Countdown: M Day (32 page)

The far recognition signal was a call on a cell phone. The near one wasn’t really needed, since the approaching boat was blaring out Leon Russell at volume.

“Hey, Leo, dude, ain’t seen you in fuckin’ years! And how’d you get the eight track fixed?”

“Tim! Bubba!” Ross shouted, jumping into the surf from the puttering boat, holding itself against the seashore by engine power. Behind him, he dragged a rope. This he tied off on a nearby tree before running to meet Lindell. Then came a small orgy of hand shaking, back slapping, and “hey whatever happened to?” reunionizing.

Ross turned away, shouting something in Spanish to the captain of the boat. The engine cut out almost immediately.

“Be right back,” Leo said to Lindell, the turned and waded out about two thirds of the way to the boat. There the captain, and presumably his brother in law, met him, passing over one end of a length of garden hose.

“I got three hundred feet of this crap,” Leo shouted over the sounds of the surf. “Think it’ll be enough?”

“It will,” Lindell replied. “At least while high tide lasts it will. I paced it off.”

Leo turned around, saying over one shoulder, “Great. Now, how about you run this to your tank, then give me a shout so I can tell my brother-in-law to start pumping?”

“Wilco, bubba …Hey, what about the food and beer.”

“That’s what I’m going back for, dummy!”

Wineperu, Guyana

For whatever reasons—and Boxer thought it was that the Venezuelans were having some serious maintenance backlog back at base—Corporal Hosein wasn’t molested on his drive from Camp Fulton to the wrecked naval base. The fact that he’d driven entirely at night probably helped, even if it hadn’t guaranteed it.

And I’m not too sure that driving without headlights is necessarily any safer than with headlights and risking being bombed. Course, I’m not sure it isn’t, either, and safety wasn’t the point, anyway.

Hosein arrived just before sun up, and the rosy-fingered bitch, “the child of morning,” was just about to peek over the horizon. He’d learned, since joining the regiment, that this was called “BMNT.”

He called out for Morales and Simmons. When that didn’t work immediately he explained, “It’s just me, guys. The colonel sent me to get you but he had to stay behind.”

“Oh,” said Simmons. “In that case, here I am. Hey, Che, get your lazy ass up.”

Hosein had to really peer closely in the direction of the voice before he could just barely make out a human silhouette. “How’d you do that?” he asked.

“Training,” Simmons answered, as if that explained everything.

Well …maybe it does,
thought Hosein.

“The colonel sent me to get you and bring you back to camp. No, I don’t know why. Something about a ‘special mission,’ that’s all I know.”

“Maaannn,” Morales began a gripe. “It’s not our fault the sub sank. And we’ve almost got it recovered.” He flicked his head toward the river. “C’mon, take a look.”

Shrugging, Hosein followed along. It was getting lighter by the minute. By the time they reached the water’s edge, he could see well enough to make out a single tripod, built of logs, sticking up out of the water. A taut cable ran from a shackle near the top of the tripod into the stream. He thought, but couldn’t be sure, that he could make out a faintly bullet-like object outline just below the surface.

“I’m impressed,” Hosein agreed. “Makes not a shit of difference, though; the colonel sent me to get you. And the RSM said something about ‘dead or alive.’”

“Ah,” Morales replied. “In that case, give us five minutes to pack.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

My logisticians are a humorless lot …they know

if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.

—Alexander the Great (attributed)

Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

A single plane, an Airbus-319, empty but for a trivial number of casualties, most of those the result of accidents, lumbered down the runway. Even nearly empty, there wasn’t a lot of asphalt left before its wheels lifted off.

That was, of course, Chavez’s private plane, having come to deliver the great man for a tour of “the front,” and with room enough for a minimal entourage and, most importantly, a news team with video equipment. The fuel spent getting there was enough to allow it to leave again with those mostly walking wounded.

Larralde looked down at the medal on his chest, just pinned there that afternoon.

Sergeant Major Arrivillaga sneered, then looked at his own new medal and sneered again. “That, and about twenty Bolivars might get us each a cup of decent coffee,” he said.

“You sound bitter, Mao,” Larralde observed, carefully keeping his own bitterness out of his voice.

“Bitter? Me? Bitter? Oh, I’m not bitter …I’m …” Mao went into a furious tirade. “Our armed forces has grand total of forty-three transport aircraft, some of them quite light. I can list them for you, since I’ve jumped most of them, at one time or another: Four C-130’s, one of them supporting the troops at Kaieteur Falls, two Shorts, ten Beechcraft, five of them Army, eight Israeli Arava, a dozen Polish Skytrucks, three Boeings, two of them only good for fuel, two Dessaults, one Fairchild and …and
that!
” He pointed in the Airbus’ direction. “And that represents better than ten percent of the practical airlift we have. But is it bringing in more troops? No. Food and ammunition? No. Fuel? Spare parts?Medical supplies? No. No. No. How about some vehicles, so we can support ourselves when we finally get off our asses and move off this fucking airstrip? Again, no.”

“Ah, cheer up, Mao. You always were too pessimistic. We’ve got better than half the brigade here now.”

“Yes, we
do
,” Arrivillaga agreed, nodding deeply. “Finally. After about a week. And you know what, sir? With the air force showing up, giving number one priority to their overfed ‘needs,’ that’s all we’re likely to have, too. And we’re going to sit here for lack of vehicles and lack of fuel to move them if we had them.”

Larralde blew air. “I know. Our job was to get us here and get the airport. We did that, pretty much bloodlessly. Well …bloodlessly for us, anyway. Our vehicles were supposed to come by air but almost all our supply was supposed to come by sea. As is, until the navy gets the ports unfucked, supply has to come by air, and there’s no room for the vehicles.”

“There might be,” Arrivillaga cursed, “if Hugo would forego his flying bordello.”

“Oh, c’mon. You were on that plane, too, getting decorated. There wasn’t a whore in sight, just that older …”

“Like I told you, sir, Hugo doesn’t like them too pretty.”

Larralde did a double take. “
You
told
me
?”

Mao ignored that as too inconvenient to deal with. Instead he continued with his general theme. “Or maybe the general staff would get off its collective ass and charter some planes.”

Arrivillaga stopped speaking. He’d caught sight of two of the troops, wandering off together and trying to look nonchalant about it. “Ah, fuggit.” He stood up, abruptly. “Out of my pay grade anyway. But young Vargas and Villareal, though they don’t know it yet, have just volunteered for shit burning detail. Seeing to that will make me feel a lot better …and it’s
within
my pay grade.”

Georgetown, Guyana

If “mass” could be defined as a couple of thousand, then there was a “mass rally” by the statue of Cuffy, at Square of the Revolution. Besides banners saying things like,
“Viva la Revolucion,”
and “Socialism or Death,” there were a fair number of Venezuelan flags being waved in among the crowd.

As there should be,
Conde thought,
since we passed them out. But I shouldn’t be here, making a stupid speech in a language not my own. Can these Creole babblers even understand English? Or am I just wasting my time here?

Yes, I am,
he decided.
I shouldn’t be here, wasting my time. I should be down at the docks trying to unfuck the mess we were left when all the workers failed to show up after their president’s little pseudo declaration of war.

Note to self: Next time we invade a country, we need to cut it off from the internet, too.

Conde mentally spat.
And the army’s bitching up a storm that none of their shit’s been offloaded. Well, screw ’em. The navy supports us; the air force supports them. That’s the deal.

Looking over the crowd, he wondered,
Can I get some use out of these rabble, unloading the ships? Nah, if they’d had jobs they’d be at them. These are the career unemployables, most of them, who provide the illusion of mass to the revolution.

Well, at least docking space isn’t a problem,
thought the XO of the First Marine Brigade, Colonel de Castro, standing on the roof of a building not far from Stabroek Market and overlooking the river. The XO was in charge, for the nonce. This would stay that way until the next increment of troops showed up, along with the brigade commander.

De Castro grimaced with annoyance.
No, docking space isn’t an issue. Unfortunately, longshoremen are.

Up to a point, things had gone well. Certainly the town had been seized easily. Then the ramped amphibs had come in, on the north side where the slope of the shore was suitable, and let loose their cargo.

But that was almost all vehicles, some wheeled transport, yes, but more combat. We’ve got all the AMTRAKS, all the Engesas, all the Land Rovers, Tiunas, and M-151’s we can use.

And a grand total of thirteen trucks, for almost two thousand of our people. And we need all of those, and twice as many trucks over, if we’re even going to live here, while the two thousand barely suffice for keeping order in the place and securing—lightly, be it noted—the town.

Oh, sure, in a week or eight days the amphibs will come back, this time with lots more trucks and another thousand troops. And the brigade commander. Which will add to, rather than reduce, my problems.

De Castro looked down at two thin and ragged lines, staggering down one of the gangways of one of the ships, and up the other. The former column then massed up in a gaggle as they tried to jam close enough to two standing trucks to get rid of their burdens

Of course, it’s not as bad as all that. I
have
managed to pull out a couple of hundred of our people, to unload the ships by hand. And they’re managing to get to the dock a grand total of about a hundred and fifty tons a day. At that rate, the last of the ships we
currently
have in harbor will be unloaded, oh, in about three months.

He scowled.
A hundred and fifty tons a day. Which is more than enough to live on, true, since we only use up about twelve to fifteen tons. But it is not enough—not without a lot more trucks—to actually
get
anywhere. New Amsterdam and Linden? I’ve got a platoon in each, just enough to guard the flags we raised over the public buildings.

God help us if the air bridge doesn’t hold up and we have to use what little transport we have to support the fucking army.

God help us, too, if we can’t get the food flowing to the civilians again. They’re about out of held stocks and when that runs out we’re going to need to bring into port a thousand tons a day for them alone. On the plus side, when we tell them “unload or starve,” we’ll probably get the dock workers back.

But I shudder to think of the problems when I have to start into the food wholesale business. And, now that I think of it, what are their merchants going to do for money, since the Guyanan dollar has become worthless? Wish we had thought of that.

Note to self: call the brigade commander and ask him to get us sent about half a billion Bolivars and an accountant team to do currency exchanges.

Kaieteur International Airport, Guyana

It was international because of both regularly scheduled, plus frequent charter, flights from Venezuela and Brazil, and sometimes Montreal, Quebec. For something in the middle of the jungle, the airfield was not unimpressive, at ninety-six hundred feet and fully asphalted. More impressive still was the reason for its being there, the seven-hundred and forty-seven foot falls to the southeast. Nor was the Kaieteur Falls a mere trickle; it dumped over twenty-three thousand cubic feet of water down to the Potaro River
every second
. One could hear the roar even at the airport, six kilometers away. When the wind was right, one could hear it even through the walls of the austere guest house the commander of the brigade, Colonel Camejo, had commandeered for his headquarters.

“You know what bugs me, Sergeant Major?” the rather tall and eager-looking Camejo asked.

Straight-faced, Zamora, the brigade’s senior noncom answered, “If it isn’t that while the goody-two-shoes Marines and Hugo’s pets, the paratroopers, got priority on everything, with us getting whatever was left over, or that while they got plussed up to strength while we’re sitting at under sixty percent, or that we get one lousy C-130 lift every other day, which brings barely enough to eat, or that the helicopters got so overworked the last week that instead of eighty percent of them being up, eighty percent are back at Tumeremo and down, for maintenance, or that those fat bureaucrats in Caracas still haven’t finished cutting contracts for air charters …other than those things, sir, no, I can’t imagine what’s bugging you.”

“Nobody likes a cynic, Sergeant Major,” Camejo intoned, waving a disapproving finger.

At Zamora’s raised eyebrow, Camejo added, “I understand the first charter is due in here, today. From Rutaca Airlines. Don’t know what kind of plane it will be.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it, sir. And it will probably be a biplane they dug out of a museum.”

Camejo chose to ignore that. Instead, he said, “What bugs me is that we have absolutely no contact with the enemy.” He waved to the northeast, in the direction of Ebini Hills and the presumptively gringo base there. “There are five thousand of the bastards down there; so intelligence says, anyway, and we have not clue one what they’re doing.”

Zamora shrugged.
Well, of
course
we don’t. Finding out would take some troops moving, and that would require lift we just don’t have. No sense in saying that though, the colonel already knows it.

Instead, Zamora said, “On that note, we’ve got a bevy …well, more of a horde, really …of civilians coming up the road to Lethem, on the Brazilian border.”

“How many?”

“The air force’s best guess is maybe eight thousand.”

“Shit. We can’t feed them.”

It was not insignificant that neither Zamora nor his chief even thought of the possibility of taking the civilians hostage, to force the surrender of the troops at the camp. They were civilized men and even, in their own eyes at least, vanguards of civilization.

“Oh, hell, no, sir,” Zamora agreed. “Thing is, we don’t seem to have to.
Somebody
laid out stockpiles for them, about every three-days’ march. They’ve been living on those. I put a guard on the one that’s right under Mahdiana Eagle Mountain, to keep our own people from pilfering it.”

“Good thought,” Camejo commended. His face grew momentarily troubled. “Odd, isn’t it, Sergeant Major that someone …”

Whatever he was about to say, the colonel was interrupted by the sound of a heavy jet, passing low overhead and straining its engines in a turn. The two rushed outside and looked up, just as a big, lumbering Boeing 737 was making its final run onto the airfield. The jet had “RUTACA,” in big blue letters, painted on the side.

“So shoot me; I was wrong,” said Zamora sullenly.

Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

The smell of burning feces—worse than either the human waste or the mixed in diesel, alone, would have been—was everywhere. At least it was everywhere Carlos and Lily could get to, between his having to drag the half-full, odiferous barrels to the burn area, while she had to tote twenty-liter cans of fuel, mix it in, torch it off, and stir the mixture as it burned.

“Well …there’s one thing, one good thing,” Lily admitted, as Carlos let go the latest overfull barrel of waste, jumping out of the way, backwards and fast, to avoid the splash.

“What’s that, hon?”

She had tears running down her face, not from the work but from the smell and the fumes. She wiped those away, leaving a series of dirty streaks on her skin. “There’s nothing like burning shit to take away a case of the hornies.”

“Where
you’re
concerned, lover,” Carlos answered, with a leer, “even that isn’t enough.”