Countdown: M Day (15 page)

“Don’t sweat the electric tower, Chief,” Kravchenko said. “I can tell you from here what I’d need to drop that. Easy. And I didn’t ask to become the cook for this mission,” he finished.

“It was you or Litvinov,” Baluyev replied, “and as bad as your cooking is, it is usually survivable. The same cannot be said of his.”

Seated after, fishing pole in hand, Litvinov smiled to the city receding sternward. Pays to think ahead.
Pays to really fuck it up sometimes when someone tasks you with something you would rather not do.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Theory has, therefore, to consider

the nature of means and ends.

—Clausewitz,
On War

Camp Fulton, Guyana

Victor Inning, ethnically a Great Russian who had, once upon a happier time, “served the Soviet Union,” lay abed next to his gently snoring and equally Russian wife.

Damn, but I miss the old man
, he thought, meaning by that that he missed his wife’s late father, an old cold warrior, a
very
high ranking officer of, first, the KGB and than the FSB The old man had died, in harness, in the Lubyanka, as he’d have wanted to go. Even so,
Damn, but I miss him. Not only was he a voice of sanity in a world that should be institutionalized, if we could just find an asylum big enough, but I could have gone to him for the fucking mines Boxer and Stauer want.

So Boxer and Waggoner figured out roughly what we need and where I can’t go to get them. “No place in Latin America,” they said. “Some places love Chavez and some hate his guts; but they’re all potentially infiltrated, to include Brazil. No place in North America. None of the core EU states. Not North Korea. Not Vietnam. Not China. Not Russia.”

Most of that I could have come up with on my own.

Where,
where,
can I get them and in the quantity needed? They didn’t have to forbid me from going to the EU; no member of the core of the EU will sell. I can’t ask Russia even if I didn’t think they’d pass it on. Even my old comrades in the FSB are pissed at me—some of them to the shoot on sight level—for joining the regiment.

“Though I still wouldn’t have,” he whispered to the darkness. “I still wouldn’t have if the old man hadn’t told me to take his daughter and get out while we still could. And this was the only place that would take me and not arrest me.”

The United States is …well …right out. Besides, while they’ve got mines, they seem to prefer modifying aerial bombs to turn them into “destructors.” Or sometimes purpose building mines to be dropped from aircraft. And I don’t have any contacts there anyway, not to speak of, not that I could use. And even if I did, we don’t have any aircraft for which the purchase of even the bombs, let alone the destructor kits, would make sense.

Canada? Well, emotionally they might as well be part of the EU.

Guyana could get them from us, openly, and from nearly anybody that has or makes them. But what Guyana buys for us, Guyana knows about. And what they know about, Chavez will know about quickly. So says Boxer, anyway, and I’ve learned to trust him on these things.

I’d go to Iran or Iraq, but not only are they back at de facto war with each other, they’ve both got civil wars going on. What they make, they use on each other and themselves. Kind of pointlessly, too, since oil’s a glut on the market and nobody cares all that much if they export any or not.

Singapore makes a good series. So does Taiwan. But Taiwan is busy mining the approaches from China and will have few to spare, while Singapore is just plain touchy about selling arms under the table. Not that they hesitated about selling us five thousand rounds of new 105mm, mind, once I put them the offer. But that was aboveboard.

South Africa has a shitpot of old ones, dating back to the Great Patriotic War. But that’s really old. I wouldn’t trust them to do the job. Maybe they could recondition them. Wouldn’t hurt to ask ARMSCOR, I suppose. Or maybe even skip them and go straight to Pretoria Metal Pressings-Denel.

Damned pity it is that that bad lot of 105 is just too low in explosive filler to make a good mine for anything but …

Hmmm. Now isn’t that an interesting thought. Partial solution? Maybe.

“Lawyers, Guns, and Money” (SCIF), Camp Fulton, Guyana

The SCIF, which served a lot more functions than merely being a facility to hold and discuss highly sensitive intelligence, was, as usual, silent. Oh, there were possibly as many as a hundred people working there, but the nature of the work suggested librarylike levels of quiet.

“You want
what?
” Gordo asked incredulously.

Victor smiled. “I want about five or six hundred of those four thousand and change artillery shells, the ones condemned for having the questionable propellant. Oh, and money. We’ll need some money.”

“What for? For both, I mean.”

“The shells to become naval mines,” Inning answered. “The money to buy fuses and have a factory somewhere else mill out connectors to screw regular influence fuses—we’d need a mix of them, pressure, magnetic, and acoustic—to turn them into mines. We can drop them over the side of frigging canoes, if that’s all we have left.”

“To use where?” Gordo asked.

“Here in Guyana. If a 105 had more explosive, we could maybe use them somewhere else. As is, I don’t see a lot of value in using them anywhere but to mine Georgetown and the Demerara River, and
maybe
the mouth of Puerto Cabello. Even so, that’s one or two of five targets taken care of.”

“They’re not ‘taken care of,’” Gordo corrected, “until they’re armed and laid.”

“Not my problem,” Victor answered, then primly countered, “Moreover, ‘an action passed on is an action completed.’”

“You’ve spent way too much time around Americans, Victor,” Gordo observed.

“Pshaw. It was the same in Russia and the Soviet Union. It’s the same everywhere.”

Gordo considered that, then decided,
Yeah, it probably is. Sad, ain’t it.

“So can I have the money and the shells?” Victor asked.

Nodding, Gordo replied, “Yes, you can have the shells certainly and I’ll hold the comptroller upside down by his heels and shake until the money falls out. But what about the rest of the job? And where are you going to get the fuses in the first place?”

“Working on it,” Victor answered as he turned to leave.

“Working on it,” Victor repeated to himself, as his footsteps echoed down the tile-floored and concrete-walled corridor, heading for his office.

“It’s times like these,” Victor muttered, once seated behind his desk, “that I wish the Czech Republic had access to the sea. They may be part of the EU, but the Bohemians will still sell anything they make. Unfortunately, they don’t make anything that isn’t useful to them. And they’ve got no use for naval mines. Pity.

“Still, the idea of using shells for mines isn’t a bad one, even if I do say so myself. So I wonder what they’ve got for shells.”

Victor twirled his chair around to face a bookcase. From that he selected a large blue-bound volume, fingering it out of the tightly packed shelf. Kicking his chair back to face his desk, he opened the reference. Then he laid a legal pad next to the book, set a pen next to that, and began thumbing pages.

Hmmm,
he thought,
that’s interesting. Though the fuse wells are different sizes, what we can do with 105mm shells we can do with 240mm shells.
Those, the Czechs have. Let’s see about …aha …roughly forty kilograms equivalent high explosive in a 240mm shell. That ought to be good for medium depths—say, sixty meters or less—for other than first class warships. Death to a medium merchie or landing craft, probably for a tanker, too. Still, to get those shells without the mortars that fire them would be suspicious. The Czechs only have …
Victor thumbed some more pages.
Ah …they’ve a grand total of four tubes. They won’t sell. So …have to add …um …two, I think …yes, two M-240s …that’s the minimum for testing, all from Russia. No, let’s make it four. And might as well have Guyana order the shells from there, too. That should allay any suspicions in that regards. Hey, Boxer said we couldn’t go to Russia for mines; he said nothing about going to them for shells or guns. And they won’t go to waste; the line battalions can use the mortars to present a better opposing force for the U.S. armed forces that come here. Also, they’re fairly cheap since the Russian Army has gone to the self-propelled version and put the towed ones in depots. The comptroller shouldn’t bitch much.

“Okay, so how many would we need?” Victor picked up the pen and began to tap it against his cheek. “No, that’s not the right question. The right question is how many can we deliver.” He started some calculations on the yellow pad, while thinking,
Let’s see. Maracaibo Area? Mission for the Antonovs and two Antonovs can carry, say, fifteen tons between them. Each shell is a pubic hair over one seventh of a ton, so we need …call it …one hundred and …five. No, that’s not right. We’ll want to drop ten or twenty flat steel fakes for every real mine. And at least a few serious, purpose-made mines; if I can find any. Sooo …drop the number deliverable to a maximum of an even hundred and probably more like eighty. That’s totally inadequate, of course, to actually block the Gulf of Venezuela, but it’s probably enough to frighten anyone out of using it. At least if we can supplement them with something better.

Then there’s the Orinoco River. Call it …oh …thirty shells for that.

Outside the mouth of Puerto Cabello? Maybe another fifty. And to mine the waters north of each port east of there …two hundred more? Make it three hundred.

And, for here? Seventy ought to do for Georgetown and to help block the Demerara

All righty, then. Let’s factor in P for “plenty.” Four mortars and a thousand big shells takes care of a
lot
of the problem. Well, with the 105s and assuming I can get the influence fuses and have fuse well adapters made, it does. I wonder if Pretoria Metal Pressings can handle that many. Hmmm …maybe not. Shit, I hate making things more complex than necessary. Shit. And where do I get the fuses? Israel? Would they sell the fuses?

The thought of fuses sparked another thought.
How do I throw my old comrades off the scent? How indeed? I could order some
Smelchek
fuses. Then they’d be sure I wanted the shells for mortars, rather than mines. Okay …kind of a waste but we’ll do that. Now let’s see about Israel and destructors.

Victor reached for a different, blue-bound volume, nearly indistinguishable from the first.
Ah, yes. They make destructor kits now. They’ve found a need to use them off the coast of Gaza. Would they do the adapters? Surely they could. Less certain they could hide the destructor kit sales, though, and they’d insist on hiding them. And the two together raise too many questions, anyway.

Notes to self: send my Hassidic outfit to the cleaners, today. Start work to get Guyanan Defense to order the mortars and shells, tomorrow. Travel arrangements to South Africa and Israel, soonest.

And …um
—his finger came to rest on a different passage of the first book—
side trip to Montenegro. They like me well enough. As well they should, since I was the instrument of them unloading the
Naughtius
on the regiment.

Victor felt a sudden shiver of anticipation. It had been a while since he’d really had the chance to practice his true calling, which was clandestine arms smuggling, not mere procurement. It was a good feeling to get back into the saddle again.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He was the most theatrical of men, busy at all times

not merely being a general but doing it in the most

dramatic way possible, the Great MacArthur, who played

in nothing less than the theater of history—as if life were

always a stage and the world his audience.

—David Halberstam,

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

Bolivar State, Venezuela

It had been a bright afternoon when Chavez finished his inspection of the parachute brigade and ordered the brigade commander to summon all his officers to a huge mess tent set up under some trees and a net. The sun was long down and the mosquitoes having a feast and he was still talking.

I know he likes to talk,
thought Larralde, like the rest of the commanders and staff of the battalion, standing at attention as Hugo Chavez went into his third hour of continuous tongue lashing with no sign of flagging.
He likes to talk, but this is getting fucking ridiculous. Get to the point, Mr. President; an hour spent listening to you would be better spent training my people. Sure, they’re all
…we’re
all …lacking in true Bolivarian revolutionary spirit. So fucking what? Maybe I should never have …

“And in conclusion,” Chavez said, glaring out over the heads of the officers assembled, “I am sorely tempted to fire the lot of you for your lack of military ability, lack of initiative, and lack of the spirit of Bolivar.

“So now I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.” Chavez pointed at Larralde and demanded, “Who are you, Captain?”

Larralde braced to a stiffer attention and answered, “Captain Larralde, Miguel, Mr. President. Commanding Company B, Second Battalion.”

Chavez nodded, causing his jowls to shake. “While I’ve been talking and the rest of these pussies have been quaking in their all too shiny boots, you’ve at least
looked
like a man. Here’s what I want from you. I want you to take your B Company and just forget the idea of parachuting. It was a silly idea in the first place and there’s no way you’ll be ready to do it.” The president’s eyes swept around the crowded tent. “That goes for the rest of the brigade, too. Prepare, instead, for an air landing.”

Turning back to Larralde, but speaking to the crowd, he asked, “Now what do you need besides your company?”

Larralde parroted the force list he’d given Chavez at Miraflores Palace. Chavez nodded, turned to the brigade commander, and said, “Get it to him. No later than tomorrow.” Chavez went silent for a moment, then said, quite despite what Larralde had requested, “A captain is too junior to command a force that size. Consider yourself a major, effective right now. And tell your second sergeant major that he is now a first sergeant major. Brigade commander?”

“Mr. President?” that colonel aske, nervously.

“Shuffle your officers around as much as necessary to build up Larralde’s unit to full commissioned strength.
And
get him the attachments he needs.”

It was late and all of the other officers and non coms had left the mess tent. Larralde and his new—and unwitting—first sergeant major sat across a table from each other, with a bottle of cola and another of rum with the number 1796 printed boldly on the label. There wasn’t any ice but one couldn’t expect everything.

“Where did you get this shit, sir?” Arrivillaga asked, sipping his cup straight.

“Hugo insisted I take a couple of bottles back with me. I’ve been saving them.”

“Ordinarily, I prefer bourbon,” Arrivillaga said, sipping again. “But this”—he twirled the glass contemplatively—“this isn’t bad.”

“Figured you could use the moral fortification before I lay out what we have to do.”

Arrivillaga drained the metal cup, slapped it to the table, then announced, “Okay, sir, I’m ready.”

Larralde then proceeded to tell his senior sergeant about both his own and the sergeant major’s promotion, the new troops they’d be getting, and the change to the plan. He neglected to mention that Chavez’s orders were, mostly, his own idea. Mao already knew that, anyway.

“The promotion is nice, of course,” said the newly promoted First Sergeant Major Arrivillaga, totally unfazed by the news, “but you realize, right, sir, that you’ve made us a perilous amount of work.”

“Win a little, lose a little, Mao,” Larralde shrugged. “At least this way we have a chance.”

“So how are we going to do it? To prepare, I mean; you’ve already told me how we’re going to take the airfield.”

“We’re going to prepare for it by preparing for it,” the new major answered.

Arrivillaga scowled. “You’re not a general yet, you know, to be coming up with that kind of mindless, self-serving bullshit.”

Larralde laughed and bent his head to scratch behind an ear. “I’m actually serious. We don’t have the time to prepare everyone for general combat. But they don’t need to know how to do a deliberate attack, or a movement to contact, or an ambush. They don’t need to march forty kilometers at a whack. They need to know how to use their weapons and the basic soldier skills. And they need toughening. But they’ve got to be able to board and debark from a particular airplane, specifically, to move fast once they debark, to clear certain
specific
buildings at the airfield, and how to do a hasty defense. And, whenever we can scrape a few minutes or hours from teaching the basic soldiering they need, we’re going to be rehearsing the actual operation. They’ll learn the collective things they need to do based on what they
really
need to do.”

The sergeant major looked dubious. He held up one hand, the middle and ring fingers pointed at Larralde, the index finger raised and the little finger lolling a bit. The hand moved just enough to give an element of warning to the shaking of the index finger.

“I can see that working, sir, as long as everything goes well. But if we’re not training them for the general problems they
might
face, and then they must face them, we’ll be in trouble.”

“Yeah, Mao,” Larralde agreed. “I know. But it’s an either-or proposition. You, yourself, were the one who pointed out that spending a bunch of time road marching was simply bad prioritization.”

“Well, sure,” the sergeant major said. “That’s my job, to point out silly shit so you can tell me to fix it. But spending a lot of time that we don’t have, learning to put one foot in front of the other, is one thing. Skipping core missions …color me skeptical.”

“Skeptical? That’s a color formed by mixing Bolivarian red and shit brown, isn’t it?” Larralde joked. “With just a hint of shiny?”

“As long as the shiny is thin and flakes off easily,” Arrivillaga replied, with a tight smile.

There was a rustle of canvas by the tent door. Mao looked up, then quietly announced, “Your other officers are here, sir. And they look a little scared. I’d better go get some more cups.”

Ah. Time to meet my “public.” Again.

As Arrivillaga stood and walked in the direction of the kitchen, Larralde smiled and turned halfway around in his folding metal chair. “Gentlemen,” he said, beckoning with one hand, “Come. Sit. We have much to discuss. Because we’re going to have much great fun together.”

   *   *   *   

“‘Fun’ the son of a bitch called it,” muttered Lily, sprawling under some wide shade trees at the back end of the rifle range, facing away. Behind her, came the steady
poppoppop
of Kalishnikovs peppering—or at least lightly sprinkling; they weren’t the most accurate of rifles—paper targets downrange.

Lily, Villareal, and the rest of the platoon were covered with mud, scratched, and sweaty from the individual movement techniques they’d been put through by Sergeant Major Arrivillaga every spare moment they’d not actually been engaged in marksmanship training. Likewise muddy, but disassembled for cleaning, were their rifles, spread out on plasticized ponchos on the grass before each man and woman.

Carlos Villareal, using a toothbrush to pick caked-on carbon from his rifle’s bolt, said nothing and carefully kept his face blank. There was no sense in offending Lily, after all. But, to him, it had been fun, possibly the most fun he’d ever had with his clothes on. What was a little mud and sweat for that?

On the other hand,
he thought,
to the girls this has not been fun at all. What was that old gringo song? Oh, yes: “I don’t like spiders and snakes.” And they don’t. Different …

Carlos’s thoughts were interrupted by someone calling out, “Attention!” He dropped the toothbrush and bolt onto the poncho, getting to his feet and snapping to attention along with the rest of the platoon.

I
hate
Kalashnikovs,
thought Mao, bitterly, as he sauntered up to the gaggle of rifle cleaners.
Oh, sure, they’re simple and easy to train on …to train people to miss, that is. I want my goddamned FNC back. I want these ever-so-far-from-soldierly rabble to have FNCs. I want to dump these fucking stamped pieces of shit in the nearest river. I want …ahhh, fuckit.

The FNC, for which Mao pined, was a Belgian design, in the NATO standard caliber of 5.56x45. It impressed nearly everyone who used it. Moreover, Venezuela had many FNCs in its depots, better than fifty thousand of them. The Kalashnikov, specifically the folding stock AK-104s that the troops had been issued, had its virtues. Fine accuracy was not among them.

The reason Larralde’s command, indeed none of the invasion force, had FNCs was …

Mere fucking appearances,
fumed Arrivillaga.
The fucking communists—freedom fighters, one and all, of course—use them so
we
have to use them, too. To
look
the same. Bah.

Mao glared around at the stiffly braced recruits and shouted, “Go back to what you were doing, you crawling shits. Your rifle is more important than I am.”

Still, silently cursing, Arrivillaga went to find the company commander.

Larralde sat comfortably, or as comfortably as the open top allowed under the glaring sun, in his command vehicle, a Venezuelan-made Tiuna. Behind him, on the seat, rested a charcoal-colored plastic case, about four feet long and a foot or so wide.

Larralde patted his command vehicle. The Tiuna, at least, had worked out reasonably well.

Better than that fucking abortion of a tank rebuild Hugo’s cronies foisted on us,
thought the major.
On the other hand, it’s even more expensive than the gringo Hummer, and probably not as good. Oh, well.

Larralde sensed his first sergeant major’s arrival before he saw him. He looked over at the scowling noncom, smiled, and said, “I can read you like a book, you know.”

“Bullshit, sir.”

“Well …” the major half-conceded, “I can read you at the moment. You came to bitch—for the umpteenth time—about the Kalashnikovs, didn’t you?”

“So?” Arrivillaga answered. “Is there a decent soldier in the army who knows any better that wouldn’t bitch about them? No mind reading required.”

Mao scowled. “You know, sir, it wouldn’t be quite so infuriating if the assholes-that-be hadn’t also left us with our Belgian-made light machine guns. I could see the logic, maybe, if we had ammunition commonality. But we don’t. We’ve got rifles in 7.62 short, light machine guns in 5.56 and machine guns in NATO 7.62. Makes no fucking sense at all.”

“Going to get worse, too,” Larralde said, “at least it will if we don’t make a few adjustments. He nodded his head backwards in the direction of the charcoal gray case behind him.

Arrivillaga shrugged his shoulders and muttered something unmentionable, then took the couple of steps needed to stand next to the Tiuna. He leaned over, unsnapped the latches to the case, and flipped it open.

“Ooo …shiny,” the first sergeant major whispered as he pulled a long, almost spindly, rifle out. “Dragunov. Me like.”

Then Mao’s shoulders slumped again. “But
another
fucking caliber. What the hell are they thinking?”

“Not exactly,” Larralde corrected. “In the first place, that’s in 7.62 NATO, so it will match our MAGs.” The MAG was another Belgian machine gun, a general purpose gun, in that caliber. “And, in the second place, I called Hugo’s office to make a date with your cousin and had her put me through to him. We’re dumping the other Belgian guns and getting RPK light machine guns to match our rifles.”

“That makes a little more sense.” Mao’s scowl deepened, as he said, “You better not even think about screwing my cousin, sir.”

Larralde shook his head in puzzlement. “You didn’t seem to mind when you thought Hugo was fucking her.”

“You’re not Hugo,” the sergeant major answered, turning abruptly to walk back to the firing line.