"The enemy gets a vote."
—Common wisdom, understood by all decent armies,
and completely lost on the press.
People were beginning to return to the town now, indeed to return to all the villages of the roughly forty thousand square kilometers of the Balboan Zone of Responsibility or BZOR. The people numbered anywhere from a million to two million; no one really knew and aerial surveys were of little help.
The populace of Ninewa returned to what was mostly a ruin. There were no functioning utilities, no governmental administration, no schools, no jobs. Whatever local money the people had was worthless except perhaps as toilet paper. Then again, since the Sumeris did not, by and large, use toilet paper it didn't really have even this small value.
On the plus side, there was food—plenty of it, as a matter of fact— in the granaries and silos of the former government. These were under guard by the legion, which had taken control by right of conquest. There was water no worse than what they had been used to drinking. As this same water might well have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands in the years leading up to the invasion, this was small recommendation.
There was also plenty of work to be done. With work, with money, with food for the money to buy, there was some hope. Electricity was nice, but it could wait. Clean water was more important, but it could wait, too, albeit at cost in lives. For now, what the people needed were jobs, money, and food to buy with the money.
And therein lay a problem, for although plenty of the food had been captured, enough to last until the next harvest came in, following right on the heels of the invading armies had come the cosmopolitan progressives.
The progressives came in one of four or, rather, five categories. Some had assets or skills and were willing and eager to help the Sumeri people by helping the invaders. Others had assets and skills, money at least, but were totally unwilling to cooperate with the invading armies even though that was the only way to help the Sumeri people. Some had neither assets nor skills and only enough money to ensure that their representatives in Sumer could live rather well while by being gadflies. Some came with nothing but a willingness to work and were willing to live pretty poorly while they did so. And then, for the fifth group, there was the press, which was unwilling to do anything useful and, indeed, was most eager to see the entire enterprise fail, preferably miserably.
The cosmopolitans, most of them, did not want the food sold. They did not want the people forced to work to earn the money to buy it. Food was a "human right" and it was morally wrong to withhold it.
Carrera said, "Fuck off." The cosmopolitans lived to be appreciated, that and for their perks, and rough language was not something they were used to. This cavalier treatment sent many of them packing but, in both Carrera's opinion and Sada's, too many of them stayed.
The legion called a meeting of the Kosmos, sending patrols out throughout its ZOR to so advise them. About half showed up. These were given their marching orders and rules of engagement. They were also promised that security would be provided by the legion as long as they followed the legion's program.
The rest? Those without the obvious security of uniformed legionaries? Sada's watchers came to the fore here, showing up in the middle of the night to threaten, to beat, in a few cases to kill. The only limit on their conduct was, "no rapes." This rule was not always followed and Sada had to have a few of his men, with regret, hanged in public squares.
Some more of the Kosmos packed up, true, but even more came to Carrera's next meeting.
The press waxed lyrical about "the growing lawlessness and terror in Sumer."
That, Carrera admitted, was a problem but not one admitting of an easy solution. That he had hired Sada's brigade, and even expanded it, helped. Still, that was only about three thousand young men employed. There were anywhere from a third to three-quarters of a million men without jobs, though many of these were farmers and could be said to be constantly employed. For the nonfarmers, he could decorate every non-functioning lamppost in the BZOR with hanged bodies and still men would rob to feed their families. And who could blame them?
Again, Sada's watchers provided a partial solution. Sent out to all the larger towns and in all the neighborhoods of the city of Ninewa, they reported on the crime status in their areas, naming names. Carrera's helicopters would then fly in, surrounding the town concerned with Sada's troops. Hangings, sometimes mass hangings, quickly followed. That was the province of the mullahs Sada had found, the chief mullah charging a price of one gold drachma per death sentence.
The press added, "Travesty of Justice" and "Death Squads" to their existing repertoire of "growing lawlessness and terror."
"In the long run, though," Sada told Carrera, "however necessary they seem now, the hangings might do us more harm than good on their own."
"Why's that?" Carrera asked, puzzled.
The two men sat conversing in one of the university buildings, the entire complex still being under occupation by the legion. Fortunately, the furniture had not been looted precisely because of that occupation. The rest of the town had been somewhat looted, what little there was to take, by the returning people. It was only "somewhat" because of a dozen or so street lynchings that had taken place supervised by the men of Sada's brigade.
"We're not individuals the way you people are," Sada explained. "Everyone we hang is a member of a family and a tribe. It doesn't really matter if the bastards we string up are guilty because right and wrong here do not mean objective right and wrong, they mean, "What is good for my tribe is right; what is bad for my tribe is wrong." Executing young men who could bring in money and eventually father families is therefore inherently wrong."
"How many have your boys hanged so far?" Carrera asked.
"Eighty-seven," Sada answered, instantly. "As of yesterday. Fortunately, they're mostly from two of the smaller tribes. Also, fortunately, they were mostly here in Ninewa where tribal affections are slightly looser."
"How did the dictator maintain control if killing a tribe member makes enemies of the entire tribe?" Carrera asked, even more puzzled than he had been before.
"Well . . . see," Sada explained. "He changed the equation. Resistance meant something between tribal culling and tribal extermination and not a man or woman in the country but believed he meant it. Therefore that became the ultimate wrong, risking the complete death of the tribe."
"I can't exterminate entire tribes," Carrera said. Jesus, I've got some decency left. "You have a solution?"
"Work? We have to provide work for the young men. We might also slip some money, under the table, to the leaders of the tribes we've affected."
Carrera answered, "No . . . I won't reward people for failure to control their young men. I'm willing to provide work, though."
"It'll help," Sada answered with a shrug. And I can take care of bribing the tribal leaders, even if Patricio will not.
"Let's look at the map," Carrera suggested.
The map, marked up with grease pencils, showed the borders of the BZOR, which was a near square of about two hundred kilometers on a side. Ninewa was approximately in the center of the eastern side along the River Buranun.
"We need to build a base here," Carrera pointed to a spot just northeast of Ninewa. "I'll also need one more smaller base for each infantry cohort, though those will need to be big enough to house three times that many, eventually, and assuming the war goes the way I expect it to. Can your people handle that kind of construction?"
Sada snorted. "Back on Old Earth my people were building magnificent palaces and cities when yours were still painting themselves blue." He did some quick calculations in his head. Let's see. An average cohort base will need to house about fifteen hundred men when it grows. At sixty square meters per man that would be ninety thousand. A square of three hundred meters on a side . . .
"How are you planning on building your bases?" Sada asked.
"Basically square. Ditch. Earthen wall," Carrera answered. "Maybe adobe housing. Small airstrip inside for the Crickets. A full-length strip, maybe twelve-hundred meters, at the main base."
"Okay . . . that would be about one square kilometer you'll need to rent or lease—trust me, Patricio, you'll want to lease it rather than just take it—for each cohort base. A fair price, depending on the quality of the land, would be somewhere in the range of twenty to fifty thousand FSD per year for each."
"That's all?"
"Yes, somewhere in there. Probably on the low end provided you make it clear that the housing will stay when you leave. Then, for the walls . . . ummm . . . call it two or three thousand men employed with shovels for a month, for each base. Housing would be . . . honestly I don't know anything about housing."
"I know someone who does," Carrera answered. "Get me Tribunes Cheatham and Clean," he shouted out the office door.
"Two to three thousand each would work for the outlying bases," Carrera said. "Here in Ninewa it would have to be quite a bit larger."
"Yes," Sada agreed. "Including my brigade it would have about four times the area and twice the perimeter. Call it four to six thousand men for a month."
"That would make a big dent in the unemployment situation here in Ninewa," Carrera said. Unenthusiastically, he added, "But only for a month or so. Speaking of your men and families, has yours arrived here safely?"
"Yes, just this morning. I've taken over a couple of rooms here in the compound for them."
"We'll need to secure the families of your men as well, you know," Carrera observed.
"Just so. But the university hasn't enough space. For now, the families are safer where they are. When we build the base, we can make room for them as well and move them there."
Cheatham knocked on the door, accompanied by the Anglian, Clean. "You called us, sir?"
"Yeah . . . how much would we need in housing, presumably adobe housing, for the troops?"
"Adobe?" Clean asked, visibly interested. "As it so happens, I've always had a great interest in adobe construction. Did you know that it can be as strong as concrete and, if labor is cheap, also much, much cheaper? It's a wonderful building material for the very rich and the very poor."
It took Clean and Cheatham some days to work out the plans and the requirements. Still more time was spent in negotiations with local leaders for the leasing of land. After that it took more time for PSYOP and word of mouth advertising to assemble work crews. Within a month or so, however, about fifteen thousand of the otherwise unemployed Sumeris had found work in base construction. This was less of a drop in the bucket than it seemed as each Sumeri with money to spend created jobs for the otherwise jobless.
It helped, but not enough.
Fadeel al Nizal was a man with a problem.
Actually, I have more problems than I can count. Starting with this one.
"This one" meant Mustafa ibn Mohamed ibn Salah, min Sa'ana. And Mustafa was not a happy camper, nor even a happy troglodyte.
"You shame me for being a member of the same race," Mustafa stormed. "I gave you money, hundreds of thousand of FS drachma, and what do you show for it? Nothing!" he raged. "I've given you access to our data base to recruit your own group and what have those you have recruited done to resist the infidel? Lain around buggering each other for all that anyone can see!"
Abdul Aziz ibn Kalb, standing well off to one side, flinched even though he was not the target of the tongue lashing.
"Sheik Mustafa," Fadeel began, "I admit, we were taken by surprise by the speed of the infidel conquest. But then," and Fadeel looked around at the walls of the cave as if to say, Aren't you a little surprised to find that your impregnable Pashtia, the Pashtia that did to death the might of the Volgan Empire, is reduced to this little hole in the ground?
"Don't try me, little man," Mustafa glared. "If we are here it is due to the will of Allah. He is the great strategist. Ours is but to fight in His cause."
"Indeed," Fadeel agreed. "And all will turn out well, even in Sumer. But we do have problems there."
"Like what?" Mustafa demanded.
"Number One is a turncoat Sumeri general named Sada. For reasons I dearly pray the Almighty will reveal to me someday, this man fought the infidel gloriously . . . and then surrendered and joined him. Worse, this Sada, the dog, took his brigade over with him."
"He is in the infidel's pay," Mustafa said, with a glare of hate. "His family must pay."
"Easier said than done, Great Prince. The turncoat's family is already beyond our reach. Those of his men will be . . . harder to identify and find. We are working on this."
"Ah, so you actually have done something."
"We have done what we could. I have just over one hundred future martyrs operating in Sumer. About twenty of them are in the area of the traitor, Sada. It would be more except that about half, or a bit more, of what I sent simply disappeared. I suspect he has a network of informers. And I can't eliminate the informers without knowing who they are. I can't find out who they are without getting more of my people in place. And I can't get my people in place, as long as the area crawls with informers. Only in the city of Ninewa, mostly because it is of a size that makes it impossible to identify strangers, have I been successful in infiltrating. That; and that there been a major displacement of people and disruption of society wherever there was serious fighting."
"And you have a plan for the use of what you do have?" Mustafa asked, growing visibly calmer.
"I do. Noting that everything is in the hands of the Beneficent, the Merciful, still I am prepared to begin attacks against these crusaders very soon."
"With what?"
"I have too few men to conduct a proper suicide campaign at this time," Fadeel admitted. "But I can do kidnappings, I can plant bombs, I can do some assassinations. Watch and see. There are munitions scattered unsecured all over Sumer. My people are buying these up. Very soon the invader will feel our sting."
Tariq Mohsem was one of the town's few Christians. A bit shorter than most of the Sumeri norm, and also a bit stouter as befit a normally prosperous shopkeeper, he was also one of the first merchants to reopen for business. Tariq's shop, one of Ninewa's largest before the invasion, was a general store that sold food along with some dry goods, household appliances, tools, and such.
He'd returned to find the shop looted and heavily damaged. He had some funds, not the worthless Sumeri pounds but hard currency from the FS and TU. It had been his escape money. Instead of using it to escape with his family, however, he'd decided to stay and rebuild. Factoring large in that decision had been the very forthright way the occupying forces—or liberating, for those who insisted on more aesthetic terms—had shown early on that they were intent on maintaining order. Perhaps the clearest indicator of this was the young man Tariq had found dead in the shop, though visible from the street, hanging by the neck from a cross beam—Who would have thought a neck could stretch that far?—and with a sign on his chest proclaiming, "Looter."
"If the invading forces provide safety and order," Tariq had told his wife, "why not stay? This is home, after all."
So, instead of using the money to flee, Tariq had hired a couple of carpenters to put his shop back in order. The rest he had used to buy food from the invaders. He had to admit, they'd charged a fair price.
"Thank God," he'd also said to his wife, "that they are, too. If we were further north, in the Anglian or FSC sector, they'd be giving the food away and no one would shop from us."
Things were going well enough, so far, too. He'd bought the food at about forty percent of what the invaders told him he could sell it for. And don't the bastards stop by from time to time to make sure I'm not gouging, too? Of course, that doesn't stop me from taking some of the grain and trading it for other foodstuffs, which I can mark up rather more than that.
With the profits, and given that he was one of the first stores to reopen, Tariq not only hired two assistants, he also took on an armed guard for the evenings when he closed shop.
Of course, not everyone had a job yet. The six thousand or so men employed by the legion, locally, were only a fraction of those needing work. On the other hand, those six thousand with money created a certain amount of work on their own, as did the men of Sada's brigade and even the damned foreigners. In any case, Tariq was finding business picking up almost to preinvasion levels. As to whether it would drop off again, as more competition reentered the market; who could say? Tariq hadn't gotten where he was by inability to compete or to work hard. Indeed, in a freer market he expected to do rather better.
No one noticed when the tall, slender man with the oddly and unevenly shaped eyes pulled the beat up, dented and dirty white van to the front of the store. Even the lack of a license plate excited no interest; many, perhaps even most, of the automobiles operating in the town were unlicensed. Perhaps they had once had licenses; who knew?
The slender fellow had a friendly face, although anyone who saw him probably thought it seemed a bit distant. He fiddled with something in the van, something below door level. No matter, everyone in the country was still in a state of shock, even those for whom the shock was not unpleasant. Nor was there anything particularly suspicious in the driver's reaching below the dash.
Opening the van's door and stepping out, the driver simply walked into the store. No one thought it odd that he consulted his watch and left after approximately four minutes. And no one walking by the storefront connected the man departing with the parked van.
Standard military time fuse burns at a rate of forty seconds per foot. The fuse had been cut to a length of fifteen feet. Thus, between the time he reached below the dash, and subtracting a few seconds to enter Tariq's store and five minutes inside, the slender man had just over four minutes to walk away at a fairly leisurely pace. He was almost three hundred meters away when . . .
"What the fuck was the point?" Carrera asked Sada.
"I'm not sure," the Sumeri answered. "Does it have to have a point?"
The two men, surrounded by legionaries with a few of Sada's men as well, stood in front of what had once been a store. The street was mostly still there, barring only a four foot deep crater, but the front of the store itself was gone. Indeed, much of the back was gone as well. Bodies and parts of bodies remained. Some of those parts were very small.
"Do we know how many people?"
Sada asked one of his men before answering, "At least fifty-seven. That many are more or less intact. As to the parts . . ."—he spread his arms, shrugging— ". . . hard to say."
Carrera's eyes focused on one very small part. It was a leg, small, slightly olive in tone, with a shoe on the foot. A baby girl's leg, he thought. A baby girl . . . like my Milagro. So fucking what if she was a Moslem, she was still just a baby girl. Bastards!
Sada looked at the legate, looked away quickly, and offered, "It is no shame to cry, my friend. The shame would be in doing nothing about this atrocity."
Wiping a hand across his face, which did little more than streak the dust that had gathered there, Carrera forced the sorrowful tone away and asked, bitterly, "What can we do? It's in the nature of these things that they leave little evidence."
Sada laughed grimly. "Remember what I said about us being the sort of people who become exceedingly resentful about losing family members? Well . . . I think we have here the recruiting brochures"— his hand swept the scene, taking in the bodies and parts of bodies— "to acquire some numbers of people who will do anything to get even for what's just been done to their family. Watch and see if I'm not right."
He bellowed something to one of his officers supervising the soldiers at the bombing site. The officer came over and Sada spoke to him briefly. Then he turned back to Carrera and said, "I've just ordered Lieutenant Faroush to round up as many relatives as he can find and bring them to the university. I don't suppose your people are up to teaching a course in counter-terror? No? Well, we'll think of something. After all, it isn't as if we Sumeris have never had experience in crushing dissidents."
Sada's adjutant had narrowed the number of applicants down to thirty-six.
Since this was Sada's adjutant, the officer didn't do the normal thing for Sumer and select based on who could offer the highest bribe. Instead, he screened out those too old, or too young, those who didn't look strong enough and those with wives and children still living. Not that the others were turned away completely. Instead, they were redirected to neighborhood militias. Some joined; some did not.
After that, the adjutant selected for intelligence and desire for revenge. This required personal interviews, literacy being far from universal in Sumer and vindictiveness something that could never be objectively tested for. This process took time but narrowed the number of suitable candidates considerably.
Those few dozen were gathered now in a plain and somewhat run- down adobe mosque in this plain and ramshackle Sumeri town. Indeed, the only brightness to the assembly came from the flickering lamps along the walls and the shining, hating, vengeful eyes of the men assembled. Along with the few dozen was another, smaller group of specialists Sada had recruited from the dictator, Saleh's, secret police.
"So," Sada began, in addressing them, "you have agreed to give up your old lives, to become instruments of justice and vengeance? Excellent. Let me tell you what you are going to do. In a few minutes I am going to turn you over to one of my officers and a couple of special people he has selected to teach you how to become the instruments you wish to be. Before that happens, I am going to take your oaths, in the name of Allah, that you will obey every order you are given without question. You will be trained, over the next few months, in how to kill. More than that, you'll be trained in how to kill in the most terrifying manner. After that, you will return to your homes. In time, orders will come. You will gather in small groups to prepare and then you will hunt down and kill—or otherwise punish—those whom you are told to, wherever they may be and who or whatever they may be.
"Let me explain something to you, two things, actually. One is that once you have taken the oath, you may not release yourself from it. Your families are hostages, wherever they may be, for your continued obedience. The second is in the nature of what you are to do.
"You see, there are three kinds of terrorism. The first is what you have suffered, random acts of senseless violence. This kind almost never works," Sada sneered. "Witness the Federated States of Columbia. When their people were randomly killed, they merely went to war to exact vengeance and destroy the terrorists. Two regimes, here and in Pashtia, which formerly were great supporters of terrorism around the world, have fallen. More than that, as boys in school you all read—at least those of you who had the chance to attend school did—of the great terror bombings of the Great Global War. That was all random terror; it targeted nobody in particular. Note that no one ever knuckled under to them until nuclear weapons were used. So much for random terror.
"The other kind of terror is specific. With this kind, punishment is inflicted on particular persons, either on themselves or on those whom they love. To be the target of specific terror is a fearsome and terrible thing. Specific terror works. If it didn't, would the dictator have lasted a week?"
The eyes of the men assembled seemed to glow. Yes, yes, they thought. This is what we want: specific terror.
"The third kind of terror is genocidal. With this an entire people and even civilization is threatened with destruction. Thus, it includes specific terror because, if all are killed, then all whom you love are killed as well. Anyone who does not believe that this kind of terror works is a fool. Genocidal terror was all that kept the Federated States and the Volgan Empire from destroying each other and, incidentally, probably us as well. Genocidal terror is probably all that keeps the United Earth Peace Fleet and the Federated States from using nuclear weapons on each other now.
"So there are your three types. The kind that was used on you and brought you here and the other two, which are the kinds you will use to retaliate. Are there any questions?"
Seeing there were none, Sada said, "Very well. Stand and raise your right hands . . ."
Ricardo Cruz was just leaving the gymnastics building where he had showered when it happened
The first warning was a flash in the distance, behind some houses in the town. Next came the muffled sound of a small explosion. Then came the first blast, much nearer. Only after that could anyone make out the freight train rattle of incoming mortar rounds.
Cruz screamed, "INCOMING!" as he threw himself into partial shelter at the angle where steps met building wall.
The rounds came in at even intervals, a dozen of them, about two seconds apart. Whoever was on the other end apparently knew what he or they were doing. They landed with about thirty meters between shells, moving in a slightly arcing line from near the broad front steps to the main office of the campus and across an open field. Between the even spacing and the even timing it was the obvious work of a well-trained mortar crew, using the traversing wheel on the bipod to quickly and expertly lay the rounds. Before the last round had landed someone caught on the field was screaming out in pain.
"I knew this shit was too good to last," Cruz muttered as he picked himself up from his temporary shelter and then ran to offer aid, toward the still incoming blasts.
I swear I will kick my own ass if I ever go to the showers without my body armor again.
The mortar attack was over almost as soon as it began. Automatically, the legionary Command Post's duty officer ordered a reaction century of mechanized troops and a mixed flight by a Turbo-Finch and a Cricket.
The Cricket was airborne in minutes, the Finch following almost immediately thereafter. The mechanized troops were bursting through the university gate to race into the town scant moments later.
Mistake. Big mistake. Big, bad, fucking mistake.
Khalid al Marri kept in the shadows atop the half wrecked apartment building. It was the same building that had been taken by the now departed FSA 731st Airborne Brigade. People lived in it, still, but not in anything like what had been its pre-war capacity. That was a shame, because al Marri's mission was to get the crusader dogs to overreact, to kill some number of the civilians now living inside. Ah, well; between his own surface to air missile and the other one located a kilometer away and overlooking the same area, one was sure to take down a crusader aircraft and cause a reaction.
From his vantage point, al Marri saw the flashes of the mortar firing and the impact of the shells inside the university compound. Not much time now.
Despite his prediction, al Marri was still somewhat surprised at how quickly the enemy got aircraft into the air. Just like the dogs, to have airplanes standing by to kill the people, he thought, his heart overflowing with hatred for the infidel invader.
To the outsider, privileged to look into al Marri's mind, that would have seemed incongruous. There he stood, ready to do his best to bring violence and destruction down onto the innocents of the apartment building beneath him, and hating those he intended to provoke into that violence because of their willingness to engage in it.
There was no real contradiction, though. To al Marri, and he shared this much, at least, with much, perhaps even most, of the cosmopolitan progressive community, things were neither good nor bad in themselves, but only in relation to the end being sought. To some extent, they shared that viewpoint with Carrera, at least as he had come to be, the major difference being only the end in view.
In any case, one of the infidel airplanes was coming his way. Still keeping to the shadows, al Marri picked up the tube he had carried to the top of the apartment building and placed it on his shoulder, fitting his eye to the sight. He aimed the sight and tube at the noise he heard coming from the craft's engine. Then he flicked a switch and was rewarded with a low hum as the seeker head went active and coolant circulated to drop its temperature so it could make out the heat of the airplane's engine.
The engine stood out in fuzzy view in the sight's eyepiece. Al Marri squeezed the first trigger and was rewarded with a beep which told that the sight saw the target. Elevating the tube until the target was near the bottom of his field of view, he then squeezed the second trigger. The sealed back of the tube blew off as the missile went airborne, al Marri feeling a slight push from his front as the missile's exhaust pushed him backwards.
Though he was too busy to note it, the other missile, launched from a kilometer away, likewise took off within a couple of seconds of his own.
Tribune Miguel Lanza of the legion's air ala wasn't really a scout pilot, despite the Cricket he strapped himself into. Instead, he'd flown transports most of his adult life; "hauling the trash," as he liked to say, especially when the trash consisted of human beings who could hear him say it. Nobody minded; Lanza had been a fixture in the old Guardia Nacional, then in the Defense Corps, the Civic Force and now, finally, in the legion.
At nearly fifty, Lanza was a bit long in the tooth for the Turbo- Finches. Those birds went through gyrations that pulled the blood from the brain and made an old man faint. Even so, he had checked out on them. One never knew, after all, when a pilot would be needed. Likewise, he'd gotten himself qualified on the NA-21s and - 23s—which were similar to his normal bird—and the Crickets. The helicopters were still beyond him but he intended to fix that if he ever got a chance to get back to Balboa.
Lanza loved to fly. Moreover, he believed in leading from in front. For a pilot, leading from in front meant flying, even flying the dangerous missions. That was why, despite command responsibilities as the senior officer of the ala, he'd been standing by on alert when the word had come of the mortar attack. First to the Cricket despite his years, Lanza had told the younger pilot just behind him in the sprint to, "Fuck off, sonny. This one's mine. You can observe."
An amazing aircraft, the Cricket; one hundred feet of take-off run and the thing had gone up like an elevator, pulling Lanza's stomach down to his butt despite the low speed. Lanza's observer was already fiddling with the radio before the thing was off the ground, getting the latest intel update from the command post. There wasn't much intel; that was, after all, why the command post had ordered the Cricket launched in the first place. Aviation was mostly about reconnaissance and always had been.
The command post did have a presumed firing position for the mortar or mortars—no one knew for certain if there had been more than one—that had fired at the university. This Lanza set his heading towards. It led over a set of five modern and ugly looking apartment buildings.
Once airborne, Lanza pulled one of the two sets of night vision goggles the Cricket carried over his head and onto his eyes. The observer did the same. Lanza looked back and over his left shoulder, catching sight of the Turbo-Finch that followed at a discreet distance. Confident of support, Lanza turned his eyes back to the flight path. Then, with both pilot and observer looking forward, both sets of goggles suddenly flashed brightly and went blank.
"Shit!" Lanza shouted as he pushed the Cricket's nose down with one hand, tearing off the goggles with the other. "Shitshitshitshitshit!"
The missile wasn't what one could call "bright." As a matter of fact, where the FSC had poured money into "brilliant" munitions, the Volgans—and they had made the thing some years prior—concentrated instead on "competent" ones. Competent was another way of saying, "good enough for the purpose, especially if used in mass."
It saw the target, a glowing greenish blur, and sped towards it. The target attempted to duck by dropping and the missile duly corrected itself, following the target down. The missile's dim but "competent" mind went something like, "Oh, boy, I'm going to hit . . . Oh, boy, I'm going to hit . . . Oh, boy, I'm going to hit," as it got closer. Still, the target went erratic. "Oh, boy, I'm going to hit," changed to, "Oh, shit, I missed."
The missile promptly blew itself up, scattering numerous small rods of hot metal through the air, some of which connected with Lanza's Cricket.
Lanza felt the plane shudder, first from the blast and then, slightly and unevenly, from the metal rods scattered by the warhead. The observer felt rather more, and let it be known with a piercing scream, as one of the rods passed through the upper portion of the cockpit's Plexiglas rear canopy, through his seat, through his harness and into his back. He slumped forward.
The important thing is not to panic, Lanza reminded himself as he played with the controls to assure himself that his plane would still respond to command and fly. His heart was pounding, and it showed in his voice, as he called the CP and said, "This is Lanza . . . We've got SAMs! Shitpots of 'em. My Cricket is hit and my observer wounded . . . I think they got the Finch that was following me . . . I'm heading back and I suggest that no more planes be launched for now, not until we can reduce the SAM threat."
Al Marri felt a great joy overflowing. True, and it was a shame, his own missile had failed to bring down its target. Yet he had seen the other crusader aircraft go up in a fiery ball of light. His partner in this enterprise had clearly scored against the enemy. Of course, the towering apartment building was still standing. Perhaps that would change. For now, al Marri decided to follow orders and leave. There would be other days. Besides, the enemy armored column that had left the university a few minutes prior was just now reaching the part of the town from which the mortar attack had come. The next few minutes would be interesting.
The mechanized century had taken some pretty fierce losses in the fight for the town. These hadn't been made good yet. Instead of having four tanks, five Ocelots, and fifty-eight men, the century had two, four and forty-six. Worse, maybe, the leadership was low. Both the century's key men, the signifer and centurion, had been killed, with command devolving onto a sergeant.
Not that Sergeant Paredes was a bad sergeant, not at all. The kid had actually been tapped for centurion track before the legion had even left Balboa. He was slated to be replaced by a newly graduated signifer, due in on the next transport. You really couldn't bitch; the whole legion was straining for leadership, what with the losses in the invasion and the scramble to form replacement units back home.
The problem was that the sergeant hadn't really been trained for the job he had. Smart? Check. Good attitude? Check. Aggressive? Check. Brave? Double check. Wise?
Kaboom!
Three of al Marri's comrades in Fadeel's organization were waiting for the armored column as it approached. There were only so many roads into the area, a small open spot surrounded by buildings. Along each of the major ones a very large explosive device had been improvised from an automobile or, in one case, van. These were primed to be set off remotely, by radio. The radio control devices and solenoids were, after all, cheap and readily available for purchase from any good hobby store in the TU or FS.
True to form, the arrogant invaders took the easiest, quickest and broadest route to the mortar site. One of the men standing by with a handheld remote control device watched as the lead vehicle in the column passed the van he had parked earlier. The first three vehicles were tanks, followed by the four that carried infantry. The bomber had thought that getting an expensive tank would be the greater prize but his team leader, who was also Fadeel's brother-in-law, had assured him that killing more men was better in the long run.
Thus he waited as the clumsy tanks passed. When the first infantry carrier reached a spot next to the van he pushed the button.
Kaboom!
The explosion physically threw the Ocelot's front around by ninety degrees, knocking Paredes' helmet off. He was slammed to one side, splitting the skin over his scalp and breaking one arm with a sickening crunch. The driver, who had had his head stuck up out of the hatch, was knocked unconscious. From what Paredes could see, only half of the track commander made it into the track. Where his upper torso had gone? Who could say?
With blood seeping into his eyes and his arm shrieking in protest Paredes crawled to the back of the track and twisted the door latch open. The door still didn't move—perhaps the hull was slightly deformed—until the sergeant kicked it open. When he emerged, weaponless, helmetless and using one arm to try to keep the other in place, the building walls to either side were lit by fire, despite the smoke.
In shock, Paredes looked to one side and saw a tipped over Ocelot, with flames pouring out of it. No survivors, he thought, grimly.
His assistant, a corporal, ran up asking, "What the fuck, Paredes? I mean, what the fucking fuck?"
"Bomb," the sergeant answered, simply and a bit distantly. He was swaying on his feet as he continued, "I'm . . . a little hurt. Stop the tanks and get them back here. Set up a perimeter. Report to higher. And take over because . . ."
The sergeant pitched face first onto the asphalt.
Sada was there, representing and in command of his Sumeri Brigade. So were all the cohort commanders as well as the primary staff and McNamara.
"Let's be honest," Carrera was saying. "We got overconfident and we got sloppy. Some of that's understandable; post invasion let down and all. We had the boys on an adrenaline high for weeks. When the adrenaline went, they just went on a natural downer. It was to be expected and we should have expected it. . . . I should have expected it.
"That's in the past. We can only affect the future. For the future I have some other news, most of it good. There have been attacks all through the country over the last several days. For the most part, we got off lightly. The Anglians and the FS troops were hit a lot harder. I think we can thank Amid Sada's watchers for the fact we weren't hit as badly. They've identified and helped round up about half of the insurgents, so we think, who infiltrated our ZOR . . ."
Carrera waited for a few moments for a translator to pass what he had said on to Sada who answered, "They did, Pat, and thank you. But they're only part of it. If there had been no work here, then the attacks would have been a lot worse."
"I know," Carrera agreed. "In any case, there is some good news. The FSC's War Department is finally waking up to the fact that we have an insurgency here and it's not going to go away on its own. We've been offered a long-term contract to keep a legion here and to expand that legion to roughly divisional strength. The details don't matter much except that the rate of reimbursement we get is going to be based on our strength in country. Even so, we're not going to hurry that expansion. For one thing, the Area of Responsibility we get assigned, the size of it, goes up as our strength does. For another, if we break ourselves in trying to get big faster than our school system and recruiting standards would currently permit, we'll soon find ourselves unemployed." And I'll find myself without the means of finding and destroying those who murdered my wife and children.
"It isn't just the insurgents, Patricio," Fernandez said. "We've got to go after those who feed them, those who support them, those who supply them and those who'll spread their propaganda, too. Everybody."
The unloading proceeded in accordance with a schedule designed to get one national or ascriptive group completely off the transport before another was unfrozen. The Panamanians came first, roughly ten thousand of them, as their colony, named Balboa, was the westernmost of the six colonies the Amerigo Vespucci had come to settle. Even among the Panamanians, there was a split as Chocoes Indians were to be dropped before the European- and Mestizo-descended people. The Vespucci would merely accelerate slightly in its orbit to assume the best position for unloading each of the others.
Ngobe Mzilikaze, Captain of the Vespucci, thought this was needless and excessive care. True, there had been problems with the colonies from Europe, from farther south in Latin America, and from Africa. And what happened with the colonists from the Balkans, the one time they had been awakened without regard to ethnicity, ought not even be talked about. But the Central Americans, despite having had a few wars amongst themselves over the centuries, had no real or deeply engrained hatred of each other. They much preferred civil to foreign war. Nonetheless, since the Cheng Ho disaster, standard procedure was to unload ascriptive, national, religious and ethnic groups as separately as humanly possible.
Ngobe hoped the settlement went smoothly. He carried important dispatches for the UN enclave on the island they called Atlantis, dispatches he was bound to deliver personally. Yet he could not, consistent with his duty, abandon his post aboard the Vespucci until all of his cargo was unloaded.
Belisario Carrera had never even believed it was possible to be so cold. Shivering worse than a leaf in hurricane, worse even than a high living leader of a Kosmo charity faced with an audit, he sat up in his deep freeze cubicle like a corpse arising at a funeral.
That was not the only Finnegan's Wake aspect to the resurrection, either. As soon as he sat up a white-coated technician handed him a plastic cup containing several ounces of nearly pure ethanol mixed with what passed for orange juice.
"Drink this," the technician ordered. "Primitive, I know, but we've found it's the best thing to get the blood moving and to warm you up."
The tech didn't mention that, after many dozens of voyages now, it had also been found to calm colonists who sometimes tended to panic when they realized they were suddenly, from their point of view suddenly, an uncrossable distance from a home and family they would never see again in this life.
Gratefully, too cold even to enquire as to the young wife who had accompanied him, Belisario took the proffered ethanol and drank quickly and deeply. He barely choked on the liquid as it burned its way down his throat and began to light small fires in his veins and arteries.
Beginning to warm now, and finally able to think more or less clearly, Belisario asked about his wife, still lying frozen in the next compartment.
The tech checked the meters on the compartment and answered, "She's fine. Would you like to be here when she awakens? It sometimes helps."
High Admiral Kotek Annan looked out over a skyline gone dark. It was far too much to say that Earth had become "a world lit only by fire"—though fire all too often lit it—but there had been a steady drop in all the activities that might have brought light. At least here in Europe there had, though Europe had started off on so high a plain it still exceeded most of the world. China was doing well enough, as were India, Brazil, and a few other places. The United States, along with those portions of what had once been known as western Canada and which now made up six of America's sixty-three states, was still a powerhouse though there were indicators that that was changing. The U.S. still tried to act as if the UN didn't exist, too.
"The secretary general will see you now, High Admiral," a flunky announced.
Nodding slightly, Annan turned from the window and the darkness it showed and walked briskly into the well-appointed, even luxuriously appointed, offices of the secretary general, Edouard Simoua.
"Kotek, my fine boy," said Simoua, rising and taking the younger man's arm warmly. "So good to see you. And how is your most excellent great-great-grandfather?"
"He is well, Your Excellency, in rigorous good health. I saw him in Kumasi just a few days ago. He told me to pass along his thanks, both for my appointment and for the antiaging treatments you ordered for him."
"Well," began Simoua, "it is sad but we are just in the infancy of antiagathic therapy. If your esteemed ancestor can hang on, even greater things may be possible. Besides, we people of the right views have to watch out for each other, do we not? And no one else is going to if we don't, eh?"
"Indeed, Your Excellency," Annan readily agreed. How could he not? His family—and he, personally—benefited immensely from the "I'll scratch your back; you scratch mine" philosophy of nearly all of those elites who worked for the great supra- and transnational organs of the Earth.
"Please, sit, my boy. Can I have anything brought to you? Coffee? Tea? Something stronger, perhaps?"
Annan shook his head as he sat in the proffered chair. "No, thank you, Your Excellency."
"As you wish," said Simoua, taking a chair himself opposite Annan. "I wanted to discuss your new command, the Amistad, and the others that will follow."
"Ah, yes," Annan agreed. "I have been up to see my new ship. It's a wonder."
"Indeed. It is the finest that America could build." Simoua laughed. "We took it in lieu of a UN dues payment that they would never have given us anyway."
"A wonderful ship it is, Excellency, but I confess I am a bit confused about my mission."
"Govern the island on the new world that is our enclave. Atlantis, they call it. Observe . . . for now," answered the secretary general. "Spread our influence. Organize the fleet we will send you. It's going to be thirty-three ships, eventually, you know."