a little ways up the river. As soon as the sun drops, I want you and Litvinov to start getting ready to recon the thing. Assuming we survive your cooking of course. And tomorrow I’ll want you to look over the structures supporting those power lines.”