CHAPTER ONE
I can picture in my mind a world without war,
a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking
that world, because they’d never expect it.
—Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts
Ring Road, Camp Robert B. Fulton, Guyana
From somewhere in the distance a macaw shrieked with indignation at having its repose interrupted by gargantuan, smelly, noisy creatures that had, so far as it was concerned, no business whatsoever in its jungle
Indifferent to the bird and its complaining, Wes Stauer tapped his foot against the floor of his Land Rover impatiently He was a big man, Stauer, six-two, unbent, still with a full head of hair, though now gone completely gray Pale blue eyes were framed by deep crow’s feet If he’d once been considered a son of a bitch, and he had, that had mostly abated since he’d been able to stop dealing with the politicians, and politicians in uniform, who had been, so he thought, as much the enemy as anyone who ever popped a cap in his direction.
The Rover carried standard Guyanan license plates, but the bumper was painted with, “M Day, Inc.” and the regiment’s logo, a diving raptor It sat, engine humming, on a two lane, black asphalt road, just shy of a broad, whitish, concrete pad set into that same road Stauer, like his driver, wore pixilated tiger-striped jungle fatigues, with little in the way of insignia On both their heads were perched broad-brimmed jungle hats of the same material.
Fucking Reilly, Stauer fumed silently Had to take his battalion out—all of it, naturally—and had to do it at precisely the time I need to get back to base.
Antennae whipping, a camouflage-painted tank-looking low, mean, and predatory—ground its way across the white concrete pad on the road and down into the jungle-lined, dirt tank trail to the west The concrete shuddered as it passed, little bits of gravel bouncing with the vibration Not for first the first time, Stauer though that the tank looked less like the T-55 that had provided its basic body, and more like an American M-1 that had somehow suffered fetal alcohol syndrome.
As if on cue, a turretless Eland armored car, with loudspeakers mounted to the sides, nosed up onto the road Standing in the open-topped back of it, broad grin written across his face, rocking with the motion, Seamus Reilly gave a mock-serious salute and then waved happily at Stauer’s scowl The grin and the wave made the middle-aged Reilly appear much younger than he was.
As the Eland followed the tank to disappear into the perpetual twilight of the Guyanan jungle, Reilly turned his face back to the front Stauer was pretty sure he was singing one of those awful Irish or German songs he inflicted on his command
As that armored car disappeared, it was immediately replaced by another vehicle, this one a turreted Eland, its 90mm gun pointing generally in Stauer’s direction Stauer couldn’t be sure, what with the helmet and boom mike half covering the Eland commander’s dark face, but he thought it was one of Reilly special pets, Sergeant Towns, commanding the thing And singing.
Stauer sighed Twenty tanks—assuming they’re all working and he’s pulled none from the operational float—twelve turreted Elands, twelve antitank Ferrets, nine scout Ferrets, fifty-two turretless Elands, carrying infantry and mortars, mostly, and about sixty-five wheels …at twenty-five kilometers an hour …I’ve got quite a wait
“I can take a chance going in between them, sir,” Stauer’s Guyanan driver, Corporal Hosein, offered, sensing his colonel’s impatience Hosein was a tall, dark, frankly skinny, Bihari-descended corporal handpicked for unflappability by the corporation’s, which is to say the regiment’s, Sergeant Major, RSM Joshua “Or get out and stop traffic Sir.”
Stauer shook his head “Nah, Hosein Fuckers would like as not just run you or us over and then where would we be?”
“Pretty flat and low to the ground, sir,” the corporal agreed, white teeth flashing in an ashy, dark face “Still, sir, it’s going to be a wait.”
“Yeah,” the colonel agreed as the muzzle of another tank began to jut out from the trees. “But let the bloody harp have his fun.”
Suddenly, the muzzle stopped its advance and began to swing up and down. The mechanical roar coming from the right of the road likewise dropped in volume. A few moments later a uniformed man wearing a tanker’s helmet appeared on the side of the road and began waving the Land Rover to pass. The free end of a detached communications cable ran from the helmet down past the signaling tanker’s waist.
“Colonel Reilly must have radioed to let us through,” Hosein observed as he put his vehicle into gear and began to roll forward.
“You never really know with Reilly,” Stauer said softly as the Land Rover rolled forward. He glanced to the right at the tank vibrating half-hidden in the murk, adding, “It could be a trap.”
“Headquarters, atten …shun!” shouted Joshua from his office several doors back from the front entrance. There’d be hell to pay for someone, later on, that he was the first one to see the colonel enter the building.
“At ease,” Stauer called out. I was hoping nobody would notice I’d come back. Should have known better. Now the RSM is going to ream somebody’s ass for it.
He stuck his head inside Joshua’s door. The RSM said, without being asked, “Your interview is waiting in your office, sir.”
“Thanks, Top. Has he been waiting long?”
Joshua shook his gray-haired head, a smile briefly lighting his deeply seamed black face. “Nah. As soon as I heard the plane and realized Reilly would be tying up the roads, I told the duty driver to take his time about getting back. Colonel Von Ahlenfeld’s been here maybe five minutes.”
“Great. I’d tell you ‘good thinking,’ but you already know that.”
Stauer turned away and walked past the adjutant, seated now at his desk in the open area surrounded by the offices of the rest of the regiment’s primary staff. The adjutant, DeWitt, just nodded greetings as he went back to his paperwork, muttering dark imprecations at—to Stauer’s complete lack of surprise—Reilly and the First Battalion.
Stauer shook his head, thinking, Anybody who can piss off the adjutant daily can’t be all bad.
At his own office door, Stauer stopped, spent a second composing himself, and then bellowed inward, “And no, Lee, you can’t have a company. Company commanders I’ve got coming out the wazoo. What I need is a battalion commander.”
“I just knew you were going to be difficult about that,” von Ahlenfeld said softly, as Stauer entered the office. Taller, at six-three, than even Stauer himself, blond where he wasn’t gray, and mustached, the newcomer stood in front of a map of the newly built up areas, studying it.
“Forget the map,” Stauer said. “I’ll give you the guided tour in a little bit.” He stuck out one hand, which von Ahlenfeld took warmly. “How have you been, Lava, you old bastard?” Stauer asked.
“Bored,” Lee A. von Ahlenfeld answered, frowning. “Bored out of my frigging mind.” He sighed, adding, “Which is rather why I’d have preferred the excitement of a company.”
“You’re too old,” Stauer replied, “too capable, and—as mentioned—I’ve got company commanders coming out my ass. I need somebody for my Second Battalion.
“If it’s any consolation, that’s only about the size of a big company. Sorta. Kinda.”
“Sorta? Kinda? Care to explain?” von Ahlenfeld asked.
“Second Batt’s got five companies,” Stauer replied. “In theory, A through C are lane walker and instructor companies for the jungle training we provide here, while D Company handles our internal training, from basic to leadership to special combat skills. The last one’s the headquarters. Strength is two hundred and thirty Euros and gringos and seventy-nine locals.”
“Big company,” von Ahlenfeld said skeptically.
“Yeah …well. In a sense, it’s bigger than that,” Stauer admitted. “The three predominantly local battalions, Third and Fourth Light Infantry and Fifth Combat Support, each have their own command and staff at battalion level, but the cadre of each of the four companies of those are also what amounts to A teams, detached from or affiliated with—depending on how you want to look at it—one of Second Battalion’s companies. So while your line companies might look like big platoons, with fifty-one men each, three A detachments and a fifteen man headquarters, in fact they can have seven teams and a headquarters, if we stripped every spec ops man out of the Guyanan battalions. Course, the Guyanan battalions would be useless then, so we never do that.
“And, no, before you ask, that’s not racist. We’ve got them—some of them—up to being fairly good squad and team leaders. But we haven’t been at it long enough to make good senior noncoms. And officers have to be made by society long before the military gets its hands on them.”
“Why set it up that way?” von Ahlenfeld asked.
Stauer shrugged. “Few reasons. I don’t want the SF types going altogether native, so I have them stay affiliated, regimentalized, if you will. And it gives us some fair flexibility in assignments. Plus …well …one of the problems with SF types is we forget we’re part of the army—not that we’re part of the Army anymore, mind you—and forget how to do our primary mission, which is to train locals to fight as regulars and lead them in so doing. That half of Second Battalion’s operatives are detached …or attached …or whatever …are doing just that means they won’t forget. And it’s awful damned convenient that the company doing lane walking for the jungle school has a close, intimate relationship with the leadership of the battalion playing guerilla for our rotational unit. Cuts way down on problems in the field.
“And, yeah,” he admitted, “it is kind of a personnel management pain in the ass for Second Battalion’s commander, since he ends up assigning people to the Guyanan battalions and quasi-managing them.”
“My ODAs?” von Ahlenfeld asked. “They’re up to strength?”
“Strength, yes. But we’ve got shortages in MOS’s”—Military Occupational Specialties; jobs—“and ranks that are persistent and difficult to overcome. We barely manage to have one Delta”—18D; Special Forces medic—“or corpsman per team. The alternate’s usually a weapons guy that we put through a course here and at one or another of the local hospitals. They’re good; but they’re not Deltas. We did give Second Battalion all the navy corpsmen but two. Engineers and communications aren’t quite as badly off. We’ve got a surplus of weapons guys, though some of them are just regular infantry, albeit tabbed. Most of your teams are led by noncoms, not officers. They are not a bit less capable for that lack.”
I can probably live with that, von Ahlenfeld thought, then asked, “How are your Guyanan battalions?”
Stauer made a so-so gesture, shaking his wide-spread fingers, palm down, and hand held low. “Technically and tactically, they’re pretty fair,” he explained. “Morally? For battle? Not so great. Not awful. Not great, either. But they’re getting better Cazz’s Third, in particular, shows promise.
“See, there’s not a lot of military tradition here. Sure, they did what they could for the old Empire, but that was very damned little. When we had that little dust-up with Suriname, maybe a quarter of them deserted. Naturally, we didn’t let the deserters back afterwards. We’d probably have lost another quarter if the Surinamese hadn’t folded as quick as they did. To be fair, they were newer then.”
“What happened with Suriname, anyway?” von Ahlenfeld asked. “I mean the whole thing. I read about it in the papers, but those were long on condemnation and short on facts.”
Stauer pointed to a different map on his wall than the one von Ahlenfeld had been studying previously. This map showed the entire top and northeast corner of South America.
“This place,” he said, “is in the possibly unique position of having almost its entire territory claimed by its neighbors. It’s Poland, but without the tradition of nationhood.”
Stauer’s finger shifted left. “To the west of the Essequibo River, Venezuela claims better than half the country. Bad as the fucking Palestinians with Israel, Venezuelan maps in school kids’ textbooks show the place as part of Venezuela. Hell, back about 2006, Venezuela even added another star to their flag to represent Guyana, or the portion of it they claim, and that’s always a bad sign.”
The finger flicked to the right. “To the east, Suriname claims a good deal of what’s left. And it’s been arbitrated—repeatedly arbitrated—and all parties have agreed on the current borders. And those agreements are simply discarded almost as soon as the ink is dry on them and the claims get raised again.
“There was a Canadian energy company that tried to do some exploratory drilling in one of the disputed zones, out to sea. The Surinamese navy showed up and carted off their drilling platform. That was the second time that had happened, so the Guyanan government asked us for help. I said we were willing, but we extracted some serious concessions out of them for it. Like our own legal system and laws, recognized and accepted by them, right to use their defense establishment, such as it is, to recruit locally, to order arms and equipment, that sort of thing, plus an official status.
“One of the side effects of recruiting locally is that we’ve essentially wrecked Guyana’s own Defense Force, by the way. All the best recruits come to us and even some of their leadership has defected over to us because we train better, live better, and can pay a lot better. You will find a number of former Guyanan captains wearing sergeant’s and corporal’s stripes here.
“So we sank Suriname’s navy, then landed Second Battalion at their major base and killed or captured most of what was left, people-wise. Then we crossed over the border with Reilly and his band of cutthroats, wrecking the Surinamese land force, too. About the time we were halfway from the border to Paramaribo, the Surinamese government decided that, since the Dutch Marines wouldn’t get here in time to help, maybe the old border and offshore drilling were just fine, after all. However, given the history and nature of boundary disputes here, the Canadians pay us a retainer to keep ready, because there will be a next time.”
I’m counting on it, von Ahlenfeld thought. If not, I wouldn’t even be here.
“God knows,” Stauer continued, “the locals couldn’t afford to pay us for their defense. They’re dirt poor and they’ll stay dirt poor, too, because almost no one is willing to invest here lest the country be partitioned and they lose their investment. The Canadians are almost unique, and either very cagey or very stupid, for putting new money into the place.
“So, anyway …that’s a few of the Second Battalion’s missions: to provide training support to—well, to be honest, to be—the jungle school here, to manage personnel to provide company command for the three Guyanan battalions, and to provide initial entry and more advanced training. There’s one other.”
“Yes?”
Stauer smiled. “Yes. Typically we only need one of your three line companies for lane walking squads and platoons for the jungle school at any given time. One of the others trains itself. The last mission, for whichever company isn’t doing one of those two, is to be ready to conduct and to conduct special operations, on order, on our own behalf, or, more typically, on behalf of someone who has contracted for our services.”
“Now, do you want to look the place over before you make a decision? We can grab lunch at the O Club on the way.”
“Sounds good,” Lee agreed. “By the way, were those tanks I saw from the air as I came in? And if so, where did they come from? I didn’t recognize the model.”
Stauer nodded. “Yeah, those were tanks. Half of them we captured in Africa, the other half we bought from Israel through the good offices of the government of Guyana, of which we’ve been an official reserve since about five hours before we landed near Paramaribo. They’re Ti-67s2 tanks; that’s what the Israeli company that did the mods calls them, anyway. The mods themselves were from China and Textron, who call the model the ‘Jaguar.’ We just call them ‘tanks.’ Basically they’re modified T-55s with a new American turret configuration, a thermal-sleeved 105mm gun, Israeli fire control, explosive reactive armor, and a host of other improvements. They’re a good buy for the money, and when you capture half of what you need …”
“Should I ask?”
Stauer shook his head. “Nah. I could tell you, but …“On the other hand, I can tell you that, outside of your battalion’s, most of our arms are Russian.”
Von Ahlenfeld didn’t sneer, as some might have.
“We mostly went high end Russian, mind you,” Stauer continued. “No Kalashnikovs, for example. We bought Abakans. No PKM’s, we’ve got Pechenegs. Grenade launchers are GM-94’s. Heavy machine guns are KORD’s. Our light machine guns are RPK-74’s, though.
“We stayed away from RPG-7’s. Instead we’ve got RPG-16’s. For medium antiarmor work we’ve got Vampires. Chile sold us a couple of dozen Israeli-built 60mm High Velocity guns on old QF Six Pounder carriages, plus spare barrels and a shitload of ammunition. We’ve got a very limited number of SPG-9’s. We didn’t bother with antitank guided missiles, other than a couple of launchers in your battalion, and Reilly’s antitank platoon, because the terrain just doesn’t generally suit them.
“For artillery we went French, because they were available. Mortars are Israeli. Sniper rifles are Barretts, in .338, from home.
“And then, every light battalion has a platoon of Eland 90’s as armored gun systems …”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” von Ahlenfeld queried, “meaning that I’ll survive the answer, where did you get all that shit?”
Stauer scratched lightly at his nose, hesitated a moment, then answered, “Mostly …ummm …Victor.”
“Victor? No shit?” Von Ahlenfeld looked and sounded incredulous. “We were all sure he was dead.”
“He would be,” Stauer replied. “He would be right quick like, if he ever tried to settle down somewhere without at least a regiment to keep him alive.”
Stauer had released Hosein to the RSM and was driving himself. He hated riding in the back of a vehicle, didn’t much like making someone else do so, and wanted to talk to von Ahlenfeld one on one.
“How the fuck do you pay for all this?” von Ahlenfeld asked, as Stauer’s Land Rover passed a row of substantial, white stucco-covered barracks before turning north from the last outlying camp, Camp Python, to head back to Camp Fulton. A housing area lined the eastern side of the road as they progressed. A sign announced that the name of the place was “Glen Livet.” It, too, was white stucco though, unlike the barracks, built mostly to single floor plans.
“I mentioned that Canadian energy company,” Stauer answered. “We have funding, some of it regular, some of it spotty, from eight other sources.
“Our jungle school makes a profit—pretty good profit, as a matter of fact—from selling training to the Army and Marines. We can handle up to a regiment or brigade at a time. And, once a year, we give the Guyanan’s own infantry battalion a free rotation. I write that off as a good will measure. We go pretty easy on them, actually, which is only fair since, as mentioned, we’ve wrecked them.
“You will, by the way, see a lot of oddities in our table of organization because, officially, we primarily support a jungle school. For example, we’ve got mules and small submarines, hovercraft, unmarked civvie cars, and even bicycles because you can reasonably expect an irregular force to use any or all of those to move people and supplies. And landing craft because a regular force can expect to be moved by those, sometimes, anyway.”
Stauer paused, then added, “Anyway, we wrecked the Guyanans. Except for their Second Infantry Battalion—‘Two Battalion,’ they call it. It’s a reserve formation and it’s better than you would expect because a number of the people who take their discharge from us, and take on civilian employment, opt to keep their hand in with the GDF reserve. We don’t have a reserve of our own, though we’ve considered it. Each of our two light infantry battalions have adopted two of those four GDF companies, unofficially. Our Third Battalion took on ‘Big Brother’ duties for their 242 and 244 companies, while our Fourth, FitzMacach’s crew, helps out their 243 and 245 companies.
“Doesn’t cost us much, really. And they’re happy to get whatever help we can give them.
Von Ahlenfeld coughed in such a way as to mean, And, again, you pay for this how?
“Oh, right,” Stauer said. “At any given time, some of Third and Fourth Infantry battalions, along with Fifth Combat Support and Eighth Service Support, are away under a personal security contract. Right now it’s ninety-four gringos and Euros and five hundred and ninety-one Guyanans deployed. Those battalions are all overstrength, anyway. We make a pretty fair amount of money out of those, more than enough to pay the expenses of those four battalions But then you’d know all about that.”
Von Ahlenfeld just smiled. Post retirement from the Army, he’d been CEO of a major security provider for quite a few years before he’d gotten tired of the thing.
“And, yes,” Stauer said, “I knew you were sick of it, so I didn’t even think about offering you that job.
“We also get the occasional paid mission for one of Second Battalion’s line companies, or a portion thereof. We charge through the nose for those, though. You may recall those eight ships running Israel’s blockade of Gaza that sank in the Med?”
“What did the Israelis pay you for that one?”
Stauer smiled broadly. “The Israelis didn’t. They could have done it themselves for cheaps, if they still had the balls for that kind for thing. A pro-Israel group in the United States did. It was just good luck that a storm picked up when the limpets started going off.” His broad smile became a laugh. “Just think of it; seven hundred and nineteen ‘peace activists’—unusually well-armed ‘peace activists,’ at that—drowned overnight Except for the fifty or so who blew to atoms when the mine set off the what we think were a hundred and fifty-odd tons of rockets, shells, and explosives they had hidden under the concrete and food.”
Stauer sighed contentedly. “Sometimes, you know, the satisfaction of just knowing you’re doing the Lord’s work is more important than what you’re paid. One of our ex-SEAL types is Jewish. He took special pleasure in mining the Saint Rachel of Ihop.”
Von Ahlenfeld thought, Oh, yes, I am going to enjoy this job.
“Are you the folks who fed Julian Assange and his eight pals feet first into a wood chipper and then posted the video on Wikileaks?” he asked.
Stauer shook his head, “Nah. We’d have done it, happily—happily killed the fuckers, anyway—but someone beat us to it. Not sure who, maybe it was Mossad.” For the briefest of moments, his face looked mildly piqued, as if he wished it had been his people who had done the killing. The look faded.
“We run a shipping company with a freighter we originally leased but later decided to buy, plus a sister model we outright bought, and another eleven we lease. Two of the crews and all of the captains and XOs are our people, but we never move anything for ourselves, or anything under the table, except with a ship fully crewed by our folks. Sometimes we exchange crews completely so we can do that with ships we’re surer nobody’s watching.
“Mostly all I expect out of the freighter business is that it pay for itself, while letting us move people and things around. It does. Barely. Long term, if the economy turns around, we should make a good profit.
“Sometimes, but not often, we use the freighters to run arms. We make a lot more money on those jabs, but they’re tricky.”
Stauer pulled into the parking lot by headquarters, parked, tossed the keys to a waiting Hosein, then led von Ahlenfeld back to his office.
Without missing a beat, he continued there, “Then there’s what we make off of local resources.”
Von Ahlenfeld looked at him from under a furled brow. “Huh?”
Stauer rocked his head back and forth a few times before answering, “We bought this area”—Stauer stood and walked to a map and began to trace with his finger—“bounded by the Mazaruni River, the Kaburi River, and the Issano Road, plus some small outlying parcels. It’s just over four hundred thousand acres’ worth, for …well, for shit, basically. And the Guyanan government was happy to get such a good price. Besides timber, it’s got rubber, gold, bauxite, gems …Trust me, we make a fair profit on the deal and they get fifteen percent of our net. Plus we own a chunk down in Brazil that we don’t use for anything but profit.”
“How big a chunk?” von Ahlenfeld asked.
“Think, Rhode Island. Big chunk. We can’t use it ourselves because the Brazilians are highly suspicious of us, in general. They don’t know what we did, but they know we did something there that they wouldn’t like if they knew about it.”
Stauer looked Heavenward, almost as if he expected the skies to open and lighting to strike him down. “And then …well …we made a lot of money on our first operation, in Africa. A lot more than we were supposed to make, shall we say? That’s been invested and gives a pretty good return.” When no lightning came down he visibly relaxed and turned his eyes back to his guest. “And, since the world’s economy is already about as down as it can be, those investments are pretty safe, too.”
“I’m almost sold,” von Ahlenfeld said. “And the money you’re offering is …enough, if on the low side of what outfits like yours pay. But what I really want to know is, how much independence of command do I get?”
“Oh, c’mon, Lee,” Stauer admonished. “You know me. I don’t care how you get the job done so long as you get it done. Christ, I put up with Reilly, don’t I?”
Von Ahlenfeld sighed contentedly. “Good point. If you can stand him, you can stand me. Okay, pending any shocking revelations, I’m in.”
“What? You don’t even want to see the house that goes with the job?”
“Is it in ‘Glen Livet’?”
“Ummm …no. The Second Battalion’s housing area’s called ‘Glen Fiddich’. And, yes, it’s sort of an inside joke.”
“What? No Glen Morangie?” von Ahlenfeld asked.
“That’s Reilly’s battalion’s housing area,” Stauer replied, straight-faced.
“And the housing area for Headquarters is?”
“Woodford Reserve,” Stauer answered, then added, “Yeah, I fucked up and let Reilly and the sergeant major lay out the camps and name them. So sue me.”