CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Always look on the bright side of life …

—Monty Python, Life of Brian

Miraflores Palace, Caracas, Venezuela

Hugo Chavez wept, openly and without shame, his shoulders heaving in great sobs. Even his military staff, quite despite the fact that most of them loathed him, felt sorry for him. The crowds, once buoyant and then grown sullen hostile, that had swarmed the area of the palace were dissipated as the news of the disaster sank in. Venezuela was ruined.

“Make peace, Mr. President,” said Nicholas, the foreign minister. “It’s all that’s left. We don’t know how many more tricks the enemy has to play on us; we only know that he doesn’t seem to run out of them.”

“No!” Chavez shrieked, through his unfeigned tears. “After everything they’ve done to us? No!”

It wasn’t like we didn’t start it, thought Quintero, the general. That said, I’m inclined to agree with you, Chavez, you piece of peasant shit. Nobody should be allowed to do this to us and get away with it. Five thousand dead? Six thousand? Ten thousand? We may never know.

That said, even if not said, we’re getting nowhere …

“Make peace, Mr. President,” Nicholas repeated. “We’re stymied at Ciudad Guayana. The mercenaries—not even mercenaries, simple Guyanan troops under mercenary leadership—toss back every assault. Our troops in Guyana are starving. Soon, we’ll be starving here, too.

“Basically, Hugo, we’re fucked.

“And it’s not as if I didn’t warn you.”

“The Cuban minesweepers aren’t coming, either, Mr. President,” Admiral Fernandez added. “The only way we’re getting rid of those mines is if we make peace and the enemy tells us how many went where.”

“What …what happened to the minesweepers?” Chavez asked, looking up and using one hand to wipe away the tears coursing down his ruddy face.

“Ambushed at sea, sir,” Fernandez replied. “Most of their crews signed on with the mercenaries. We wouldn’t even know what happened except that some of them, true to their country, refused to sign on. They’re all interned by the Dutch on Aruba, though supposedly the faithful Cuban sailors will be released soon.”

“And, no, Hugo,” Nicholas said, “before you ask, the Dutch are not going to turn them over to us, no more than Columbia is going to turn over the planes that dropped the mines or the special forces team that destroyed Punto Fijo and the refineries. Before it became obvious we were losing the war, they might have …the Dutch, I mean, not the Colombians. Now? They’re just not afraid of us anymore. And Trinidad and Tobago told me to bend over and kiss my own ass, adding that I was a Spanish pirate, to boot.”

“There’s one other thing,” General Quintero said. He nodded in the direction of the blue-uniformed air force. “Right now, the Air Force is doing a good job of making sure that the mercenaries in Guyana stay on the west side of the Essequibo River. Eventually, though, the gringos are going to get across. Maybe by night. Maybe by some ford we don’t know about and they haven’t found yet. But get across they will. And then they’ll hit our starving troops. Starving troops, Mr. President, are unlikely to put up much of a fight.”

“I thought I gave orders for them to live off the land,” Chavez said.

“Yes, Mr. President, you did. That’s not as easy as it sounds.”

South of Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

“Dinner,” announced Sergeant Major Arrivillaga, leading a scraggly looking burro by a rope, “is served. Or will be, once this thing is butchered and cooked.” A dozen chickens, necks already wrung, were draped across the burro’s bony back, as was a double sack of yucca.

Larralde glanced over the animal, distantly hoping it was too dumb to understand its fate. “What did it cost us?” he asked.

Mao sighed. “In money? Nothing. The farmer wouldn’t sell, too worried about the day when his family would have had to eat the donkey I had to take it. And the chickens. And the yucca. There weren’t any eggs. Besides the yucca there were no fruits or vegetables near to hand, either. And flour was right out.”

Larralde sighed, “Needs must.”

“Yeah,” Mao agreed. “But you know what? That farmer, who was probably fairly neutral to begin with, is going to be joining the guerillas soon. He’ll have to, because that’s going to be the only way for him to feed his wife and kids, and he’ll want to, because he’s got a good reason to hate us now.”

“So why didn’t you just save us the future trouble and kill him?” Larralde asked mildly.

“Because I’m a soldier, not a barbarian. And maybe, just maybe, if they can lift the siege—well, what other word is there for it?—in good time, we might be able to feed those people soon enough that he won’t have to turn guerrilla. Maybe.

“I also ran into some transportation troops, waiting around pulling their puds while their truck sat idle for lack of gas. They said the Marines are eating high off the hog in Georgetown, out of our stores, because, since there’s no way to transport it to us, they might as well.”

“We’d have done the same in their circumstances. Besides, I’ve heard that Georgetown is seething at the rationing. Some of that food is probably going to feed the civilians.”

“Drop in the bucket, that,” Mao snorted. He grinned then. “Gotta confess, it’s a satisfying notion that, if the people in Georgetown rise up and win, they’ll get all the revenge on the Marines I’d ever dream of.”

“Too true,” Larralde agreed, likewise grinning at the thought. “On the other hand,” he added, more soberly, “if we lose control of Georgetown, then there’s no way we’ll ever get resupplied.”

“Point,” Arrivillaga conceded. “Well …win a few, lose a few.”

“Speaking of losing,” Larralde said, “the troops are getting pretty convinced we’re going to lose here, and stinking.”

Not that this was any news to Arrivillaga—he kept his hand on the company’s pulse a lot more closely than Larralde did—but he asked anyway, “Who did we lose?”

“Three people. Two deserters in the night, Gollarza and Flores. Their platoon leader thought they were off in the bushes, fucking, and so didn’t report it until a couple of hours after you left. And Ponce shot himself in the foot, about an hour ago.”

Mao scowled, that, even more than the desertion, was a bad sign. Very formally he asked, “Have I the major’s permission to handle this?”

A little sadly, Larralde nodded.

“Field rules?”

Again, Larralde nodded agreement.

“Compan-eee,” Mao shouted, loud enough to be heard over artillery fire, “formation …on me …and bring me that son of a bitch, Ponce.”

Mao took one look at the medics, sympathetically carrying Ponce on a stretcher, and let out a scream of outrage. Storming over, he slapped one medic, punched the other, and then reached down and spilled the self-wounded man to the ground. Rifle in one hand, he bent over and grabbed a shrieking Private Ponce by the juncture of his shoulder harness. Then he dragged him, screaming still more with each jolt across the broken ground, and dumped him in the middle of the clearing where the company, minus minimal security, was forming in a C shape. There he let go of Ponce’s harness, then gave the man a kidney kick.

“Bastard!”

“Fall in,” Mao ordered, hate and rage dripping from each syllable. “Parade …rest.”

“Last night,” Arrivillaga announced, “we had two deserters. If I can catch them they’ll hang from the shortest tree I can find sufficient to lift their feet no more than half a millimeter off the ground. This motherfucker, however”—he gave Ponce another kick, for emphasis, raising another scream—“decided to shoot himself to get evacuated back. I don’t have time or leisure to hang the son of a bitch at the moment, so this will have to do.”

Without another word, Mao shouldered his rifle, aimed and fired, spattering Ponce’s head like an overripe melon. The private barely had time to register shock before he was already food for the ants.

“And that’s the penalty for a self-inflicted wound. Now where’s Ponce’s squad leader? Ah, there …good. You, you personally, bury the piece of shit. The rest of you, dismissed.”

Lily Vargas alternated between throwing up and crying on Carlos’ shoulder. “He … .he …he …murdered him. Just like that …he murdered Ponce … .he …”

“Shhhh, Lily,” Carlos said. “It wasn’t murder. It was an execution.”

“There was no trial,” she hissed. “No judge. No court. No law!”

“An execution,” Carlos insisted. “There was no time for much else. Laws of war.” And I can recall an occasion when you were not so insistent on a trial for some criminals, dear.

Again, she threw up—not that there was much for her to toss, given the short rations—and then fell into more sobbing.

“I …I hate this,” she blubbered.

I’m not far behind you there, love, he thought, stroking her hair for whatever comfort it might give. Maybe we should both take the route Eva and her boyfriend did, and just get the hell out of here.

“Happier now?” Larralde asked, a couple of hours later, passing Arrivillaga a scrounged wooden bowl of donkey and yucca stew.

Mao’s eyes narrowed as he took the proffer. “What are you talking about, sir? That was disgusting. That it was also necessary doesn’t make it less disgusting.”

“No, not much less.”

Mao set the stew down; he didn’t feel very hungry anymore. “I warned you, sir, before we ever started this, that there was going to be a price for the half-assed training we gave these boys and girls.”

“Yeah, I know. Nothing to be done about it then, nothing to help with it now.”

“Even so, Hugo fucked us. We should have had years to get ready for this. We should have had minesweepers, and units already at full strength without taking street sweepings in at the last minute. We should have had professionals, properly trained and led, not this …this …rabble.”

“You go to war with the army you have,” Larralde answered. “It’s just the way it is.”

“Bullshit, sir; you plan your war and then make the army you need to fight it.”

Larralde shook his head. “Hugo told me, back when I convinced him to interfere and alter the plan, that there wasn’t time; he had to fight it, now, or there’d never be another chance.”

“Still bullshit,” Mao retorted. “And you can tell my cousin I said so. Hugo, too, for that matter. Moreover, you can—”

Whatever Mao was about to say was lost, as a gun, a very large gun, fired from somewhere to the south, its shell screeching past the company line to explode in the trees to the north.