Countdown: M Day (7 page)

For example, a less experienced soldier would have been hard pressed to determine anything from the three steady sounds coming from the artillery. For that less experienced soldier, it would likely have proven impossible to consciously figure out the meaning of any given oddity in the mild and repetitive
thumping
coming from the distant firing position, the passage of the overhead freight trains, and the explosions coming from fairly close up ahead. In his own detached way, Schetrompf’s mind kept track of all three.

On the other hand, it’s kind of hard to maintain detachment when that lunatic …

Suddenly, Schetrompf rolled his eyes in his Marty Feldmanesque face and began to dive into the safely of the Eland’s compartment. He’d sensed something wrong, an off key note in the artillery symphony. Later on he would figure out that it had probably been the absence of one freight train that had keyed him.

“DUCK, MOTHERFUCKERS!” Schetrompf shouted loud enough to be heard over all three artillery sounds, over the roar of tank and Eland engines, through the muzzle blasts of C Company’s tanks, firing at targets as they broke past the two ridges, and even through the ear-encompassing crewmen’s helmets and the enveloping armor. Even two or three vehicles away.

Staff Sergeant Dan Kemp barely fit inside the Eland. He was just too big, a huge bear of a man. He was also fairly new in the regiment and corporation, having only taken his retirement and punched out of a billet with Third Battalion, Five-O-Second Infantry about fifteen months prior. He’d arrived here several months after that, having found civilian life degrading to the point of disgusting. Sadly, from his point of view, he’d missed the Suriname dustup. Fortunately, however, next month he’d have completed his years’ probation, at which point they’d jump him up to Sergeant First Class and let him buy a share in the regiment’s owning corporation, M Day, Inc. Then, he’d truly belong.

About armored vehicles he’d known little at the time, beyond avoiding the bastards, though he’d since learned quite a bit. The mindset had come tougher, learning to think while moving not at two and a half miles an hour, but at anything up to forty or, on a good road, about sixty-five.

This, of course, was barely a road at all, so speed was not a lot over ten miles an hour. Kemp appreciated that, as it gave him the chance to review the mission and make some educated guesses at the follow-ons Reilly would toss the battalion’s way once they passed the ridges.

Behind and ahead of Kemp’s vehicle, the machine gunners were letting loose with their pintle-mounted guns, Russian-made KORDs in 12.7mm. These were not only considerably lighter than the American M-2, they fired at a much higher rate. Even with that higher rate, though, they weren’t really expecting to hit anything, but—just as in combat—fast flying lead, especially if it had an audible
crack
to announce its passage, was just the thing to keep an RPG gunner’s head down until you were past his defense and eating his, and his unit’s, vitals.

Kemp thought he saw some targets, or perhaps just a badly camouflaged or artillery-uncamouflaged fighting position, up on the left side ridge’s military crest. He reached out to tap the machine gunner, Wilkes, to grab his attention and direct his fire when the world went bang. And
bang
. And
Bang
. And
BANG
.

“Oh, shit!” First Sergeant Schetrompf exclaimed from his perch behind the assault line. He’d heard the first all-too-near explosion, then the second nearer one, and finally the one that seemed right next door. The concussion was like a club laid up alongside the head. Nonetheless, whatever mental computer had told Schetrompf to duck also told him it was all clear. He got his head up above the rim of the Eland’s passenger compartment in time to see one of his company vehicles spinning like a top on its left rear corner, flinging antennae, scraps of tires, weapons, plus troopers and parts of troopers, in all directions.

Schetrompf lunged for the radio. “Dustoff! Dustoff! Dustoff! NOW!”

Air Strip, Regimental Hospital, Camp Fulton, Guyana

Eyes shut tight, Kemp had no idea where he was and only the vaguest idea of how he’d gotten there. Images jumbled in a confused, disoriented, frankly shocked silly, mind, all jockeying for place. He recalled clearly only a few things; the top of his driver, Wilkes’, head coming off, the front end of the Eland lifting while the thing began to spin, and then himself flying through the air and seeing the armored car spin in a view framed by his flailing legs.

His head hurt and he wanted to puke. Maybe worse was the pain in his back. He felt pressure lift from his back, but that did nothing for the pain. Between the concussion—he was pretty sure he was concussed—and what felt like a fast descent, he couldn’t hold his gorge any longer. Turning his head to one side, he opened his mouth and spewed forth. That made it a little better until the aroma reached his nose when it caused his stomach to lurch.

He felt the landing—it was a hard one, with much bouncing—and screamed from the refreshed agony of his back. He barely noticed the change in pitch from the motor—
an airplane motor …they must have dusted me off
—as the pilot reversed thrust. That hurt, too.

For a moment, Kemp lost consciousness. When he came to, someone was already pushing the stretcher and backboard on which he lay outward toward the rear of—
a plane …they carried me from the range in a small plane
—the aerial ambulance.

As Kemp began to drift off, he caught a glimpse of a pretty face, framed by blond hair. He didn’t think he’d seen that face before.

“Are you an angel?” he asked, weakly. “And am I dead?”

The face smiled, angelically enough. “Yes, I am and no, you’re not. I’m Elena Constantinescu, one of the hospital nurses. We’re going to take good care of you”—Kemp didn’t see as she took a quick glance at his evacuation tag—“Sergeant Kemp. And with any luck at all, you’ll be fine.” Very calmly and confidently, she added, “You’ve had a bad day, but it’s going to get better.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“It’s a rough war, son, and your own people will steal

your best men if you don’t watch ’em.”

—Robert A. Heinlein,
Starship Troopers

Surgeons’ Lounge, Regimental Hospital, Camp Fulton, Guyana

Though the sign on the door said, “Surgeons’ Lounge,” in fact the room was open to anyone who owned a share in the corporation, along with the few local doctors and nurses employed by the hospital. Richly paneled from local lumber, it had very much of a “dark wood and dead animals” ambience to it, quite despite there not being a single stuffed trophy on the walls. Indeed, what animal products there were came in the form of leather chairs and sofas that, but for the continuously running air conditioning, would probably have rotted away in short order. Even with the air conditioning, the furniture gave off a sweet smell that suggested that some microorganism or other was trying to eat the leather anyway. It was also, quite possibly, the only American-run hospital in the world where the surgeons’ lounge was a smoking area.

“For all his other failings, mental and moral,” said McCaverty, through a dense cloud of cigar smoke, “thank God Reilly’s an asshole about making the troops wear their helmets.” He looked quizzically at the growing ash on the end of his cigar and, deciding enough was enough, flicked it into a cigar ashtray stationed by his usual chair.

“He’s an asshole, all right,” agreed Phillie Stauer, nee Potter, who still bore a grudge against Reilly over some humiliation he had once dished out to her. The tall, blond, jade-eyed chief of nursing could still turn heads, and regularly did. Considering she’d borne two children, neither of them small, in the last four years since the rgiment formed, her waist was remarkably narrow and her hips exceptionally well defined.

Scott Joseph, Regimental Medical Officer, Chief of the Hospital and, for the last day the back-up surgeon, just nodded, exhausted. He was the spitting image of Ghostbusters’ Egon, except considerably more tired looking at the moment.

“We’d have had at least three more dead if he weren’t,” McCaverty added. “Or maybe four.”

“Not four,” Joseph said. “Helmet had nothing to do with Patricks. Thing I can’t figure is that with all that mayhem and blood, bodies and parts of bodies everywhere, he gets up and walks away with hardly a scratch. I mean, it’s not like he didn’t get thrown.”

“Not so odd,” Elena Constantinescu said, her Romanian accent nearly gone by now, after four years with the regiment. “I asked him when I was stitching up the one little cut he had. He said that he’d been standing up asleep and so was completely relaxed when he hit. Didn’t even know a shell had landed nearby until someone told him so.”

“Still freaky,” Joseph insisted. “How the hell does someone sleep with that shit going on?” he asked rhetorically.

“I asked that, too,” Elena replied. “He says unless the bullets are really flying with hostile intent, he tends to find life boring in general.”

Joseph shook his head. There were some things about the people in the regiment he found incomprehensible, even now.

“What do you want to do with Kemp?” McCaverty asked, changing the subject. “They immobilized him well at the scene, and I’ve got a regimen of methylprednisolone going. But do we try to treat him here or send him Stateside?”

Joseph considered that. “I’ve got a pretty good in at Baylor, which is a great place for physical and occupational therapy. Surgery, too, for that matter. We could send him there.”

“Budget cover it?”

Joseph shrugged. “It’s not a budgetary issue; Kemp’s covered by Tricare. I’m sure Stauer will supplement any difference; line of duty and all.”

“How badly off is he?” Elena asked.

McCaverty took a deep, lung-destroying puff of his cigar. “Hard to say,” he answered. “His injuries were his back and one knee, plus a concussion. I’d stake thirty years of neuro experience that he’s fine in the head, but backs and knees are tough. They rarely really heal perfectly, even in a young man. And Kemp’s not that young.”

   *   *   *   

“You’re getting too old for this, you know, Sergeant Kemp,” said Reilly, visiting his wounded in their hospital rooms. He’d showered and put on a clean uniform, not for his own sake, but because Doc Joseph and the medical staff would have met him at the door with rifles if he’d tried to bring any unnecessary dirt into their pride and joy.

Kemp shook his head no but verbally agreed. “No shit, sir.” His leg was in a cast. Reilly was pleased to see that he wasn’t in any kind of traction.

“They won’t tell me anything here—afraid to upset me, I guess—but who did we lose?”

“Well …Milo Wilkes is dead. Do you remember that much?”

“Yes, sir,” Kemp replied. “Better now than at first. You’re not likely to live when half your brain goes up in the air while the rest of it stays behind your face.”

“No, not likely,” Reilly agreed. “Anyway, we lost him and Simowitz, dead …”

“What happened to Sim?” Kemp asked.

“Hit a tree head first. Broke his neck.”

“Shit.”

“Shit,” Reilly agreed. “Thing is, we were actually lucky. If your Eland had been moving half a kilometer an hour faster, the thing probably would have hit it. Then nobody would have survived.”

“What are we doing with the bodies?”

“Milo’s folks wanted him sent home. His corpse goes out tonight with an escort. Simo’s don’t seem to care much; he’s going into the regimental cemetery tomorrow afternoon. We, at least, care.”

That seemed reasonable to Kemp. He asked, “Do we know what happened?”

Reilly nodded his head, then explained, “We froze the battery in place and checked all data. It was fine. Then we grilled the crews. They swear there was no change to the settings after the freeze order. Right now we think—we’re pretty sure—that it was a bad lot of one-o-five. Going through that lot, we’ve found defective charges in about an eighth of the boxes we’ve looked at so far. Stauer’s ordered the entire lot sequestered and destroyed, about a million bucks’ worth. We’re not going to have much 105mm firing in support for about four months; that’s how long it will be before an order for more will be filled. I think there are only about twelve hundred rounds left in the inventory after the bad lot’s taken out. And Stauer says we can’t use any of it until our full load is replaced.”

Kemp nodded his head, but only once before a wave of nausea overtook him. After several long moments of heavy breathing, he asked, “The others?”

“All hurt, except for one, but they’ll be fine.”

“The Eland?” Kemp asked.

“Seriously fucked up. We going to part it out and take a new, rather a rebuilt, one from the float park.”

Kemp nodded, then winced. That made sense. Hesitating, in the way a man will when he doesn’t necessarily want to hear the answer, he asked, “Me?”

Reilly sighed. “You’re a problem,” he admitted. “Right now you’re doped up. Doubt you can even feel much of what’s wrong with you. But your injuries make it extremely unlikely you’ll be fit for a squad, let alone a platoon, anytime this side of the sun running out of hydrogen.”

Doped up or not, for Kemp that was a jolt of pure fear for the future. “So now what? Am I out on the street, sir?”

Reilly shook his head. “The regiment doesn’t play that way. You’ve got some choices. You can take a lump sum disability—and it isn’t especially ungenerous—and go home to therapy. Doc Joseph’s working on setting something up in Houston for that. Or you can go as a supernumerary to either the regimental three or four shop. For that, we can hire a local physical therapist and you’ll take time off from your normal duties for therapy. Or, you can go to Texas for therapy, still draw regular pay, and then go to either regimental three or four.”

The three shop, for “S-3,” under the American, which is to say the French, system, handled operations and training. The four was logistics.

“Can I think about that?” Kemp asked.

“Sure. Take your time. And speaking of time,”—Reilly glanced at his watch—“I’ve got to get my ass out to the parade field for the assumption of command of the new Second Battalion commander. You could see it from your window, but if you get out of bed before the medicos say you can I’ll send Sergeant Major George over to break your other leg.”

Kemp chuckled. That caused him to wince, too.
Not that I don’t think for a minute you wouldn’t have the sergeant major do just that.

As Reilly turned to leave, Kemp asked, “Are you in any shit over this, sir?”

Reilly shrugged. “Other than how it feels inside to lose two of my boys, no. Oh, Stauer’s not happy with me, but then he rarely is.”

Building 26, Camp Fulton, Guyana

(Second Battalion Headquarters)

Von Ahlenfeld hadn’t been this happy in,
Oh, a very long time.

My own battalion of Special Forces, and without a single fucking politician to report to; how great is that?

Sitting behind a wooden desk that was perhaps a trifle too small to comfortably fit his large frame, von Ahlenfeld looked from face to face of the commanders, staff and senior non-coms that made up the leadership of his battalion. These included the Russian executive office, Konstantin—balding, graying where not balding, solid like a bear and with clear blue eyes, Welch—commanding A Company, not as solid through the body as Konstantin but perhaps even more muscular and certainly taller, Hilton—a little bit of a runt—commanding Bravo, Charlie, under White, the oldest of the crew of commanders, though for all that he was old, he fidgeted with the energy of a much younger man, Gene Maldon—in charge of D Company and therefore of the battalion’s initial training, specialist training—most of it, and leadership training programs, and, lastly of the commanders, a rather somber Headquarters Company commander, Wahab, an African who was hiding out from the vengeance of his chief for permitting the regiment to get away with a really outrageous sum of cash, and to screw said chief out of a vast estate in Brazil.

Also present was the sergeant major, Rob “Rattus” Hampson. Of the entire crew, von Ahlenfeld had only had the chance to get to know Rattus to any degree. So far, his opinion confirmed Stauer’s: “Good man, for all he’s a medic.”

At a long conference table that stretched forth from von Ahlenfeld’s large but still undersized desk, the others sat in order: Welch, Hilton, White, Konstantin—at the very end, with the staff in a line behind him, Maldon, Wahab, and—“seated at the right hand of the father”—the sergeant major.

“Sir,” began Konstantin, in an accent in which the Russian was virtually lost. He’d been well trained in American English at some time in the past. “Your commanders and staff are formed and present.”

“Very good, XO,” the new commander said. “Now, gentlemen, by companies and then staff sections, tell me about this battalion.”

“So you’re telling me that our number one priority has to be to convince the regimental commander to break this attachment, or detachment, or habitual relationship, with the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Battalions?”

“Yes, sir,” Hilton confirmed. “It sounded like a good idea when we started, but it hasn’t ever quite worked out. The leadership of those companies never knows which way to look, us here or the battalions’ own command and staff. Some of them aren’t above playing us off against each other, either.”

The adjutant added, “Sir, and that’s not even counting the administrative nightmare of the D Companies …”

“D Companies?”

“Deployed companies, sir,” the adjutant answered. “Though, in fact, they are the Delta Companies, reinforced, of the Third and Fourth Battalions, and the Fourth Platoons of Fifth Battalion’s companies and the battery.”

“I concur with Major Hilton, sir,” Rattus offered. “Sure, there are a couple of advantages, coordination-wise, to doing it this way. But those guys are generally pros. They’ll work well with us even if we don’t have that constant flow between the two.”

“Also, sir,” offered the battalion’s adjutant, “we’re short as shit on medics. If we can transfer some of them out of Third, Fourth, and Fifth we could be one hundred percent here, even if most of them wouldn’t be Delta”—Special Forces Medic—“qualified.”

“Sir,” said Rattus, “get me control of them back again and I’ll
make
them into Deltas. Personally.”

“All right,” von Ahlenfeld agreed. “You think it’s that important; I’ll go to the wall with Stauer over this.”

“Won’t be much going to the wall required, sir,” Rattus replied. “He hides it, but he’s been ambivalent about the arrangement for …well, for a good long time. Guaranteed; he’ll only need a nudge.

“And, sir? I guarantee you you’ll make friends for life out of those battalion commanders, especially Cazz, in Third. As much of a pain in the ass this has been for us, for them it’s been worse.”

“There is a downside, sir,” the adjutant offered. “Reilly, in first battalion, is a thief. Of people. That habitual relationship—or whatever you want to call it—has protected the cadres of the mostly Guyanan companies. Take it away, and he’ll be looting them for personnel in no time.”

Building 16, Camp Fulton, Guyana

“Sir,” announced Sergeant Major George, big, red-headed, and beefy, “there’s a captain here, from Third Battalion, who would like a brief word with you.”

“Ah,” Reilly smiled to match his senior non-com, “that would be Captain Coleman. By all means, send him in, Top.”

“I took the liberty of calling Coleman’s operations-
cum
-first sergeant, sir,” George said before turning away. “He comes highly recommended.”

“Who’s the first shirt over there, Top?”

“Harrelson. He’s good troops.”

Reilly nodded. If George said that X recommended Y and X was good troops, that was good enough for him. “What about Webster?” he asked.

George shook his head. “Nah. I figured you still might not want Coleman, even with your wife in the family way, and if I ask Webster he’ll tell Cazz and then Coleman’s life will be made living hell for his ‘disloyalty.’”

Reilly waved a finger. “See? I knew there were reasons I kept you on.”