First Citizen (25 page)

In practice, it was a fuckup.

We were on the freighters, in sight of the coast off Progreso, with 150 Stompers in the air and some of them even circling our ships, when the beach opened up with rockets. Old Exocets. Hot shit.

“Star. Captain
. Billy, how many do you count?” That was Corbin. He was radioing from the bridge of the M.V.
Inland Captain,
which was our flagship. For safety we had split the command, with me in the second boat, M.V.
Gulf Star.

“Three launch sites, at least. Gran, if they hit one of these buckets, you can write it off.”

“We can’t shoot them down. Can we maneuver?”

“I suppose we could widen the range,” I replied. “Let any natural error in their flight path take its course …”

The
Gulf Star’s
captain, for whom this whole adventure was just another charter-for-profit, overheard that last comment. He quickly put about and headed out to sea.

Still holding the radiophone, and squinting toward the beach, I pulled my 9mm automatic and stuck it in his ear. “Not yet, Barney.”

Our wake fell back into formation.

“Billy, can the Stompers take out the launch sites?”

“Worth a try, but the delay will blow our timetable.”

“Turning back blows it worse.”

“We could divert,” I offered. “Say, to Puerto Juarez?”

“As bad as turning back. Two hundred odd sea miles … about fifteen hours … and who knows what the reception will be like there? No, whistle in the Stompers.”

“All right, General.”

“And Billy … Have the command ship pick you up. I think you better take the lead on this.”

“Unnhgh … Yes, sir.”

I was not happy about that. Not that I was scared—just concerned more about the main movement than cowboying around with the first wave. But Gran’s intuitions were right: He had a major problem with the rockets and he wanted his most experienced man on it. Me.

The command Stomper was a special ship. I had directed her outfitting—radio gear, guns, map cases, computer, crew of three to tie Bird Leader into the network, plot the ground action, and keep score. When I was aboard, however, the right-hand seat was mine. So flying the first wave had its compensations.

Pete Beckwith, the alternate pilot, brought her right down on the
Gulf Star
’s fantail, where I was waiting in my flight gear with a fresh copy of the battle map, marked with all the launch points we had spotted, in my thigh pocket.

“Welcome aboard, Colonel,” Pete said, scrambling over to the left seat. The copilot hopped out that side and I slid in around the variac stick. During the transfer, the fans were under full control from three sets of hands, overlapping for about three seconds. Teamwork.

I twisted the stick, the nacelles countered, reversing thrust direction on our port side, and the Stomper spun away from the ship on a rising curve.

“Got a problem, Johnny,” I said, handing the map back to our computer jock. “Exocets, we think.”

“I saw them. This map is out of date, Colonel. We’ve laid in a couple more sites you didn’t see.”

“Great … The formation is set up for ground assault, not a raid. We got four, count them, gunships.”

“This ship has rockets and quad-fifties,” Pete said. “We could take a crack at the sites, too.”

“War hero,” I said cheerfully. I had figured the attack to go that way. We were already vectored in on the center launch site.

A corner of the CDU was showing me a silhouette line of mangrove swamp with a hard point shadowed in. Johnny was a fast programmer. I armed the rocket pods and tipped the fans far forward. We ate up the surf. When we were 300 meters out, the operators in the trees panicked and tried to take
us
out with an Exocet. Dumb. Better they had frozen like a fawn in the woods. I sideslipped with a twitch of my wrist and used my thumb to send a Beeswarm down its backtrail. There was a blue-violet flash followed by a sincere
thud.
When we swept over, an acre of swamp had flattened out to black mud and sucking tidewater.

“Bingo,” Johnny shouted behind me. The war was on.

We cleared out two more launch crews the same way. The third fought back with something that, finally, could kill us: a ten-kilogram SAM-9. It was a ducted, air-breathing wasp-thing under control from the ground. Coming up beneath our chin bubble, it looked like some kind of model airplane. It was too small and maneuverable for me to dodge, and it was carrying too much C-4 explosive for me to ignore. The only solution was to outfly it. I cracked on the power and surged straight up. The SAM came right up with us, which surprised me badly. The sweat broke out under my collar. Next I tried rolling forward and shooting off at 300-plus toward the mainland. That worked; I could see the SAM tumbling in our fanwash. So I flipped over, loosed a burp of .50 caliber in its general direction, then homed a rocket on the launch site picked out by the CDU. Flash, thud, flatten.

The beach was pretty well worked over in twenty minutes. I had Pete get on the radio and call in a vee of five skinned Stompers—again, planes carrying assault troops, not aerial guns—to secure the area, while I flew on to Progreso proper to see what else the
Comunistas
had waiting.

From the main plaza and the waterfront, we only drew flashes of small arms fire, plus a half dozen or so of those SAM-9s. Hardly a room-temperature reception. We took a high hover for air control and sent in the other twenty skins of the first wave. They settled like a flock of pigeons and our boys and girls tumbled out shooting.

That morning, I spent twelve hours in the right-hand seat of my command craft. As soon as Progreso was halfway pacified and the freighters were heading into the harbor, I took a flyby south down the highway toward Merida to scout resistance. Nothing, nothing, and then a circle of trucks at Dzibilchaltun. Or however you say it.

It was a clearing in the coastal undergrowth covered with a million square, white stones. Atop a mound near the center of the area was an old stone blockhouse looking like a military hard point, except for some kind of friezework around the roof. The trucks were parked south of it. I gave the blockhouse my last Beeswarm rocket. Flash, thud—but all it did was knock some stucco loose from the frieze and blacken the west wall. Killed anybody inside, though, I bet.

We flew back to Progreso, set down near the fuel bladders—which by Gran’s orders had been unloaded first—ran another 700 gallons of JP-5 into my ship and rearmed her. Then we took off to give some more grief to that concentration at Dzibil-whatever. I gathered the other four gunships and a dozen skins that were just coming in from the cutters at sea.

“Column headed this way,” I told them over the radio. “Near Zibblechaltun on your maps.”

“That’s an historic ruin, Colonel,” one of the pilots protested. “It’s preclassical Mayan architecture.”

“Right! Also, a bunch of stones with guys behind them trying to kill us. Now, fly!”

We engaged that column of trucks north of the ruins and moving toward Progreso. About fifty in all this time. If you figured twenty men to a truck, plus heavier armaments than we could airlift, then they had our first wave outnumbered with a force of a thousand, or by about three to one.

As gunship leader, we burned the first two trucks in one pass. The rest of them circled and scattered in among the trees and stone temples.

“Skin leader, take them down.” I was committing a large fraction of our available forces to a pitched ground battle against terrible odds. Well, the alternative was to let the
Comunistas
dig in and bottle us up in Progreso. We would have to stay in those mangrove swamps for ten years.

The Stompers dropped straight down and unloaded battle-ready troops right into the enemy’s cluster points, while the other gunships zipped around and blew up anything that was not occupied with our boys and girls. Meantime, I got high and diverted every Stomper we had coming in from the cutters. I wanted to put the best part of 1,500 men into Zibble-
gesundheit
as fast as possible. The war was going to end right there, as far as I was concerned.

The first of the reinforcements were coming south, high over the trees, like a flotilla of Canada geese, when I got a radio call from Gran in Progreso.

“Colonel, proceed with a raiding force southwest toward Celestun. Intercept a force en route for one of the oil derricks,
Zanja del Norte
No. 32 at map coordinates YJ-0016/ZJ-0028. Intercept and interdict. Over.”

What was this shit about an
oil derrick?
“But, Gran!” I turned a fast circle in the sky over the ground battle while trying to figure out my response. I had my adrenaline up, telling me to fight, fly, fuck, or die, and Granny wanted me to go off chasing rabbits somewhere to the west. “We are right in the middle of clearing the road—” I started to say.

“I don’t care how important you think your action is, Billy,” Corbin cut across me. “Those rigs are three-quarters of the reason we’re down here. Now crack on the power and check it out. … Clear.”

“Yes sir.” I said into a frequency that had already gone dead.

Not a lot of choice about what happened next. I handed control of the battle over to the number two gunship and tipped our Stomper to the southwest. I took one other guns along as escort.

The eastern end of the Bay of Campeche, the body of water between the Yucatan Peninsula and the Mexican mainland, was a new oil field. It was richer even than the western end, around Tampico. Some of the rigs were too new to be on my maps. But I found
Zanja
32 all right. Three hundred miles offshore, or about ninety minutes by air. It was going to be close on fuel. I hoped they had a stock of JP-5, or even -4 for their service choppers. In a pinch I could burn kerosene, but that was about the limit of my fuel specs.

We flew northwest to cut across the direct sea line from Progreso, then swung southwest and followed the route of this supposed insurgent force all the way to the map coordinates Gran had given. We found the rig but no boats on the way, not even fishing boats.

Zanja
32 was a big one, with dual chopper pads and three drill towers. It was no shallow-water walking rig but a permanent tip-and-flood installation. In a hundred years, it would be the center of a coral-reef
cayo.

“Rig
Zanja
three-two,” I radioed. “California six-four bravo-hotel. Request permission to land.”

“
Si
,” came a quiet Spanish voice on that frequency.
“Con permiso.”
Which should have been my first tip-off. The language of air traffic is always English, even on a Mexican rig in Mexican waters. But I was too worried about fuel, cross winds, and the size of the landing pad to link up little facts like that with the overall situation.

I had the wheels down and was feeling for the center of the pad when it blew. A wall of lacy orange flame, roiled with black smoke, rose up around the cockpit bubble. The ship jarred and sagged badly to port as one of my engines took in a piece of shrapnel and exploded in a shower of fan blades. Pete and Johnny worked quickly to shut down systems, while I fought to keep the ship upright and disarm the rockets at the same time. For a few seconds the external air filters fought against the heat and smoke, but soon a gray, sour version of the hot death outside seeped into the cabin. Then the bubble itself was melting in dime-sized holes, letting in gouts of flame. Our fingers were still punching off systems when the smoke knocked us out.

Chapter 13

Granville James Corbin: A Clean, Well-Lighted War

The momentum of that first attack took us as far as Merida, the provincial capital, which was our primary objective. Colonel Birdsong was wise to force the enemy’s stand at Dzibilchaltun; we were able to roll them right back to the city so fast they had no time to prepare its defenses. That was vital, because we didn’t have an armored column and a single artillery battery inside the city could have stopped us cold. The extent of my generalship in taking the city was to lay out a simple encircling movement, bringing our ground troops in from the east and west simultaneously in trucks.

As it was, we had to subdue Merida on a house-to-house basis, clearing and securing each district. Our singular advantage against the enemy was more modern weapons with a higher firing rate than the Communists, with their Soviet-era castoffs, could achieve. In two days of hard fighting, we cleaned them out and drove them south into the bush. The first part of our war was over in 72 hours. It was almost too easy.

I only regret that the fine ruins of Dzibilchaltun had to suffer. They are—or were—an excellent example of early Mayan architecture and culture. I was deeply disappointed that the enemy forced us to destroy part of the people’s heritage in our advance.

As we brought the trucks and headquarters vans through this area, I asked the video crews to stop shooting. Because they had been rolling continuously since we had docked at Progreso, this request raised some comment.

“It would be much better,” I told them, “if we show some of our men at work putting the stones back and washing down the burn marks. We are going to be builders in this land, not destroyers.”

“Good line, Gran. We’ll use it in the biography. But while we’re here, how about just one clip of you examining the damage and, maybe, shaking your head sadly.”

“Later, boys. We have work to do.”

I did let them shoot as we formally entered the city, after its submission. It would have been more dramatic if I had been standing in a tank’s open hatchway. Again, if we’d brought any tanks. Instead, I made my driver slow the jeep down while I stood on the front seat, holding onto the windshield with one hand and waving with the other. We located some sympathetic residents to pose by the roadside, smiling and waving back at me.

Once we were based in Merida, I found time to make inquiries about Birdsong. The crew of the second ship that had flown out with him to Rig 32 was fully debriefed on what they’d seen.

“Some sort of boobytrap, sir,” the pilot affirmed. “The colonel touched down on the landing pad and it went up right away.”