Countdown_ The Liberators Part 27

"Better than fair," the cook answered. "For that you get extra portion of goat."

D-78, Rako, Ophir

While the United States Army had never been a force in which idiotic personnel management b.o.n.e.rs were unknown-for example, at a time when it had been critical for Special Forces personnel to be able to blend in with the locals, it had on at least one occasion a.s.signed a black captain to a Special Forces A team oriented to Norway, and this at a time when there were virtually no blacks in Norway-in Fulton's case it had made the far more sensible decision, deep in the throes of the Cold War, to a.s.sign him to a Special Forces Group, the Third, and team oriented towards the fringe where Islamic Africa met Christian, Animist, and Christian-Animist Africa. Thus the continent held few surprises for him. He'd seen it all. As Buckwheat said, more or less frequently, "Thank G.o.d my multi-great grandpappy got dragged onto that boat."

He'd said just that, once, after demonstrating the use of a condom to the men of a nominally Christian village. For that particular demonstration, he'd used a stick to simulate the male appendage. The next morning, after he'd arisen, he'd discovered that every married man had used his condom exactly as he'd shown them. Outside of each hut, planted in the ground, was an upright stick and on each stick a properly rolled out condom. He'd thought then, as he thought now, Thank G.o.d my multi-great grandpappy got dragged onto that boat. Tough s.h.i.+t for him, of course, but awful good for me and mine.

The reason for him thinking so, on this occasion, was the village into which he and Wahab and their guards had just driven. More precisely, it was the young girl, kicking, crying, begging, and pleading for all she was worth as she was dragged by her feet to where a collection of grim faced women stood, one of them holding a knife, another several rags, and a third a basket that Fulton already knew held acacia thorns. The thorns were a suture subst.i.tute.

Who do you blame for this? Fulton asked himself, as he had every time he'd been a near witness to a female circ.u.mcision. The Arabs? Islam? Nope, this predates them. The people doing it? "Nothing is stronger than custom." And how do you change their minds? Answer: you don't; I've tried. Poor little s.h.i.+t.

Neither Wahab nor the guards so much as blinked when the girl, now concealed inside a hut, began to scream in earnest, heartbreak incarnate. Again, Fulton thought, Poor little s.h.i.+t.

Though Wahab didn't blink, he likewise thought, Poor creature. Thanks to Allah my Alaso wasn't so treated when she was young. Of course, I can't say anything. Even if the mission we are on didn't require "cover," I am already so embarra.s.sed in front of Buckwheat that I want to puke.

No more than had Wahab or the guards did the chief of the village seem to pay the slightest mind to the girl's voiced agony. The chief wore what amounted to a skirt, below, and in a sort of plaid, no less, with a bright blue s.h.i.+rt and a light, patterned shawl. On his head was perched the snug-fitting, rounded cap, called a "qofe." The chief looked to be truly ancient, from which appearance Buckwheat a.s.sumed they were about of an age.

The guards made the introductions while Wahab remained in the background.

"You are an American," the village chief, Zakariye, observed. It was not a question.

"Indeed, yes," Fulton agreed. "Is this a problem?"

"Not at all," said Zakariye. "Indeed, we hope someday to have closer relations with the United States, so says my eldest boy, Gutaale. That, however, is for the future . . . and is in G.o.d's hands."

"As are we all," Fulton agreed. While the chief's wives and daughters, modestly wrapped in accordance with their faith but not in the stifling burkas of more fundamentalist regions, served lunch, Wahab busied himself with taking pictures. Eventually, the girl being c.l.i.torectomized not so far away ceased her wailing and shrieking.

D-77, Rako-Dhuudo highway, Ophir

Wahab said exactly what Fulton was thinking, "We're so f.u.c.ked!"

"Why f.u.c.ked?" asked the guard manning the machine gun.

The reason for the exclamation was the column of dust-covered tanks-at this distance Fulton made them as being either Russian T-55s or the Chinese copy, the Type 59-pa.s.sing across the road heading north to south. The tanks threw up a thick, linear cloud of dun-colored dust.

"He just worries whenever he sees soldiers he isn't one hundred percent sure are harmless," Fulton lied. "I thought you guys didn't have any tanks,"

"People you call 'pirates' took them from s.h.i.+p," the guard explained. "Maybe . . . a month ago. Radio say we got . . . ummm . . . twenty-four. Me, I think the pirates didn't steal anything and there was a deal"-the guard winked- "under the table between our people and the Russians. But, hey, I'm just hired guard. What I know?"

"I do know," said another guard, "that there are black men training the crews. I never heard of no black Russians."

Fulton suppressed the chuckle that the line deserved, even if the speaker didn't know why it deserved it. Besides, having to face tanks, even T-55s, in armored cars is not a laughing matter. s.h.i.+t.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

The reasons for the current overestimation of the importance of intelligence in warfare are twofold: the first is the common confusion of espionage and counter-espionage with operational intelligence proper; the second is the intermingling of operational intelligence with, and contamination by, subversion, the attempt to win military advantage by covert means.

-John Keegan, Intelligence in War

D-75, a.s.sembly Area Alpha-Base Camp, Amazonia, Brazil

"s.h.i.+t," said Bridges when he saw the pictures Fulton had downloaded via satellite. He then added, "'Dad, get me out of this'."

"What is it, Matt?" asked Lox.

Wordlessly, Bridges swiveled his laptop around to show his coworker.

"s.h.i.+t," Lox agreed. He filled his lungs with air and called for Boxer.

Boxer came into the tent breathlessly, followed by Stauer and the operations officer, Ken Waggoner.

"What the f.u.c.k was that in aid of?" Boxer asked. Just as Bridges had, Lox answered nonverbally by pointing at the screen.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," Stauer said, shaking his head slowly. "That I was not expecting. Oh, s.h.i.+t," he repeated, needlessly. "We should have asked the Israelis to mount their high velocity 60mm guns. Too late for that now. s.h.i.+t."

"Tanks?" Waggoner mumbled. More loudly, he added, "I didn't plan on tanks, boss. Not real ones. Not a bunch of them. Nothing you or this Air Force reprobate told me said we'd have to deal with tanks. Jesus! How the f.u.c.k do we deal with tanks in those numbers?"

Boxer, less inclined to lose his head than most, asked, "Where were they spotted?"

"On the road to Objective One," Bridges answered. He took back control of the laptop and scrolled down untill he came to some verbiage. This he read. "Well, just off it, actually. They're based right near there . . . Buckwheat says they're just T-55's or Type 59's . . . probably depot rebuilds . . . maybe night vision equipped . . . but no thermals. No add-on armor, either. Annnddd . . . the crews are barely trained. What he saw was driver training . . . he thinks. That, or he says ' they need driver training.' He also says that there are probably two dozen of them."

"Why the h.e.l.l didn't you see them?" Stauer asked of Boxer. "You're tapping all the NRO's s.h.i.+t!"

"I looked. A few weeks ago. They weren't there then." Boxer sounded quite apologetic. "And there was nothing on the news or in the intel channels to suggest otherwise."

Stauer suppressed an urge to unload on the intel type, but, No, sat recon is limited. And the press is not notably good about honest reporting in this part of the world. He did the best he could.

"Chilluns," said Stauer, "this is what we in the trade call a 'bad thing.' And we need a solution." He considered for a moment, then added, "Send to Buckwheat that he's to stay on station." He shrugged, "In country, I mean, not right there with the tanks. I need to know a lot more about those T-55's. Everything there is to know, as a matter of fact." Turning to Waggoner, he said, "And you start working on a plan to take them out, without compromising the rest of the operations. If we have to take some risks, elsewhere, then that's what we'll do."

"Could we get some tanks of our own?" Waggoner asked.

Stauer shook his head. "Maybe, but if so, so what? They won't be M-1's or anything our armor crews are used to, so they'd need training and there wouldn't be time to train. Even if there were time to train, the gantry on the Merciful isn't up to forty to seventy tons of steel. Even if it were, the LCM's probably can't carry an M-1 or equivalent. And even if they could, we couldn't conceal them in a container. And if that weren't necessary it would still take too long getting ash.o.r.e when we'd have to ferry them in one per boat at a time.

"No, we need to do something else."

D-75, 90mm Range (subcal), a.s.sembly Area Alpha-Base Camp, Amazonia, Brazil

There was a steady pop-pop-pop, deeper than from a normal rifle, or even a normal .50 caliber. This was the sound of the modified spotting rifles being used for 90mm gunnery training.

When Reilly returned to the range from a short but intense meeting with Boxer and Stauer, all three gun-armed Elands were on line firing. Downrange, in three deep zigzag trenches the engineers had dug, three teams of three soldiers each-the other crews for half the Elands-manhandled silhouettes of generic armored vehicles while the gunners tried to perforate the moving targets.

Lana Mendes was half in, half out of the hatch of one of the armored cars. I'm not sure which view is better, Reilly mused. He didn't muse, or view, very long though. Instead he walked up and slapped her hard on the thigh. The stream of mixed English, Afrikaans, and Hebrew (really Arabic, since Israel had had to borrow) curses previously emanating from the vehicle let up momentarily, only to commence again with real fury as she withdrew her top half from the turret. Reilly tried not to notice when her s.h.i.+rt caught on the turret and began to ride high.

As she was fixing her s.h.i.+rt, before she could even begin to lay into him, Reilly cut her off, abruptly, saying, "We've got a serious problem, Lana. Leave Green in charge. Round up Sergeant Abdan. Meet me at my hooch in half an hour."

With that he turned on his heel and walked away. Lana thought, I like the other view better.

When Lana and Abdan arrived at Reilly's tent, the other key leaders.h.i.+p was already there, seated on Reilly's cot, folding chairs, or the ground. The first sergeant, George, the company exec, FitzMarcach, and the antiarmor section leader, Harvey, shared the cot. The two infantry platoon leaders, Hilfer and Epolito, sat on folding chairs. The mortar section leader, Peters, was already there and seated on the ground, as were Viljoen and Dumisani. Matthias Nagy, who would lead the team of engineers supporting Company A, was likewise in attendance, but standing. n.o.body looked particularly happy but Harvey looked especially pale.

The first sergeant and XO spread apart to make a little room on Reilly's cot for Lana.

"As I've said, we have a problem," Reilly began. "The other side have tanks, and near enough to one of the key objectives that we can a.s.sume they'll pour out to fight once we show up."

"How many?" Abdan asked. "What model."

"T-55's and-we think-twenty-four of them."

Lana looked instantly horrified. "You can't, I mean you can't take on tanks, even T-55's, in Elands and expect to survive the experience. They got no- "

"Yes, you can," Viljoen interrupted. "I've done it twice. In Namibia. I'm not saying it's easy but it can be done."

"And were you outnumbered four to one?" Lana asked heatedly.

"Well, no," Viljoen admitted. "We had the numbers, if only slightly, at the point of contact.

"Boss," Harvey said, turning to Reilly, "My Ferrets are going to carry eight missiles loaded, between them, and another dozen stowed internally or on the back deck. That's twenty missiles, max. Sir, do you know why they call them 'missiles?' Because they miss a lot more often than they hit. From my twenty, ideally, we kill seven or eight tanks. That still leaves sixteen or seventeen facing a half dozen Elands. And that's too much."

"Don't count on me to whittle them down," Peters said, spitting tobacco juice into the can that he seemed always to have in his hand. "If I hit something much smaller than the Earth, with a mortar, it'll be a fluke."

Abdan shook his head. "Sir, the boys are already griping about having to traverse the turrets by hand and have the commander double as a loader. If we had four M-1s, I'd take on your two dozen T-55s with a grin. As is . . . "

"Yeah," Reilly agreed. He disagreed about the numbers, though. "Maintenance being what it is, and tanks being what they are, there's not much chance we'd have to take on all twenty-four. Think more along the lines of twelve to twenty." He turned his head toward Viljoen. "Tell us about taking on T-55s with Elands."

"It's simple, Wes," Reilly explained later in the day. "I can handle maybe half of those tanks if they come after us. And they're close enough that we won't have seized our targets before they do come looking for us. They're also close enough to block our egress back to the sea and the s.h.i.+p. Are those targets all that key?"

"Yes," Stauer answered.

"Okay, then my options are A: Hit the tank compound first, before I do anything else, with everything I have, while the f.u.c.kers are asleep, killing everything that moves and taking time to thermite the back deck of each one. Understand, though, that the targets might get away.

"If you don't like that, there's option B: Seize the targets: leave the vehicles behind; everybody goes out by air. I won't comment on what this does to the rest of your plan, even a.s.suming we could do it before the tanks are ramming their barrels up our a.s.ses.

"Then there's C: Reconfigure the light aircraft due in, in a few days, to attack the armor base. They'll have to linger there, shooting anything that moves, for several hours. My guess is that while they'd cause some delay, even get a few, they wouldn't stop the tanks.

"Lastly is my personal favorite," Reilly continued. "D: Two to four aircraft-call it 'three'-strike the place, along with the mortars, immediately following which I and the Elands roll in and shoot the s.h.i.+t out of it, while my XO takes the rest of the company to the objective to seize the targets. The aircraft can keep any survivors busy while the company links up and moves to the sea. This has some downsides in terms of the likelihood of meeting serious resistance at the objective, and people escaping through a thinner net. I was counting on those 90mm guns to cow the opposition. Oh, and I'm going to need the cooks to supplement my mortar section. In any case, even D has some . . . issues."

Note to self, Stauer thought, bet with Sergeant Major, pay off, soonest.

"How about dropping off your engineers to mine the road?" he asked.

Reilly shook his head. "I've checked the maps. The road's a convenience, nothing more. With luck we get one tank that way and then the rest pull off road into the desert and continue the march. And there are no unfordable streams we could drop the bridges to, nor even any fordable ones we could mine the fords of."

"What if I cancelled Welch's mission and sent his boys to take out the compound?"

Reilly wrinkled his nose, this time. Despite that, he replied, "I've got no brief against special forces, but they're just as likely to alert the opposition as to take them out. Only so much s.h.i.+t can be back-packed, after all. And besides, you need them for the mission you've already got them on. The whole thing's kind of a waste, from our point of view, if they don't do that."

And if Welch's mission doesn't go off, we can't stay together, and I spend the rest of my miserable life alone.

"Yeah," Stauer admitted. "I'm willing to consider Option D. It's very close to what Boxer and Waggoner came up with, by the way."

"Greats minds and all," Reilly said with a shrug. "That said, I've got another problem."