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Chapter Twenty-Eight

My troops are just poor . . . boys in rude shirts, but they're good soldiers, and they'll soon have better shirts.

—Charles XII, of Sweden

The new year saw some material things change while many remained the same. Desert uniforms changed to a new tiger-striped and pixilated pattern Carrera had ordered from a company in the FSC. Another pattern was created for the radically different jungles of Balboa, Carrera believing that any pattern which tried to do both would do each only half as well, if that. The loricae, the silk and glassy metal vests the legion used for body armor remained the same. The basic design of their Helvetian helmets didn't change, but they grew lighter as a new model, likewise manufactured from glassy metal, made its appearance.

Two new rifles were in development. Both were in 6.5mm. The nearer to perfection was a Volgan design, the Bakanova, superficially similar to the Samsonov already in use. The Bakanova inside was radically different, however, having a rammer to half feed a fresh cartridge during the extraction process and thus increase the rate of fire to eighteen hundred rounds per minute, for two rounds anyway. This made burst fire a practical and useful capability for the first time in a general issue rifle on Terra Nova. To take full advantage of the burst fire capability, the Bakanovas were to be modified to fire a Montgomery Arsenal 6.5mm Jotun cartridge. The barrels were also modified—increased by four inches—to take full advantage of the more powerful round. The Bakanovas, however, had not yet been perfected.

Even there, an improved rifle was only considered to be a stopgap. Carrera wanted something new and had formed a group under Terry Johnson to investigate possibilities. Among the possibilities being looked at were combustible casings, semicombustible casings, electronic priming with the rate of fire controlled by a computer chip in the rifle, near simultaneous feeding and extraction to bring the rate of fire up to two thousand rounds per minute, and carbon fiber wrapped thin steel barrels to reduce weight and improve cooling.

There were some new rifles issued, but only for the snipers. These came in three calibers, .34, .41 and a reduced charge .510 that, with a silencer attached, was extremely quiet. For these rifles, frightfully expensive in themselves but with money no longer being so much of a limiting factor, thermals sights were obtained.

Two new machine guns, a heavy in .41 and a general purpose MG in .34 were likewise under slow development.

Mortars and MRLs remained unchanged: 60mm, 120mm and 160mm mortars, and 300mm rocket launchers. Artillery was being switched from 122mm to a 155mm lightweight gun pirated by the Volgans from an Anglian design. The numbers grew, too, from the seventy-eight systems the legion had first gone to war with, inching upward to the one hundred and fifty-two it would need to field when it reached the equivalent field strength of a full division.

Helicopters and fixed wing aircraft had, so far, proven mostly satisfactory. The Turbo-Finches were retained, but modified for additional armor protection for the pilots and with a semiactive defense system against shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles added. This came at a small cost in ordnance carried but, in the circumstances of a guerilla war against small, scattered, and for the most part poorly armed irregulars, Carrera considered it a fair trade off. The IM helicopters and NA cargo aircraft likewise had done good work and were retained. Some of the NA-23 Dodos were converted to aerial gunships firing a mix of ordnance, .50 caliber, 23mm and 40mm. Like the artillery, the numbers of aircraft increased towards the final goal of one hundred and thirty-two deployed systems, exclusive of aerial medical evacuation.

Heavy armor had proven mostly good enough during the invasion and the subsequent occupation. Contracts were let, therefore, for an additional six hundred and ninety combat systems, mixed tanks and Ocelots, exclusive of simple armored personnel carriers, to be delivered over four years. This was enough, if barely, to keep Khudenko's factory in Kirov employed. Some of his workers were invited to Balboa to set up a depot for heavy maintenance on the armor.

One of the legion's larger purchases, in every sense, was in the form of an old light aircraft carrier, once called Her Anglic Majesty's Ship Revenge, and more recently known as the Amazonia. This had been offered for a price not much above its value as scrap metal or about the cost of three Jaguar tanks. It needed work, of course, before it would be fit to fight, but its engines were good and it could already sail. It also needed a trained crew, for which purpose Abogado's FMTGRB added another subdivision. Other ships for the naval classis of the legion were manned and, approximately, ready sooner.

The legion was growing. It had to; the insurgency around it was growing even faster. Worse, it had spread.

Pashtia, which had fallen very quickly to the FSC led coalition, was already showing some signs of future problems as the Ikhwan reconsolidated in neighboring Kashmir and sent teams forward to contest the land. Carrera expected it to become a major theater of war again, though it would be, he thought, some years.

Within the oil states of the Yithrabi Peninsula there were terrorist strikes wherever the local government chose to accommodate the wishes of the FSC. From Mustafa's point of view the results of these strikes were a very mixed bag. In some cases, true, the government had ceased such support to the infidel. In others, disastrously, it had instead struck back at the Ikhwan, arresting and imprisoning holy men, sometimes even as they preached the jihad from their pulpits. Worse, the government security and intelligence forces had taken to searching out and destroying Ikhwan cells, seizing weapons caches and, most damnably, interfering with the flow of money to the cause.

Along the northern border of the Volgan Republic there had been some remarkably effective strikes, proof to the Ikhwan of the holiness of the cause. No longer could Volgan mothers pack their children off to school without fear. No longer could Volgan soldiers march with impunity, even within their own country.

Uhuru was beginning to see flare ups, some trivial but many quite bloody, between Christian and Moslem factions. Overall, the Moslems had the edge there, however. Long lines of black Christians and Christian-Animists now marched as coffled slaves towards the markets of Yithrab. Meanwhile highly civilized Taurans and progressives in the FSC wrung their hands and wept at the plight of the Uhurans. That, however, was all they did. After all, weeping and hand wringing made them feel virtuous while forceful action would have been a rebuke to their worldview.

It was actually quite easy to trace the troubles. All one had to do was run one's finger over a map of the planet. Wherever Salafis or Salafi inspired or controlled Moslems shared a border with anyone else—Christians, Christian-Animists, Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus . . . anyone—that border was awash in blood. Even at sea blood was beginning to flow as Salafi pirates in the Nicobar Straits and along the coast of Xamar attacked shipping for loot, ransoms, and slaves.

 

Santissima Trinidad, Bahia de Balboa, 3/1/462 AC

The surplus special operations and patrol boat was capable of mounting up to ten .50 caliber machine guns or some combination of those and either 30mm or 40mm grenade launchers. It could have been fitted for missiles or torpedoes as well, but in this case was not. Indeed, only four of the possible ten weapons stations were filled.

She was low and lean and predatory. Made of aramid and carbon fiber composites, the boat was eighty-four feet from stem to stern and seventeen and a half feet in beam. Capable of better than fifty knots, it was one of, if not the, fastest things smoking on the water.

That his crew was only half trained, the boat's skipper, Warrant Officer Pedraz, knew. Then again, I'm only about half trained, too. How much training do you need to run down a yacht moving at fifteen knots? Not much, I think. It's an easy target to practice intercepts on. Hopefully they won't mind too much.

The target yacht was named The Temptation. This seemed fitting to Pedraz, since his patrol boat had Santissima Trinidad painted across her stern.

It was just a routine run, a training run. They approached from astern to within one hundred meters of the Temptation. Pedraz had no idea that there was anything amiss with the yacht until he heard frightening cracking sounds splitting the air overhead.

"Holy shit, Chief, that fucking boat is firing at us!"

The speaker was Able Bodied Seaman Miguel Quijana, a young recruit to the legion's classis. At barely seventeen, Quijana had never before been shot at.

Well, dammit, neither have I, thought Pedraz as he ducked low behind the boat's superstructure, his finger pressing the klaxon for "battle stations."

When you've got the range advantage, use it, the chief remembered one of his FMTG instructors telling him. Gunning the engine, Pedraz twisted the wheel hard left and swung his boat past the Temptation. The Trinidad's wake caused the Temptation to rock, upsetting the aim of the men aboard. The chief kept a nervous watch behind him until he had determined his ship was out of small arms range.

He put his head up. Each of the .50 caliber machine guns was manned by two anxious looking crewmen. He nodded to them and turned to face the yacht. Moving at only twenty knots or so, the Trinidad closed the distance, aiming for an intercept point about two hundred meters ahead of the yacht.

"One hundred rounds per gun," Pedraz ordered, when he judged the position right, "FIRE!" Immediately the air was rent by hundreds of powerful muzzle blasts a minute. The recoil wasn't enough to rock the boat or upset the gunners' aim. Downrange, however, the superstructure of the yacht began to come apart under the hammering of high velocity fifty caliber slugs. Even with a half-trained crew, the fire was fierce enough that several of the gun-wielding men aboard the yacht went down, ripped apart by the heavy bullets. The others soon dropped their weapons in abject terror.

Slowly, the Trinidad approached, her crewmen rocking with the boat and keeping their machine guns trained on the yacht. One two- man gun crew could not see the yacht as the Trinidad's own cockpit blocked their line of sight. These Pedraz selected to board with him, along with the boat's cook and one of the radar crew.

"Spoon!" Pedraz shouted to the cook. "Draw five submachine guns out of the armory. Francais," he said to his second in command, "take the con. I'm boarding."

"I've got it, Chief," Francais answered.

Thus armed, all five men of the boarding party loaded a small rubber boat with a motor. This sped, cook manning the outboard, to cross the short distance between the two boats, leaving a white wake V-ing out behind it.

Blood dripped out the runnels in the yacht's side, Pedraz noted, as the rubber boat touched the target's side. He went first, keeping the yacht's passengers covered until a second sailor, ABS Dextro Guptillo, could board. Then he tied the rubber boat to the yacht. The rest of the sailors followed.

None of the yacht's crew resisted. Most were down anyway, dead, wounded, or having shat themselves silly. After making sure the remaining few were disarmed, Pedraz ordered the Trinidad over. The crew conducted a thorough search of the yacht, stem to stern.

Pedraz expected drugs. There weren't any. Failing that, money? Not much. Arms? Only what had been used to shoot at his boat.

He was puzzled, really puzzled. Why the hell did they shoot at me? Makes no sense. It was a serious overreaction to our playing games. He asked one of the unwounded men on the yacht and got a sullen answer. That also made no sense. And then it hit him, Castilian accent . . . bombings in Castilla . . . similar bombings here. Bingo.

 

Balboa Base, Ninewa, 3/1/462 AC

Fernandez's daughter's murder remained a festering hate within him. He nursed that hate, guiding and developing it from a small planting into a full-blooming tree. He didn't let it distract him from his work.

"Where—where the fuck—are the explosives coming from!?" Carrera asked Fernandez as he looked over the latest casualty figures from roadside bombings in the BZOR. His anger was not at his chief of intel, but at the enemy.

Fernandez rubbed a finger over his upper lip. He answered, "The . . . ummm . . . ship reports that they're coming in from Farsia right across the border and from Bekaa by way of Bilad al Sham. They're being bought from either the Volgans—the criminal organizations there, not the government—or the Zhong. Some, too, may have been bought in other places. A fair amount was bought right here. The money appears to have come from Sachsen."

"Sachsen? That Westplatz twat?" Carrera asked.

"So I would surmise, her and some of the others."

"Evidence?"

Without a word Fernandez turned in his wooden swivel chair and, opening a cabinet, extracted a thin red file. This he handed over.

Taking the file and opening it, Carrera began to read. When he was finished, he said, "Get Sada and bring him here. I have a mission or three for some of his special workers."

"Wilco, Patricio. By the way, next week I need to go visit the Hildegard Mises. We have some special prisoners I want to see to . . . personally."

Carrera thought on that and suspected it meant Fernandez was going to oversee something that a man ought not oversee, not if he wanted to keep his soul. He didn't want to see it, either. Nonetheless, he said, "I think that, this time, I should join you there."

 

SS Hildegard Mises, 9/1/462 AC

Mohammad Ouled Nail spat at Warrant Officer Mahamda as the latter set about giving the customary tour and demonstration. Mahamda looked questioningly at the short, wiry, dark man standing nearby.

"I think the tour will be unnecessary," Fernandez said. "Let's go right to interrogation."

Nail lifted his nose and clamped his mouth shut, almost theatrically. I won't say a word to you pigs.

Fernandez just smiled as two stout guards picked up the bomber of Castilla and Balboa and carried him, struggling, to a dental chair. They expertly strapped him in to the point he was almost completely unable to move.

Silly man, Fernandez thought. You should have thought a bit more carefully on what it meant when you were tried, sentenced to death, reported hanged, and yet found yourself here.

A sort of articulated cage was fitted onto Nail's head, with metal projections to fit between gums and lips and blunt-tipped screwbolts to hold the head to the frame. The guards set the helmet on Nail's head and began turning cranks on each side of the helmet. When it was firmly affixed, a far from painless process in itself, they rotated the jaw separator down. Nail refused to open his mouth, of course. One of the guards picked up a small hammer and deftly whacked Nail between the legs. That opened his jaws for a scream. They then forced the device into his mouth and turned another crank, which spread the device, separating the invading bits of metal and forcing the terrorist's lips and jaws apart.

"He's ready, Doctor," one of the guards called out. In walked a white-jacketed dentist who looked over the arrangement and nodded satisfaction. The dentist put in earplugs and covered his ears with muffs. Then he picked up one of his drills and stepped on a pedal. The drill began to whine.

Nail's fear-filled eyes followed the drill bit as it inched closer to his mouth, ultimately crossing just before the bit touched enamel.

In a few moments he was screaming, pleading, begging to be permitted to talk, but over the whine of the drill no one seemed to be able to hear him.

 

Ar-Ramadi, Ninewa Province, 14/1/462 AC

Giulia Masera didn't have Westplatz's local connections. Still, she wanted to help the cause. Indeed, she'd been fighting for the cause all her life. For the better part of the last year she'd been fighting in the role of a journalist, uncovering the misdeeds of the FSC and its running dogs. When a Sumeri, apparently having noted her sympathies, approached her with the offer of a kidnapping to both raise funds for the resistance and discredit her own fascist government, she jumped at the chance. She'd have made the offer herself if she'd only known where to find members of the resistance.

 

If one had asked a Roman Catholic why he or she believed in the Bible and the teachings of the Church, the nearest to an honest answer might have been something like, "That's how I was raised." Masera was not different. She'd grown up at the knee of the hero of her life, her grandfather, who had been an antifascist partisan in her native Etruria during the Great Global War. Both her mother and father had been Marxist activists and had made the easy transition to cosmopolitan progressives.

She didn't like the Salafis or even the more secular terrorists she supported. But when she considered the evil she saw in the FSC, in capitalism, and in the travesty that passed for democracy, she saw something that justified even support for murderers, oppressors of women, and theocratic fascists. Sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils.

Giulia was picked up off the street without incident and taken to a residential basement somewhere in the city. The men who took her were as polite as she'd expected they would be, being allies and all.

In the basement, a small TV studio had been set up. Her co-fighters spent a few hours coaching Giulia before she made a teary-eyed plea for her government to come to her rescue by withdrawing their troops from this imperialist war and paying the just ransom demanded.

Imagine her surprise then when, taping apparently completed, her newfound comrades tossed a rope over a hook in the ceiling, tied her hands to the rope and hauled her up to her tippy toes. Imagine her greater surprise when she was stripped to the waist and, out of deference to Islamic modesty, turned around to face away from the cameras, her legs being likewise tied by the ankles to bolts in the floor to prevent her from twisting and shamelessly showing her breasts to the camera.

Neither of those surprises, however, compared to the surprise she felt when the whip first bit a bright red, oozing strip out of her back.

"Now howl like a dog, bitch," her captors instructed as one of them lay on the whip for another stroke. Still in shock from the first stroke, Giulia shook her head in shocked misunderstanding. No matter, the second lash evoked a piercing scream that was every bit as good as a howl.

When the flogging was done, another twenty-three strokes later, and Masera sobbing and hanging by her wrists from the rope, the leader and the other captors pulled balaclavas over their faces and lined up three to either side of her shuddering, bleeding body. Into the camera the leader said, "Twenty-five million Tauros," he said, "or this twat gets fed feet first into a wood chipper for the nightly news."

At that, all the captors raised their weapons above their heads, shouting, "Allahu akbar!"

 

SS Hildegard Mises, 16/1/462 AC

They'd let Nail talk, but only after drilling away most of the enamel on his two front upper teeth. This had been replaced with a temporary filling material. There was no sense, after all, in wasting the good stuff on a walking corpse.

 

Talk he did, intending to lie. Sadly for Mohammad, lies required concentration and pain destroyed it. They'd caught him in a lie, a trivial thing, really, from his own badly abused mouth.

He'd thought he'd get the drill again and shat himself at the thought of it. He'd probably have been happier if they had gone the dental route. Instead, though, they'd moved him to a different chair after stripping off his trousers. Even over the pain, he'd been deeply embarrassed when his captor had stuck something cold and hard up his ass, then put his penis in what looked like a light socket.

There were things, he discovered, that hurt worse than dental work without anesthesia.

 

23 Al Rasul Street, Doha, 17/1/462 AC

Although weapons were easier to obtain on the Yithrab peninsula even than slaves, the four Sumeris had brought in their own. These were silenced pistols, in 9mm. Other weapons, though it was to be hoped they would not be needed, were secured in the rental car's trunk.

 

The team waited near the guarded gate for the chauffeured limousine that always came at this time every day but Friday. Not that they intended to attack the limo, far from it. But the limousine carried four children, two boys and two girls, to and from their school every day. Its arrival thus signaled that all the targets were present at home.

Seeing the limousine pull through the guarded gate at the front of the mansion, the rental car's driver waited five minutes before following the same course. The gate opened and an ethnic Bengali emerged, wearing a uniform far, far too hot for the climate.

"May I be of assistance, sayidi?" the Bengali asked of the driver. In answer, the man sitting beside the driver shot the gate guard with his silenced pistol. One man got out to drag the Bengali's body behind some well-tended bushes. The car proceeded through the gate, and into the mansion complex.

 

Al Iskandaria Studios, Doha, Terra Nova, 17/1/462 AC

"I won't show this perversion," Sheik Hamad insisted to the vicious looking man seated opposite him in his plush blue and green themed office.

 

Hamad was a study in contrast to his visitor. The sheik was tall and lean, with the sharp features of a desert nomad accentuated by his pure white keffiyah. His visitor was short and a bit overweight, perhaps the scion of some peasant family.

Probably a Sumeri peasant family, the sheik thought, based on the accent.

"Yes, you will," the visitor answered amiably. "By the way, have you spoken to your wife today? Why don't you give her a call? They live at Twenty-three al Rasul Street, do they not? Here, use my cell phone. The number is already dialed."

 

SS Hildegard Mises, 19/1/462 AC

Nail knew they were working over his captured comrades, just as they had worked over him. He knew it because they often played his comrades' screams over the speakers in his cell when he was not, himself, under the torture.

 

They'd gotten pretty direct in their approach. They were being direct now.

"What is the address for the safe house you used in Ciudad Balboa?" Mahamda asked.

The captive spat out an address. Mahamda consulted an earpiece stuck into his right ear and shook his head, sadly. "Your answers don't match, Mohammad. You know the price of that."

"Please . . . no . . . I am telling the truth," Ouled Nail begged.

"Perhaps you are and perhaps you are not. Listen to this." Mahamda turned on a speaker so that Ouled Nail could hear the pleading screams of his comrade. Nail couldn't know it, but the transmission was on a time delay controlled by the interrogation team to ensure that no one undergoing questioning could, between screams, coach anyone else on a story.

"He's just lost a fingernail," Mahamda said calmly. "Now it's your turn." He flicked off the speaker and turned on a microphone. He nodded at an assistant.

Mahamda's assistant grabbed Ouled Nail's middle finger on his left hand firmly, then took a pair of needle-nosed pliers and jammed one end under the nail. The terrorist shrieked into the microphone then, sobbing, begged, "For the love . . . of Allah . . . please . . . please tell them . . . the truth."

It took three nails each before the addresses given matched perfectly. There were seventeen more nails to go, along with much skin, many teeth, and a virtual infinity of nerve endings. Indeed, there were more than enough nerve endings to learn everything Ouled Nail had ever known or even suspected.

 

Neue Ulm, Sachsen, 21/1/461 AC

Senta Westplatz was busy packing for her return trip to Sumer. An agent of the freedom fighters was supposed to give her the tickets at the airport. In the background Fernsehen Sachsen droned. Senta paid no attention to the television until she heard the name of a friend and comrade, Giulia Masera, mentioned. Even that really didn't catch her attention—Giulia was often in the news—until she heard the words, "kidnapped" and "torture."

 

She ran to the TV barely in time to catch the last four strokes of the whip that set her comrade to howling, much like a dog. Hand clenched over her mouth as she watched the spectacle, Senta was simply horrified, so much so that the knock at the door barely registered until it had been repeated several times.

Finally, Westplatz did go to the door, pulling her hijab over her hair automatically as she walked.

"Yes? How may I . . . ?" she asked the deliveryman standing there, impatiently, holding a wrapped package.

The blow to her solar plexus came as a shock to Senta. She went down like a sack of rice, loosely and almost without a sound. The deliveryman entered the apartment, closing the door carefully behind him. He hit the woman once again, hard, in the chest. She wouldn't be screaming for help any time soon. From his pocket he drew a very small digital camera with which he took a short video of Senta moving feebly and gasping for air.

Returning the camera to his pocket, he then squatted down by the shocked almost-corpse and picked it up. He looked around quickly and identified the bathroom. Then he carried Senta to it, stripping her body and placing it in the tub. Another few seconds were spent recording that scene as well. After putting on some rubber gloves, he flicked the switch to close the drain and turned the tap to let the water fill.

Taking a towel with him, the deliveryman then went to the kitchen and carefully opened the drawers until he found a sharp knife. He had one with him, of course, but it would be better in the short term if the implement came from the house. Returning to the bathroom he found that Senta, still gasping desperately, had sat up. He pushed her back and grabbed her left wrist, which he twisted toward the far wall. Senta struggled but feebly.

With the knife he made a long slash lengthwise up the radial artery. The cut went deep and blood spurted out, staining the tiled far wall and turning the water filling the tub red. The deliveryman released the arm and took another short video of the blood flowing. Then he took that hand and wrapped it around the handle of the knife, holding it firmly. With this he made a not very deep and deliberately ragged cut up the right wrist. Then he let both knife and hand go free. He watched for a minute as blood loss took away consciousness. When the water had mostly filled the tub he shut off the flow and waited for ten minutes. A quick check of the carotid confirmed the woman was quite dead. He took some more video of the corpse.

The deliveryman then retrieved the package and removed from it a change of clothing, another pair of rubber gloves, a false moustache, a digital camera and a plastic bag. He exchanged clothing, putting his old, blood-spotted clothes in the bag and the bag back in the package, which he rewrapped loosely. He put on the gloves and began to search the apartment. Since no suicide was very likely to be packing a bag for a trip, he returned the articles of clothing to what seemed logical places. In the course of his search, he found a folder at the bottom of the bag. He did not find any air or train tickets. The folder he set aside for the moment.

Continued searching of the apartment turned up nothing further, not even a computer. Walking to the door, folder and package in hand, the man stopped to listen for a few moments. Nothing. Then he opened the door, exited, and closed the door behind him.

By the time the police began to suspect that Senta had been murdered, the assassin would be long gone, leaving no personal trace. The video would be posted on the Globalnet as a warning to other Kosmos who might be inclined to help the Salafi Ikhwan.

 

SS Hildegard Mises, 24/1/462 AC

The walls of the cell were covered with color photographs of the victims of the bombs he'd helped set off in Balboa. He couldn't escape them; his eyelids had been sewn open. When he looked at the pictures, in his mind's eye he saw his own family laid out butchered as he was sure they would soon be.

 

Mohammad Ouled Nail wept as the cell door opened in front of him. Mahamda entered with that small dark man—Fernandez, he was called—who seemed to be in charge. Another man, taller and lighter skinned than Fernandez, stood there as well.

Nail's hands were bandaged but blood oozing from the fingertips had stained the white gauze red.

It wasn't just pain that made Nail weep; it was also the shame.

He'd thought he was tough and brave. He'd thought he had faith in his God. He'd been sure they could never break him. He'd been sure, too, that he could lie.

He knew, now, in his innermost being, that there was no God. He knew he couldn't keep a story straight when in agony. And he knew he couldn't take the pain.

His joints were, half of them, dislocated from the little metal framework—the "Scavenger," they'd called it—they'd placed him in and tightened. They hurt almost as much from the decompression chamber he'd endured. His face—they'd made him look in a mirror—was blotched with burst blood vessels.

The evil looking infidel, Fernandez, made his pronouncement. "Murdering bastard! Turn him into a woman, then hang him . . . her . . . it." Then, horror of horrors, the evil infidel had bent down and whispered, "I'm sending a team to exterminate your family in Castilla, you son of a bitch."

 

Topside, far from the screams, Carrera and Fernandez sat on a large pipe, staring across the dark vastness of the ocean toward the lights of the Yithrabi coast. In these confined waters the ship rocked gently, slowly. It didn't matter; Carrera was sick to his stomach anyway.

"Do you ever have nightmares, Omar?" Carrera asked of Fernandez.

The Balboan shrugged. "Everyone has nightmares, Patricio."

"Do they?" He shook his head. "Not like mine, I don't think. Not like mine.

"Did you know," Carrera continued, "that I was raised to be a civilized man? I don't advertise it but my mother and father were progressives, cosmopolitans, in fact. I sometimes wonder if that's why I was able to transfer my loyalty from the Federated States to the legion; because I wasn't raised to be loyal to the Federated States, even though for many years I was and, to some degree, still am. An interesting thought, is it not; that maybe the end result of the destruction of ties to nations is not loyalty to mankind, but loyalty to even smaller and more exclusive groups than nations? To family most of all."

Fernandez's mind was not the sort to worry about such things. He kept silent. Besides, what was wrong with having an ultimate loyalty to one's family? As far as he could see that was the default state of mankind.

Carrera flicked a cigarette butt over the side, then reached for a tumbler of whiskey resting on the deck by his feet. From this he drank deeply.

"Ever read any Shakespeare from Old Earth, Omar? Henry the Fifth, maybe?"

Fernandez shook his head in negation. "I've heard of it; that's all."

"No surprise, I suppose. It's a play; never underestimate the benefits of a classical education. There's a scene there . . . where the king insists that he is not to blame for the condition of his soldiers' souls should they be killed in battle for him."

Carrera laughed, bitterly. "Damn old Will. He answers the questions he wants to but not the one you want him to. Tell me, Omar, what do you think? If Henry's soldiers had sacked Harfleur, would he have been responsible for the sack? For the rape of the 'shrill shrieking maidens'? For the dashing of old men's heads to walls? For the 'naked infants spitted upon pikes?' Where would the blame lie then?"

"Patricio," Fernandez began, "I don't thi–"

Carrera cut him off. Nodding his head toward the hatch that led into the bowels of the ship, he asked, "And where does the blame lie here? Who is to blame for that obscenity taking place below? If it's you, does that relieve me of anything? I don't think so."

Sighing, Fernandez asked, "Do you want me to shut the program down?"

Taking another hefty slug of the whiskey, Carrera coughed and then answered, "That's the worst part: no."

 

Ic (Intelligence Office), Camp Balboa, Ninewa, 29/1/462 AC

Thank God Patricio didn't succumb to the weaker part of his nature, thought Fernandez while sitting at his desk in Sumer. Bad enough he shows too light a hand with some of our adversaries. But we must have the information that comes out of that ship, whatever it costs.

 

The desk sat deep inside the Intel Office, which was the most secure building in the camp. It was built of a double wall of pressure formed adobe bricks with the interior space filled with earth as well. The office was surrounded by another wall, this one topped with barbed wire and with a tower at each corner of the compound. Guards manned the tower, the narrow gate, and the inside of the building continuously.

There was no air conditioning; Carrera simply forbade it on the theory that troops given air conditioning would never grow acclimated to the heat, which was, while drier, even worse than Balboa's. The four exceptions to this rule were the religious facilities, the field hospital, the troop messes and the small brothel quadrant full of Sumeri whores, most of them widows or orphans.

So instead of air conditioning, Fernandez sat under an overhead fan. Paperweights—generally of steel, glass, or fired clay—held the papers on the desk in place against the breeze of the fan.

It was better to be seated. After days on the Hildegard Mises Fernandez found himself still swaying when he walked on dry land. He hoped it would go away soon.

It had been worth it, though. Normally Fernandez was, while willing enough, not a man who enjoyed inflicting pain. This time had, obviously, been different.

They were still on the ship, the one named Ouled Nail and the other three who had survived. They'd be hanged when they'd healed from their surgery; be hanged, incinerated and their ashes dumped out with the garbage.

Big mistake to survive, Fernandez thought. Worse mistake to survive after killing my blood and then being captured. Bastards. Well, let's see what today brings.

What today brought were dispatches from Sada, received from Sachsen. These included a folder taken from the not-quite-packed bag of a woman. Most of the names in the folder were of no interest. Rather, they were of no obvious interest as they had no markings against them in the folder to indicate any importance beyond the merely personal. They would, of course, be investigated anyway.

Two names were interesting. One of them was a woman, this one living in the City of Akka in Bekaa. She appeared in the folder as Westplatz's main contact with the insurgency.

"Odd," Fernandez said to himself, "very odd that a Spanish name should appear among our adversaries, yet be living in Bekaa." He decided to pass the name on to the research section.

When the name came back, a few days later, with a healthy file including pictures both before and after the plastic surgery, all Fernandez could say was, "Ohhh," before passing the file back to Sada's office.

 

Akka, Bekaa, 2/2/462 AC

Standing on a second floor, iron railed balcony overlooking the Tauranian Lakes, Layla Arguello shivered despite the warm night air. There was something going on that was monstrous in its implications. People, her people, good and trusted comrades of many years of struggle, were disappearing right and left. She was pretty sure they were disappearing right.

 

She'd been something of an icon in her youth, had Layla. Borderline pretty, with a simple, sincere face masking a devious mind, a photographer had once taken her picture with her hair covered by a man's keffiyah and a man's rifle slung over her shoulder with the muzzle projecting above her back. This photograph had rocketed around Terra Nova, propelling Layla into an unwanted, even unfortunate, stardom. Songs had been written about her in several tongues. The stardom, in turn, had made it nearly impossible for her to continue her mission, which was, by and large, the hijacking of aircraft.

Nothing deterred, Layla had undergone a series of plastic surgeries to hide her true face and make it possible for her to continue boarding aircraft in order to hijack them. The significant part of that was that she had endured the surgery without anesthesia, this being by way of a gesture of solidarity with the suffering People of the world.

Later in life, after many hijackings and many terms in prison, Layla had married a comrade from the struggles in Colombia Latina. Later still, she'd entered politics, winning office repeatedly based largely on her revolutionary past and her potential for continuing the revolution into the future. As a politician, her new face became even better known than had been her old. Likewise well known were her residence, office, domestic arrangements and family situation.

Is it time to go undercover again? she wondered, staring at the stars winking in the waves below. No . . . I can't. The cause needs me here, easy to find and with all my connections intact. But I think I ought to improve my security.

 

Camp Balboa Base, Ninewa,
Sumer, 3/2/462 AC

Sada, Fernandez and Carrera met in a conference room in the intelligence offices. The conference room was small; the idea of a large conference in the shadowy, dirty world of intelligence, counterintelligence and direct action was something of a contradiction in terms. A few flies buzzed—Fernandez had reason to believe they were the only bugs in the room—and the rotating fan whined despairingly overhead.

 

"There are a few people, very few," Fernandez admitted, "who won't break under torture. She's going to be one of them."

"She has two sons," Sada had pointed out. "She might not talk over threats to a husband, or even her father and mother, but she's an Arab, an Arab mother; she'll talk to save her sons."

"What do you think she's going to know to justify torturing and killing her sons?" Carrera had asked. "Remember, we do not torture anybody we have not announced that we have killed and are not planning to kill. If you tell me she's part of a plot to set off a nuke in a major city, maybe that would justify it. Maybe. Or if you tell me that you know, not suspect but know, that her sons are in on the whole thing. Can you do that?"

Sada shook his head. "No, we can't say that. Both of them are still in school. One's in college; the other in high school. They're likely to join the enemy at some point in time, yes, but for now? No, as far as we can tell they're innocent enough."

Fernandez grew heated. "If the sons will grow up to become terrorists, and they will, we should kill them now while we can. If we're willing to kill them then why not do the rest?"

"It just seems wrong."

"Patricio," Sada said, "you heard me when we first began working together but I don't think you listened. We Arabs are not like you people, and it isn't just a matter of religion. After religion, and not far behind . . . maybe even ahead, family is what really matters to most of us. We stopped, or at least cut down on, the hangings because it was making enemies of entire clans. The same logic applies here. At least the clans and tribes here could be bought off. But unless you are willing to kill the sons who will avenge this woman—and the right or wrong of it matters not at all—you are better off not touching her. What's the sense of killing or taking one terrorist if, in the process, you create two? On the other hand, if you're reluctant to take and use the sons to loosen their mother's tongue, at least let us kill the lot of them."

Fernandez inclined his head toward Sada. "Adnan is quite right, Patricio. Moreover, what's the difference between that and an air strike that takes out a whole family to get one terrorist? There isn't any and you know there isn't." Fernandez's voice and face grew desperate. "Patricio, for God's sake they created you by killing your family and leaving you alive. They have brought out the very worst in me. This is not different."

Carrera thought about that. He'd done some terrible things, let innocent people be killed to get at the guilty. But this was just . . . wrong somehow. He couldn't deliberately order the deaths of the two boys on the mere chance that they might someday become a threat.

"No. Kill the woman, fine. Leave her family alone."

"Well," Sada said, acquiescing, "if it's to be a simple assassination then there's no sense in using my own boys for it. Can we afford to hire a hit team?"

Fernandez, still shaking his head in disgust at Carrera's squeamishness, asked, "Of course we can afford it. A hit team from whom?"

"Possibly the Anti-Zionist People's Liberation Front; they're strong in Bekaa and never liked the fact that Arguello, a woman, garnered so many headlines. Or maybe the ZII, the Zion Intelligence Institute, could suggest someone. Maybe they'd be willing to do it themselves. Give me a week to work it out."

"You have contacts with the ZII?" Fernandez asked incredulously.

"Just one good one," Sada answered and then refused to say more.

 

Akka, Bekaa, 9/2/462 AC

As it turned out, ZII wouldn't touch it. The head of the organization, Mickey Zvi Maor, who knew Sada from school in Anglia, was firm on that. Oh, they wished the woman dead, one thousand times over dead. But they were such an obvious candidate for the hit that Maor begged off. He did suggest contacting one of the religiously affiliated parties in Bekaa, all of whom distrusted women in positions of power.

 

Sada sent one of his more trusted lieutenants, Major Qabaash, to Bekaa to do the negotiations.

 

"Qef halak, ya sheik," Qabaash began at the audience he had secured with the leader of the Monotheism Party in a suburb of Akka. The sheik lived simply enough, in a rambling adobe house with a fountained central courtyard. The fountain was not ostentation. In the fierce heat of the Bekaa desert the fountain served to cool the courtyard without the pollution of the infidel's electricity.

Serene and dignified, the sheik—his given name was Ghaleb— returned the greetings and swept his hand down, inviting Qabaash to sit near him on some cushions placed where they would receive the most benefit of the fountain's cooling effect.

Serving women, some the sheik's wives and concubines, others his daughters, brought in trays ostentatiously laden with more food than two men could hope to eat. Besides the usual lamb, there were bowls of red maize paste, flavored with native "holy shit peppers."

Holy shit peppers were at the low end of piquancy compared to some of Terra Nova's natural spices. Above them were Joan of Arc peppers, only for the very daring or masochistic. At the very high end were the plants known as "Satan Triumphant." No one had ever managed to eat these, whole, though they had found a use during the Great Global War when distilled into a potent chemical agent similar in its power and effects to phosgene oxime. Highly diluted, they could have been used for food preservation. Unfortunately, STs were so vile that the slightest underdilution would have preserved the food indefinitely as no human being could have hoped to eat it. Mixed in minute proportion in shoug, a fiery popular paste, was about as useful as "Satan Triumphant" peppers ever got.

Besides the red maize paste were pitas made from the flour of the chorley. There were half a dozen Terra Novan "olives" on the trays, as well. These had little resemblance to Old Earth olives, being roughly the size of plums and gray in color. They grew in clumps of three on a plant that looked like a stunted, anemic palm, except that unlike the palms of Old Earth this one's trunk was green while its fronds were gray. The taste was said to be similar to normal olives, though slightly more astringent.

One did not get right down to business when dealing with the sheik or, indeed, with nearly any Arab; there were the niceties to observe first. A full two hours of mostly meaningless pleasantries followed. Mostly, however, does not mean entirely. By the end of the two hours, from hints and suggestions, Ghaleb had learned that the heretic woman, Layla Arguello, needed to die and Qabaash had learned that the price of her death, her husband's and her sons would be fifty thousand FSD, half payable up front and half on confirmation that she was truly dead. Two of Terra Nova's three moons, Eris and Bellona, had risen by the time the two reached this point.

"It would be better," observed the sheik, getting down to business, "if her sons did not grow up to avenge her."

"I could not agree more, O Wise One," Qabaash answered. "Yet those are our limitations. The people I represent will not countenance the killing of the sons."

Ghaleb's smiled slightly as his fingers pulled at one ear. "Easterners, eh? It never ceases to amaze me how little they understand us and how completely they insist on trying to fit us into their own mold. For the woman and the sons I would charge fifty thousand. For the woman alone, the price is one hundred thousand, for I will have to recompense families when the sons grow up to exact their revenge."

"It is fair, O Sheik, and the amount in within my discretion."

To himself Qabaash mused, If this were the FSC, they would, at a cost many times greater, drop a large and expensive guided bomb from an aircraft costing more than this country earns every year. The bomb would kill Arguello, and the FSC would congratulate itself for its discretion and humanity. The bomb would also kill fifty genuine innocents and probably miss her sons. For a mere fifty thousand I could get rid of the lot and kill no true innocents if only I were permitted. Life is strange and the Almighty's sense of humor unfathomable.

 

Akka, 17/2/462 AC

Ordinarily, the sheik would have merely given a sermon in the mosque on the subject of female iniquity and mentioned Layla's name as an example. Several of his followers would have read between the lines, hunted her down to her home and killed her and her family. Word would have leaked so that the sheikh could reward his diligent followers properly, but only within the close confines of the clan, so that the police could pretend bafflement. Because of the absurd requirement that her family not be hurt, more direct and less subtle methods were required.

A team of Ghaleb's followers was thus handpicked and given its marching orders. They were experienced and bright men; they had no real difficulty finding Layla's residence and office. They did find it suspicious that she changed her routes between the two more than daily. This meant that the killing would have to take place either in or in front of either her office or her home. Given that they were, unaccountably, forbidden from killing her family it would have to be the office.

Purchasing weapons and explosives in the market in Akka was like buying dates and figs. Finding Layla's residence and office was equally easy, reconning them not much more difficult.

Unfortunately, what the hit team did not count on was the woman herself. Layla Arguello was not some untrained, innocent Kosmo journalist or humanitarian aid worker. She was, herself, a trained and experienced terrorist. Moreover, her long career should have told the team she was a smart trained terrorist. Smart and trained terrorists, in the circumstances of Akka, Bekaa, did not go about unarmed.

 

What should have been an easy hit turned into a somewhat lengthy firefight. With six men with rifles engaging one woman with a pistol the result would normally been foreordained. Not so with Layla.

Near her office, her car was suddenly cut off by another that swerved in front and forced her driver to crash into a parked car by the curb. The car following Layla's smashed into the rear of her own to further shock the occupants. Her driver and the guard sitting in the front seat were thrown forward—the use of seatbelts indicating a certain lack of piety among their people—and stunned.

Layla, however, was not shocked. She had the door open and was crouching outside, digging in her purse for a pistol and her trademark hand grenade, even before the men in the assaulting cars had their feet to the pavement. Her hand closed on the grenade first. This she donated to the following car. It went off on the asphalt, laying out two just emerging assassins with multiple shrapnel wounds. Red pools began to spread across the pavement.

The remaining four assassins were momentarily shocked. This gave Layla enough time to dig out her pistol, a 9mm job made in Sachsen. With the pistol in hand, she stuck her head over the trunk of her own immobilized automobile and fired at the passengers of the car that had rammed hers from behind. She hit one, she thought.

A long burst of fire from the car that had swerved in front of hers smashed the windows of her own, sending the glass shards tinkling to the asphalt and killing the driver. None of the barely aimed bullets hit her, but spraying glass scored her forehead and face, causing blood to run into her right eye. Desperately Layla used her left hand to try to wipe the blood away and clear her eye for shooting. Even through the haze she managed to jack a couple of rounds in the direction of the first auto.

Achmed, nephew of Ghalib, was shocked by the return fire. The explosion of what he assumed was a hand grenade had been bad enough. But for the woman to have the effrontery to actually shoot back? This was too much.

Unfortunately, the return fire was also too much. Achmed, feeling ashamed, closed his eyes and kept low to the ground to escape the bullets this damned heretic woman seemed to have in great supply.

The rough pavement dug into his face. Achmed forced his eyes open and saw a woman's foot and a knee exposed under the floor of the target vehicle. He pointed his rifle in the general direction of the foot and pulled the trigger.

 

Layla was reloading her pistol from one of the four spare magazines she kept in her purse when she felt the blow just above her knee. Partly from the physical force of the blow and partly in automatic response to the instant and intense pain, her leg spun out from under her, causing her to drop the loaded magazine she had been struggling to insert. She fell to one side even as her hand groped the asphalt for the magazine.

Unable to stand or kneel any longer Layla forced her back to the rear wheel of her car while her hand continued to feel around, searching for the lost magazine. She found and grabbed it with a joyful cry.

Before she could reload, she stopped. Two angry looking men were standing above her, each with a rifle pointed towards her head and torso. A third sprayed her guard, still sitting in the front seat, knocking his bloodied corpse over onto the lap of the dead driver.

No chance now, Layla thought, dropping the magazine but retaining the pistol.

Layla's last acts in this life were to smile as if her own death were a triumph and to spit at her assailants.

The rifles opened fire. At this range even very bad marksmanship could not miss. Over forty bullets entered Layla's body. When they were done she lay dead against the rear tire, her head lolling to one side and the pistol still held tightly in her hand.

 

Camp Balboa, Sumer, 19/2/462 AC

Layla's bullet-riddled body was barely in the ground in Bekaa when the first replacement units began to arrive in Sumer. This was the Second Cohort of the now renamed 1st Tercio (príncipio Eugenio). Whereas the 1st Cohort had never had a strength above four hundred and sixty, the replacement was closer to a real battalion's strength of nearly seven hundred. It was still organized in six subunits though these, in deference to the increase in strength, were called now "maniples" rather than centuries and were subdivided into platoons rather than sections. The platoons were still rather small, as platoons went.

 

Sporting new sergeant's stripes on his collar, Cruz didn't care about that. In truth, he didn't care much about anything except that this combat tour was over and he was going home for a while, home to his Cara and, hopefully, home to marriage and the beginning of a family. He had a good job with the legion, work he liked and work he had proven good at. He intended to stay even though this would mean frequent separation from his loved ones.

Waiting with his gear for the trucks that would take himself and the rest of the cohort to the Ninewa airport, Cruz mused upon the meeting he and his cohort's tribune had had with Carrera and the legion's sergeant major, that crusty old bastard, McNamara.

He'd been shocked, more than a little, when Carrera had announced that he'd been selected for Cazador School and, if he passed that, further selected for the Centurion Candidate Course.

"They'll be harder than combat, Sergeant Cruz," McNamara had informed him. "I know you don't believe that now but, before you accept the appointment, just trust me on this."

He'd sat silent for a while at that, thinking hard. Finally, he'd decided, "I think I can take it, Sergeant Major . . . Legate. After all, I have good reasons to."

Interlude

Earth Date 27 May,
2104 (Terra Novan year 45 AC),
Atlantis Base

The shuttle came down from the Amistad carrying a full platoon of thirty UN Marines, all the ship had available. It screeched in to Atlantis base furiously. The Marine commander directed his troops to wait at the small terminal while he went to collect his orders from the Base's deputy, acting in High Admiral Annan's stead.

 

"The helicopter went off the air several days ago," the deputy advised the major commanding the Marines. "I don't know if they crashed or what."

"Where were they heading?" the major asked.

The deputy's finger played over his computer's keyboard, bringing up a somewhat undetailed map of Balboa colony. "The high admiral said he was going here. "Hunting," he said." Since the deputy had some idea of just what it was that Annan had intended to hunt, and since that was technically illegal, even for a high admiral, he kept his mouth shut as to what Annan's objective had been.

"I've been in contact with our office in Ciudad"—the Deputy laughed; to call such a miserable collection of shacks a city was absurd—"Balboa. They say the high admiral stopped there on his way."

The major could have surmised the hunt's objective but long years in UN service had conditioned him not to dig into, not to even think upon, the foibles of his superiors. He had his own life to worry about and another four years would see him retired to his Botswanan village on a very comfortable, Noblemaire-Rule-driven, pension.

 

Following Annan's flight path, the shuttle stopped off at the local UN supervisory office in Ciudad Balboa. The bureaucrats there had nothing to add. It struck the Marine major that the guards on the office seemed even more slovenly and undisciplined than was the UN norm. Still, it was close enough to that norm to excite no real interest. After refueling the shuttle from local stocks, and seeing that his men were given a decent meal and some rest, the ship took off heading east.

The shuttle was not equipped to scan the jungle below. Even if it had been, it might well not have noticed the several dozen armed men on horseback over whom it flew, riding hell for leather, westward, beneath the thick triple canopy.

 

The helicopter was easy enough to find; it had landed in the open and there it still was. When the shuttle descended to a leaf- and grass- churning landing, the major and his men debarked. They found the helicopter, along with twenty-two insect-eaten heads on stakes in a circle around it. Of the high admiral's body, or those of the eighteen Marines who had accompanied him, there was not a trace. The bodies of the three-man crew, or what was left of them after ants, antaniae, and buzzards had taken their share, were found right by the helicopter.

The nearby village was abandoned. No footprints told where the villagers had gone. Prints of horse hooves, some dozens of them, led off to the east but disappeared in the sodden jungle. The major was about to organize and send off search parties when he received a distress call from the UN supervisory office, now some hundreds of kilometers away.

The call for help ended almost as soon as it began. By the time the shuttle arrived back at the office it was nothing more than a corpse- draped, smoking ruin.

The shuttle landed nearby. This was a mistake.

 

XIII.

Among the weapons found in the supervisory office's armory had been a single sample of a very special type. This was a magazine-fed, bolt action rifle in 14.5mm, with its own limited visibility scope, recoil absorption system and a muzzle brake to further reduce the otherwise shoulder-shattering recoil of the piece. For all that, it was no different in principle from any of the bolt-action rifles in use on Earth. It was this simplicity that recommended the weapon to both Belisario and the UN, though the latter used it exclusively for hunting mammoth, not men nor their machines.

Belisario lay now beside the sniper he had chosen, a cholo from Panama with a deserved reputation as a marksman. The cholo's, or Indian's, name was Pedro.

"Pedro, can you hit the gas tank?" Belisario asked.

"No, señor," the indio answered. "I don't even know where it will be. But I can hit an engine, no problem."

"Make it the engine then, compadre. But make it the engine. We can't afford a miss."

The pair lay in a shack overlooking the UN office. More particularly, their field of fire covered the marked, concrete shuttle landing pad to one side of that office. What they would do if the shuttle landed elsewhere, Belisario didn't know. His men were scattered in small groups in other buildings. Perhaps that would be enough.

He'd told them no cooking fires, an order that had not gone over particularly well. He hoped they'd listen, but had less than absolute confidence that they would. What he could do about it he didn't know. Rather, he hoped he didn't know.

Will it come to that? Belisario wondered. Will I someday end up having to shoot some of my own men if they won't follow orders? God . . . if there is a God . . . deliver me from this, please.

His thoughts were interrupted by the whine of the UN shuttle circling the area before coming in for a very soft, though leaf and dust churning, landing.

Belisario was just rising and turning his head toward Pedro to give the order to fire when the cholo fired sua sponte . . . and immediately screamed and rolled from the gun, clutching a broken shoulder. So much for recoil absorption systems. The muzzle blast half-stunned Belisario, knocking him right back on his arse.

"What the—?"

On hands and knees, shaking his head, Belisario crawled back to the low window through which Pedro had engaged the shuttle. As he neared the opening, he heard and felt the familiar blasts of his own men's muzzle loaders, combined with the rattle of machine guns. Belisario hoped at least some of those machine guns were among those he and his followers had captured at the UN's office armory.

The first thing Belisario saw from the window was smoke. True to his word, Pedro had struck an engine. The engine had then caught fire, a fire which spread to other parts of the shuttle. The entire machine seemed about to burst into flames.

While Belisario watched, it did burst into flame, the fireball catching several of the UN Marines, sending them running as shrieking human torches. The Cochean felt no satisfaction at this, but only pity and perhaps even a bit of regret. He regretted, too, that any equipment that might have been on the shuttle was now irretrievably lost.

A near miss knocked bits of wood off of the wooden window frame causing Belisario to duck. Taking a moment to steel his soul he returned to his observation point. There were no more near misses, however. Instead, with his head now rapidly clearing from the shock of Pedro's muzzle blast, Belisario saw a dozen or fourteen—it was hard to be sure under the circumstances—UN Marines, cowering at the edges of the burned area. He suspected that those, plus the ones he had seen burn, were all that had gotten out of the shuttle. Those survivors were tightly pinned by the machine gun fire coming from Belisario's looted weapons.

Between the machine gun and rifle fire, plus the real fire from the shuttle, first one, then another, then a group of three of the Marines dropped their weapons and stood up, arms raised high. It wasn't their bloody fight and if the locals were willing to take prisoners they were willing to become prisoners.

Belisario was still in the first phase of a very steep upward learning curve. He'd never thought to arrange for a signal to cease fire. Fortunately, his followers were not cold-blooded killers but simple farmers and ranchers and artisans who would kill only most reluctantly. Fire ceased as the gunners and riflemen saw that the Marines were, in fact, trying to surrender. As the fire let up, and seeing those trying to surrender standing unharmed, the rest of the UN troops quickly put down their weapons and stood, as well.

Saying, "I'll send someone for you, Pedro," Belisario left the room and walked out of the shack towards the UN Marines. He was met, not too far from the burning shuttle, by one very shaken Botswanan major with his arms raised high over his head.

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