Countdown: M Day (42 page)

Konawaruk-Mahdia Cattle Trail, Guyana

Snyder’s first notification that he’d perhaps let the point of the company, a scout platoon Ferret, get a little too far was when that Ferret came apart at the seams as a result of three or possibly four hits from largish antitank warheads. The double flashes suggested to Snyder that they were 84mm Carl Gustavs, a system he was familiar with from his time in certain units of the United States Army.

And bad news, at this range.

“Back off! Back off!” Snyder called over the radio. “Redleg, this is Bravo Six, over.”

“Redleg, over,” came the instant answer. One of the implications of “priority of fires to X” was that the fire direction center would wait very expectantly for any request from X.

“Fire target set Bravo One Zero Four through Bravo One Zero Eight, over.” One through Three had been, respectively, Tumatumari Landing, Tumatumari, and Konawaruk. They’d not been needed.

The predawn sky to Snyder’s north immediately lit up with what looked like a number of very large strobe lights, as the guns and the heavy mortars began firing to their own south at maximum rate. Snyder guessed that the guns and mortars were firing, between them, about four rounds per second.

“Shot, over.”

I can see that.
“Shot, out.”

“We’re giving you a shake and bake,” the artillery announced. “Shake and bake,” usually reserved for use on fuel and ammunition dumps and carriers, was mixed high explosive and white phosphorous. Even without that ideally inflammable target, it had some extra moral effect beyond the mere weight of shell. All men fear being badly burned.

“Roger,” Snyder acknowledged, “break …break, Third Battalion’s Eland Section; you’re attached to Third Platoon. Third, start working your way around to the
enemy’s
left.
Don’t
attack until I give the word.”

“Roger …Roger; at your command.”

The obvious reason defenders take up a reverse slope position was to prevent their enemy from seeing them until it’s too late for the sight to do them much good. There were other, equally valid, reasons. For one thing, normally the slope itself tends to exaggerate the normal artillery and mortar range-probable-error, such that more shells fall short, more long, and fewer strike around the line of the defense.

Captain Trujillo, commanding a company facing east, just behind the slope, had mostly been concerned with the first advantage and had been only dimly aware of the second. This was, in some ways, just as well as, with the artillery engaging him coming from the north, the second advantage had ceased to operate. Rather worse, from Trujillo’s point of view, was that his troops were now
on
the gun-target line. Thus, the normal dispersion of artillery and mortars—usually long and short rather than right or left—meant that even those long- or short-falling shells landed either on his men, or close enough to be dangerous. And the rate of fire, averaging a heavy shell per second on each of his platoon, was quite outside his very limited experience. Perhaps worst of all, the screeching and blasting shells drowned out the sound of the enemy armor. He no longer could tell where they were or what they were doing from the sound alone.

It was no small risk to stick ones’ head up to see, under the circumstances; every blasting shell was followed by a horde of metal shards, whining omnidirectionally through the air. Indeed, the air seemed full of them. Still, no coward, Trujillo had his responsibilities and high among those was to see, that he might command.

And at least it’s getting light enough to have a chance to see something.

Unfortunately, he picked the same moment to lift his head from the shallow scraping that a 105 shell picked to land about fifteen feet in front of him. One particular shard, razor sharp and about nine inches long, buzzed through his face, just under his helmet’s rim. It sliced off the top of his head, leaving his cranium and most of his brain still in the helmet, which flew off independently.

The worst thing of all though, from Trujillo’s perspective, and the best, from Snyder’s, was that the guns were firing parallel to
Snyder’s
line. Thus, he could move forward quite close to the Venezuelan troops, in fair safety.

Leading with his own three gun-armed Eland’s, Snyder moved his company up to just past the topographical crest—the very top, in civilian parlance—of the hill that had separated him from the enemy. Smoke from the ruins of the shattered Ferret arose from off to his left. He wasn’t too worried about incoming antiarmor fire at this point, as a dozen 105mm guns and half a dozen 120mm mortars were making a living hell out of the reverse military crest along which the Venezuelans had lightly dug themselves in.

Better still,
he thought,
with the rising sun at my back most of them can’t stand to look in my direction, except at an angle.

On their own, without command, his own company’s three Elands began donating 90mm shells to likely targets, interspersing those with bursts of coaxial machine gun fire. The machine gunners of his turretless Elands, the ones the battalion used as armored personnel carriers, added to the din with the KORD fifties.

Snyder watched calmly for perhaps half a minute, then radioed, “Third, are you in position?”

“Roger, we got delayed and lost a vehicle to an OP”—observation post—“we didn’t count on. But we’re ready now. Nobody dead, two hurt that we can keep with us. Two more need evacuation. We’ve called for Medevac. It’s on the way. Not moving until you call off the artillery, though.”

“Roger,” Snyder replied, “break, break, Redleg, lift fire from Target One Zero Four, over.”

“Roger,” the gunners replied. “Give it sixty seconds for the last shells to impact. They’ll be four white phosphorous, all together.”

“Roger. Third, did you copy.”

“Got it, Six. Four Willie Pete and then we go in.”

“Affirmative. Do it. Break, break; Redlegs, be prepared to shift onto Target Bravo One Zero Nine, at my command.”

“Roger …your Willie Peter just left the tubes.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Since when has the doctor of medicine and

dentistry become such a pantywaist as to require that a

bald responsibility others accept with good grace must

be diked out with certain frills before he will buy it?

—RADM Lamont Pugh, USN,

Surgeon General of the Navy, 1952

First Battalion Aid Station, Bartica-Potaro Road, Guyana

The battalion aid station was set up just north of the road, flush against the trees that lined it. It wasn’t much, just some tarps pulled out from vehicles and suspended on poles, then staked down. No more of the equipment had been unloaded and set up than required for immediate needs. After all, the battalion had quite a long, running fight ahead of it, even assuming they could force the bridge.

Since there wasn’t a whole lot of flying to be done, McCaverty had volunteered his services to Reilly, that being as close to the action as the good doctor was likely to get, at least until the Venezuelan Air Force finally went away for good.

The work he was doing now, treating the thin trickle of casualties from Garraway Stream, wasn’t the kind of high end surgery for which an absolutely amazing amount of money had been spent training him. Rather, it was cut and paste and stitch and splint, along with the occasional transfusion and more than a little doping against pain, before shunting the wounded back to the field hospital at Camp Fulton.

McCaverty smiled evilly at his next patient, a seated thirty-two year old half-Chinese, half-Hispanic corporal named Chin—no relation to Captain Chin of the naval squadron. A shell splinter had torn across Chin’s shoulder, ripping the skin roughly but not doing much damage to the underlying meat. The skin was currently held together by two clamps that reminded the corporal of nothing so much as curved scissors.

Holding up a curved needle from which a black filament dangled, he said to Chin, “This is
really
going to hurt. You sure you don’t want that shot?”

“I need to get back to my vehicle and my gun,” Chin replied. “Just do it, Doc.”

“Okay,” McCaverty agreed. “Your funeral. Just so you know, I may have to turn this over to one of the orderlies, midway through, if someone more serious gets carried in.” The doctor leaned over and grasped the sides of the wound, causing the corporal to wince slightly. And then the needle went in.

“Oh, fuck!”

“Not too late for the shot,” McCaverty said.

“Just …do it.”

Outside the covered-over area in which McCaverty did his work, someone shouted out for a medevac to retrieve two badly wounded troopers from Bravo Company.

“I’m up next,” Corporal Tatiana Manduleanu announced, grabbing her aid bag and beginning the short jog to the Land Rover she’d been assigned. “Come on, Brewer,” she shouted to a private who was the entirety of her little command.

In moments Tatiana and her assistant were bouncing merrily down the road, headed for the ford at Tumatumari Landing.

And why,
she asked herself,
do I feel so much happier doing this than I ever felt leading off a client for a shitpot of money?

Garraway Bridge, Guyana

Reilly had had his vehicle driven to within about a hundred and fifty meters of the riverbank. This was behind the tanks, but forward of where he’d let Alpha Company move its own vehicles. From there, he’d dismounted, taking one RTO—radio-telephone operator—with him. There’d been a little fire on the way, but nothing close enough he couldn’t classify it as “light and random.”

Now, he sheltered behind a tank, low, with his head barely peeking out from around one of the tank’s treads. He’d made very sure beforehand to use the telephone mounted to the tank’s rear to tell the crew, “Under no circumstances, to include your imminent death, are you people to back up. I’m right behind you.” The RTO, standing in the tank’s lee, had a microphone to one ear, the tank’s phone to the other, and his rifle slung over one shoulder.

Reilly looked, but couldn’t see a whole lot. Trim and a few engineers were somewhere in the water; he knew that much. Whether they were still alive, and whether the bridge was clear, he didn’t know. Still, he didn’t see any odd blocks attached to the span, or otherwise inexplicable wires leading from it, so he assumed the best.

He crawled backwards—no easy maneuver with his arm in a sling—and then stood up. Making a gimme gesture to the RTO, he took the microphone and said, “Bravo, this is Black Six. When are you people going to get off your dead asses?”

“Six, Bravo, moving in now,” Snyder’s voice replied.

The machine gun fire had stopped zinging the water behind him. Likewise the grenades hadn’t come in a while.
It could be the other side is out of grenades,
Trim thought.
It could be they’ve decided they have bigger problems. It could be they think we’re dead. Or it just might be they’ve forgotten about us.

The squad with him had only lost one man, so far, and that one about half an hour previous. The sapper, blinded by a grenade that had gone off above water and all too near, had staggered off, shrieking, into the open until a machine gun found him. A dozen small geysers had erupted around him, even as other bullets found their way to and through his head and torso. With a piece of his cranium flying almost straight up, the screaming had abruptly ended as the sapper had been spun around and cast off, broken and ruined. The body, facedown and leaking brains from a huge hole, had floated away downstream, spinning slowly in the current and painting the river pink in a spiral.

One …one’s not so bad. Could be worse. Could have been all of us. But I wish Reilly would get off his dead ass and clear the river.

Konawaruk-Mahdia Cattle Trail, Guyana

As a large cloud of smoke erupted from his right, Snyder heard from that flank the chattering of fifty calibers interspersed with the deeper booming of the 90mm cannon.

“Redlegs, shift to Target Bravo One Zero Niner.”

“Roger. The mortars won’t range Mahdia; we’re cutting them back to battalion control. Your last shells will be twenty-four rounds of white phosphorous, over.”

“Losing the mortars. Understood. Willie Pete, out,” Snyder finished. He watched forward intently. There would be a moment of risk when the shells lifted, if the Venezuelans recognized their window of opportunity.

Buuut . .
. Snyder saw what he took to be a half dozen uniformed men, no weapons in evidence, running from his right to his left, fleeing the attack of Third Platoon and its attached Elands. A couple were cut down, sprawled in undignified death.
Aha, there they go.

“Bravo, this is Bravo Six …” He waited until he saw huge white flowers blossom across the front. “Into the assault …” The machine guns atop the vehicles picked up their fire. Infantry formed up on line, two or three to either side of each APC. “Forward!”

Mahdia, Guyana

Colonel Camejo didn’t waste his time radioing Kaieteur for resupply or reinforcement. It was three days travel away by foot and muleback. He’d either win here, with what he had, or lose here, alone.

He looked over his situation map.
Still, it’s not looking so bad. Sergeant Major Zamora says the companies at the bridge are holding firm. Says it was iffy until he shot the battalion commander and told the executive officer to take charge. Note to self: that incident will not be reported.

The artillery is finally doing some good. Should I tell them to drop the bridge, or try to? No; we’ll need it ourselves, when the order comes to move on the mercenary base.

I wish I knew what was going on to the east. But …Trujillo’s a good man. His last report said he was holding. He’ll not let me down.

“Have we got that medevac flight from Kaieteur, yet?” Camejo asked aloud.

“In bound, sir,” one of the command post rats reported. “Two fixed wing. They’ll be here in about five—”

That report wasn’t finished, as a rain of fire began to fall onto the town. One nearby shell blew in the windows of the building Camejo had taken over for his command post, though nobody was badly hurt from it.

After that first deluge, the rate of fire slackened to about a round every five seconds. Still, for a good thirty minutes, Camejo, the one company of infantry in the town, and the bulk of the support troops from both battalions and brigade combined, were shaken, rattled and rolled by a steady stream of high explosive.

“They can keep this up all day, gentlemen,” Camejo said. “They can …” he chanced to glance out a shattered window as a swarm of troops ran by, emerging from the cattle trail that ran to Konawaruk and Trujillo’s company, all the fleeing men heading west “ …oh, shit.”

As if to punctuate the words with an exclamation point, several streams of fifty caliber punched through the air, mostly over the fleeing troops’ heads.

“To arms!” the brigade commander shouted. “The gringos are upon us.”

What should have been for Snyder a ten-minute drive, in peacetime, took three times that, what with the need to rout the enemy to his front, then collect his own troops and reform them. Pursuit, except by fire, hadn’t really been possible.

Besides,
thought Snyder,
shooting fleeing men in the back is distasteful, at best.

The scout platoon, in the lead, reported to him, “We’re off the trail and at the outskirts of the town. Recommend lift and shift fires.”

Snyder passed that on, along with his control over the battery. Then he said, “Right through the fucking town, gentlemen. Kill ’em all, before they get away.”

“Die like a man,”
Camejo silently quoted.
And what the hell? Hugo will have me shot anyway. He made that clear enough when he came to visit us at Kaieteur.

He bent down and took a rifle from a soldier who had more interest in hiding than fighting, then walked out into the street. Facing east, the colonel began walking forward. Hot explosive gasses burst out the shattered windows of a building to his front. He saw a small knot of soldiers begin to enter the building, their point men firing. The soldiers wore strange uniforms but helmets not unlike his own. Raising his commandeered rifle to his shoulder he fired at the last of the soldiers, bringing the man down in the dirt street. Letting the rifle relax to a waist level carry, he moved onward.

From a cloud of red dust, ahead of him, an armored vehicle emerged. It stopped on the road. Camejo saw the machine gun aim low. The gunner called out, in Spanish,
“Arriba los manos!”

Camejo shook his head and began lifting his rifle back to his shoulder. The last thing he saw was the muzzle flash of the machine gun. He was dead before his body hit the ground.

“Brave bastard,” Snyder muttered, leaning back from the gun. “The courage of your enemy honors you.”

South of Potaro Landing, Guyana

In the nature of things, when animals, or people, flee a disaster they don’t always flee directly away from it. Some will follow low ground, some roads and trails. Some will run off in directions that make no sense to themselves or anyone else. Panic and rout are not exactly intellectual exercises or events.

On the intersection of the roads that led east to the Garraway Stream Bridge and north to Potaro Landing, Sergeant Major Zamora was standing like a rock as the first of what looked to be a small trickle of terrified men reached him.

Zamora took one look at the man’s filthy, terrified face, eyes wide in utter panic, and thought,
Oh, shit.

“Soldier! Halt where you are!”

The man ignored him, but kept running north, glancing behind himself every few seconds at a threat that wasn’t there.

“It’s not there
yet,
anyway,” Zamora muttered. As the soldier reached him the sergeant major straight-armed the boy, knocking him ass down on the dirt. Then the sergeant major crouched down and asked, “What happened?”

The soldier shook his head and started to rise. Zamora palmed the boy’s face, knocking him back again.

“I asked you what happened.”

“Dead …all dead,” the panting troop managed to get out.

“Who’s dead?”

“My squad leader …the brigade commander …everybody else. They’re behind us …with tanks.”

Nodding his head, Zamora asked, “And Sergeant Major Zamora? Is he dead, too?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“And Hugo? Did they get Hugo Chavez?”

“They’re all dead,” the boy insisted.

With his left hand Zamora took a firm grip on the terror-stricken troop’s uniform, then stood up dragging the boy with him. With his other hand, he reached for the pistol at his belt.

“Son,” he said, “I’m Zamora. I’m not dead. But unless you calm down, right the fuck now, you will be.” He then shook the boy like a rat in a terrier’s mouth. By the time he was done, he’d lined the pistol up on the soldier’s head. Two eyes crossed, staring straight at the muzzle.

“I …I …I …”

Zamora spoke firmly, in a way that would brook no argument even without the pistol. “Calm down, son. Everybody else panicked, so you did, too. No shame. No crime. Nobody’s going to hurt you if you will remember your duty,
now.

“Now, are you all right?”

The boy drew several shuddering breaths before answering—gasping, really—“I …I think so, Sergeant Major.”

“Good.” Zamora released the lapel. “Now come with me.”

The mountain guns were still firing, somewhere off to the southwest, when Zamora led the boy into the battalion command post. To one side of the lightly beaten path a body lay. The body wore lieutenant colonel’s insignia.

Zamora announced to the major now in command, “Sir, you’re the senior officer I can find at the moment. We are fucked and it is up to
you
to get us unfucked.” In as few words as possible, be briefed the major on what he’d been able to glean from the bits and pieces of information the soldier in tow had known.

“I see,” answered the major. “And your recommendations. Sergeant Major?”

Having soldiered for better than thirty years, Zamora already had his answer. “We’ve lost here, sir. Consolidate whatever we can in an arc around Potaro Landing. Pull the troops on the bridge out last. Screw the mountain guns; order the gunners here and save
them
. We’ll escape and evade across the river tonight, and then back up the mountain to Kaieteur.”