Free Countdown: M Day by Tom Kratman Page B

prices. Clamp down on FARC, here? Take away their safe haven and arrest or disband the battalion they keep on our soil? Crack down on FARC’s “revolutionary” drug trade, on which some of them live very well indeed? Or maybe the better answer is to appear to do all those things, while doing none of them.
    Consider this carefully. We cannot face an attack by Colombia while we are engaged in Guyana.
    But, then again, can they even think about paying for a war? Maybe not. Maybe I’m worrying over nothing. Best have a chat with Nicholas.
    After reading the Intelligence Annex, and filling four pages with hand-scrawled notes, Chavez turned to Operations. There he found nothing unexceptionable, except perhaps for a certain overoptimism. Certainly the plan for preparation of the target was good. Of course, the fucking generals had nothing much to do with that. And, The seizure of the airfields at Kaieteur and Cheddi Jagan International to serve as bases for expansion …no choice there; there’s no other way to supply our troops initially, while landing the Marines at Georgetown, even while little penny packets of second stringers take helicopters and light planes in to the …um …one …two …fifteen …call it “thirty” odd little airstrips west of the Essequibo. Okay, as those are occupied a little further in with each lift, it looks more and more to the ignorant press like an inexorable advance in overwhelming force. And, of course, we’ll play to their incarnate, insuperable ignorance and brief it exactly that way.
    And I’ll look so very reasonable, to the international community, when I give Georgetown and the area east of the Essequibo back again, since that’s not part of our legitimate claim.
    Hugo mentally shrugged. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn’t give it back. If Guyana isn’t extinguished, there’s always the possibility—small, to be sure—of revenge.
    Reading on, Chavez came to the section on amphibious movement. Idiots. Just idiots. Why, oh why, do we stage the Marines out of the northern coast when we can move at least some of them by land to a port closer and cut the time to fully deploy them in half? He scrawled furiously, the anger expressing itself in letters rough and crude on the pad of paper.
    Hugo finished up with operations, put that section aside, then picked up the Logistics annex. He was about halfway through this, and on page twenty-seven of his note-taking, when he realized, Those fucking assholes. They’ve got this plan done in a vacuum. Where the hell is their plan for secrecy? Why haven’t the silly shits made a plan for securing the embassies—especially the gringo embassy—in Georgetown?
    They’ll have plans—and they’d better be good—three days from now or I’ll have new commanding generals …and an admiral …for all three services, plus a new minister of defense.
    Chavez looked up from his papers to the antique map of Gran Colombia on his private office wall. Because Bolivar and I share a dream.

CHAPTER SIX

    If everything were to be discountenanced in
    peace by which an accident might possibly occur,
    soldiers would be greatly sinned against, since they
    would be enfeebled and rendered inept for war, the
    chances of losses being doubled at the same time.
    —Field Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz,
    The Nation in Arms

    Camp Fulton, Guyana

    Trees, close together this close to the open, asphalted strip and the free ambient sunlight, passed by in a rattling blur. Although the road was less than four years old and had been well-built to begin with, the jungle, aided by heavy vehicle traffic—heavy in both senses—took a severe and continuing toll.
    “Day after tomorrow is assumption of command?” von Ahlenfeld asked.
    “Zero nine hundred,” Stauer answered as he twisted the Land Rover’s steering wheel to guide it around a sharp, jungle-shrouded curve “Don’t be fucking late.”
    Past the curve, on the straightaway, the Rover passed a small and