Countdown: M Day (8 page)

“Besides that, without me, you couldn’t pour piss from a boot with the instructions written on the heel?” George joked.

“Right,” Reilly agreed, smiling, “besides that. Send Coleman in.”

“Well, that settles that,” said Reilly, as he and George watched a deliriously happy Captain Coleman walk—no, float—above the asphalt between the headquarters and his car.

George asked, “Does he know what a fucking hard job it is and how bloody difficult it’s going to be to fill Lana’s shoes?”

“I told him,” Reilly replied. “I’m not sure he really understands, but I told him.”

“What are you going to do with Lana?” the sergeant major asked.

“First things first,” Reilly said. “And first I’ve got to do a little finessing and some horse trading to a) find a slot for Lana she won’t find insulting and b) bribe Cazz to let Coleman go. Unless, of course, Coleman succeeds in what I told him to do and gets Cazz to accept the political benefits of having someone from his battalion in a good position to get support from this battalion. I mean, hell, we’ve got more trucks than the rest combined. That alone would make it worth it.”

“Well …it’s true enough,” George said. “There are a lot of potential benefits to Third Batt if First owes them a favor.”

“You know that,” Reilly answered. “I know that. But Cazz is a jarhead …”

“Hey, hey, sir!” George mock-warned. “I served in the Corps, too, for four long years.”

“Sure. But I try not to hold that one black mark against you.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches,

battles and death. Let him who loves his country in his

heart and not with his lips only, follow me.

—Giuseppe Garibaldi

Highway 15, Easter Valley, Venezuela

Under thick, weeping skies, amidst the roar of a tropical deluge pounding roof, trees, and ground, the Venezuelan Army bus crept slowly along the potted, asphalt road. The wipers tried to keep the windshield clear, but just weren’t up to the task at any speed beyond a crawl. For that matter, the roof of the bus was subpar for keeping the water out; a steady drip-drip-drip splashed driver and passengers alike. Near the front, just behind the driver, the uniformed sergeant escorting the volunteers rocked, more or less asleep, with the movement of the bus.

Staring out a left side window, Lily Vargas’s sleeping head resting on his right shoulder, Carlos Villareal saw only intermittently, when the lightning flashed, say, or another vehicle passed the bus in either direction.

Though passing this bus,
he thought,
on a night like this, is more foolhardy than anything Lily and I signed up for At least, I
hope
it is
.

With a sigh, Carlos reached up—careful not to disturb the sleeping Lily—to wipe away some of the water that had collected in his hair and was beginning to run down his forehead.

Oh, well. At least it isn’t cold.

Yet, he amended. He understood that it could get quite chilly in the mountains, or when you were wet and the wind picked up. Oh, maybe not cold as a gringo might define it, but cold enough for someone used to Venezuela’s usual oppressive and moisture-laden heat.

The pair, plus the other eighteen volunteers from his neighborhood security group, had turned in their rifles and been issued small vouchers for meals and considerably larger—two million Bolivars, about a thousand gringo dollars—enlistment bonuses.

On the hunch that the money might soon depreciate radically, Carlos had cashed his check and given the money to his mother with the firm instructions, “Buy necessities, Mama. Things that might get tight if we end up in a war. Or something.” He could only hope that his mother, never the most responsible of women, would follow his guidance.

Lily, on the other hand, had put hers in the bank. Only time would tell which approach had been the right one if, indeed, it would make any difference.

Maybe we should have each bought land. But how can you be sure the government wouldn’t take it? And how could we be sure that they wouldn’t seize some rich bastards’ estates and give them away …as long as you didn’t already own some of your own.

Headquarters, Fifth Division,
Ciudad
Bolivar, Venezuela

It was the squealing of the brakes as the bus slowed to pull through the gates of 5th Division’s main cantonment that awakened Carlos. Lily still slept until he nudged her.

“Wazzafugama?” she murmured, blinking sleep from her eyes.

“We’re here, Lily,” Carlos answered.

Lily sat straight up then, rubbed at her eyes, and leaned over to stare out the bus window.

“Crap,” she said, looking at the ruins of what had once been a rather neat and tidy military base. “And I thought la Dolorita was a dump.”

Carlos didn’t have time to comment before the bus driver jumped to attention. Waving the driver back to his seat, Captain Larralde stepped up onto the main deck of the bus.

“Relax,” Larralde said. “This is not where you’re going. Though compared to where you are going, you may think this place is not so bad.”

“Where’s that, sir?” Lily asked, as she thought,
Worse than this? Oh, hell.

“A tent city we’ve set up near the clothing and equipment issue warehouse,” he replied, not so much to Lily as to the new recruits present, generally. “We’ll be there about two days; that’s how long it will take to get you fitted and get all your inoculations …of which there are many. There are several thousand of you, so it could take longer, maybe four days at the outside. When you’re not standing in line, for equipment issue or shots, my sergeants will be giving you the rudiments of military drill. That, and physical training.” He shrugged. “It’s not the best thing for you to be doing, but it’s about all we can do, here and now.

“From here,” he continued, “we’ll be heading, about a hundred of you people and fifty of mine, to another tent city, out in the …well …it’s not the exact middle of nowhere, but you can see it from there on a clear day. Which won’t happen very often. That’s where you’ll do most of your training in the time we have.”

Larralde forced himself not to shake his head with despair and disgust. Whatever its other flaws, and he knew they were many, the Venezuelan army had never before in his experience stinted on time to train new troops.

We used to take nearly a year,
the captain thought,
to turn a civilian into a soldier. And I suspect we needed every day of it. Cowardly culture? No. But military culture? Also no. I’ve got my doubts we can do it in a mere ten or eleven weeks. Maybe the gringos can, but they’re different, a different culture. And unless procurement does a better job than they usually do, we’ll be lucky even to put the veneer of competence on this rabble in the time we have.

And, of course, politics dictates we train the women and the men together …and at
that
we have no experience whatsoever.

Larralde sighed again, expecting that it would become a major feature of his routine respiration. “You won’t be seeing a lot of me in the near future. So let me introduce you to …”

   *   *   *   

Sergento-Mayor de Segunda,
or Second Sergeant Major, Arrivillaga was a very unhappy man. Bad enough that the captain had dumped this one on him; at least he wasn’t unique in that regard. But the rules he was told to operate under:

“No, Sergeant Major, you may not beat the new recruits with sticks. No, you may not run them until they suffer cardiac arrest. No, you may not chop off their food with no notice for a week at a time. No, you may not keep them from sleeping for more than twenty-four hours at a time. Oh, all right; thirty-six hours. But no, you may not shout at them—especially not the girls—until they cry. You must use
positive
motivators.”

Oh, Captain,
Arrivillaga thought,
have you any idea at all what you’re asking of me? Of us? What positive motivators? I let the top performing boys fuck the girls? Let top performing girls at the captain? Bah.

Even so, Arrivillaga knew the captain had his best interests at heart. These were all
revolutionary
boys and girls, which is to say each and every one of them had a hotline to someone who had a hotline to Chavez. And, if abused, or if they thought they were being abused, Arrivillaga might well find himself counting monkeys in Amazonas State, a fate devoutly to be avoided.
Though, on the other hand, I’ve got a hotline to Chavez, too. Still, rather not use it if I don’t have to.

Arrivillaga, five foot eight, stocky and mestizo, with hair gone steel-gray, was something of a rarity in Venezuelan military circles, as was his captain. Both could speak English, though that was not that unusual. Far more rare, almost unique, in fact, both were graduates of the United States Army’s Ranger School, based out of Fort Benning, Georgia. This had been in the past when United States-Venezuelan relations had been both good and noncontroversial. They were fairly good again, of course, officially. The difference was that, in the past, the again growing Republican Party hadn’t wanted Venezuela’s leader strung up.

It was that, the experience of Ranger School, that had led Larralde to caution Arrivillaga, personally and especially.

Sighing, as had his captain before him, Arrivillaga stepped onto the bus at Larralde’s beckoning signal. The captain had then taken off for the next bus in line.

Arrivillaga couldn’t keep a frown of distaste from his face, or scorn from his voice, as he said, “Boys and girls, I am Second Sergeant Major Mao Stalin Arrivillaga. No, I am not a communist; neither was my father. No, I am not an internationalist; neither was my father. No, I am neither Russian nor Chinese nor Georgian, in whole or in part.

“My father simply admired Russian and Chinese military achievements. Hence my name.

“I am a nationalist, a Bolivarian to the extent that I care about this country. I care about no other.

“For you …creatures, it doesn’t matter anyway. For you, I am Sergeant Major Arrivillaga …or sir.

“Now, when I turn my back on you rabble, and step off the bus, I will begin to count. By the time I reach three—not four, not two, and five’s right out—you will be off this bus and standing in two lines …”

   *   *   *   

Lily groaned as she lay back on her stiff folding cot. Every muscle and joint hurt, and she was pretty sure it was not from the light physical training she’d done, so much as a reaction to the twenty-one distinct inoculations she’d received, ranging from hepatitis to typhoid, tetanus to yellow fever.

On the other side of the tent, likewise behind the thin cloth partition—nothing more than a couple of white sheets—someone had strung up to separate the boys from the girls, Eva Gollarza tsked, sympathetically. Her sympathy was somewhat strained, however, since she’d had exactly the same shots and felt approximately as miserable as Lily.

Even so, Eva dragged herself out of her own cot and staggered over to feel Lily’s forehead.

“You know,” Eva said, “I’d say you don’t have a fever except that I’m sure I
do
and if you feel normal to me …”

“What I want to know, sir,” Arrivillaga said, “is where the fucking inoculations came from. Half my new people are sick, and the rest are sicker.”

Larralde found himself sighing again. “Cuba, Mao, they came from Cuba.”

“Let me guess; Fidel had an excess of old, contaminated, and condemned stocks that nobody would buy and so he donated them to the cause?”

“Good a guess as any,” the captain conceded. “We should have known better to listen to that fat, gringo propagandist.”

“Now what’s this going to do to our schedule?” Larralde asked. “Every platoon is in the same boat.”

“Not much good,” Arrivillaga replied, with a headshake. “Not here anyway. I can make them draw equipment while they puke. Besides that, we weren’t doing anything
here
all that important. And who cares about square bashing? But if they don’t get better soon …”

“Yeah, I know. By the way, did anybody
not
get sick?”

Arrivillaga inflated his cheeks, then let the air escape with a raspberry sound. “Villareal got over it in about a day, which would be normal even with
safe
inoculations. I figure the boy has a strong constitution. Seems like a good kid. Shame we’re not going to be allowed to turn him into a real soldier.”

Carlos had been the only one able to go to the mess tent under his own power. As such, Arrivillaga had told him to wash his hands carefully and get a container—the sergeant major actually said “Mermite can,” whatever that was—and pick up breakfast for the rest.

The cooks had been happy enough having someone to deliver the meal. They were already overtasked trying to feed groups where
nobody
was fit to walk.

“Make sure you bring this back as soon as possible,” the beefy mess sergeant had insisted, tapping the can. “We just don’t have enough and unless this is back and cleaned before lunch
nobody’s
going to be eating at mid day.”

Breakfast had been simple:
Perico
—a national dish mainly consisting of scrambled eggs, with an admixture of onions, olives, and peppers—as well as several loaves of round bread. The cooks had bundled the bread, along with some paper plates and plastic spoons, plus twenty small cardboard juice boxes and a plastic garbage bag, into a napkin. The
perico
they’d packed into the greenish, thick-walled can which Carlos then had to struggle with all the way back to the tent. It wouldn’t have been such a pain in the ass except that the napkin was large enough to drag on the ground if he used both hands, as he had to, to transport the container.

He cursed the can and the napkin the entire way.

There was no sense in asking the people to line up to be fed. This much Carlos understood immediately. And if he hadn’t, the smell of vomit and shit would have told him so. Instead, he opened the can and laid out the napkin in the center of the tent. The
perico
had smelled pretty good back in the mess tent. Here? It just couldn’t compete.

First, he delivered the boxes of fruit juice on the twin theory that a) people who couldn’t eat could still drink and b) they’d damned well better.
Besides,
he thought,
if they’ll drink a little something maybe they’ll have the strength to eat.

As he delivered the fruit juice, he checked each of his fellow volunteers for excessive fever, the simple way, as his mother had checked him in his boyish years, hand to forehead. Nothing seems outright life-threatening.

Drinks delivered, he had a better idea of who would and would not eat. Most were willing to try, though Lily just shook her head before leaning over the edge of her cot to retch into a washpan.

By twos, Carlos filled paper plates with the mixture and added a slab of bread to each. He didn’t have a knife, so that was a matter of breaking it with his hands. Then, again by twos, he carried the full plates to his comrades. In some cases the plates sat there untouched on quivering stomachs. Still, most tried to choke down a bite or two.

“You’ll have to feed Lily, Carlos,” Eva said weakly, after Villareal placed her plate on her belly. Eva’s hand waved in the direction of Lily’s cot. “She just can’t eat on her own.”

“Feed …? I suppose you’re right.”
But, God, she stinks. Still …sure.

Carefully averting his nose as he pushed the filthy washpan away, Carlos knelt beside Lily, placed the plate on her, lifted her head with one hand and began to scoop with a spoon held in the other.