30 August 1026 Local

Rosario, Argentina

30 August

1026 Local

“Where the hell is he?”  Octavio Kluger muttered.  He sat in his neat, but aged office.  His furniture betrayed not only his frugality, but a certain measure of his personality.  He was not a man of excess in any form, and believed that money was a thing to be saved, not spent on frivolities like office furniture.  Kluger owned a new company that built and repaired an old, relatively straight forward piece of military power.  Kluger owned and operated an old fashioned cannon factory.

He swiveled in his squeaky old chair and looked into the window that allowed him to oversee the shop floor beneath him.  There, he saw ten 105mm M2 pattern towed howitzers undergoing final reassembly.  The M2 was an old American design, and in fact a great number of the pieces that he refurnished here were originally manufactured in the US.  Kluger had seized the opportunity to extend the service life of these old artillery pieces.  His company manufactured new replacement barrels, or tubes as artillerists called them, and an assortment of other parts that these old guns needed.  Then they all came together on the shop floor beneath him.  His employees ran the gamut.  Some were skilled metallurgists, some manual labor to move the heavy tubes and recoil springs about.  A great number, including him, were former Argentine Army, and most of them were American trained artillerists.  Some of them had even seen combat.

Octavio Kluger had seen a share of combat against the British back in 1982 when he was an Assistant Battery Commander of an Argentine artillery unit.  He was at Goose Green when the British Paratroopers had attacked.  He had been wounded and captured and spent the remainder of the short war in a British field hospital.  His anger at his government’s inability to supply him with artillery ammunition and for his own infantry to defend him from the lightly armed Paras had long faded.  He was no longer a youthful Lieutenant, fresh from the Artillery Basic Course at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where he had been an exchange officer.  He looked at his reflection in the glass.  There he saw his military and business careers, etched in the lines in the face that hung in the glass before him.  He remembered the fire of indignation at being wounded, a bullet across the abdomen, and the agony of being captured.  Being shot abdominally hurt like hell, of course, but the pain of surrender would stay with him for the rest of his days. His right hand hovered over the scar where the nine millimeter bullet had gouged into his abdomen, spilling his intestines out onto the loamy soil of Goose Green.  He squeezed his eyes shut remembering how much like sausages thrown in dirt, his own entrails had looked.

Those British!  Shot him to pieces, and then slapped him back together again.  A debt he owed to the nameless British Army soldiers, doctors and nurses, who scooped him, and his lower gastrointestinal tract off of the soil, pumped him full of morphine, and sped him to a field hospital.  He remembered snippets of his time in that field hospital, an orderly dumping a bucket of warm, soapy water into his wound, to begin the process to clean out the bloody mud that streaked it.  He remembered the incredulity of being placed ahead of two wounded British paratroopers, one who had a brutal compound leg fracture. He clearly remembered the brown, morphine fog and the overwhelming, world consuming ache of his recovery.  “For what?” he had asked himself what could have been a million times? The British had called them the Falklands, if he remembered correctly. 

All of that pain, all of that suffering and he had only fired four salvos from the tubes that had been assigned to him.  Sixteen rounds and then some Sterling submachine gun wielding Paratrooper had blown his guts all over the dirt.  Good Lord! Some combat career!  Kluger shook his head.

Kluger was a blond man, aged forty five, and one could definitely see the German ancestry in him.  He kept his hair cut short, and his blond mustache was trimmed neatly.  His mother and father had immigrated to Argentina in 1945, under less than ideal circumstances.  Apparently, his father had been an artillery officer in the Wehrmacht, and filled the young Octavio’s head with stories of the heroics of the Eastern Front.  His father’s politics were never a factor, and Octavio had only asked twice.  Each time father had politely told son that it was none of his business, and not to ask again.

Kluger knew without a doubt that his father had been a Nazi.  The old man was well connected Nazi at that.  He had, when he was 13, quietly stolen into his father’s study and had picked the lock on his father’s old army trunk.  There he found a black Waffen SS uniform, with the rank of Obersturmfuhrer, or Colonel.  He found pictures of him with Herman Goering and Adolf Hitler himself, no less.  He saw pictures of peace and of war and pictures of his father’s battalions of towed 88mm cannon, their long, black barrels pointing backwards, trailing the half-tracks that pulled them.  The photos were black and white, and all of them had thrilled Octavio, knowing that his old, doting father had been a man of power and ability back in the wars of old. 

Octavio was the youngest of six children, and had been born Argentinean.  Each one of his brothers and sisters had served in the Argentinean Army, Navy or Air Force during the Malvinas Campaign as the idiots in Buenos Aires had called it.  Kluger called it a bloody, damnable disaster.  In fact two of his brothers had died during that war.  One died when his A-4 Skyhawk blown apart by a British anti-aircraft missile, and another had been a gunnery officer on the General Belgrano, when that blasted Royal Navy submarine had torpedoed her. More than once he had been woken by nightmares, able to imagine what being tossed into the frigid South Atlantic must be like.  

“Octavio! Hello, Octavio!”  Kluger jumped with a start. 

“Miguel!  Just caught me…” 

“Back at Goose Green, were you?”  The distinguished looking Mexican grasped Kluger’s hand.

“Indeed.  You, of all people know how it is.  How, in the name of hell have you been?”  Kluger asked, smiling, gesturing to the worn leather office chair that was in front of his desk.

“Not bad, old friend, in fact I feel better than I have in years!  Sorry for keeping you, but I am a slave to this!”  He held up the tiny silver cell phone.  “My son just called me about another business activity.  We’re buying some new shallow draft cargo boats for our Amazon Project.  It is simple technology, actually an updating of the American Higgins Boat design. But now…”  The older man said.

“Yes, now!  What have you come all this way for?  What is it you need me to do, my old friend?”  Kluger responded.

“I have come for two reasons, Octavio.  First,” The older well dressed man stood and walked to the window.  The glint of light from the welding on the shop floor caught his face and cast shadows of his form along the wall. “First, I need to talk shop.  I need to know if you will be able to, at the least, quadruple your current refurbishment capacity.”

“Quadruple?  I can do that, Miguel.  I can refurbish almost 10 pieces in a month, right now.  I am currently arsenal-reconditioning most of the Argentinean Army’s light pieces.  Most of them are American M2 pattern howitzers, but I am also working on a few of their newer British built M119 pattern 105’s.  I didn’t realize that the Mexican Army would be willing to ship their pieces all the way down here, when it would be cheaper for the Americans to do it.  Hell, the American’s would probably get some contractors to do the work on site,” Kluger picked up his chipped coffee mug and took a sip of the bitter, lukewarm fluid.

“We don’t want the Americans to do it. Besides, we have other pieces as well.  Ever worked on older Soviet and newer Russian patterned artillery?”

“We have performed arsenal-reconditioning on virtually every artillery piece that was ever employed.  From the old 37 millimeter Pak Three guns, the 122 millimeter light artillery, and even some of the old Soviet division heavy equipment.  We take great pride in being able to quickly reverse engineer and fabricate a number of spare parts.  That’s the key, Miguel.  We hand craft spares that are needed, laser scan them, email the part specifications back here and then use CNC machining techniques to turn or mill any number needed.  We then UPS or FedEx the parts to where they are needed,” Kluger sat back in his chair, quite pleased with himself.

“Then conceivably you could send out teams to various locations to fix systems on site?”

“Indeed.  Why?”  Kluger asked, intrigued and hungry for the business.

The older Mexican looked about the office.  Not seeing any obvious methods of eavesdropping, he lowered his voice, “Cuba.”

Kluger's brows raised,  “I'm listening, Gerardo.”

The Mexican officer leaned forward, elbow on his knees, “We are going to land Airborne and amphibious troops in and liberate the island from the Communists!”

“Finally ready to get rid of the doddering old fool?  Between you and the Americans, it won’t be long before there aren’t any Communists left in this world.”  Kluger chuckled.

“Octavio, this is why we want you to do this.  We don’t want the Americans to know about this in the slightest.  We’d like your teams to go from unit to unit and check out their equipment.  We need you to fix what is broken, and fix it right in relatively short order.  We're planning something, something big.  This will be an old fashioned campaign.  Infantry, artillery and armor!  This is a war for old fashioned soldiers like you and me!” 

“For you perhaps it is so, Miguel.  So you want my teams to look at all of the artillery in the Mexican Army?”

“Mexican, Venezuelan, Paraguayan, Chilean, Uruguayan, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran-“

“Miguel!  You mean this is an-“

“Yes!  An OAS operation!  Finally, a major operation that will allow the military forces of our nations to shine from under the skirts of the “Gringos”! The Organization of American States, or whatever the politicians finally decide to call it, will provide the political framework for the assault.  The actual operation will be under Mexican Army command.  Ground, air and naval forces of twelve nations will be participating.  What an operation!”

“You sound very enthusiastic,” Kluger chuckled, “What exactly do our American brothers think about your plan?  Do you actually expect them to place their troops under command of a ‘wetback’?”

The slur rang out like a shot.  Kluger knew his guest hated the term, had seen him enraged by the derision.  The muscles in at the back of the tall Mexican’s head contracted, pulling his face up, taut.  Some color drained out of his aristocratic face.

“No,” The man sat down again, “I rather expect that they would not.  That’s why we aren’t going to tell them a goddamned thing.”

“Miguel, we’ve known each other a long time,” Kluger leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on the cracked Formica desktop.  “How do you expect our governments to keep this a secret?  The Yankees have operatives and agents everywhere, and our nation’s politicians are all so corrupt that you could just as easily buy our state secrets as steal them.”

“Octavio, my old friend,” The Mexican leaned back in the worn chair, and pulled out a silver cigar case.  He extracted a long, dark cigar and began the process of trimming and lighting. “We’ve been around long enough so that men and women we can trust are finally gaining positions of power.  Men and women like you and me, old soldiers, who having shared a common bond, of training in the American style of war, are now experienced enough to be able to make policy, not just enact it.  The current president of Venezuela, in fact, attended the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth with me.  I believe you attended the Artillery Officers Advanced Course at Fort Sill with a member of the Chilean Congress and a Brazilian regional governor?”  Kluger nodded and the silver haired Mexican continued, as he lazily puffed away on his cigar. “We know that freedom can triumph for the Cuban people, and will allow our peoples the chance to show the world that we are no longer to be looked on as third rate.  It will give our business markets to develop.  Fortunes will be made!”

“I can imagine refurbishing all of the artillery of a liberated Cuba!  The contracts will make me millions!” Kluger could see it!  He could smell almost smell the sweet scent of money!  All of the artillery pieces and tanks and heavy mortars in the Cuban military had for years languished, forgotten, neglected, rusting and hardly used.  The communist government in Havana, cash strapped since the fall of the Soviet Empire, had no funds to pay for training, ammunition, or even spare parts.  Even with Russia as resurgent it had been, there had been very little other than symbolic improvements in the Cuban military.  The Cuban Army had professional and dedicated soldiers, but no money for expensive items, like artillery shells or motor oil.  Worst of all, like all dictatorships, the Cuban military was geared at keeping the Cuban population quiet and obedient, not ready to repel even a token invasion force.  With appropriate planning and will, and a good dose of follow through, a fiasco like the Bay of Pigs would not be repeated. 

“With our contracts getting the OAS in shape and your first dibs on the Cuban equipment that isn’t destroyed in the operation, you stand to take in around a hundred million and change.  Sound good?”  The Mexican exhaled, a thick aromatic plume diffused into the sparse office.

“For you, my dear old friend, and one hundred million dollars,” Kluger laughed, his whitening blond hair accentuated his ebullient grin, “I’ll even volunteer to fight this war for you!”

“Funny you should mention that, Octavio,” the well dressed, elegant Mexican leaned forward.  “After you finish getting the refurbishment plans under way, I’d like you also to assist with planning and training of our artillery officers and gun crews.”

The idea of serving in uniform again thrilled Kluger.  His pulse thundered in his ears.  “I – I’d be honored, sir!”  He stammered.

“That’s exactly what I thought you’d say!  In fact I’ve already talked to the defense minister.  He listened to my ideas and agreed to offer you the rank of Major in the Argentine Army reserves.  He’d like to meet you tomorrow in Buenos Aires to make it official.  You do know where his office is?”

“Yes, sir” Major Octavio Herman Kluger responded.  He fought the silly urge to jump up and stand at attention.  Father would be so proud! A major and a chance to fight the communists to boot!

“I appreciate your confidence, General.  I look forward to the day when we march victoriously on Havana and see the evil communist regime destroyed! I will do my best to equip, train and unify these disparate and unorganized artillery units into a force that even the Americans would respect!”  Kluger’s pride and enthusiasm were palpable.

The Mexican smiled at his old friend, blowing a thin channel of smoke high in the air.  “That, my old friend, would be wonderful indeed.”