Countdown: M Day (40 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

War, war, is still the cry, “War even to the knife!”

—Byron,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Mahdiana Eagle Mountain, Guyana

Sergeant Michaels handed a written message to his radio bearer. “Encrypt this and get it to the TOC”—the Tactical Operations Center, basically the First Battalion command post—“immediately.” The message contained the locations and composition of every Venezuelan unit Michaels had seen emerge from the jungle to set up housekeeping in and around Mahdia, Guyana, over the last several days. The message would go out compressed and over a half-rhombic antenna, just to be sure. There were, after all, about eight hundred Venezuelan troops within five miles, by Michaels’ best estimate, and he really didn’t want them to learn they were being watched from above.

At that, Michaels was by no means content with the information he’d been able to gather. He had rough positions—“estimated company digging in across road two kilometers north of Mahdia”—for example. “Heavy mortar platoon, believed 120mm, one thousand meters southwest of Mahdia Airport,” for example. “C-12 Huron or Beechcraft King Air, landed Mahdia airport, 0621 hrs, believed unloaded Class IV, to include mines,” for example.

It was all good, but it wasn’t quite enough.

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

Boxer outranked Reilly, both when they had been a part of the United States’ forces and, here and now, in the regiment. If Reilly cared about that, it was tolerably hard to see as the fist from his uncasted arm pounded Boxer’s desk and his voice made George Washington and his boat crew, hanging on the concrete walls, shake.

“I”—bang—“don’t”—bang—“give”—bang—“a”—bang—“good”—bang—“flying fuck about the welfare of your fucking RPVs!” Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. “I need two of them over Mahdia!” Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. “Tomorrow!” BANG!

Boxer smiled. Reilly was basically all right, in his book, but took certain techniques to handle. And you couldn’t back down to him, not even once.

He smiled and said, “Calm down, asshole. Or take your theatrics somewhere else.”

Reilly shrugged and smiled back. He wasn’t even deflated. Instead he said, “Well, it was worth a try. But, no shit, Ralph, I
need
real time intelligence tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah,” the Chief of Staff agreed, “you do. But you won’t get it if our RPVs just go out of our control and crash, will you? Like they started crashing over Kaieteur Falls.”

“But this isn’t Kaieteur Falls,” Reilly insisted. “It’s thirty miles to east and we’ve got no indication that Hugo’s set up anything to interfere with radio control.”

Boxer agreed, nodding very deeply, and then pointing out, “We didn’t see any special radio electronic equipment around the falls, either, but our scout birds still went out of control and crashed.”

“Static electricity from the water?” Reilly offered.

Boxer raised one eloquent oh-that’s-such-bullshit eyebrow.

“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” Reilly conceded, “but, look, the MI guys didn’t lose control until the things were within twelve miles of the falls, right? Alternatively, they didn’t lose control until the things were about fifty miles from the control station. But the control station’s rolling with me, and the RPVs won’t be more than twenty miles ahead of us, if that.”

“Well …okay, yes, that’s true.”

“So take a chance, Ralph. Or, rather, have Bridges take a chance. It could mean life or death for my people.”

Boxer’s face twisted a bit. He tapped his intercom and said, “Bridges? Come see me in twenty minutes.”

After Bridges answered, “Yessir,” Boxer turned his attention back to Reilly. Pointing, he said, and his voice was not genial, “You get out of here. Go find your wife and fuck her while you and she can. But …if you
ever
think you can come in here and pound on
my
fucking desk again, I’ll have you in the same jail where nobody speaks anything you do, the one where you sent those three assholes from Brazil—Kamarang, wasn’t it?—so goddamn fast you won’t know what hit you.

“And I’ll get back to you about the RPV’s.”

Which means I get them,
Reilly thought.
Shame to have to act like a spoiled brat over it, but I didn’t make the world, or the human race; I just have to deal with them as I find them.

Field Hospital, Camp Fulton, Guyana

Ordinarily, the best protection for a field hospital, in time of war, was to be out in the open, and plainly marked. It might have been here, too, but, since the Venezuelan Air Force had crumpled the permanent hospital in the initial attack, they couldnassume it. Thus it was scattered about the jungle, in several score tents, those laying a long arc roughly paralleling the Kaburi River.

It wasn’t convenient. It wasn’t nearly as sanitary. And people died from both of those factors, in retail fashion. But that was still better than risking wholesale deaths to another airstrike.

Reilly had one of his battalion’s Land Rovers, rather than his own. Fortunately, this one had an automatic transmission. For all he knew, and he strongly suspected, his old one was still sitting in the ditch. Reilly drove himself to a parking area, under some netting and with the thick, interwoven jungle canopy above. After stopping at a likely looking spot, he beeped twice, then spun the wheel and began to back up. When he got out he dragged with him a piece of a green tarp, which he draped over the windshield. Rather, he tried to drape it. One arm just wasn’t a very effective means to do the job.

He was almost ready to give up when he heard a familiar voice from behind him, “Oh, Ranger buddy.”

There is a God.

Reilly turned around, a corner of the tarp still clutched in his left hand. “First Sergeant Coffee,” he asked, “could you give me a hand with this motherfucker?”

“I’ll do better than that,” Coffee said. “I’ll drape it on myself. You, on the other hand, can do me a big favor by going to the medical company CP”—Coffee’s left hand indicated a direction—“finding my company commander and your lovely, albeit somewhat fat for the moment, wife, and screwing her silly. Or whatever it takes to get her to stop acting like a loon.”

“That bad, huh?”

Coffee rolled his eyes. “You have no …okay, well maybe you have some idea. Seriously, boss, she’s climbing the walls. Maybe it’s the hornies; maybe it’s the hormones. Maybe—and I think this likely, although frankly inexplicable—she’s been worried about you, too.”

Coffee took the tarp and began draping it properly. “But do
something,
would you?”

Lana,
Reilly thought, holding his wife tightly, albeit one-armed,
crying on my or
anyone’s
shoulder? That’s just not like her.

She’d met him at the tent flap door with a gasp, a huge smile, instant tears despite the smile, and a slightly erratic, waddling gate. The waddle wasn’t so much from being all that front heavy, as that she was normally so slender even a small offset to center of gravity was enough to throw off her stride. After a few moments of being held, while crying, she pulled away from his for a moment. The sobbing stopped. Then she looked up, and said, “You son of a bitch! I’ve been worried sick about you, about the baby, about
everything.
And do you call? No. Stop by to check on me or the baby? No. Bastard!”

And then she was sobbing again, into his shoulder, as if she’d said nothing of the kind.

All of which goes to show not that I’ve got something to learn about women, especially pregnant ones, but that I know
nothing
about women, especially pregnant ones. But at least I don’t think it’s the sex she’s been missing.

At which point Lana backed off again, gave him a nasty, dirty look, but took his hand and led him off to her own nearby tent for a little …privacy.

Standing not too very far from Lana’s tent, Coffee and Doc Joseph smirked while smoking one of Coffee’s vile cigarettes. The doctor never, of course, bought cigarettes. This didn’t stop him from bumming them from time to time.

“Think it’ll help?” Coffee asked, as the tent flap closed behind the couple.

“Can it hurt?” Joseph asked, with a broad grin across his face. “I was ready to try the old sex prescription trick …or anything else I could think of that might have settled her down.”

Coffee answered, “No, Doc, probably won’t hurt any. How about you? You still hurting?”

“Good question,” Joseph said, sobering. “And not one I particularly want to answer.” He tossed the cigarette to the ground. “And on that note, I need to go make my rounds.”

“Cazz’s battalion gave us our window,” Reilly told his wife, as the two lay together, fitted like spoons, front to back, on an altogether too narrow military folding cot. The cast on the arm he’d thrown over her was something less than comfortable, but better than no arm at all.

“While the Venezuelan air has been concentrating on him, I’ve been able to shuffle people around, move more freely to give orders, inspect, and buck up the troops, and push out a little more recon.”

Lana faced the tent wall, her sweat-soaked back to him. She didn’t turn as she said, “But they’ll be back, as soon as you start to move.”

“Not quite as soon,” he replied, confidently. “Bridges thinks all the air has been pulled north of the Orinoco River, all the way to Caracas in most cases. They’re afraid Cazz is only resting for a day at
Ciudad
Guayana, and will roll on
Ciudad
Bolivar. He’s left one bridge over the Caroni River open, after dropping the other two, just to give that impression. It will be anywhere from hours to a half a day before they can get onto us. Maybe more, depending on whether they’ve succeeded in moving the ground crews and the ordnance from their forward airstrips.”

“But Cazz isn’t going past
Ciudad
Guayana,” she objected. “They’ll be back forward.”

“They don’t know that. In their position, I’d be worried, too.” Reilly gave a little laugh.

“What’s funny?”

Unseen, he smiled. “Well …here I am, with the mechanized force, and there he is, with a light infantry force and some stolen trucks. But—while I’d have to dig in my books, assuming my library survived—”

“It did,” she said. “I checked. Though the books are still there waiting for a bomb and the windows are blown out so the bugs can get at them.”

His casted arm moved with a shrug. “Nothing to be done about that now. Anyway, while I’d have to check the books, I think Cazz and his—be it noted,
light
infantry battalion—are the current holders of the world historical record for miles of contested advance, across the surface of the Earth. It was something like one hundred and ten miles in twenty-four hours, held by one of the SS formations in France in 1940. Third Battalion went well over that, maybe a hundred and sixty miles, in twenty-four hours.”

“Then you’ll have to beat that, won’t you?”

Intersection, Bartica-Potaro Road and Issaro Road, Guyana

Sergeant Michaels had done good work, within his limited capabilities. Now, with two RPVs—for the nonce, at least, still under control—snooping over the Mahdia area, Reilly had a much better idea of what was facing him. Inside his TOC tent, he watched the map being updated as more and more information came in from his attached MI section.

Basically, it looked like he was facing one reinforced battalion.

A single Venezuelan infantry company was dug in along the Potaro River, opposite Garraway Stream, which wasn’t important because of a stream, nor because it was the locus of an unincorporated town, of sorts, but because there was a bridge there.

Even as Reilly watched, one of the TOC-rats began grease-penciling in a thin minefield on the southeastern bank.

“How do we know?” Reilly asked.

“The RPVs picked up the heat signatures of small, round, likely metal objects,” answered his S-2, Sadd. “Matching that with Sergeant Michaels’ report on mines being unloaded, and I think we’re facing a minefield. Probably not dug in, and surely not with antihandling devices yet. But not something we want to charge through, anyway.”

“Concur,” Reilly said. “Trim, will the bridge take the tanks?”

Trim, the rump of whose company—including the bridge platoon—was attached to First Battalion, answered, “Yes …
but
. We’re lucky that the old 1930’s era suspension bridge went down in the nineties. What they put up to replace it is considerably better. Again, though, but. The bridge is not stout enough to stand the passage of seventeen upgraded T-55’s, at forty-four tons each, charging across at full pelt. Still, if you take them across at a crawl—and I do mean a crawl, two or three miles an hour—the bridge should survive.”

“Right,” Reilly said. “We weren’t going to charge the bridge anyway. One of your sapper platoons is going to have to go into the river to make sure the thing isn’t wired for demolition.”

Trim notably paled; that had potential to be a ghastly, bloody exercise. On the other hand, if ordered to do it, his troops would try. Therefore he had no choice but to lead them in it.

Looking back to the map, Reilly noted another infantry company, situated on the reverse slope of some high ground five miles east of Mahdia, right where the cattle trail from Konawaruk crossed the hills. The expected third company was in the town of Mahdia.

“Artillery?” Reilly asked.

“Here, sir.”

“Except that I want a thin screen of smoke paralleling the far side of the river to either side of the bridge, your priority of fires are going to be to Bravo Company.” He pulled a small laser pointer from a keychain attached to the loop of his trousers and pointed it at the map. The light rested on a spot just north of the Potaro River, and about three miles east-southeast of Garraway Stream. “I want you to support the attack across from here.”

The battery commander, Bunn, short, stout, and balding, chewed his lip for a moment, then asked, “That’s awfully close to the firing line isn’t it?”

“Yes, but nowhere here do I see any mortars that can range. And I don’t think they’ve moved in anything longer ranged than a 120mm. And from that point I marked, you can support us all the way past Mahdia Airport.”