Countdown: M Day (16 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Mines are equal opportunity weapons.

—
Murphy’s Laws of Combat Operations

Russian Embassy, 3 Public Road, Kitty, Georgetown, Guyana

It was ten in the morning and already beastly hot. And with the Atlantic just the other side of the seawall, and that just the other side of the road, it was drippingly muggy, to boot.

Major Sergei Pakhamov, military attaché for the Embassy of the Russian Federation to Guyana, loosened the collar of his shirt and cursed. The air conditioning was down again, and the town’s thick heat oppressed him greatly. Sweat crawled down his back, itching and tickling on its way. He cursed that, too.

And cursing the one will have just as much effect as cursing the other. Oh, well, let’s see what business there is—damned little, I’m sure—to amuse me in this otherwise make-work-while-the world-forgets-you-exist little spot of limbo.

“Anything interesting, Katya?” Pakhamov called out through the open door to his office.

“Request to purchase arms for testing, in your otherwise empty in box,” “Katya” replied.

The woman, over fifty and turning plump was actually named Catherine Persons. While dark of hair, skin, and eye, she was ethnically indeterminate, as with many Guyanese, being a thorough mix of at least six groups, from Arawak to Hindu, Iberian to Irish. She’d been a sufficiently dedicated communist that she’d been affiliated with, if not officially an employee of, the embassy back when it had been the legation of the Soviet Union. The permanent job had come shortly after that empire’s collapse. How she felt about the whole dictatorship of the proletariat now she kept to herself. From her reaction to some of his ribbing, Pakhamov was reasonably sure she remained a communist and, like most such, a very disappointed and frustrated one.

“What arms?”

“Local forces want to buy four heavy mortars for testing, along with a package of ammunition and laser guidance packages,” she replied. “Along with two laser designators. It’s bullshit, by the way. I have it from my cousin in Defence that our people don’t want the things; they’re for the Americans up river. Officially a ‘reserve of the Guyanan Defense Force.’ Which is also bullshit.”

“Can you think of any reason not to recommend approval, Katya?” Pakhamov asked.

“Other than general distaste, no,” she admitted.

“Neither can I. And it would be nice to have something to do. Take a letter, Katya,” Pakhamov said, rising from his sweaty seat and moving out of his own stuffy office into his secretary’s only marginally better one.

Tivat Arsenal, Gulf of Kotor, Montenegro

Victor Inning could, in theory, have flown in. The town of Tivat had, after all, its own airport, with a fair number of convenient connections to other spots of Europe. Moreover, he was good with disguises and had any number of false passports to see him through customs. The one he was currently using was American, under the name of “Victor Turpin.”

He’d decided against flying directly in, going instead via Athens, Greece—“If it’s good enough for half the terrorists in the world; it’s good enough for me”—and renting a car there, then driving across the border to Montenegro. Once at the marina—for the old naval arsenal had been mostly converted to the uses of the very wealthy—
Who somehow,
thought Victor,
never seemed to suffer from, nor to alter their extravagant lifestyles merely because of, the fact that the world’s economy is in the tank
—he’d checked into a small hotel and waited for his best contact in the old Yugoslav, later the Montenegrin, Navy to arrive.

Feels like old times,
Victor silently exulted, as he nursed a scotch in the hotel’s tiny bar, waiting for his contact to arrive.
Even if it’s a lot safer for me, here and now, than it sometimes was in other places, at other times.

Victor was on the verge of consulting his watch when he heard and felt the stool next to his being pulled back. He looked toward it and said, in English, “You’ve put on weight, Lazar, since last I saw you.”

The Montenegrin, Lazar Toldorovic, late captain of the Yugoslav then the Montenegrin Navy nodded a half-bald head, answering in the same language, “So my wife tells me. Every fucking day. I don’t need to hear it from you, too, Victor. Finish up your drink. I’ll wait.”

“Yes, I have mines,” Toldorovic said slowly, as his car wound through the darkness and the sharp turns and steep hills above the town. “Not many. Definitely not new. But I have some. M-70 acoustic-induction jobs.”

“Define ‘not new,’ please,” Victor requested. He already had the basic statistics on the weapons: twenty-one inches across, one hundred and eleven inches long, a ton in weight, exclusive of dunnage, of which seventy percent was explosive.

Toldorovic nodded. “‘Not new, is pretty
old,
Victor. Decades old. Worse, not maintained. Sitting in a bunker at the old naval arsenal for a long time before I picked them up, along with anything else that wasn’t nailed down. I’ve sold off most of the rest. Frankly, I’d like to get rid of the M-70—assuming, of course, that your offer is fair—and just retire from this little sidelight. The reason why I’m fat is that I eat too much. Oh, and drink, of course. The reason I do that is
stress
because my
house
is sitting on twenty fucking tons of high explosive. There have been nuclear weapons that didn’t pack so much punch.”

Victor tsked, commiseratingly, then asked, “How many have you got?”

“Thirty-two, plus a testing kit for the fuses and wiring. The mines are mostly still in their dunnage. I doubt they were much maintained even before the old federation fell apart.”

“How much, Free On Board, at Tivat, for the lot?”

And so began the haggling.

Rosoboronexport, 21 Gogolevsky Blvd,

Moscow, Russian Federation

There had been a time, a period of over a decade, when Russian arms exportation had been an exercise in chaos, if not outright anarchy. Factories had sold directly to customers. Military branches and even fairly small organizations—motorized rifle divisions, say—had sold direct. The air arms had sold adventure tourism using the latest in Russian fighter technology. Private individuals had also gotten in on the game. This was, indeed, how Victor Inning had begun. There’d been no control, no direction. Worse, with all those independents operating against each other, profits on the trade had been abysmal.

No more. By Decree 1834 of 4 November, 2000, the president of the Russian Federation had set up Rosoboronexport as a monopoly, the sole official intermediary in arms trading. Others still traded on the margins, of course, but the advantages of having the backing of the resurgent Russian state were immense. Better than ninety percent of Russian arms that were exported went through the state monopoly. Moreover, they tended to be relatively quick with their deliveries.

At the desk in charge of Latin American and Caribbean sales, a weary-looking, suited bureaucrat heard an artificial a cough from his open office door. He looked up to see a junior assistant standing with head half bowed and a folder in hand.

“We have a small problem, boss,” the junior said.

“Which is?” the senior asked.

“That small order, from Guyana, for four M-240 mortars, a thousand standard shells for them, and eighty Smelchek fuses. The military attaché there recommended approval. Maybe out of boredom.” The junior shrugged.

“So what’s the problem?”

Again the junior shrugged. “It should have been routine. It’s quite a small order, after all. But when I brought it by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs they wanted to think about it and get approval. No explanation; they just said to wait.”

Boeing 777, Emirates Flight EK763 (Dubai to Johannesburg)

I still think the bastard screwed me, Victor fumed. Three hundred thousand Euros for some things we don’t even know
work?
Well …, to be fair, the test set did indicate that at least three of the five I tested were functional. And the others might be repairable. Maybe. I suppose that, if sixty percent of them work, about twenty thousand USD for a large naval mine isn’t entirely outrageous. Assuming, of course, that the test set itself wasn’t screwed up. Then again, if it were screwed up it probably wouldn’t have said some were good while others were bad.

But why did I ever agree to that price? He needed the money more than he knew I needed mines. Oh, Victor, I fear you’re getting soft in your old age.

Then one of Emirates’ almost invariably lovely, and always young and healthy, stewardesses swayed by in her stylish uniform and minimal-concession-to-Islam, quasi-veiled cap.

Victor watched the slowing receding rump for a quarter of a minute, just long enough to know,
Okay, maybe not entirely soft in my old age. Yet.

Victor rode business class, which was at least as good on Emirates as any other airline. The same could not be said for economy, in which the airline crammed people in, ten across on a 777, even more than the industry’s miserably uncomfortable standard called for. They claimed their seats were more comfortable.

Yeah? Bullshit. I could swear I heard the crack of a whip, somebody pounding drums, and an overseer shouting, “Row, you infidel swine. Row!”

Pretoria, South Africa

The place hasn’t improved any, since the last time I was here,
thought Victor, on the short drive from Tambo Airport to the headquarters of Pretoria Metal Pressings-Denel. PMP-D had sent a car, driver, and armed guard to meet him at the airport. That had become mere common sense, if the company hoped to do any business at all. Few places in the world had made the jump from civilization to barbarization quite so far as South Africa had, though most were racing to catch up.

What Victor was looking for, two sizes of threaded metal adapters to allow naval mine fuses to be screwed into artillery and mortar shells, plus explosive inserts to carry the explosion from fuse to shell, was really too small a job to garner him any more attention than a car, driver, and armed guard from PMP-D. That suited him just fine. Attention was not something he craved, especially this trip.

Thus. he was somewhat surprised to be led by his guard directly into the large, red brick headquarters and to the chief of marketing, a large, rustic, moderately elderly, and not too intelligent looking Boer who introduced himself as, “Dirk Cilliers, Mr. Turpin. Welcome to Pretoria. Please; please have a seat.”

Victor sat as directed, then laid a folder on his lap, opened it, and pulled out a specifications sheet. “We need several hundred of two kinds of adapters, Mr. Cilliers. For mining work.” He handed the sheet over.

The veneer of stupidity on Cilliers’ face fell away, as he looked over the sheet. “I can’t tell what you want to adapt to them but why do you want adapters for NATO and Russian artillery shells?” the Boer asked.

Before Victor could answer, Cilliers looked up and said, “I only
look
stupid, Mr …Turpin. And only when I want to.”

Victor sighed.
Too clever. I was being too clever. Time for a little honesty? Yes, but not too much.

“Mines,” he answered. “The people I represent want to turn a number of artillery shells, which they have, into mines, which they need.”

“Congo?” Cilliers mused. “Uganda?Rwanda again? Colombia, perhaps? Peru? Never mind, I really don’t need to know.”

“You’re not worried about this being a sting?” Victor asked.

The Boer snorted. “Here? In South Africa? When the people who run the country are so desperate for safe-haven cash they’ll do or permit anything so long as they get their cut? No, Mr. Turpin, I’m not worried about a sting.

“I am, however, a little concerned that you possibly haven’t thought your problem quite through.”

“How’s that?”

Cilliers laid the paper on his desk and tapped it with his finger. “The interior dimensions for the adapters you want are wrong. We make a number of booster charges, for mining, generally, and those correspond to certain well known uses. None of them will fit your adapters. It is not, however, an unsolvable problem.”

Head cocked, Cilliers asked, “You did want to buy boosters for your adapters, too, didn’t you, Mr. Turpin? For ‘mining’ purposes?”

“Ummm. Yes.”

“Very good. We can handle this. It would help immeasurably, however, if you could tell us the metrics on the fuses that these adaptors are to connect.”

“It’ll be about a week for that,” Victor replied. “Maybe a few days less.”

“That will be fine. You can expect the adapters about three weeks after you get us that information. Boosters, too. That’s three weeks to being ready, here, ready to move to whatever port or airport you would like.”

God, I wish I could ask him about getting some of South Africa’s stock of old naval mines reconditioned and sold to us. But that would probably be a bit too much. Besides, I’m not sure we could deliver any more heavy mines than I’ve contracted for.

“You don’t foresee a problem, then, delivering this …mining equipment to port and getting it loaded?”

Cilliers laughed, and the last vestige of apparent stupidity disappeared as he did so. “Mr. Turpin, I spent twenty years of my life busting embargoes on my country. And that was when the whole world was officially interested in consigning us to the grave. They succeeded, of course; they buried us. But it wasn’t because we couldn’t get around their silly laws. And this is much easier—less than a single container—than most of the things we used to do. So, no, no problem. And if you want them FedExed, we can do that, too. It’s only a couple of tons, after all. Of ‘mining equipment.’ And supplies.”

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 32 Smolenskaya-Sennaya Square, Moscow, Russian Fedeation

The best one could say about Russian architecture that dated back to Stalinist times was that it was not
quite
as bad as had been the Nazis’ plans for Berlin. The building housing the main offices of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was not a positive exception to this rule Overengineered, because the Soviet Union of the late forties and early fifties had lacked the knowledge and skill for economy, the neo-gothic ministry had set back construction of desperately needed housing by a significant degree, all on its own. And it hadn’t been the only major, and gaudy, similar project decreed by Stalin