The gringos seemed worried about it, though, as did the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, and even Finns who had also come to teach the new Panamanian soldiers the nuances of their new equipment.
Cortez laughed, without mirth. “New?” Some of it was, of course. Most of it, however, was rebuilt. This was true of all of the American-supplied armored personnel carriers, and most of the Chinese-purchased light tanks. Some of the Russian artillery had seen service in the Second World War and spent the intervening decades in naturally cold storage in Siberia.
Yes, most of the equipment was rebuilt. Some — notably the Finno-Israeli heavy mortars — was new. Much, though, was not only old and used, but shoddily made and ill-cared-for since manufacture.
Mentally Cortez added up his building assets: three light mechanized regiments with a mere forty-two real tanks between them, an artillery regiment with nearly one hundred tubes but most of those obsolescent, an armored cavalry regiment with another fourteen real tanks, about one-hundred Chinese light amphibious tanks, something over three-hundred armored personnel carriers… some few other odds and ends.
Against that tally Cortez weighed the debit side: anywhere from several hundred thousand to several million centauroid aliens whose standard small arms could shred most of his armor as if it were tissue paper.
Cortez tallied the one against the other and came up with the only logical decision for a man in his shoes and of his temperament: flight.
Though by now the flight to Fort Sherman and the landing at Battery Pratt had become routine, nonetheless the inbound helicopters were always met by a ground party to guide and direct the landing. Though there were plans to pave the landing zones, or LZs, at some point in time, for now they were simple dirt and grass patches hacked out of the jungle.
The pilot searched for the LZ in the solid green carpet below. Even here, one thousand feet above the jungle, the smell of rotting vegetation mixed with flowers hung heavy. Spotting the LZ, the pilot aimed his bird and carefully eased up on his stick… coming lower… lower… lower until both the ground guide’s arm signal and his own feeling for the suddenly reduced load told him his cargo was safely aground. The crew chief confirmed this over the helicopter’s intercom. The pilot’s finger automatically moved to cut the load, then hesitated, waiting for the ground guide’s signal. This came — a slicing motion of the right hand under the left armpit — and the pilot cut the load free.
The copilot asked, “Why do you always wait for the signal, Harry, when you know damn well the load’s on the ground?”
The pilot answered, correctly, “Because someday it’s going to be too dark for the crew chief to see. Someday the atmospherics are going to fool me about whether the load is down or not. More importantly, someday that kid, or somebody just like him, is going to have to direct us, or somebody just like us, down when the crew chief can’t see and the pilot can’t tell. And that kid… those kids, and those pilots have to know that they can depend on each other.”
The copilot shrugged as the chopper lifted off again to dump its internal load, in this case two score Panamanian laborers from the city of Colon, at a different pad. These the crew chief hustled off the bird and down the ramp as quickly as decorum and international chumship allowed.
“That’s the last of them, Harry,” the copilot said. “What’s next?”
Harry, the pilot, pointed to a tadpole-shaped hill circled in black on a map strapped to his right leg. “We’re picking up four Russian mortars. Heavy jobs, 240 millimeter, so we’ll be making it in two lifts. Then we’re dropping them off here, at this hill in the middle of Mojingas swamp. Then we call it a day.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“That sounds good to me, Mr. Ambassador, but can the United States deliver? Half — more than half — of the modern arms you promised us are going elsewhere.” Panama’s president wagged a scolding finger.
Embarrassed, the ambassador from the United States swept a hand through immaculately coiffed, silver-gray hair. “Presidente Mercedes, I can’t begin to tell you how much that upsets me. But… we had no choice. When the other Rio Pact countries invoked the aid of the United States, we had to deliver substantial quantities of up-to-date weapons to them.”
General Taylor, as big and black and fierce as ever, scowled from his chair next to the ambassador. He knew that the impetus for the diversion of those arms had begun with State. He just couldn’t identify his source. At the ambassador’s raised eyebrow the general subsided.
“Other things are going well, Mr. President,” the general offered. “The five planetary defense bases should be completed prior to the expected date of the first wave. Fortifications are being built across the isthmus.”
“And,” interjected the ambassador, “Panama’s unemployment rate has dropped to next to nothing as men are drafted or put to work digging those fortifications and building the roads that lead to them and support them.”
“This is so,” admitted Mercedes reluctantly.
“Moreover,” the ambassador continued, “the increase in world trade, though it cannot be expected to last indefinitely, is pouring ships through the Canal and money into Panama’s coffers at a fantastic rate.”
And much if not most of that is going into my personal off-world bank account, Mercedes thought, while remaining silent. And a tidy sum it is, too. Already I’ve been able to book passage off-planet for all of my immediate and much of my extended family. That, and I still have enough to live pretty well once we leave. Though I would prefer to live better than merely “pretty well.”
“The United States is concerned, however,” the ambassador continued, “about where that money is going.”
“Enough!” Mercedes thundered. “It is bad enough to have you thousands of gringos here, again. But this is still a sovereign country,” by which the president meant a personal fiefdom, “and our internal affairs are precisely none of your business.”
Mercedes, eager to cut off this line of inquiry, continued by playing the imperialism card, a charge to which the United States felt singularly vulnerable, and with singularly little reason almost anywhere except Panama.
“Indeed, bad enough to have you back after just a few short years of freedom. How many decades or centuries of imperialist theft before you leave us in peace and poverty this time, I wonder.”
The ambassador, addicted to the niceties, was taken aback by Mercedes’ apparent fury and more so by the charge of imperialism.
Taylor, on the other hand, was not only unshaken but had been around the ass end of enough Third World hellholes to know that “sovereign country” did, in fact, mean little more than “personal fiefdom.” Taylor knew, too, that a goodly chunk of the world’s population had been better off under American and European colonialism than they had ever managed to be under their own governance.
Idly, Taylor wondered, How hard would it be to arrange for the timely demise of this politician? Not very. But, then again, every man has a point of satiety in his appetites. If we eliminate Mercedes, his replacement will have to start stealing at the double time to build his bankroll. Still, something to think about…