Countdown: M Day (43 page)

The major nodded, then began barking orders to the staff to set the troops in motion.

Once that was done, the major asked, “How did we lose?”

Zamora gave a bitter smile. “That’s easy, sir. We didn’t have the vehicles to support one battalion here and one at the other crossing. So we dug in close to the airport, for ease of supply. And, one of our companies did the exact right thing, taking a reverse slope defense, but it turned out to be wrong under the circumstances.”

“Shit,” said the major.

“Yes, sir,” Zamora agreed, “‘shit.’ Oh, and sir? Get a message to Caracas. Maybe the
Estado Mayor
can get some air down here to take out the bridge. At the very least, our people at Cheddi Jagan need to know the road’s open and that they’ve got company coming.”

Garraway Stream Bridge, Guyana

The Venezuelans had pulled out by the time Bravo Company showed up at the bridge. It still wasn’t clear to move across.

Trim heard Vic Babcock-Moore’s voice rise above the din, “Pop and drop! Pop and drop!” This was followed by the sounds of footsteps thumping across the span.

Scrambling up the bank, Trim watched two of his engineers, each carrying a satchel slung across from the right shoulder to the opposite side. They ran forward to where Trim guessed the surface laid mines had to be. As a mine was reached, one of the engineers would pull a small charge with a fuse and pull igniter from the satchel. Pulling on the rings of the igniters, they set the fuses to smoldering. The assembly was then dropped on top of or right beside a mine, before each man scurried on to the next one.

“Good old Vic,” Trim said, just before remembering that he’d better duck before one of the mines took his head off.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

All the gods are dead except the god of war.

—Eldridge Cleaver

Mahdia Airport, Guyana

“Look at all the damned
loot!
” Gordo exulted. He was particularly pleased about the several score, mostly pretty healthy, mules, as well as the couple of hundred rounds of 105mm.

Look at all the damned bodies
, Stauer thought.
Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit after all.

The loot consisted of the mules, a few light trucks, all classes of supply including ammunition, eight mountain guns, a couple of dozen mortars in 81mm and 120mm. There were also a couple of hundred prisoners, though they were not, properly speaking, “loot.” They were also being escorted back toward Camp Fulton by some of the walking wounded. And Venezuela’s walking wounded? They just walked, helped by their buddies, where needed.

As for the rest of the Venezuelans, maybe as many as a thousand of them, Reilly had them pinned up against the Potaro River. He sincerely hoped they’d escape during the night, because he neither wanted to attack them there, nor wanted to leave them behind where they could threaten his future communications with base. Indeed, though he could have closed off the crossing over the Potaro, below Kangaruma, he’d deliberately left it open as an inviting door to safety. Even so, Reilly was having the mortars throw a very limited amount of H and I—harassing and interdicting—fire at them, just to keep them feeling defensive.

The bodies, on the other hand, were twenty-one of the regiment’s own. And more were still coming in, in dribs and drabs. They were laid out in nylon body bags, in a neat row, in the shade of a building. The shade wasn’t consideration for the dead, but to delay the time until they began to stink. Hopefully, they could be evacuated to the cemetery at Camp Fulton before that happened.

Stauer and Gordo, driven by Hosein, had bullied their way into the order of march, just before the first of the tanks tried to make it across. Since there was some chance that the bridge would collapse under the tanks’ weight, they were the very last in order. Even the artillery was already on the south side of the river.

A weary looking sergeant, heavily laden with all the accoutrements of a scout, walked up to the Land Rover and asked Hosein, “Have you seen First Battalion’s scout platoon?”

Hosein glanced at the name tape and rank, pointed a finger to the east and said, “I saw some Ferrets that way, Sergeant Michaels.”

“Thanks, Corp.”

“Sergeant,” Stauer asked, “have you seen your battalion commander?”

Michaels shook his head. “No, sir, but I did see Sergeant Major George thataway”—Michaels hooked a thumb in a general southward direction—“and where he is, my colonel’s probably in the area.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. Good job with the recon, I understand.”

Michaels shook his head. “Not so good, sir, missed a lot of shit I should have figured out or seen.”

Stauer and Gordo met Reilly, Snyder and George roughly three klicks south of the airport. The latter three were hunched over a spread-out map on the hood of Reilly’s Land Rover. Stauer and Gordon stopped a distance away to listen.

“What took you so long?” Reilly demanded of his subordinate. Neither in facial expression nor in tone did he seem to be even remotely happy.

Snyder answered coolly, “There were
two
companies up there, not one. They were understrength, I think, but still there were two of them. We found it out the hard way and had to go smash the second one, too.”

Reilly considered this. Finally, relenting, he said, “Fair enough. Well done then. However …“I need four things from you, Snyder,” Reilly said. In tone, the statement was an order. “I need you, the scouts, Third Battalions Elands, and two ADA guns plus four missile teams I’m cutting to your company to move out in thirty minutes. Sooner would be better. Second, grab us the bridge over the Essequibo at Awartun Island. Third, when you get the bridge, secure it; secure it from ground and air attack, both. Yes, that means the quad 23mm guns stay there …”

“How long do they stay there, sir?” Snyder asked. “And what can I expect in the way of an enemy there.”

“Bare minimum, expect aerial interdiction to start in about four hours. It will take Hugo that long to call his aerial dogs off of Third Battalion and redirect them against us. I expect that to start with your company. How long do you secure the bridge? Until the sun runs out of hydrogen or Gordo gets the ferry from Rockstone up and running and can supply the battalion that way.

“Sir, I can’t be there in four and a half hours,” Snyder objected. “Eight would be more like it …”

Reilly snarled. “Screw security. Haul ass. Four hours.

“Fourth, I want you to push north past Linden, and preferably all the way to Vryheit, then screen the line Demerara River to St. Cuthberts. We’ll be along about three or four hours after you get there, assuming the bridge at Awartun is still standing.

“Assuming you make it to the screen line, and if the paratrooper brigade at Cheddi Jagan comes boiling out, you can fall back as far as a line running from Dalgin, eastwards.” Reilly traced on the map with a twig. “Now you’re going to want to ignore me in that case, and fall back behind this river, north of Linden. I don’t want you to do that, I want you to hold—if it comes to that—north of that river. Clear?”

“Clear, sir.”

“Good. Go. You now have only four hours and twenty-seven minutes to get to the Awartun Island bridge.”

Snyder saluted and walked off, shaking his head. It was only then that Reilly and George noticed the regimental commander and S-4 standing and listening.

The two walked up to the laid-out map. Stauer didn’t bother using a twig as he tapped it by the junction of the Essequibo and Cuyuni Rivers.

“We’ve still got some landing craft,” Stauer said. “Gordo’s going to start shunting Fourth Battalion across the Essequibo River, tonight. However, all Fitz’s boys can do is parallel the Essequibo north, than cut east along the coast, pinning in Georgetown from that side. I hope, but can’t guarantee, that that will force Hugo to pull the paras out of Cheddi Jagan and consolidate on Georgetown.”

“I was rather hoping to bait them out of the airport and crush them somewhere between there and Linden,” Reilly said.

Stauer nodded. “So we overheard. And, yes, it would be nice if it happened. But I think they’re going to fall back to Georgetown.”

“Why, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?”

A broad smile lit Stauer’s face. “Well, you know we didn’t, in fact, have anybody set to mine Georgetown harbor. Oh, yes, we intended to, but had never gotten it set up when they caught us with our pants down.

“Interestingly enough”—the smile grew broader still—“Biggus and the
Naughtius
had a couple of mines left over so—”

“They’ll figure that out quick,” Reilly interrupted. “A couple of mines won’t do.”

“Ahem …if I can finish without being interrupted?”

“Sorry, boss.” Reilly really did look chastened.

“There are no mines off of Georgetown, nor in the Demerara River. And the
Naughtius
had no limpet fuses. But, they did have underwater fuse. So they slipped under an outgoing ship, somehow managed to attach a mortar shell to the hull, and lit the fuse as soon as the ship started to leave harbor, then skedaddled. So it went boom, and Hugo’s boys think the harbor is mined, too. I understand Eeyore barely made it into the sub in time for the sub to get out of the effective underwater blast radius.”

Reilly looked skeptical. “And we know this because …”

“We know what happened because
Naughtius
radioed us and told us. We know what the Venezuelans think happened because Hugo went on the air to condemn our mining and Bridges’ signals intercept people picked up a transmission from Georgetown matching Hugo’s tirade.”

Reilly cast his eyes downward for a moment, thinking. At length, he asked, “So there are probably going to be six battalions in Georgetown? I can’t handle that, not even with Fitz’s battalion to do the detailed work.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Stauer answered. “Just pin them in the town; starvation will do the rest.”

“As it seems to be in Venezuela as a whole,” Gordo added. “By the way, you need to go easy on the 105mm. What we still had, plus that eight hundred rounds we got in, and the bit you captured, is it until this campaign is over.”

“We didn’t use any of that,” Reilly said.

“What?”

He shrugged. “We didn’t use any of it. Every round we fired crossing the bridge was from condemned stocks. Yes, some shells may have fallen long or short, but the enemy was mostly on the gun-target line. Over was usually still on them. So was short.”

Harry Gordon rubbed at his eyes. He was something of a cheapskate, all in the job description, of course, and, “You mean I ordered thousands of shells destroyed and I didn’t
have
to?”

“No, no,” Reilly counseled. “You did have to destroy them. Eventually. Just luck …well, mostly luck, that the unreliable propellant wasn’t an issue, today. All the good stuff we’ve saved for the move on Georgetown.”

Turning his face back to Stauer, Reilly asked, “Speaking of towns, sir, how’s Cazz doing?”

“Holding on,” Stauer answered. “Not a lot more than that, though The Venezuelan Air—“

The regimental commander was interrupted by the blaring of horns, and a large number of men screaming, “Air raiaiaid!”

“Speaking of which, Boss,” Reilly said over one shoulder, as he sprinted for his command vehicle, “be seeing you around.”

Ciudad
Guayana, Venezuela

Leaving the bridge over the Rio Caroni probably bought us two, maybe even three days,
thought Cazz
. Fuckers must have shit themselves thinking we’d left it open only to continue our charge and occupy
Ciudad
Bolivar.

’
Course, the down side of that is that now
they’re
using it to support the people hemming us in. And nothing we know about them makes sense except that they’re a hodgepodge of whatever could be scrapped together in a hurry, that they’ve got some old AMX-30 tanks that the turrets don’t seem to traverse well on, and that they outnumber us by …well,. by a whole lot.

Third Battalion had started out with observation posts, at least, covering all the major roads into town, Highway Ten,
Avenida
Angosturita,
Avenida
Guayana, and
Avenida
Leopoldo Sucre Figerella. The latter two, what with the bridges down, had been mere OPs. The other two, and a few key spots nearby, had been more strongly outposted, a platoon each, with the intent of buying a little time if Hugo made a stronger push, sooner, than Cazz really expected.

They’d made the push, though it had come later than expected. It had also come stronger than expected. Now, Cazz’s battalion was almost entirely confined to the area he’d picked for his last ditch stand. Basically, that position was the Rio Orinoco at their backs,
Avenida
Jose Gumilla on their right, Highway Ten on the left, and
Avenida
Guayana to their front. At just under two kilometers, it was a ghastly long front to try to hold in a city, with but a single infantry battalion.

On the other hand,
Cazz thought,
They’re a lot less willing to destroy the place to get us out than we are to wreck it to keep it. And it’s not as if we didn’t make them bleed pretty badly driving us back to this.

From somewhere in the rear, an open space not far from the river, what sounded like a dozen mortar shells thunked outward. Thirty-seven seconds later, Cazz heard the splash of shells somewhere to his south.

Odd, too, that the entire police force, for all practical purposes, elected to surrender to us rather than be let go, as I offered. I suppose they were afraid they’d be used as infantry. They probably would know, if anyone would. Hmmm; should I have driven them out anyway? Nah, they don’t eat much and we’ve got plenty of food. Especially after we looted every state-owned grocery store in the city, near enough. Plus, they’ve been useful building fortifications. Well..it’s not like they’re soldiers who can’t be put to military work, is it?

The Drunken Bastard,
El Porvenir, Panama

If the locals thought the painted Styrofoam boat was a little on the odd side, they didn’t say anything about it. Indeed, they seemed pretty happy to have Chin’s crew show up for dinner at the local restaurants, or buy their groceries, such as were available, locally. They did a lot of drinking, in what passed for the local watering holes.

For his own part, Captain Chin spent his days inspecting his boat and crew, watching CNN, Fox, and the Spanish channels intently, and desperately wishing that regiment would give him a little guidance …
some intelligence …a word, perhaps, that they still exist. But nooo, they’re too
busy;
they’ve got more important things—

“Hey, Skipper?” asked the watch.

“Yeah, what is it,” Chin snarled, not happy at having his two minutes of hate interrupted.

“Well, I don’t know how important it is, but CNN was in one of their tirades talking about illegal mining of the sea—”

“It’s not illegal,” the captain said. “They just want it to be. Trust me; if a non-socialist state were being mined by a socialist one, they’d be all in favor of it.”

“But you’re a socialist, Captain.”

“Yeah, but I’m not a hypocrite. Anyway, what was so fucking important on CNN?”

“Oh, just that in the middle of their editorial, they cut to the international response to this …ummm …how’d they phrase it? Ah, yes, high seas terror. It was—”

“The
response
please?”

“Sorry, Skipper.” The crewman hung his head. “Anyway, they showed a film of two minesweepers—one little one, one big one—leaving Santiago de Cuba.”

Chin’s head shot up. “When?” he demanded.

“Um …yesterday, I think, Skipper.”