Countdown: M Day (39 page)

Larralde was seated and had his hands clasped over both his eyes when Mao found his way to him. The sergeant major had water running freely from his own eyes.

“Laser,” he said. “Someone hit the flight crew with a laser. I thought those fucking things were illegal.”

Larralde, still with his eyes covered, answered, “So’s invading a sovereign country, but we did that anyway. And, if I understand it, it’s not illegal to temporarily blind someone so they die, only to permanently blind them and leave them alive.”

Mao wiped tears from his face and nodded. “Okay, if you say so. But we’d better get off our asses, anyway. Half blind or not, I think aerial resupply here has just become a problem, so we’d better get that road open and clear.”

“Still a bunch of dirty bastards, legal or not,” Larralde said.

CHAPTER FORTY

You know, I have one simple request.

And that is to have sharks withfrickin’ laser beams

attached to their heads!

—Dr. Evil,
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

Four Miles North-northeast of Agricola Village, Guyana

Hosein, the colonel’s driver, had met them when they’d left the SCIF, lugging the ZM-87 laser projector. He’d already had a small, uninflated rubber boat, a Zodiac Cadet Fastroller, along with a tiny electric outboard motor, loaded in the back of StauerLand Rover. The laser, its mount, and the batteries were placed on top of those.

From Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Hosein had taken them to pick up a pair of bicycles from the S-4, Harry Gordon, then around to various dumps and caches hidden in the small corners of the camp, as well as in the surrounding jungle. There was no trouble with any of this. Apparently the word had already been passed: “Whatever they need, if we’ve got it, give it to them,”

They’d needed a lot. Besides rations, ammunition, and money, they’d needed a small generator to recharge the batteries. For that, Gordo had produced a Bourne BPP-2, a thirty-pound, man-packable hydroelectric device, with a suspension system for anchoring the thing under water and thus drawing power invisibly.

Between the laser, its batteries, the hydro generator, the food, the ammunition, and every other damned thing, the weight had come in at approximately three hundred and twenty-five pounds per man. Yes, they were ex-SEALS. Yes, they were intensely fit, physically. Yes, they were in their thirties, hence much younger than the regimental norm. But still,
three hundred and twenty-five pounds per man
? That was a bit much, hence the bicycles. Of course, loading those in any balanced way was tough, and took a night’s trial and error.

Still, eventually they were packed; eventually they were at the bank of the Essequibo; and eventually they were on the other side, struggling with repacking the bicycles to the scheme they’d come up with before leaving. They also had to carry the roughly ninety-seven pound Zodiac inflatable and its motor. They made a total of four miles, pushing all the way, before they’d decided to rest.

The next night, even though fresh, had been worse, as they’d had to push the bicycles up the high ground that ran between the Essequibo and Demerara, paralleling those rivers. After that, going downhill, it hadn’t gotten any easier, due to the difficulty in controlling the bikes. It had taken two more days to reach the Demerara River, north of Amsterdam and Dalgin.

There they’d met Captain Byng, who spoke remarkably good and precise standard English, especially for the area. From that point, they’d been in “Injun Country,” and they’d had to be very careful, staying off of anything even remotely reminiscent of a trail while they moved. Fortunately, they’d been able to reinflate the boat and take the Mahaica River nearly to Saint Cuthbert’s. This had cut several days off the journey, although it had been a risk.

But, “No, they’ve nobody south of Saint Cuthbert’s,” Byng had assured them. “Beyond that,” the captain had shrugged, “I can’t tell you. I’ve got better commo with the regiment than I do with 242 Company.”

They’d followed the edge of the marshy ground the Mahaica fed, staying just west of it, until their GPS had told them they were in the right area. From there, they’d hidden their equipment and found an enormous tree, with a thicker trunk than its neighbors and towering over them by as much as ten meters. They still couldn’t see the Cheddi Jagan airstrip, itself, but they could see the space above it. Indeed, they could see planes taking off and landing by night and day.

By night, Che made a hide of woven branches, in among the tree’s own. They’d actually uprooted entire plants, wrapped the root balls in plastic and bound those to the main tree. Some kinds of photography could detect the presence of chlorophyll, hence its absence. Dead branches, even if they looked green to the naked eye, could have served as a marker for, “Blast the ever loving crap out of this.”

When they were ready, Morales lowered a rope. Then he and Simmons hauled the laser, sans tripod, up to it, securing it with bungee cords to the trunk, just loosely enough to aim and track a target that would be following a fairly precise line. One of the batteries, too, was hoisted up. That, however, was tied tightly to the tree and wedged down into a spot where a branch grew off to one side. Finally, Morales put in a rope sling so that he or his comrade could lean back to aim the thing, since it was configured like a heavy machine gun rather than a rifle.

Then they settled down to wait, taking turns in the firing position until just the
right
kind of target showed up: a big, fat, civilian, chartered cargo carrier.

Morales let his binoculars rest by the strap around his neck, calling out, “Simmons, we got one. Big fat blue and white Boeing, with a red belly and tail.”

Simmons didn’t say anything. Che shrugged, thinking,
Yeah, so it’s dirty? So what? Orders are orders.

Morales powered up the laser emitter, which came to life with a soft whine. Then he slipped into the rope sling and let himself rest back. Pulling a set of goggles from a breast pocket, he slipped those over his eyes. They’d been made expressly to guard against backflash from the frequencies the ZM-87 fired on. Sighting down the barrel of the thing, both hands gripped on the spades, Morales fired.

Rutaca Boeing 737-2S3, YV-216C,

Over Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

The pilots were bored.

Which is good,
thought Captain Mueller who, quite despite his name, looked approximately as darkly Venezuelan as Hugo Chavez did.
Nice easy loading, with disciplined troops from the army. None of them sniveling; though their collective sense of humor is a little odd. The stews are happy. And as soon as we refuel, it’s back to Caracas where Stefania is, as usual, going to suck me off right here on my own chair before my wife comes to pick me up.

Mueller flicked a switch, causing the landing gear to whine its way down to locked position. He made a quick glance at his altimeter, then eyeballed the approaching field because, like all good pilots, he really never entirely trusted sophisticated electronics.

Glancing down again at the instruments, then back up, Mueller pulled back on the yoke and …

Suddenly, his vision ended, replaced first by a green flash that seemed to come from everywhere and then by utter blackness as his overloaded optic nerves gave out for the nonce. He swore something unintelligible over the agonized scream of his copilot. Then the pain struck, causing him to clasp his hands over his eyes even as his legs spasmed in sympathy against the pedals. Unconstrained, the yoke went off on its own.

It hurt too much, far too much, for Mueller to even note the alarmed shouts of the passengers and his flight crew as the plane heeled over to port. He didn’t even sense it heeling over.

Fortunately, it was only a couple of seconds between the blindness and the agony, and the wing digging into the tarmac of the field. It was even less than that before the nose of the plane jackhammered in, killing Mueller and starting the Boeing spinning end over end down the field, before it erupted in a great fireball.

Four Miles North-northeast of Agricola Village, Guyana

Che couldn’t see the plane actually impact, though he’d seen the movements that indicated there was no way it wasn’t going to crash. He also saw the fireball rise, and then the column of smoke that followed it.

“We’ll call that one a kill,” he muttered.

“I take it you killed it?” Simmons asked from below.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Do we move now, or wait for another one?” Simmons shouted up.

“I don’t think we can risk one more shot from here,” Morales judged. “We’d better do the bugout boogie.”

Morales shook his head, mostly in regret.
No doubt it went down. Poor bastards. And, if we don’t have sharks, I suppose SEALs will have to do. And it feels every bit as dirty as Simmons said it would. Shitty way to fight a war.

Tumeremo Airfield, Venezuela

It wasn’t very likely that more than a dozen of his men heard Cazz’s warning shout. On the other hand, he wasn’t the only one shouting, and for any that missed those, the rising rattle of just about anything the battalion had that would shoot—antitank weapons excepted—generally sufficed to get their attention. For any that might have missed either of those, the impact of ten S-13OF rockets, two pods’ worth, fired by the lead Sukhoi and impacting along the field about a half a second apart, was probably enough to catch their interest. And if that failed, there was the three-ton truck, spinning as it arose into the air, after one rocket went off directly underneath it.

Cazz had thrown himself to the dirt as soon as he saw the flash from under the attacker’s wings. The explosions that followed felt like they were picking him up and slamming him back to earth, repeatedly. Even before those bludgeons ended, he heard chunks of metal buzzing overhead. Someone screamed in agony; one of his Guyanans, he thought.

Soon enough, that first scream was joined by so many that it wasn’t possible even to guess at the source. Men cried out for medics. Some of those cries were in Spanish, so at least some of the fragments must have struck among the POWs. Someone—Cazz thought it was his sergeant major, Webster—shouted, “Get a fucking missile on that son of bitch!”

Rolling over to his back and looking up and around, Cazz saw two of the aerial attackers circling overhead, and the one that had just attacked pulling up to join the circle.

That leaves … .oh, fuck!

The next plane came in at the airfield crossways, and pointed almost directly at the battalion commander. He rolled over and scrambled first to hands and knees, then to his feet as he raced to get out of its path. He fell twice, rolling back to his scrambling feet with an agility that belied his age. The whole time—a seeming eternity—Cazz kept throwing glances over one shoulder.

The plane was low and parallel to the ground when Cazz saw it release two silvery cylinders from the hardpoints under its wings. He had one thought, voiced as soon as it came to his mind:

“NAPAAALLLMMM!”

Cazz ran for his life, parallel to the plane’s line of flight. His back suddenly felt intensely hot, even as he felt the hair on the back of his head crisp and curl. He also felt, cutting through his soul, the heartbreaking shrieks of the dozen or so of his troopers caught in a fiery, agonizing death.

The planes had barely departed before the noncoms and junior officers began bringing a little order out of air strike-induced chaos. It was something one could expect with a good battalion.

And these boys,
Cazz thought,
my Americans and my Guyanans, both, are good.

“Thirty-seven dead, sir,” Sergeant Major Webster reported. Normally that would have been the battalion adjutant’s job. He, however, was one among a small group of charred corpses, their arms and legs burned into fetal positions, on one side of the airfield. “That we know of. Thirteen more missing. Thirty-two more or less wounded, mostly from Headquarters Company. We don’t know how many of the POWs got plastered. Scores, anyway, since they were all grouped together. Our heavy mortar platoon took it particularly bad.”

Cazz nodded, saying, “I thought it would be worse.”

Webster shrugged, the classically imperturbable
primus pilus
. “Everyone expects that kind of aerial attack to be worse. Still, it was bad enough. The worst thing is it cost us time. And they’ll be back, them or their buddies. Soon.”

“Yeah,” Cazz agreed. “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here, fast.”

“All the trucks, at least, are fueled, sir,” the S-4 said. The loggie sounded infinitely weary. His uniform was speckled with drops of blood that had come from someone else “The ammunition we captured is still enough to do us for a while, but it’s mostly not loaded yet.”

Cazz rubbed a hand along the back of his head, brushing away the burnt stubble. His other hand fished in a leg-mounted cargo pocket for his map. He unfolded that and measured the distance to his target by eye. “About a hundred and twenty miles,” he said. “Two hours, maybe. Maybe less if we really haul ass. If they come back and catch us on the road, we’ll get hurt. If we stay here, eventually we’ll cease to exist as an organized force.”

“Once we’re in
Ciudad
Guayana, sir,” Webster said, “they’ll have a hard time using air on us for
political
reasons. They’ll have to dig us out by hand. These are good boys; that won’t be easy.”

The S-4 added, “Sir, they’ll probably leave us alone here once you start rolling north. I’ve got a better chance of loading the necessary supplies with them concentrating on you than if they’re able to concentrate on us, here, as a group. If you move out, I can probably get you enough by this evening, before midnight, anyway, assuming you make sure the road’s clear.”

“So we say, ‘fuck it and drive on’?”

“Boot, don’t spatter,” Webster replied.

“You’ve been listening to Reilly,” Cazz accused.

“It’s not a crime.”

Cazz shook his head. “Some places it is. Anyway, Sergeant Major, have the bugler sound the fucking charge. We’re going to
Ciudad
Guayana.”

“Good,” Webster said, then added, “You know, we really need something to take care of the air. The missiles just don’t cut it. I’m thinking lasers.”